There’s a difference between a service that’s free as long as you stay within its limited parameters (two users, or three clients, or two workspaces, etc.) and one that suddenly announces that it’s implementing fees in order to stay afloat. If you appreciate Chris Anderson’s thought-provoking ideas about the free price tag in his book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” you’ll know that some of the companies that lure us in with “free” may not be able to properly leverage a large non-paying customer base to stay in business.

Take the white-label social network-building site Ning, for example. Ning wasn’t entirely free. If you wanted to remove ads from your community, you had to pay $24.95 per month, and if you wanted to point your domain name to your network or get more storage and bandwidth? More fees. Then, earlier this year, Ning announced it couldn’t sustain hosting free networks and gave all the owners of unpaid networks an ultimatum: Either upgrade or migrate somewhere else.

Clearly, free tools are attractive, but there’s a risk that some of these tools may not be free in the future. How do we manage the free tools, sites and networks we are using online that are integral to how we do business? Here are some things to consider:

1. Don’t go free for “mission critical” tools. If the site or service is key to the work process or growth of your company, pay for the services you need from the start. There are fixed costs you should be accounting for every month and things like project management, invoicing and payroll, phone systems are just a few of them.
2. Go free, but budget for future fees. You can find a lot of useful tools entirely for free, but you won’t always get the features or support you really need. While you’re bootstrapping, free can fit the bill, but as you project future expenses, start adding in fees for the enhanced versions of the products you use every day.
3. Use free trials to test drive, then commit. Not sure which project management tool you want? You can try a few for free to see which one you prefer and make a better-informed decision before committing to paying.
4. Stay free by migrating. Often when a site that was free starts charging, its competitors see it as an opportunity to win new users. Let’s look again at Ning. As of this week, Ning may start eliminating non-paying accounts so make sure to choose the paid account that’s right for you. But what if you don’t want to pay? The network hosting site Grouply has been aggressive in offering not only a free alternative to Ning, but a painless way for migrating your Ning network to its service. In just a few minutes, you can import the critical content from your Ning network, including member information, then configure your new Grouply group with additional features like social network integration, event management tools and customizable websites. After that, you can send an announcement to your members informing them of the change, or use Grouply to back up your Ning network and store the content until you decide to use it again.

There’s a lot of value in “free,” but there’s even more value in planning for a future when free turns to fee. Are you prepared?

What are you using for free and how are you planning for any changes in the future?

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There are approximately 90 Ning Apps already available in the directory. Everything will be managed by the Tab Manager, which will allow you to control the navigational structure of your Ning network as well as the layout of your shiny new Ning Apps.

These apps are also added to the My Apps area in the Profile View for your members. They can then organize the apps any way they want.

Here’s a peak at some of the Ning Apps (Napps?) available today:

It’s taken a while to get here but this is a smart move on Ning’s part. Facebook and Apple have clearly shown the value and popularity of proving easy access to ready-to-go apps for their platforms, so this news should inject a great deal of excitement throughout the Ning ecosystem.

Let us know what you think of Ning Apps in the comments.

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Enter Konnects. Konnects wants to fill in the gap between LinkedIn and Facebook, providing social tools for a younger professional who may not quite have enough contacts to make LinkedIn really work for them but want to focus on business more than Facebook promotes. Konnects wants to be not only the place where business professionals can find one another but also the place where they can transact business on the site, exchanging all of the information and documentation needed to solidify a working relationship.

Konnects focuses less on email and much more on chat, instant messaging, video conferencing and Twitter integration. The site has the usual social networking features such as Your Network News which is similar to the status updates of you and your contacts on many other networks.

You also get recommended communities on your Konnects home page although I’m not sure why some are being recommended to me. The “Women’s Resources” made sense since I’m a woman. But “Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber”? I live in Alaska. And “Accounting?” I hate accounting.

What Konnects has that LinkedIn doesn’t have is an integration of Communities – not Groups – that are essentially white label networks a la Ning. Maybe I’ll create my own community.

Also on your home page, you are fed videos from your communities but if you don’t belong to a community yet, you get a plain icon that says “Join More Communities. Get More News.” And you can blog.

While Konnects claims to have over 350,000 members so far, my interactions on the site have felt a little lonely even though I am connected to the CEO of Konnects and one of their publicists. I’ve poked around at some of the communities and put out a few invitations to connect (with a free account you are limited to three). I’ve put out a bulletin to my contact list of two. I’ve updated my profile. I’ve tried to connect with people I know who are supposed on Konnects (as per the site culling through my Gmail address book) but never heard from anyone. And I’ve watched the paint dry.

Konnects is still in beta but it is more visible now so perhaps the community will start buzzing. Additional features are for premier users only such as unlimited messages, profile advertising (so you can market yourself to others), and free Internet calls to members. Monthly membership is $14.99 or $89.99 for a year.

With paid membership, you can also view the profiles of the people who have viewed your profile. Despite the creepy aspect of this, it does give you an advantage to see who is curious about you although getting in touch with them after they viewed your profile could also seem pretty creepy.

A nice feature of Konnects is aggregation of your community content. If you join a number of communities, you can actually get an aggregated view of, say, the classifieds from all communities, and you can access all you communities with one login, one password (unlike Ning). Another useful feature is that you can list certain people in your contact list but make others private – a smart way to protect your higher profile contacts.

More features, productivity tools and other third party tools are in the works.

As an avid user of many social networks, I know that especially with professional ones, you get out of them what you put into them so I am reserving judgment for now and will keep plugging away at upping my Konnects connectivity.

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One of the benefits of a constantly changing technology landscape is that as a consultant, I can continuously grow my diversified list of services that I offer to clients adding new and interesting tactics. In the last year, I’ve been exploring virtual worlds and lately it has really been paying off as I’ve taken on new Second Life marketing projects.

More recently, I’ve been exploring custom social networks for my own projects and for my clients. With moves by major Internet sites toward a more open, “social Web” including Google’s new FriendConnect service that is currently in beta, I think social networks and virtual worlds will become more and more relevant to how companies and organizations communicate their messages and do business online.

Private-label social network can offer the following:

1. Brand building environments. I remember the days when my clients wanted their own “online communities” attached to their web sites, forums where their customers and potential customers could interact with one another and with company representatives. Besides being fraught with maintenance and liability issues, they saw online communities as viable ways to get their brands in front of people on a recurring basis. For better or worse, social networks take message boards to an entirely new level of interactivity and engagement.

2. Community building tools. Online forums of the past allowed community members to post message, either in response to existing messages or starting message threads of their own. Custom social networks allow members to express themselves through multimedia features including blogs, blog comments, page comments, photo uploads, video uploads, even audio uploads. The community can create more content in more ways than ever, tipping the publishing power from strictly the company or organization hosting the community to the members themselves.

3. Viral features. In the “old days,” online forums relied mostly on word of mouth or happenstance to build their memberships. Today, social networks provide tools that let members spread the word about the networks through widgets, easily invite other members into the network, and even see what other members are doing through activity feeds so they can do it, too.

4. Social glue. There is nothing more powerful online than the strength of social bonds. When people connect with people they know or through people they know, they are more likely to interact in and return to a community because they have a social investment in that community. By building social networks, companies and organizations use social bonding to keep people coming back for more.

Because I’m not a developer, I’ve been using Ning to build custom social networks. I like the elegance of their tools and design templates for the non-programmer and non-designer. I do find Ning is lacking in a few areas such as not offering collaborative tools for network members, not having a way to post articles or upload document files that can be shared, and lacking a calendar feature. But for the time being, they are a major player in the custom social network building space.

This week, a new service debuted in public beta mode – WackWall – looking to enter the same space as Ning. WackWall feels like a watered down version of Ning with fewer features and capabilities. For now, I’ll stick with the tool that works and keep an eye on what Google, Facebook, MySpace and others will be offering in the near future.

Are you getting into the business of building social networks? And if so, what tools are you using?

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Here are some of my thoughts on rules of online communities:

1. You can’t own a community. A lot of people who start and build communities immediately assume ownership. They get lawyers to craft a Terms of Service that says that they own everything posted within a community. They set the rules in stone and police the community. While I understand why companies want to “protect their assets,” ultimately, online communities can be fickle and rebellious. They do not want to be owned. Trying to turn a community into a commodity is ultimately a recipe for failure.

2. Communities aren’t free. On the flip side, I think people who want to be a part of an online community must be cognizant of the fact that anyone hosting the platform for a community to be built has some kind of interest in seeing that community grow. Some people start a community that they wish existed and want to be in. Other selfless types start online community for the good of the people. (Beware of supposed selfless types). Still others have commercial interests in mind for the community (advertising, sponsorship). As long as the purpose of the community is clear, everyone has a choice if they want to participate or not. Nothing comes for free.

3. Every community needs leadership. I know some people will debate me on this point but I don’t think a community can survive without some person in a leadership role. They don’t have to be “boss,” they don’t have to be “dictator,” however, there is usually one person who initiates a community and is the driving force behind that community. The community leadership could consist of several people, but leading by committee can bog down a community’s growth. At the end of the day, the buck must stop with someone.

4. A community dies if it is all about you. Often a community grows around a single person but that is really more “Cult of Personality” if the community continues to revolve around that person. Many blogs are activated by Cult of Personality. Successful bloggers nurture their comments sections so those who comment get the spotlight as well. Online communities may need a leader but they should not be reliant solely on a single person to survive. When that person goes, what happens to the community?

5. At some point, organic communities need roots. I’m still blown away by the power of the Internet to aggregate clusters of like-minded people. When those people keep coming back to continue the conversation from organic seeds, that is phenomenal. However, at some point, structure needs to be put into place to make sure the community is scalable if growing the community is desirable. Without some kind of structure, a community eventually implodes.

6. Community building is not all about the tools. But the right tools do help. These days, the right community building tools seem to be social networking features (friends), blogs or microblogging features, and even SMS features so the community conversation gets carried onto your mobile device. Bells and whistles don’t make an online community, but as people get used to using new networking and communications, they’ll come to expect them in the platform where they choose to start a community

But enough of rules. Here are some of the tools I use every day or that I’m trying out to build community online for my work.

1. Ning.com – I love the ease with which I can build what I call “private-label” social networks. NIng groups seem richer than Facebook or MySpace groups. They have a central group page but they provide blogging and social networking tools for each member of the group so they can build their own presence and brand. I’ve recently started groups as diverse as Survivors of Carbon Monoxide Poisoning (SoCaMP), Alaska Women in Business and Athena Isle Writers (who meet in Second Life.)

2. Facebook Groups – I’m still on the fence about Facebook Groups. They seem less “participatory,” and I find I have much more success using Facebook Events to reach my groups. Still, I’m checking them out, getting a feel for them. By contrast, I’m not using MySpace Groups at all. I initially found them to be too spammy so have avoided them ever since.

3. Plaxo Groups - I’m also on the fence about Plaxo Groups but nothing ventured, nothing gained as they say. Like Facebook, I’m not finding that people are very active in their Plaxo Groups, but for more professional groups, Plaxo could work out.

4. LinkedIn Groups – I’ve just created a new group – Athena Isle Women – to help women succeed in Second Life. It is still pending approval, but I’m thinking this may trump Plaxo Groups for best forum and tools for a women’s professional online networking group.

5. Second Life - There are many limitations to the Second Life “Groups,” namely that you can only belong to 25 – including the ones you join and the ones you create and the way groups are configured is not conducive to communications between members unless those members are online (using Group IM). Still, Second Life can’t be beat for virtual face-to-face meetings of community members. There is something so much more immediate and “real” when you are in a virtual space with other people’s avatars than when you are IMing or posting to a message board. No replacement for in-the-flesh meet ups, but sometimes the next best thing.

Almost every social networking style site gives you the ability to create a group. Many are very niche so instead of being for “professionals” as LinkedIn would be or for “the general public” as Facebook might be, they are much more targeted. I belong to some of these more niche sites as a member such as Maya’s Mom for mothers to WorkitMom for working women who happen to be moms. But I haven’t yet created groups on these sites even though the community building tools exist.

Bottom line: Online community building is about the people first, the shared interests or experiences next, and the tools are the means of bringing people together in new ways.

What tools are you using to build online communities?

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