B2Bridge

There's a lot of dispersed knowledge on the web on b2b marketing, but a lack of a one-stop shop to access this collective intelligence. And social bookmarking sites such as digg.com are more broadly and differently scoped, submerging more specialised topics such as b2b marketing. That where BeeTooBee.com comes in. B2Bridge talked to its originator, Brian King.

Like Digg, BeeTooBee is community driven and aims to provide 'new avenues of thought leadership for interactive marketing [...] in one place'. The current focus is on marketing blogs, where a lot of the leading thinking seems to take place, but there is also room for white papers, webcasts, academic papers and other resources. Users can submit links, either anonymously or after registration. The latter gives you access to the community features, and keeps a record of submissions, comments and votes. Submissions are in a holding queue until they receive 3 votes, after which they're publishing on the home page. With time, this threshold may increase.

BeeTooBee uses Pligg.com, an open-source content management system developed for social bookmarking sites. Brian developed the idea last autumn, and the website has gone live early 2007. The major part of visitors comes from the United States, but a significant part of visitors comes from Europe and Asia. Traffic is still limited, but encouraging for a start-up with only modest marketing support so far. According to MarketingProfs, there are about a quarter of a million marketing professionals in the US, and probably about 10% of these are in B2B. This sets BeeTooBee's benchmark for success.

Starting up takes lots of animation and moderation. At first, Brian was the prime content provider of the site, but now gradually the community is taking over. Some off-topic submissions, some in exotic languages or with a commercial motive are removed to safeguard the quality of the site, but Brian is committed to maintain the integrity of the voting system, which is entirely user-driven.

As the community takes over content development, and the site stabilises, Brian can focus more on the promotion. At B2Bridge, we're very pleased to have BeeTooBee around, and wish Brian good luck with his project. As B2B marketeers, your participation will be key to the success of our own social bookmarking site.