One of the core components of social media is the community web site. Flickr is a general photo community, Facebook et al is the ultimate digital society with many, many subgroups. There are also a lot of niche groups following a SM structure. And, as a designer, this is one I can’t live without.
There are many facets of this site that make it a great social media/community site, at least for those of us who love colour.
- All content is user-generated. This is a hallmark of a Social Media site. User-generated media, or crowdsourcing, is a model followed by many sites, including Digg.com, YouTube.com, Wikipedia.org and iStockPhoto.com.
- There are strong commenting, rating and bookmarking tools. The ability to engage with others on the site through commenting on palettes, making friends, rating people’s palettes and colours, and bookmarking and saving colours is very easy, and heavily encouraged through a points system. This generates a high degree of contact between the community members.
- The site is based around people’s profiles. The profile - a page about you - is a core feature of social sites. It provides an anchor in the site, and a place where people can learn about you (like the small talk of any cocktail party), and you can learn about others. Facebook.com is a profile site; other sites use profiles to create the community aspect.
- There is a strong and continual sense of branding on the site, but is not intrusive. Everybody on COLOURlovers.com is a “lover”. All of the text, down to the 404 page, revolvers around this theme. If you want to leave the site, they’ll understand because not all relationships work out, and they hope that we can still be friends. The consistency of this theme is incredible - rarely has this been executed so thoroughly and consistently.
- The blog establishes the site’s expertise, and selected members of the community guest blog. The site has established itself as an expert in colour through sharp commentary in the blog, and selected experts within the community share their observations in the “official” blog.
- The crowd contributes heavily to social bookmarking. The blog posts get Digged frequently by the community, and occasionally show up on Digg’s front page driving even more traffic to the site.
- COLOURlovers.com maintains and encourages a Facebook group. Using other social media sites to promote your site’s community is a very basic SMM tactic.
- The site’s founder - Darius - is front and center in the community. And the site’s not so big that you can’t get a personal email from him. That’s socialbility.
There are at least a dozen more ways that this site is a textbook example of a vibrant web community. It is very much a niche site, but the web site facilitates, not hinders, the community building.
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