Extract maximum value from your social website

Meanwhile, social sites, where brands add social features onto their existing sites, have also grown more widespread as organisations begin to realise the power of tapping into the passion inherent in their brand and their core audience. By adding social features to their existing online presence, these organisations bring like-minded people together around a brand, topic or lifestyle to share ideas, views and experiences. Adding social features lets visitors add to the content already on the site, contribute entirely new content to the site, and behave socially in the confines of the site, just as they would at a social destination like Facebook. The potential of social sites is huge and social networking and community building have become key elements in many businesses' marketing mix. Organisations that have built social features into their own websites have enjoyed a growth in traffic, more page views, greater average time on site and improved conversion rates. But despite this increasing use of social media, most companies are failing to squeeze the maximum value from their social media investments by not combining their social sites with social networking sites. Addressing limitations
Both forms of social experience have different functions. Social networking sites create and serve a need to be in contact with friends online. For social sites, the value is clear: more traffic, more engagement, more conversions and more revenue. Both models are growing in popularity, both serve important goals, and both will endure. But no matter how successful an individual social site is, it is still just an individual site.  Across the web, social networking sites and own-brand sites remain disparate entities, where the identity and activity for an individual stored on one site remains entirely separate from that on another. There are millions of social sites online today and as long as these sites remain separate, the passion and energy that organisations have worked hard to generate and sustain on their social sites will be confined to that site alone. On the other hand, social networking sites, because of their horizontal nature, will never succeed in supporting the focused passions of social sites. It's telling that while Facebook is an element of many organisations' social media strategy, not a single substantial brand has surrendered its own web presence in order to reside exclusively on Facebook. And so social sites struggle to match the sense of familiarity so typical of social networking sites. This is because most people who frequent social sites, even social sites that they love and return to often, don't usually interact with their personal friends at those sites. Instead, that interaction takes place on social networking sites. In failing to link the two forms of social media experience, sites are squandering the potential of their social media investments. The key to breaking through these limitations and extracting the maximum value from a social website lies in linking the two models in a process called 'social bridging'. A joined-up approach: social bridging
Social bridging lets the own-brand sites created by organisations connect with the web's most popular social networking sites, enabling identities, relationships and activities to be shared across the entire social web. It lets each form of online social experience flourish and do what it does best and by connecting them, helping each one to succeed beyond its inherent limits. Because social bridging increases the likelihood of site registration and participation, social sites have much to gain. Letting site visitors tell their friends on Facebook, for example, what they're doing on a 'bridged' site and making it easy for these visitors to invite their Facebook or Twitter friends back to the site can enhance the host's brand beyond their own site, attract more traffic, and make the site more inviting. And for social sites with an already-vibrant online community, social bridging opens the door to a new level of reach, enabling them to tap into community members' social graphs to dramatically increase the broadcast range of community activity on their site. A unified social experience
Social bridging is a concept that reflects the rapidly changing social landscape of today's internet world. As the volume of content online is rapidly expanding and the rate at which users are interacting with that content is skyrocketing, new standards and strategies are evolving to create a unified social experience that will benefit both users and the social sites and social networking sites they visit. With social bridging, users and social sites can produce a richer, more relevant, high-value experience by untethering identity, relationship, and activity from any one particular site -- making those social elements freely transportable across the web. Social bridging is real. It relies on a mix of technology and online community management best practices. The technologies are, and will continue to be, based on a mix of software industry standards and social media software vendor offerings. And the best practices help social site owners to create online social structures and relationships that more closely mirror our offline lives. While social bridging is still in its infancy, it suggests a future where our online identities, relationships and conversations will cross the web effortlessly, and offers a high-ROI approach to extending reach and effectiveness, allowing marketing managers to extract every last drop of value from their social sites. Stephanie Himoff is VP of European sales and business development at Pluck.