B2B Social Networking - Ning

Original post  - Jan 10, 2008

I’ve been taking a look at social networking sites for the B2B industry. I rediscovered Ning today. When they were first launched they were a free-only service that was geared towards only the consumer Internet audience. Now they’ve added a paid service to remove or run your own ads, increase bandwidth and storage space, and use your own domain name.

As a network administrator, you have full control of exactly how your network looks and acts - ability for blogs, rss feeds, video, audio, photos, forums, and outside plugins. You have ownership of the content on your network, with the ability to backup any code and content within it. Ning does not currently interface with outside registration services (would love to see them support OpenID), but you can import and export your registered users. There’s also the option to create a closed network so that only the people invited can get in.

In just 5 minutes I was able to create a B2B social network that I’ll eventually tweak and link up to this site. If it grows, I can change to the paid options at any time. If you’re looking for a social networking tool for your B2B Website, take a look at Ning. It may be an easy, good and cheap way to add social networking to your site.