Concerns about Facebook’s privacy controls have led many people to leave the site and form their own social networks through services like SocialGo and Ning. These are template sites through which users can create their own social networks, no matter how large or small that network is.

June 28, 2010 — More than 60 percent of Facebook users have considered quitting the site because of privacy concerns, according to a recent survey by web security site Sophos. With people slowly losing trust in the social networking site because of its constant, and somewhat sneaky, changes to its security settings, maybe it’s time to look at a new model.

Instead of reluctantly conforming to what Facebook has laid out, thousands of people haven taken their interests and concerns in their own hands and have built their own safe social networking site to keep in touch with a select group of friends, colleagues and people of shared interests.

With services like SocialGO, anyone can customize a site in minutes, selecting from a variety of templates and adding features like messaging and status updates, much like Facebook. Yet unlike behemoth social networking sites, each group can choose their own privacy settings, permissions and a personal URL, along with hosting the site on their very own domain, making it a good white label social network platform for businesses that want to use their own solution. The SocialGO platform allows groups to also create blogs, discussion forums and video chats with its members as well as share photos and events calendars. The site also has a feature known as “concierge”, where they will design the social network site for you and provide full support as you build and integrate the network further.

Thousands of groups are already using SocialGO’s services for professional and personal reasons, including fan clubs, business associations, eCommerce retailers, organisations and a vast number of special interest groups – from pet lovers to video gaming insiders.

With dissatisfaction in Facebook only increasing, last month, “Quit Facebook Day” got more than 34,000 to jump ship – the business of customizing social networking sites will surely grow, as more people branch off to design sites to fit their own needs.

Lack of privacy controls can be a real problem for those clients who already have online reputation management concerns.

Whether you’re an avid microblogger or you’re looking for more sites to include in your online reputation management program, you might be surprised to learn that Twitter isn’t the only such platform on the Internet although it is witbout doubt the most popular and widely used of its kind. Here are three more to get your teeth into:

12 Seconds used to essentially be a Twitter application but has now attempted to branch out on its own. It’s really a micro video blogging platform and rather than providing users with 140 characters of text it encourages users to post video updates that are 12 seconds or less in length. Great for video blogging regulars that are up to a serious challenge.

Posterous is an ideal choice for those that believe micro-blogging should be made as simple as possible. Sign up using nothing more than your active email address and then you can simply email your most recent updates to the increasingly popular website. It even lets you integrate your Posterous updates into social networks like Facebook and even Twitter.

If you’re looking for a single microblogging platform that enables you to do virtually everything you can with other social networking websites FriendFeed gives you all that and more. You can add just about everything from your Facebook updates to your Tweets to your video blogs and display them all in your FriendFeed feed. The problem with this amount of information is that it may well lead to information overload for you and your followers.

Very few people these days comprehend how important Google reputation management can be to a company’s overall success in a public relations campaign. However, if you want evidence of the important of Google reputation management, simply look to what the big companies do when they mess up.

British Petroleum, which is currently facing a lot of heat over their oil spill off the coast of Louisiana is, according to recent reports, buying up Google AdWords related to the spill. They hope to reroute many searchers to webpages which explains BP’s cleanup and restitution initiatives rather than to websites which explain how bad the spill is and how bad it is being handled. Regardless of how one feels about the spill, this news explains exactly how important Google reputation management is.