There are a number of site creators out there, but a good portion of them aren't also your Web host. Dotster is a provider of Internet business services, which really means that it targets businesses with a bunch of tools that may or may not help the actual business process. With the addition of its latest feature, Dotster Connect, the company is looking to provide an all-in-one solution for businesses in need of an online presence. Dotster is doing this by providing domain names, hosting, and several add-ons that offer some additional choices to users.
With Dotster Connect, you now have add-ons that provide forums, blogs, polls, friending capabilities, and more. There are two options for a Dotster Connect account--Small Business and Enterprise. The biggest differences between the two are the number of options presented for building out a social network, and the amount of customization available for the social networks. And the price. According to Dotster, "a simple SMB network might cost as little as $199 a month plus set up charges while an in-depth enterprise network might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the degree of customization." Ouch.
The goal is to provide "affordable" and scalable social networking capabilities to businesses. What Dotser is saying with its new Dotster Connect, however, is that businesses can better retain customers with basic social networks. This has been a point of debate for a couple of years now, and we've seen implementations of businesses rolling out social networking features in the past with poor results.
Traditional media news publication websites, for instance, are just now beginning to find optimal ways in which to engage user activity on their sites. Even the current offerings of more integrated ways in which to create a presence for your brand within other existing networks has its faults, though integrating these white label social networking features with outside sites is the direction in which I think Dotster Connect should head.