In 2003, P&G Femcare (Tampax & Always) had a site aimed at tween girls called BeingGirl. It’s purpose was to help young girls understand the changes their body was going through and help prepare them for their first period. The site included an advice column from a licensed social psychologist, articles, and a very popular forum where girls could ask advice of other girls about all things teen.

The site had high traffic when tragedy struck…sort of. Some of the talk in the forum had turn explicitly sexual and inappropriate. There was also some evidence of the beginnings of cyber-bullying in some of the threads. Some parents complained and the forum was shut down immediately.

Unfortunately for P&G, without their forums traffic to the site began to plummet. We were brought in to see if we could innovate our way out of the problem.

The first thing we realized was that moderating posts before they went up was impractical and exposed P&G to too much liability. We decided that the best course of action was to include a “report this post” button and form. Any post that was reported was automatically removed for review.

In addition we wanted to encourage good behavior. We created as feature by which girls could donate points to posts that were particularly helpful (much like Reddit’s “gold” feature.) These points could be used to customize their site experience and included bling on their profiles. We also created a points-based system that awarded points for every post or comment with neutral or positive sentiment. Posts could be up or downvoted by the other participants.

We created a flash-based interactive feature called “the locker” that girls could customize, with stickers, photos and original stickers that they could create. They could create and send them as gifts to their friends.

These innovations largely solved the problem and locker went on to last through two complete site redesigns. Traffic was restored to pre-shutdown levels, and even increased.