There is no disputing that Tastyfresh.com is an international community. It always has been and always will. The only problem with it being international is that we have not built a local community at the same time. This has always been a concern of mine. In the past, we've tried local message boards, but either they were never used or the people using them never interacted with the other boards. We've tried to push the idea of groove fellowship, local groups who would meet once a month, but there wasn't a good way of recruiting or coordinating these efforts. We've even tried to promote labels and artists as well through links and profile listings, but that content kept getting out of date faster than we could update it.
Until the recent advent of social networking, the best tool we've had on Tastyfresh.com for meeting likeminded people has been the message boards. There is nothing wrong with that, but I believe that this fact has also kept others from becoming active on the site.
I've talked at length before on the boards about the disparity between forum members and people who view the site. In September 2009, we had 5,938 visitors. Currently, we have about 400 members on the forums (minus a few spam accounts). If you do some simple math, that means that only 6.7% of the people who visit this site have taken the effort to join it. If you look at those who have posted at least once, that number drops to 275 members. That's only 4.6%. When you look at the numbers, we have a very small community and a large number of casual readers. I would like to change that.
Over the past couple of months I've been researching a product called Jomsocial and reading up on how to run social networking sites. Given our myspace, facebook and twitter addictions, it seems that the best way to keep up with an individual has changed from a message board to a profile page. In fact, profile pages have always been part of what I've wanted to do here. Every few months I get five or six emails from people looking for DJs. Every week or so, there is one about where people live. Then there are the almost weekly "where can I find Christian producers" ones. If the members of this site could just have profiles, maybe we could help those new to the site make these connections more easily. After reviewing Jomsocial, I showed it to the senior staff and they all agreed that it was a solid enough idea to keep pursuing. And this week, Jpuddy set up a demo server for us to do some testing. It really is turning out to be a great tool.
So, you are probably wondering what Jomsocial is. It is a social networking component that can be easily integrated into Tastyfresh.com. It will give every member here a profile page. You can "friend" people already on the site and invite others to join Tastyfresh.com. You will be able to form groups just like other social networking sites. By including this, you will also be able to more directly contribute to Tastyfresh.com's content as I will also build in a tool for article submissions. If we like what you write, we'll publish it. It's that simple. There's a lot more that Jomsocial can do, but one of the more impressive things is that it can be connected directly to your Facebook account allowing content changes that you make in Facebook to be migrated to Tastyfresh.com as well. In short, the staff and I believe this is a good next step for us to take in expanding our presence in the scene.
The only catch is that Jomsocial doesn't come for free. It is a commercial product and will cost us $150. As always, when the site comes across an expense outside of hosting, I turn to the community to invest in it. Even in a small community, $150 is not a large amount to raise. If fifteen people give just $10, we'll be done. I don't want you to blindly invest in this site, so please research Jomsocial for yourself at www.jomsocial.com and pray about it. If you don't feel led to give or that this is the right direction to go in, don't feel obligated to support this effort. If you do however see like we do the benefit in bringing social networking to Tastyfresh.com, please consider supporting this endeavor. If you have any questions about this, please let me know and I will address them. Once you're ready to contribute, all you have to do is chip in.