And that is exactly what CVS Caremark is hoping with its new community “For All the Ways You Care.” The campaign officially launched last year with TV ads and an innovative contest that celebrated and honored women’s roles as nurturers and caregivers. It takes another step forward this week with a new and enhanced community website. An email invitation received on Monday officially announced that website along with a series of new community features that invites users to participate with others and the CVS brand. New member features include personalized profiles, customizable stories, forums and support groups, and resources.

It’s a great concept and an admirable effort but success is all in the details and execution. While CVS and its agency Hill Holliday should be commended for expanding on a good concept and successful contest that humanized the brand, there are a few lessons to be learned here. First a look at the traffic using Compete tells an interesting story. The site is struggling. After hitting a high of 35,000 unique visitors in December with the support of national TV ads the site now hovers around half that. That compares to over 4,000,000 monthly unique visitors for CVS.com. Next, referring url data on Compete site shows the majority of the traffic is coming from sites associated with the CVS brand - www.cvsadvisors.com (and advisor site and panel for CVS) and www.hhcc.com (Hill Holliday the agency). So what should CVS.com do to build the community site and facilitate sharing and interactions among visitors?

1. Leverage Existing Assets: With 4 million monthly unique users, CVS may have benefited more by integrating the program into www.CVS.com or at least promote it on the homepage. A visit to CVS.com’s home page today showed no mention of the “For All The Ways You Care” program – missed opportunity. And although I received a solo email announcing the official launch because I signed up for the alert, CVS should leverage its existing programs and communications including its ExtraCare loyalty program to further promote the effort.

2. Build, Listen, Grow, Activate: CVS has little to no presence on Social Network sites such as facebook, YouTube, etc. CVS.com’s Twitter presence is limited to a handful of twitter accounts with few followers – the largest of which CVSPharmacy has 464 followers but no posts. Part of being successful is being there. Social Networks are a great opportunity to listen and learn and best of all they cost little other than the time and effort you put into them. While “For All The Ways You Care” may be central and critical to CVS’s long-term community strategy it would certainly benefit from a presence on and integration with other CVS communities across the leading social networks.

3. Define and Refine Goals, Objectives, Target Audience – If the goal is to build a vibrant online community CVS need to rethink its approach. To do so across today’s social internet requires a deep understanding of the audience and where to find them. Are they creators or spectators, as an example? Knowing this will dictate the approach, tactics, content and ultimately success of the program.

4. Tactics - After knowing the audience, think about the tactics. Imagine if the $169K that CVS spent on just one Extreme Home Makeover :30 TV ad was applied to targeting key influencers online. My guess is we’d be seeing a ton of growth. Time to funnel a lot of the big budget into online marketing and communications to grow and engage the community.

5. Partner – Picking the right partner to grow participation is critical. While Hill Holiday created a very strong concept, it’s critical that CVS partners with agencies that understand the social web and how to grow participation.

Overall good idea that is struggling, but certainly capable of getting better with some additional thinking, new tactics and a lot of listening.