BT Tradespace provides small businesses with simple online publishing tools that allow you to quickly and easily create and post content to the web.
Each BT Tradespace member’s page includes blogs, photos, podcasts, contact information, maps, virtual business card, and Click to Call … and there’s more under development
Members can create vibrant pages of content related to their business that they can easily and quickly update every day.
The service also allows members to connect through channels based on their industry and areas of interest.
More popular content is presented through the community channels and members will have an opportunity to “plug” content (Muti-style) and the most plugged content will also be shown on the relevant community channel.
In short, this service is really a sort of Facebook/MySpace for business. It is a great idea because it seems to make it pretty easy for SMEs to get into the social media space. This quote on Vecosys by Ivan Croxford expresses it quite well:
“We’re trying to solve a number of problems for small businesses,” Ivan tells me. “We know people have had trouble getting online full stop. The difficulties of SEO etc are tricky and can be costly. Small businesses don’t have the time or skills. BT Tradespace exposes the utility of blogging as it’s simple and easy to create presence for an SME.
“Rather than static marketing copy, we’re trying to get them into using it as a conversational marketing tool. We’ll see a lot of people put up one post and that’s it, but we have a woman blogging furniture in manchester who does it weekly.”
Incorporating new media elements into your business is not a prohibitively complex process. There is a lot of jargon going around but the principles guiding the adoption of these technologies are pretty straightforward – have better conversations with your customers and employees, listen to what is being said about you and share your knowledge (incidentally, this is what we are all about). From there it is really a matter of picking the right tools for the job so chat to people who know the tools, tell them what you want and go from there.
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sme, bt tradespace, new media, social media, enterprise 2.0, for business
What do you think?