Brands as Community Builders
BlogBusinessSummit.com’s Teresa Valdez Klein wrote an interesting piece titled Meet The Community Builders about the accelerating trend of businesses creating their own social networks, and comparing The AFL’s KickApps-powered community to that of one of our competitors.
In essence, she likes both, but cites the KickApps user experience as being more robust and polished than the other, which is still, in her words “pretty beta.” We’re very proud of our platform, and our goal is to build the most capable and flexible community platform out there, making it easy for members to have fun and contribute while giving you, the publisher, complete control over what’s going on in your community.
As Director of Propaganda (err, Marketing) I’m genetically predisposed to mention a few additional points that I think really differentiate us in the marketplace.
Breadth of platform
Starting on the backend, we have a full range of management and reporting features that makes it easy for you to control everything going on in your community–all built on a rock-solid, Java-based platform. For major brands, this is especially important. On the user-facing end, KickApps puts a full suite of social media functionality in the hands of anyone who has a website: video/audio/photo sharing, rating, and tagging, personal profiles and groups, content syndication through widgets, and premium video capabilities.
Time of implementation
Whether you’re a one person shop with limited technical resources or you have a team of hardcore developers ready to write code at the drop of a Twitter post, anyone can go live with KickApps in a matter of a few hours to a few days. It all depends on how custom you want to get.
Price
The entire platform is available for free using our ad-supported model, and if you want to build a community using your own ads (or none at all), we have a risk-free model in which you only pay for the page views delivered.
Thanks to Teresa for her interest in the platform. By the way, since she wrote the piece The AFL actually launched an enhanced version of their KickApps community. Check out the screenshot and link below.
