Plugging into Ning

With millions of voters—and dollars—at stake in Washington these days, politicos are always looking for new ways to plug into social networking. One hot topic in political tech circles is Ning, a platform that allows politicians to create their own social network. We asked our dueling tech gurus David All and Jerome Armstrong how to figure out if Ning is right for your social networking needs.


Don’t Get Branded a Beginner
By Jerome Armstrong

Ning is great for beginners. But a candidate on Ning is like a politician who’s on Blogspot because he heard blogs are the next big thing. You look like a beginner.

The first concerns are technical. The supporter data collected on the network is shared with the service provider, so every bit of information provided by your members is also the property of Ning. And by collecting information on Ning, you are creating a data silo that much more difficult to integrate with the rest of your campaign’s data.

And like all generic platforms, Ning fails to meet the specific needs of a competitive political campaign. It provides ample opportunities for individuals to network and communicate, but a successful campaign does a lot more than just communicate online—it organizes.

President Obama’s online campaign is the future of online platforms in political campaigns. Each supporter had a personal fundraising page and the social network was integrated seamlessly with the campaign’s field tools for volunteer canvassing and phone banking. Any Democratic candidate should have a social network that integrates with ActBlue and the Voter Activation Network, widely used partisan platforms for fundraising and fieldwork, and likewise for the platforms across the aisle.

Services like Ning are a great way for a campaign or organization to try out a social networking tool and see if it clicks. But for now, enterprise solutions that integrate with partisan platforms will continue to offer a better set of tools.

Jerome Armstrong is a blogger at MyDD.com, a founder of SBNation.com and a partner at the WebStrongGroup.

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The More Open, the Better
By David All

When you get right down to it, open products are simply more reliable. Sure, you might miss out on some fancy proprietary features like a built-in impact thermometer, but when it comes time to stuff everything you own in the trunk of your car and campaign like your life depends on it, your tools have to work—and work well.

That’s why Ning is the only social networking platform worth using for campaigns. Six pots of coffee deep at 2:30 in the morning, you don’t want to call a developer to fix something—you just want it to work. You want a workflow that has been streamlined by the input and feedback of hundreds of thousands users. And you want a system that can help you hit singles and doubles all day, every day without endless downtime and inexplicable glitches.

That’s what Ning gives you. Clean, beautiful aesthetics stacked on top of core technologies and architecture that gets the job done every time. And the best part: It is extremely cost-effective and simple to use. You get everything a campaign needs: a customizable design, a simple system to administer and moderate activity, a superb level of security and a thought-out, battle-tested system of support and guidance.

With the platform opening its doors to application developers, the breadth of connectivity available with a Ning network will soon be even wider. This will allow campaigns and political groups to spend their resources designing custom pieces to enhance the experience of their users and help their community make a difference on the issues that matter most.

David All is president of the David All Group, a web 2.0 agency, and founder of TechRepublican.com.