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Leveraging the Power of the Community 239

Advanta’s Ideablob

Advanta, which focuses on small business credit cards, insti-
tuted a unique small business idea contest where people
could submit small business ideas and win $10,000. The
concept was to create a living breathing community of ideas
under the banner – Ideablob. Their offer was “Submit your
idea. Get votes. Win $10,000.” While contests are relatively
common in the social networking world, it was a unique
approach to offer this in the small business arena, to have
monthly contests awarding $10,000 to the best idea. These
ideas were voted on by the users. The website had reason-
able traction with about 30,000 unique visitors according to
Compete.

1. Quality of Content (value-add) 3

2. Quality of Conversation 3

3. On Consumer’s terms 4

4. Virality/Advocacy 6

QuickBooks Community

QuickBooks (Intuit) launched an online community lever-
aging its already active physical community. The online
community has strong content and active blogs in the dif-
ferent expertise and industry areas. It is rich with content
and touts 10 specialized blogs. They currently have signifi-
cant traffic with 90,000 unique visitors. That number has
doubled from the previous year.

1. Quality of Content (value-add) 7

2. Quality of Conversation 8

3. On Consumer’s terms 8

4. Virality/Advocacy 7