Network. These different designers

A little more than a week ago, an article about social constructors was published on Habré, but for some reason, only two of them, Taba and Ning, were told in it. For some reason, it seemed that there were more such designers than two =) But you can also take social networks that can serve as a designer - then there will be much more than two. After spending a certain amount of time and remembering the social networks that you have ever seen, you get an interesting picture. All social platforms, with the help of which you can unite people around a topic, make your own community or group, in general, can be divided into three main blocks: 1) consumer networks 2) corporate networks and 3) networks for business.

The segment of corporate networks is still absent in Russia, customers either use Western solutions, or do not use them at all. In the world, this segment is quite developed, there are such companies as Jive , Awareness , Communispace , Pluck and other vendors, for example, ConnectBeam and Lithium . These companies have long and successfully solved the problems of Western corporate clients in creating social networks for them. Whether such a trend reaches Russia - we'll see in a couple of years. Maybe we will have something of their own and better?

But with consumer and business networks the situation is more rosy =)
We all know the main players in the consumer segment - Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, MoiMir, Yandex Clubs, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, MirTesen ... These networks are created mainly for people to communicate with each other, uniting according to personal preferences. In addition to them, in this segment there is also a social designer Ucoz , which can be used both to unite people according to their interests, and to create small business networks, but at the simplest level. Somehow they tried to create such a network for a student business club on Ucoz, to be honest, it turned out not very nice and inconvenient to use, some kind of sharp patterns, the same type of structure. Another disadvantage of the group at Ucoz is that such links are often regarded as potentially dangerous and harmful. Like, all of this lies on free hosting, and often these sites are used by spammers and scammers :) Trifle, probably, but you must agree, it doesn’t look solid. Yes, maybe, as a first step, it is possible, but then it starts to miss some necessary settings. In principle, these social media tools can be used to create business communities, groups — but their functionality will be very limited.
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It is much more interesting to use resources that are intended for the implementation of business tasks. In general, the segment of social networks that are created for the purposes of small and medium-sized businesses seems to me very promising. The fact is that SMB now more than ever needs to build relationships with its customers, become proactive - and catch its customers where they spend a lot of time - on the Internet. So, for familiarization: according to the study, 61% of people trust the opinion of others expressed on the network. Not bad, right?

Among the most well-known resources for SMB now there are popular systems for autonomous blogging - WordPress and TypePad (although the latter is mostly a product for the western market), platforms for social networks- Ning , vseVteme , SocialGo , Taba , LiveStreet . But LiveStreet is still only a blog engine, an open-source platform, not a full-fledged network designer. And he is very suspiciously similar to Habr ...

Each of these products has a number of its own advantages, chips. But let the comparison of business constructors be the topic of the next post =) If it is interesting, then I can post it here, all of a sudden someone will come in handy.
Probably, I have forgotten someone, so if there are more additions for social network designers for SMB, it will be very cool.