The Big Leap: New Mactopia Site Integrates Community

Yesterday we launched a major client site that has a couple important community features. Hopefully the level of complexity involved isn't apparent on the site itself, but I'm proud of the work, because we did some complicated stuff.

Meet the new Mactopia, the web home of MacBU, the Microsoft group that creates software for the Mac:

This site is a great example of a business moving from a broadcast to a participatory model on the web. The old site had little more than a web email form supporting customer interaction: Click Submit to send your message into oblivion. Today the new site includes numerous access points for customer interaction, all serving core user requirements, dynamically layered throughout the site, algorithmically filtered, and aligned with the brand.

Two new areas of the site support direct interaction among customers and between customers and the company:

• The existing NNTP technical support groups are now mirrored on the site itself, in a web-based forums interface that adds features to make them easier to use. They synch in both directions, and discussion threads are now searchable along with other support content.
• The popular Mac Mojo blog, formerly hosted on MSDN, is fully integrated with the new site, and the best content from the blog is dynamically integrated with product pages, providing a way for people considering a purchase to look under the hood, ask questions, and get to know the people and thinking behind the products.

To integrate these areas of the site in a meaningful way, we had a number of challenges to solve:

• The existing NNTP groups were working. We had to keep from breaking them.
• The MVP community, crucial contributors of technical support and general help for Mac Office users, strongly prefers to interact with the NNTP groups through a newsreader interface--which is an inappropriate interface for the users they're there to help.
• Support Forums created by the community and Help content published by the company serve the same user need: Get a solution to a problem. The two kinds of content needed to be differentiated, so authorship is clear. But there's no way to know whether a given question has the best answer in one place or the other.
• While the Support Forums and Help content are both searchable, there's no way to rank search results by relevance across the two areas, and the databases being searched return differently-structured data.
• Integrating the blog with the main site means many people who aren't familiar with blog conventions will encounter it. We needed to present the most broadly interesting content, along with the standard newest content, front and center.

This list is really just the tip of the iceberg, and I think it's interesting because these are challenges typical to any large project that involves integration of community content. We had to make compromises every step of the way. Only time will tell, but I think the site architecture will support great quality over the long term--thanks in large part to the passion and smarts of the fine folks at the MacBU.

MacBU took a huge step here by opening the site to user participation. They'll face huge challenges over the next year as they adjust to a brave new world of customer relationships online. A lot will depend on their ability to stay responsive in the face of a huge volume of questions and requests (the old site's monthly traffic was already in seven digits). They'll face tough questions about how to moderate borderline posts. Their commitment to transparency will be tested. They'll be unfairly treated.

All this adds up to a big opportunity. So pay attention. This is a ride almost everybody's in line for.

Comments

[Ariel v.]

Really good considerations. Super important to differentiate authorship/authority when credibility is a factor. That said, I also think promoting the value of reader authority (rhetoric, anyone?) in a way that doesn't detract from credibility is key. This gets me thinking - thanks for the post.