Professional Services

Demand Media's Professional Services team helps customers get the most out of Pluck and social media by provisioning them with Pluck, training them on how best to integrate the platform into their Web sites,  and guiding them to success.

It all starts with the team. You'll be assigned an Engagement Team, with a named Engagement Manager and Solutions Engineer, who will ensure the success of your Pluck implementation. We have a deep bench of experts to draw on – with expertise in CSS, JavaScript, AJAX and XML, as well as project and community management – who will help you craft the social media experience that accommodates your digital strategy and your audience.

Provision

Provisioning is all about getting Pluck installed and running in our state-of-the-art hosted environment according to your requirements, so that project development can get underway. Your Demand Media Engagement Team will provision you with the tools, environments, and the applications you need to deploy Pluck to your Web site.

Provisioning Pluck starts with an exchange of information between you and Demand Media regarding your vision, objectives, timeline, and any technical information we need. With this information we deploy a Pluck environment in our data center for you, to be used for development, testing and staging of your social media project. Your Engagement Team will install the Pluck applications you need into both your Stage and Production environments according to your requirement and preferences. If you require a secure connection to Pluck, we will help you with the generation of the certificate requests and get your certificates installed in the stage and production environments.

Train

All of our Training services are designed to ensure that you have the knowledge and skills that you need to design the best possible integration of Pluck, build the integration into Pluck, plan a community management program, and manage and moderate your community with the Pluck Community Management Workbench and Moderation Manager tools.

With more than 400 significant implementations to draw on, your Engagement Team will be able to offer a substantial catalog of best practices concerning usability, monetization, community development, performance and scale, and moderation. The Training process begins with this content. If your team will be managing some or all of the technical side of your implementation – and your Engagement Team can handle anywhere from 0% to 100% of that activity – we deliver training on basic and intermediate concepts around invocation, styling and design, linking, and configuration. If you choose, we will also train your team to develop and test the authentication integration between your registration and login system and Pluck, as well as review usability, linking, and other technical concerns.

If you will be managing your community, our team will train your team on the Pluck Community Management Workbench and Pluck Moderation Manager to ensure that your community management team is ready to take on the task of growing, rewarding, and policing the community effectively and efficiently.

Guide

Finally, at every step of the way your Engagement Team is ready to your consultative partner, guiding you through the project to the best social media implementation, advising you on technical specifics, and consulting with you regarding community management best practices tailored to your unique needs.

We'll deliver Architecture and Design services, advising you how best to leverage Pluck features and functions on each page of your Web site. We'll review your goals, wireframes, and other requirements and provide actionable and meaningful feedback according to our expertise. We can also provide Project Guidance services, helping you to plan your Pluck implementation project. We'll review your resource plans, calendars, plans, risks, dependencies, estimates and effort levels. In most projects this is an ongoing activity.

Beyond the initial training some technical teams require additional assistance with Pluck Integration Guidance. Your Engagement Team is prepared to assist you with this integration of social media into your Web site. For those who require this assistance, it's typically an ongoing, project-long service.

Finally, many of our customers rely on our Community Management Guidance services. We help them get the most out of Social Media by assisting them in the development of a plan to grow their community of visitors and fully engage those visitors so that they become adherents and customers. We'll guide you through the creation of – or enhancement to – your community development, management, and moderation programs.