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CREATE N
EW S
OCIAL O
BJECTS
The same collective effort occurs around PGi’s communications system API and
its supporting external, PGiConnect community, and around open source efforts like
WordPress, ExpressionEngine and Drupal with the development of themes, modules,
and similar extensions to the core platforms. These languages and applications—the
social object is indeed the product itself—have communities around them driven by the
participant’s own needs to be more productive, to build better solutions, and to gain
personal recognition. On that last point—recognition—be sure to think through and
plan your community’s reputation system: It is a critical component in driving collabo-
ration and, therefore, essential to the long-term success of your efforts.
Connect Your Audience
With your social object and the (participant) motive for social interaction planned out,
the final step—once you’ve established your object(s)—is to make them available for
sharing and to optimize the resulting work products of your participants for discovery
via search.
The connection to your audience—making objects available—can be done
through a combination of techniques. For social objects like photos, make sure they
can be found: This means tying them to a URL of their own. Don’t rely on the page or
container for discovery and sharing. While it’s true that many objects on the Web have
a URL of some sort, make it easy to surface and share. If you are planning to use Flash
or similar embedded content methods, pay special attention to this: If the only refer-
ence to a piece of content that someone would like to share is the top-level URL for the
page, the ability to share what people would otherwise spread around may suffer.
Overt methods for sharing overcome this: “Send to a Friend” or “Share This”
goes a long way in helping people start or engage in conversations. For discrete objects
like photos, take the added step of optimizing them for discoverability by encouraging
and providing examples of tags, titles, and descriptions for the objects that participants
create. Rather than “Upload a photo” for example, your upload form should include
a tag, title, and description field that are required to be populated for submission. It
may seem like a burden, but this added information will actually help your community
grow by making individual contributions more discoverable.
With the overall need established, and the tools that support social conversation
and collaboration in place, tell your wider audience about it. Link to it, publicize it,
and share it yourself. As your community begins to form, turn to your moderators to
facilitate the growth of the community.
Types of Branded Communities
As you plan your community program, consider the type of community you want. Will
this serve participants through the aspirations and values of the brand, or will it be
more focused on specific products or similar aspects of the services you offer? As with