Last activity: 6 hours ago
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!
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.
Biznik launched an extraordinary new online business networking feature today: video profiles. We teamed up with another Seattle startup, EyeJot.com, to provide you a way to instantly record and post up to 5 minutes of video, all from within your profile on Biznik. No need for editing software. No need to shoot first and upload later. No need to cut and paste the link from Youtube. All you need is a computer with a video camera and we take care of the rest. Well, you still have to have something to say. You’re on your own there!
Heres a two-minute video that outlines how to use the video profiles.
As far as I know, Biznik is the first online business networking community to include recordable video from within profiles. LinkedIn didn’t even give users the ability to upload photos to their profiles until last September, so don’t hold your breath on seeing video there any time soon. If you know of any other business social network that offers this, let me know and I will stop making bold claims! Until then, I’m going to keep bragging, because this is worth bragging about. In fact, why don’t you hop on to your profile, record a profile, and we can all brag together.
All of the current Mac laptops already have video cameras built-in. If you don’t have one of those, you can get an inexpensive USB camera, and mount it externally. The video tool is pretty good at automatically figuring out your settings, and within minutes you should be recording your first video. If you have any problems, we’ve created an extensive video FAQ page that should have you up and running right away.
So, what do you think of video on your profiles? Will you use it? Will you watch video on member profiles?
The fantastic folks at Wowrack have installed two new smokin’ fast servers for Biznik over the past week, and last night John and I brought the new configuration online. The result, those of you on the site this morning I’m sure are noticing, is a stunning improvement in speed: pages on Biznik.com are loading at least twice as fast as before, and in some cases, much, much faster. Overall the site feels snappy and responsive. Posting comments happens almost instantaneously now, whereas before it sometimes took 6, 7, 8 or 9 seconds to complete (i.e, “forever”). This new server configuration is not only fast, but it can handle an extraordinary amount of traffic without breaking a sweat. So invite your friends and bring the traffic - Biznik can handle it!
We have dedicated all of next week to one task: making Biznik.com run even faster still. There are many pages whose performance needs further improvement: viewing members in your network, for example, is still unacceptably slow if you have more than a handful of people in your network.
Enjoy the new speed, and as you’re surfing around the site today, if you notice any pages that you’d like to see load even faster than they do now, let me know by emailing dan at biznik dot com.
This afternoon we launched a brand-new section of Biznik called Learn. Initially it is accessible to Supporting Members (and invited beta participants) only, so if you're interested in having first crack at contributing an article or reading what other members are contributing, this is a great time to upgrade your membership. The new section of the site features two things: Articles and Tips.
So, what's an article? It's up to 1,000 words on a business topic that will be helpful to someone who is building and growing a business. It's an opportunity for any member of Biznik to share his or her knowledge about how to do something or how to understand something about business.
All articles and tips can be rated by the community. That's right - you get to vote, on a scale of 1-10, on how "helpful" the article or tip is to you. The highest rated articles and tips will be most visible, and most likely to be read by others. And here's the kicker: Once you've published enough articles, which are rated high enough, you will receive an "expert" badge on your profile.
What articles are NOT: Articles are not an opportunity to sell your services directly, and they are NOT a promotion (we already have provided the promotion tool for that.) Articles are not a place to publish articles that aren't immediately relevant to small business. They are not a place for commercial messages of any kind.
What articles ARE: Articles are concise, well-written pieces that someone running a small business will find instantly helpful. They are an opportunity for the author to gain visibility and status within the community by sharing his or her expertise, and drive traffic to their own website or blog as a result.
So, what can you write an article about? Everyone on Biznik is an expert at something, and if your expertise extends to knowledge that will help a small business grow and be more profitable, please write an article or publish a tip - you'll benefit, and the community will benefit, and that's what Biznik business networking is all about. Finally, we will be exercising rigorous editorial control over the quality of the articles, so don't take it personally if we kick them back to you with requests for improvements. Enjoy!
NPR correspondent Wendy Kaufman is doing a story about Biznik, and she'll be at the happy hour at McLeod Residence this week on Thursday, Dec. 13. If you've got a story about how Biznik is working to make your business grow faster and be more profitable, please join us - she is planning to interview a few members about their experience in this community.
We’re in the final stages of readying a new feature for release on Biznik: Articles and Tips. Unlike previous features, this one will be released first in beta form, to Supporting Members and a small group of invited participants. We are releasing this to Supporting Members first and foremost because we love Supporting Members! And we want you to feel the love by having first crack at this awesome new tool. Secondly, we need a whole lot of articles in the pipeline before we can launch this to the rest of the site, so this will be an opportunity for Supporting Members to post as many articles as they like. Here’s how it works:
By the end of this week, Supporting Members will see a new tab to the main navigation, called Learn. (It will be hidden from all other users until some time in December or whenever we receive enough articles to make it launch worthy). Under that tab, you’ll find a list of articles and business tips, that are authored by members, for members. Members will be able to rate the articles and tips on a scale of 1-10, and the most helpful articles and tips will become the most visible. By contributing enough highly ranked articles, you will earn an “expert” badge on your profile, which will help you build your reputation inside the Biznik community.
If you’d like to have first-crack at this new feature and an opportunity to contribute articles of your own, now is a great time to upgrade your account.
We've decided to enforce a policy that requires all Biznik members to use their real name on their profile. The main motivation behind this is simple: if you're going to do business with someone, you are going to want to know their real name. Simple. It's pretty difficult to develop trust for someone who won't even tell you their name. Many other social networks allow usernames and pretty much anything goes. Facebook is a notable exception - they require real names, and as a result the integrity of the network is much higher.
I've already begun asking members who have put things like their business name into their name field to change it, so this is a head's up to everyone to be sure your profile first and last name fields list your real first and last name, and nothing else (no keyword stuffing allowed here - that is a violation of our Code of Conduct). In some cases I will be editing profile names directly to ensure compliance.
Biznik is an award-winning social network! We were recognized by the International Academy of Visual Arts (www.w3award.com), which gave us a silver award in the Social Network category.
Here's the full story: http://blog.biznik.com/2007/11/03/biznik-social-network-recognized-in-2007-w3-awards/.
Please post any bugs you find here. I've locked the old one because it was getting too long.
Hey folks, I need to jump in with some observations about this forum. I've recently noticed a lot of "me too" comments that are dragging the quality of the conversation down. Before you comment on a post, pause for a second and ask yourself, "how is what I'm about to post going to contribute to this conversation?" If the post you are making is more social in nature, take it to the Coffee Break forum. Let's keep all posts in this forum on-topic and thoughtful, helpful, or otherwise likely to increase our community business knowledge.
We made some big changes to Biznik's participation algorithm today, which I'd like you all to know about. Here's a link to a blog post I just made that outlines the changes: http://blog.biznik.com/2007/10/10/business-networking-is-not-a-spectator-sport-bizniks-participation-algorithm-rewards-active-members/
Biznik membership is growing steadily at an average of 15 new members per day. But we'd like to see that rate increasing, so we're launching a campaign to get first-time visitors to Biznik.com to sign up. And, because Biznik is all about collaboration, we're going straight to you to come up with content for this campaign.
Here's how it works: Reply to this post telling us what you love about Biznik in 20 words or less. If your quote is selected, it'll appear in rotation in the right column of selected pages throughout the website, and will include your photo, your name, your business name, and a link to your profile. For ideas, you can see the first four quotes we're using already here.
So, what do you love about Biznik?
We made a change to the navbar this afternoon, that I want to announce. Now, the email icon is persistent next to "Your Profile." This allows you to get into your messages with one click at any time, not just when you have new messages. When there's no new mail, it's just an email graphic. When new messages are waiting, an exclamation mark appears to the right of the email graphic.
You may have noticed that Biznik was down most of the morning. The outage was caused when a spike in traffic caused our servers to be overwhelmed. But now that it's back up again, have you noticed how much faster things are running? John spent the morning optimizing the way pages are served. The result is that not only are we able to handle the spikes in traffic better, but two of the sections of the website are running much faster now: Events and Biz Talk. Check it out - they are really snappy now.
Has anyone noticed anything different on the home page today? If you look in the right column, under the "meet this member" box, you'll notice that there's a new content block, called "Indie biz tips from Marketing Mix." I'll be sending out a more complete announcement about this via email soon, but for now, I just want to send a quick announcement that this addition to the site is the result of a collaboration with Biznik member Ilise Benun. Since 1988, she has been teaching people to promote themselves and their services, has written 6 books, spoken at numerous conferences and consulted with hundreds of designers, copywriters and other solopreneurs.
The posts that we're picking up are from Marketing Mix, a blog Ilise contributes to regularly, which is packed with tips devoted to helping small business owners, freelancers and independent professionals grow their businesses into thriving enterprises. So if you see a post that catches your eye, check it out - we think you'll find some really good stuff there.
Late yesterday we added a new Supporting-Member-Only feature: you can now set a signature line that will link to your website from all of your posts in Biznik.
At first glance it may seem like a minor improvement, but in reality this one packs serious promotional punch: Not only will all members reading discussion posts see your URL, but equally important to those of you promoting your own sites, so will Google. Now, the more you post in Biz Talk and comment on events, the more often Google will see links to your site, which translates into increased findability for your site on Google.
Full instructions on how to activate this feature are here: http://blog.biznik.com/2007/09/24/new-supporting-member-only-feature-promotes-biznik-member-websites/
The Biz Talk enhancements that many of you have been asking for are now live... you can now follow discussions via email, share them on digg and other popular social sites, forward a page to a friend, and bookmark your favorite discussion. Enjoy!
If you search on the term "business networking" in Google, result #7 is currently www.businessnetworkingadvice.com, a blog that's run by Biznik member Josh Hinds. He recently interviewed me, asking me questions like "how do you define business networking?" and I'd like to share a link to that post here as a way of kicking off a discussion about business networking in this forum: Dan McComb on business networking.
So, how do you define business networking? And how do you approach it? What strategies work best for you? Any big successes or blunders you care to share?
So, you want to start a Biznik community in your city ... where to start? This forum is the place for those of you who are leading rather than following in the effort to build community. Share your experiences here, let us know what's working and what's not for you. And, let us know what features are missing from the website so that we can better support your efforts.
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