The timing of this article couldn’t be better, Sandbox, our premiere branded community with the leading Telco in the Philippines

– SMART Communications just won the Gold Integrated Boomerang award.  The Boomerang Awards run by the Internet and Mobile Marketing Association of the Philippines aims to highlight the role of Internet and mobile platforms in building the business of brands, services and companies.

SMART’s Sandbox is an integrated web/mobile entertainment portal that includes games, music, news and a community called Sandbox My Groups.  In this article I’ll be sharing our key learnings from the Sandbox launch.  But first I’ll explain our philosophy on communities and our objectives for the Sandbox launch.

At Mostyle we recognised the need for a community platform that can easily be rebranded by our customers but more importantly to ensure that their brand was the focal point of the community (rather than solely friend networking as per standard social networks).  We call these communities – MicroSNS (Micro Social Network Service) to infer their smaller size in comparison to the giants like Facebook and Friendster.  Using this MicroSNS approach we applied the following objectives for SMART’s Sandbox My Groups project:

1. Brand the web/mobile community with the new Sandbox theme
2. Integrate the community to become a seamless part of the greater Sandbox environment
3. Tailor features to best fit with the local blogging/media sharing tastes in the Philippines

The launch exceeded our expectations given the incredible marketing campaign and national TV commercial exposure but more important was the response from users.  Our key learnings from the launch are as follows:

Giving users a “host” for the community: My own account was left as the default friend (much like Tom in MySpace) for the purpose of greeting users, providing support and establishing tone within the community.  Upon joining Sandbox users received a welcome mail from me with some simple introductory instructions.  The majority of users appreciated the mail and sent a mail back with some instantly wanting to strike up a conversation (a response we hadn’t seen in our Australian community).  One of the main benefits from this default account was the feedback from end-users – both positive and negative.  From a point of view of directly connecting with the users this was gold.

Giving users a choice of access: By allowing end-users to access the community via their mobile browser or standard web browser gave the system the best options for usage. Most importantly the features and functions are equivalent across both interfaces rather than the mobile version being a “cut down version” of the desktop experience.  We expect that having a mobile interface will be a standard for all future communities.

The ability to launch live updates based on user feedback: Thanks to the parallel web/mobile architecture of our platform we were able to smoothly launch updates to the live service in a short period of time.  User feedback helped us to prioritize features and also improve the user experience.  This type of rapid patching isn’t so easy with applications installed into mobile devices.

Cater to the local audience: One of the most interesting responses during the launch was the support given by users.  The perception of a “home grown” community that was being launched locally (in the Philippines) was a strong attraction for users despite the solid grip that Friendster has in the market.  The benefits of a “tailored” community that has content, users and styling for a particular type of user can outweigh social networks that are for “everyone”.

So what now?  The beauty of having our own platform is that we can listen, learn and evolve the service to ensure that end-users are happy and that activity increases.    For us this has been great validation for the future of branded communities – in particular for more brands to launch and manage their own web/mobile community.