How do you engage the visitors on your site? How do you work to develop new interactivity? A lot of insight can be gleaned from the experiences of the people who are out there getting their feet wet, building online communities from scratch. Here is an interview with Marina Cianfarani, owner of qmpeople, a social network with some original features.

Disclosure: qmpeople is a Pandia Sponsor.

Pandia: Your site has been online since 2004, but it wasn’t launched in earnest before 2008. Did you do a lot of market analysis before launching the site?

Marina Cianfarani: Yes, even though we did have clear ideas in mind for our site since the start. We have seen that many social networks had the same characteristics and lack of personality so it has been simple for us to develop qmpeople.

Nevertheless we understand that nowadays it’s crucial for anyone to know the market, actual and potential competitors and emerging trends. For that reason we initially launched qmpeople only in Italy (our country of origin) and after more than six months of 360 degrees analysis we decided to expand our initiative to the international arena.

Outsourcing

Pandia: We understand that you are a rather small company. How do you manage to keep it running. Through outsourcing?

Marina Cianfarani: Yes, we outsource a large part of our activities.

For example, we chosen our SMS gateway in South Africa, hosting solution in USA, domain management distributed across several authorities/providers thanks to a custom DNS solution, legal experts on Internet laws in Ukraine as well as many young collaborators in different parts of the world.

Pandia: Does this mean that you make active use of computing in the cloud? Will cloud computing be the key to online success for publishers and social web site owners?

Marina Cianfarani: At qmpeople we use cloud computing but we think that the most important key factor on a long time basis is the ability to fulfil the end users needs, better than competitors do. Anyway in these times of global crisis, resources are important so cloud computing can provide important resource optimization.

Language and culture

Pandia: You are based in the UK, but are clearly trying to reach large parts of the world. How do you cope with the needs of different languages and cultures?

Marina Cianfarani: qmpeople is borne as a multilingual platform to allow people from any part of the world to communicate, share interests and contents, play games and enjoy themselves.

To accomplish that task we are running our network on several localized versions of the most common languages such as English, German, French, Spanish and Russian, with native support of different time zones, currencies and languages.

Dating site?

Pandia: So what is qmpeople? The first impression is that it is a dating site. The next is that it is some kind of social web site. A bit Facebook like, perhaps?

Marina Cianfarani: Our slogan is “qmpeople – A world of friends” meaning that qmpeople is a place where people from any part of the world can meet and interact. It seems a simple and common slogan but our vision is that qmpeople will reinvent the idea of friendship on Internet.

In fact we are focusing on people who want to make new friends (not only already existent friends like on Facebook) by using a different paradigm than existent social networks. They allow people to make new friends only in a virtual way, without real interaction.

qmpeople want to solve that problem by introducing resembling real friendship activities, such as “help me” in which you can help friends in their time of need: no virtual gifts, virtual kisses and so on but real help.

The use of design

Pandia: I am fascinated by the visual design of the site. You have deliberately chosen a comic book like design with bright colors and simplistic icons. Is this a way of lowering the anxiety threshold of your visitors?

Marina Cianfarani: Yes. Social networking is almost often too serious. Sites like LinkedIn need a formal design because they are involved in business activities, but in our case we think that people would enjoy a funny and informal environment.

Pandia: This is a social networking site. Key to success in that industry is to reach critical mass as regards the number of active users. What are you doing to achieve this?

Marina Cianfarani: We are exploring all marketing opportunities to promote our initiative but we are focusing on contents and market analysis.

Discussion groups

Pandia: The site goes beyond dating. There are, for instance, discussion groups for topics as diverse as the TV show The Office and Haiti relief. But there is not much traffic in all of them. Can you tell us what you hope to achieve with these groups?

Marina Cianfarani: Groups will boost user experience thanks to several services we are going to introduce during next months. We have deployed a first beta version of them so they simply need some time to reach the same level of user interaction as other well know tools such as those to exchange off-line and real time messages.

Videos

Pandia: There is also the possibility of uploading videos. Is this a good way for contact seeking people to present themselves?

Marina Cianfarani: Videos are very appreciated by Internet users, as YouTube demonstrate. They can be a good way for people to present themselves to other users so we are developing specific applications to facilitate the submission, the internal and external sharing, and enhancing activities such as tagging.

Help Me

Pandia: What’s the deal about the Help Me section?

Marina Cianfarani:The Help me service allows you to give help to your new friends in their time of need. It could be seen similar to Yahoo Answers, but it even allows users to ask for economical help. Yes, thanks to native PayPal support, any registered user can send money to fulfill one or more help request. Please, take a look at how the community decided to help pwilkins by donating him some money to repair his motorbike.

Content production

Pandia: To succeed in the search engines, a site needs a lot of relevant textual content. Do you try to get your members to become active content producers?

Marina Cianfarani: Yes, qmpeople is a closed platform at the moment because we think this approach would increase the user experience.

We are different from Facebook because we have no third party applications but, of course, user generated contents is very important so we are using a viral approach to stimulate our users to write lots of contents such as their statuses, comments, what they like/don’t like and niche contents on specific groups.

Advertising

Pandia: You make active use of Google Ads on your site. There is even a row of Google Ads links that could be interpreted as menu links.

I guess there are some of our search engine marketing readers that would be interested to know why you are doing this. Aren’t you just driving visitors away to other contact sites?

Marina Cianfarani: Advertising is a key factor to obtain important resources to develop our network. That can sound as a risk to drive visitors away because a lot of other social networks are currently interested in promoting their sites on qmpeople. But we think, and our experience demonstrates, that users come back to qmpeople because they love it. In other words, we don’t see the promotion of other social networks as a risk, but as an opportunity.

Pandia: What is the qmpeople secret?

Marina Cianfarani: We can summarize it like this: powerful functionality, originality and simplicity.

photo credit: ginnerobot