Tiscali, the new owner of Liberty Surf, has chosen to put together the virtual community plat-form in Sophia Antipolis and the personal web hosting specialist on a same entity.
Things have gone very fast. Less than fifteen days after Liberty Surf has been taken over by the Italian group Tiscali, two unities of the French group, Respublica.fr, a plat-form of virtual communities created in Sophia Antipolis, and Chez.com, specialized in personal site web hosting, are gathered together in one entity : the communities pole. The point of such a grouping is to find a synergy between the different companies of the Liberty Surf group and, especially, to guarantee the marketing of the products.
Better synergies and marketing
' Two key factors have motivated the creation of the pole : the research of the best synergies between the different entities of Liberty Surf group and the strong complementarity of both Respublica.fr and Chez.com offers', it is said in a press release.
They want to find synergies between the different companies that Liberty Surf has gathered within 18 months and to market products in order to increase the turnover. First step : take advantages of the experience of the two sites. The common direction will favour natural industrial synergies between Respublica.fr activities which strongly focus on communities and Chez.com ones dedicated to personal sites.'This will is the expression of the emergence of a unique 'Pages Perso' product, highly competitive, which takes advantages of the expertise of Chez.com (historical and major actor of the market).This product will be spread to the other portals : Respublica.fr, Libertysurf.fr, Monsieurcinema.com, etc. As well, the 'chat' and 'Forum' services of Respublica.fr will be used by the others.
Christian Conti, chief executive of the pole
Second step : increase the turnover. Thus, the main products of the pole ('Pages Perso', 'Chat', 'Forums') will be on the professional market at everyone's disposal. 'Cross marketing' actions will be launched to drain the 'Pages Perso' audience towards targeted and cost-efficient community services that can make customers come back. While editorial set of themes of all sites of the group will be harmonized. New forms of audience marketing will be created, especially for advertising spaces of the 'Pages Perso'.
Christian Conti, 33, co-founder and chief executive of Respublica; Nenad Cetkovic, 35, assistant chief executive; Pierre Villela-Petit, 27 (Marketing and Sales Manager at Chez.com); Sergine Dupuy, 28, Marketing Manager at Respublica.fr) will be in charge of the new pole (71 people). Their mission will be to manage some 170 million pages seen in a month. And to make them profitable…