Community Networks

For companies that invest in an online presence, a successful web strategy creates customers out of site visitors and engages them in forming relationships with each other under the company's brand presence. Some of the biggest successes on the Web exist because companies have adopted this strategy and have created vibrant online-communities.

There are a wide variety of community solutions available, but nearly all oriented toward a "single community" model - a single central entity as the focus of the community, with differentiation by discussion only. There is an emerging class of Internet site, however, based on a different model of interaction and customer dynamics. These sites are characterized by the aggregation of local, self-defined groups of interest that share common identification and support. The central entity acts as a coordinator and provides branding and technical support.

Examples of such sites include:

• Content aggregators
• Web-hosting providers
• Portals
• Networks

For a company whose online presence is distributed across a network of affiliate sites, integrating an online community requires a solution that is distributed as well. However in the community space, no one has addressed this need... until now. ezboard, the market leader in hosted communities, introduces a total community solution (hardware and software bundled together) that allows sites to create their own network of distributed communities -- CommunityNET.

The CommunityNET solution provides all of the benefits of an online-community while working within a distributed community and eliminating the high cost of administrating separate communities on different systems.

Read our White Paper on Community Networks (143KB PDF)