How to Drive Engagement and Build Online Communities
December 13, 2011 by Kevin Michael Gray
Engagement is everything in the marketing world. It is the currency of our industry. If you are successful at engaging consumers you will be successful as an agency. Today's featured article offers some top notch helpful tips on how to drive engagement while building a loyal online community. Read more below:
Thanks to the highly predictable online ad network provided by Google and other players in the industry, getting traffic is now a fully scalable process. But what do you do with those visitors once they land on your website? This is the most persistent challenge most professionals working in the online media space are faced with today. Luckily for us, a few good Samaritans have taken it upon themselves to provide us with the tools and means to accomplish just that.
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Automattic – Open source meets flawless coding
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“Code is poetry,” they proclaim. Automattic is the company that brought to us the beautiful CMS we now know as WordPress. But if you thought that WordPress was all that Automattic ever created, think again. Over the years, Automattic has done more than its fare share in reinventing the web and making it a more lively and interactive place. They’ve built PollDaddy, one of the most robust and widely used survey platforms on the web. They’ve also built BuddyPress, a community oriented CMS which features user profiles and micro-blogging integration.
The most interesting facet of their work philosophy is their strong support of Open Source technology – since most of their products are built around it, Automattic has fostered a global culture of contributing developers – enthusiasts all across the world doing their bit to improve existing products free of cost. Aside from design and development, Automattic also organizes open events all across the globe to facilitate networking among people working in the field of digital and online media.
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Gigya – The science of user engagement
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Who wouldn’t want to make their site more social? From large enterprises to online magazines, everyone wants a piece of the social pie – to not just draw visitors to websites, but also engage them in ways that establish and maintain a sustained partnership. This is exactly what Gigya promises to do. With clients like USA Today, Verizon, Universal, PCmag, CBS and TBS, Gigya has proved that when it comes to online social engagement – their platform is second to none.
Gigya’s interaction with your visitors begins right after they land on your website, social logins help to make the process of signing-up a breeze and the identities thus created are centrally managed – giving you valuable insight into your readers. Beyond the basics, Gigya provides tools to analyze and increase your traffic, build and sustain communities and increase reader loyalty by employing a user reward system based on the principles of game mechanics. Gigya is probably the best thing that can ever happen to your web strategy.
