'Net Features : community

Make Photos Interactive on Your Website

Mike Phillips — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 18:20:00 GMT

We all want our website visitors to spend more time on the site and interact with our content. Photographs are a good way to keep people interested in your content but, traditionally, have not offered much in the way of interaction. Phlook has a solution.

By uploading your photo to Phlook, you then get an embeddable piece of code. This is then entered into your content and the photo appears with several interactive options - such as the ability to leave a note, vote on a photograph, zoom functions and photos can be e-mailed to others.

While this might not be for every website, for some, it could prove to be a good way to keep people engaged and give them a reason to come back often. After all, people like the opportunity to have their voices heard and they will often check to see if their comments have resulted in any discussion on the site. This might also be an interesting way to gather feedback about new products or even website designs. Think of it as a way to build community with your photographs and to give people the opportunity to "have their say" about the content on your website.

See a Phlook demo here.

Stipple is another, related service. Here, users can tag photos anywhere on the Web, including using their Facebook accounts, via a mouseover. And beyond people, items within the photo can be tagged. Not only can items be tagged, but particular items within the photo can actually be purchased by users, directly from the photo. The publisher can then earn a portion of the revenue or earn per click, depending on the set revenue model.

Think Globally, Act Locally

Pete Prestipino — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:22:00 GMT

National borders and geographic regions. This is one of its great strengths: customers can shop the world over without leaving the privacy of their homes, and e-marketers can reach millions of people with a single website or e-mail campaign.

But its very vastness can also be disconcerting, and the myriad choices available may impact customer loyalty.

Read more about creating customer-centric communities.

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Get Your Gravatar On

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:03:00 GMT

As a web professional, you have to make a conscious decision about what appears on your website. With so many many widgets, gadgets, and ad networks vying for the virtual real estate of your site, it's easy to see how quickly you can lose sight of what's really important - those visiting your Web property. One way to bring some soft features (those which add value while not distracting at the same time) into a Web property and give back a little to users is to reward them for commenting, sharing, etc. through the use of avatars. One way to do this is to use Gravatar.

Gravatar (an abbreviation for globally recognized avatar) is a service for providing globally-unique avatars. They're global in the sense that users can use them wherever they are online. On Gravatar, users can register an account based on their email address, and upload an avatar to be associated with the account. Gravatar plugins are available for WordPress (provided natively in WordPress as of v2.5) and are available as a third-party module in the Drupal web content management system and many others. As of late, I'm seeing more commercial CMS and blogging systems making Gravatar (or at least avatars) support native - and that's a good thing.

How It Works: When the user posts a comment on a blog that requires an email address, the software checks whether that email address has an associated avatar at Gravatar. If so, the Gravatar is shown along with the comment.

For WordPress users, there are actually quite a few gravatar plugins that might come in handy to add some virtual punch to your WP installation. The most popular seems to be WP-Gravatar, which lets bloggers use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with comments and allows publishers to set their own CSS style to use with the comments section and the author about box. It's been downloaded nearly 25K times, but there are some great alternatives including Easy Gravatars, Wavatars, and Gravatar (and userpics).

Learn more about Gravatars here.

Other options for creating a stronger sense of community might be to use the newly released Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect. Do you enable users to display avatars or gravatars? Do you feel it has provided value to your online community? Let us know by commenting below.

Low Hassle Web Community Building

Pete Prestipino — Sat, 24 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

When you say "online community" to a marketer, most immediately think of a forum site, bulletin board, or possibly the latest flavor in social media. While those are all possibilities that businesses should at least discuss as part of their communication objectives, there are some small and easy things marketers can do to add "community" online without a ton of resources or hassle.

Read Low Hassle Community Building by Joe Pulizzi now