- Megan Smith
- Community Manager - Ovation TV
- OvationTV
- Jennifer Colley
- Creative Manager, Digital Media
Ovation TV - OvationTV
Often, as developers, we overlook the importance of a great community manager. However, we also know that the community manager wouldn't exist if there was no community to manage! This is why we have chosen a 2-man team, or should I say 2-woman team, as our KickDeveloper Of The Month for June.
I would consider them to be the best team of KickDevelopers on the site. Megan Smith leads the community action as the current standing Community Manager at Ovation TV while Jennifer Colley heads up the development process. Together, they are unstoppable!
OvationTV has quickly become one of our top sites with over 7,000 members! The focus of their site is on the fine arts of different cultures. With a tagline like "Make Life Creative" you know that they are down to business!
Here's what Megan had to say in an interview conducted via email: "We love the widgets, being able to display the 70,000 plus images, video, audio etc in such a simple and customizable way. Jennifer has worked closely with KickApps to build the ultimate - what we like to call, the super widget! This feature basically turns our web pages which used to be comprised of several widgets and html chunks into one big widget cutting down on load time. Given that we can stylize each widget and filter the content makes it easy to keep it all consistent. We've integrated the widgets into all our minisites for program events, its an effective way to display the related video clips and other media.
The super widget came in extremely handy when we went to build the custom community home page. We wanted this page to really feature the best of the best in the community. We believe this helps motivate our members to strive for quality by calling attention to the My Art series where the highest quality work is chosen for on air showcase. As well as the highest rated media sitting right under latest uploads, an obvious method of comparison.
We love the marketing possibilities behind the community, the monthly curation projects have turned into the perfect partnership outreach mechanism for web. This landing page became the gateway into the community site, a 'curated' offering of arts related info from museums, institutions, individual artists etc. Our first curation project, Megan was working with our partners at MCA Chicago. We used widgets pulling the content they uploaded to their profile into the landing page of the community for all the members to see. (This page was also featured in Ad Age. ) And lucky for us being a TV network, we can use some on air time to promote our new partners' curations on the community landing page - a huge selling point. When Megan started working with individual artists like Mark Morris outlining the content for a curation, we were able to make the page about his particular influences, not only showcasing his work but the work he is inspired by and that was really valuable for the community members who are mostly artists themselves.
Since KickApps offers so many functions, members, partners and curators are quickly becoming live chat hosts and discussion board leaders etc. We can tie program premieres to live chats so viewers can talk about what they are all watching together and more and more ideas are evolving all thanks to this functionality.
To sum it all up, we love the functions and features KickApps offers because they allow us to extend our reach as a company. From individuals to institutions, everyone has the chance to inspire and be inspired on the Ovation TV Community.
On behalf of the entire KickDeveloper Community as well as KickApps, I would like to congratulate the both of you, Megan and Jennifer, on your recent achievement as KickDeveloper of the Month!
