MerchantCircle Launches Social Networking for Business
MerchantCircle is a brand new social networking site geared specifically towards small businesses that likes to fancy itself as the MySpace for business.
Designed from the ground up to be search engine friendly, MerchantCircle is targeted at the small business owner (Realtors and brokers included) and gives you a very easy way to have a presence on the Web.
In fact, in all likelihood, you already do. The site is pre-populated with the names and contact info of 14 million businesses across the US – so all you have to do is jump on the site and claim your company if you're in their database. (I haven't figured out exactly how MerchantCircle polices this though – when I claimed our listing, I didn't have to prove any affiliation with my company.)
For the business owner, MerchantCircle allows you to maintain a network of business contacts. Just like MySpace, or Linkedin for that matter, you can invite local businesses to become part of your network. Once they're in your network, you can create coupons, email newsletters and advertising campaigns for distribution throughout it. In this sense, MerchantCircle functions as a bare bones CRM platform.
For an additional monthly subscription fee, you have access to a couple of premium features (like being able to create a map to your location) and you can even expand the reach of your advertising campaigns onto Google and Yahoo's search engines. But what's really nice about MerchantCircle is that they don't cripple their entry-level account. You get to play with most of the site's features even at the free level.
I really like the idea of extending social networking online into the small business space. It's a concept that is already well-established in the offline world (chambers of commerce, trade associations etc.) and one that can easily be made more efficient and more effective on the Internet. It just makes sense.
The bottom line is that MerchantCircle makes it easy for almost anybody to put together a web presence and begin to connect with other businesses online. At the very least, it's probably in your interest to stake out your own territory before someone else does.
Greg Sterling has a far more comprehensive post on MerchantCircle's features here
More from SearchEngineLowdown.com as well.
Technorati Tags: MerchantCircle, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Marketing, Real Estate Marketing, Real Estate Blogging, Real Estate Blog, Real Estate Blogs, Real Estate, Realty Blogging
4 Comment(s)
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- From Real Estate Blogs | Jun 6, 2007
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Ben | Jun 9, 2006 | Reply
Joel
I appreciate the comments. We are working hard to see how we can bring more Local businesses online so they can take advantage of the performance being provided on the Local Internet. With more and more Local consumer online looking for Local information, there is a great opportunity to leverage the Local Internet for new customers.
For real estate agents, we have found 3 key drivers of success:
Blog- If you take the time to take some of the interesting content in your head and get it out on the web, you will get customers. You have alot of very valuable information about the market, the community, or even the parking problem downtown. Blog it and people will come to you. This is really no different than the best practice many real estate do of writing the real estate corner in thier local paper- just faster and easier.
Publish a Newsletter- We make it easy for you to use local news, other local merchants blog entries, local pictures and your own opinions in a quick newsletter you can send via email and post on the web.
Create an Ad- In less than 10 minutes, you can create an ad about your business and have it on 1000 local business pages through MerchantCircle.
On the security front, we don’t discuss all the ways we handle it, but we learned alot from other online communities and have both a pretty strict terms of service and an automated process for identifying misuse of the system. By the way, happy to do an interview sometime and connect you with a couple of real estate professional who have been using the system if you would like sometime. Here is one example
Sampson | Jun 9, 2006 | Reply
Social Networking is the key to success in any sales position.
Gung Ho | Jun 10, 2006 | Reply
Social Networking…whoda thunk it!
rockwatching | Jun 11, 2006 | Reply
Your thing on the marketing icons is really interesting, its the first time I had ever really pondered the nature of logos, it is a mix of psychology, art, and human nature. A fascinating post. mick http://rockwatching.wordpress.com