The Trusted Site Study: Where Small and Midsized Businesses Go on the Net to Answer a Question or Solve a Problem- Wally Bock, Author, Keynote Speaker, Article

The Trusted Site Study: Where Small and Midsized Businesses Go on the Net to Answer a Question or Solve a Problem

When small business managers who use the Net have a business problem, they most often head for business publication sites for answers, but chambers of commerce and associations could seize the top spot with simple changes in their Web sites. That’s my conclusion from a survey of 315 small business managers who are both experienced users of the Web and members of a chamber of commerce or association.

Because we found associations and chambers had a special "trusted" relationship with their members, I’ve chosen to call this the Trusted Site Study. It began as a feasibility study for a business idea of mine, BusinessExperts.net, which wound up not succeeding.

Objectives

The objective of the study was to determine two things. The first, since it began as a feasibility study, was to determine whether small business managers would use a library of quality, screened business expertise if it were made available on the Web. The answer to that was a resounding "Yes!" The folks that we surveyed regularly use the Web as a source of business information and searched for the kinds of articles that BusinessExperts.net would gather in one place.

The second objective was to get some idea of how business users actually go about searching the Web to answer a business question or solve a business problem. I found that, right now, business publications such as Inc. Magazine, lead the pack in terms of sites our small business managers are likely to visit. But I also found that chambers of commerce and associations have a special relationship with their members that could propel them to the top of the list if they were to provide more information on their sites as well as make some other site changes.

Where They Go For Information

We asked our email survey participants, where do you go on the Web when you have a business question? Here are their responses.

67.3% go to a business publication site
60.6% go to a search engine
59.4% choose a chamber of commerce or association site
47.9% choose a site devoted to small business issues
12.1% choose their local library’s site
4.8% choose their local newspaper’s site.

In addition, 18.4% mentioned a variety of other types of sites not listed above.

Our respondents offered an average of 2.7 answers to the source question.

On those statistics alone, it would appear that business publications are the clear leaders of the pack with search engines coming in second, but popularity is not the whole story. We also asked our respondents in follow-up interviews what their actual search process was.

Our business users went first to their bookmark file. That file might contain the business publications, chamber of commerce, association, and other sites. If they did not find an answer there, they then went to the search engines.

My conclusion from this is that search engines are as popular as they are among business searchers primarily because the businesspeople are not finding the answers they want on the sites they go to first.

One reason is that many chambers and associations do not have sites. In our survey group, only 48% reported that their chamber of commerce had a Web site and 68% reported that their association had one.

Comments On The Sites

In my follow-up interviews, I asked our business users for their comments about the various types of sites that they visited and their usefulness in finding answers to business problems.

Search Engines

Search Engines were viewed as a "source of last resort." Our business users went to them when they couldn’t find answers in other places. Search engines as we use the term in the study included true search engines, such as Excite, and InfoSeek, as well as index/catalogs such as Yahoo, Mining Company, LookSmart, etc.

In general, our users felt that if they had to use a search engine they were in for a long search. In general, our business users felt that search engines returned far too many irrelevant results and that their ranking and relevancy systems made no sense.

Feelings on this issue got pretty strong in our interviews. One interviewee put it this way, "When I know I have to use a search engine, I have to psych myself up because I know I’m going to be angry and frustrated for a while."

Business Publication Sites

Business publication sites were the most popular of the sites that our business users went to. Two publications stood out far above the pack in terms of perceived value. They were the Wall Street Journal and Inc. Magazine.

Inc., especially, was mentioned for its variety of helpful features. In addition to articles, which many business sites have, Inc. also has several self-help features and chat features.

Our business users like the fact that articles on business publication sites were editorially screened for content. That definitely increased the value of those articles in their eyes. They also valued self-help features like Inc.’s Virtual Consultant.

Chats and discussions did not fair so well. Comments from the folks we interviewed were that the chats and discussion groups tended to be full of self-serving comments by consultants, information service vendors, etc.

The other feature which had highest value on the business publication sites to our users were searchable archives of articles. Having access to an extensive library of editorially screened information seems to be the prime value of business publication Web sites.

My conclusion out of this was that the editorial screening of article content seems to be very important to our users. It helps establish value and removes the need for them to do the evaluation step themselves. The extensive size of archives was important as well. Our users disliked overtly commercial pitches masquerading as information and seemed quite able to sort out wheat from chaff from this issue.

Small Business Sites

While small business sites were relatively popular relative to other sites coming in at 48% use, they were, in some ways, almost as frustrating to our users as the search engine sites.

Our users found small business sites to be poorly organized, and full of information of extremely uneven value.

As one of our interviewees put it, "there’s lots of stuff on those sites, but I never know what’s good information and what’s bad."

Our users like the fact that there was extensive information on many small business sites but often found that the sites were merely pointers to other sites rather than holding quality information themselves. What that lead them to was a series of searches where they went to a site, followed a link, found it to be less than valuable and returned to the main site only to begin the process again. Poor site organization and design were mentioned frequently by our interviewees.

My conclusion is that while extensive information is important to our business users, it’s equally important that content be filtered or screened in some way and organized on a Web site that helps people find the information they want.

Association and Chamber Sites

Association and chamber of commerce sites were the sites that our business users wished would be better. I found that they undertook slightly different types of searches on chamber sites and association sites.

Users searched their association sites for information related to their specific profession, industry, or business specialty. This makes sense since these are the organizing principles around which many associations are designed.

On chamber of commerce sites the searches tended to be for more general business purposes. For example, our business user would go to a chamber of commerce site to seek information on managing accounts receivable, but would use and association site to see how other similar businesses handled accounts receivable.

Our business users liked the membership directories on both chamber and association sites. They used those directories in two ways. One was to find potential vendors, but the other, somewhat surprising to me, was that they used the directories to find either similar kinds of businesses or people that they could view as experts.

There were two major dislikes for chamber and association sites. Our users felt that their chambers of commerce and association Web sites were primarily marketing tools for the organization, rather than member benefits. One of our interviewees put it this way, "They tell me over and over again why someone should join, or why I should buy a book from them, or how easy it is to register for an upcoming event. What they don’t do is help my run my business better."

I need to be clear here, the comment that you just read was not about chambers of commerce or associations in general. It was about chamber of commerce or association websites.

The major frustration our users had with their chamber and association sites was that they didn’t have enough information and had poor organization. We asked those whose Chamber of Commerce (48% of participants) or Association (69% of participants) had a website how they rated the helpfulness of the site when our survey participant was looking for information to solve a problem or answer a question.

	Association	Chamber of Commerce
Lots of help with problems and questions I have	7.9%	1.3%
Some help with problems and questions I have	61.1%	17.8%
Hardly any help with problems and questions I have	25.5%	74.3%
No response / no opinion	5.6%	6.6%

Chamber and association sites though, did have something that no other site seems to have and that is a "trusted" relationship with members. Our interviewees told us again and again that they trusted their chamber and association for many reasons, the most common of which was that they had a personal history with the organization and knew many of the people who were either members or staff. They wanted the organizations they belonged to to meet their information needs because they felt that the organization would provide resources and a certain amount of screening. The problem, in many cases, was that their organizations simply did not do this.

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