I whip up a social network for my own SCORE Chicago community using Ning, to practice what I am preaching. Now I find myself trying to sharply define and communicate its value to potential users and my organization.
The purposes of the SCORE Chicago Community site, which has not yet been approved by SCORE Chicago, are threefold:
- To give counseling clients who have had 2 or more counseling sessions a place to showcase their businesses to other small business owners, and to the public. Links here should also help their own website rankings in internet search.
- To motivate potential clients to ask for business counseling so they can become a part of the community.
- To encourage a community to hatch around shared interests of Chicago entrepreneurs and small business owners.
No revenue objectives, but I suppose Adsense might support any bandwidth charges.
It becomes clear to me as I demo the site to my associates that in order to interest people in joining, potential users need to understand the basics. And of course they need to believe that it will be worth their time and effort to create a page and visit.
With those objectives in mind, I create a post to explain its benefits on my LearnedAtSCORE blog:
Check out this Community for SCORE Chicago Clients
I’m soliciting feedback on this explanation of the site and its benefits from selected clients and counselors. And from you. If I get encouragement and approval from above, I’ll start a campaign to notify appropriate clients in our database.
Meanwhile, what do you think? Will small business owners want to put up pages to describe their businesses to a broad market? Will features like Groups allow them enough visibility in target markets? (Ning FAQs say that keyword tags are coming, but not available yet) Will people ask for business counseling to become a part of this community? Do entrepreneurs and small business owners feel a need to network?
Your thoughts? Please post.
P.S. Ning means “peace” in Chinese, according to Ning’s site. Not the ethos you expect to find where passionate people gather to discuss and debate.
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There’s way too much going on this page. I focused right in on the “What can I do here” stuff. Got annoyed when I could not find the search feature you mentioned.
Then dropped down to the groups to see if I had anything in common with the companies already enrolled. It’s a stretch, but at least there is a condo site and so I enrolled because of that and the fact that I know you.
You need or someone needs to crank start the forum discussion.
Going back to the front page. I would have preferred a lot of white space and a few very simple words that would help ground me in. The best example is what I found on the Fast Company website at http://www.fastcompany.com.
Then I needed to see some “real content” that showed me some benefits. For example, I under marketing or another topic. Is there something here that I can use and will benefit me.
Don’t be disappointed though. I found this exercise extremely valuable. I stayed on the site about 5 minutes, but in reality, most visitors would have clicked off in less than 20 seconds like they do on my site if they don’t get what they can do here or what can benefit them.
Small Biz people will probably put up pages but unless there is a person to person event to bring them together, I am not so sure how far it will go. Maybe it is too early to tell.