Enhanced Social Profile Application and New Social Reputation System Give Website Owners More Social Features and More Tools for Delivering on Business Objectives
AUSTIN, Texas – Demand Media, Inc., provider of the industry-leading Pluck social media tools to publishers, retailers, enterprises and brands, announced the availability of the latest major upgrade to its Pluck 4 platform. The new release includes among its many features a significant enhancement to the platform’s user profile application, Pluck Personas. It also includes a powerful new social reputation system, Pluck Rewards. Finally, it delivers deeper integration with Facebook, allowing users to leverage their Facebook identities and relationships within Pluck-powered conversations. These new features and enhancements address the demands expressed by large retailers, brands and publishers to offer a more sophisticated, nuanced and, ultimately, more manageable online social experience while meeting the needs of their business objectives.
“The Pluck 4 platform, introduced last fall, was the industry’s first application server specifically built for integrated social media. The expectations that website visitors have of their online experiences continue to rapidly evolve. As a result, we are honoring our commitment to empower our customers to meet those expectations,” said Steve Semelsberger, senior vice president and general manager of the Business Solutions Group for Demand Media. “Our enhanced social profile application and our new social reputation system pave the way for more feature-rich and, importantly, more customizable online experiences. The benefit to our customers is the opportunity to better understand their audience and to create an even more fulfilling online experience.”
Social Profile. Pluck Personas is simple to deploy and fully customizable, but it is among the platform’s most ambitious and feature-rich applications, enabling sites to offer a more fully interactive online social media experience. It allows a website visitor to create a user profile with basic information and a range of customizable profile elements, to friend or follow other site participants and to connect with social destinations like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Connectivity with social media destinations is possible through Pluck’s Social Bridging features which offer great benefit to site owners. Profiles created in Pluck Personas offer a variety of user-to-user communication mechanisms, including private messaging and shared activity comments. They also fully integrate Pluck Rewards badging and leaderboards, making profiles a window into a user’s social reputation.
Site visitors’ access to the information in Pluck-driven user profiles is a function of ownership and privacy settings. Pluck Personas provides three modes of privacy—public, friends only, private—to dictate how information is viewable in the user profile by other site participants. For example, only a profile’s owner has a view of recent activities by their friends or others whom they follow. Sites that implement Pluck Personas satisfy a growing appetite on the part of website visitors to fine tune the depth and breadth of their exposure and involvement from community to community.
The British Medical Journal, a global medical publisher, is using Pluck Personas on its “doc2doc” site to help physicians interact and network with others at both the professional and social level.
“We are getting great value out of the enhanced functionality in the new Pluck Personas application,” said David Isaacson, British Medical Journal’s doc2doc Community Manager. “We are particularly pleased with the built-in Social Bridging links to Facebook and Twitter. And for all the power in the new application, it is gratifying to be able to customize its behavior and style to our particular requirements without any appreciable HTML or CSS skills.”
In addition, publishers, brands and retailers activating Pluck Personas, such as Confetti, the UK’s favorite destination for brides-to-be, are seeing their users forge new relationships with others on site and beyond. Confetti’s use of the application is helping its visitors easily interact with others on wedding planning tips and ideas as they plan the most important day of their lives.
Social Reputation. With consumers increasingly invested in online communities, community managers need more tools for identifying, incentivizing and rewarding behaviors that enhance the community experience. These managers increasingly find that a visitor’s social reputation provides a valuable lever for influencing community behavior, and can make it easier to launch communities, ensure their early success and control the direction in which they evolve. Pluck Rewards, a service that can be integrated into virtually every aspect of an online community, allows community managers to track visitor behaviors that are relevant to the community’s larger business objectives, and then publicly or privately surface and reward those behaviors.
Pluck Rewards supports both Earned and Assigned Badges. Earned Badges are based on visitor activity – both Pluck-based and host-defined – and are rewarded and accumulated by the Pluck system according to community standards. Assigned Badges are community manager-driven. They let community managers recognize valued visitors. Badges can be publicly displayed or utilized in background programming, or both. Pluck Rewards also supports “leaderboards,” a mechanism for tracking visitor behavior. Like Pluck badges, leaderboards can surface visitor rankings publicly or privately, for internal accounting purposes or as an incentive for visitor competition.
Microsoft recently integrated Pluck Rewards into its Windows Phone Backstage site. Visitors to the site earn points toward prizes by registering, completing their profile and, most importantly, engaging in product discussions and engaging with other visitors. Top contributors and point accumulators are prominently featured on the site’s leaderboards. All of these features are powered by Pluck Rewards.
Facebook Open Graph Integration: As announced in May, Demand Media extended the Pluck 4 Comments application to enable users who are already logged into their Facebook account to make comments without having to re-login on a Pluck customer website. Demand Media also leverages its Pluck Rewards system to automatically grant a Facebook badge to any user that comments using their Facebook identity. With this new release, users can find and connect with any of their Facebook friends who are on a Pluck customer website. Additionally, Pluck customers can make use of a new, Facebook-aware Pluck Recommendations application that supports the Facebook Like functionality. The combined effect of these enhancements is to lower barriers to social participation in Pluck-driven websites while allowing Pluck customers to leverage the popularity of Facebook on their own digital properties.
Pluck 4 Personas, Rewards and Open Graph Integration are generally available. For more information please visit http://www.pluck.com/products/pluck-4.html.
About Demand Media
Demand Media, Inc. is a leading online media company that informs, entertains and connects millions of people every day. Through a portfolio of vertical web properties reaching more than 80 million monthly visitors, a global network of digital partners, and a breakthrough content studio, Demand Media publishes what the world wants to know and share. Founded in 2006, Demand Media is headquartered in Santa Monica, CA with offices in Bellevue, WA, Austin, TX, New York, NY and London, UK. For more information about Demand Media, visit http://www.demandmedia.com
