Prospero Unveils New Hosted Community Application For Custom-Branded Ratings And Reviews
Prospero, the leading provider of community content management solutions, announced today Prospero Ratings and Reviews, a new hosted application for capturing, aggregating and managing community members' opinions and experiences on products or services. Prospero Ratings and Reviews enables online publishers to rapidly deploy ratings and reviews that are seamlessly integrated with relevant portions of their site. This application provides a venue for consumers or readers to post unbiased, relevant information about their personal first hand experiences. Organizations can now get immediate consumer opinions and feedback on their products or services. Utilizing Prospero's unique Active Content API, the user feedback can be integrated with editorial reviews and displayed anywhere on an organization's web site while still maintaining editorial control.
Using Prospero Ratings and Reviews, online publishers can now enhance their websites by offering a collaborative environment for community members to easily share valuable customer/reader opinions and experiences about specific products, news articles, events and services while incorporating this information into editorial content. As part of Prospero's CommunityCM platform, the Ratings and Reviews application can be branded to match any web site interface while providing online publishers a flexible design, powerful control over content approval, word filtering, terms of service violations and other moderation requirements, as well as an easy way to quickly offer this feature to their online visitors.
"Internet publishers are struggling with how to leverage the beneficial dynamics of online community services without the high cost of software development and operations," said Rusty Williams, Prospero's VP of Marketing. "Our new Ratings and Review application is another illustration of how Prospero is helping publishers quickly utilize the collaborative power of the web to enhance their site with rich, relevant content that will engage customers without expending the financial and human resources previously required for custom development."
Key features of Prospero's Ratings and Reviews application include:
- Flexible design - Prospero Ratings and Review application uses CommunityCM's new structured message technology to append additional client-defined data fields to content submitted for publication. Publishers can gather many different types of feedback – and vary the data collected based on product or service being reviewed. Through the tremendous design flexibility of the XML-based architecture of Prospero CommunityCM, the resulting community-generated structured data can be displayed in any custom format.
- Speed to Implementation - Once CommunityCM is configured and integrated, the Ratings and Reviews application can be up and running in less than a week. Most companies spend months to develop a less sophisticated application in-house
- Publication Control – Today, solutions are mostly home grown, require custom programming and do not include the sophistication of related features such as word filtering and moderation control. Online publishers get all of these essential tools included with Prospero's Ratings and Reviews.
- Syndication – Users can subscribe to Ratings and Review content through RSS syndication. Publishers can instantly notify their audience when new reviews are added or when there is a new subject to review.
- Reporting – Prospero provides comprehensive activity level reporting as well as the ability to integrate with a customer's existing third party reporting systems (e.g. Omniture).
- Moderation Services – Prospero's Community Management services team can help to monitor activity across all applications, including Ratings and Reviews to ensure that members adhere to the organization's Terms of Service guidelines.
About Prospero CommunityCM® and Active Content
Prospero's CommunityCM Platform is the industry's first community content management platform for easy and comprehensive integration and simplified control of user-generated content across all applications within a website. This powerful dynamic, interactive platform contains the broadest range of tools to customize online community applications and integrate and moderate community content while supporting extreme peaks in traffic. Prospero's Active Content technology is an API designed to enable online publishers to integrate elements of Prospero's community applications within any page of their web site, creating dynamic, engaging sites embedded with rich, relevant content.
About Prospero's Suite of Community Applications
Prospero delivers the broadest set of community applications designed to expand audiences, create communities and develop community-based content that can be used throughout any web site. The Prospero Community Applications are hosted on the enterprise class Prospero CommunityCM Platform. In addition to the new Ratings and Review application, Prospero's other applications include:
- Prospero Discussion Boards: Encourages site visitors to react to articles and interact with each other by posting and reading messages and responding to polls. Discussions are organized in topic-based folders. Moderators can use a variety of tools to lock out disruptive users and approve or delete content.
- Prospero Blogs: Full featured blogs enable authorized staff or end users to publish regular articles within a customized layout that accommodates site-specific branding, navigation and advertising. Prospero Blogs include popular features such as syndication via RSS feeds, automatic calendaring of entries, visitor tracking, and polling.
- Prospero Profiles: Enables members to create personal profiles and find other people with common interests
- Prospero Event Chat: Event Chats are fully moderated, live interviews with celebrities or featured guests
- Prospero Chat: Always-available chat rooms provide site visitors an opportunity to participate in live discussions where they can type messages back and forth with other members online at the same time.
- Prospero File Libraries: Collections of files – programs, Word documents, spreadsheets, and nearly all other files types – can be shared with the group.
Founded in 2000, Prospero Technologies is the leading provider of community content management solutions for the online publishing industry. Designed to support extreme peaks in traffic, Prospero's community solutions allow organizations to easily, quickly and cost effectively develop branded community applications such as blogs, chats, and discussion boards to online consumers and manage these using a single, intuitive platform. With its flagship CommunityCM® Platform and community applications, Prospero offers the industry's first complete solution for real-time, online community content delivery. Prospero's clients include Fortune 500 media, entertainment companies and internet publishers such as iVillage, Washington Post.com, About.com, AOL, BusinessWeek, Fox, CBS, Meredith Corporation, Knight Ridder Digital, Delphi Forums, NASCAR, Tribune, Wall Street Journal, MLB.com, Amazon, Comcast, MSN, and MSNBC. For additional information, visit www.prospero.com or contact the company at 978.698.6542.