Build or buy?

Posted on June 13, 2007 by Chris Stock

Someone asked me why they should subscribe to eNeighbors instead of building their own neighborhood website. I get this a lot, so I thought it made sense to publish it here.

Here’s why you should subscribe to eNeighbors, instead of building your own neighborhood website:

Permanence – Even if you have the technical expertise to build your own website, what happens when you move? eNeighbors will always be there to support your neighborhood.
Updates – eNeighbors continually makes improvements to its product. Subscribing to eNeighbors ensures that you get the latest and greatest.
Convenience – Why hassel with hosting, domain name registration, backup, and security? Let us do the work for you.
Support – We provide e-mail support for your entire neighborhood.
Savings – For $82.99/mo. you get access to a proven product with a robust feature set, world-class email support for every resident of your neighborhood, and you can reduce the cost of neighborhood communication by eliminating your costly newsletter.
Registration – Building a website is one thing, getting the neighbors to use it is another. Our registration process will get the majority of your neighborhood online.
Certainty – eNeighbors has a proven product with a tested user-interface. You know exactly how much it will cost and that it will work.
Money Back Guarantee – We’ve never had to refund a client yet, but if you aren’t completely satisfied with eNeighbors, we’ll refund your money in the first 30 days of use.
Why wait? – eNeighbors can have your site up within 5 days. Building your own site will take months.
The Network – When you sign up with eNeighbors, you join a network of other neighborhoods that also use our service. Our customers provide us with valuable suggestions that you can take advantage of. For example, one person told us they want the ability to post classifieds in other neighborhoods. Great idea.

Ultimately, eNeighbors is more than a website, it’s a communication solution for your neighborhood. Does your neighborhood really need website? Not really. You need better communication.

eNeighbors: High Relevancy

Posted on June 12, 2007 by Chris Stock

Transparent Real Estate has a good post on hyperlocal websites as it relates to the real estate industry.

To sum it up, eNeighbors has the most highly relevant user-base to which a realtor can advertise.

Let me stress that eNeighbors is not a tool for realtors. Our customers are neighborhoods and their residents. Of course, that’s what makes us such a desirable target for realtors.

I’ve had several realtors ask me if they can pay for their neighborhood to get an eNeighbors website and my answer is always no. In order for a neighborhood website to be of value, we must establish a relationship with the board of directors or other neighborhood leadership.

However, if you’re a realtor and you want to get your neighborhood online. I would suggest that you email the board president and let them know about eNeighbors. Ask them to consider it at their next board meeting and forward them the eNeighbors website address – www.eNeighbors.com for more information.

Once the neighborhood is online, you can advertise for free in the classified section if you’re a resident. You can also sponsor the website to maximize your exposure whether you’re a resident or not.

eNeighbors Mailer

Posted on June 11, 2007 by Chris Stock

eNeighbors is taking the hassle out of mailing website Welcome Letters to your neighborhood. We can now complete the mailings on your behalf.

Not only does this make it more convenient than ever for your neighborhood to “go online”, but it may also save you time and money.

You have two options: (1) Postcard, or (2) Security Envelope.

	Postcard ($0.75/piece)	Envelope ($1.09/piece)
100 pieces	$100	$134
300 pieces	$250	$352
500 pieces	$400	$570
1000 pieces	$775	$1115

*All prices above include the $25 processing fee. Note that special circumstances may exist that alter the quoted prices.

If you’re new to eNeighbors you can learn more about our sign up process on our website.

eNeighbors Features: Classifieds

Posted on June 9, 2007 by Phil

We’ve recently put together a small sales team and subsequently developed some training materials to get the guys up to speed on all the features of eNeighbors. So, I thought I’d follow suit here on the blog and post a series of entries tied to the different features that eNeighbors offers a neighborhood.

First, there are 5 core communication features that we offer:

1. News
2. Events / Calendar
3. Groups
4. Classifieds
5. Bulletins

In addition, there are other more standard web features:

1. Online Resident Directory
2. Contact Form
3. Architectural Request Form
4. Resources (this is for all your HOA documents)

The first feature, I’ll cover is Classifieds since it has been our most popular so far. As of this morning, there have been 253 classifieds posted on eNeighbors from about 15 different neighborhoods in the past 10 weeks.

1. Classifieds are free

2. It’s so easy to post a classified, you can do it in about 2 minutes. All you have to do is click “Post a Classified”, type up your ad, preview it, and then click “publish.” Your ad is instantly added to the site for everyone to view.

3. The top 3 most recent classifieds appear on the Home page.

4. When you post a classified, it is viewable by anyone in your neighborhood that has registered on the website.

5. There are 4 different categories you can post to:
– For Sale
– Wanted
– Neighborhood Services?
(things like babysitting, pet sitting, yard work, etc.)
– Professional Services
(things like, Mary Kay, tax services, house painting, etc.)

6. Finally, each classified post is automatically put into the eNewsletter and sent to every neighbor that has chosen to receive the newsletter either daily, weekly, or monthly.

Browsing vs. Searching vs. Sharing

Posted on June 4, 2007 by Phil

The other day, Techcrunch ran a guest post from David Sacks (founder and CEO of Geni and previously the COO of PayPal). I’m going to attempt to summarize his point in one sentence:

Locating content on internet portals has evolved from browsing to searching to sharing.

And today, Facebook has this latest stage of “sharing” figured out way ahead of Yahoo and Google who are still in the search phase of allowing users to locate info on the web.

Ultimately, the sharing phenomenon is more about “pushing” content rather than “pulling” it since the content is recommended by your trusted sources (i.e. your friends list).

So, given that this is the eNeighbors blog, I’m obviously going to tie this into our long term vision and content model…

eNeighbors is building a hyper-local network of neighborhoods, and our registered user base is tied to a physical location (as opposed to the 18 different profiles you have on MySpace under various aliases and which MySpace can offer no data at all about where you really are on the planet).

Once this network is in place and has enough adoption, it inherently creates the ultimate local platform for local business advertising and referrals since the users all live in the same area.

The sharing concept of trusted content becomes extremely important when you are looking for someone to fix your roof or the best real estate agent in your area.

So, instead of going to Ask.com or Yahoo Local to find service providers in your area where you have to search at the city level or metro level, eNeighbors will be able to provide neighborhood-level information on service providers, and on top of that you’ll be able to get trusted referrals from your neighbors that have actually used the service.

I’m telling you, the top down approach to these search portals has to go, people. Demand better (and more relevant) information.

The Neighborhood Challenge

Posted on May 22, 2007 by Phil

Being part of a neighborhood board of directors is a tough job. It’s usually voluntary, so getting that extra effort not only from yourself but from the other board members is a challenge especially since the rewards are only intrinsic in nature.

Anyone that’s ever worked as a project manager knows how difficult it can be to manage a group of people who don’t always see eye to eye on every issue. Additionally, there are a number of community needs that constantly must be met.

I just finished putting together a great outline of these challenges and the corresponding solutions that eNeighbors offers to help conquer these challenges. My hope is that this document will help clarify how valuable the eNeighbors service is to neighborhoods and more specifically managed communities.

Here is the list of challenges addressed in the PDF:

– Communication
– Time Management
– Sense of Community
– Safety Concerns
– Architectural Compliance
– HOA Documentation
– Board Member Turnover
– Privacy of Information
– Community Value

View and download the PDF here

Neighborhood Safety

Posted on May 15, 2007 by Phil

I received an email last week from one of my neighbors concerning an incident in the neighborhood where an ice cream man asked a child to get in his van. The email contained a message from the local police department that was originally sent to McGruff coordinators and included a case number for anyone experience a similar situation.

Safety situations like this one have to be the most important thing a resident of any neighborhood would care about. Especially if they have children.

The email I received had about thirty email addresses throughout the chain. I know that there are over 300 homes in my neighborhood. That means that potentially only 10% of my neighbors are aware of this problem. Obviously word of mouth plays a significant part in alerting the community, but that still leaves a significant portion of the neighborhood uninformed.

The Bulletins feature of eNeighbors is the perfect tool to instantly alert your entire community of any type of emergency. I think this is one of the most valuable services eNeighbors provides. Additionally, this scenario made me think of potential integration points with local safety officials. Imagine if the city police were able to alert multiple neighborhoods by using the eNeighbors network of communities.

Learn more about eNeighbors

The Local Rant

Posted on May 14, 2007 by Phil

Ahmed Farooq has a great rant on his blog, tech soapbox, about paid reviews and how useless and ineffective they’ve become. But the thing that grabbed my attention was buried in the middle — Ahmed provides some outstanding insight to the difficulty of understanding and utilizing local data.

(The following is in reference to their product iBegin Source)

“I’ll admit people have a hard time understanding the significance – local data is expensive, and that is why we keep seeing the same re-hashed sites. Plus – local data is inaccurate. Horribly so.”

Bottom line is, guys like Ahmed have been working on the data trying to figure out a way to make it relevant. To make it contextual. To make it usable. While other sites (like us here at eNeighbors) are trying to gather the users in one place. A place where local data is again — relevant.

So how do we bring this local data together and give it to the users?

Once again, I think the reason this is so hard is because when you go to Google, Yahoo or MSN, you start at the top. Then you work your way down to the city level. Then if your lucky, you can get to your community level (this is where Ahmed’s comment about the horrible inaccuracies kicks in).

It just makes sense to approach the users from the bottom up. I understand the cost issues associated with keeping a presence in every community in the country — it can’t be done. That’s why you let the residents do it.

But the problem is, they have to care enough to do their share of the work. Why should they care? No one has made it apparent as to how they will benefit. It’s not clear how their input will make their lives better. We need a way for residents to engage in conversation with other residents and in turn provide that missing link of local information that they seek, but don’t fully understand.

Ta da! It’s here. eNeighbors provides this exact sort of communciation platform, and in turn also allows the hyper-local presence that is a perfect match for local data on small businesses at the community level.

Learn more about eNeighbors

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