The Business Exchange. BusinessWeek's answer to the Question, "How are you evolving?"

For those unfamiliar, BusinessWeek has taken a leap into the world of social media and crowdsourcing by launching the “Business Exchange.” Think of it as Facebook meets Digg meets BusinessWeek-filtered type content.

Much like my experience with Twitter, when I first joined the Business Exchange (BX) my interest level was very high, but soon trailed off. I understood that this community offered benefits to its users via information and networking opportunities, but something wasn’t drawing me back. That being the case, I felt it would be worthwhile to contact the community manager for BX to see what steps have/are being taken to grow the community and increase the frequency of usage.

Ron Casalotti Director of User Participation at BW was kind enough to provide me with a extremely thorough look into the exchange as well as address my question specifically. Below is the communication from Ron and my subsequent thoughts:

“So, why go back? What is the value?

BX (as we refer to it) has high Google rank and indexing. For example, the BusinessWeek home page (businessweek.com) has a Google rank of 8 out of 10 – not bad. BX, only out in the “wild” for three months, already has a Google Rank of 7. And so, your activity on BX can be indexed by Google and found by other users giving you “plus” page views as we link directly to the originating site.

This BX effect rubs off on its registered users. This is demonstrated by doing a Google search on your name. BX is the 4th entry on the results (see attached) – not bad for a profile that’s only been in existence for 13 days (Nov. 20). And so it is a great vehicle for advancing your personal brand. That justifies why to register – but why continue to visit?

BX is an efficient new touch point for people to see your online content. Add blog posts or articles you’ve written to the appropriate topics (we have over 700 and rising each day). From your current blog entries:

Birds and the Mules of the Web 

Buy 1, Get 12 Free: How to save the Album 

Recap of Black Friday

Every entry can likely find a place to be added to BX. So, by being a repeat contributor to BX you get plus traffic, at no cost, and the opportunity to expand your personal brand.

But what can you get out of return visits? Short answer – the benefit of the wisdom of the crowds. How so?

BX is NOT a targeted search engine. We would be foolish to try to compete with, for example, Google News. Our feeds add fresh articles and blog posts as a supplement to user added items. But they cannot identify which items or sources are the most important.

BX IS a social network of like-minded business oriented professionals. Where, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like is about you and the people you know (or groups you identify with) as the coalescing factor, in BX the individual business topics (created by the community as a folksonomy – not prepared by us as a taxonomy) are the coalescing factor.

The intelligence of a group is higher than of any single member. Even if you know 95% of all there is to know about a specific topic, if another BX user has an interest in the same topic and can add something you don’t already know, you’re better off after visiting than you were when you got here. By each of you adding content to your topics, other BX users will benefit and add theirs. As we add more social features, the ability to connect with new like-minded users will benefit all.

BX saves you time. The single most common comment we received from consumer testers across the levels of tech-savvyness, was that in order for them to use it BX would have to save them time. It does, and here’s how. Doing research on a topic? Go to Google News and search on it. You’ll get lots of results. Then, review the results to determine which article, from what source is the best for you to review. That takes time. In BX, each topic has a “Most Active” tab. Items added to BX only populate that tab if a human being (as opposed to our supplementary incoming feeds) has determined that the item is worthy of their time. They “vote” with their clicks. The more positive actions our users take on an item (added by user, read by users, saved by users for future review/sharing) the higher the score the item carries. And so, you can go to the “Most Active” tab in any topic to see which items “people like you” (like-minded business oriented individuals with an interest in that specific topic) already have vetted as having value."

My own thoughts:

The value of BX can be looked at from the perspective of two different audiences (although these audiences do overlap in many cases).

1.) Publishers: Most bloggers and journalists understand that it makes a great deal of sense to distribute your content wherever it is relevant, especially when that venue is free. As Ron alludes to in his first point, the BusinessWeek brand ranks very well with Google and indexes high among keyword searches. By submitting blog entries to the BX not only are you giving your posts a higher and more permanent spot on the web, you’re also putting it in front of a web centric audience of savvy publishers and demanding readers all while aligning yourself with the BusinessWeek brand. And by creating his connection between yourself and Businessweek, you’re getting one step closer to exposing your content to those information seekers who aren’t on DIGG, or Twitter, etc but rather go to tested traditional resources for information.

Although it’s made quite clear that the content within BX is an aggregate of private users and not BW authors, it lives within an environment that the non social media folks are more comfortable with. From the perspective of publishers, these are all reasons enough to go back to BW often as it (in my opinion) offers people like myself much more in return than it asks for.

2.) Information Gatherers: As a person who often is seeking out specific topics of information, I find that tools such as Google search no longer are able to meet my objectives. More often than not, I want to leverage the human filter to dig into the massive repository of content on the web. Tools such as Mahalo, Digg, Reddit, etc are doing all of this but in many ways are still broad. What BX is trying to accomplish here is carve out a niche within this field of information dissection to bring a specific class of business and technology oriented content to its users. I don’t want to say that BX necessarily filters out any kind of content, however from what I’ve explored so far, the general understanding among this community is that there is a certain genre and style of information that is appropriate for this exchange. As the user base grows, I would imagine steps will be taken to ensure that the content stays as relevant as possible to avoid some of the pitfalls that DIGG has seen in terms of people abusing the system.

Going back to my original point, I have found that within this environment I have had a great deal of success finding relevant and timely information on topics I have searched for. I entrust the sentiment of like minded individuals to guide my information search on BX and even if it isn’t by any means the ONLY place I will go to research, it will certainly now be ONE of them more often than not. With the help of Ron, BX will certainly gain traction in terms of growing and engaging its community when so many of its rivals in the more “traditional print media” space.