Pluck Social Media Solutions for Publishers

The Pluck Social Application Server, with its broad portfolio of social applications and a rich set of developer-accessible services and components, powers a multitude of strategic destinations for media and publishing companies. Reader participation, citizen journalism and networked publishing are just a few of the initiatives that innovative media companies are evolving. By organizing their online offerings around reader intent, publishers are creating socially driven experiences that their readers find more relevant.

Creating value for their customers also creates value for publishers. In our experience, Pluck-powered social solutions help publishers attract audience, foster audience engagement and loyalty at the publishers' sites, and ultimately increase revenue through monetized page views and sponsorships. We have flexible, proven blueprints for publishers that want to capture any or all of these business outcomes.

Social Media Solutions for Audience Acquisition

If you manage a publication or other content-based destination you know that traffic is the lifeblood of your business. Traffic is fundamental to page view monetization, and it's also a key metric for sponsors. Pluck's publisher blueprints deliver a variety of effective audience acquisition tactics. You may want to solicit original article and media content from visitors to your site, or it may be more appropriate for you to focus on attracting readers' reactions to your own content. Either way, we'll show you how to use Pluck to bring in reader-contributed content, which in turn will bring new visitors to your site through search. Pluck's unique Social Bridging capabilities, which provides integration with Facebook and other major social destinations, also brings traffic to your site. In fact, Facebook reports that on average every social interaction on your site that you syndicate to Facebook brings three visitors back to you.

USAToday.com, a daily online newspaper, makes it easy for its readers to interact with content on virtually every page. And the readers definitely enjoy the social experience: since the publication’s deployment of social media features, the paper’s community has contributed more than 11 million article comments and tens of thousands of photographs and blog posts. And with hundreds of readers contributing 100 or more article comments every month, community definitely describes what USAToday.com enjoys.

Social Media Solutions for Audience Engagement and Loyalty

Once you've attracted visitors to your content we can show you how to entice them to stay, and to keep coming back. It's all about giving your visitors a place to learn, to be entertained, and to engage around a shared passion. Our publisher blueprints will help you to create "sticky" social experiences that make your site part of your visitors' online routine. We'll help you identify and promote the most influential and respected members of your community in an effort to improve the quality of the experience you deliver. And we'll show you how to firmly associate you and your brand with the passion that keeps bringing visitors to your destination.

The NFL wants to own the online conversation about professional football among 18-to-35-year-old males. To win the loyalty of this prized demographic, the league has enhanced nfl.com with highly social age-appropriate experiences that fans can't get anywhere else. The NFL Draft Fan War Rooms, for example, lets fans be GM for a Day, offering their own draft choices and reacting to actual picks in a highly interactive and graphical environment. The War Rooms drew over a half million fan comments during the 2010 draft season (up 180% over 2009), and attracted major sponsors.

The Lance Armstrong brand and great content bring traffic to health and fitness site LiveStrong.com. But what keeps visitors on the site and brings them back again and again is the site's "sticky" social experience. Users benefit from daily fitness tips, weekly expert blogs, and engaging applications like the Daily Plate, a social diet and exercise application which has over 2.5 million users, 200+ million tracked foods, 26 million tracked exercises and 6 billion burned calories.

Social Media Solutions for Revenue Enhancement

Successful publisher communities drive additional monetized page views and attract sponsors. Our publisher blueprints can help you foster the most appropriate mix of visitor-enhanced and visitor-generated content for your online presence. We can help you create innovative experiences that drive core page views. And we can show you how to encourage the flourishing of content that connects with your audience's core passions, content that you and your sponsors can be proud of.

SFGate, online home of the San Francisco Chronicle, makes innovative use of reader-contributed content, and two-way bridges to Facebook and Twitter, to attract new visitors to the publication. Article comments, ratings and recommendations drive 4% of site traffic per month. New channels – Moms, Bandwidth, etc. – rely heavily on reader-contributed content and user photos drive nearly 80% of traffic to these channels. Readers can syndicate to Facebook and Twitter their SFGate activities, and Facebook reports that every such post sends three Facebook members back to SFGate.

Pluck Social Media Solutions Overview

Pluck-driven social features are integrated directly into the core site experiences of over 450 leading digital destinations. That level of integration results in measurable increases in engagement metrics, page views, and monetization.