Custom LinkedIn communities
portal for our Social Media Marketing client
Client Overview
Our client is a provider of social media marketing solutions to help marketing
departments of enterprises of all sizes, including Fortune 500, to develop
successful B2B Social Media strategies by creating social groups, implementing
thoughts and ideas that drive powerful conversations, and leverage the “social
authority” they gain to benefit their brand marketing.
Our client is responsible for grouping more than 100 of the largest LinkedIn
communities worldwide, all professionally-moderated. All together these
business communities represent more than one million members. Our clients’
goal is to allow professionals to gather and share expertise related to their
specific business interests and creates a profitable B2B community that serves
your customers’ needs - and yours.
Engagement Situation & Challenges
Today, many businesses have leveraged the prolific growth of social media
anchors like Facebook and LinkedIn, to create a following for their brands. J&J’s
highly successful YouTube channels, the GAP Groupon promotions, PWC’s
growing career portal on LinkedIn are some examples. These brands have
created a large following of consumers, where the network participates in
“conversations” with the brand-owners, sharing insights, opinions, and data
that the brand owners can then take back to refresh their go-to-market plans.
On the other hand, many companies that have launched internal or external
social media plans have stuttered or failed, as they frequently come up against
hurdles like:
• How to enable business dialogue over the social group?
• Enabling ideas that would build conversations
• Finding richness in the dialogues to build the marketing further
Some of key requirements of the engagement were:
One of the key motives was to provide tools and intelligence frameworks to help
clients understand the conversations occurring in their business communities.
Development of a custom portal solution enabling business visibility through
professional and social networking website supporting the following
functionalities:
• Single sign-on using social networking websites
• Allow creating groups of various categories like
• Human Resources
• Career Management
• Information Technology
• Energy
• Finance
• Participate in the discussions through email
• Publish material in the form of whitepapers and case studies on the portal
for other members to download
• Build a profile and - follow-on discussion topics
• Launch and review polls and surveys
• Share blogs, webinars and podcasts online to build business dialogues
• Host events online
• Community Team Training & Coaching
• Personalize targeted campaigns through it
Xoriant Solution
Our client was looking to work with partners having similar experience of
fullfledged customized portal development and maintenance. Xoriant’s prior
experience on UI technologies like advanced JavaScript, UI frameworks like JSF,
automated testing of web portals as well as Content Management proved a
perfect fit for our client’s requirement.
Xoriant team closely worked with the client team to understand the
requirement and conceptualized the overall design to make the portal scalable
and user friendly. Xoriant recommended and fully implemented search using
Apache solr search engine for content search. The advantage of Apache is that
it is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library suitable that
can be used for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially
cross-platform. This enabled fast retrieval of content across the portal.
Xoriant Contributions
Xoriant developed a portal which helps corporations create, grow and manage
vibrant communities, and harvest the benefits of managing communities:
business intelligence, qualified leads, and human resources.
Used LAMP, Amazon cloud architecture on Drupal 6 as the basic framework to
extend the functionalities as per the requirements of a community portal. It
started with creation of a single unified interface to architect, manage and
monitor for different social networking websites like Linkedin.
Enabled to showcase the marketing materials like presentations, case studies,
other collateral on these community portals which are downloadable and
members could leave in their views and opinions.
Allowed the members to participate in various groups and discussions by
integrating these entities with the portal and registering with respective social
networking website APIs
Created a database for all the members and their participation in the
community portal which could be retrieved to understand the profiles and
followers of the discussion topics
Invited and allowed real time participation of members in the polls and surveys
carried out as well as host events
Integrated the portal with email accounts for easy participation in discussions
Integrated Apache Solr search engine to enable the members to search their
desired information thereby boosting the performance over site-wide search.
Tools
&Technologies
Xoriant
Contributions
• LAMP Architecture
• Amazon Cloud Architecture
• Apache solr search engine
• Drupal 6 framework
Key Benefits
Helps client moderate the group, formulate ideas to create conversations,and
build the social dialogue to subtly bring in the brand authority
Increased the followers base for the groups manifold and helped enhance the
brand awareness by 20%
Added to the business leads by 15%
Increased the client’s focus on core strategy, market intelligence, and program
development
Saved costs up to 30% for these focused marketing strategies with the help of
cloud environment
Key Benefits
Xoriant team’s immense expertise in customized portal development
enabled us to achieve this. Such customized targeted solution brought
our client great opportunities in attaining their business goals. The
solution helped us establish a system to routinely gather market
intelligence to improve strategic decisions, including resources and
market positioning. We thank Xoriant team in enabling increase in
awareness and credibility among potential customers of our clients.
Director-Technology