Monday, 27 April 2015

Creating a New Social Platform | BizWay

To create my own social platform, there are some fundamentals that every community manager should consider before starting up the platform. To create a successful social platform, managing staff are required to:
  • Know the purpose of the platform
    • It is very important to specify that what kind of community (group of people or interest) and/or what does your community need
  • Select the type of platform
    • It is necessary to select a platform that a trend meets the community you are looking for.
    • Something interesting that entices large community in short time
  • Design the platform
    • It is important to know community's tendencies. In most successful platforms, people focus on:
      • Ease of use
      • As a company, advantages of using the platform
      • As a community, what is the benefit and purpose of using it
Creating an interactive platform can built Two Way Business Communication. What I meant by Two Way Business Communication is that the two sides (Company and Customer) can obtain tangible and /or intangible benefits. Needless to say, today's most businesses have been integrating their physical activities into online platform to improve the method of the progress.



As a community manager, I will be implementing my own experience to launch a new social platform that may help the two way business communication. However, one of the hardest steps is starting up level. Therefore, designing a platform is an important concept as it may be crucial challenge to change the content later.

The community platform I would like to create is called BizWay.


The BizWay means the new invite only business communication platform. According to the lecture - 08 slides, there are five social design challenge areas related to start which are:


  • Carving out a niche
  • Competing for a niche
  • Getting to critical mass
  • Attracting early members


  • Early adopter benefits
 However, the two main focus areas in this platform are on:
  • Getting to critical mass
    • Created services allow users to invite friends and acquaintances to join the BizWay
    • Pay for invitation (referral). For instance, increasing data storage limits
  • Attracting early members
    •  Adding interesting games will entice new users to invite non-registered people to join and subscribe
BizWay allows its users to upload and share videos, musics, photos and even articles for educational, non educational and business purposes. Users can exchange and share activities internally. What internally means is that non-registered users cannot see any uploaded videos, musics and photos. To activate these options and make them available to and accessible by friends and acquaintances, new customer must use a referral's ID (username) and complete the registration steps carefully. By doing so, members will make profits by the stage 1 benefits which are:
  • Internal benefits
    • The company side. In the early start, we expect that the company can entice more people very quickly if users acknowledge that they will get a free data storage per any invited new user. You may ask how BizWay can make money and keep in touch with its users. There will be two options of registrations to attract users and businesses:
      • Individuals (free of use of social media). Users are able to upload videos, music, photos and blogging articles and exchange them with other users
      • Businesses (paid version): As this platform is still under the test, we will estimate and set up a reasonable fees for the business sites in accordance to the type of business. The business option is a full option platform which includes price list, more data space, discount options to their business, visible business contact details and free product advertisement
  • External benefits
    • The user side.  By joining through referrals, users get 2 GB of storage for free. If the early members desire to increase their storage space, they can get additional 100 MB by inviting a new user. The additional space can be expired within 3 months if the user cannot invite another user. According to the BizWay's policy,  users can increase the storage space up to 32 GB otherwise they have to pay. The reason of this is for BizWay's business and financial safety. Therefore, the advantages of using our platform are:
      • Members can transfer part of their data storage space to any other member
      • Business owners can advertise their products and make them visible to customers
The big idea of implementing these functions will enable us to increase success expectation by:
  • Encouraging people to use BizWay's platform
  • Attracting companies to advertise their businesses through our platform

In conclusion, BizWay is an invite-only platform that registered members can get 2 GB for free and 100 MB by inviting a new user to join. Because the platform does not accept direct registration, social media activities are available only for its users.

Leaving a comment is important to improve our platform, what do we have to change or edit please?
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4 comments:

  1. Anonymous28 April 2015 at 18:27

    Nice blog but will inviting be the only way to receive an account?

    I can see an invite only element would do a good job at keeping trolls out of the conversation however this also makes me wonder if this will hinder the growth of the site and just how it will hit critical mass with this restriction.

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    Replies
    1. Unknown28 April 2015 at 21:06

      Hi Ben,

      You well done by asking this interesting question.
      One of the big ideas of this platform is how to attract as many users as possible to create large community. To do so, our platform does not limit or restrict uploading or downloading photos, videos and music. Once users are activated, they have permission to use any of the available photos or videos (excluding unacceptable photos such as violence). To illustrate this more, I give you an example. With Facebook, users need to follow a bit complicated steps to download a video from a friend’s timeline, while BizWay does not (Variety of options can come up by one right click on). Another thing, Facebook allows its users to upload up to 10,000 images, while users with BizWay can get extra data storage depending on their needs. The other difference is that there is no restriction on photo size when a user creates a cover photo, while Facebook accepts at least 400 pixels wide and at least 150 pixels tall.
      As a community manager, I think with the options mentioned above will not hit critical mass with restriction. So, users can restrict themselves by not inviting/advertising our platform to the community not the BizWay.

      Does this answer your question please?

      Again, I would say the question was great and appreciated.

      Regards,
      BizWay Community Manager

      Delete
  2. Anonymous5 May 2015 at 00:35

    Hi Younis,

    Good work. I feel the think which might be lacking in this platform is the thing which you have mentioned has niche is present else where like moodle.net is something very similar but it's in education and there are several others as well, so i would some one join this and also unless you don't have a direct benefit for users it will really be tough to attract users presently. In the time when my-space, Facebook got started that was a possibility as social networking was at its infant stage but know not sure....

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    Replies
    1. Unknown7 May 2015 at 22:02

      Well, I had a deep navigation in Moodle's website you mentioned above. I realised that one of the magnificent advantages of exchanging ideas through comments is not just to answer questions, but is also about getting benefits from what others think. In your comment, I would say Moodle has a number of core APIs that can be a reliable source for the assignment.

      Regards,

      Delete

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