To understand the power of social media, it helps to have good use cases to look to for inspiration. That is why I am so happy to be able to start talking about MyRagan.com, an online community of the Chicago-based publishing house Lawrence Ragan Communications that is targeted at professional communicators (read: public relations, marketing and corporate communications professionals).
In a little over a month, the community has gone from zero to over 6,000 members. While on the one hand, such a number pales in comparison to the tens of millions of MySpacers and Facebookers, the reality is that MyRagan.com serves an entirely different need for it users and enables a totally different set of outcomes for its operator, Ragan Communications.
For users, networking between PR and corporate communications professionals was previously limited to organized events often bound by local presence, email lists and discussion groups. By leveraging Me.com's SNAPP PRO solution, Ragan has been able to rapidly launch a highly targeted, brand-centered community that seamlessly integrates the different conversations, contexts, content and communications that are meaningful to their audience.
Think about it. If you are a media relations specialist sitting in Washington, DC, where do you connect with other media relations specialists, and how do you narrow or widen your “like minds” filter by geography or role?
Similarly, once you do connect up with these individuals, how do you engage with them? How do your put your C.V. shingle up in terms of profiling your knowledge, skills, interests and experiences?
Where do you create and organize content that is an expression of your perspectives? And how do you maintain the intimacy that creates a context that is meaningful to your constituency of professional communicators?
By connecting the dots between discussion groups, profiles, blogging tools and the like, and enabling community builders to customize and actively manage their communities, Me.com’s SNAPP is enabling a new type of highly specialized community to launch and grow that is focused but has global reach, dynamic but inter-connected in a more than the sum of the parts fashion.
Or, in the words of Mark Ragan, Ragan Communications’ CEO, "The SNAPP platform offers an amazing array of tools for our members. And it blends in perfectly with our current web presence. We credit SNAPP for allowing us to capture the interest of our customers by quickly building a community that reflects our trusted brand."
For the myriads of specialized information publishers, verticals and micro-segments that the long tail is all about, Me.com’s SNAPP is destined to be a game-changer.
Here is the press release announcing the launch of MyRagan.com:
http://www.primenewswire.com/newsroom/?d=121665