Editorial Articles

So you want to harness the power of interactivity and engage with your consumers, prospects, investors, partners and everyone that comes into contact with your company. But where do you fall on the Social Spectrum at the moment?

For many marketers wherever your sites are along the spectrum, you’re probably experiencing an inexorable pull along it. Don’t fight it; it’s a natural progression and maybe you’ve already decided to build an online community as an extension of your web presence to engage your audience and further build brand loyalty. You’ve worked out what will bind and interest your community based on the shared interests of your audiences and you’ve managed to sell the idea internally, but now what do you actually have to do to get social nirvana?

Build from scratch or buy a standard platform?
You might think that choosing the technology to run your community is an IT job but the involvement of the digital marketer will pay dividends. After all, it will be you that is responsible for updating content, populating the community, administrating the various features etc. Software for setting up and running communities is now available. However, you need to be careful as not all community template packages are the same.

The key thing to remember is not to treat your community and your existing website as separate entities. Combining them will result in a much better user-experience. You need to make sure that your community software is already – or can be easily - integrated with an organisation’s existing content management system (CMS).

The role of the CMS in the community
You need to get the back end right. Some social features (like social bookmarking) are fairly low-touch. Others require a significant amount of back-end programming and integration.

The CMS you use will make a big difference in the success of your social web initiatives. The right CMS will not only make it much easier to introduce social features – it will also make for richer, simpler, easier-to-use social web experiences.

Ideally, you need a CMS that is:

Social-centric – not every CMS is built to handle the more challenging social features. If social media is not in the DNA of your CMS, shop around. Ask to see the community templates.

Editor-friendly – social sites take more editing and administration than static sites. You need a CMS that makes it easy for non-technical editors to add content, create pages and moderate comments.

You will also need to populate your community areas with great content from your CMS to keep people interested, involved and coming back for more. An editor should be able to upload relevant articles and link to different forums.

Developer-friendly – developers shouldn’t have to learn a whole new language just to create social features for your site. You need a CMS based on a standard, open platform with lots of tools and templates to accelerate development.

Modular – your CMS should always be growing by letting you snap on new modules as they’re developed.

Widely used – a popular CMS has an active developer community to contribute modules, ideas, advice and experience.

Actively supported – open source is great but when the going gets social, you’ll want a CMS that has someone standing behind it – for support, development, training and advice

Performance matters
Social sites make much greater demands on your servers than simple content sites – especially if user-generated photos and videos are involved. You may need a platform that can handle millions of users of and billions of page views per month. If your CMS can’t scale to the demands of the social web, you risk frustrating (or losing) your users.

Analytics are critical
You’ll want to actively monitor and measure all activities on your social pages in real-time just as you would on the rest of your site. Make sure that rich reporting and analysis of your community will be possible.

Integrated e-mail function
No doubt you will want to collect the email addresses of community users easily – and segment them before emailing selected members. Warning: This sounds easy but many packages don’t include it.

Communities in action
Last year the Swedish magazine Internetworld voted Visitsweden.com and its extremely active community at www.CommunityofSweden.com as best website. Key to that success was the integration of the community within the main site – and the sharing of content and cross-fertilisation that that enabled.

Registered users discuss all kinds of issues including their favourite places in Sweden, discoveries, opinions and experiences of hotels and tour operators, as well as sharing stories, tips and photos. The majority of community participants are from Sweden though there are over a thousand from the US and 392 from the UK. I suggest you check it out if you’re planning a trip to Sweden.

All content on the Community is tagged with the topic description, geographical location and season to make searches easier. And all photos are clickable and can be viewed in a larger version.

Without a doubt, the know-how to build – and maintain - a community are skills that every digital marketer now needs to have.

Author: Neal Perry, General Manager for the UK and Ireland, EPiServer