Spread the Mojo: San Diego Web Startup MojoPages Gets Real World Advice on Building Communities to Review Local Businesses

kind of traction MojoPages shows with its early media partners.) Is the goal to promote Mojo’s brand name or to drive Internet traffic to its media partner websites? (It’s “absolutely to drive traffic to local media search websites,” Carder said.)

In one of the rare disagreements during the evening, Knapp told Carder, MojoPages would have more success co-branding with its media partners, while Huberman countered, “You have to control your own mojo.”

Huberman also asked a question that touched on the second key issue that Carder brought to the MIT Enterprise Forum: How many registered users does MojoPages currently have? (About 40,000, Carder answered, conceding, “Our community is very ghost-townie.”)

Carder said MojoPages’ workforce has been mostly focused on developing its search and business-rating technologies, and on search engine optimization, or SEO. As a result, the second key question that Carder brought to the event is: “How to attract and retain online community members that will contribute reviews and spread the gospel of Mojo?”

Carr suggested that MojoPages could build its community by reaching people in the online communities they already are in, including Local.com, Citysearch, SuperPages.com, Facebook, and MySpace.

Huberman offered Carder a variety of advice on amassing a Web community: Of the 40,000 users you have, she told Carder, you need to figure out, who are the MojoPages power users? What makes them tick? What are their demographics? And how can you clone them? She recommended that MojoPages work with businesses to create incentives for users to write reviews, so for example, if you write a review about a salon, you get 50 percent off your next spa treatment. Another technique for building traffic, Huberman said, is to “incentivize users,” for example, by offering discount coupons to users who sign up 10 friends.

Creating such incentives, though, will require working closely with local businesses. Carder agreed, saying, “I think the business owner is going to be the biggest contributor to our success.”

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.