Turning your website into an online community

A cool new social networking software service called KickApps is providing some simple technology that has the potential to turn your website into an online community. The service has two main selling points – 1) it facilitates social networking by providing tools for the creation of user generated content and sharing, and 2) it promotes viral distribution of user-generated and branded content. At the core of the service are KickApps Widgets, which are Flash or HTML-based code snippets that display media content (e.g. video, photo, audio) and community members in lists (e.g. “Highest Rated Video” or “Newest Members”). The widgets can be pasted onto company or artist MySpace pages, blogs, or websites, and they contain links to more detailed pages of user and/or artist-generated content. After signing up with an ID, users can upload a variety of personal media, can create a personal bio, can make friends, tag media, and chat on the site. These features have the advantage of keeping visitors on the site for longer periods of time. In addition to the content creation and social networking features, users are also presented with a number of viral sharing options such as video drop, widget drop, and the option to email to a friend. Thus, users and visitors can grab the code from the widget and paste it onto their own web pages for free, providing the ability to drive traffic back to the website. The service provides full controls for content moderation so a company or artist can easily monitor and organize content generated by users. What is particularly great about this feature for use in the music industry is the potential for being able to place widgets strategically-generated by an artist along side with widgets created by fans, thus making fans feel more included in the artist’s world. Some question whether users are interested in the notion of creating multiple social networks outside of the single, comprehensive network they have likely already established at a site like MySpace. The other drawback is that users would most likely have to create a new ID for each community hosted by a different company/artist, which may lead to exhaustion (brief commentary at TechCrunch) Nevertheless, there certainly are examples of consumers actively participating in multiple online networks (as an example, consider how many people have developed a network on MySpace but have also developed a music discovery network on Last.Fm, Pandora, or Mog). Of course, decisions about the nature of the content included in the widgets or even whether to use the service at all would need to be tailored to each artist and the demographics of his/her fanbase. But, even if fans do not necessarily want to network in an infinite number of separate artist communities, the widgets still provide them with something to take away to their own sites and blogs. While many Labels are still uncomfortable with the idea of providing code to share streaming music video, the widgets offer the opportunity to provide other material that may appeal to fans and cater to their desire to promote themselves and their favorite artists in their own space. Technorati Tags: music,marketing,interactive,kickapps,widgets