Medical Mingle is a young site that launched on September 24, 2007. In launching the site, Andy Hale, Creative Director with OneSite (the company that created Medical Mingle for us), told me the following about the most important thing in getting Medical Mingle off the ground.
Andy said: "Well to be quite honest I think the biggest thing is just as I mentioned, making the site a little more 'free-spirited'. Understandably, ads and advertising are serious factors on sites but then again they can also add a bit of leeriness of people wanting to really post - if they don't see much activity and see mostly ads and not much content they might think it's not on the up-and-up.
What I would do if I were you is start a viral marketing campaign, and get 10-20 people, and have them post regularly - start talking - and basically make a 'street team' that works online. Their job is to get activity going on the site. Then when people get to the site they'll see actual activity. At least in terms of social networking, people lurk a lot - part of the fun of most networks IS just browsing peoples pages. On some of our other networks we have a lot of traffic from people who just browse pages (looking at photos or videos etc) but may not actually have an account. And once they feel they have a) something to contribute or b) find there are people OR content to interact with they'll sign up".
Our goal is to make Medical Mingle a valuable and prominent site in the health care and medical community. To do so, we need leaders like Andy mentioned, who will make a commitment to "to get activity going on the site".
I'd love to see more new blogs (we need a lot more non-recruitment related blogs), people responding to blogs that people have posted, more activity in the forums, more photos, and a lot more videos. We also hope that our members will join the groups that are appropriate to them.
I'm not sure what we're going to do yet, but we will do some special things for people that join this group, and are the driving forces that will "pump up the volume", which in turn will "pump up our membership numbers".
I would love to count on you to be one of our leaders. Are you up to the challenge? Go Go Go!
Sites like ours grow by both providing something of interest, and by people (including members) telling other people about us (anyone working in the health care and medical field). People joining this group are those who will make a commitment to tell everyone they can about Medical Mingle, including health care professionals, as will as students studying to become health care professionals. Remember, the more members we have, and the more people participate, the more value people will find in joining us, and being active with us. We hope you join our membership team, as it's extremely important to our success.
