New NECC Conference Social Network About to Go Live

[Steve Hargadon]

www.necc2008.org. Let me know what you think. I did some custom work on the colors and header to match the actual conference site.

[Garin Hess]

Looks really nice. I think you did a good job at integrating the look/feel.

Do you pay for premium service so you don't get Ning's ads?

[Steve Hargadon]

Yes, we did pay for the premium services. Glad you like the look/feel!

[Garin Hess]

I like the "We hope you will use Ning to:" list. That should really help conference attendees figure out what the purpose of it is. I know that for a while, my thoughts about social networks were, "That's cool, but they don't seem all that useful." So that list should open the eyes of new members to why they should participate.

[Steve Hargadon]

This cover letter was actually generated by Anita and Donella. They did a good job!

[Garin Hess]

It looks like you are going to have your speakers create the forums for their sessions? How do you plan to do that?

[Steve Hargadon]

Still working on this. But it's best if they do, since then they will be alerted to all posts in reply. For CUE we set up a discussion for every session, but then realized the speakers were not notified in any way when someone posted about their session.

[Garin Hess]

Do you not allow blog posts? If not, why not?

[Steve Hargadon]

I just posted a blog post to make sure it was working. I think there just hadn't been any posts yet.

Thanks for keeping this discussion going!

[david]

Steve,

You have a great looking site. I am thinking about setting up a Ning site for a conference we are running in July (short lead time!!!).

May I ask what steps you took to prep the site (did you create groups, start session discussions proactively, etc), and convince folks to join?

Also, did you have to do a lot of convincing to get the speakers to engage in the session discussion forums?

Thanks in advance,
Dave

[Steve Hargadon]

Well, the nice think about Ning is that you can set up a network in all of about 5 minutes. The NECC network is really just their standard setup with a nice header and custom colors. Don't really even need those to get started or to be effective!

For NECC, I asked the conference organizers to write the "Welcome" note, and then I started the "Introductions" forum thread. I then announced the site to my network and blogged about it, and then the NECC folks announced it to their lists.

I'm not doing any convincing to get the speakers to engage, but they are being asked to by NECC. :)

Good luck!

[david]

Thanks for your reply, Steve.

I'm hopeful that it will be as easy a process for my site. :-)

-Dave