Constructing a Social Media Site From Scratch

Meredith’s MixingBowl.com is a study in community cultivation.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, July 6, 2009

Launched in January 2009, Meredith’s MixingBowl.com was constructed from the ground up as a community site for food lovers. While the company has an aggressive plan in place to make it one of the top 3 or 4 players in the consumer cooking category, Meredith’s vice president and general manager Jeff Myers took a decidedly organic, purposeful approach to building the site, breaking it into phases with specific benchmarks related to each phase.

Currently at about 16,000 registered members now, with 300 to 400 signing up per day, according to Myers, the site sits on a platform built by Ripple6, and reflects Meredith’s preference for a homegrown effort rather than shoehorning a strategy into a commercial site. Myers spoke with AD on how they built it and what’s ahead.

Describe the opportunity. Why build a social media site?
Consumers have demonstrated a significant appetite for finding and sharing food content online. When you intersect that with a trend toward participating in the social space, it makes you think about what that means for the future of how consumers are going to interact with cooking online. That all flowed from our need to significantly grow our presence in the online food space—we will be one of the top 3 or 4 players in a very short time.

Describe the process of finding the right technology provider to build MixingBowl.com.
There were three main considerations: One was the basic technical requirements of what we were looking for; the ability to scale; and the stability of the platform. This didn’t mean we wouldn’t go with a small provider, but we had to be confident of their ability to grow with us. They also had to deliver against specific needs—we didn’t start with the platform, we started with what we needed to deliver in terms of customer experience, then looked for a platform that could deliver on that. Lastly, we needed a company that could design custom features and capabilities on our timeframe.

Talk about how you broke audience growth into phases.
First was the building phase, where we were establishing the community and reaching out and inviting people—in many cases personally inviting them—and then allowing that community to grow organically from those initial invitations.

On a social site you have to cultivate your audience before you move to the second phase, which is when we bring in the larger food community and begin to achieve scale. We targeted to have 10,000 members during the initial phase. We didn’t want just anybody. We were very careful about who we recruited so we could create the kind of community we wanted because that has a tremendous impact on the culture.

What are the key tracking metrics?
We look at the rate we’re adding members, the frequency which members come back and the average length of time between visits. We expect the time between visits to be significantly less than an informational site because the social site becomes part of what they do in everyday life. We also look at the time they spend on the site, the kinds of activities they do—add content, sharing discussions, number of groups created and number of discussions. These are all indicators of a healthy community.