At Pearse Street we’ve designed and developed many social networking websites. We’re now wrapping up our first development of a University social networking website. What we’ve done is create a site similar to Facebook that caters more to the needs of a University. We’ve incorporated social media features that cater to the needs of educators, students, education departments, admissions & administrators. The University plans to use the website as a recruitment tool & one would think that with  the cost of tuition these days they will recoup all expenses rather quickly.

Can a College or University social networking website be a viable recruitment tool? Will integrating your website or a custom built social network with FaceBook connect increase the flow of applications? Will a Social application that is passed from wall to wall increase enrollment? Will colleges reap additional benefits on top of improved enrollment numbers?

I would contend Yes! Social networking websites are so successful because they increase efficiency. We have a desire to be informed & stay in touch. Online communities make it easy to connect. Major Colleges, Universities & even some Prep schools are seeking social network design & development services. At Pearse Street we currently only except jobs that we believe in. Our clients tend to have to convince us to work on projects. I’m particularly interested in accepting more projects in the education niche because the business model makes so much sense. The development of a school social networking website will be of great benefit to the admissions department and will improve communication between students, faculty and other departments.

Pearse Street inc has built out our university social media software debugged & tested. This social university software can be easily manipulated and added to. New features specific to the needs of any University can be developed and integrated into the platform. Design & site layout can be fully customizable with no restriction. To find out more about Pearse Street social networking website design or application development services visit http://www.pearsestreet.com .

Are you a social media expert or a social networking expert. It seems that many novice marketing hopefuls are claiming to be social media experts. Most have an online marketing resume with on marketing campaign in it and that campaign is marketing themselves as a “social media expert”.

Working for a company that creates social networking websites I have a unique perspective on this subject. I contend that a social media expert is someone who plans, designs & develops social media. Am I wrong. I would think someone who uses social media to promote themselves is just “someone who uses social media”. Fuchsia McInerney the CEO of Pearse Street Inc I would consider a social media expert. Scott Monty the “social media expert” at Ford I would consider a personal branding expert. Scott has managed to make his name come up on a google search for “social media marketing”, he has used social media marketing to do this. All of these so called social media experts are perhaps just “social media marketing experts” or maybe just shameless self promoters.

When a social network is built someone will be dealing with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Three years ago the company I work for began it’s first social network design. The customer we had done some web work with before. The customer was informed we had never designed a site of this complexity before. Our salesman at the time who was also a web programmer insisted that we could handle the job. The client agreed that even though this was new to us they wanted to move forward. So we began the development of our first social networking website. Did we start with a social networking software of any kind? NO! We began what turned out to be thousands of hours of coding and recoding and recoding.  It became apparent real quick just how in trouble we had gotten. We were far beyond just taking a loss and we continued. The site was fraught with bugs so the losses continued, many man hours paid out to our programmers and no new payments coming in. The whole process was stressful for our team.

We considered never taking another social network design on. Luckily our team came to include some incredibly talented and ambitious programmers & front end designers. We decided to learn from our mistakes and build a customizable  social networking software. This software would be a starting point for each custom design. We would have to be able to add or subtract features. Newly developed features would have to be easily integrated into the framework. So we began the development of the first version of the social networking software. Luckily this time we knew what we needed. The actual development took well over double the predicted time frame. When done we had a framework that was full of bugs. It wasn’t as efficient as it could be but it was fully functional. The bugs were all fixed and we began building custom social networks for clients.

We were still losing money on each network we developed.  The framework wasn’t efficient enough. It took to long to set up and long time to add features to. Customization wasn’t as easy as it could be. Every custom change seemed to create two or three bugs. So what did we do? We began the second version of the framework. The second version was really awesome and we found it way easier to cater to the customers needs. Although the second version of the software made all the difference in the world we had learned so much the development of 2.5 began right away. All of this development and improvement had to be done between paying client projects. Here we are years later with version three. Every social network we design has a full custom appearance and layout.  Some of the core functions are often similar and most include newly developed completely unique features. We couldn’t create these websites without a social network software that we could easily customize and add to. A social software with no bugs that is user tested and that can easily except changes and new features.

Do you need to hire a company that has a social software already developed? Yes. Does the quality of the social networking software matter? Yes.  Beware of any company that says “we’re going to build the this social network from scratch” .  Make sure you check the sites in the portfolio to ensure that they do in fact include social networking features.  Ask about the software. Ask about limitations of the software.

Remember a fully custom social networking website is best integrated with a fully tested framework. Pearse Street Inc has emerged as the leader in social network design & social software development. Find out more about Pearse Street services by visiting http://www.pearsestreet.com/services.php .

• How Should Your Business Be Networking Online?

• Are You Taking Advantage Of Social Media?

• Could Your Website Use Social Media Features That Engage Users?

At Pearse Street Inc we build social networking websites and social applications we also use social media to market our own services. Our business and honestly our complete existence revolves around social media. Most of our clients find us on Google and it’s because of our impressive presence on so many social networking websites that we rank so well. We are integrated into the web that is the internet as a result of our many social media campaigns. This integration is the result of many hours of signing up, participating, networking and posting links. This has taken many hours, but the results have been more then worthwhile. The only cost has been our time, the vast majority of online networks are free to participate on. We’ve earned sweat equity on the web. Our website continues to bring in clients and we continue to spend little to no money on marketing (we do spend plenty of time though).

The design of a social networking website is highly complicated.
The first social network any web developer builds will be a disaster.
The second social network wont be good either.
A social networking website should be built with a pre-developed social software.
Building a social networking software takes thousands of hours.
Debugging a social network software takes thousands of hours.
You should work with a company who has a portfolio full of social networks.
A project proposal for a social network should be highly detailed.
The contract should detail all specs that will be included in the website.
Seek a company who specializes in social network design.

Pearse Street Inc. Is a Web Development Firm That Specializes in Social Network Design