Site’s Community Platform Delivers Useful and Original “Expert Generated Content”

Business.com today announced the launch of Work.com (http://www.work.com), a Web 2.0 site designed to help the more than 25 million U.S. small business owners run their businesses.  Work.com features unique “How-to Guides” for more than 1,000 business topics, ranging from start-up basics to advanced management techniques.  The Guides are written by business experts who can now share their expertise with others through a new form of “Expert Generated Content” (EGC).  Work.com is being launched by Business.com, the leading business search engine and directory. 

“More small businesses are turning to the Internet every day, in fact many times a day, for help in running their businesses,” said Jake Winebaum, CEO of Business.com.  “What they find are search results or articles.  Our research shows that neither of these options serves the time-starved, ‘get it done yesterday’ needs of small business particularly well, so we’ve created Work.com to help entrepreneurs solve their business problems faster and easier.”

Searches yield comprehensive results, but these results are often overwhelming, and are not edited or organized for the needs of small business.  Internet articles are informative, but don’t often contain actionable next steps and links to solutions on the web to help quickly solve real business problems.

Work.com’s How-to Guides, on the other hand, combine the editorial voice and learning aspects of articles with the action-orientation of search results.  These concise guides are authored by experts in the Work.com community and combine the best elements of wikis, blogs and collaborative directories in this unique new content form.  Work.com’s Guides are offered in a streamlined, consistent, easy-to-use, one-page format, helping the small business owner find the answer quickly and efficiently. 

Each Guide contains:
• An overview of the task
• Step-by-step directions for accomplishing the task 
• Deep links to the Web sites recommended by the Guide’s author/expert as the Web’s best resources for getting the task done

The Guides are “Expert Generated Content” as they have been created by a community of authors, experts and entrepreneurs.  The Work.com community platform allows users and business experts to:

• Write a Guide – Users can write their own guide on a new or existing topic.  These authors will receive a member profile page and an overall expert rating based upon the community rating of their Guides. 
• Comment on a Guide – Users can comment on published Guides, add or challenge the expert’s recommendations, and receive feedback from the expert.
• Rate a Guide – Users can rate a Guide on a scale of 0-10 based on its usefulness, and each Guide features the community’s aggregate rating.

About Work.com
Work.com is a Web 2.0 site built for small business, launched by Business.com.  The site enables entrepreneurs to solve their most pressing problems and to realize their most compelling opportunities.  Work.com accomplishes these objectives through its unique “How-to Guides” that combine the informative, editorial aspects of articles with the action-orientation of search results.  The Guides are “Expert Generated Content (EGC)” as they have been created by a community of authors, experts and entrepreneurs.  This community of business experts can author Guides, comment on Guides and rate each Guide to contribute to the Guide ranking system.  The Guides are organized according to Work.com’s “Taskonomy™,” an intuitive and powerful tool that allows users to navigate between related tasks.

About Business.com
Business.com (http://www.business.com) is the leading search engine and directory designed and organized strictly for business.  It provides professionals easy access to business products, services, companies, news and other business information to help them get their jobs done more efficiently.

Business.com was founded in 1999 by eCompanies.  With more than five years of growth and three consecutive years of profitability, Business.com was recently named to the Inc. 500 as one of the top five fastest growing private media companies.  Still privately held, Business.com has attracted leading investors including Benchmark, Institutional Venture Partners, Evercore Partners, Reed Business Information, and McGraw Hill.
 

Tags: small business, business.com, work.com, how-to guides, urlwire

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Work.com Launches To Help Small Businesses Tackle Their Most Important Business Tasks
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