The Hindu Business Line : For the small guys

A free Web-based business-to-business (B2B) tool that allows businesses to build networks, engage in interest groups, advertise products and services to buy and sell, recruit human resources and partner with organisations?

The recently launched MyTradeBook.com says this is the description that fits it.

Anton Koulakovskii, Director Sales, Marketing & International development, Mytradebook.com, explains that the company’s B2B tool is targeted at the SME (small and medium enterprises) segment.

The company’s research is focused towards social networking.

“We analysed the trend of social networking sites and realised that amalgamating the concept of social networking with the B2B marketplace will help businesses to expand their reach and add to the global appeal. We also did a thorough study of leading B2B sites, primarily their service offerings and value additions. A comparative study of B2B services offerings has given us unique leads with regard to value additions for users,” he says.

Just like other social media, this can be used as part of an overall Internet marketing strategy by companies of all sizes. Although it was developed to help small and medium size businesses showcase their products and services, it does not rule out large companies.

“Having a MyTradeBook.com account can help large organisations increase and sustain brand awareness with businesses from their target market that have presence on the site — and the same organisations in the near future may choose to purchase banner advertising space on MytradeBook.com (a feature currently under development), thus taking their marketing even further,” says Koulakovskii.

Also, the users’ advertisements posted on MyTradeBook.com can be shared on other social media sites.

Any person who sees the advert can up-load it to a social network where they are most active and share it with their contacts. Or the link to the same advert can be e-mailed to anyone. Moreover, the same user adverts can be shared between MyTradeBook.com users, and targeted to relevant interest groups.

For example, a Web site development advert can be directed to Interest Groups related to business start-ups and Web site development. This can be referred to as behaviour-targeted marketing, as users in interest groups are served only relevant adverts.

While the business concept was very clear to the founders, the one hurdle they faced was related to IT infrastructure.

“We have actually done the modelling for the data integration and design for data warehousing in association with our vendor for IT Infrastructure and most of our technology platform is outsourced.

Data security is also another aspect where we have opted for the best solutions available. Currently, MyTradeBook.com is hosted on a server in Nottingham, UK. In the short term, we have plans for moving to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2),” says Koulakovskii.

How does he expect to generate revenue? “We are going against the current marketing trend of falling advertising revenue, and make money from banner advertising. This is why we made the site completely free so the more people use the site, the better, as we can serve more page impressions.

In the future there may be some additional paid-for services, but the core functionality as it is today will remain be free of charge,” he says.

Paromita.pain@gmail.com

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