Special Olympics Launches Community Site ‘The Gym’

There’s no question that social media is a natural fit for not-for-profits. Increasingly, they’re deploying online communities to energize their constituents and encourage active participation. And it makes sense: These types of organizations are run by active and passionate people who donate their time and resources in support of a great cause.

That’s why I was thrilled to hear that Special Olympics has launched a community site called The Gym. Built on the KickApps platform, The Gym is a place for fans and supporters of the Special Olympics to connect with one another, to share, and to get involved. Take some time to visit the site and see how you can contribute.

9 Steps to a Successful Online Community

It’s been said before: social media is a powerful way to grow and engage your audience, but it’s even more effective when paired with good planning and best practices.

We’re committed to delivering a platform that makes it as easy as possible for you to build and manage your online community, but the bottom line is that technology (whether it’s ours, yours, or someone else’s) is just one part of the equation.

That’s why we put together this whitepaper, 9 Steps to a Successful Online Community.

You can download it here.

This is an evolving work, so please let us know if you have comments or suggestions about how we can make it better. If you find it helpful, please drop us a line and say so. We look forward to hearing from you.

Make Money From Home!

Now that I have your attention…sorry, couldn’t resist…I want to address one of the most common questions from publishers looking at deploying KickApps to power social media on their websites: How much does it cost?

If you’ve been reading this blog on a regular basis you’ll probably have picked up on a few of themes about how we see the world: ease of use, innovation, audience engagement and growth, and business model. Our philosophy, from both a technical and business point of view, is grounded in eliminating barriers of entry for publishers who seek to drive engagement and audience growth on their websites to increase advertising and sponsorship revenue opportunities. The pricing of the platform reflects this.

We have two plans that meet the needs of the wide array of publishers that use KickApps:

1) KickApps Ad Network – No Fee:
• Access to the complete KickApps platform at no cost. No setup or startup fees. No storage of bandwidth limits and no charge for DNS masking (we don’t think it should cost you extra to ‘own’ your community)
• Publisher controls right skyscraper ad slot on community pages and can earn revenue immediately by delivering ads (many of our smaller affiliates use their own Google AdSense accounts for this)
• KickApps inserts Google AdSense ads on the leaderboard ad slot
• Ability to switch to our ad inventory control option at any time

You should consider this plan if you want to get up and running with no initial investment (other than your own resources). Many affiliates that are just beginning to add social media pick this option while they develop their site and community. As their community activity grows, many realize new opportunities to monetize those pages and decide to buy out the entire array of ad slots available. However, many also choose to remain on our network because it simply works for them. Remember, you have access to the right skyscraper and can earn revenue by placing your own ads in that slot.

2) KickApps Ad Inventory Buyout – Usage Based Fee:
• Affiliate has access to all ad inventory (including in stream video and banners) on the community site and can serve up their own ads (using Google AdSense, DoubleClick, LightningCast, etc.), or no ads at all, using their own ad server
• Fees are based on usage—rate per thousand community page views (CPM). Therefore, you only pay for the page views that your community consumes
• With access to multiple ad slots on each page (publishers can insert as many as six ads on a given page, including pre- or post-roll video), the effective CPM is our rate divided by the number of ads you choose to insert on a given page
• There are no setup or startup fees
• There are monthly minimum commitments for a defined number of page views (based on CPM rate). If you commit to a higher monthly minimum (high monthly page impressions) the CPM rate goes down. You can always increase your monthly minimum to lower your CPM rate as your community grows
• Please contact us to sign the ad inventory buyout agreement: info@kickapps.com

You should consider this plan if you want to control all the inventory on your site and add it to the overall sales model for your site. Community page views equate to incremental revenue that reaches audiences in a highly targeted manner. Publishers that are working with us are seeing tremendous success in this and it enables their sales and marketing organizations to create innovative campaigns for sponsors and advertisers.

Pollack Media: Platforms and Widgetizing Social Media

Jim Kerr, vice president of new media at Pollack Media Group, wrote an article about social media, platforms and widgets. It’s an interesting read that can be found here: Platforms and Widgetizing Social Media. Jim talks about how “[t]he widgetizing of the web and the extension of platforms is a critical element of the future of social networking. Users no longer want to send people to places to view their content, they want to bring it with them.”

Expanding on this, he cites Eric’s blog post about open portals “Imagine if a portal… took the initiative of providing any 3rd party website open access to a wide range of hosted programs (with both traditional content and user participation functionality). The… affiliate platform would invite webmasters to browse for programming that improves their user experience, thus creating incremental traffic and ad inventory for both [the portal]… and their affiliate websites.”

Jim wraps it up by writing: “Creating a destination site is still important on the Internet. But the definition of what makes a good destination site is changing. In the past, a site was considered good if its content was sticky enough to draw people in. Now a site is considered good if its content is so sticky that users view it without ever visiting the site at all.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves!

[UPDATE: According to his blog...] Jim’s going to write more on this next week and will talk about “practical implementations of social networking which include the ability to share the content via widgets.”