Discuss Cooking is a real community on which members can create a profile with information, favorite recipes and pictures. Furthermore, members can really interact with each other. And if you are looking for a culinary event, you can check out the calendar.

The website is managed by Social Knowledge, a company specialized in online communities. Through technology they try to bring people with similar interests together in order to harness the distributed expertise of the community members. Social Knowledge teaches companies how to benefit from online communities. One of their many customers is Wrangler with the Wrangler forum.

Where do you find important and influential bloggers and how do you know that they will continue to be read by numerous followers? We want to launch Who’s Cookin’ on the Flemish market, but we cannot limit ourselves to Flemish blogs. After all, language is not a border in the blogosphere, is it?

I recently found out that there are a few websites that can give you a list of top-read blogs on particular topics. Bloglovin’ is one of them (www.bloglovin.com). Providing a tool to easily follow your favourite blogs, it is used by over 300.000 people worldwide. You can look for blogs by selecting a topic or you can also select countries. Unfortunately for us, Belgium is not yet listed.

Technorati is another website that links and rates blogs (www.technorati.com). If we take a look at the Food blogs, ‘Serious Eats’ seems to be the most read. This is a food blog and community which is updated daily. It looks really good …. And delicious!

Sources: www.bloglovin.com, www.technorati.com, http://www.seriouseats.com/

Pauline

The most retweeted Mashable tweet on March 27, 2010 proves me right. “15 Essential Social Media Resources You May Have Missed” enlists 15 popular posts from the site earlier this week. 10 out of 15 posts include a numbered list in the title! Just take a look at “5 Stellar Ways to Explore Space Using Social Media“, “6 Easy Ways to Score the Best Deals with Social Media“ or “4 Ways Non-Profits Can Use Google Buzz“. Or how about “3 Useful iPhone Apps to Help File Your Taxes“? I believe I’ve made my point.

Why do we keep making these lists?

1. People have the tendency to cling to numbers if they see them. Numbers are simple and attractive, exact and secure. If a post states 10 reasons why Twitter is popular, we will generally accept those reasons to be true even when foundation is missing.
2. Our brain can handle far more content if that content is clearly structured. Given the fact that time of internet users has become precious, numbering content can speed up the process of reading. Numbers organize our thoughts.
3. It is a well-known fact that people remember things better if they are enlisted. Try memorizing a full text. Then summarize it in 5 main points and memorize again. The difference is obvious.

Now, are you planning on starting an influential blog any time soon? Start making those beautifully numbered, claiming-to-be-true lists!

Evi

If we take a look at the top 10 ratings of the Flemish television channels VTM, VT4 and Vitaya, we notice that four programs out of 40 have something to do with cooking. This is one program out of 10, which in my opinion is very significant. The number one program of the popular channel VTM, is ‘Mijn restaurant’ and it is viewed by almost 1 million people (938.695 to be exact). It’s worth mentioning that ‘Mijn restaurant’ is already at its third season and still as popular. We consider this proof of the lasting cooking trend. Cooking is not only trendy in the traditional media, it has also found its way online. The ‘My Open Kitchen’-community of Solo now counts 72.991 active members, and 7.743 recipes are posted and shared. Who’s Cookin’ definitely has an audience out there!

Pauline

Hacker Croll stated in a personal letter to Twitter, that his actions were solely meant to bring some attention to the security weaknesses of the website.

If you know that an average of 50 million Tweets are sent out a day, security is a major concern for Twitter.

Laura

A few months ago, Digg – a social network site where people can discover and share content from all over the web – implemented in-line advertisements, also known as Digg Ads.

Only four months after they launched, these kind of ads have proven to be successful and a win for users, advertisers and, maybe most importantly, for Digg itself. Do I smell a new trend in the SNS-world?

I hear you wondering: “How are the Digg ads different from other online ads?” First of all, ads are integrated in the normal Digg content, marked with ‘Sponsored by …’. Users can digg or bury ads just like they can with all the other content on the SNS. Popular ads are rewarded with lower CPC’s: the more diggs (clicks) an ad gets, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Of course, the opposite is also possible. This system ensures that the ads on the website are of high quality and relevant to the members of the community.

At Who’s Cookin’, we see great potential in this advertising model and we are thinking about implementing it ourselves. This seems to be a great way to reach our chefs and clients with ads that are relevant for them, and that is exactly what we are aiming for.

For more information: http://about.digg.com/node/545#

Pauline

Choosing the right business model for our internet start-up isn’t that easy. After reading an article in the Economist it was easier to compare business models. I realized that they could be combined to make the most of it.

First we have the cost-per-click model. Skeptics point out that the click-through rates on display ads on social network sites are rather low. However SNS are very popular for advertisers. The audience they can reach is very high and, more importantly, the ads can be targeted with laser-like precision because of all the information available on the SNS. On top of that, advertisers have a great return on investment. There could be a viral marketing effect when friends share their experiences about products or services. Research has shown that recommendations from friends have significant importance in purchase decisions.
From: The Economist

A second model we will implement is the subscription model. A basic profile will be free of charge but for an extended profile we will install a yearly fee. Chefs can upgrade their profile with, for instance, more photos and videos of their previous work. However, this subscription fee won’t influence the order of appearance of our search engine. The order will be determined by clients who give ratings. LinkedIn also uses the subscription model for premium services.

Another model we could use in the future is the Asian model. You can sell games, virtual goods, virtual gifts, custom backgrounds and other paraphernalia to personalise a SNS page. The American company Hi5 even introduced their own virtual currency, the Hi5 coins. Inside Network, a research company, estimated that sales of these virtual wares could grow to 1.6 billion dollar in 2010 in the United States.

For more information about these business models you can read the article on the following link: http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15351026.

Laura

The trend of the Foodie 2.0 was already announced by The Food Channel in 2009. Food lovers want to connect through the internet to talk about their passion. They want a virtual community to share their experiences, recipes, favorite restaurants and suggestions.  

Online communities even exist for people who follow a specific diet such as the raw food community eat.rawfood.com where ‘rawfoodists’ from around the world meet and network.

In Belgium we have My Open Kitchen from Solo where both professionals and members provide recipes. On the website you can rate the recipes, give comments and even create your virtual cookbook with your favorite recipes. So the next time you are hungry, visit www.myopenkitchen.be.

An important American culinary community can be found on Yelp.com where food lovers give restaurant reviews. According to Nielsen Online and Alexa the website gets on average 4 million reviews a month and has 15 million monthly visitors. Everyone can write a review on the website after creating a profile. Yelp claims to be all about real people writing real reviews. The reviews on the website aren’t limited to restaurants, there are also categories such as shopping, nightlife and hotels. The restaurant reviews are listed by city and by feature. If you want to Yelp yourself or plan a trip to the States you should check out their website.

Laura

Location-based social networks

LBS allows members of a community to share their exact location and activity at any moment using GPS via their mobile device. In an update feed, you can see where your friends are at, add comments about a restaurant or a bar you’ve been to, let people know you’re going to a concert downtown… And if you’re lucky, a friend might even be in the neighborhood and accompany you to it.

Foursquare

One year after its launch, Foursquare has grown to be one of the most popular and promising LBS. It effectively combines ‘location’ and a playful aspect. You can share your experiences, earn points for logins and even become virtual mayor of a location.

Mobile fever

After the trend of creating online profiles (e.g. Facebook) and regularly updating your status (e.g. Twitter), location-based social networks clearly are the new hype that fits into the mobile internet fever. More and more smartphones support LBS as well. Let’s all keep an eye out for these rising stars…

Evi

While browsing the web earlier today, I stumbled upon a website called Social Media Today. Designed as an online community for marketers, bloggers, media professionals etc., it allows for discussion on the current and future state of social media, and the way in which social media are influencing the way people do business.

But the discussions on social media are only the tip of the iceberg. An entire section of the site (called Social Media School) is devoted to keeping readers up to date with the latest tips, tricks and technology of social media. If you want to implement social media in your business, the site is definitely worth checking out. And if you feel you have something to add, you can simply join the discussion by signing up and adding your own blog to the mix.  

Nicolas