Organizations venturing into online community face a challenge that's quite different from the work of creating a traditional web site: the challenge of motivating users to participate in and contribute to a bottom-up, user-driven community. The fastest-growing web sites today offer a compelling combination of relationships, tools and content that offer users a unique reason to participate in this particular community, as opposed to the hundreds of others that have sprung up across the web.
Social Signal has the expertise to help you identify the particular value that you can offer to a user community. Our extensive background in online advocacy and social marketing gives us deep insight into the kinds of features, content and social structures that motivate people to participate actively in online communities. Our work is guided by best practices in public engagement and social web ("web 2.0") development. These best practices have shaped an approach that is:
Participatory: The latest generation of participatory web sites succeed to the extent that they can achieve a critical mass of users who in turn collaboratively build a critical mass of relationships, features and/or content. This tipping point can be reached through the site's content, by offering social opportunities for interacting with other users, or with features that support critical tasks in the user's everyday life or work. We strive to offer content and activities that provide at least two - and ideally all three - of these magnets to potential users.
Decentralized: The explosion in online communities means that many audience members have existing allegiances to particular social networks, blogging tools or other social web services. Rather than ask participants to replace their community allegiances, we look for ways of integrating diverse web sites and tools. Many of our projects take an ecosystem approach that circulates content and builds relationships across multiple web sites by using RSS and tagging.
Platform agnostic: Achieving your goals drives our choice of technology. Different strategic goals and activities, different audiences and usability requirements, and different budgets and technical constraints can add up to very different preferences about platform features. While we have worked most extensively with Drupal and WordPress (two platforms that offer particular support for community-driven sites), we have worked with a range of other tools and continue to explore new content management options so that we can always offer our clients the tools that are most appropriate to their particular needs.
Context-sensitive: While the Internet provides opportunities for deepening issue awareness and engagement, effective learning requires that we adapt content and messages to the strengths and limitations of the web. We keep text short, use images and multimedia content, and prime for user feedback as ways of facilitating user engagement with even the most complex material.
Consultative and iterative: The needs and goals of community members should guide site features, content and activities, because the most successful communities are those in which members feel like community owners. Consequently, sites should begin with the minimal features and content required to engage participant interest, and expand with features that reflect participant feedback.
Above all, we take an integrated approach. Social Signal is well-versed in the technical architecture and implementation of complex web sites, but we are more than just a web development team: we're a web development team with a built-in understanding of your communications needs, participation goals, and political context. You don't have to worry about site content that reads like a computer manual because we're used to developing messages, articles and help documentation for a wide range of audiences. You won't struggle to translate your goals for citizen engagement into online activities because we approach online communities as places to expand and explore contemporary social citizenship. You don't need to coach us on how to frame complex political issues for the web, because we have years of experience in writing, teaching and social marketing on policy challenges. Our experience gives us valuable insight into which features and content can engage and sustain public involvement, and which just get in the way.
