What's A Directory?

Posted by Phil Kessler on June 24, 2009, 10:15 AM EDT

A business decides to set up a social marketing presence where they can do a few things - communicate directly with customers and prospects through blogs, wikis and forums, provide a venue for customer support through company posts and customer comments, or introduce new products or services to a targeted audience.  The site is membership based so users can participate and communicate, and they get a profile page themselves.

Now suppose the business has suppliers who would like to reach that same audience - how would they do that?  Concourse Connect has built in a middle layer of access, think of them as storefronts, called business profiles.  Any supplier, vendor or interested organization can create a business profile in our application. Each profile has a full suite of Web 2.0 tools so each business can set up their own community within the main one.  Here's an example of a business profile inside our Gourmet Oasis demonstration site.  Now these busineeses are addressing the members of that community directly and benefitting the owner of the Community by creating more traffic and awareness.

Would those suppliers pay for the privilege of having a presence in the community?  We have a number of ideas on how directories can generate revenue for the owners.