Disney Family.com Gearing Up For Parent-Focused Social Net Launch

Parentpedia. Family Blogger. Comment Contest. Consider these just some of the elements of DisneyFamily.com that laid the groundwork for the company’s next project, the summer launch of its parent-focused social network, Disney Family.com Community. The ad-supported site is open to both mothers and fathers, but mothers are the target audience. While still in the QA phase of development, Disney (NYSE: DIS) Family Network’s director-marketing Maureen Bergmueller and director-user interface design and community Maria McManus walked me through a demo of the social net’s key features. Some highlights:
-- Fundamental principles: Based on observations of its current family site and research on its competitors in the field, Disney began its January development of the social network with the understanding that to their key demographic, mothers, intimacy is of chief importance. While MySpace and Facebook users can gain satisfaction by uploading their own photos and spicing up their “About Me” sections, moms in the online community want to relate to others through their families while expressing themselves in creative ways.
-- Uniqueness among user profiles: Aside from choosing their own background images and colors on their profiles, Community users can create and customize their own avatars—not only to represent themselves, but to represent their whole families, from children to pets. Users can also create their own “stickers,” thumbnail-type images that can be shared among the rest of the Community or kept to oneself. For example, a mother can create her own “Proud to be a C-section mom” sticker and opt-in to share with the other Community users. Other C-section mothers can then adopt these stickers to their profiles and see the profiles of and connect with other members who snagged the same sticker. Other features in the works include Twitter-type updates where users can type in a blurb to be shown in a thought bubble next to their avatars and soon after Community launches, Disney will introduce quizzes modeled after ones typically found in women’s magazines.
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-disney-familycom-gearing-up-for-parent-focused-social-net-launch/

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