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Badges, We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges

By Matt Lawrence, Biznik Director of Community

Posted Friday, January 21st, 2011

Except when badges are really cool and they help increase visibility and get you business, then badges are very cool. Biznik highlights member status with these colorful badges. Here is a list of the current members that have attained each one of these badges and what the badge means (and how you can get one!)

181 members have the Expert Badge. To earn Expert status, a minimum of 4 of the business-related articles you author must be selected by Biznik for inclusion in our general Articles section of the site while maintaining a rating by the Biznik community of 8 or above. Get published!

215 members have the Connectors Badge. To earn a Connector badge, 10 people you have invited to Biznik must have followed your invitation link and signed up. Invite someone to Biznik!

There are currently 11 Welcome Posse members. The Welcome Posse are Biznik members who know the ropes and who can help you get a leg up on making the most out of your Biznik experience. They are volunteers and choose to welcome new members because they value this community. If you have questions about how Biznik works, this is a good person to ask! To date, 11,050 members have been welcomed to Biznik by a Welcome Posse member, the first member being welcomed on April 16, 2010.

980 members donned the Event Host Badge in 2010. Event hosts contribute to the community by hosting Biznik Events such as workshops and business networking socials. A “Biznik Event” is one that has been selected for publication to the main calendar. The badge displays the number of Biznik Events that were attended by 3 or more people. Host an event!

There are 10 Ambassadors. Biznik Ambassadors are energetic cultivators of the Biznik community in areas where Biznik has not yet established a presence. They have demonstrated a level of enthusiasm and commitment to the Biznik community that sets them apart. If you are interested in being a Biznik Ambassador, drop us line: sparks@biznik.com.

Thank you to all the amazing community members who have made this year engaging, thoughtful and exciting. The comments in Biz Talk, the articles and in the event discussions have enlightened and educated hundreds of thousands of people in 2010.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 21st, 2011 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Ambassador, News. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.scn.org/~abt Keith Gormezano

    As someone with both a Connector and Event Host badges, I thought that there would be more people with Connector badges. Particularly since membership is over 50,000.

    I think one reason there isn’t is that most of us can’t always give someone a join link.

    An example is when I give someone my business card which lists my Biznik profile and states that I have 13 reviews or compliments for my Seattle based QuickBooks and Quicken set up, review, and training services, help, support, and classes on site.

    If someone decides to join, from what I can tell the Biznik web site does not note from the cookies that the joiner came in as a result of my specific link (member’s profile) being entered (versus coming from the results of a search engine search) and also does not ask the joiner how they heard of Biznik to give that member credit.

    Perhaps, that could be changed where the web site will insert the name of the profile visited if someone clicks on join after visiting it and new members can also type the name of the person who referred them and we can double the number of connectors on Biznik.

  • http://www.biznik.com Lara Feltin, Biznik Cofounder

    Keith, your suggestion is an interesting one, however it does not seem reasonable to give credit for someone joining Biznik simply because their profile was visited in the same session as the new profile creation. It is not uncommon for a visitor to the site to view many profiles at one time. Stumbling upon your profile as a result of clicking on a comment you made in an article someone found through a Google search does not equate to you inviting that visitor to join Biznik.

    We do provide a custom URL for those who wish to invite new members outside of the ‘Invite’ tool, but it does not send them to your profile.

    Your profile is at http://biznik.com/members/keith-gormezano

    When inviting others to join at your invitation, they need to go to: http://biznik.com/join/keith-gormezano

    Note the first URL is a link to your profile in the members directory. The second URL is a link to the Join form. By containing your perma-link (the name of your profile tacked on the end).

    If a user is invited to Join Biznik, they expect to find a Join form. It would be confusing for the user (and extremely poor User Interface) to be redirected to another member’s profile when they were attempting to create their own profile.

    If your business card contains a link to your profile, that is asking the person to view your profile and does not equate to an invitation to join Biznik. If you were to include the link to the Invite page on your business card, be warned that it would not contain any of your profile’s content.

    You commented that with 50,000 members it’s surprising that more people don’t have the Connector badge. I disagree. The Connector badge is not easy to obtain. A Connector is someone who’s invitations have resulted in 10 new members. It’s easy to send out a lot of invitations to join Biznik. It’s not easy to get 10 of those people to follow your suggestion and join Biznik.

    If you’re concerned that someone joins Biznik at your verbal prompting without using the Invite URL that contains your perma-link, then you should use the ‘Invite form’. Doing so will associate the person’s email address with your invitation. If that person creates an account with that email address at a later date, you will get credit for the invitation. It’s the only sure way we’ve devised to count actual invitations to join Biznik vs. casual references to the community.

    NOTE TO OTHER READERS: You may find your own custom Invite URL on the Invite page. Simply login to Biznik and click the blue ‘Invite’ link in the upper right corner of every page.