January 10 Background
- This is a backgrounder describing site changes that will take place Thursday, Jan. 10th at noon PST (8 PM GMT). AboutUs will post to our blog about the announcement at that time at this URL ( http://www.aboutusweblog.org/2008/1/10/launching-3-new-products ) - Thanks for your interest.
- Ray King, CEO of AboutUs would love to answer any questions you have and give you a tour of some forthcoming technologies from the AboutUs Labs. That's Ray on the right. He can be contacted via email (
), IM (Skype IM: Rathbone) or phone. (+1 503-888-8808)
), IM (- Included with this backgrounder is a PDF for new customers and multiple versions of the AboutUs logo.
Contents
- 1 Summary
- 2 What's being launched?
- 3 Why would a company want to track their page on AboutUs for changes?
- 4 Why would a company want a premium AboutUs package?
- 5 How souped-up can an AboutUs page be?
- 6 How Do Premium AboutUs Pages Relate to Portals?
- 7 Why would a company want to sponsor a Portal?
- 8 What's so special about AboutUs? Some notable highlights.
Summary
AboutUs, a wiki about websites, is announcing 3 new service-based products and offering a preview of some new technology in the AboutUs Labs. Launched in 2006, AboutUs now receives 5 million unique visitors per month. The big picture of what's new today is this: AboutUs is offering professional content production services and wiki training for businesses.
What's being launched?
AboutUs is launching 3 new products.
1. Free monitoring. Any wiki page on the AboutUs site can now be watched automatically for changes - no account creation required. Wikipedia, for example, doesn't offer a service like this.
2. Premium Service Package. A Premium services package includes in-house design of your business's AboutUs page and personalized wiki coaching for a one time fee of $99. Many companies take the time to learn and design sophisticated AboutUs pages on their own, now they can get professional design and training services. See some page improvement examples
3. Portal Sponsorship. Companies can (and are) now sponsoring topical portals that aggregate business listings and functionality like calendaring and maps for cities around the world and industry verticals. Our showcase example is the Portland Tech Portal. We believe this product, plus our years of collective experience with wikis, will demonstrate that open, editable, community-built content can be and desirable to sponsors and thus economically viable.
We're also offering a preview of some new technologies that will be launched in early 08, still under development in our Labs. Please contact Ray King, CEO (contact info above) for a personal tour of those projects.
Why would a company want to track their page on AboutUs for changes?
Reputation management is one of the primary ways that companies are engaging with new social media online. Unlike blogs or other web pages, a wiki page about your company can change, it can be changed by you and thus warrants ongoing monitoring. Sometimes those changes are bad and you don't want to leave them unresponded to. Other times they are good changes and you can discover a new person online who's interested in supporting your organization.
Now you no longer have to remember to check back on the site for changes, we'll notify you automatically if any changes are made to a page about your company or any other page(s) you wish.
Right: Julia is on the Operations & Finance Team. Her background is in sustainable business.
More than 5 million unique visitors each month visit AboutUs - company pages on the site appear high in Google results pages. AboutUs offers companies a high-profile place to communicate with customers and be included in wiki-style business listings.
The future of this already highly visible site is in industry Portals, content platforms built out of individual pages that can be leveraged for subsequently created project pages.
Right: Vinh Nguyen is a designer at AboutUs. Don't you think he's done a nice job with the site?
How souped-up can an AboutUs page be?
You can do some really nice things with an AboutUs page and we can help you do them. We provide a direct link to your site at the top of your AboutUs page, but we can help that traffic to your site be as informed about your company as possible. Here are some examples of high-quality AboutUs pages to check out Page Improvement Examples
Right: Prior to joining AboutUs Content Team co-organizer Tak Kendrick worked as a journalist, writer, graphic designer and a teacher. He is one of the people who can help you Promote Your Page.
How Do Premium AboutUs Pages Relate to Portals?
In addition to heavy traffic from search, people also navigate through AboutUs by category - to discover and learn about web pages and companies that are related to each other. These categories of pages can be turned into full-featured portals, which can then be built upon further for events, sub-topics or other collections.
$99 is a great price for a company to put their best foot forward on this platform, both aesthetically and with assistance from AboutUs in relating to the world of wiki users who will be visiting their page. When you're ready to take it to the next level, consider sponsoring your industry or city's portal. It's a great way to add value to your community and win the admiration that comes with such a contribution.
Right: Ward Cunningham is the inventor of the wiki and the CTO of AboutUs. His vision of pages as bricks and Portals as walls has been key in determining product strategy.
Why would a company want to sponsor a Portal?
An AboutUs Portal is a high-value, living directory of your industry. It's got good SEO and serves as a platform for subsequent development of events listings, sub-industry listings and any number of other types of aggregation. The best example we've built so far is the PortlandTech Portal, but more are in the works as we speak and forthcoming product releases will make creation of high-quality feature-rich Portals much more common.
What's so special about AboutUs? Some notable highlights.
Briefly:
- AboutUs staff has years of experience in helping people learn to use wikis.
- Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, is the company's CTO. Three of the co-founders of WikiIndex, the world's leading wiki about wikis, are AboutUs staff members. More than 30 people - labor and political organizers, writers and artists who have used wikis in their respective fields have joined the staff of AboutUs to teach people how to use wikis. You can see some of their photos above but check out our staff pages to see the breadth of experience our team brings to AboutUs.
- AboutUs is the only wiki with an 800 number for free customer service.
- The AboutUs staff spends hours every week talking to people all over the world about how to use a wiki, how to enhance their pages on the site and how to resolve conflict online through a wiki-based ethic of constructive engagement.
- Our staff is international.
- Part of our staff is in Portland, Oregon but AboutUs also has an office in Lahore, Pakistan. Staff from Portland visit the Lahore office every 3 months. Many of the company's strategic decisions are made through a process called Consensus Polling where the teams in Portland and Lahore have equal input into decisions.
- AboutUs embraces emerging standards of openness.
- From OpenID login to easy data-export to the consensus polling technology built in-house for company-wide decision making - AboutUs eats its own dog food.
- AboutUs is already generating revenue
- Though AboutUs is a collaborative project built together by people from around the world, it needs none the less to be economically viable. Advertising revenue from 5 million monthly unique visitors to the site and Portal level sponsorships are already coming in. The new products launching today should lead to a further, substantial increase in site traffic and company revenue.
