Sazbean

Pluck SiteLife is a hosted social networking application which resides entirely within your website via javascript or API calls. This interesting combination keeps social network members on your website (for brand and traffic) and integrates seemlessly with the rest of your content, allowing use of your own ad servers and analytics programs.

Architectural Record (from McGraw-Hill) is an excellent example of how invisible the lines can be between your website content and the social network – sometimes even overlapping. The out-of-the-box javascript implementation has the downside of the social network content being invisible to search engines for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. Most content in a social network may not be important for SEO but it is something to keep in mind depending on your industry and audience. Important content can be implemented using their APIs to display the content in your site’s HTML, which will be visible to search engines.

SiteLife’s customers include McGraw-Hill, News Corp., Reuters Media, Circuit City, and the Washington Post (customer list). SiteLife Platform is the basic package with functionality added through Reactions, Videos, Photos, Blogs, Forums and Personas (visit links for examples of implementation):

• Platform: Community management, reporting, abuse management, branded experience, single sign-on, shared services, hosting and management.
• Reactions: Comments, recommendations, reviews, ratings, and article submissions.
• Videos: Flash video with conversion, sharing, public video galleries, ratings, recommendations, comments, email this video, integrated discovery tools, moderation, brand control, and integration with advertising programs.
• Photos: Galleries for general or specific topics, managed photo queue, upload options, mobile posting, tagging, titles, descriptions, automatic scanning and resizing, recommendations, ratings, comments, and email to a friend.
• Blogs: Rapid startup, moderation, author tools, integrated photos, content control, and multi-author blogging.
• Forums: Author tools, moderation, search, discovery, migration from other forums, groups, and user signatures.
• Personas: Personal landing page, user profile, friends, messages and custom templates.

Pricing includes an initial setup fee and then a monthly service fee which depends on how many page views and modules you have. The average setup fee for large websites (like Washington Post) is $50k-$100k and then a monthly service fee in the low thousands.

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