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Integrating Pluck

Posted by jasoncrickmer at 9/28/2011 2:28 PM CDT

Pluck has proven itself in being an important component in our customers’ programs for engagement, advocacy, and conversion. Our years of experience partnering with the best brands in the world have helped us shape a set of incredibly precise approaches. In fact, John Loudamy, Director of Professional Services, and Don Roedner, Director of Marketing, have codified these approaches into a set of Blueprints that prescribe exactly which tools to use to maximize your results for different outcomes.

When it comes to implementing these prescriptions (or even blazing a new path), each customer approaches the integration project differently. I have seen a number of different approaches to the actual nuts and bolts work of integrating Pluck onto customer websites and other channels, and I would like to share some of the approaches that I have found most successful.

In my first post on this topic, I want to dive into the "Rapid Deployment" approach.

The Pluck setup engagement is built on three key themes – provisioning, training, and guidance. These themes run throughout all of the approaches, and come down to simply describing the type of actions that our team of experts perform with your team. In the Rapid Deployment approach, customers leverage the wealth of out-of-the-box capabilities to quickly add integrated community to their own website’s content and product pages.

This approach is well suited for customers that are lean on technical resources and are sharply focused on results. The customer team is typically made up of a front-end designer, a front-end developer, and the business stakeholder (e.g., director of marketing), and is looking to go-live in just a few weeks.

The major activities in this approach are:

Project Kick-off – project goals and objectives alignment; validate the timing of the project activities and milestones; insure adequate resources have been assigned to the project. This is typically an hour-long teleconference.
Product Functional Training – a 3-4 hour web conference deep-dive into the features and capabilities of the Pluck platform for the entire project team. The Demand Media team will make sure that we cover all applications, when and where they are best used, and cover key concepts around moderation and community management.
User Interface/Experience Planning – 2-3 hour planning session, wireframe review, etc, to plan out where best to leverage the community elements; sharing of best practices.
Technical Overview and Training – 1-1.5 days of technical, hands-on training on how to integrate Pluck. Our goal is to exit this with some HTML/JavaScript pages, built by the customer’s team, that are a Proof of Concept for integration (and may even be the actual basis for the completed integration!).
Environment Provisioning – the Demand Media team will provision and configure a dev/stage environment of Pluck, as well as a production instance of Pluck.
SSO and Application Integration – the customer’s team integrates the Pluck applications and widgets into website, and integrate their websites login/authentication system with Pluck. The Demand Media team provides guidance, consultation, and support through the integration activities.
Moderation Training – Demand Media’s team trains the customer’s team on the use of the Pluck workbenches and moderation tools. Customers that fit the Rapid Deployment profile often chose to initially leverage the Pluck Moderation Services team in order to move quickly, and as a means of accessing future resource needs.
Production Readiness & Go-Live – with the integrations complete, the team trained, and the production environment up and running, the customer pulls the trigger to take the integration live.

It is our goal to make sure that customers are able to execute quickly but also get all of the training and product knowledge that they need. Many customers that take this approach continue to iterate on integrating additional Pluck applications or tweaking the ones that are already live after the Go-Live. This is a proven approach and the DM Professional Services team can help ensure that early integration and development decisions can be easily extended during later development phases.

And speaking of additional iterations, the next approach I want to cover takes "iterative" to heart – leveraging the Agile process for integrating Pluck. Stay tuned for my next post.

And as always, we welcome your thoughts and comments! What process works best for your organization? Let us know here on our blog, or contact me directly at jason.crickmer@demandmedia.com.

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Tags: integration, professional, services, pluck, rapid, deployment, process, methodology, bestpractice

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