Define - Connect - Win

Appealing to a consumer audience is becoming more and more challenging, especially with the excess of online ‘magazines’ and services available in ever more narrow niches. Younger readers are less interested in print magazines and expect to be able to ‘do stuff’ not just ‘read about stuff’, and the audience expects not only this participation but a collaborative multimedia experience at the same time.

Underpinning the evolution of the consumer’s expectation is the general move towards a need to participate in the conversation. This means being able to interact with the source as well as interact with others in the same interest group. All consumer media must evolve, at the very least, a simple way for its audience to participate in ongoing conversation and should consider editorial information as a conversation starter, rather than as an end in itself.

Firestarter is designed to provide consumer media brands with a range of options to respond to their users. At the simplest level, Firestarter makes it easy to introduce the basic participation tools – comments, ratings, polls, reviews, blogs, forums, profiles; and provides your audience with an intuitive User Dashboard to manage this participation easily. Most content management systems that have introduced these types of “social media” tools focus on the flow of content, whereas Firestarter sees this as an opportunity to engage the user and provide that user with a set of tools to promote and extend their participation in the future. Once a user has established a dashboard, this is the opportunity to extend that user’s experience and participation in order to maximize their engagement in the community. This is why Firestarter focused on the dashboard as the core central component.

We provide consultative help and development to all sorts of media companies regarding how to develop strategies to better engage targeted communities using web 2.0 tools and behavior. We can customize Firestarter to reflect your goals and strategy, introducing and integrating personalization, multimedia, social networking and other services to better serve your user base and better engage that user base.

To discuss how we can help your consumer media brand evolve, contact us today.