... with a public whose interests and values are reflected on your site
Social Signal has a proven ability to create online communities that foster a trusted relationship between your organization and your site's users. Because its content is user-created, a successful online community brings you closer to your audience – because it ties your identity directly to an online presence that intimately reflects your audience's interests and values.
We focus on building your relationship with online participants at every step in the development process. We start by balancing creative brainstorming with careful needs assessment to develop a concept that will uniquely appeal to the audiences you wish to engage. We often build an initial presence with a light feature set, and then solicit user input into how to develop the site further – giving users a meaningful sense of ownership over the community's evolution. We emphasize skilled site animation and moderation, and supply or work with your site moderator, so that users feel encouraged and supported.
And we recognize that trust is a two-way street: your site will flourish when you trust your users as much as they trust you. Because "good fences make good neighbours", we think carefully about filters and moderation structures that discourage hostility and anti-social behaviour. And we help you make the transition to a terrain in which efforts at control can easily backfire; if you're inviting users to contribute to your site, they need to know that they won't be readily censored. We help our clients build an atmosphere of trust by working with them to develop site policies that encourage constructive contribution while promoting users' sense of ownership over the community.
The trust you build with your online public is key to the success of your brand or identity in the era of the social web. Your identity is held in trust with your public, and defined by their perceptions of your mission, message and behaviour. If you're a public-facing organization, chances are that your identity is already being discussed, and remixed on blogs, photo sites, or YouTube. By creating your own online community you're joining the public conversation about your identity, and creating a constructive context in which that conversation can more effectively unfold, and in which you can build a trusted relationship with your community's members.
Trust may be the currency of online community, but it's not a currency you can buy. Let Social Signal help you build trust with your public by building an online community that treats trust-building as paramount, every step of the way.
