7Summits Agency

Our team has been hard at work recently, hence the lack of regular blog posts! I am also pleased when we can share our work, and I’m proud to announce the re-launch of the SocialMedia.org member community.  This was an exciting and challenging project for us; we certainly felt a great amount of responsibility to develop a community that struck the right balance between functionality, and experience.  We are pleased to see it finally come to fruition, and we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the project.

For those who don’t know, SocialMedia.org has become “the community for the heads of community” in large companies including Dell, McDonalds, Target and more. It provides a closed community for collaboration among the top advocates and heads of community or social media. It gives members the ability to ask a question, share insights, best practices, examples, guidelines as well as get real-time feedback, all invaluable insights from an engaged and knowledgeable group of peers.

This incredible opportunity for knowledge sharing among peers in the uncharted social media space, led to rapid growth of Socialmedia.org’s member-base which in turn created conversation fragmentation, content management challenges, and scalability issues with the existing community platform. Members were looking for new ways to connect with peers, access content and keep up-to-date on this rapidly evolving field but the current community was hindering their progress.  SocialMedia.org wanting to up the stakes, turned to 7Summits to build a new community on Jive Social Business Software (SBS) 4.5 that would match SocialMedia.org’s extraordinary brand and voice. Our expertise in creating social sites that are both functional and engaging gave us the credentials to completely redesign their member center so that members could continue their conversations online.

Community Reboot and Redesign

The new community design was driven by three primary goals:

1. Generation of quality content
2. Facilitation and encouragement of member participation in real-time discussions
3. Creation and support of relationships among members

As the project lead i’m so humbled to work with such a talented team of architects, designers and developers who worked tirelessly with SocialMedia.org team to not only deliver but exceed these goals.Our team drew upon our collective experience and knowledge in creating engaging communities for large companies nationwide to design the site’s new experience, develop and test the necessary technology, and ensured the complete migration of the existing community profiles and content.

Our developer sherpas worked hard building extensive User Interface customizations via Jive Template modifications, customizing use case flows via the Jive Template, developing HTML widgets (static, dynamic as well as CMS style widgets), deploying a high level of custom CSS and added JavaScript functionality, as well launching user/group management customizations via admin console plugins. This project sets the bar high of whats possible in terms of manipulating the Jive SBS platform to deliver a streamlined community experience for a social savvy user base.

The end result of all this work is one of the most focused communities that we’ve ever developed. Its strikes a perfect balance between content, design and features. The new community democratizes access to cutting-edge knowledge by creating many-to-many connections between members and content. This allows members to make contacts and enhance their standing among peers while reducing the pressure to keep up-to-date on an emerging field that is quickly reshaping how business gets done.

SocialMedia.org member screenshots are available and additional examples of 7Summits’ work can be found in its portfolio.

Follow the Socialmedia.org and 7Summits Buzz Here