Category: Community Management

Paul Jun destroyed a wedding. He brought together a gang of friends, waited for the right moment then charged into the ceremony and began smashing things up… and killing the guests. The wedding took place on World of Warcraft between two players who had met and matched up in real life, and Paul was engaging in what he called “troll-like behavior.”

Look around your neighborhood. You’ll probably find people a lot like yourself: similar income, similar education levels, similar outlook, similar views.  It’s what journalist Bill Bishop called The Big Sort, the tendency to choose to live among people similar to ourselves. It’s one of the factors that has led to America’s polarization. When we meet and make friends with people who are like us, we find it harder to see the world from a perspective different from our own.

Imagine that you’re on your way out of your therapist’s office. The elevator opens and the person waiting by the door gives you a double-look. You’ve never seen them before. You don’t know them. But they know your name, who you work for, what school you went to, the details of your recent break-up, your struggles with an eating disorder, and of course the fact that you’re seeing a therapist to get your life back in order.

It’s hard to believe now, but back in the early days of the Web, when Amazon was still a bookshop and Mark Zuckerberg just another geeky Harvard student, websites didn’t have comments sections.

Remember MySpace? It used to be the king of social media, the platform that other social media platforms wanted to be.

Chances to beat Zuckerberg at his own game don’t come around too often but owners of private social networks have a glorious opportunity right now.

There’s a wide variety of reasons why people might want to start their own social network; privacy is a dominant one. Whatever you’re interested in keeping safe, from your children to data about how you use the internet, smaller social networks can be a very appealing option. Here’s three popular private social networks, to show you just how viable they can be in today’s market, and some of the ways you can utilize plugins like PeepSo.

Google’s autocomplete tool is a great way to find out what people want to know about certain topics. It completes your words and sentences, based on what it thinks you’re going to type – and it makes these assumptions based on what other people around the world are searching on Google, and how frequently they’re searching for it (note: this works best if you’re logged out of your Google accounts and clear your browser history, as otherwise you’ll get autocomplete results tailored to you – rather than results ranked by worldwide popularity).

At a glance, it might look like Facebook is your only option if you want to effectively incorporate social networking into your business’ online marketing strategy; but that’s simply not true. Here’s some facts and figures you should know about social media in 2015, and which might help show you just how relevant and profitable a niche, privately hosted social network could be.