That’s MORE TH>N social

We’ve been keeping this project under our hats for a while, but I can now tell you about a cool new website that the Nixon McInnes team have been working on with our pals over the road at Spannerworks for the UK insurer MORE TH>N.

The MORE TH>N Living website gives the insurer a platform to engage in social media. As our client explains:

“In it, we talk about current issues related to the stuff people value so much that they buy insurance for it; with green motoring and green housing being big themes right now.

Original articles are added several times a day and are available via RSS so you can keep an eye on the pulse of the site from within your news reader of choice. Audience participation is essential, and actively encouraged: we’ll love to see your comments on the site, and as all the content is released under a Creative Commons licence, we’ll also love you to spread the word on your own blogs, on Facebook, on email… wherever you live your digital life..”

The site reinforces the MORE TH>N brand by being useful and interesting to its target market. It’s not full of special offers or advertising for their products – just quality original content that anyone is free to use. As a happy side-effect of this, it’s hoped that the site will add some serious Google juice to the main MORE TH>N website.

We built the site using the open source blogging platform WordPress, and to include news from other blogs we integrated Megite into the site, as used on Mashable’s Mashtracker service.

The site represents a new approach to online marketing where there is no tried and tested best practice and so we adopted a Rapid Prototyping approach to the project to get the site out into the world so we can start to measure the impact that it’s having. We expect the site to evolve considerably and it may well look quite different in a few months time. It’s a fun experiment.

There's more info on Antony's blog.

Comments

[Alex Farran]

Quite impressive what you can do with wordpress. I'll keep an eye on that site and see what you do with it.

I think it could benefit with a couple of usability tweaks here and there. For instance, if you replaced "Today's interesting things" with "Your Car" and "At Home" on the respective pages it would direct attention to the main content of the page. Compare those pages to "Flood Advice" to see what I mean.

[Mike Parham]

Not much activity on the site though. Which I don't think is a surprise - who wants to spend their time talking about insurance within a corporate self-serving micro-site? A waste of time, money, and the obvious talents of the Nixon McInnes team...ill-conceived at best.

[Tom Nixon]

Thanks for the feedback Mike. I don't think there's much (if any) content about insurance on the site though. I agree - that'd be dull as hell!
The content on the site is created daily by professional writers and is not selling any MORE TH>N products. I wonder if you would think more of the same content if it was on a blogger's personal site?
There are some key metrics that will determine whether or not the site is a waste of time/money, but this is a long-term play. You can't always expect to get instant results from a social media marketing project.
In any case, we do expect the site to change and evolve. You could be right - this formula may turn out to be flawed, but the team who worked on the site aren't precious about it and thought it best to get stuck into social media and learn by doing rather than pontificating.

[Mike Parham]

Hi Tom, I agree it's worth experimenting with and that it's early days, don't get me wrong. However, you ask whether I would think more of it if were on a blogger's personal site - I totally would. My key problem with the Morethan social project is that Morethan is a corporate entity and most people would not think of it as impartial or created out of sheer environmental altruism. It's been created for financial reasons, i.e. to bring in more links (which is apparently good for search engine ranks) and also to position Morethan as a green company. But it can't be controversial or point a finger at polluting companies or anything like that, as Corporate Morethan just wouldn't allow it. One of the most compelling things about the Internet is that people can discuss things openly, like calling-out companies that are damaging the environment, creating petitions, etc, but a Corporate Social site is surely just like a corporate blog, i.e. its a corporate communication channel masquerading as public service. Criticise for being cynical if you want but I don't buy it and don't think it will last.