Bringing a Community to Life Online
filed under: Social Media and Internet Culture
http://tbg.cm/fnFNHz
For as long as I have been a part of the Kashi.com project, we have been talking about building a visualizer of sorts. In short, Kashi wanted a way to bring the community to life online; To show that the community was full of real people, with real passions and emotions regarding natural lifestyle. We wanted to successfully show that the Kashi community was a powerful place where people were actively taking steps (both big and small) towards living naturally.
Well its been a long time coming, but we finally found the right solution. It took us awhile because like all great things, the solution wasn’t easy. We initially thought we should just promote the number of people taking challenges, but quickly agreed that the community is so much more than just that. We tried using various graphics or progress bars to show the involvement of people on the site, but again agreed that the emotional tie to the real people was missing. In the end we realized there was indeed a perfect solution, but it consisted of three distinct elements:
- telling the emotional story of our users and their goals, struggles and accomplishments
- showing the power of the community and how small steps together add up to far greater things
- displaying how active our community is within the site, both with challenges and other content as well.
Over the next few months we worked to design, develop, and push live some new functionality that would help address these key points. We first tackled the “power” of the community, which took its form in the way of simplified polls. We wanted to show that even small steps can have impact when many people take them together. By presenting users with a simple yes/no question, we were able to show how a seemingly small and simple action can have greater impact in the hands of many. Facebook did something similar to this back on election day, and the numbers were phenomenal. Our results have been similar!
When moving on to the “emotional” part of this task, we knew we wanted users to be heard on the site, and we wanted them to be able to share their stories in a way that was not only rewarding to them, but potentially helpful or inspirational for others. We set our efforts on creating a super simple tool that would encourage users to return often and share their accomplishments (both big and small) through personal posts. The end result was a twitter-like concept, with some unique, Kashi-inspired features.
While the accomplishments tool and polls help show that our members are out and about making change in the world around them, we wanted to be sure to show their participation on the site as well. This lead us to our last creation, a mini newsfeed that would bring the community to life in real time. There is tons to do on Kashi.com, from accepting challenges, to rating recipes, and joining conversations, and this new feed clearly outlines members and their ongoing activity on the site.
Communities are over the web these days, but to truly bringing one to life online is not an easy task. To show “real” in a virtual space is a bit of a challenge, but we think we nailed it for the Kashi.com community. The people, their goals, and their passions seem to come together quite well, and if you haven’t already, you should really check it out.
2 comments
Have you seen the Lululemon community (http://www.lululemon.com/community/originalintent)? I wandered into one of their stores in DC and they were challenging people to write down their 10 year goals, then figure out a plan of attack to achieve them. I thought that was pretty ambitious! It sounded cool in the store, but for some reason the site doesn't seem to deliver? You would think that part of the brand's goal would be to create repeat visitors and loyal customers on their website by creating a community around 10 year goals. Maybe they intend on making it just an in-store deal? Hmmm. Does that help foster local community support? If so, is that better?