Building a business strategy around community
In 2007 I was asked by Cowboy Advertising to consult as a digital product strategist and designer for some of their clients, including Disaboom.com. Disaboom wanted to build a social network that would attract the disabled community so they could attract advertisers that provided various goods and services to the disabled. When I joined the team, Disaboom had already launched and there was a significant amount of content developed for the website. But the audience wasn't coming.
For the staff at Disaboom, it seemed like an obvious proposition - They shared with us their fundamental business strategy as:
Disaboom had done an excellent job of achieving points 1 and 3. They had robust research on the demographics of the various disability sectors. They had also done significant outreach to advertisers and had made sales commitments if they could reach certain traffic goals. But the "build it and they will come" strategy had not bore out.
Disaboom had a decent account registry system where users could create profiles and connect with other people of the diability community, and they had written an impressive amount of reviews and articles about this equipment as well as medical documentation and content that covered issues that directly related to various disabilities and medical treatments. In their minds this should be content that directly served the disability community.
I worked with the research team at Cowboy to create user surveys to start determining what would encourage users to register. We quickly discovered a couple two primary issues. First was that although Disaboom considered their users as a disabled "community", their disabled audience was just as diverse as most able-bodied. They weren't necessarily interested in joining a social network just to connect with other disabled folks. The second assumption that was challenged was the idea that the disabled wanted to read about their condition or equipment reviews . Although they found some of this content interesting, it wasn't enough to entice them to revisit the website, much less sign up for membership.
Having come from the entertainment industry, I encouraged Disaboom to think less about there users as members of a disabled community, and to think of them more like an "audience." I knew that the solution for attracting the audience would be the content we created. I worked with Disaboom's C-Suite, Community Managers, and Marketing teams to develop a business strategy guided by content... where each piece of content written served a specific goal against which to measure ROI. Content started shaping up into 3 different buckets. Learning, where users could read about emerging medical research and health information; Living, where the audience could read about pop culture and general interest stories from the perspective of other disabled writers; and Connecting, which would eventually allow users to share their own perspectives and connect with other people.
From their our content strategy blossomed into a robust content offering that had appeal not only to the disabled, but to wider audiences as well.
On the community side of the business, we knew through our research that this community was not very keen on registering as users, and particularly not interested in sharing images or perspectives. This was the early days of social networking, and "sharing" wasn't the daily activity that it is today. We attempted to take on that challenge by partnering with disability ambassadors, a roster of very impressive disabled athletes, comedians, and personalities that we hired to become the faces of our community... to help get the conversation started.
We adapted some of the previous branding for the site but attempted to make it bolder and more emotionally engaging through the new approach to content.
This content-first approach to product design even extended to our advertiser outreach. We worked with our advertising partners to modify advertising from direct product placement similar to this...
To ads that were more emotional in their nature and that led to more sophisticated landing pages that were content focused rather than direct point of sale.
These ads would lead to robust content portals tailored for specific audiences, that would often have opportunities for multiple advertisers. We saw ad engagement increase while we also cultivated a much more interactive and engaged audience from users.
We did an official relaunch of Disaboom in the beginning of 2008 and it was a success. So much so that Disaboom was purchased by a competitor soon after. In the meantime, our work got the attention of both the disability community and the wider press. The articles below are examples of the accolades we received.
