Nature's Sunshine click to visit site
How do you build a social network around your marketing and training materials? You make a game out of it.
Nature's Sunshine came to Lights and Colors looking for the ability to take their archives of videos and PDF's and place it online for their users to watch and read. But, they also wanted to motivate their users to participate. We proposed that they incentivize their users by awarding them badges, much like the Achievement System from Xbox Live. See, playing games DID pay off.
In many ways Sunshine is a web application. It tracks each individual user's progress on the site, what videos they watched, what documents they have downloaded, even the comments they made on the forums were evaluated. All of this was tracked and as they fulfilled certain criteria our system rewards them with an Achievement Badge. That badge is visible on their profile for all of the community to see. So it was rewarding the members that had active participation on the site. In the forums, if a user posted a particularly interesting or useful comment, the other users can award points to that person and help them earn other badges. Again, the cream rose to the top, and the new users knew who they could look to for advice and help when it came to using, promoting or selling Natures Sunshine's product line.
Perhaps the best part of Natures Sunshine is it's built around a ASP.NET content management system called Cuyahoga.
That allows Natures Sunshine to control all of their information on the site, from the videos they post to the documents to even creating new badges and introducing them to the community. We also built in a robust reporting system, that could tell Natures Sunshine what videos were being watched the most, what documents were being read, who had what badge, etc. No expensive month to month web overhead, just trained internal employees that can monitor their community and enhance it based on their findings.
