Ready to go....announcement time

The church was supposed to send out an announcement this past week and at today's service with an insert to the bulletin. But everything got put on hold due to an annual conference being hosted by our church. My fault- if we would have been ready before, it would have been something that we let churches that were visiting know about and how they could have the same for their community.

This past week we had a past client call back to ask for their neighborhood back. But since they had a civic club lined up, several sponsors and banner ad sponsors they were willing to pay for the rights. So we signed them up. And they are off. They already have enough lined up to pay the monthly fee (remember they get 75% of the revenue) and still be able to be the REALTORS that represent the neighborhood- and they appointed the civic club as the Neighborhood Ambassador. I know this is a little different than the plan that starts with a church or civic club, and they pay nothing and the sponsors they approve pay to support the site. We are convinced this model will insure the best participation and make sure that each neighborhood hold true to the real goal - to help the residents of the community.

So we gave them a chance and know it can work. But we are more able to gamble with a church.

Stick around and we will let you know how quickly this gets off the ground. Soon.....

While developers worked I thought of stuff.......They hate it when I do.

Now that they were at work I realized a couple of things. Things I haven't talked about before.

First, a few years ago we developed a service for our customers on the neighborhood websites that was very unique and very expensive. Tiny Web People. You've seen them; a live person walks out onto a site and talks, informs, and directs the site visitor to information or things of interest.

When we first saw it about 4 or 5 years ago, it was a grand or more to have a spokesperson video taped and made into a walk onto your site greeter. So we learned how others were doing it, (there were only a couple of companies doing it then), we developed our own software to do it our way, built a studio, recruited actors and developed a cast and began to have people on all our neighborhood sites greet site visitors, talk about sponsors, what each page was for, and just made things more lively.

From that point the service grew into what is known today as Tweople.com - Tiny Web People. Companies and website owners all across the country use them to bring their sites to life every day.

So how can we use that to help our neighborhoods, churches and sponsors better connect with the neighborhood? Well since we have the actors coming in to shoot videos for paying customers of Tweople.com anyway, why don't we have them do them for each neighborhood and the sponsors at no charge?

So that is what we are going to do - offer the church to have one of our spokespeople do a new video for the announcement page to introduce the Neighborhood Ambassador.  And for each of the 3 Channel Sponsors, they can do the same thing at no cost.

So I am writing a script for a new announcement page spokesperson that will tell visitors about First United Methodist Church of Winter Park being the Neighborhood Ambassador.

The second thing I thought of was wouldn't it be really cool if people could set up their own groups within Front Porch Chat and people could be invited to join or request to be a part of a group. Each having their own interest or purpose, like WP High students that are part of Elevate or WP Business Owners talking about employee relations, or Friends of Tom, whatever........And each group could meet on their front porch on a set day or time and talk online in private, or message each other or the group....and the one that set it up would be the admin for that group, approving or inviting others, and if someone did not belong removing them and even sharing or passing admin to others that he or she chose?

Now it would be a real social network- but within the community. After all who would you rather talk to? Your neighbors, or someone across the country that you didn't know and they may be just pretending to be who they say they are.

So I have now sprung it on my developers. And it's going to happen too.

Anyone else have any wants, needs or ideas?. Let me know. It has to be something that will make each neighborhood better and work across the board for all.

Back to work for me. And if you see a bunch of geeky guys chasing this old guy down the side walk- that's probably me in the front.

Getting ready to kick it off

So over the holidays we went to work here at My Online Neighborhood. Knowing that one person was going to monitor and manage Helping Hands, another to manage the daily content of the entire neighborhood site, and now 3 sections with multiple pages, or channels as we like to call them , for different sponsors with their own logons to change their pages - we had some work to do. When we make changes like this it has to work for our entire network of sites. And it has to make it easy for people to log in and change things just by filling in a box or two.

So our task list was set and we got to work. The goal was to send an email to the entire congregation by the end of the month and start signing up sponsors as soon as we could. So we also set up forms for those who were interested in being a sponsor and advertising their business while at the same time helping their community and the church's youth group. Those inquiries would come to us and we would help each in getting going. We didn't want to burden the church with having to explain everything. That was our job.