Everyone wants to enable the social glue of customer generated content – videos, pictures, blog posts, and everything else you can imagine. But, what a bother.

Now you can create your own social network, using Kickapps. It’s a community-building platform – something of a private label social network that you can embed in your site with a modicum of effort. You may even have already seen it, if you’ve visited or used community features on ABC Family, the DIY Network, or the Phoenix Suns. A Kickapps community can let your customers upload videos, photos, and MP3’s. They can create a rich profile to let other community members know all about them. Then, they can create or join special groups to get to know everyone. If you want to create your own brand’s Facebook, here’s one way to do it.

Now you can’t say that creating a customer social network is beyond your reach.

While it’s easy to talk about social networking, it can be more challenging to actually enable it for your customers. There are so many moving parts.

Now you can create a social network with one of many social networking platforms – some without even knowing any HTML. The term social networking covers so many areas, that it’s very difficult to identify just one system that’s right for any one company. With this detailed list, you should look for a company that’s like yours (or maybe one you admire), and then consider using the same software. There’s no shame in being a fast follower.

Think your customers want to express themselves with comments, tags, images, videos, and any number of customer-generated items? Why not give them a canvas to paint on?

It should come as no surprise that some of the most innovative advertising vehicles are connected with the marketing of music. It’s almost purely emotional and, more importantly, the heaviest users and buyers (okay, downloaders, too) are also the very tech savvy youth market. Want to reach this target?

Try creating a Slide design that can act as the background or frame for content on MySpace, Facebook, or any number of other social networking sites. Users simply choose a background, then add photos (either from their PC or from a service like Flickr), and then simply copy and paste the code into their social networking site. Slide is a master at serving up the specific code for embedding their “frames” into other sites (as you’ll see in this Diana Krall example).

Slide reaches over 130 million social network users across the web. Whether you’re selling (Toyota) Scions or the latest movie, creating an easy to use Slide can be an efficient way to reach today’s social networker.

Your best customers have something in common – their interest in your brand and your category (of products or services). We’ve spoken about a service named Twitter (see Stay close to mother hen ) that lets you stay connected with your customers by text message. Now there’s a more robust offering that helps you create a mobile social network with your customers.

Frengo lets you create text messaging channels called buzz, then invite people to participate (by mobile or web). Once you’ve created your channel, you can then interact by text message with your members. You can keep these text messages private (restricted to your members) or let anyone follow it by opening it to the public. There’s almost no limit to interesting content – imagine updates from the latest industry trade show, a fashion show, or even a sponsored sporting event. Or, you can just push original content, say a groovy growth idea, to anyone who subscribes.

Your customers can follow your brand wherever it goes – all for free.

Today social networking is most associated with websites like Facebook or MySpace. However, the real social marketing device isn’t a website that you can access from your laptop on our desk . . . it’s in your pocket.

Dodgeball (owned by Google) shows you how social networking can take advantage of the fact that everyone carries a mobile phone. What’s interesting here is how the combination of mobile phones and social networking can bring together people. Members of this system sign up and confirm their cell phone number. Then, they check in with the service, say when they’re at a bar. The service will then let their friends know where they are and also alert the member if friends or friends of friends are anywhere nearby.

In the same way, you could create a social network today, using low cost tools, and combine it with basic mobile phone capability to keep your customers close to you. While it’s not as easy as just flipping a switch, it could help you retain your existing customers and bring them back to your business more frequently.