Individually, we are one drop.
Together, we are an ocean.

- Ryunosuke Satoro

By David Hunegnaw

AboutOurWork will be participating in the Ohio Growth Summit this week and as a part of our involvement, wrote an article on the importance of business-to-business networking, online and offline.

Studies have shown that anywhere between 51% and 70% of small businesses STILL do not have a website. If you’re one of those business owners still without a website, we can help.

We’ve spent the past year building the AboutOurWork platform and along the way collaborated with dozens of friends, family, strangers and chambers (of commerce) in order to ensure that we are building the right tool, at the right time, and for the right audience.

AboutOurWork was invited to visit our new friends, WebLink for their annual Summit last week. We made some great new Chamber contacts, ran intro some existing Chamber friends and most importantly, built some solid relationships with the folks at WebLink.

Cynthia Boris of Marketing Pilgrim said it best in her recent Marketing Pigram post

For the small business owner, social media is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it’s a relatively inexpensive form of online advertising but on the other hand it can take up a lot of time to deliver only minimal results.

It goes without saying that technology has played the role of matchmaker for years. For example, hundreds if not thousands of websites exist to help match singles romantically simply based on a profile page that includes personal information along with likes and preferences.

And the formula for success is pretty straight-forward… the better the profile picture and the more kick-ass the personal profile, the better the chances for online dating success. And with that simple formula, dating sites like Match, eHarmony, and POF rendered the idea of attending awkward blind-dates and speed dating events a thing of the past.

Our goal is to do the same with B2B networking.

Tags are like keywords that you can add to your AboutOurWork company profile that help will you get found in the major search engines – ie: Google. Tags are also important for finding potential business-to-business opportunities via MatchUp, our B2B recommendation engine.

Your business connections have real value. Connected allows you to leverage the value in your business connections, is a smart way to shorten time to trust and can help your company secure new business faster.

Great interview with Nick at DoesWhat on AboutOurWork including our inspiration for MatchUp, our target audience, and advice for new startups.