AUSTIN, Texas - (Business Wire)
Pluck Corporation, a subsidiary of
Demand Media, and The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company are collaborating to deliver a unique social experience to consumers visiting the
Scotts.com site. By adding Pluck
® social media capabilities to its website in early 2008, Scotts has increased its capability to engage with consumers, enabling them to participate in blogs, forums, photo galleries and other interactive tools designed to inspire, assist and advise gardening enthusiasts
– directly within the Scotts.com site experience. The ultimate goal for Scotts is to build relationships with existing and new consumers.
In conjunction with other marketing and user experience initiatives, the community-centric Scotts Miracle-Gro site has enjoyed the following results since debuting Pluck social media features in February 2008:
- Overall traffic to Scotts.com is up 18% year over year.
- The site has hosted more than 246,000 social interactions between consumers.
- Scotts.com rankings in organic search on Google and Yahoo! have significantly increased by cultivating the lawn and garden content available to consumers.
- Social media capabilities are a fixture of Scotts’ relationship-oriented online strategy.
“Research and our own experience have shown that consumers want to interact with each other around gardening and lawn care topics,” said Ed Billmeier, senior director of interactive and relationship marketing for The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company. “Pluck social media technology has played a key role by helping us build and extend relationships with customers in new ways, making social media an important new component of our brand strategy.”
Working with Pluck, Scotts enhanced its digital property to offer a powerful new set of consumer-centric experiences, enabling visitors to Grow, Learn, Connect and Solve. Within just days, thousands of visitors registered to create blogs, upload photos, ask questions and get answers from the “Gurus Next Door,” which include experts from Scotts along with members of the community.
“The gardening and lawn care market that Scotts serves is fueled by questions, answers and knowledge – all of which are particularly well served by integrated social media,” said Dave Panos, CEO of Pluck and executive vice president of Demand Media™. “Scotts is demonstrating how brands can be extremely successful with social media, especially in information-intensive markets.”
Pluck technology platforms offer comprehensive social media capabilities broadly deployed on more than 350 leading digital destinations. Pluck enables online properties to engage site visitors with a complete range of social media capabilities including user comments, ratings, recommendations, reviews, photo and video sharing, forums, groups and social networking profiles called Personas. Pluck capabilities are seamlessly integrated via easy-to-deploy widgets and a robust set of platform-level APIs that allow site publishers to tailor social media experiences to the needs of their distinct audiences.
About Pluck Corporation
Pluck social media solutions empower leading media companies, consumer brands, and retailers to integrate open content, community and social networking into their web properties driving audience traffic and revenue. Customers include BSkyB, Condé Nast, Discovery Communications, Kraft, the NFL, Overstock.com, RealNetworks, Whole Foods Market, and The Washington Post. Awards include a Red Herring 100 and AlwaysOn Media 100. Pluck is based in Austin, Texas and operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of Demand Media. More information on Pluck offerings can be found at www.pluck.com.
© 2008 Demand Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Demand Media is a trademark of Demand Media, Inc. Pluck is a trademark of Pluck Corporation. All other products and company names herein may be the trademarks of their respective owner.
For Pluck Corporation
Quinn Daly, 310-394-6429
Quinn@demandmedia.com
