by Eric Brown

There are all sorts of ways today to connect with, participate and enjoy a conversation with your customer. There have been numerous posts about starting and maintaining a company blog, which is an excellent tool. Another favorable venue is to create a Ning site. It is a very easy application and can create a pretty cool place to have conversation and engage your customers. It is sort of like having your own My Space site, and very easy to update and foster community with your brand. Ning is an online platform for users to create their own social websites and social networks. Launched in October 2005. Ning was co-founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini. Ning is Andreessen’s third startup (after Netscape and Opsware), and gets much of its notability from Andreessen’s successes with those companies. Ning hopes to compete with large social sites like MySpace and Facebook, by appealing to users who want to create networks around specific interests or have limited technical skills. The unique feature of Ning is that anyone can create their own custom social network for a particular topic or need, catering to specific audiences.

I was fortunate enough to be involved in a Social Web Site project, Trilibes, which is also a great Ning site launched and led by Seth Godin, who is coining a name for Social Networks as Tribes. It was by invitation only, and was an interesting

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