BT Tradespace, BT’s MySpace, offers new digital marketing opportunities for UK business

BT recently launched their version of ‘MySpace for business’ called BT Tradespace which for everyone whos familiar with MySpace is exactly what the name would suggest. For those who aren’t, Tradespace lets businesses create their own microsites which act as sort of extended profile pages for their business information. Basic company details such as name, website, address, phone numbers as well as social media features like blogging and community development are also available to Tradespace owners.

It would be easy to be sinical about what BT are doing with Tradespace. The idea is a good one, a sort of 21st century digital marketing embrace of the humble phonebook or yellow pages, but if this was not backed by BT it would undoubtably get lost in the vortex of unrealised web 2.0 pipedreams. Tradespace works beautifully, the software is quick and simple, the basic version is free and once they get the users and the visibility online I’ve no doubt it will take off and become a good traffic generater for a lot of small businesses.

The biggest criticism that I think will come of Tradespace (from the digital marketing community not its users) will be that it really doesn’t offer anything new or even particularly interesting- arriving relatively late in the social networking day without offering much in the way of a USP (unique selling point).

Blogging has been done, so have photo albums and I’m not sure how useful these will be to most businesses- i suppose images of products would be useful, but probably not in the photo album format which behavours more like you’re looking through a friends holiday photos than browsing an inventory.

Podcasts and videos are great but anyone who has time to maintain this level of Tradespace activity probably already has a pretty well functioning website of their own, this would just duplicate content and create more work. Events and member rating, again not exactly innovative but could be of some use when Tradespace’s traffic level increases.

Community features like recommendations, invite a friend, RSS feeds are again nice ideas but in my experience these aren’t really tuned to the way business and especially UK small to mmedium sized business operates. People in most SME’s (who I’m assuming Tradespace is predominantly aimed at) and their main customers, i.e. the great british public, have honestly not long come round to the idea of email as a valid form of B2B or B2C communication- in some industries (like digital marketing) take up for e-communication has obviously been higher but in many of the sectors where tradespace could be most useful the majority of communication is still made by phone or even post. I can’t help feeling that a lot of what Tradespace offer in good intentions could be lost on way to market and could even alienate users from the whole experience.

In a way I hope I’m horribly wrong about BT Tradespace and it spawns into a business directory, social media monster as I think it could a)be good for UK small business and b)be good for UK digital marketing. However I think for most business Tradespace could prove more trouble than its worth in terms of maintenance time.

Worth noting however BT seem to be gearing Tradespace towards a big SEO coup. They give SEO keyword recommendations in the backend and are based on search friendly social media principles. Theoretically Tradespace pages could start appearing all over search listings for corporate names and services (unless Google get concerned about BT’s growing user base which could potentially damage Adwords revenue and cull their rankings).

Also should point out for any SEO’ers there seems to be some ripe linking territory available here and its hard to see how you could go far wrong listing basic company details and a link to your main website off of Tradespace.

Check out the Vanilla Digital tradespace page to see the site in action.

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