Are any marketing or
advertising jobs seeing pay increases? How can you gain the most from social media and Twitter? What can a Fortune 500 executive learn from a successful CEO of a small company?
Bizmore will
allow small- and medium-sized business owners looking for answers to tough questions to go straight to the source and get advice from experts and peers about a variety of business and marketing
issues. The question-and-answer platform, similar to Yahoo Answers or Ask.com, adds a social community element that also allows owners to network in a way that is similar to LinkedIn.
Former
CNet.com's Alice Hill and Business 2.0's Jeff Davis, the duo heading the new site, brought in a dozen experts to moderate the Q&A conversations. A staff of writers will focus on business-related
features.
The site crept online this summer to start building a following, but the official launch comes later this month with support for several types of private networks. Companies can launch
public or private forums. Some will remain open for anyone to join in the conversation, while others will require a membership and fee. Services from a menu of items will offer document sharing,
storage space, and more.
Administaff, which provides human resource support to about 8,000 small businesses, is the first company to come on board with a network, according to Hill. "They wanted
a place to answer HR questions," she says. "Many HR questions are repetitive, but if you tag every topic in the forum it gives members a method to search on a topic for answers at a later time. It's
like building a living archive of the best HR advice."
Hill says they are also working on a mobile version of Bizmore. Company and personal profiles won't make it in time for the launch later
this month, but shortly after. "We want to add a marketplace -- an area where people can list their services," she says. "We spent a lot of time making sure to limit direct solicitation in the Q&As.
We hired really good moderators, and you won't find people trying to sell their services just anywhere on the site."
Bizmore is supported by deep-pocket backers too, such as Vistage
International, a global network devoted to business advice and owned by Thomson Reuters, Oracle's Larry Ellison, and Michael Milken. The plan is to go head-to-head with sites, such as American Express
Open Forum, in hopes of becoming the go-to place for business advice.
Aside from membership forums, Bizmore will generate revenue from companies sponsoring specific sections of the site and
Google ads. Search engine optimization (SEO) has also been a consideration.
Hill says Bizmore won't allow search engine crawlers to index the closed networks on the site, but the majority will
become searchable on Google, Bing and others. "I'd love to type 'How to determine if state sales tax is required' into Google and have the answer from Bizmore appear in the search results," she says.
"Our model is to make the site open and crawlable."