Tag Archives: gina bianchini

Conversation with Gina Bianchini Part 2

Posted on by
Reply

In this part we cover tips for community leaders on Ning, how the Ning platform has evolved, the importance of customization and Gina’s views on which social platforms will survive.

Top tips for successful Network leaders

Douglas: What are the top five things that Network Creators [the founders and leaders of Ning Networks] should know when they start out?

Gina: I wrote a blog post when we first launched Ning Networks about what a Network Creator needed to know when starting out: http://blog.ning.com/2007/03/eight_steps_to_creating_a_grea.html. I came up with eight steps then – and they remain the same success factors two plus years in – so don’t make me choose five :-)

What I think is fascinating is that a different combination of features and design are important when you’re first launching a Ning Network. For example, photos, videos and blogging are the best features to use to get a new social network off the ground. Later, discussion forums or events may make a ton of sense, but keeping it simple upfront and investing in only a few features and great design is the greatest indicator of success.

Once you have that, launching with a small, initial set of members and a focused answer to “what should I do first?” by your new members should get you on your way.

Community and leader lifestages

Douglas: The community leaders I’ve interviewed have said that there are lifestages in community-making. What’s more, they grow and change as their community grows. They evolve into different types of leader, as their social network evolves.

Gina: Exactly. The other thing, especially in the early stages of a Ning Network, is it’s really important for the Network Creator and core members to be actively involved.  You can’t just throw up a Ning Network and let it run itself before it’s developed its own norms and rhythms.

It’s like being a host or hostess of a party.

For example, one of our Network Creators, Chris Anderson talks about how at the beginning of creating his Ning Network, DIY Drones [about creating your own Amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] he needed to contribute photos, videos and blog posts every single day.  As the social network grew to 150-200 people, he could take a step back. Now that it has over 1,000 people, it runs itself.

This is only one example of what we see across our 2 million Ning Networks that have been created in terms of how Ning Networks grow and evolve through a healthy ecosystem of different types of members or roles within a Ning Network.

By looking at the commonalities across what are otherwise very distinct social networks on the Ning Platform, we can build into Ning Networks smarter and better ways for Network Creators to accelerate the growth and ongoing management of thriving, rich, immersive social experiences.

Evolution of Ning

Douglas: It sounds like you’re creating the infrastructure for high functioning organizations.

Gina: That is our mission.  So, hopefully, the answer to this is a very loud, “heck, yes!”

Douglas: And the software you’re creating is enabling the leadership to identify where they need to focus. And it’s recognizing that each social network has slightly different needs at each stage of its life?

Gina: Absolutely.  We can see, for example, the portfolio of features used by active social networks versus those sets of features that are used on Ning Networks used for experimentation or never take off. We can take that small but critical insight into defaults for new Ning Networks and give the Network Creator as much help as possible to create something special and successful.

Douglas: So you’re identifying the behaviors that are predictors of success and then developing software that predisposes other social networks to do the same thing?

Gina: That’s the goal. We want to help each Ning Network be as easy and compelling as possible based on the data we have across over two million Ning Networks created.

Douglas: So what are the top things that you might see in an early stage of a community that you’d like to help optimize?  What can you can help them do?

Gina: Stay tuned.

Douglas: Fair enough!

You might have already answered this, what’s missing that you wish you had built on Ning?

Gina: That’s a tough question just because, as a perfectionist, product-oriented founder and CEO, I could probably spend the next two days telling you all the things that I can’t wait to build or that I wish we could get out next week.

Engagement vs. page views

What I would say is that the biggest thing that has evolved in social technology since we launched Ning Networks almost three years ago is the transition from thinking about success and the product in terms of feature-driven pageviews to member-driven engagement.  Member engagement is this notion of identifying who your members are, what roles they are playing on your interest-driven social network, and how you drive deeper engagement from there.

The Internet is moving from a race for eyeballs to a race for engagement and, while it is too soon to tell where this is all going, I think it’s a fantastic, dynamic trend that we love.

Douglas: So, as Ning has grown, you’ve realized what you’ve got is an enabler of a range of different relationships around a series of passions and interests?

Gina: Absolutely.

Douglas: And you want to evolve the product to enable these relationships to work better. One of the ways to do that may be identifying the different roles that the different members play and helping them play those roles more effectively.

Gina: Well, we’re already doing this. These are the things that people are starting to see pop up on their Ning Networks and will only get more pronounced from here.  That’s the thing that’s also really fun about this kind technology is that because it’s the Internet you can get things out the door quickly.

Douglas: So we talked a bit about what you want to do in the future. But how is Ning designed right now to enable high-functioning communities? What do you think you got right?

Customization

Gina: The thing that we did and continue to do differently – and better –than anybody else is develop features for extreme flexibility and uniqueness.

We think about everything in the context of how can our Network Creators and their members customize what we’re about to put out. How can our Ning Networks take a feature and put their own unique spin on it?

We are constantly looking for ways for our Network Creators to take a standard feature like photos or even virtual gifts and make it uniquely their own in a rich, immersive experience that is only limited by their creativity and the market for members joining.

It is not the kind of thing that most people wake up in the morning and think about in software development and design and yet it’s fundamental to everything we do.

Douglas: So why do you think customization is so important?

Gina: There are multiple reasons. First, because we love to see what happens when you give creative people the opportunity to take an idea and turn it into a totally new reality. Second, customization is critical to support distinct interests and identities from veterans to offbeat brides and zombies. You can’t have The Hook without customization and, as we talked about earlier, The Hook is what makes a Ning Network different from every other Ning Network or any other social platform out there.

For people to find their community and know whether or not it’s the right place for them, customization is a prerequisite.

Douglas: I’ve been talking to two big Ning Network Creators: Steve Ressler who runs Govloop and Joseph Porcelli who runs Neighbors for Neighbors. They seem to be trying to customize all the time.

Gina: Yes.  And our job as a partner and a social platform is to take the things that people like Steve and Joseph and their members are doing on our service and make it easier and faster to customize those things.

Which social platforms survive?

Douglas: Great.  So here’s another big question: if you were to imagine the world in five years what would community platforms look like?  Who survived?  Who didn’t?  How are they being used?

Gina: So on one level I think that the social technologies that are here today have staying power and are poised for continued explosive growth.  That’s because this stuff is actually quiet hard to do and network effects are alive and well. It’s why, for example, there isn’t a number two to Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, or Ning. Different social networks have carved out their area and are rapidly innovating to deepen their relationship with people for that particular area of their life.

I also think that the ways people use and connect across different social technologies will only get more sophisticated, richer and more immersive on the web while being connected everywhere via mobile experiences.

What this should mean in practice is that every person on the planet will have an opportunity for a richer life because of what they are able to access from a simple mobile phone. The political, economic and social ramifications of this are profound.

Douglas: So, coming back to today, if you had to advise anyone…ordinary people…to pick just three pieces of social software, what would they be and what needs would they satisfy?

Gina: So I think Facebook because they will continue to do the best job of connecting people that you already know and everyone went to school somewhere.

I think Ning would be the second one because I think we will continue to give people a more and more compelling way to express and connect with other people around the things they care about the most in their lives.

Tied for third place is Twitter and Linked In. Twitter is an amazing service in terms of providing a real time stream of interesting news and events.  I’m finding that I can rely on Twitter for my news today in a much more compelling way than reading a news site online.

And then I do think there will be always a need for professional identity online. I think Linked In is going to continue to dominate professional identity.  They’re going to do more and more interesting things around people’s professional identities and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.

That would be my answer although I recognize I chose four not three.

Douglas: That’s fine.  I just wanted to see which ones you picked and what you think distinguishes them.

So here’s a personal question.  What is the most useful or satisfying community you’ve belonged to and why?

Your most satisfying community

Gina: I came from a family of teachers. I knew nothing about business when I came to college. Through the help of friends and mentors, I got a job at Goldman Sachs right out of college and drank out of the firehose of new professional experiences.

I was incredibly fortunate to start out on this adventure with 70 other 21 year-olds of varying backgrounds, degrees and personalities who became some of my best friends to this day. Fortunately for me, California has better weather than New York, so many of these colleagues have since moved out to Palo Alto, CA, so my social world came with me.

Without this set of friends and support network, I’m not sure I would have built the expertise or confidence to start a social technology company and create a service used by millions of people every day in the expression of who they are as people.  That’s the power of community and something that I hope Ning can continue to provide people across all walks of life.

Conversation with Gina Bianchini (Part 1)

Posted on by
Reply

This is the first of two parts of a conversation I had with Gina Bianchini. Gina is CEO and Co-Founder (with Mark Andreessen) of Ning.

Ning is a social platform that enables people to form communities of interests and passions. Well, you’ll see what it is and why Gina thinks it’s different from other platforms in this conversation…

This part covers why Ning was founded, what makes it different from other social platforms and what defines a successful Network.

The next (to be posted in a few days) will cover the evolution of Ning, it’s next significant development, what social platforms will be around in five years time and what Network Creators need to do to ensure success.

Douglas: Gina, why did you start Ning?

Gina: We started Ning with a simple premise: what if we gave everyone the opportunity to create their own unique social experiences online?

We saw early on that the native behavior on the web – or what people wanted to do on the web differently from any other medium before it – was connect people with other people. Looking at eBay, Craigslist, chat and discussion boards, it was clear to us that people wanted to connect and engage online in a fundamentally social way that the Internet and no other media type enabled.

With this as our foundation, we sought to create a social platform for people to create rich, immersive social experiences for the things they cared about the most.

Ning vs. other Social Platforms

Douglas: So what distinguishes Ning from other social networking sites?

Gina: We are focused on enabling unique social experiences for people’s interests and passions.

The fascinating thing about how social technology platforms are evolving today is that each social platform focuses in on a specific area of the human experience. It’s a bit like the five families actually. You have Facebook for connecting you to people you already know; Twitter for news and real-time events; Linked In for your professional identity and Ning is designed for meeting new people around your interests and passions.

For example, the IAVA (The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America) has created a private social network on Ning for returning veterans to be able to find and talk to other returning veterans in a safe place and share their experiences.

Or TuDiabetes (http://tudiabetes.com), which has over 10,000 members touched by diabetes who are there to dive deep and build strong relationships online with others affected via videos, blogs and discussions around topics critical to living with diabetes.

From the politically important to the emotionally critical, Ning is the broadest platform for unique social experiences on the Internet today.

Douglas: So do you think online relationships based around a passion or a need are inherently stronger than, say, those that are on Facebook?

Gina: I don’t know if they’re stronger, they are just different. There will always be a place for you to have a relationship with the people with whom you grew up or went to college. That is one of the things that makes Facebook special.

I think relationships built around interests and passions are typically about meeting new people who have a shared love or identity to you. Where you can’t control where you are born or who you went to school with, what you care about – your favorite music, your critical causes, the reason you get out of bed in the morning – is what makes you uniquely you.

Connecting people around the things they care about requires a different approach than Facebook or Twitter, which are really set up for a different purpose. Interests and passions require context for that particular topic and the ability to go deeper with a smaller set of people filtered for the truly engaged.

Douglas: I agree.  I was talking about this to Linda Stone. We discussed what needs were being satisfied by which social networks.  Twitter versus Facebook versus Ning versus Meetup and so on. The only two that lean into the passion/interest/ cause/needs area effectively are Ning and Meetup.  Except there’s a fundamental difference between the two. Ning is enabling people to cluster around these things online…not necessarily anchored by geography. Meetup is at the intersection of passions and local.

Gina: Yeah.  I think they’re very complementary actually.

Douglas: I do too.
So here’s another big question.  What is community exactly?

What is Community?

Gina: A community has historically been defined as a group of people organized around common values and social cohesion within a shared geographical location.

With the Internet, you don’t need the geographical location, so the opportunity for community has increased exponentially with the types of communities expanding in ways that have no analog in the real world. From offbeat brides to steampunk aficionados, entirely new communities can emerge in minutes around interests that may only exist or be possible in an online world.

Ingredients of a successful Network

Douglas: What constitutes a successful Ning Network?  What are the ingredients?

Gina: Our successful Ning Networks share one thing in common and that’s “The Hook.” Regardless of topic, category, or member base, when a Ning Network has a Hook you know immediately what the social network is about, who it targets, why you should be there, and whether you belong in this contextual world.

How is the Hook communicated? The Hook is communicated via the name of the social network, the brand, the visual design, the features, and the layout. From these small sets of levers, we’ve seen tremendous diversity in the rich, immersive social experiences on Ning.

For example, when you show up at the Offbeat Bride Tribe, it’s got a Goth boot – like a Doc Marten boot – under a wedding dress.  In a split second, you know this Ning Network is about brides who want a wedding that doesn’t conform to the traditional.

Or Lost Zombies, which is a Ning Network creating a crowd-sourced documentary of people who are contributing themselves as the majority of the zombie army.  You immediately know when you’re on it that it’s about zombies: the look and feel, the photos, the videos and overall design tells you immediately what it is about.

These different Ning Networks are really clear about why they exist and why you should join them. They make their case immediately when you first land on the homepage and it goes from there.

Difference

Douglas: One of the things I wrote about in the Culting book is the ‘Four D’s of Difference’. It’s about how effective communities must communicate their difference to potential recruits. Everyone is trying to find their tribe.  We have a profound human need to be amongst ‘like-others’.  The successful cult-like communities…the ones that generate enormous stickiness…are the ones that telegraph their difference to those that are the most likely ‘match’. They say: “you’re different and we’re different in the same way… so come on in.”

Gina: Exactly.

Douglas: And they can do this in a number of ways.  But they absolutely must declare their purpose very clearly.  It could be in a Manifesto. By the way the membership behaves, maybe how they dress, the design of the site, the church, the meeting place, how they talk to each other.

And what’s equally important is to communicate not just to those who could belong but also to those who shouldn’t.  It needs to say, “Hey, you’re not like us. That’s cool but you probably don’t belong here so find the place where you do and you’ll be more comfortable”.

In other words you need to be very clear about who you’re appealing to and who you are not. And be very clear about what you get, and what you don’t if you join.

Gina: Absolutely. And I think that that’s going to get more and more obvious as we move forward.

Douglas: Why?

Gina: Because people are becoming more sophisticated in how they use social technologies and, especially, how and where they define what they stand for and who they want to stand with online.

If people want to be one of many in a rigid, uniform social network, they have that option with where social networks have been, not where they are going.

As the number of options for social experiences continues to grow exponentially, social experiences must both be unique and interesting, but they also must telegraph who belongs and who doesn’t. And they need to do it quickly and effectively on the first impression or they may not get another chance.

We see this playing out everyday across hundreds of thousands of active Ning Networks and it’s absolutely critical in separating out the successful from those that merely exist.