What’s a sponsored account?

* editorial posted by c_prompt in FAQ

We’re certainly glad you asked.

We recognize there are companies who use blogs for marketing. Frankly Scarlet, we don’t care if you’re marketing a product, service, or idea. As long as it’s not illegal or fraudulent, market away using our tools. (No, that does not mean we agree that everything that is deemed illegal should be.)

Let’s get one thing straight: one of our goals is to provide (very) low-cost earning opportunities for less well-known content providers/bloggers. When you’re a company posting here, your goal is not to provide an earning opportunity for your staff per se – your primary goal is marketing to make profit for your shareholders. (Well, for argument’s sake, let’s assume that’s your goal.)

We have nothing against a company wanting to make a profit for its shareholders – after all, we’re shareholders ourselves. But companies that perform marketing here want special capabilities. So, to keep our costs low for the content providers/bloggers, we charge a monthly fee for those special capabilities that are primarily directed at marketing.

What are some of the amazing marketing capabilities you’ll receive with a sponsor account?

Message multiple users at once from modmail: Have a special event coming up that you want a targeted group of users to learn about? Want to offer a special promotion code to a group of select accounts? Let them all know at once with one message.
Manually manipulate your community’s front page: Position a post advertisement at the top of your front page so that it receives constant visibility. Pin a few important posts onto your front page, and change their position within the queue. Decrease the score or remove a post from your front page that is inconsistent with your goals (without deleting it or moving it to the graveyard).
Tip using earned karma: To reduce the risk of fraud, we limit the amount a user can tip another user to the amount of karma purchased. However, for companies, we understand your earned karma will likely be reinvested back into your community and marketing efforts. Therefore, we allow sponsor accounts to tip users with earned karma (which is useful for encouraging authors to write about your company).
Your own iframe: We give you access to an inline frame on your community pages that allows you to include HTML, style sheets (.css), and even Javascript. (Obviously, same-origin policy is disabled for security reasons.) Run a community that gets a ton of page views? Use it to add advertising (e.g., Google Adsense, Microsoft Bing). Run a chess community? Why not embed a Javascript chess board to allow your community to play, or a chess tactics trainer like the one in /chess? Promoting a new health product? Embed a Javascript BMI calculator like on c/health. Music is your passion? How about a top 50 widget like you see in /music?
Earn a percentage for submitted posts and comments: This is a key tool in our mainstream media busting arsenal. We realize there are many who can do a much better job gathering, organizing, distributing, marketing, and administering valuable content. In addition to the good feeling you’ll receive in making the world a better place, why shouldn’t you get a piece of that action in return for your effort? We think you should. With this feature, you set the price of post and comment submissions and 75% above the base price is divided among all sponsor accounts in your community. For example, if the base price of a post is 2 karma and you, instead, charge 10, you will earn 6 karma for each post (i.e., your price 10 less the base price 2 times 75% divided by 1 sponsor account). If there are two sponsor accounts in your community, each of you will earn 3 karma. (Note: Your percentage is rounded as we don’t support fractions of karma.)
Community form submission fields: Have an email marketing newsletter for which you want to collect email addresses and build an email subscription list? Are you about to launch a beta and looking to create a waiting list of email addresses and zip codes? Community form fields allow you to capture an email address and an extra field from visitors. You can specify if you want to collect this information only from logged in users, logged out visitors, or both. We'll automatically send you a message with the captured information when someone submits a community form.
Custom domain chat: If you're using a custom domain name, you can enable your own free live chat with Chatra. Visitors to your site can ask questions via live chat. You and your team can respond immediately. When you're away, a popup email form is also available.
Registration popup: The first time a non-logged-in visitor views a post on your website, a voting popup encouraging your visitor to support the post author will display after a few minutes. If you're using a custom domain name, you can turn this popup feature off.
An annual opportunity to be a DFAD (default for a day): We recognize that default communities are great opportunities to increase your readership and visibility. For sponsor accounts of at least one year, your community will enjoy the inflow of new members. And we’ll even let you pick the day.