Business Fights Poverty was established in March of 2008 to pioneer new ways of fighting poverty utilizing economic and business opportunities by groups and individuals. Founder and Director, Zahid Torres-Rahman discovered and implemented the perfect platform for his idea through a chance conversation and a day’s worth of work.
Online community guidelines detail the types of behaviors that are and are not appropriate on your community. They include things that some might consider obvious, but they also include items that are somewhat unique to you and your community. I liken an online community to a country. Each country has culture, laws and social norms that make it different from every other country.
©2010 Obert Houser
In March 2007, we started TuDiabetes because we saw that too many people with diabetes were feeling isolated instead of benefiting from the shared experience they could have by connecting to other people touched by diabetes.
Today, Diabetes Hands Foundation‘s networks allow members to find support locally and globally. Our more than 23,000 members describe the TuDiabetes family as a lifeline, a source of guidance, a sanctuary, and even a college education! We proudly connect advocates, artists, dreamers, thinkers, and people touched by diabetes of all types so that all of us may live a more expansive life with diabetes.
I sit back and reflect on where we were 5 years ago and where we are now:
On our fifth birthday, please help us keep going strong in our mission to improve the lives of people living with diabetes worldwide.
If all members of TuDiabetes donate $5, we will raise more than $100,000. Our goal is less ambitious: we are seeking to raise $20,000 before the end of March. So we ask you to give us 5 dollars, or more if you can.
Thank you for your support! And here’s to another 5 years!
-Manny
Social media in particular has revolutionized how patients and doctors interact with each other. Communication barriers are being broken with services like email, Twitter and Facebook. Getting access to trusted and peer-reviewed resources is easy, and finding a community of others going through similar disease experiences no longer requires joining a physical support group.
At Ning, several health-related groups have focused on implementing the best ways to harness the power of social media for medical purposes. The following are a few themes we picked up from our clients.
Learn to Live with Your Disease
Many Ning-supported medical and wellness websites give patients a platform to make their voices heard in a community of other users who understand and can provide support for the disease. One example of this is the blogging feature, which allows users to publish blog posts about anything on their minds. By allowing for constant reflection and feedback from others going through similar and shared experiences, these websites provide a positive space for users to explore how they and others live with this disease.
Tara is a member of TuDiabetes.org®, a Ning website designed for diabetic patients to come together and share resources, get support, and help each other live with the disease. The following is an excerpt from her introductory blog post:
Hello, tudiabetes, I’m Tara.
I was diagnosed 6 months and 13 days ago with Type 1 Diabetes. I’m 22 years-old, work out on the regular, and no one in my family has ever had this disease so to say it came at a bit of a shock is an understatement. Diabetes wasn’t even on my radar, I’ve never known anyone with the disease and I knew next to absolutely nothing about it. But when the nurse checked my blood-sugar and a result of 579 came staring back at her, there was no question about it- I have diabetes…
As site creator Manny Hernandez explains, the idea for using social media for a greater good appealed to him, and after he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, the idea dawned on him to create a community for diabetic patients, a site that has since been described as “Myspace on insulin.”
“In TuDiabetes.org®, we write blog posts, exchange ideas in discussion forums, share photos of ourselves and our loved ones and videos that we find useful and informative,” wrote Hernandez on the Ning community.
TuDiabetes.org® offers a unique tool, TuAnalyze, that allows users to track their Hemoglobin A1C level. Hemoglobin A1C is a marker that gives patients an idea of how well they are performing with long-term blood sugar control. TuAnalyze, developed jointly with Children’s Hospital in Boston, gives users a tool to record, share and compare their own diabetes information against community aggregated data maps. Through this tool, TuDiabetes.org® helps patients manage their disease, another way of helping them learn to live with their condition.
Connect and Receive Support
On December 1, 2011, a member on Living with TN posted that she was feeling nervous a few days before a Micro Vascular Decompression surgery, the gold standard surgical treatment for trigeminal neuralgia (TN). Within a few days, other members commented back, reassuring her of her choice in doctor and treatment, pointing her to more resources within the website.
This is just 1 example of how Ning sites are bringing people together to create collaborative communities supporting members going through similar experiences. The traditional support group has evolved into online forums, discussion boards, and chat platforms, allowing members to connect with others like themselves. Members can even send each other virtual “gifts” to other members at AVMSurvivors.org, a Ning site for members battling arteriovenous malformations, a disease of the blood vessels. These gifts consist of icons displayed on users’ profile pages and are meant to be signs of comfort and support.
The communities created through these Ning sites are also meant to provide sources of encouragement. A new campaign called the “Thrive Challenge” was recently started at Vega Community. Members post their work out and fitness goals for 2012 and beyond. By doing so, the community can continuously encourage members to keep on track with their targets and celebrate successes.
At Raw Food Rehab, a Ning site for individuals partaking in the raw foods diet, members can join different groups that the site lists as “rooms.” The rooms contain more specialized discussions on topics ranging from books, women’s health, tools and gadgets for making raw food, and more. One room is titled “The Chapel,” where members can post about prayer requests and discuss spiritual support. Though these discussions are not purely centered on raw food, these parts of the community connect like-minded people with similar goals for further conversation about various aspects of their lives.
Share and Access Resources
A common thread that links every health-related site on Ning is the wide availability of resources, either through forums and live chats or information packets available for download off these Ning communities.
From peers:
Forum discussions allow members to post information for sharing or frame informal questions for others on the site to answer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Posted content depends on the nature of the website. For example, users have an outlet to recommend wig manufacturers and stores to buy wigs for individuals who have alopecia (hair loss) related to medical conditions. For patients allergic to gluten, Gluten-Free Faces provides a space to share tasty recipes from others suffering from the same condition.
Innovative ways to share information through media-rich features like pictures and videos give users more tools for communicating disease-specific knowledge. At TuDiabetes.org®, videos demonstrate how to use certain types of insulin pumps much better than written manuals. Members can also post videos of themselves and their journey with diabetes, or inspiring speeches that help them with their treatment course.
From colleagues:
Information exchange is not only among patients – several Ning communities are centered on physician communication within the field. DoctorsHangout.com is a Ning site specifically created for social networking among medical students, residents, and physicians. Here, members of the medical community can ask their colleagues, in and out of their specialties, for advice on tough cases and share interesting clinical findings, instantly. Users also post about study tips for board certifications and medical school standardized exams. The ability to post media-rich content allows members in the medical field to share images of physical findings and videos highlighting different surgical techniques.
For radRounds.com, image sharing is especially important as the Ning site allows radiologists to ask colleagues advice about reading different types of films (X-rays, CT scans, MRI, etc.). This site offers unlimited storage space so doctors can upload images and files for consultation, and physicians can stay up-to-date with the latest radiology news and technology through forum discussions. By connecting physicians, Ning websites facilitate greater information sharing to better physician knowledge and, ultimately, patient care and health.
About Joyce Ho
Joyce Ho graduated from Stanford University with a BA degree in Human Biology. She is a third year medical student at the Stanford School of Medicine and is currently participating in the NBC News Fellowship in Media and Global Health. Read her blog or follow her on Twitter @MedGlobalHealth
This is the second in a two-part series by Ning’s Marketing intern, Nicholas O’Farrell, on teen mobile use. You can check out his earlier post on the basics of mobile in the teenage world.
To understand teen mobile use is to understand the teen mobile market. As a group, the teen sector is unique – while most mobile markets change as technology advances, the teen market depends on and transforms with the ever-changing interests of its teenage consumers. We typically hear about new things to check out from each other, and we’re less likely to sign up for a service or purchase something without having heard about it from a trusted friend. The endorsement of a mobile product by a peer is infinitely more valuable than advertisements on the Internet or TV. This is responsible for the perception that trends in the teen mobile market are so quick to emerge and expire – the transient nature of what is in high school vogue results in a market that is constantly transforming to keep up with its teen consumers.
Switching gears, as we hear talk of a shift to a “Post-PC world” and the mass migration from traditional computers to mobile devices like tablets and smartphones and the cloud, I’ve begun to consider the fact that teens may in part be driving this migration. While still pricey, tablets and smartphones, like the iPad and Android devices, do offer less expensive alternatives to computers and laptops for teens, a group that, as a whole, is not yet financially independent. These devices are more portable and convenient, and oftentimes easier to use than traditional PCs – think back to the teenagers and accessibility concept I highlight in the first part of this post.
As I see it, today’s most advanced mobile devices are so developed that they can serve as practical and realistic substitutes for the conventional computer. I use my iPhone 4 more than any other device – for communication, entertainment, school – anything and everything – and my use is more the norm than the exception. In truth, mobile is the future of consumer technology, and the fact that teenagers are so attracted to mobile’s accessibility, popularity, and connectivity may very well be a driving force behind the migration away from the traditional computer.
Post by Nicholas O’Farrell. Nicholas is a Marketing intern at Ning. Over the summer, he’s worked on a variety of projects with us, spanning from online community building for political organizations to working with Ning’s legal team and blogging for the company. A triplet and citizen of three countries, Nicholas enjoys reading, writing, traveling, skiing, and exploring new cultures and languages.
Interested in working at Ning? Learn more at join.ning.com!
This is the first in a two-part series by Ning’s Marketing intern, Nicholas O’Farrell, on teenage mobile use. Stay tuned for his Friday post about the teen mobile market and their role in the migration to mobile.
In many ways, “mobile” is a teenage concept. From its beginnings in the 1970s to the 3G and 4G networks used today by the likes of Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone, Vivo, Orange and T-Mobile, it has experienced much of the same physical and conceptual growth that teenagers undergo to become adults. In fact, mobile’s foundation was laid with the introduction of earlier mobile technology in 1991 – coincidentally the year today’s oldest teenagers, now 19, were born – and the technology has boomed ever since. Growing alongside today’s teens, mobile has become one of the defining technologies of Generation Z (people born between 1991-2010), so much so that the generation – my generation – might be more aptly named Generation Mobile.
While teen mobile use appears complex, it boils down to 3 vital characteristics. A service that incorporates all 3 of these attributes into its mobile product is more likely to have a large teen base:
The most important motivation for teens to use and continue using a mobile service is ease of use. It’s one of the reasons for the massive popularity among teenagers of Facebook’s mobile app and texting – communication services like these are quick to learn, easy to use, and offer instant gratification.
It’s no surprise that the percentage of teens owning cell phones increased 15 times between 2000 and 2010 (from 5% of the teenage population owning in 2000 to 75% of teens owning in 2010. Mobile use amongst teens, like many other things in middle and high school, is driven by the notion that “if everybody else has it, you have to have it too.” No, it’s not traditional peer pressure – it’s the feeling that if you don’t have something, you’re missing out!
Having come of age during the era of social networking and online sharing, many of us now look for mobile services integrating with the many accounts we already use, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Zynga. We want mobile apps that allow us to chat with our Facebook friends, our AIM buddies, and friends still tied to SMS. Mogwee takes this idea and merges its interactive social tools to create a fun and quirky multi-platform group communication mobile service. Now I can use one app to interact and connect with my friends, all from the palm of my hand — it’s this all-in-one mobile connectivity that teenagers crave.
Check the Ning Blog on Friday for the second half as Nicholas discusses the teen mobile market and teens’ role in the migration to mobile.
Interested in working at Ning? Learn more at join.ning.com!
As summer swings into full gear and the 4th of July fast approaches, communities across the nation are preparing to host Independence Day celebrations. From Maine to California, Americans all over are getting ready for barbecues, parades and outdoor gatherings not so different from the first July 4 celebration in 1777. In Hawaii, one community is preparing for an epic fireworks display – volunteers are raising $60,000 for the Kailua Fireworks show. Since funding for the show was cut in 2009, local businesses and community members have taken it upon themselves to raise money to keep their fireworks tradition alive. In 2010, community organizer Brook Gramann brought the fundraising effort online, and their Ning Network was born – Kailua Fireworks.
The community serves as an online hub for its explosive endeavor, highlighting pictures and videos of past displays and ways to fundraise. Members can donate to the fireworks fund or buy Kailua coupon books, read press excerpts about successful past shows, and get updates on the race to $60,000. While Kailua Fireworks focuses on the financial aspect of the show, the emotional and traditional is just as meaningful, as described on the Kailua coupon book:
“The 4th of July Fireworks in Kailua not only light up the sky and the hearts of our community, but also remind us of what it means to be an American. They give us a shimmering light of hope for a bright future. Fireworks unite families and our community under the mutual goals of being together, celebrating freedom, and seeing the night sky in all its glory.”
As of July 1, Kailua Fireworks has raised over $34,000 and we’re excited to track their progress over the next few days as they gear up for their big 4th of July show. If you’d like help them out, please visit Kailua Fireworks’ donation page.
Interested in working at Ning? Learn more at join.ning.com!
Whenever I am surrounded by women of the Web, I am impressed with how they leverage new digital products and services to enrich their lives and to help other women succeed in digital channels. This spirit of innovation and collaboration was especially noticeable at SheCon’11 and defined the tone and the energy of the conference in Miami this May 20-22.
The event was packed with trail-blazing women like Eleanor Hoh, aka Wokstar, who is using her blog, Twitter profile and YouTube channel to teach people that cooking is easy and that, with a few basic wok lessons, you can prepare quick, healthy meals without even glancing at a recipe.
One of my favorite speakers was Rosie Pope, the pre- and post-natal fashion icon who’s now the star of Bravo TV’s hit Pregnant in Heels. Rosie explained how she is using her Facebook page, blog, Twitter and guest blogging opportunities to capitalize on her newfound fame and audience. She said that her Facebook page has allowed her “to design into her clientele versus dictating over them, “ which I think is a pretty profound change in how clothes being designed. She can clearly see that different demographics and people from different parts of the U.S. want different things from their maternity fashions.
I met Terry Wheatley, founder of #winesister of the @winesisterhood, and CMO/Partner at Canopy Management. Terry is a brilliant brand developer of wines; she is focused on community-building and she wants women to feel empowered while sharing a glass of wine. She spends a good portion of her marketing resources building the Wine Sisterhood following on Facebook and ensuring the Wine Sisterhood website is full of easy-to-read information on wine.
Terry organized a Sassy Suite each evening so that we could all meet, mingle and enjoy a few great wines with intriguing names like Rebel Red and Promiscuous while taking turns getting hand massages from a professional masseuse. (Yes, attending conferences is hard work.)
This is truly an amazing community of women. I’m grateful that we have both a physical community of SheCon events and a digital SheCon community on Ning to keep in touch and share information on the ways digital is helping us improve our lives. I’m proud to be a member of this community, and I strive to be a member who harnesses the power of digital not just to improve my own life but to enable other women to thrive. I hope all of you will reach out to me on the network on my profile.
SheCon official Ning Community
Rachel Masters is a partner and co-founder of Red Magnet Media. Before co-founding Red Magnet Media, Rachel was the Vice President of Strategic Relationships at Ning, a social networking platform with more than two million individual social networks. At Ning, Rachel managed over 300 branded social networks with partners like 50 Cent, Red Light Management and The Collective.
I’ve attended many conferences, with major themes focusing on the music-tech community. Over the last 6 years, during the growth of social media and the expansion of community-building tools, I’ve observed recurring and like-minded questions asked by panelists from every background. Similar core issues arise amongst community creators and leaders. As niche intimate communities grow to bountiful online spaces where humans transcend physical boundaries and interact globally in meaningful ways, creators are asking:
What happens to the offline component? How does a community grow? What kind of space am I building? What’s it all for, anyway?!
Mom 2.0 Summit
I recently attended Mom 2.0 Summit in New Orleans. Marketers, Moms and Mums covered high-level concepts; the keynote from Abigail Disney and Lois Vossen united the audience as a powerful community, empowered by tools to “heal the world where you are.” As digital storytellers, the “mommy blogging” community is a powerful contingency and their energy is positively different; I knew I was in a room full of powerful and driven women, community creators, leaders and builders. They know what tools to use, and draw in amazing sponsors like Whirlpool. Not only did I want the washer/dryer on display at Mom 2.0 Summit, I knew I wasn’t going to end up simply teaching these women how to craft an “@ reply” on Twitter.
The Four Questions
Among a list of amazing speakers, Laney Whitcanack and I ran a workshop, Building Community or Building Business: A Blueprint for Creating Space.
In the music space, we often discuss the union between offline communities at live music events with online music communities. Many artists are trying new things to bring content online, but the live music online/offline space has yet to be conquered. Many of the moms I met in New Orleans expressed similar disconnections within their own communities. Together, Laney and I helped community leaders discover answers to this by going through a few exercises while shying away from mentioning any specific tools. We asked four questions of community leaders:
What is the purpose of your community?
What kind of space do you want it to be and what do you want from it?
Secret Sauce: What are you doing to help participants disclose, share, and follow information?
What is the structure of the community?
In a fast hour, we drew Venn diagrams, learned about a community of teachers sharing information online, and a community focusing on bountiful friendships between Muslim and Jewish Americans. We tried to focus mostly on answering the questions without relying on the preference of one social tool over another, but it was impossible to ignore the benefits of Ning and the benefits a community creator enjoys by choosing Ning’s platform. A creator might want to build a “living room” with a forum, or a “community recreation center” using Ning groups. Because they adapt so easily to growth, Ning’s products enable the “secret sauce” necessary to help participants disclose, share and follow information. Ultimately the creator must make regular decisions about the environment and is empowered to grow large spaces filled with people from around the world for distinct purposes. For our workshop, we reviewed what tools are best and for what purpose, and purposely focused on growth, space, and creative communication, all of which are fully enabled by Ning. It felt great to be there, knowing that these conversations were not future tripping – we were talking about what community leaders and creators can do right now. It dawned on me during the workshop that Ning speaks the language of a worldwide web; within the right space, any community can transcend spoken word.
Offline
The gap between online and offline communities can be tough to bridge. In music, the common activity is obvious; music fans go to shows offline. But moms have many common interests, ranging from teaching to aerospace engineering. While the communities grow en mass online, at the conference there was a strong desire to unite offline, too. One way to bridge this gap is to find leaders in a community who want to take on specific regions and organize activities to drive engagement, such as posting great content from activities for the rest of the community to experience. With Ning groups and calendars, this strategy is easy to execute. In the end, the number one question that must be revisited every 12-18 months: What is the purpose of my community?
Show Mom The Money
One unanticipated and recurring question raised: How do you monetize? The growth and popularity of “mommy blogging” communities built from the heart is incredible. And the thirst for these communities is ever-present. This leads to a conundrum—time needed to manage and money to support these mom epicenters. And that’s where choosing the right tool does play a role in community building decisions; this is where Ning shines. Having full control over if and where advertisements appear in online communities, or ways to incorporate guerilla advertising in an authentic way becomes incredibly powerful and attractive to advertisers and people trying to reach community members. Additionally, people are willing to pay a premium for valuable and useful content they can digitally access. Going back to the bridge between online and offline, branded merchandise and fundraising add true value to any social destination by making the online community more tangible, real. Giving a real value to your community makes it, well, priceless.
Corey Denis is VP of Digital Marketing at TAG Strategic, a digital entertainment consulting firm. She has been pioneering digital music marketing since 1999. She also founded Not Shocking, working with clients like SoundExchange, Michael Tilson Thomas, IRIS Distribution, Inu and Todd Fancey.
At Constant Contact, we’ve been heavily focused on integrating the power of social media into our suite of products. We know it’s increasingly important for our small-business customers to have a robust social media marketing strategy in place, one that will deliver results. That last part is key: How can an organization use social media in a way that delivers something tangible to its holistic online marketing efforts? Well, we are happy to say that we have an answer — the integration of Ning with Constant Contact. We are simply delighted to partner with the pioneer and leader in social websites.
Ning is an incredible tool for creating your own social media hub that can be used to raise awareness, solicit donations, and organize powerful groups of like-minded people for a cause. With the integration of Constant Contact, Ning Creators can now simply and effectively reach out to their network with newsletters, sales promotions, event invitations, and more. Conversely, Constant Contact customers can now create a Ning Network, instantly adding a social experience for conversation between customers and enabling sharing content across all major social networking platforms.
Ning Creators looking to start using Constant Contact can find a lot of helpful information, webinars, and other resources for getting started on our website. I’d like to share a few of my personal favorite best practices for using our Email and Event Marketing products:
We’re excited to hear your success stories using Ning with Constant Contact, and we encourage you to share them with the Constant Contact community.
— Steve Johnson, Vice President, Constant Contact
