Community Experience Development White Paper 2009

Executive Summary from 2002 white paper "Community Experience Development"

This paper outlines a business philosophy centered on the paradigm shift of the branding “push” mentality to the community “pull” concept, resulting in planned consultation methods and technological implementation for both the corporate and non-profit sectors.

Community Experience Development™ (CED) combines the essential elements of technology, brand strategy, and inclusion to deliver an absolute marketing environment. CED is a comprehensive consulting method utilizing tools for creating, managing, and tracking brand communities online and offline, including: visitor profile databases, content submission and management, site-building, and personalization tools for cultivating, fascinating, and illuminating the target audience.

• Cultivate: Attract and nurture community members, develop a comprehensive strategy for defining roles, and create demographic and ethnographic profiles.
• Fascinate: Engage members with creative and informative content relevant to the community core and track the effectiveness of new products, services, etc.
• Illuminate: Educate community members to the organization’s new offerings through eLearning environments for mature levels of sophistication.

The core CED principles involve leveraging intellectual properties to position each community creator as the expert in their industry. Achievement of CED objectives results in the evolution of the brand community as the destination point for the given topic. This document describes the problem area of access to a unified community experience on the World Wide Web, which is common to non-profit and corporate groups alike.