This implies not only usabil­ity improve­ments, which I am work­ing on with a web-developer, but also the expan­sion of the com­mu­nity and the con­ver­sion of the com­mu­nity in business.

Adver­tis­ing

It is clear that I need to spread the word, there­fore I started adver­tis­ing the web­site through a few days cam­paign on Face­book which was localised in UK. That brought some new adopters to Blomap. I am plan­ning to do another cam­paign very soon in USA. 

Events

I even decided to organ­ise the first Social Media Apero in Basel which can help me find busi­ness part­ners or investors, adver­tise Blomap, find new mem­bers and by all means it will help me make a name for myself in the Swiss Social Media “soci­ety” and further.

Research in the field

I will soon start a new blog www.socialmedianatives.com which is only a domain now. I want to start a research about the new gen­er­a­tion and inves­ti­gate their approach to social media which I am sure to find inno­v­a­tive. Beyond my enor­mous pro­fes­sional and per­sonal inter­est in these top­ics I believe that this will help adver­tise my busi­ness and projects. I hope to meet a lec­turer of the St. Gallen Uni­ver­sity at the social media apero to speak about this project.
The Reasearch Cen­ter for Infor­ma­tion Law at Uni­ver­sity of  St. Gallen in Switzer­land is part­ner of the Berk­man Cen­ter for inter­net and soci­ety at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity for the Dig­i­tal Natives project, which have sim­i­lar­i­ties with my research, though my research would be much more spe­cific on Social Media. 

Web-development

I am wait­ing for the web-developer to make var­i­ous usabil­ity improve­ments, I am look­ing for imme­di­acy and brevity and I hope to get them as soon as pos­si­ble.
The web devel­oper is even going to cre­ate a func­tion­al­ity on Blomap to allow html links.
They are essen­tial to start work­ing with a bunch of affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing pub­lish­ers I selected. 

Edi­to­r­ial stance and plan

My edi­to­r­ial stance is clear: I want the con­tent to be reli­able, trust­wor­thy.
That means meet­ing the expec­ta­tions of the com­mu­nity.
It is a spe­cial­ist and renowned per­spec­tive that adver­tise­ments which speak against the prod­ucts are some­times more prof­itable than ads pro the prod­ucts. So I am not wor­ried about the results of affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing pub­lisher team’s real­is­tic reviews on prod­ucts they should advertise. 

My edi­to­r­ial plan will be par­tially related to the affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing links and par­tially to gen­eral com­mu­nity needs of get­ting inter­est­ing con­tent which the edi­to­r­ial team is pas­sion­ate of.
Gen­er­ally speak­ing report­ing and shar­ing infor­ma­tion is what peo­ple want to find in a community. 

Chiara Bolognini