Abstract
Advertising and marketing professionals such as Weber (2007) and Brymer (2009) speak to the value of engaging consumers via online social networks to establish relationships and increase lifetime value. Yet, students tend to display blasé, almost bored attitude toward the potential value of Web 2.0 applications to direct response and marketing strategies. There is no excitement – no added enthusiasm for investigating this seemingly innovative realm for message delivery to potential prospects. Why? Because social media is nothing new to them. Rather, it is a taken-for-granted aspect of their daily lives. The ubiquitous nature of social media applications such as LinkedIn, Ning, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook are no more “new” to our students than the “traditional” mediums of television and radio have been those of us in the over-30s and -40s demographic.
As noted by Prensky (2001) and subsequently by Kalamas, Mitchell and Lester (2009) marketing educators facing this communication gap between themselves and their students and are in search of ways to reduce the divide between “the digital immigrants, educators, and the digital natives, students” (Prensky, p. 51). While many educators are still developing the basic skills and knowledge needed to effectively connect to others in the digital sphere, our students are already expert online content producers (McGee & Diaz, 2007), (Dye, 2007). Oblinger & Oblinger (2006) refer to those digital natives born since the 1980s as the “Net Generation.” Current Net Generation college students have grown up using multiple forms of online social media, and it's now up to faculty to catch up, gain understanding, and engage students in active learning modalities.
Caravella, Zahay, Jaeger & Ekachai (2009) provided some suggestions for integrating Web 2.0 technologies to increase student engagement, such as blogs, podcasts, and content management systems (CMS), such as Joomla! (www.joomla.org). These methods were deemed successful, in part, because each “mirrored the interactive world our students live in when they are not in our classroom” (Caravella et al, p. 63). The authors further encouraged colleagues to take the leap of faith to deploy Web 2.0 technology into the students' learning environments, encouraging us by saying, “Web 2.0-based applications are growing because they are easy to use, and there are lots of choices – so if you don't find something to be easy, go find another application” (p. 63).
Enter Ning (http://www.ning.com) and the learning environments it can provide to direct marketing educators. Ning is an online platform that allows users to create, according to the Ning home page, “your own social network for anything.” Best of all, Ning is easy to use – even for a digital immigrant who may lack the technical know-how needed to design and maintain a more traditional web page. Creating a Ning social networking site is also free, and the network one creates closely mirrors the environment of the social networks most familiar to the Net Generation: Facebook and My Space.
Ning was created in 2004 by Netscape pioneer Marc Andreessen and current Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, who also co-founded Harmonic Communications, an advertising analytics company later sold to Dentsu (Humphries, 2008). Ning is a white label social networking platform that allows users to build their own social networks from scratch, including selecting a unique name. The site's domain name then becomes, http://myname.ning.com. For example, one of this author's Ning sites is http://ISC461.ning.com and another is http://London0910.ning.com. Other white label platforms include KickApps, CrowdVine, and Groupsite (formerly CollectiveX). After a review nine such providers, the online technology review site http://www.TechCrunch.com concluded that Ning, “provides the best platform for setting up good-looking, sophisticated social networks with minimal effort” (Hendrickson, 2007). It's that ease of use that makes Ning such a viable option for establishing an online learning community.
Ning has relied on social networking to expand its own membership ranks. It now hosts more than 1.6 million social networks, with a total of more than 37 million members (Spinks, 2009). According to Maney, K., Kattan, & Partanen, A. (2009), Ning is adding approximately 2.5 million new members monthly. Ming's revenue is largely generated via Google AdSense, and contextual Google links are placed along the right column on every page within a free Ning social network site. However, a site creator can opt to pay a $24.95 monthly fee to remove the ads from their site.
Other premium services offered by Ning include the option to pay an additional $24.94 monthly fee to remove all Ning promotional links from a site's pages. By paying to remove the Ning promotions, a user is also able to remove the Ning brand name from the domain and link to their own custom domain name. An example of this is a Ning site created to add a specialized social network to www.marthastewart.com, found at http://dreamers.marthastuart.com. An experienced Ning user can quickly discern that Martha Stuart Living (owned by Omnimedia) has tapped into the many advantages of using a white label social network like Ning. The Ning site with the largest number of users – currently more than 470,000 registered members – is believed to be http://Thisis50.com, which was established by rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson (MacMillan, 2008). Since sites like these require considerably more than the 10 GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth available to a free Ning site, creators have the opportunity to pay $9.95 per month for each additional 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth.
While the cost of these optional premium services can add up, a free Ning site has proven to be more than adequately functional for use as an online learning community for a university class. The 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth are large enough to hold the data equivalent to 5,000 photos or 500 videos. The administrative controls offered to the site creator make it simple to limit or eliminate a student's ability to upload files that require exorbitant levels of storage. Of course, instructors with larger class sizes (100+ students) may need to completely eliminate the student members' option to post images or video.
The Google contextual ads have not proven to be disruptive in the learning environments provided by the Ning social network sites. In fact, the presence of such targeted, contextual messages can be utilized as a teaching tool. The students can monitor which advertisers are targeting our site members and discuss how our individual membership profiles may be affecting ad placement. For example, students started noting the large number of Google links related to the United Kingdom on the site. After some discussion, one student made the connection that the instructor regularly teaches courses in England and operates Ning sites to facilitate communication with students. Use of a Ning site may also proved a good means of studying online metrics for a direct marketing curriculum. Ning encourages active measurement by its member sites by allowing site creators to add an Analytics box to the site for placement of any JavaScript or HTML code, including those for web analytics software available from providers such as Google Analytics.
Any course on database or direct marketing would not be complete without lessons pertaining to consumer privacy. Ning's own privacy policy serves as a launching point for a student online privacy project. Jill Nissen, Ning vice president and chief policy officer, posted a blog entry announcing updates to Ning's privacy policy on December 22, 2009. Nissen said the company's goal was to make it easier for users to understand the Ning's use of personal information gathered from members and to clarify the roles of third parties. She noted, “In the updated policy, we've provided more detailed information about the collection and use of non-personally identifiable information by ad networks, ad servers and other third parties. We've also added information about the choices you have regarding the collection and use of this information” (Nissen 2009). In past courses the author's students have begun their privacy project by applying the Direct Marketing Association's privacy policy tips and recommended best practices to analyze and critique the Ning policy. They were then assigned two other online sites for privacy policy review and analysis and asked to conclude which of the sites they evaluated best adhere to the DMA's recommendations. Because Ning uses cookies and web beacons to collect personal information, using its privacy notice as a starting point also allows for discussion of relevant issues such as online behavioral monitoring and consumer protections regulated by the Federal Trade Commission.
One of the greatest advantages of using a Ning site is the extensive options it provides for student involvement in a digital environment. While course management software interfaces such as Blackboard allow for the creation of an electronically based classroom community, the Ning platform offers options that more closely simulate broader social networks. The recently released Blackboard Learn Release 9.0 does allow students to journal, create their own blogs, and participate in discussion groups, but it does not offer students flexibility to create their own sense of personalized online space, which is a hallmark of the social web. In Caravella, Zahay, Jaeger & Ekachai (2009), Debra Zahay reported increased student involvement in a blog created for the course than what she had received when previously using Blackboard to engage students in discussion. The Ning platform provides and even broader opportunity for students to create their own web content, including the use of their own CSS (cascading style sheets). Further, this initial use study indicates that this high level of interactivity further enhanced learning as students became more personally invested in how they presented their member pages.
After being invited by a site creator to join a Ning social network site, each Ning site member creates his/her own page – complete with customizable backgrounds. Advanced web users can use his/her own CSS to enhance their member pages while others can easily select from more than 50 pre-set options provided by Ning. On their individual member pages students can write their own blog, post photos and videos, download widgits and applications, start their own discussion forum, create event calendars, and add in and out RSS feeds. Each Ning site creator – in this case the instructor – retains management control of the site. Settings can be used to pre-screen postings and control membership. In initial trials of using a Ning site as a teaching tool, site membership was kept private, allowing only those invited to join the course's social network site. Any Ning social network site can also be made public and allow for full CSV (comma separated values) importing and web optimization. This option may be implemented in future course offerings to allow students to engage in a SEO project and work to attract new members, just as one would recruit new members to populate a branded social web site.
Students were also allowed to create public and private groups within their own member page, which were then utilized to facilitate planning and file sharing for group projects. The private groups function was especially useful because students were preparing entries for the DMEF's Collegiate Echo Challenge and did not want to share ideas with competing groups. Each group page includes an easy-to-use “send message to group” function that any group member can use to email all the group's members. Students also used a running discussion section to keep one another updated on progress made on the Challenge and to share ideas about possible strategies and tactics. Because the instructor was also a member of each group, it served as a means of monitoring activity and providing input and feedback.
Another application students found useful was a Ning feature called Events. Using this function, students can schedule face-to-face group meeting or schedule live online chat sessions. Event creators can control whether an event is public or private – meaning the every creator can decide who to invite Invitations are made by typing in individual email addresses, selecting from one's Ning friends list, or by importing an entire address book from another address book application like Outlook. An updated RSVP section is maintained. When the event date and time passes, Ning automatically removes it from the Ning page, which simplifies site upkeep for the site creator.
The Ning site was used for other class activities as well. Through the Ning site, students reported on direct marketing case studies, posting their reports for the entire class to review. This was a graded course requirement. While the instructor could review such responses, online feedback and grading was not an option because of privacy limitations. Testing and grade reporting is one area where Ning falls short compared to other digital learning environments, such as Blackboard. However, Ning was not designed to promote a great deal of private interactions – that would depart from the communal spirit of open social networking. Thus, Ning does not function as a platform for conducting online tests or quizzes or the online posting of grades.
Based on this trial classroom study, the use of a Ning site holds promise as a means of engaging the digital natives (students) in a digital learning environment. Through informal polling at the onset of the course, students reported paying little heed to marketers' efforts to engage them within the digital universe. After using the class Ning site to focus upon the potential uses and applications of social network marketing and other Web 2.0-based strategies, students reported a much broader sensibility about the means and methods of influencer marketing tactics and the potential value of social web marketing for consumer engagement, loyalty building, and referral.
This initial application of a Ning site in direct marketing education supports McNeely's (2005) conclusion that, “This is how the Net Generation learns: by doing.” As Ning continues to develop and offer new applications – including those aimed at revenue generation – this online learning environment may also come to serve as an online laboratory for the Net Generation to “do” direct marketing in a virtual, yet real, environment.