This month I had an acci­dent and was oper­ated so all my work was stopped because of health issues. I am try­ing to apply for an exten­sion for exten­u­at­ing cir­cum­stances but none sent me the form, so I have no idea of how it works.

I had to post­pone the sec­ond social media apero on 4^th of May and I could not work to gather together more peo­ple because of my health issues and because I wasn’t con­fi­dent about my health sit­u­a­tion on that day. I am still won­der­ing if I will be able to go there tomor­row.
I reached 25 guests, 32 maybe attend­ing.
I could not work to find a spon­sor and the group did not help, so I informed the group that every­one will pay for its drinks.

How­ever, the work done before the day of the acci­dent and some work done after­ward resulted in the expan­sion of the Social Media Basel group with 61 mem­bers and the fan page with 121 fans.
I per­son­ally have reached 521 Face­book friends, most peo­ple are inter­ested in social media and web.

The expan­sion of my audi­ence will start again once I will recover.

I only was able to attend a Social Media Sem­i­nar where I ver­i­fied that the lan­guage they use is Swiss Ger­man, so I was com­pletely cut out.

The only good point was that a per­son rec­og­nized me and con­tacted me on Face­book afterward.

I was unable to develop fur­ther con­tacts even after this event since my bad health condition.

The busi­ness cus­tomer I found for Blomap, a real estate in Lon­don very keen on Social Media, didn’t push me to fur­ther adver­tise its apart­ments. In addi­tion to that its assump­tion that I leave in UK made me feel yet more iso­lated, since I could not intro­duce myself to an event of an hotel con­sul­tants group where he men­tioned Blomap on Linkedin.

The client of my com­pany Swis­site Inter­na­tional, the bride-shoes online shop which requested a social media cam­paign on Face­book includ­ing group and fan page, delayed on sign­ing the con­tract and my acci­dent stopped also that. 

The Social Media Natives blog will start some­day, as soon as I will recover.

I ran some other Face­book and Ad Words cam­paigns and they brought traf­fic and some new mem­bers to Blomap. I must say more traf­fic than mem­bers. This is due to the dou­ble nature of Blomap which is either a com­mu­nity or a blog plat­form open to every­one. The adwords cam­paign gave me rea­son to think that the travel top­ics are the most rel­e­vant for the Blomap business.

The Web-developer delays con­tin­u­ously on its tasks and I am look­ing for other devel­op­ers. It is very dif­fi­cult to find some­one hon­est, pro­fes­sional and competent.

In addi­tion to that I started work­ing with the affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing pub­lish­ers and the two Ital­ian pub­lish­ers revealed a very low com­mit­ments to the job.

I applied to UK affil­i­ates on Zanox (affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion agency) in order to start a busi­ness with some inter­na­tional pub­lish­ers and the next step will be deliv­er­ing affil­i­ate links to these pub­lish­ers who will earn 30% per­cent­age of the income gained through the affil­i­ate links. 

It is highly likely that I will need to monthly pay a team of publishers/bloggers to work on Blomap, since I see that the cur­rent pub­lish­ers are not so much com­mit­ted to the project, prob­a­bly because of the unse­cure income.

The neces­sity of a new devel­oper and of pub­lish­ers con­sid­er­ably increases the risk management.

What­ever will be the next result I see two pos­si­ble future ways for Blomap:

- a non com­mer­cial way, because of lack of cap­i­tal to invest on the fur­ther devel­op­ment of the com­mu­nity, so Blomap will be a sim­ple com­mu­nity for the time being.

- a com­mer­cial way, because of arose oppor­tu­ni­ties of cap­i­tal to invest, given that I will find some investors.

Most com­mu­ni­ties have no busi­ness onto the inter­net, so it would not be crazy to think to a non-commercial way for Blomap. 

Blomap could stay for the moment as a cre­ative project of my com­pany, a sort of flagship.

How­ever, the pos­si­bil­ity to have cap­i­tal to invest could quickly change everything: 

• I could make those usabil­ity improve­ments which can make blomap much more usable to use; 
• I could trans­late it in sev­eral languages; 
• I could invest in adver­tise­ments and attrac­tive functionality; 
• I could pay bloggers/publishers and com­mu­nity coor­di­na­tors to expand the com­mu­nity and to develop the affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing busi­ness and other pos­si­ble busi­ness opportunities.
• I could have a real office.

In fact, the tourism indus­try has a very large tar­get group and it is com­pletely con­vert­ing onto the internet.

So my pre­vi­ous idea of mak­ing Blomap an online global jour­nal could not bring me any money at the moment. If this con­cept will develop it will develop later, once the com­mu­nity will become con­sid­er­ably big.

What I crit­i­cise of my work at the moment is a slight lack of project man­age­ment due to my health con­di­tion. Things changed or stopped because of my tem­po­rary health condition. 

Fur­ther­more I stopped using any project man­age­ment soft­ware and this is a very bad move, I will recover it asap.

Even the place where I live makes me feel demo­ti­vated. Switzer­land does not excel in media inno­va­tion, that’s it. 

In addi­tion to that the lan­guage Swiss Ger­mans use is an inac­ces­si­ble dialect. How­ever, I started a Ger­man course to refresh it (I had to stop it because of my health con­di­tions) and I am going to attend a three months pro­fi­ciency Eng­lish course start­ing in Sep­tem­ber in UK. Enhanc­ing my lan­guage skills would be greatly ben­e­fi­cial to com­mu­ni­ca­tion issues which are against any busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties even if learn­ing Swiss-German is rather impossible.

In fact, once I will be fine the first move will be gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion to find and con­vince investors to invest in my com­pany, very good lan­guage skills will be very useful.

 Chiara Bolognini

Posted via email from MA Media Suite — Pro­duc­tion Lab