Results

Engagement

Community is an excellent driver of engagement. If you want to grow and captivate your audience, your community should offer plenty of opportunities for conversation and interaction around topics your audience members are passionate about.

Our Engagement Blueprint is a guide for building community features that attract your core audience to their favorite brand, product or lifestyle topics. Our blueprint helps you to own the conversation around those topics, across your websites, mobile apps and social media destinations.

Blueprint Goal

Our Engagement Blueprint helps you create a social environment that attracts new visitors to your community, creates a sense of membership and belonging, and ultimately inspires preference for your brand. Success is measured in traffic to your community and visitor contributions volume.

Audience Hot Buttons

Successful Engagement communities generally exploit audience appetites for knowledge, fascination and association.

Communities that score high on Engagement have lots of high-quality content supplied by the brand, by community members, or both. If you want to be the best source of content about a particular topic—the NFL’s mantra is “If you want the NFL, go to the NFL”—the blueprint shows you how to mix entertaining and educational content and surround it with opportunities for community visitors to interact socially with likeminded people.

The hard core fans in the NFL.com community have an insatiable appetite for football. Knowing this, the league serves up content and in-game entertainment that isn’t available anywhere else.

The Community Experience

The Mattel Barbie Collector community experience includes everything an enthusiast craves: lots of useful information, thousands of photos and lots of opportunities to interact.

The Engagement Blueprint shows you how to create a community experience that delights, informs and engages its members.

Delight is about providing an experience that visitors can’t get anywhere else. This is a motivation to spend time in the community and to return often.
If your community experience satisfies your audience members’ appetite for information, your brand will gain authority and credibility.
And making the whole experience social, letting your enthusiasts befriend each other and invite friends from other social destinations, is what Engagement is all about.

Community Building Blocks

The Engagement Blueprint calls for particular social applications that are good for delivering content and encouraging social behavior. Each blueprint element can be deployed on its own, but Engagement really takes off when all of the blueprint elements are working together. Social applications with value in an Engagement context include:

Through great design and very capable moderation and management, AARP has turned a simple social application – Forums – into the foundation of an enormous, dynamic community.

Expert Blogs. Blogs offer a good platform for subject matter experts to contribute content. Blogs also have great SEO value, which means your community can grow your core audience at the same time you are entertaining and informing its members.

Comments. Audience comments on articles and other content have great power to inspire passionate, enduring conversations about topics people care about.

Media Galleries. Photo and video galleries are particularly engaging social platforms. We’re a visual species, and photos and videos have power to entertain, inform and engage.

Influencer Rewards. An engaging social experience seldom happens on its own. People don’t make a community part of their daily routine without community leadership. Badges and leader boards provide a mechanism for identifying and surfacing those leaders, rewarding their efforts and inspiring others to be leaders as well.

The Engagement Blueprint Delivers

The National Football League clearly wants to own the conversation about professional football. Their ubiquitous marketing message is “If you want the NFL, go to the NFL” and to back up that directive the league has made NFL.com an incredibly engaging place for its millions of community members.

The community experience at NFL.com is definitely something fans can’t get anywhere else, and it is intensely social. The Draft War Rooms give fans a place to be GM for a day, arguing over their team’s draft strategy and offering their own. And Game Center is an interactive in-game social application where fans can rate player and coach performance as the game unfolds, and predict what will happen next.

Time Spent at the NFL.com Community

Young men who visit the NFL.com community spend an unusual amount of time per visit. They also spend a large percentage of their total time online there.

Engagement at NFL.com

Membership - The NFL.com community has over 3 million registered members

Contributions - During the season, these fans submit more than 8 million contributions per month

Standout stat - On the first day of the 2011 NFL Draft, community members submitted more than 90,000 comments

The more than 2 million members of the AARP.com community go there to be part of literally hundreds of thousands of conversations about virtually every topic under the sun. The AARP community members are all passionate about some topic or another, but they are all passionate about the community.

Comments Volume per Article

Comments Volume is a reliable indicator of engagement. At AARP this metric has steadily grown.

Forum Posts per Discussion

Forum posts per discussion is another engagement bellwether. By this measure AARP engagement is strong.

Engagement at AARP

Membership - AARP has more than 2 million community members

Conversation volume - Community members are adding 80 new discussion topics every day

Standout stat - This community, already large, has grown by an average of 75,000 members per month for the last year

Barbie Collector is a community dedicated to all things Barbie. Mattel uses the site to showcase – and sell – its products for adult Barbie collectors, and shares the spotlight with its stable of designers. The site also promotes specialty retailers who carry collector-grade outfits and other products. The Barbie Collector community members show off their Barbie collections with the help of the Pluck Photos application, and take advantage of the site’s social features to befriend and interact with other collectors.

Barbie Collectors are Becoming Friends

Successful communities see high levels of social actions, like friending. Mattel’s Barbie Collector community clearly supports these actions.

Engagement at Mattel

Membership - The Barbie Collectors community has more than 262,000 members

Contribution volume - On average these members contribute more than 3 pieces of content per month

Standout stat - Members uploaded more than 95,000 photos in the community’s first six months

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