Thoughts on BT Tradespace
Aug-2008
I have just been playing around with BT tradespace, something which I know Dan Wilson has been involved quite heavily with. Why not visit the Vendlab Tradespace page.
BT are onto a good idea with this offering, which has been around for a while now. However they have missed, or at best are missing, the boat in terms of functionality.
With its blogs, videos and recommendations, BTspace is trying to combine social media functionality with a simple way for businesses to get online. Whilst I think that there is room in the marketplace for some sort of MySpace for business which creates some sort of social experience around business listings, tradespace’s functionality is very limited. The service is very static and does not have the facility for content to be drawn from elsewhere. This is very much the trend at the moment e.g. Friendfeed, plaxo and facebook.
Presumably there are some companies out there who would appreciate a simple way of creating a web presence, however for businesses which already use blogs and trade online, are they really going to duplicate their content on Tradespace. Take the products and service section for example, is anyone already selling online really going to go through the laborious process of listing all their items here if they all ready sell them elsewhere. This is where a link to eBay or Amazon would be useful.
It looks like ArenaFlowers.com have done their best to use Tradespace (see Arena Flowers Tradespace page) – any thoughts Will?
On an optimisation point, as ever with these services the platform does not give access to the the <title>. A way I always get round this is by changing the company name from to something like “Vendlab – online marketing consultancy” to get some extra keyword in there.
Hello Trevor,
BT Tradespace needs the same kind of attention as you would need for a regular website and would certainly work well for small business with little or no Internet presence. But for businesses which are Web 2.0 aware and have their footprints in the Social Media arena, managing the BT Tradespace page is quite tedious. For Arena Flowers, we port older content from our blog to the BT Tradespace page on a regular basis to ensure that it is continually updated. It is the same for the images and products as well as it doesn’t take an XML feed. A Squidoo like offering from Tradespace would be much more beneficial for businesses.
Take at look at at ‘Show and Sell’ it’s absolutely brilliant and a must have for any Tradespacer!!!! Can’t tell you what an impact it’s made to my business!
Louise, would you like to fill us in on what show and sell is?
take a look at http://www.showandsell.me.uk
Brilliant group of people really helpful know tradespace inside and out and really helped me