Community site to create brand awareness and establish indus

[justinjoylife]

Hi,

My company is building a Community site to create brand awareness and establish industry leadership.

It will be a site that kind of promotes the general industry but recommends our product in our category.

We are coming across a few strategic decisions:

1) keep the corporate site and community site completely different and non-related and don't tell anyone we run it. this provides credibility but would blow up in our face maybe if people find out
2) keep the corporate site and community site different but put a "sponsored by" at the bottom to let people know. this is probably a better option but what about a universal login? how interlinked should these sites be?
3) just put the darn community site and corporate site under one domain. but that reduces credibility. or does it?

Does anyone have any idea? for an example visit www.scotts.com and www.lawncare.com. they do a rendition of option 2.

[arttranz]

I’ve been faced with these kind of decisions with several of my clients… and based on my experience… here’s my suggestion…

If, you use a community site as a way of contributing to the community, meaning providing useful related information, resources, articles, not-for profit benefits, a go2place with lots interesting things to browse through for someone (has to be related … somewhat at the minimum). Not only would your corp-site will benefit from it but it will increase your readability and make your end-user/customer more interested in using your service rather then go to someone else. Basically, it would be your channel to establish the brand recognition/name/presence and also to be known as a company they can rely on for information and get their questions answered.

Although, if your biz has any type of advertising restrictions or somehow this could hurt you (although, I doubt that very much unless you are in the Law biz – pretty much the only major industry with serious advertising-related restrictions) by attaching your name to something that is free (i.e. community site); in this case you just have to be smart about hiding it or not-hiding it but presenting it in a way of not crossing any dangerous borders.

One more tip: it’s also a great way to let your biz partners and affiliates and other interests within related industries to advertise. Something you would want to defiantly limit on your corp-site, but have no limits with on Free Community Site.

Hope this helps.

arttranz :wink:

[justinjoylife]

Anttranz -

thanks for the feedback but would you let people know you own the community site?

[arttranz]

u don't have to say that you own it (literary in those words) but you can indicate the relation of the two