TechWag

: Image via CrunchBase

There are many people out there who are going to tell you that owning and running a social network is easy, the real truth is that not only it is not easy, but it can seriously cut into time to do much of anything else that you might have had planned to do with your time.

There are many fits and starts to developing and starting a social network for an organization. Once you have made it through the politics stage and into the implementation stage, the social network can become time consuming for one person to manage. It is almost unmanageable if you are expecting that person to do any other kind of work. The social network is its own job in its own right, including ensuring that the network does not become stagnate and stale. Many experts out there will tell you that running a social network is easy, but in reality, the time commitment is something you need to consider before you decide who is going to run it.

Things to think about or issues to address as the network is going live are:

1. Where are you going to integrate your social network to, what tools you will use to interact with those social networks you choose to use? If you integrate into Twitter, there are many very good tools like Seesmic desktop and Tweet deck. Both of these I use and while they can be distracting, Seesmic has an audible alert when someone retweets your stuff, or makes a direct comment. This makes working with twitter much easier, and I highly recommend both tools to interface with twitter. You should tie in your blog(s) and other direct content systems into Twitter and monitor your twitter channel on a regular basis.

2. FriendFeed is a must have integration point, but also requires that you monitor it all the time, while it is easy to monitor your own page, if someone likes something you write, check them out, subscribe to them if appropriate to the image you are trying to portray and understand that FriendFeed is not a professional network. There are naked pictures, off color comments, and depending on the image you are trying to create, could cause you problems along the way. I recommend dumping all new subscribers to a “try out list” before adopting them into your main feed for the world to see.

3. Who is going to engage with people on your primary production sites? If you allow comments, and people start commenting, who and how are you going to manage those comments? When the social network gets popular you can use technology to intercept most spam, but working through comments that might or might not be legitimate requires a human judgment call.

4. Who is making the content and do you trust them enough to blog or create content unfiltered. While a good policy goes a long way in helping to answer this question, if you put in an editorial process, where all documents are reviewed before posting, this is also going to be a huge time black hole for the editor or final pass reviewer. Many groups skip this part and prefer to do damage control if something gets posted that should not be.

5. Please know and understand that there are many people out there that are trying to tell you that they are a guru, and that they know best. Unless they have a specific plan that works in your industry to work from, much like you, they might be working on ideas and supposition. They will not be working on what works for your specific industry. It is easy to come up with a plan that sounds great, it is harder to implement that plan, and it is harder to track, trace, and work out who is actually interested in the content that you are writing about on your production systems. If anyone offers you a way to “lock out the competition,” run, run for the hills, do not answer their calls, and do not allow them into your office.

This is not an easy business; there are no shortcuts outside of hard work, and lots of hard work that will consume people’s time. The people who are popular now have been at this for a long time, and they have built up their reputations over time. Much like your company or you personally are going to have to build up your reputation over time. There are some things you can do to ease your path, like following what has worked for others in your specific industry. Knowing whom the popular and respected bloggers are in your industry, as well as understanding how social networks link together. This is the key to social networking, understanding the layout of the people, places, and ideas that have worked. Over time, you will experiment, but the first step is working very hard to get yourself or your company established on the internet.