Despite the breathy post title, Raincity staffers DID NOT pose for the cover of the newest tome from romance-centric publisher Harlequin, however the RCS team DID build the new eHarlequin Community.

Less than a week since launch, the fresh participatory marketing endeavor is already bustling with activity and humming along to enthusiastic reviews.

The details of the myriad new features and the tricky customizations crafted within a compressed time-line (along with the big strategic vision of the project) are summed up in the eHarlequin Portfolio entry.
However, what was most interesting from my vantage point was how quickly the participation started on the live site.

After watching the developers busily typing as they closed in on site launch - seeing tickets ticked off and hearing excited murmurs and rumblings - there was a momentary lull after the cut over to the "live" site until the site begins to do what it was designed to do. Indeed, within minutes, the site was busy with users signing up, starting new blogs, commenting on the welcome post and well, ... participating.

In their kick-off Welcome to the new Community post, the Harelquinners set the tone of the new portal,

"If you’re new to this community…welcome! Likely the only thing NEW you see is this blog post. But, if you’ve been with us for a while, welcome to the “new look” of the eHarlequin.com Community, now with added social networking tools and other fun features like buddy lists and profile pages!" They go on to detail many new features, and the reasons for the add-on, and gently point the audience to the new ways to get involved in personal expression.

The Harelquin crew clearly understands their customer base and know the value of creating community interaction. With a passionate audience ready and waiting, the site was bound for success but sheesh - just days after launch, the forum threads are long, blog post well-commented, many new blogs started, and a list of ideas for tweaks and new features growing.

Certainly, there is great value in creating ways for your customers to become evangelists for your company which, among other benefits, creates an instant focus group. The first step to accomplishing this participation is making something fantastic enough to be worthy of their affection; secondly, provide them with a easy platform and incentives to crystallize their enthusiasm into authentic personal expression.

With their new social networking community platform launch, eHarlequin have created a powerful soapbox for their dedicated readers to exclaim and extol about their favorite new books. (And that was enough to encourage project ringers Erik and Francis to head out for a night of snowboarding to celebrate.)