Dear iluni12-ers,

Perhaps many of us wondering, why would the maintainer want to spend time, efforts, and money for building iluni12.com? The ideal answers would be: The maintainer is tried to paying back what he has got from the almamater to the alumni community, with the vision of building strong connections between the alumni, and the mission of providing a media for communication and knowledge sharing that highly accessible by the alumni, easy to use, and constantly evolving to provide more rich features.

Thinking that the concept of "bersatu kita teguh, bercerai kita runtuh", which is very true, by having a strong connections between the alumni, it will benefits each alumni individually and in return will also benefits the almamater. Why? Because every individual has access to resources, knowledge and perhaps power, which when combined collaboratively together it may produce great things.

On the other side, there are also side effect benefits for the maintainer also:
First, the opportunity of having the experience of applying his (technical and strategical) knowledge into reality.
Second, by applying the knowledge into reality, at the same time also enhance the knowledge itself, following the concept of learning by doing.
Third, Build stronger connections with many of the alumni.

So, actually there are benefits for the maintainer. All resources, the time, efforts and money spent was returned as experience, knowledge and connections which are more valuable.

Strategic Approach

The technical part of this website is quite straightforward, it can be seen as the website itself along with all the features provided. By using the technical knowledge, we can build a good website, but it may not necessarily usable. Features is something, but for a community website, without users and contents, the website would be meaningless. As such, apart of the technical knowledge, we also need a strategic approach to be applied to get this initiatives become successful.

Vision & Mission
How do we apply the strategic approach? First, we have to know our ultimate goal. As such we have to set our vision. Once we have the vision we have to set a mission as our guide to achieve the vision. Based on these vision & mission, we will derive all activities and efforts accordingly. The vision and mission of iluni12.com as as stated earlier above:

Vision:
Building strong connections between the alumni

Mission:
Providing a media for communication and knowledge sharing that highly accessible, easy to use and constantly evolving.

Marketing Strategy
Once we have our vision and mission, we need more detailed strategy to get it fly on the sky. Since this is a community website, a good marketing strategy would perfectly suits the need. As such, let's try to see marketing concepts that was socialized by Hermawan Kertajaya in many of his books.

Positioning, Differentiation, Branding.
According to Hermawan, there are 9 key components of marketing that grouped into three:
1. Marketing Strategy - Mind
- Positioning
- Segmentation
- Targeting
2. Marketing Tactics - Market
- Differentiation
- Marketing Mix (Product, Price, Placement, Promotion)
- Selling
3. Market Value - Heart
- Branding
- Process
- Service

From each of these groups, the most important components are Positioning, Differentiation and Branding. Let's take a look on these three marketing components first and we will derive the other component afterwards.

Positioning
Positioning is one of the marketing strategy. It is part of marketing strategy because it is used to win mind share. The positioning of this website is as stated in the mission statement, it is a media of communication and knowledge sharing that highly accessible, easy to use and constantly evolving.
In short, the positioning of iluni12 website is:
The media of communication and knowledge sharing between the alumni of Fasilkom UI.

Differentiation
Differentiation is one of the marketing tactics. It is used to win market share. As such the main differentiation of iluni12 website is the features and benefits provided to the users.
iluni12 already has a mailing list as communication media between alumni. As such, the iluni12 website should provide different benefits that add more values to the existing mailing list. In this regards, iluni12 website provide the following differentiation derived from the mission statement above:
1. Highly accessible: iluni12 website use different access method that the mailing list. It is accessible from anywhere through Internet through HTTP using its own domain name. Though iluni12 mailing list is also accessible though HTTP and SMTP, some companies are block either the email or the HTTP access which cause our alumni work in those companies unable to access the mailing list from their office. Iluni12 website is using its own domain name, which most likely not blocked by any of proxy servers used by companies. Thus, many alumni that work on multinational companies can still access this media of communication from their office.
2. Easy to use: Many features provided to enable users easily access and track information. The features are configured to be seen integrated with the whole website, and user can easily navigate among the features available. No registration required to see some contents. Registration required to actively participate.
3. Constant Evolution: iluni12 website built using a highly customizable and evolving Content Management System (CMS) framework named drupal. This CMS system has the community that actively develop enhancements and modules to be easily integrated into the system. Thus it enable this website to be constantly evolving to provide better features.
In short the differentiation of iluni12 website is: accessible, easy, evolving.

Branding
After we win the mind and get the market share, the next thing to do is to win the customer heart. By winning the heart, it will create loyalty, which in turn may produce devoted customers who spread word of mouth campaign. This hopefully will start the snowball to roll. The start of making the brand equity was the hardest part. The activities of building the brand equity are as follow:
1. Choose a brand name: iluni12.com
2. Get a strong tag line to support it: accessible, easy, evolving
3. Do brand campaign: promotion on exiting media
4. Review market response: Polling, Comments, Feedbaks
5. Adjust the tag line and the brand if required accordingly.

JacK95