Promo - July 2008 - (Page 15)

The Players content created by in-house editors at Purina. “It was essentially more of a magazine site,” says Tom Kasperski, Infuz vice president of account services. “I think Purina was trying to develop content that would drive traffic organically, so that people would contribute and then come back regularly just to catch up with other owners inside the community.” By putting community members in charge of generating content, Purina got a better listen to just what interests their best customer advocates. “The beauty of social networks is that not only does the audience find content created by people like themselves more interesting to read, but it’s also free,” Kasperski says. And if they like a social network, why not a Digg for dogs? At about the same time as the PetCentric Place debut, Purina rolled out its social bookmark site Petcharts (http://petcharts. purina.com) that uses a custom search engine to fetch pet-related news from major media sites such as The New York Times and Yahoo Pets, along with video from YouTube, photos from Flickr and blog content from some 50 influential pet sites. Just as on Digg and other bookmarking sites, visitors can read or view content, then vote it up the ranks in popularity so that the highest vote-getters always appear first on the page. The pet tales can be sorted into cats and dogs, and consumers can even download a widget that pushes the content of their choice to their desktop via RSS headlines. As for PetCentric Place, it’s still picking up fans of all species, and Ryan Fauss says it will continue to evolve. “We hope to add new features and functions every quarter or so to find new and different things that are relevant and engaging to this audience,” she says. l P Promo / WWW.PROMOMAGAZINE.COM / JuLy 2008 15 http://petcharts.purina.com http://petcharts.purina.com http://www.iCGroupLP.com http://www.iCGroupLP.com http://www.promomagazine.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Promo - July 2008

Promo - July 2008 Contents Editor's Note Shelf Help Beautiful Bovines Rest Stop Who Let the Dogs Blog? A Helping Hand Commentary Solid Gold Q and A: Mighty Mattel Flying the Coup Putting E-mail in Motion Resource Center The Agency Center The Young Prefer Mail Index of Advertisers

Promo - July 2008

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