Biznik.com
CURRENT COMMUNITY SIZE: (as of 4/01/08- 9000 members)

COMMUNITY DESCRIPTION: Per Biznik- “Biznik is a business-building social network for indie professionals. That means folks who own and operate their own businesses, whether they are the head honcho of one or a team of twenty. Accountants, fashion designers, writers, sex therapists, business coaches, attorneys, marketing gurus, soap makers – and countless others – are all part of the Biznik mix.”

Our Take: At the core, Biznik is currently a Seattle based group focused on professional networking for smaller businesses. It has a fairly strong community that has almost daily in-person meetings covering a wide range of topics.  The community is rather helpful for most business members, but occasionally goes through lulls of conversation at times.

Functionality and usability of the Biznik platform is well-structured compared to other community platforms, but at the cost of some “geek centric” features that more robust forums may have. It also has a variety of articles in a “learn” area aimed at niche-content for independent professionals. Articles within the “learn” portion of the site are created by members of the community - which produces some good content with the occasional bad-apple sliding through the typical community voting section.

Advantages of using Biznik: For a business user in the greater Seattle area, Biznik is a good place to network with other like-minded professionals seeking business growth opportunities. For out of area prospects, Biznik has fewer in-person meetings available, but does boast a profile system that has a fairly good presence on Google for related keyword searches.

Biznik provides three membership levels:

• Free Basic. The typical profile: photo, map of your location, testimonials, and basic information. You can attend Biznik events and host free events, along with limited daily direct e-mail to other members.
• $10 monthly = Active Member: Unlimited e-mail contacts. You can host events and keep the proceeds. Search engine promotion (which is being tested as we speak) with two additional URLs on your profile (perhaps a little SEO value) and your promotions sort higher than non-paying members. Video profiles/introductions have also recently been added to the service through inclusion of the Eyejot platform.
• $24 monthly = Supporting Member: Sorting of your profile becomes priority, which doesn’t have much impact in the Seattle area (after 4000 members, everyone is lost in the shuffle), however you do get rotation of your promotion for local members, as well as features for supporting members as they are released (haven’t seen any of those yet that I am aware of.) HTML signature is included in all of your posts, which may drive additional traffic to a site from the Biznik community if you participate in the conversation.

Real World Examples of Biznik in use:

Learn articles:
Online Press Release 101 - Ask the Experts in Online Community - Unethical SEO - Social Media Profile Marketing

Search Results in Google
Social Media Promotion Training profile on Biznik, Social Media Promotion Training on Google (result five by itself)

Conclusion: if you have a business, the minimal end Biznik has value in serving as a profile in a social media branding campaign. Profiles show up well in search results and have a fairly robust information level, however profile information is only going to show up on one keyword unless you have multiple members of your organization use the community. On the paid end, membership is geared mostly towards exposure within the community based upon participation- which means that paid members should make the decision to engage the Biznik community with written information.

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