BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange Launch

BusinessWeek launches their social media/web 2.0 beta site called Business Exchange today. Last evening, I started an early exploration of the initiative by going to the BusinessWeek’s home page - www.businessweek.com - and clicking on the Business Exchange header in the navigation bar. The first step was very simple, already having a LinkedIn account. All I need to do to set up my profile in Business Exchange was to type in the email and password associated to LinkedIn. Next I arrived at a screen where I accepted a few typical terms and conditions, entered my email and a new password. Moments later I received an email from Business Week confirming my registration and providing me a link to complete my registration so that I could gain access to all the features.

Once in, I elected to edit my profile. First I needed to unlink my profile from LinkedIn. This was easy enough to do by just pressing the highlighted link named unlink my profile. Next I made a few edits to my profile but very few.

Then I started building my topics of interest by selecting the Your Topics navigation in the left sidebar. This took me to a list of Most Active Topics. Lehman Brothers was in the number one spot followed by AIG, Credit Crunch, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and then Social Networking beat out the 2008 Election for the top five. Having had enough of the top four, I choose Social Networking. The next screen titled Social Networking provided me a synopsis of the content that was available under the categories, Most Active, News, Blogs and Reference. I learned the topic contained 3,038 news items and 3,152 blog items. I decided to select Most Active and received 475 recent posts on the topic. I selected the first one with a really catchy title: “B2B Advertising in Social Networks are Increasing”. It took me to a blog post in Community 2.0. I scanned the article, hit the back button on my browser and then saved the article. The article was then listed in the Your Activity section of the left navigation bar.

Next I went to select Your Network in the left navigation. Here I had three choices You are Following, Following You and Mutual. Of course I wanted to find out if anyone was following me so I selected Following You, no comment. I decided to try You are Following and then Mutual and got the same message – no users being followed. I realize I need to build my Business Exchange network.

My gut reaction from the not-enough-time-but-this-has-potential perspective is that, I liked it. I sure there are other tools out there like this but I am a BusinessWeek junkie, I trust their resources to aggregate content that I would be interested in, their network of thought leaders and I loved how it pulled in my LinkedIn profile to make it easy to get started. Check it out.

- Paul Duning