BT Tradespace Public Beta starts today...

Posted 7 February 2007 at 8:20AM by Ivan Croxford in Announcements

BT has released its public beta of BT Tradespace, a new online service for small businesses to use the power of social media to promote themselves online. BT Tradespace allows SMEs to communicate simply and effectively to communities of potential customers using blogging, podcasting and other tools (e.g. click-to-call and text messaging).Hi and welcome to the BT Tradespace Team blog. I'm Ivan and I'm going to be posting here regularly to keep you informed about this new service.

Today, we have released our public beta of BT Tradespace. This is a new service by BT to enable small businesses to create an online presence in minutes, with no technical knowledge needed, that they can use to promote themselves using blogging, podcasting, photos, and many other features.

BT has developed this service because we believe it is essential for SMEs to be present online as that is where their customers are looking for them.

However, getting online is a job in itself, often fraught with technical complexity. That wouldn't matter of course if the result was worth it, but getting a decent web site up and running is only half the battle. You then have to master the complexities of search engine marketing and search engine optimisation to be found on the net.

And all that was before Web 2.0 came along with social media and blogs, podcasts, video and photo sharing ...!

Our ambition is to put the power of online marketing and specifically Web 2.0 into the hands of small businesses to do what they do best - talk to their customers about their business and what interests and matters to them. SMEs do this successfully in the offline world every day. We aim to strip out the technical jargon and complexity of creating an effective online presence and let SMEs focus on the stuff they want to say to customers rather than get bogged down in the tools to do the job.

We also believe that customers should be able to choose potential suppliers through access to richer information from businesses and other customers than is currently available today from simple Internet searches, web sites or directory listings. That's why we plan to create Tradespace Community Channels that will bring potential buyers and sellers together to do business.

To help us build this service we need to have feedback from our users, and so we encourage you to sign up (free during beta) and post your comments and suggestions on our forum.

Many thanks and remember to check back soon to get the latest updates.

Ivan

BT Tradespace Team