Konnects supplies social media platforms

Konnects social network platform is a hosted private label ”software as a service,” that let’s newspapers “go live” with a social network in about 30 days.

”I want to renovate the newspaper industry,” Gallinatti, COO of Konnects, told us. Local media sites are the main target market. This year the company is still struggling to sign up print companies, even though some early results have been successful in creating traffic.

Konnects manages the integration of the legacy site with other kinds of content and advertising. The service is relatively inexpensive: $995 to set up and from $495 a month in maintenance fees.

With a plethora of competitors in the local space, social networks allow newspapers to go ”hyper-local” by creating communities within communities.

“Of the universe of newspaper in the U.S. there are 10 to 20% who are actively looking for what we have, but don’t know we exist, 40% interested but not looking and 40% who don’t get it, ” said Nick Huzar, the companies’ CTO. “When we find someone who is looking, they ask ‘where have you been?”

Konnects has a nice clean platform, with a customizable look and feel. Its first client, Wenatchee World dropped the platform, but the Businessexaminer.com, also in Seattle is still using it. Page newspaper cooperative,has also approved Konnects as a vendor.

Gallinatti says the main key to monetizing the networks is increasing the community’s engagement with newspapers, whose audiences have been “cut up and pirated” by the internet. The company is planning to develop e-commerce features such as ticket sales, that can be embedded into the network and “shared” with friends on the site through viral tools.

Gallinetti believes that users don't upload information to newspaper sites because they prefer to share with just the relevant people.

The main issue for local social media is how to wean people off of Facebook and on to another site. One nice feature of Konnects, is that users can sign on using a Facebook connect, so no additional password is needed and soon will be able to sign on using an open ID standard.

The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and  MediaExecsTech,  developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine,  to showcases perspectives from around the  world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.

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