Chamber’s Forum 2.0
Yesterday the Chamber launched its new e-newsletter, Forum 2.0. Now, I have heard that there has been some concerns about the name . I would like to educate everyone on how the name was derived. The e-newsletter was originally going to be named “ACCESS Lakeland” until I did some research and found this and this. So we decided that a new name was needed. I tried to generate a new name, and didn’t come up with anything. A co-worker threw out the name Forum 2.0, and we all laughed; until we thought about it. You see our formal printed newsletter is called the Forum for Business Monthly. So as a play on that, and the fact that the e-newsletter is coming out twice a month. It worked. Is it fancy and impressive? That depends on who you ask. The Chamber employees would like to think that our collective efforts are impressive to every reader who ventures on to the site. So it is what it is… a twice a month newsletter that summarizes our blog and keeps our members posted.
In other news our QGIV site is doing well. We have had more transactions in the last day than the last 2 months combined.
… and the blog, well not one person has commented online. I have received a few comments via email, but that’s been the extent of our online
interaction. Please lets hear from you.
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June 19th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
It’s interesting what factors lead to a more popular blog. I think that there is a huge interest in this, but still questions remain in how to make it viable. I have been active in a political blog – http://www.raisingkaine.com. Not that I am trying to share/sell you on my politics here, but if you go to the blog you will see some factors that make it successful.
First, the blog allows for guest bloggers. There are threaded replies to posts. It becomes a community blog site – gaining large numbers of visitors. You can apply the same concepts and make the chamber’s blog a success.
As an example, I started a blog on PolkVoice. PolkVoice is a great site to cross post – given that my interests include doing business in Polk County. However, only a fraction of visitors to the PolkVoice site are interested in business related topics.
The vast majority of the visitors to the Chamber’s blog are interested in business related matters. So, imho it makes sense for the chamber to setup a blogging solution that allows other local business people to host their blogs here. What’s in it for you? Advertising revenues. Also, it will result in much more activity because it will involve many more people/companies. And many of us will all have RSS feeds on our website so it will grown exponentially.
Here is a free blogging solution that RK uses: http://www.soapblox.net/blog/frontPage.do