Objective
The main objective of the parent company MetricStream was to create a revenue generating content portal and a global community of Risk, Compliance, Audit and Quality Management Professionals who could access information, search easily for best practices, regulations and standards and get clarifications and interpretations from each other.

The secondary objective was to engage with governance, risk and compliance decision makers early in the life cycle of decision making for enterprise software buying.

Solution
We started by examining over 10,000 regulations and standards that companies globally are exposed to and through advanced search and web capabilities, zoned down to the 100 areas that command the most attention in the market in terms of conversations, confusion, discussions and service providers.

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

Once we had critical mass, we 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 1 st year, the community had expanded to over 100,000 professionals, by the 2 nd year to 300,000 and by the 3 rd year to over 1.5M professionals making this the largest portal on Compliance on the web (based on Alexa rankings).

(After Results)

Today
Launched in 2007, ComplianceOnline is now the number one destination for Quality and compliance professionals across the globe. Aimed at providing a forum for professionals to get the latest news and alerts on compliance, it has now achieved its objective and provides direct access to thousands of GRC professionals in the industry. ComplianceOnline’s success helps MetricStream stand out in a market crowded with vendors. With more than 2 million unique visitors per year and 500,000 registered users, ComplianceOnline drives a huge volume of traffic that would be difficult to expect from a corporate website. Today, ComplianceOnline has been featured by analysts like Gartner, Forrester and Dataquest. It recently won the Forrester Groundswell award in 2009 (http://www.regalix.com/index.php/regalix-and-metricstream-win-groundswell-award ) for creating an online community which was successful in spreading awareness about the company and generating leads in the process.

Link to Forrester Case Study by Laura Ramos: MetricStream Builds B2B Community With ComplianceOnline http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/case_study_metricstream_builds_b2b_community_with/q/id/45011/t/2