What do you look in a White Label or Private Label Social Networking Vendor?

Categories: Analyst, Forrester, Social Networking, White Label Social NetworkPosted on May 19th, 2008

NOTE: The weighted findings are now available on this followup post.

I’m preparing for an upcoming report to help segment out the many vendors in the White Label or Private label social networking industry. Essentially, these companies allow brands to create their own social network (like Facebook) for customers, partners, or employees.

Are you a decision maker for corporate websites? Maybe you’re a web strategist, a web architect, a web marketer, or a web developer in marketing, I want to know what you think is important.

As you select a White Label Social Networking vendor, what THREE criteria are important to you?

Example: Features, Pricing, Support are important to me because: X

If you don’t feel comfortable leaving a comment, sent me an email at jowyang@forrester.com

As with previous times I’ve asked you for your opinion on reports, I do share what the community findings were, and how I’m going to proceed. For what it’s worth, this is just one element that I’ll factor into my research, there’s other methods that I’ll be using to find out the criteria. Thanks for crowdsourcing with me.

Update: A Community Manager (Thanks Tom) are sending me their Request for Proposals (RFP) if you wanted to send that to me, that will really help, I’ll credit you in the final report. I’ll assume this is confidential however, and will ask for your permission before sharing outside of my immediate team.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 8:28 am and is filed under Analyst, Forrester, Social Networking, White Label Social Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

If I was back at Hitachi, I would have looked for:

1) Pricing: since we didn’t want to spend an arm and a leg for experimental marketing, we would have gone for low cost

2) Flexiblity: We would have wanted this system to work well with our other sites, and have been able to integrate discussions on product pages.

3) Dependability: The website needed to have uptime, I don’t want to spend money an an ASP if they aren’t reliable.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on May 19th, 2008 at 8:53 am

Finding a white label that will let us ultimately be in control of most of the code is important. We don’t want to use pre-made templates or themes. Also we would rather pay more for a custom way to update the site’s backend (ftp?) rather than some of the apps out there that require some onpage editor to update code.

Posted by Ken Savage on May 19th, 2008 at 9:02 am

1) Pricing: If we’re going to spend development to get it working with our site, the price needs to be better then us just building from scratch.

2) Customizeibility: We need to be able to tweak it to give it a consistent feel to our site and to be able to tie it in to our log in.

3) Dependability: Very reluctant to use services that are hosted off of our own servers due to load times and other possible problems.

Posted by Davey on May 19th, 2008 at 9:03 am

We’ve recently completed due diligence for an association of 220k+ members. The client’s main areas of focus were:

1) Privacy: closed social network and data isolation (contrast to data portability)

2) Revenue Drivers: can we publish ads, post jobs, or find other areas of revenue to offset any associated costs?

3) Brand Control: some services would not allow private labels, others required us to pay their team for any design changes. client wanted flexibility to have consistent look/feel across all properties

Posted by Matt on May 19th, 2008 at 9:03 am

1) Ease and Costs of integration with our other technologies (from analytics to product pages to support documentation etc.)– does the product play well or will be forever be finding and fixing bugs?

2) Administrative console ease of use — can we get our staff up and trained quickly to be able to control the site?

3) Customization costs — no template solution fits all situations. When and what are the charges for change and customized work?

In our opinion, the strategy work prior to technology selection should identify the business objectives for the project along with the corresponding metrics and measurement strategy. Where so many “white label” solutions currently fall down is on measurement. This failure ends up costing organizations money as well as time to resolve the issues. (Not to mention the opportunity costs of poor vision into the results of the project.)

There are always additional costs to any project when putting in a “white label” solution. The key is to identify and budget for these costs in advance and to minimize them once the selection is made.

Posted by Mike Rowland on May 19th, 2008 at 9:15 am

We’ve spent considerable effort looking into this question for our organization of 60K members. It’s hard to get it down to three criteria, but I would say:
1. Pricing — a product that meets our needs while maximizing ROI is high on our list.
2. Ease of use — Ensuring optimal user experience on the front end and back end minimizes time spent unnecessarily dealing with tech support issues.
3. Customization and branding — The main reason to develop our own system is to provide features and services that are most relevant to our demographic while retaining organizational branding and messaging.

Posted by Roger on May 19th, 2008 at 9:21 am

1) customization- I want to know that the platform can be changed and adapted for larger trends. For example if twitter is a sustained trend and I want to integrate twitter into the platform, I want to know that there is an API or that the provider can do it. Also I want to be able to use common tools like feedburner to track RSS, etc.

2) speed of change or ease of use- This goes hand in hand with customization I guess but when I want a change I want to be able to make it fast. Hopefully the provider can do it in a reasonable time because if I have to wait for IT to do it… well it could be awhile.

3) backend easy to use- Some of the admin panels of white label social networks are unbelievably horrible to use. For people that aren’t advanced users they can get lost and frustrated in these setups.

Posted by kevin on May 19th, 2008 at 9:33 am

Having worked on such projects with a number of clients, price and ease of adoption have always seemed to rise to the top. Price is key in getting it approved, then adoption is key in the project actually being a success. Once basic adoption has been achieved, the rest seems to just build from there.

Posted by fromtherooftops on May 19th, 2008 at 9:34 am

Flexibility is most important. There is social networking fatigue going on right now. People just don’t want to bother setting up a profile at yet another social network. So the networks that have the most open standards (with OpenID, API’s, ability to embed other services, etc) will be the ones that will prevail.

Thank you for all the great posts Jeremiah. I have been on the decisionmaker side for so long that I have not spent any time blogging. I am working with the authors of the new Harper Collins book on leadership (http://www.triballeadership.net) and I believe their social networking model (based on physics) is going to be the next evolution online.

If you know of a good place to write a guest blog post about it, or a blogger who would be interested in interviewing the author please let me know.

Thank you again for all you’re doing for the web strategists of the world!

Posted by Robert Richman on May 19th, 2008 at 9:45 am

1. pricing: we’re a start-up
2. ease of implementation; we’re a start-up
3. fun: does it create a sticky and rich environment for users?

Posted by sarah on May 19th, 2008 at 9:52 am

1. Integration. Our POV is bolted on communities will be short-lived vs those that are truly integrated (well beyond single sign-on)across content and commerce.
2. Price. Some of the best solutions from functionality perspective are pricing themselves out of the market with excessive annual license fees that are impossible to justify. We’re prepared to accept some steep upfront $$ to get a great solution, but year two licenses that only tie to possible future upgrades strike us as predatory.
3. User experience. Many of the solutions that have evolved from technology-oriented customer care threaded forums are too sophisticated for B2C audiences outside of the tech sector.

Posted by Peter Troast on May 19th, 2008 at 10:20 am

If I could do it all over again… I would pay attention to:

1. User experience. Users should not be getting a downgrade by going from a social network to a branded social experience.

2. Reporting. There needs to be an easy way to extract insights and metrics from the system, otherwise you will have a very hard time trying to mature the community over the long term and make sure you are meeting your success metrics.

3. Experience. There is nothing scarier than learning you are the biggest or most complex client that your social networking vendor has ever taken on.

Posted by toolate on May 19th, 2008 at 10:29 am

1. Reliability, Reliability, Reliability (i.e. not twitter)
2. Branding, personalized url and customization
3. Administration capabilities (ease to add users, profiles, new features).
I don’t see pricing as an issue as the law of economics will drive the pricing to be reasonable, there are too many options out there to have price be a top three criteria.

Posted by Jon Erickson on May 19th, 2008 at 11:07 am

I’m amazed at how much price point is important to people. Are we talking 4, 5 or 6 figures here for a white label site?

Posted by Ken Savage on May 19th, 2008 at 11:10 am

For enterprise class (solution sell) with install, services, support it’s easily over 6 figures for first year, then reduces to monthly ongoing costs second year.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on May 19th, 2008 at 11:23 am

[...] a web strategist, a web architect, a web marketer, or a web developer in marketing, Jeremy wants to know what you think is important. Tags: social-networking Blog [...]

Posted by White Label or Private Label Social Networking Vendors | The Progress Bar on May 19th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

1) Reliability - No one wants to visit a site that keeps crashing
2) Scalability - If we are going to build an audience of customers, the platform better support lots of them. Globalization was an important aspect from day one)
3) Flexibility/ Customizability - We looked for a solution offers a lot of open-source type functionality that is easily customizable.
4) Ease of Use - How are we going to encourage more people to participate if they’re intimidated by the interface?
5) Integration with our broader IT framework - This one’s tough, but it’s important from a long-term success perspective.

Posted by Lionel Menchaca on May 19th, 2008 at 12:17 pm

1. Customization
2. Information Architecture
3. User Management

Posted by John on May 19th, 2008 at 12:59 pm

Jeremiah,

I think it depends on where you are in your community development process. The criteria that we had 18 months ago when we issued the RFP for the Catalyze community would be entirely different from what we would seek as an established community.

In either case, the top 4 criteria include:
- Community strategy — is the company a thought-leader in building communities for my industry? Can they help me strategize ways to jumpstart/kickstart the community?
- Features — does the platform meet all of my needs today?
- Product roadmap — where is the community platform going? do they have a plan for continually upgrading the feature set to meet changing technology?
- Pricing — this is important, but not until the other 3 questions are answered

I’ll send you my original RFP by direct email. At the time, the team from Mzinga (our eventual vendor) said it was the most complete and comprehensive RFP they had encountered.

Tom Humbarger, Community Manager
Catalyze Community

Posted by Tom Humbarger on May 19th, 2008 at 2:49 pm

And don’t forget friends, this can include services and support.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on May 19th, 2008 at 3:12 pm

I’m going to follow the major themes already discussed:

1. Price
2. Ease of Use (for the user and back end set-up and configuration)
3. Customisation

These may change as we progress further with out experiments.
mick

Posted by Mick Leyden on May 19th, 2008 at 3:49 pm

As a Free/Libre Open Source Software (F/LOSS) Consultant, whenever sourcing applications for clients I use these three indicators:

1. Features - sourcing the olosest feature set to the client’s requirements

2. Community - having a responsive community helps

3. Maturity - sometimes new software has a flurry of activity and positivity to start with which wanes after a while, often better to go with tried and tested

With a free market for services around so many fantastic F/LOSS systems which are currently out there (e.g. Drupal, elgg.net), I’m surprised more people don’t make F/LOSS a requirement in their RFPs.

Proprietary vendor lock-in and feature-creep in order to sell recurring licenses solve the software companies’ business model, but F/LOSS is there simply to help solve your IT issues.

/rant

Posted by Steve Purkiss on May 19th, 2008 at 3:49 pm

Right now I am looking at a couple companies and am weighing pricing, solution presentation and monetization potentials because able to show potential for revenue via client sponsorship of community ect. makes a lot of sense. Additionally, I am looking for a company that is passionate about creating vibrant communities and that is committed to help us create a solution that will engage our readership! Of course we are under a little more budget scrutiny, but who isn’t these days?

Posted by Laurent on May 19th, 2008 at 10:22 pm

We’ve been building a number of very small social sites for our customers, playing with a variety of systems. As a systems integrator here is what we’ve ended up looking at, in order:

1. Plug-in architecture: no system does everything we need. Thus it is very important that whatever we implement, it is very easy to create new functionality. Even better is when I can extend it into other systems already in use by our customer (ie CRM).

2. Ease of Use: If it isn’t intuitive, our customers won’t use it no matter what the feature set is.

3. Features: Of course we want everything we can get our hands on. This is far cheaper for our customers than creating add-ons.

4. Pricing: I actually don’t care for free, but our customers also are not capable of paying a fortune. Thus we have to think of the first three issues with a budget in mind.

Posted by John Paul Mains on May 20th, 2008 at 7:30 am

As the new marketing manager (6 wks now baby!) for a white label in Tempe AZ called vSocial, this conversation is fascinating. Thanks for asking the question J, and thanks to all for commenting. I’ve just finished my competitive assessment of the market and some of you have reinforced my findings so this conversation is huge for me.
I’ve found that there aren’t that many white labels that truly deliver on the white label promise. By my count there are 3, maybe 4, and yes we are one of them. Things like templates, lack of DNS masking (w/o this your audience can see the label’s url in certain aspects of your site), restrictive data gathering, templated metrics reporting, blah, blah are prevalent among many so called white labels. I formally submit the term “True White Label” for consideration.
Also, white labels haven’t done a good job of communicating and differentiating (Reality Digital may have the same finding, it’s CEO is now on tour), and yes we are all struggling with pricing.

shaffe dawg

Posted by steven@vsocial.com on May 20th, 2008 at 9:49 am

[...] What do you look in a White Label or Private Label Social Networking Vendor? This report should be interesting - as should the comments on this post (tags: ningthing socialnetworking) [...]

Posted by links for 2008-05-20 « The social media revolution (in 15 minutes) on May 20th, 2008 at 10:42 am

At CrowdFactory.com we have seen a lot of RFPs and RFIs for high end large social community development projects. In general, the most important criteria that we come across are: 1. The ability to protect and promote the brand with pure white labeling 2. Expertise in developing Social Networks: Since most of these projects are so new, having a team that has years of social networking development experience is crucial to implementing a successful project.
3. A set of robust well integrated APIs to allow complete flexibility
4. Scalability and reliability of the system. Has the service been designed to handle high volume traffic.

Posted by Mark Harnett - Crowd Factory on May 20th, 2008 at 3:03 pm

I don’t think every organization needs to spend 6 figures a year on social networking tools for their sites. What about having a community around your products or services for free? set up a subdomain and tie it to a free community builder like WackWall.com, that’s a no-brainer.

Posted by Emil on May 22nd, 2008 at 3:17 am

[...] 1) I asked you what you want Earlier, I asked me readers (who I know many are in the market for social networks) what do they want in a white label social network vendor. [...]

Posted by Findings: What you said you wanted in a White Label Social Networking Vendor on May 22nd, 2008 at 8:57 am

Thanks for participating, while you can certainly chime in, we’ve weighted the scores here:

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/05/22/findings-what-you-said-you-wanted-in-a-white-label-social-networking-vendor/

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on May 22nd, 2008 at 8:59 am

1) Pricing.
2) Reliability - everything else is pointless if it doesn’t work.
3) Flexibility - customization facilities.
4) Facility to adapt pages for mobile.