Dan's Biztalk posts

Portland blogger poses question about Biznik: Does it work?

Portland has a new Biznik member, Phil Berstein, who writes an informative blog, Phil on Advertising. After joining Biznik today, Phil blogged this question:

"So, my question is for those who’ve been on Biznik for a while. Does it work? And by “work”, I mean, has it caused a quantifiable improvement in your business? More customers? More traffic to your blog? And for those who have upgraded to a paid membership — is it worth the dough?"

You can post your answer for him here.

Biznik is taking off in Vancouver, thanks to Christa Patchen Wagner

It's been a thrill to watch how Christa Patchen Wagner is rockin' Vancouver lately. Christine has already hosted one event, and has not one, not two, not three - FOUR more of her own in the calendar. In addition to that, she's also organized a workshop that she'll be cohosting with Lara and I in Vancouver on November 25th - Get Connected: How Biznik Can Help Your Small Business Succeed In A World Transformed By Social Media. Can you say rock star? She has definitely earned her Ambassador stripes, that's for sure. I can't wait to meet you, Christa!

Vote Biznik!

Yeah, I know you probably have election fatigue, but the REAL time to vote is now! The 2nd annual Open Web Awards is open for voting, and if you're a fan of Biznik, I'd love to have your help in getting us some recognition for this extraordinary community. It's easy to do - just visit this page, where you can enter your email into the widget to cast your vote for Biznik:

Vote for Biznik

Do women smile more often than men in their business networking profile photos?

I read a thought-provoking article this morning, Why women smile in their profile photos in business networking sites. Apparently, on professional online networks like LinkedIn and Xing, men frequently are unsmiling, while women are much more likely to be smiling.

I actually don't think that's true in this community. I just scanned through the first page of the seattle business consultant category, and it looks pretty even to me.

Do you think women smile more often than men in their Biznik profile photos? If so, why?

New feature alert! City pages and business categories

Good morning everyone. Hope you had as awesome a weekend as Lara and I did - we were in San Francisco at the Biztech Day conference, where 500 small business people got to soak up how to promote their business with social media. And this morning is off to a rocking start here at Biznik, where we've just launched a big new feature: new city pages and business categories. Here's what's new, starting with what you'll notice the most:

Business categories

You've been telling us that the member search on Biznik isn't good enough. That you want to browse members by business type. We listened, and today when you log in, you will noticed that you have to select a category that best describes your business. The list isn't perfect, of course - it's impossible to fit every business into 64 categories, the number we've chosen. Don't worry - just choose the best one, and you can change your mind later. In fact, if you're a paying member, you can select more than one category, or even make up your own category. Active members get up to two categories, and Supporting members get up to four.

Another benefit to the new categories: Search engine optimization. The category pages are highly optimized for the category - so choose a category you want to appear in when your customers are searching for those terms. I'm going to post a brief video about how to do this later this morning - look for that on the Biznik blog. Meanwhile, let's jump into where the new categories are going to display: on the new City pages.

City pages

The old 'Members' page was getting really tired. It was simply a list of the most active members, with the most active member at the top. It worked well when Biznik had a few hundred members, but with Seattle membership alone pushing 8,000 people, it's time for us to rethink what appears on the 'Members' page for each city. We approached this task with these things in mind: Usefulness to members, usefulness to people who might want to hire members, and with an eye to spotlight members who are making extraordinary contributions to the community.

Take a look at the new page for Seattle. The first thing you'll noticed is that you can browse members by category. Next, you can see the newest members who have signed up (it only shows members in here if they've uploaded a photo - important to show your face in this community).

Below that, we've got one of the bigger changes - Biznik now shows six of the most popular event hosts! The most popular business networking event hosts on left, and most popular workshop hosts on right. Popularity is calculated by the number of people who attended your event.

Photos from recent events in that city, and what members near that city need complete the main column.

Over on the right, at the top you can now see at a glance how many members are in that city, how many needs, and how many events. Under that, a featured member promotion appears, randomly, from among the most active members who have posted promotions. In Seattle, that means that it rotates from among Supporting Members who have uploaded promotions. Elsewhere, if there are no supporting members, it rotates from anyone who has posted a promotion.

Woven throughout the page, you'll notice buttons that allow YOU to create your own event, update what you need, or post a new promotion.

Another cool feature: The talk items in the sidebar are from members who are local to that city. So now, you can see at a glance the talk that is started by people near you.

Finally, on cities outside of Seattle, you can now see the Ambassadors who are heading up Biznik's growth in that area. If there are now Ambassadors, we invite you to learn more about the Ambassador program.

So jump in, select a category for your self, and get familiar with the new city pages. And let me know what you think of the changes.

Betsy Talbot is deep under cover in Seth Godin's new book

So, Lara picked up a copy of Seth Godin's new book, Tribes, and the cover fell off. Under the cover is a photo montage of thousands of tiny little mugshots. Somehow Lara, with her amazing eye for detail, immediately spotted Biznik member Betsy Talbot in the sea of faces. I double checked, and sure enough, it's the same photo that she has on her Biznik profile. Congratulations, cover girl!

Is there anyone out there who can write an article about how the financial crash on Wall Street will affect small business?

Here's a request for someone to write an article that is focused on how what happened on Wall Street over the past week will affect small business people like those of us here on Biznik. Any takers?

Survey says: 93 percent of Biznik's top members rank in top 10 on Google

I spent my weekend playing with numbers. Yeah, I know, it's really not like me. But yesterday, I got this idea for how I could come up with real numbers to show how Biznik's Supporting Members rank on Google. To recap: Yesterday, I did a quick survey of 33 profiles (10 percent) of Supporting Members, and was blown away by how high the average member ranked on Google (that quickie survey revealed 92 percent rank in top ten for either name or keywords). But a little voice in my head -- I think it was the voice of my University of Montana math professor -- made me dig a little deeper. I did a little Googling and discovered that my survey wasn't statistically accurate enough for me to put much weight into it - the margin of error for my sample size is 13 percent with 90 percent confidence. Not good enough.

So today, I set out to produce a statistically valid survey that would allow me to say, with 95 percent confidence and a 5 percent margin of error, just how well Biznik's top members rank on Google. I found this survey random sample calculator that revealed the magic number I would need to survey: 177. So I rolled up my pajamas and got to work.

Some background on the methodology I used: For searches on member names, I entered their names exactly as they entered them into their profile, removing any punctuation such as colons or comas. For keywords, I selected no more than three keywords from each profile, in the order that they were entered by the members. I also removed all punctuation and symbols such as "&." Finally, I included the member's city at the beginning of the search, because that's what we've optimized for in the title tags. So, for keywords of "Contract CFO," I used "Seattle Contract CFO." To clarify: for each search I used up to four total keywords: the city, and up to three keywords. It's important to note than many members used more keywords than that in their profiles, but I discarded them, because, well, that's just keyword stuffing and who would search on more than four keywords, anyway?

It took me most of the day, cutting and pasting into the Search Engine Forums SERP Tool, before I had the numbers. As I was pasting them in, I kept thinking, wow, I can't believe how high members are ranking. When I finally totted them up, I was even more blown away than I was with yesterday's numbers. Here they are:

Members in top 10 for either keyword or name: 93 percent.

Yeah, that's pretty cool, hey? And check this out: 60 percent of Biznik supporting members in this survey ranked not just in the top 10, but NUMBER 1 for their keywords on Google. Let me say that again: 60 percent of Biznik's supporting members rank #1 for their keywords on Google.

Here's the best of the rest:

• 82 percent rank in top 10 for their keyword.
• 81 percent rank in top 10 for their name.
• 73 percent rank in top 3 for their keywords.
• 70 percent rank in top 5 for their name.
• 33 percent rank #1 for their name.
• 22 percent rank #1 for their name AND their keywords.

So. This allows me to say, as I crawl into bed tonight, with 95 percent confidence and a 5 percent margin of error, this: Biznik is a tactical nuclear weapon in the battle to get your business noticed on Google.

Next up: compare these numbers with a survey of basic, free members. Is there real value in upgrading, or do free members get the same results?

New header showcases awards, press

We just launched a new promo box at the top of the Biznik home page, which is a simpler, cleaner overview of what Biznik is all about: "A business networking community where collaboration beats competition." We also dropped in icons that showcase some of the awards the site has won and press we've gotten.

It's a pretty minor tweak, but one that I think makes it much clearer what the site is about, and reinforces that it's actually working.

This is an incremental step toward some larger design changes we'll be making on the site in the coming weeks, all aimed at making the site easier to use, even more optimized for search engines than it currently is, and communicate more clearly what the value of being a Biznik member is to newcomers.

New simplified event and article urls

We've been doing a lot of behind the scenes work on simplifying the events and article urls, and as of today, the products of those efforts are live on the site. What this means for you is that it's now easier to remember and share the url for your event or article. Both are now more SEO friendly, too, meaning that they'll rank better in search engine results.

Here's an example:

Old event url: https://biznik.com/events/2008/9/9/introducing-twitter

New event url: https://biznik.com/events/introducing-twitter

Don't worry - your old urls will automatically redirect to the new ones, so you don't have to update anything - it all happens automatically.

How would you describe this?

I've recently come to think that "business networking" doesn't really describe adequately what's happening with this community, Biznik. This is a place where on one hand, members simply post profiles to drive search engine optimization of their own websites, and on the other, snag new clients at face-to-face workshops that they teach. It's a place where members build their reputation by publishing articles, and get noticed by posting helpful responses to new members' questions.

A few terms that are bouncing around in my head: "business social network," "small business community," "collaborative community."

What would YOU call it?

Farewell to Tips

In case you're wondering what happened to the Tips section this morning, I'd to announce that we decided to pull the plug on Tips. Why? Because the quality of most tips was extremely low, and it was turning into a magnet for the low-quality type of post that was mainly full of posts back to the poster's website. Read: spam. Also, tips did not fit well into the Article format that we've had great success with, and was confusing for members when deciding what to call their posts and where to put them.

Seattle Startup Resources

Rob Eickmann, who is one of the creators of the Six Hour Startup Conference here in Seattle, has created a great list of Seattle startup resources, which I'd like to pass along here.

Seattle Startup Resources, This is the list of organizations that I wish that I had known about when I came out here. It's broken into Frequent events, Infrequent events, Entrepreneur support/educational institutions, Funding sources, and Web Resources.

Startup Minded Events: where in Seattle where you are likely find technical people, hanging out having fun while working on changing the world.

Frequent Events (Every week or month):

Open Coffee at Louisa's Coffee on Tuesday mornings: Early stage entrepreneur and investor networking in Seattle. Occurs Every Tuesday Morning at 8:30Am 2379 Eastlake Ave E Seattle, Washington asack.typepad.com/asackofseattle/2007/04/seattleopen_co.html

Saturday House: Seattle Saturday House is a weekly gathering of several people who meet and do ... whatever they want! People work on projects, people talk about ideas, people conspire and hatch plans, and people play games with each other. Every Saturday at Giraffe Labs in Pinoeer Square www.saturdayhouse.org

Seattle Lunch 2.0: Learn about cool local Companies and technologies over your lunch hour - Various locations and times seattlelunch20.wetpaint.com/?t=anon

Seattle Startup Drinks: A simple concept: startup culture in cities around the world gathers around a bar to have a pint and discuss what they are working on, what they need help with and what they can do for each other. Occurs the Last Friday of every month at various locations. seattle.startupdrinks.com

Seattle Tech Startups (STS):  A group of entrepreneurs in the Seattle area who give and seek advice on running technology startups. We meet about once or twice a month. This is targeted at founders of, employees of, or those folks interested in joining local technology companies. Be ready to talk shop, get into technical arcana, and discuss the nitty-gritties of running/working at/launching a tech startup. Occurs first or second week of the month at The Douglas Forum at the Executive Education Center, University of Washington www.seattletechstartups.com

Six Hour Startup: A group of hackers/designers/entrepreneurs  meeting to try and build and lunch a startup in less than six hours. Second Weekend of every month at various locations. www.sixhourstartup.com

Venture Breakfasts (NWEN): A monthly breakfast with a featured speaker talking about startup related issues. www.nwen.org/index.php?option=com_events&Itemid=15&cat=Venture+Breakfast

Infrequent Events: (Every few months, it is best to find out about when these events occur from sites like MeetAtThePig meetatthepig.com or Seattle 2.0 http://seattle20.sampasite.com, or Gary's Guide http://seattle.garysguide.org)

Barcamp: An ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. barcamp.org/seattle

Ignite Seattle: Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking) igniteseattle.com/

Mindcamp: Seattle Mind Camp is an unconference that is held annually in Seattle. mindcamp.gearlive.com/

NPost: nPost networking Event for tech startups, Demos and getting to meet members of the local startup community. www.npost.com

Think Tanks (NWEN): Evening Knowledge Exchanges that are recognized as the go to forums for new ideas. www.nwen.org/index.php?option=com_events&Itemid=15&cat=Think+Tanks

Workshops (NWEN): Graduate School level workshops on various topics such as VC Financing, Human Resource, Bootstrapping, IP Protection and more. www.nwen.org/index.php?option=com_events&Itemid=15&cat=Workshops

There are a lot of other events that occur here in Seattle which attract interesting, smart technical people : Bizjam, Startup Weekend, Dorkbot, Powertool drag strip races, Seattle Scrum, Seattle X-Coders, Seattle Ruby Brigade, Python Users group.... Its best to subscribe to a few of the calendars above to find out about those events.

Entrepreneur Support/Educational Institutions:

Biznik: Is a Seattle based social network for entrepreneurs, they have a wealth of events and information on starting up a company. biznik.com/

Score: Small Business Administration, hosts workshops, offers conseling and has a wealth of resources for startup entruperumers. www.seattlescore.org

Freelance Seattle: good for finding freelancers to help with design/code/branding/localization/etc... freelance-seattle.net/

MIT Enterprise Forum: Hosts several different types of events though out the year, Dinner Programs which can be a companies presentation of key issues the company is experiencing or has experienced or an experts panel with a featured topic of interest, Venture Lab workshops which is a lecture series on various topics and Global Broadcasts from Cambridge aimed at different topics. www.mitwa.org/

NorthWest Enrepreneur Network (NWEN): Has Venture breakfasts, workshops, pub nights, and hosts the Early Stage Investment Forum yearly. www.nwen.org

Funding Organizations:

Alliance of Angels: www.allianceofangels.com/

Funding Universe: www.fundinguniverse.com

Ignition Partners: www.ignitionpartners.com/

Keiretsu Forum: www.k4seattle.com

Web Resources: John Cook's Venture Blog: Explores startups, Venture Capital and Life in the Pacific Northwest Technology Community blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/

Meetatthepig: A calendar for geeks, makers and other world changers. meetatthepig.com

Seattle 2.0: Marcelo Calbucci's website with local startup events, and the Seattle Startup List of Seattle Internet startups, includes an extensive list of Seattle Startup Blogs. seattle20.sampasite.com

Seattle Tech Startups: A fairly high traffic email list of various founders and others involved creating new internet companies. seattletechstartups.com/doku.php

We're co-hosting a new music industry networking night at King Cat Theater..

Lara and I have teamed up with Levi Lyon of Seattle indie record label Xil Records to host a music industry networking night.

The first of these monthly events will happen next Thursday at King Cat Theater, a newly renovated space near downtown Seattle with a swanky bar that will hold 200.

If you're a musician, or want to network with musicians, this is the event you've been waiting for you. Musicians need web designers, bookkeepers, massage therapists and attorneys too!

Networking begins at 6 with cocktails, and there'll be an acoustic performance beginning at 8pm. Hope you can join us.

Free RSVP here: Music Industry Networking Night at King Cat

You're invited to the BizJam Soirée...

For those of you who can't make it to the main event on Wednesday and Thursday, we'd like to invite you to the BizJam Soirée on Thursday evening. It's 10 bucks at the door up until 10pm - free after that!

Here's the scoop:

7pm to 8pm Arrival & Networking
Enjoy light artful confections from award-winning chef, Tiberio Simone. Cash bar provided by and benefiting the Space Virgin Light Continuum, a 501c3 Community Arts Organization.

8pm to 10pm Evening Program
Experience the “Story Wave.” Beginning with a brief solo performance by international actor and improviser, Matt Smith, will start the evening program by leading the room in an interactive story-telling adventure.

Biznik co-founders Lara Eve Feltin and Dan McComb will host the Biznik Award show - see which members will be recognized for the significant community contributions. Must be present to win!

Then grab your seats, the evening program will conclude with a rope and silk tissue aerial performance (think Cirque du Soleil!) by the students of Biznik Beverly Sobelman of Versatile Arts.

10pm to 2am Party til the Wee Hours
Wrap up the evening with your new friends, collaborators and associates to music in the form of downtemplo ambient beats provided by DJ b. wonder Jones and DJ Digitroll of Bluesdome.

Full event details here.

New sitewide search makes it easier to find people, articles, events and discussions

We’re happy to announce a significant improvement to the Biznik site today: sitewide search! You can now search from any page of the website. Just enter your search term, and the results are automatically split into four separate categories: members, events, discussions, and articles. If there are more than five results in any category, you can click through to the search results page of the given subject, where you’ll see the rest of the results of your search.

To use the search, just click in the search box, located at the top of every page. The results are grouped by type, with members first.

Next up: we’ve got some big improvements to the quality of the search results right around the corner.

I’d like to say a special thank-you to Biznik’s newly hired web developer, Matt McCormick. This is his first feature release, and we’re delighted to have him on our team. Great job, Matt!

Happy searching, Dan

What business category would you like to be listed under?

One problem with the current Biznik membership directory is that there's no way to browse members by category (for example, you can't browse all the Seattle attorneys). We're about to fix that, and if you've got an opinion about what category you'd like to appear under, please share it with me now. It's kind of important, because we're going to add routes that look like http://biznik.com/members/seattle/pr-consultants. So if, for example, you'd rather appear as "publicist" instead of "pr consultant" let me know now. It's possible that we can dynamically create both, actually. But I want to track members into selecting a smaller, shared set, so that there isn't too much fragmentation around categories.

Biznik selected as an Official Honoree for the Social/Networking category in The 12th Annual Webby Awards

Hey everybody, guess what? I gotta share this email I just received from the Webby Awards (the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet)...

Dear Dan:

It is my pleasure to inform you that Biznik has been selected as an Official Honoree for the Social/Networking category in The 12th Annual Webby Awards.

The Official Honoree distinction is awarded to work that scores in the top 15% of all work entered into the Webby Awards. With nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 states and over 60 countries, this is an outstanding accomplishment for you and your team.

Congratulations!

YOUR OFFICIAL HONOREE LISTING: Your listing on the Webby site is located at http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current_honorees.php?season=12

MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR NOMINATION: We developed an online toolkit full of PR tips, sample press releases, site bugs and other helpful tips to help you promote your achievement. Please visit http://www.webbyawards.com/resource_center/honoree to access the PR toolkit.

You should receive an official notification letter with more information about your nomination this week. In the meantime, please do not hesitate to contact me (info below) or my colleague Jody Collins, General Manager of The Webby Awards, at jcollins@webbyawards.com or via phone at 212.675.3555 should you have any questions.

Again, congratulations!

David-Michel Davies Executive Director

The Webby Awards | Int'l Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences http://www.webbyawards.com | http://www.iadas.net

Tune in tomorrow morning to hear Biznik's first national media coverage on NPR's Morning Edition

Remember that story that NPR correspondent Wendy Kaufman has been working on about Biznik for the past few months? Well, she's finished her story, and she just informed me it's scheduled to air tomorrow morning (here in Seattle anyway) at 6:50 and 8:50 am on KPLU (88.5) and at 6:50 on KUOW (94.9). So if you were among those interviewed at the McLeod Residence back in December, be sure to tune in!

Biznik welcomes Intuit as our first major sponsor!

I've got a great announcement to make today: Intuit is Biznik’s first major sponsor! We’ve been working closely over the past couple of months with some fantastic people at Intuit, to come up with a form of sponsorship that works for both Intuit and for this community of small business owners.

Check out the Learn section this morning, and you’ll see what we came up with - a new section on the Learn page featuring articles provided by Intuit on topics that we’re confident you’ll find helpful, relevant, and interesting.

After working with Intuit to develop this sponsorship, I totally understand why Fortune magazine this year called Intuit - for the third straight year - “the most admired software company in America.” Intuit really does work hard to understand and support small business, and today’s sponsorship is certainly an indication of that to us.

The sponsorship, which will run for the month of April, will help us develop Biznik more quickly, so that this community can grow faster and do a better job at our core mission: helping you grow your business faster and making it more profitable. From all of us and Biznik and on behalf of the entire business networking community here, thank you Intuit!

To give you a complete picture of why Intuit is sponsoring Biznik, I interviewed Laura Messerschmitt, a product manager at Intuit. You can read the interview here.