Biznik Blog

With the launch date for Biznik 2.0 getting closer by the day, I’ve been thinking about things to add and things to leave out. (We’ll be launching it just prior to BizJam on June 9th – yes, really I mean it this time). One of the things I was thinking of leaving out was the “how did you hear about Biznik” field, because I thought people didn’t use it very much. But when I actually queried the database, I was blown away when I discovered 48 percent of Biznik members have provided an answer. The results are very interesting, and I’d like to share them with you:

How did you hear about Biznik?

Not really any big surprises here – Biznik is spreading almost completely by word of mouth, between friends. After that, it’s Google that’s performing the introductions. One surprise for me was that Lara and I have been slightly more effective than blogs at spreading the word about Biznik (although those numbers are probably skewed toward when we first started Biznik and told everyone we knew about it). Print media, not surprisingly, barely registers on the chart because so far, Biznik has been virtually ignored by mainstream media.

One of the things that doesn’t appear in the numbers is the number of people who noted that they had heard about Biznik from multiple sources before they made the move to sign up. Which confirms something I’ve always suspected – word of mouth works particularly well only if you hear it from more than one person.

Perhaps the most common way that people find Biznik within the Web search category is while searching for friends, and the first thing that pops up is the friend’s Biznik profile. A common answer is: “Googling for someone else!” In those cases, I credited the connection to Google, rather than the friend. But it gets kind of blurry sometimes, as with this response to how someone heard about Biznik:

“My best friend, Google!”

Google is certainly Biznik’s best friend when it comes to search engines, with members crediting it 125 times by name. By contrast, Yahoo was mentioned only 7 times, and MSN just 3 times.

Here’s some more of my favorite responses:

• “Google – I typed in ‘business networking’ and finally found something that didn’t seem cheesy. “
• “Atmospheric vibration.”
• “Browsing the web looking for networking that doesn’t suck!”
• “From someone with style and class, but I can not for the life of me remember who it was.”
• “Sticker stuck to my forehead at Tost.”
• “I once licked Dan’s nipple.”
• “ML was laying down some phat beats one night at a party when Dan whispered (okay, yelled) something in my ear. I was just about to slap that dirty bastard in the face when I realized it was something about a business network for revolutionaries. Sorry, Dan!”
• “I was surfing the web for ‘business networking.’ Found a link which led me to Biznik. That was a good day.”
• “I searched Google for Seattle networking events. I was led to another website that had a listing for an event Biznik was sponsoring/holding. I said to myself – ‘Dude, Mike, you gotta do this’, so I did.”
• “The voices in my head told me about it.”

And my all-time favorite:

“I was kidnapped one Saturday while traveling through Costa Rica by a female motorcycle gang calling themselves the Thundering Biznikas.”

So, how did you hear about Biznik? Do these stats match your experience?

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 10:52 am and is filed under News. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.