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Brief
To create a social network created for financial market professionals from concept to launch within a month.
Strategy
The Brandstation on-demand social network technology platform was used to power Tradersnews.co.uk. Enterprise platform versions have already been implemented for clients such as Diageo Plc (UK) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (UK).
The project was affirmed during the height of the credit crunch and Brandstation would be the platform for a new niche social community based around finance, business and market trading. Initial requirements were to get the social network set-up and have it be fully functional within a month, which included the integration of content on the site.
Rather than private member only social networks, something that is affiliated with Brandstation’s past projects, Tradersnews had to be part public. It had to feature professionally produced content for its target audience, making it a specialist niche social network rather than just another general online society.
The aim was to reach out to market professionals and give them a platform on which they could come to and collaborate during the recession.
Ready to go features include blogs, user personalisation, team creation, friend invites, event calendar, forums, tag cloud, bookmarks, videos and RSS feed sharing.
The most important of these features was video, seen to be one of the most engaging formats. Later on in the project this became focused on news and instructional videos that really define modern global trading.
The platform needed to enable site administrators to have an in-depth understanding of user activity for community behavior insights.
It also had to be capable of sharing links and contacts across different sites including Google, Yahoo and Windows Live, and be integrated with Linked In.
Choosing the on-demand platform was key to the rapid deployment on the site. A new design template was created and within a week, the site was launched live.
Brandstation on-demand sites are created instantly as soon as you sign up, with no downloads, installations or technical experience needed, which makes it easy for anyone to have a live social network and start building a community.
Execution
Site owners needed access to user activity reports. More than just exporting user activity to an excel file, powerful activity visualisation of network activity was achieved with integration to the new SAP polestar ondemand application via the API.
As the brandstation team have created enterprise social networks we understand that more perspective is needed to visualise site usage and behavior statistics to know where the conversation is happening and to see who’s having them.
By integrating the brandstation user activity data reports with third party visualisation applications, we’re able to provide site owners with an in-depth understanding of the behavior and participation on the social network. For example highlighting which users have the strongest relationships or showing trends of popular topics amongst different members, knowing which people are the most active participants and contributors around a specific topic, or seeing what are the most used interaction methods and social network site features.
The real time nature of social networking presents a problem in understanding how business processes are solved. So far this has remained untouched by social network applications. By mashing up data from disparate data tables of social network user behavior into a rich interface, representing member engagement activity and conversation participation, we’re able to drill into specific topics and with date/time stamping to find emerging trends.
The member activities and content tags are tracked over time and currently include: created a blog post, updated a blog post, created an event, updated an event, logged in, logged out, wrote a comment on a blog, wrote video comment, updated their status, updated their profile, joined a Team, left a team, accepted an event, declined an event, added a friend, uploaded a File, created a new team, updated a team, added a new forum topic, added a new forum reply, updated a new forum topic, updated a new forum reply, added a new RSS feed, updated an RSS feed, added a new bookmark, updated a bookmark, added a new video, updated a video.
Further more, once the clean design look and feel was approved, CSS files and image assets were implemented over a default template so that content creation and posting was able to be worked on from day one. Some content migration took place from a blog application to populate blog archives.
Results
Within a week of its recent launch, the user activity reporting has provided social network activity reports that go beyond traditional site analytics.
The site is easy to maintain and populate with content, with all goals mentioned in the strategy achieved.
Ad and subscription revenue breakeven is projected to be within 6 months.
Based on activity reports and member comments, further development has already started around member subscriptions, micro payment, service directory listing, private teams and desktop news sharing.
Members are currently expected to grow organically as Tradersnews.co.uk is currently reliant on word-of-mouth to encourage visitors and registrations, making the ability to share contacts across popular internet sites a worthy addition. Further developments will include a broader collection of sites that Tradersnews.co.uk can be interoperable with focusing on activity feeds, moderated discussions and contact synchronising.
Brandstation represents a low cost, low risk, credit crunch compatible solution for companies, clubs and associations, or for anyone looking to build their own professional social network.
Viewmy.tv develops cutting edge social media technology to create communication and collaboration tools that are easy to access, use, manage and moderate with user-friendly interfaces. The company runs a portfolio of online community based properties including www.viewmy.tv, a free live Internet TV aggregation service (getting over 1 million impressions per month) providing access to thousands of free streaming TV channels from all over the World.
Viewmy.tv provides on-demand and customised social network solutions for Companies, Educational Organisations, Charities, Clubs and Associations, HR and Recruitment, PR and Marketing agencies, Government and Enterprise.
To get further information, experience a live demo or to create your own social network, simply visit http://www.brandstation.tv.
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