Awards co-presenter Bonnie Fuller
TechWeb's Internet Evolution team (photos by Yumiko Tsukada)
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Winner – Consumer: Rodale Inc. Men’s Health for Belly Off! Club
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.
Winner – b2b: TechWeb for Internet Evolution
 A social network and a think tank all in one, TechWeb’s magisterial collection of great minds, news and user interaction reimagines a range of publishing ideas. Describing itself as a “macrosite” that combines news items with social networks, blogs, videos and Webinars, the site has become a necessary stop for its 20,000 registered IT professionals and many more observers. At the core of the site is ThinkNet—a set of moderated blogs that lives up to its name. The scores of top-level IT executives and thought leaders in this network represents a who’s who of the industry. They are the people who not only think through the next stages of the Internet. They are the ones who will likely build it. With such a brain trust at its core, Internet Evolution establishes a high standard for discourse in user-driven areas like “Clans,” the user groups for IT and security professionals. Here users trade real advice for everyday problems on the job. More than a thousand substantive message board posts fill the Clan sites every month. In the process of building a highly targeted and erudite community of experienced professionals, TechWeb also demonstrates its core competency in delivering to advertisers and marketing clients the audience they need. The members skew heavily toward businesses that actually buy the technology. Internet Evolution does more than talk about the next stage of the Internet; it demonstrates a part of it: community as a publishing platform.
Honorable Mentions:
Brides.com for Brides.com on MySpace: This “Web 2.0 Bride” concept brings engagement and wedding information right where young women really live, MySpace. Through RSS feeds, widgets and blog posts, Brides.com has extended its brand most effectively into one of the largest communities on the Web.
Everyday Health and Vaseline: Everyday Health personalized a brand and a product by crafting a profile page around “Petal from Alaska.” She quickly became the most popular member of the EH community, viewed by over 130,000 visitors.
Meredith Interactive for MixingBowl.com: At this foodie site, Meredith lets the users define the social networks, groups blogs and recipe recommendations that matter most to them. This is content truly wrapped in community.
SI Digital/Citizen’s Sports Network for Facebook Fantasy Football: Grabbing nearly half a million users with its ambitious Facebook applications, SI demonstrates how a major publisher can crack the code of online social networks. Try extending valuable experiences, not just a brand, into the places your users dwell.
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