As from september, British
Sky Broadcasting (Sky)?s Sky Community platform will be supporting a new range of
social media tools from Pluck, a provider of of social media capabilities to publishers,
brands and retailers.
The new functionality incorporates cross-site user
profiling that is intended to enable seamless navigation between all the
sub-sites hosted on the
Sky Portal. It will be rolled out in
several phases, starting with Sky News, which already includes a variety of
social media functionalities including blogs, discussion boards and user
comments.
All these features were
allegedly conceived in order to involve users themselves in the process of
writing the news agenda, an objective which, it is announced, will be taken a
step further with the addition of a user-generated ?citizen journalism? section
in which people can share their videos, photos and comments related to the
latest events.
The next stage will see Pluck?s social media
package extended to most other Sky media properties such as Sky.com, Sky Entertainment, and Sky
Motoring. Pluck?s cross-site profiling
technology is expected to come into its own at this point, enabling users to
create ad maintain a single profile throughout all Sky websites.
Managing director for BskyB?s
online business unit Andy Jonesco presents the new offering as an anticipatory
effort undertaken to ensure that the Sky platform keeps up to speed with
ever-increasing traffic, explaining that, ?With over 1 billion monthly page
impressions and many millions of unique visitors, the Sky portal needed a
social media platform that could support the high-volume needs of our growing
network.?
Richard Rosenblatt, chief
executive officer of Demand Media, Pluck?s parent company, voices his
confidence that Pluck technology will be equal to the challenge, stating that, ?By
incorporating our Pluck social media capabilities into their digital
properties, we?re helping Sky provide its growing audience with new ways
to engage with like-minded and shared interest communities.?
Pluck
technology currently drives over200 online venues, including USAToday.com,
Guardian.co.uk, Reuters.com, WashingtonPost.com and Discovery.com. According to research by ComScore cited in the
press release, the Sky Portal is currently the 6th most popular
commercial website network in the UK.