Neighborhood America Customer Rodale Earns Magazine Industry's Top Honor for Building Online Community
Rodale and partner Neighborhood America demonstrate that building an online community, such as the Men's Health Belly Off! Club, can add strength to a traditional franchise. MIN honors the magazine with a 2009 Best of Web Award for Community/Social Networking.
Naples, FL (PRWEB) March 19, 2009
Neighborhood America (http://www. neighborhoodamerica. com) customer, Rodale, earns a Magazine Industry News ('MIN') 2009 Best of the Web Award in the Community/Social Networking category for its Men's Health Belly Off! Club. The Award is the industry's top honor in the digital space, recognizing outstanding websites and digital initiatives among consumer and b2b magazines.
MinOnline (http://www. minonline. com/awards/bestofweb09/) salutes Rodale for its outstanding use of community building online through a robust social network, describing the Belly Off! Club as follows:
Magazine folks often talk a good (frequently unrealized) line about 'magazines being communities,' but the Men's Health Belly Off! Club is a real proof of concept in this regard. The long-standing Belly Off! Diet program from the magazine and the MensHealth. com site gets supercharged by its own audience. The popular service program offers readers a solid plan for exercise and diet over a set schedule. The franchise its self has been a model of turning magazine content into a genuine service. Trainers and editors offered encouragement throughout the process.
By folding into that program user-generated content, profiles, reports on progress, images, the Belly Off! Concept adds real lean muscle mass. When the tools for online community surround a specific audience with a very meaningful goal, then online social networking becomes a focused and purposeful editorial product--a real magazine as community. The program attracted 20,000 user-made profiles, double the initial goal. With its positive, encouraging, goal-driven commentary from the audience, the club became UGC content that sponsors could believe in, and the section attracted several major clients throughout the year. Rodale and partner Neighborhood America demonstrated that online community can add bulk and strength, not flab, to a traditional franchise.
Neighborhood America's focus is on delivering financial results for customers. As a result, several of its customers have been recognized for excellence within their respective industries. In 2007 and 2008, Adidas earned global honors from the Mobile Marketing Association for its successful use of mobile marketing to drive revenues from two NBA campaigns: '2007 NBA All-Star Week' (http://www. neighborhoodamerica. com/mediaroom/17) and 'Basketball is a Brotherhood.'
About Neighborhood America
Neighborhood America's ELAvate solution won the 2008 CODiE Award (http://www. siia. net/Codies/2008/winners. asp) for the software industry's 'Best Social Networking Solution' for enterprises, and was recently named a finalist in 2009. Our solutions are designed to solve important organizational challenges and enable our customers to build stronger consumer relationships, increase efficiency, drive productivity and improve financial performance. Additionally, we support our customers with expert consulting services to ensure that they are maximizing the benefits from their social media strategy and our solutions. Learn more about our company by visiting: www. neighborhoodamerica. com.
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