Awareness has had a good run so far in 2009, driven by healthy influx of new customers. The company has been adapting its go-to-market strategy, looking to rely more heavily on partnerships—largely with marketing and advertising agencies—to identify business opportunities. That’s a distribution channel used successfully by many of Awareness’s competitors, but it remains to be seen if agencies can drive enough new business when they are the primary sales channel.
We remain intrigued by the approach Awareness has taken in productizing eight common community use cases into eight pre-configured and relatively turnkey Best Practice Communities (BPCs) that run off its SaaS platform. Launched this past January, these BPCs are categorized as Innovation, Corporate Voice, UGC Campaign, Loyalty, Enthusiasts, Associations/Subscribers, Peer Support, and Events. We’ll leave it to the Awareness Web site to go into detail on the differences, but we find the naming scheme to be happily self-explanatory. The advantages of such “pre-packaged” communities are in their competitive pricing and quick time to launch—just make your BPC choice, do some graphical branding, define the community’s structure and navigation, and off you go. Of course, in practice there’s more to be done than that, but being able to deploy a community in two to four weeks has considerable appeal. (We should also mention that Awareness also builds communities separate from their BPC offerings. These custom communities will take a longer time and larger financial commitment, but will result in a community built to specification.)
On the development front, Awareness released some important new features and enhancements, including Dashboards (reporting and analytics), Social Context Triggers (action-oriented keyword filters), and a wizard-based self-service portal for agency partners to easily create and launch communities.
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This post a modified excerpt from our PSGroup report Online Community Platform Company and Product Update 1H-2009. For more on this report, see this blog post.
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