Finding Innovation

I’ve been working on an amazing project for the last few weeks and I can’t begin to tell you how fulfilling it has been to my life.  Since I started working for myself I have had countless numbers of clients asking me for their very own social networking site.  I’ve tried hard to hack things together with Joomla, WordPress, and tried looking for the best system out there for a couple of years now and just couldn’t seem to find it.

With this current project I was basically being paid to find the “it” platform and make it happen.  I started off with Ning but I couldn’t rely on them since they recently switched to only paid subscription.  I didn’t mind paying monthly for it but they were talking about features that I wanted that just weren’t possible.  I wasn’t going to suffer through promises for a couple of years like I have been while waiting for WordPress 3 to come out.

So I finally found another platform that I thought would work and we quickly tested it out.  Needless to say we built the site in just a couple of weeks and have memberships rolling in. Let me tell you what all we are doing.

We have a paid membership system setup.  The only thing required was either a PayPal business account or Authorize.net.  We currently have 2 different levels of members but we can have up to three.  It also integrates promo codes and trial periods.

It also has an integrated referral program and include an integrated affiliate system.  We’re not using it but it is there and I believe it has a two tier system as well.

You can upload and integrate media into its integrate blog system with podcasting, forum system, and private messaging system. It also has web chat, live video conferencing, telephone conferencing.  If you can think of a way to communicate it has it.

I love the Frequently Asked Questions module. I will notice that I start getting the same questions from people so I just post it there and they are ready to go.

If you want to sell something, it has an integrated shopping cart.  All you have to do is plug in your payment variables from Authorize.net and it takes care of the rest including providing downloads for virtual products.

There are a large number of applications that we haven’t even started using yet such as audio video postcard system where you can send audio and video postcards to each other, you can also upload presentations for people to view.  There is a file sharing module, a document creator module, member webpages, photo galleries, reviews system, and even task managers.  It’s amazing how much is included in this program and you wouldn’t believe that you get it all for only $99 a month.

With this system we were able to build the new site in just two weeks and have over 200 members in less than a month.  The members are blown away by the content we have provided so far and we haven’t even scratched the surface of it’s capabilities.

Now I will admit that the system is a little bit quirky.  It doesn’t always work the way I think it should.  But if you are looking for an affordable fast way to create your own social networking site, then you need to check out iGroops.

Our plan is to start building our own platform where it works exactly how we want it to but in the meantime this system provides us with the blueprint that we need to get started today.  After years of trying to hack BuddyPress, and Jomsocial, as well as try out many other social networking platforms, you won’t find anything as extensive as what we have found with iGroops.  I’m happy to say I have found a platform that I can recommend to my clients looking for a system like this.

A few years back when I was working at a firm. The company had a co-located server that would get hacked all of the time.  At least once year we would be brought to our knees trying to recover from an outage.  You would think we would need to beef up our server but it would always turn out that whatever would cause our downtime would be causing other servers in the area downtime as well meaning that the problems were coming from within the data-center.  The last time that server went down it became toast and we ended up having to have them ship it back to us.

It’s a little bit funny when servers go down.  Web services go down.  Web sites go down.  Email goes down.  Everything related to our clients online business which we had created was lost.  I quickly came to learn something though.  Clients don’t mind as much when the site goes down or if a service goes down, but when their only connection to their clients goes down, then I have a problem.  For weeks during recovery, the major complaint of all of our clients was that we had to do something to get email back online.

It doesn’t take a hacker or an outage to bring your online business to its knees.  Sometimes it could be not paying your bill.  This morning I received a call from a client with a complaint that their websites were showing up with the words “Account Suspended” at the top.  I’m assuming this is a billing issue and I can’t control it because I didn’t handle their hosting. But once again, they are left without any communication through their websites because their email was through their hosting service.

So, what’s my point? After recovering from the last server issues at the firm, we had somehow come to realize that we could set up Google Apps for our domain name and run all of our email in the cloud.  From that point forward I have always run my email through Google Apps, because no matter what happens to my site or server, or whatever, my email is sitting securely on Google’s servers.  I will have communication with my clients in the event of an emergency.

When I set up new clients I try to explain to them that I will be setting up their email through Gmail and they get confused.  They don’t realize that you can set up your domain through Google apps.  You not only get Gmail with Google apps, but you also get Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Sites and you are using all of these Google services in the name of your domain name.  Its easy to set up and its free for the basic service if you have less than 50 users.

Now, it can be difficult to make this switch if you are already established on a hosting server, but if you just starting out or are making changes to your policy, I highly recommend that you move your email to Google Apps.

Some time back I found this service called Animoto.  It is the evolution of slide shows into actual video.  I tired to keep it a secret, but really this is something everyone should know about. Here are a couple of videos I put together a year ago:

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you should know that businesses of any size should be conducting video marketing.  YouTube is one of the top “search engines” that you can be placing content into.

You can create some videos using nice little cameras like the Flip or my personal favorite the Kodak Zi8, which I chose because of the external microphone jack.   I recommend creating a series of videos using Mike Koenigs 10-10-4 method, but if you need to throw a quick promo together showing images of your service or product, I recommend checking out Animoto.

I put one together real quick for my client Arrowhead Construction, Inc. You can check it below.  It took me about 3 minutes to put it together and a few minutes for it to be rendered.  You will notice that the video is short and that it includes Animoto’s labeling.  You can also purchase credits to create longer videos and if you would like to have white labeling, you can purchase a business license.

Check it out and let me know if you try it out and post links to your vids.

The new default WordPress theme, “twenty ten” is moving in a direction that makes WordPress a system to be reckoned with.  During the “State of the Word” (WordPress’s Keynote about WordPress futures) at WordCamp San Francisco last week, co-creator Matt Mullenweg stated his commitment to spend more time on themeing and twenty ten is definitely a move in that direction.

I love the new menu features in WordPress 3.0.  I love the fact that you can set a custom header image for seperate posts and pages.  You can set the background to any image or color.  I have yet to figure out how to change the colors for the main navigation though.  I probably have to dig more into that.

One new tool that I found that was a cool way to compliment this new theme is bgPatterns (http://bgpatterns.com/).  You can design a custom background tile.  You can see the one that I am using right now.  I went through their little system and generated an image that I uploaded and set to be tiled as my background:

Check it out and see just how cool you can make your new default theme.  If you build one I would love for you to share it with me.  Do you have any tips to share on how to make the default theme as cool as possible?  Let me know.