Viewpoints Technology Platform

The Viewpoints Technology Platform is a hosted technology service that helps leading brands engage their customers in a conversation to create online communities that drive organic traffic, increase conversion, provide customer insight and build brand equity.

Now for the first time, companies can combine social features such as friending, commenting, private messaging, photos, reputation rankings, RSS feeds, and tight connections to social networks, with important customer feedback opportunities such as reviews, discussion boards, idea submission, blogs, voting and ranking.

Leverage Viewpoints’ technology platform and deep experience in community building to help your company create and implement a compelling social engagement strategy. We’ll help define your objectives and key metrics, better understand the motivations of your target customer, and strategize on how best to build and sustain an active and highly involved online community that will drive traffic, sales and insight, and build your brand.

Building a successful online community means giving your consumers the tools to share their personal experiences, while encouraging ongoing interaction with other users and your brand. The Viewpoints Technology Platform offers a rich set of community tools and functionality, including:

Social Profiles: Including photos, integrated personal blogs and readership stats.
Portable Identities: Users can sign-in and share content using their AOL, Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or Yahoo! accounts.
Friending: Offering private messaging, email alerts and a friends’ activity stream.
Commenting: Featuring “threaded” commenting on reviews and ideas.
Discussion Boards: Linked to products, categories or general information.
Voting: Opportunity to submit ideas and allow community voting and commenting.
Polls & Surveys: With results and graphical reports in real time.
RSS Feeds: For every member, product and category.

Product reviews encourage passionate involvement with your brand by giving consumers a voice. They are sought after by 80% of shoppers and are proven to increase conversion and drive organic traffic. The Viewpoints Technology Platform offers a comprehensive solution for capturing and displaying consumer reviews, including:

Rich Review Form: Easy to use review form features star ratings, review headline, user tagging, pros/cons, rich text editing, spell checker, photo upload, in-line and pop-up tips and other custom questions.
Preview, Save and Publish: Gives writers flexibility to save and preview their work.
Dynamic User Tags: Pre-populated by site administrator on a category level and/or users can suggest their own.A “tag wizard” is also provided to help users choose tags that fit them best.
Threaded Commenting: Provides “direct reply” and triggered email alert to the reviewer and the commenter.
Review Pages: Optimized for organic search. Features ratings summary, thumbs up/down, filter by pros/cons, user pictures, filter by most helpful, date and rating and includes search friendly cross link units.
Add New Products: This optional feature allows customers to add new products by asking custom questions determined by the administrator which can then be used to later sort by product attributes such as brand, type and weight.
Easy Navigation: Filter and browse by product and user attributes.

Motivate customers to engage and provide valuable feedback with the Viewpoints Reputation, Recognition and Rewards engine. We will work with you to design a program that brings your community to life.

Custom Actions: Client-specified rewards that place different value on different types of engagement.
Levels: Users are auto promoted based on reaching predetermined levels.
Badges: Awarded manually and automatically for achieving levels and to highlight staff members and moderators.
Leader Boards: Showcase the most active members in different areas of the site and within specific categories.
Goal Setting: Help guide users to the actions you want them to take.
Reporting: Track participation in the program.

The Viewpoints Technology Platform includes powerful administrative tools to monitor the health and growth of your community. Whether managed directly or outsourced to Viewpoints, these tools provide you with a broad range of capabilities including:

Advanced Reporting: Download activity reports and receive custom email alerts.
Content Moderation: Identify inappropriate reviews, comments and photos.
SEO Tools: Allow a fine degree of control over keyword and page optimization.
Taxonomy & Product Catalog: Import and customize to your specifications.
Design Flexibility: Site header, home page, email templates and many other site elements.

  Viewpoints offers multiple inline integration options to provide a seamless experience between your existing e-commerce website and community including:

 Inline Integration: Multiple options are available to integrate community content on product or category pages or within your e-commerce site.
Product Catalog: Complete integration of pricing and product catalogs creates a seamless user experience between the community and e-commerce site.
SSO: Single Sign-On solutions are available for direct user authentication with your database.