Anyone who has ever utilized the internet for any purpose whatsoever is keenly aware of the ubiquity of animal pictures and videos. They are absolutely everywhere. Be it cute pictures of cats with apparently atrocious grammar or simply watching this video on loop for hours on end, there is not a human in possession of a beating heart that can deny power of fuzzy creatures to both brighten our day and bring our productivity level to zero. I remember the first day one of our developers posted the link to http://husky.dogfriendzy.com/ and I thought to myself, “Well, I guess I’m not getting anything done today.” And I didn’t.
I had the pleasure of chatting with the DogFriendzy.com network’s creator, David Parker, about where Dog Friendzy came from and where it was going.
What is Dogfriendzy.com all about for those who haven’t yet had the pleasure? What purpose does the community serve?
Dog Friendzy is a place where you can organize and share your dog photos with others who love the breed you have!
What is the background on the site? How did you come up with this idea? What made you believe this site was needed?
Dog Friendzy was created from Pit Friendzy, a site for pit bull lovers. As a pit bull owner, I wanted to have a positive place where I could share pictures of my pit bull without being chastised. After seeing the community grow and getting great feedback from users, I realized that other dog owners would appreciate a site like this for their breed of dog. We now have 22 Friendzy sites for some of the most popular breeds in the world. Our mission is for dog owners from all walks of life to connect with each other, share information, and have a beautiful online collection of the moments in their dog’s life.
We have noticed some great success with your networks, especially on Pitfriendzy. How did you attract users to your site initially?
Pit Friendzy started as a Facebook fan page. As we got more and more likes on the page, we began to direct people to our pit bull site to post their pictures.
Your site has been up and running for a few months. Has the success continued? Are you maintaining a large userbase and if so, how have you kept them active?
Social media marketing has continued to be the driving force of traffic to the sites. We’ve created a nice engagement loop from our sites to our Facebook pages which keeps people coming back to the sites. The larger our Facebook fan pages grow, the more traffic to our sites
How did you find SE Cloud and how has SE Cloud been working out for you as a platform?
I found SE by searching on Google. They have helped us create the best product for the needs of our users.
If you had to choose the single most important aspect of community building, what would it be?
The most important aspect of building a community is giving users an easy way to communicate and express themselves on a particular topic.
What are the next steps for the Dogfriendzy.com networks?
The next step for Dog Friendzy is to continue to launch other breed specific sites and grow its online presence. Our goal is to become a mainstream utility for dog owners, and the largest source of breed specific dog photos, videos, and information in the world.
Any parting words?
Thanks for all of your help thus far!
Thanks for tuning in everyone. I hope you enjoyed this chat as much as I did. Please go check out David’s network at DogFriendzy.com and assuming I’m not fired for admitting to spending all my time at work looking at animal videos, I’ll see you guys next time.
