Thanks for your interest in CloudProfile! Each CloudProfile will help you to be discovered and then engage the people who discover you in an ongoing dialogue and relationship. The key question to ask yourself is whether you want to drive an independent “identity”, traffic, and customer relationships to each of your three franchise locations. This is most appropriate if your franchises are spread out across several communities or geographies and each have a separate customer base. In this case, you would simply create a separate CloudProfile for each of your three locations. If your three locations all share a common identity, market, and customer base, then you could go with a single profile. In either case, for our premium offering, you would pay $50 per profile per month after a 30 day free trial. That includes everything – unlimited content publishing, search optimization, syndication to Facebook and Twitter, engagement tools, our listing service that will push your business details to over 50 different search engines data sources, and more.

In your business you also have an opportunity to act as somewhat of a hub for your local business community. With this in mind, you may be interested in the CloudProfile affiliate program as well. Through this program, you could help your business customers to solve this critical problem for their businesses and participate in the revenues that are derived from that.

We’ve had some really great interest and success stories building and we would love to work with you to help you to be successful – I would also be happy to provide you with a discount in return for your feedback and willingness to act as a case study once you have achieved some positive results with CloudProfile. If you’re interested, contact me at http://hawkinson.cloudprofile.com and I’ll help you to get rolling.

-Ale

Thanks

In the case of SMBLive we’ve built our software on top of Amazon’s cloud. There are definitely no guarantees in this world – but I am willing to take my chances that Amazon’s cloud is not going out of business.

That said, as with any IT infrastructure environment, it’s certainly possible “the clould” could go down for a period of time. Indeed, Amazon has suffered a few outages – but their overall reliability is terrific. Also, I agree 100% with you that SMBs need to be able to “control” their profile so they can:

1. Regularly promote themselves online
2. Listen carefully to what people are saying about their business
3. Actively respond and engage customers in conversations
4. See reports so they can properly track conversations and convert them into sales leads

Giving SMBs “control” of their online profile means making things truly simple – and it requires significant innovation and evolution beyond web 1.0 tools which are overly complicated and expensive. If you’re interested in seeing our CloudProfile service in action – let me know. I’d be happy to set you up with one.

Only problem with the “cloud profile” is if the cloud goes out of business. It also appears somewhat distracting. It’s like if I’m an actor and I use the IMDB profile as the marketing website for my acting career. It’s great that they’ve signed up millions of clients, but any small business that’s serious about its business is going to have something that’s a bit more within their control.