Idea: Social Networking for Freelancers/Entrepreneurs

Benefits of Social Networking for Freelancers:
1. New Ideas – Staying connected with social networks is an excellent way to keep updated on the news as well as new trends.
2. Writing sources – When writing human interest stories writers look for quality sources for quotes regarding their articles.
3. Instant Help - Find other freelancers for supporting your project and thereby getting an instant help.
4. New clients – Through social networking, clients can find you. For example, they can search for specific skills or find you through people that you know. The beauty of this is that you don’t have to find them. Another way of finding you is through specialized groups or discussions by looking through someone’s contacts.

Some other benefits which will help the entire community is:

• Logging: Passing on your own knowledge or contributing useful comments.


• Forums: Showcasing your skills, helping others, getting support and more.


• Conferences: Word of mouth, chatting with experts and learning new skills.


• Social Networks: Gaining support, friends and followers with links or content.


• Side Projects: Money earners, extra-curricular activities or contributory work.


• Mentoring: Potentially gaining potential employees or job opportunities.


• Meet-ups: Getting like-minded people together to interact and gain leads.


• Skill-swaps: Offering services for others in return (bi-directional outsourcing).

Activities which the Freelancers can do to help each other:

1. Freebies section which will list down all the freebies across different sites. Users can post their contributions towards this list, thereby increasing the knowledge of each other.


2. Share an Update section where users can post information on their current projects, completed projects, issues faced, lessons learnt etc.. It is just like twitter to tell others on what they are currently working upon.


3. Blogs sections where users can create blogs about several topics and get paid.


4. Get a Help section where users can ask a question and get answered by others immediately.


5. Mail section where users can send personal mails to each others.


6. Swap section where users can post their request and get other service in return continuously (Bi-Directional Outsourcing)


7. Instead of photos, users can upload screenshots of the corresponding project and can store it in their gallery.


8. Google Calendar can be integrated to showcase the schedule of that user.


9. My Favourites website application can be added which will allow users to add their favourite websites and thereby allow other users to have a look into it. This application should option to categorize Favourites list.


10. A Feed application which will feed across major freelancer sites and publish the job details here. This will help users to get project details at a single place.

Features to be present in the site

• Dashboard Overview


• Inbox


• Share an Information


• Share a bookmarkable site along with comments


• Status Update


• Just Joined Block (Tutorials, Helplines etc.. )


• People You May Know


• Profile Statistics (Visits to your profile)


• Search People


• Profile Page


• Groups


• Get Helped


• Swap Skills


• Blogs


• Mentor and Get Mentored


• Bid for Projects (Optional)


• Photo Gallery (To upload screenshots)


• Google Calendar can be integrated to showcase the schedule of that user.


• Coupons/Giveaways


• Freebies

Members

1. An important way of finding friends is through the field user enters “Looking in for”. Several options can be added here and based on user’s response, other users can send friend request when they search.


2. Another way of sending friends request is through scanning the list of friend’s friend list. Instead of showing the common friends between the two members just like normal sites, option can be given to show uncommon friends between both of them. This will help both of them to increase their network by adding these members as their friends.

Advantages of having a bigger friends list:

1. Any activity performed by a user will be posted in the Activity Feed. Thereby more the friends, more is the chance of them looking into your activities and respond to you as soon as possible.


2. Any help request posted will also be posted with Title in the Activity Feed. Hence their friend’s list can

How to increase the friend’s network:

• Find friends in the groups where you are interested. Try to be active member in that group.


• Find Members through

Activity Feed

1. Option should be provided for users to forward any activity feed to all their friends list. This will give us a feed post like “My Friend <Actual Username along with link to his profile> had posted this: <activity post details>”. This will help users to forward any help/request/information to other friends. This will be posted as a normal post with the above specified text added before it, just to differentiate

Mentoring Requirements:

• Block - Mentors of the month and link to view all featured mentors in this category


• Seperate Rating option on several factors for Mentoring


• Latest Mentor Shout Outs (Option where mentors can create a short description about the cause


• In Search for a Mentor screen, a block should be present which displays “Can't find the right mentor? Just send a request!”.


• In Be a Mentor page, firstly option should be given for users to accept for being a mentor like by submitting a confirmation form which will contain a list of categories which the user is ready to mentor others. On submission, the user will be added and maintained in a list. When some one submits a request for mentoring, depending upon the categories selected, posts will be made to all the corresponding mentors and whoever is ready can start mentoring them.


• Separate section should be displayed indicating the list of members whom the user is mentoring (i.e their followers) and list of members whom the user is being mentored (i.e following)

Project Feeds

• Option for feeds from several sites should be provided. User should have the option of customizing the list of blocks which the user wants to follow from the feed list. This will help them to follow projects from a single place.

User Points for performing various activities on the site

• Creating a New Blog - 5 Points


• Each users liking the blog: 1 Point


• Mentoring Someone - 5 Points


• Users liking the mentoring - 1 Point


• Posting Project Updates - 1 Point


• Daily Visit to Site - 1 Point


• Contributing a Freebie - 5 point


• Each person liking the freebie contributed - 1 point


• Each New Friend Request accepted - 1 point for each member


• Completing 100% profile information - 5 points


• Contribution to Groups - 1 point


• Sharing an Event - 5 point


• Each person liking the event - 1 point


• Sharing the link of sites along with description - 5 point


• Each person liking the event - 1 point


• Each person liking the user’s comments on blogs etc... - 1 point

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Idea: Become a Brand Ambassador Online

Overview:

This is a platform for users to become a brand ambassador of certain companies online and thereby market for that brand in the social network using his/her contacts. Once a user becomes an ambassador, the user will get 5 giveaways from that company. The company has the choice to select the giveaways according to several categories. There should be several options available for users to choose from while taking away the giveaway option.

What should the Brand Ambassador Do (Draft Ideas):
The Brand Ambassador will do the following things online using his social network. Note that these are just raw ideas and are not final ones. Some of them might sound very stupid and can be ignored.

1. They should reveal out online that they are a brand ambassador for the brand when spreading the word publicly about the brand.
2. A tag should be associated to their names and signatures “Brand Ambassador of <Brand Name>”
3. Link should be posted on their profiles linking to the brand.
4. Separate Photo Gallery should be created for that brand and the user should upload photos regarding that brand.
5. In Facebook, the user should post a minimum number of posts regarding the brand name daily. Posts should be live commentary about the brand.
6. In Twitter, the user should tweet a minimum number of posts regarding the brand name daily.
7. Have Ad space reg. their brand in their page.

What can the users post:

• Live commentary about the brand


• Headlines and link about certain news about the brand

Revenue Generation Options:
1. Registration fees for companies who wants brand ambassadors.
2. Different Membership levels
3. Advertisements

Problems expected:
1. How to track if someone is doing the brand ambassador job properly or not.
2. How will the company give the compensation to the brand ambassadors.

Brainstorming:
1. Need to research more on what all activities the brand ambassador should do online.
2. Need to research more on how to select a brand ambassador i.e criterias for selection of a brand ambassador.
3. Need to research more on benefits of becoming a brand ambassador.
4. How to track if someone is doing the brand ambassador job properly or not.

Reference Articles:
http://gigaom.com/collaboration/how-to-know-a-good-fan-on-facebook/
http://gigaom.com/collaboration/how-to-convert-your-facebook-superfans-into-brand-ambassadors/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter
http://gigaom.com/collaboration/10-social-media-marketing-questions-answered/

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Idea: Get sponsored online

Overview:

Users posts their requirements and these are submitted to companies for reviewing. Based on company’s interest, they decide to sponsor the request or ignore them.

Two kinds of registrations will be required - One is users who needs sponsorship and the other is companies who are ready to sponsor.

Revenue Generation Options:

1. The sponsor will have to pay a certain amount of money to register to our website and then get details matching his interest where he can sponsor. This way we filter out the bad ones who are there to cause trouble in our system.
   (and/or)


2. The users seeking sponsorship will have to pay a certain amount to register and request for sponsorship.
   (and/or)


3. The process of requesting for sponsorship and viewing the details is all free. Once a sponsor accepts the sponsorship, the details of the sponsor will not be revealed out to the end user. For getting these details, the user has to pay X% of the sponsorship amount to us as a consultancy fee.
   (and/or)

Brainstorming:

1. Different categories or kinds of sponsorship has to be thought of. Some of them which I can think of are:

• Sponsor my studies


• Sponsor an event


• Sponsor a NGO


• Sponsor a program

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Idea: Option to earn money through SMS

Option to earn money through SMS just like mGinger does. mGinger sends ads from clients to interested people and thereby they get paid.  A reverse of this can be thought where people can send sms and then get paid. Now why will people get paid on sending sms?

Answer: Marketing for the client.
People can use their free sms service and send sms and get paid for it. But there should be a tracking mechanism for tracking the number of sms being sent with that content. This may be very difficult if user sends it through their phone. But this would definitely be possible if user sends it through an online site. There can be a platform in the site, just like way2sms.com, where the user’s messages are sent using their numbers to their contacts.

More research can be done to improve this idea.

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