Open up a can Create a customer social network with Kickapps

Posted by tom klein November 13, 2007

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.

Kickapps works by using a system of widgets. These widgets are Flash or HTML-based code snippets that are configured and populated by XML feeds from their servers. In other words, they let you integrate parts and pieces of the social network on your existing site.

Why a social network for your customers? You may want to bring together customers of, say, a certain vehicle line. Or, maybe you want to bring together buyers who are all in a certain industry. Finally, you may benefit from just letting all of your employees get to know each other.

Accenture’s “Facebook” Kickapps gets iPhone friendly

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