Our approach to online participation is based on over a decade of research into online participation and over 15 years of experience in online social marketing and campaigning.

Social Signal CEO Alexandra Samuel completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at Harvard, where her dissertation focused on the creative frontiers of online activism. As the Research Director for an e-government research program led by Wikinomics author Don Tapscott, she applied her emergent framework for online engagement to the real-world challenges of more than 20 government and business clients from around the world.

Social Signal President Rob Cottingham has created dozens of social marketing and campaign sites, including one of the web’s first interactive political games and an award-winning anti-tobacco youth site. A seasoned communication strategist and one of Canada's leading speechwriters, Rob has advised political, government, business and non-profit leaders on engaging audiences in both the online and offline worlds.

We combine our strategic insights into why people participate with our tactical skills in how to motivate participation.  Each project is unique, but we approach every project from the same set of principles, grounded in research and experience:

1. Community is more than interaction: it’s a network of relationships and a sense of affiliation or belonging.
2. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come: you need to invest in planning, managing and populating your site or community, as well as in building it.
3. People are motivated to visit or participate in a site by some combination of content, tools or relationships, and you can’t offer relationships until your site is well-established. You need to launch with some mix of content and tools that will motivate people to use your site.
4. The most effective sites offer a combination of incentives for participation, both tangible (prizes, services) and intangible (belonging, positive identity).
5. Unless people care enough about your brand that they pay for the privilege of wearing your logo, they don’t care enough about your brand to participate in a conversation about your brand – which is why you’re better off building a conversation on an issue that’s connected to your brand, rather than about the brand itself.
   
6. Of all the risks you need to manage, under-participation is the most likely.
7. Effective animation (moderation) is key to bringing a site to life. 
8. Conversation is the agent of change. When you create an online community and invite people into a conversation, you transform your organization's capacity to lead and manage change.

Some of these principles inspired us to launch Social Signal, and others have evolved through experience and conversation with our clients, colleagues and friends.

Contact us today to talk about how our approach can help your organization harness the power of online community and conversation.