My Forrester Groundswell Awards Submission - Story of ComplianceOnline.com

Objective
The main objective of MetricStream, ComplianceOnline.com parent company and Regalix client, was to create a revenue-generating content portal with a global community of Risk, Compliance, Audit and Quality Management Professionals. The portal would allow these professionals to access information, search easily for compliance best practices, regulations and standards and get clarifications and interpretations from community members.

The secondary objective was to engage with governance, risk and compliance decision makers early in the purchase life cycle for enterprise software buying. This was aimed at shortening the often long business-to-business sales cycle.

Solution
Most B2B companies start communities around their products. By taking an alternative approach that focused on customer outcomes and issues, Regalix helped MetricStream built an online community that addressed business needs, not one that simply tries to sell its products and services. Regalix examined over 10,000 regulations and standards by using advanced search and web technologies. Through this research, Regalix then focused on 100 areas that command the most attention in the market in terms of conversations, confusion, discussions and service providers.

Using this data as the starting point, Regalix aggregated content from hundreds of regulatory sources, best practices sites, and media properties to create a critical mass of content. The content was categorized by role, industry, and regulation so that a user could navigate the content very easily. Regalix also created a compliance- and risk-specific taxonomy and built a vertical search engine that allowed users to get to very specific information.

Once critical mass was achieved, Regalix created premium content (in this case online training) that was provided by experts in the community on a paid basis and consumed by professionals on the portal. The community grew fast through a combination of a managed viral program and the experts serving as anchors. A small business development and editorial team ensured that consistent and high-quality content was always available for the users.

Several aspects of search engine optimization, direct marketing, social media optimization, web development and design, online research, community building were used to create complianceonline.com.

Results
In the first year, the community expanded to over 100,000 professionals; by the second year to 300,000; and by the third year to over 1.5M professionals, making complianceonline.com the largest portal on Compliance on the web (based on Alexa rankings). Today ComplianceOnline.com has more than 2 million visitors, 500,000 registered users and still growing!

Over 1,000 training courses are now offered across industries and regulations with content provided by experts who are part of the community. The site is MetricStream’s most consistent provider of quality sales leads and MetricStream is now viewed as an industry thought leader in a very crowded and segmented marketplace.