CHANGE THE FACE OF COMMUNITY MARKETING
We started a formal relationship with Sentient Storm in 2005. This award winning animation and movie editing company. Our goal was to help them create a marketing platform to help them promote on the internet, and to help them generate interest in their work among the cyberspace community.
This was truly an innovative and creative endeavor. Three years before youtube became a public name, and the term viral marketing was not coined, this company was seeking ways to use video to market products.
This type of Out-Of-The box thinking fit right into the Axiom9 platform. We had already created one of the first online communities using online publishing software and piecing together various scripts.
OVERVIEW
Management at Sentient storm took our strategy one-step forward. They introduced us to the opensource and we introduced them to a community platform via a straight blog platform. Drupal was in its infancy, but a viable option with some custom coding. Writingup had already flourished to become one of the major blog communities, and fell.
OBJECTIVES
Axiom9 was responsible for finding the displaces bloggers across the web and bring them to the newly created platform, www.communati.com . This required analyzing what worked at the old community, dissecting the competition, identifying the consumer, and then targeting them where they surf.
Within weeks we converted 2/3 of the top contributors to Communati, and generated 300 000 visits a month. The secret was in giving a face to the community. We stepped away from the norm and created a blog community owner, someone who cared for the users. The blog community thrived in this environment.
SOLUTION
Axiom9’s experience with their own community poised them to become a powerful marketing force behind communati. The overall tone of the new website was news oriented. Communati created verticals including politics, religion, and business. A single brand, moderated by a single entity, created a community that thrived as one of the most popular for two years.
Together, Axiom9’s internet experience, and Sentient Storm’s media focus created the metrics that enabled Communati to survive where others failed. Axiom9 knew how to analyze a community’s communication style, primal motivations, personality types, and goals. We used these to create the relevant semantic search, long before Google introduced the theory.
THE EVOLUTION
This metric put Communati in a strong position when Web2.0 was introduced. Instead of falling, Drupal developers created new tools. We incorporated these into the platform immediately. Axiom9’s involvement in the developer’s groups enabled them to move from Static to dynamic, and dynamic to social, long before the tools were commonly used. This was possible, even if we needed to create our own mods and widgets.
Communati became one of the first php platforms to include SEO tools for individual pages. By utilizing the social architecture, Axiom9 strengthened the brand proposition through the entire social networking process.
The heart of Communati is not in attracting content, but in attracting a blogger who is willing to comment on other blogs. Communati is known for having blogs with more than 50 intelligent and informative comments with very little flaming or contention. These grew through trackbacks and treads into complex dialogues that attracted media attention and readers.
METHODOLOGY
We identified early that users needed to be controlled, but they didn’t want to be invisible. Bloggers create content. Users click on ads. This created a self-motivated community that used revenue sharing, taught self promotion, and promoted loyal content providers. This created a self sustaining search momentum that exceeded the combined search engine traffic.
We understood that bloggers do not want to follow. They want to lead. It is not enough to give them the latest tools. They want readers. Axiom9’s market research revealed that bloggers’ strongest motivation was not revenue, but view counts.
In 2008 the marketing strategy switched from attracting bloggers to attracting readers. We were on the tails of website success stories like www.about.com (owned by the New York Times) and www.entrepreneur.com . We engaged in several campaigns to drive readers to the website.
MONETIZING THE WEBSITE
Google abandoned their communities in favor of single topic websites. This devastated most publishing platforms. Our goal was to expand the practicality at www.communati.com and to create a second venue, www.icommunati.com.
We built a platform with an eye to what the large advertisers wanted. PPC worked, but Axiom9 encouraged Sentient Storm to target the CPV and CPM advertisers. After several months, and major revisions, a new Communati was born that remained true to its blog community roots, but met the demands of small advertisers.
This required encouraging a migration from Sentient Storm’s hosting to our own servers. This was achieved in 2009.
RESULTS
Communati’s staying power speaks to the solidity of the foundation, and the quality of bloggers attracted. The platform generated an income for both the owner and bloggers as long as Google supported communities. When the bubble burst, the company lost interest. The continued success and evolution of Axiom9’s sites encouraged the company to renew their committment to their platform.
The redesign and marketing efforts are producing solid results. Communati is regaining attention as a public forum. Bloggers are returning and developing relationships. It is also regaining a solid position in the search engines, as well as social marketing venues.
Most important, it is becoming more profitable than it was in the early days.
THE FUTURE
Our goal is to continue improving the brand of Communati and iCommunati, and prepare them to meet the guidelines of the largest advertisers. Axiom9 is working on a stratagem that will result in micro-sites that improve the exposure of individual member blogs. This will work intandem with mods that will empower bloggers, enabling them to create their own, interactive, fan lists. These innovative ideas are not a reality, yet, anywhere on the net, but our web developers are always working to turn ideas into reality.