First off we want to thank everyone that has visited, provided feedback and
have made contributions to mvCommunitymap.com. Secondly, I apologize for the
length of this post, but I do feel the need to clarify some issues.
We did anticipate some skepticism from the mvCommunity and I apologize for
not responding to your posts yesterday.
There are two reasons why we haven't publicized everyone in our database.
# 1, We have to respect the Users privacy and confidentiality, not
just end-users, but vendors as well. As a vendor, how often do you advertise
the tools that you use to run your business. We don't unless we thought it
would have a positive impact on sales. So for an end-user how would
marketing "We use MV" positively impact their sales?
Secondly, which I thought might have been too obvious, is that we
are a business. mvCommunitymap does provide a free service to the entire
community, users and vendors. It does not however provide free advertising,
except to User Groups, they get their group profile displayed at no charge.
Why, because generally speaking a User Group is giving back to the
mvCommunity by providing networking opportunities and operating at cost.
Every one else will need to pay for the advertising.
Since we are a business, yes, we hope to get some new business out of this
venture. Not by poaching, but by and through advertising. We can say
confidently that more companies have heard of mvCommunitymap and TRI-SYS
today than on Monday. Will it lead to more business? We don't know, that's
the gamble of advertising. But, while advertising our business, we have
been able to give something back to the mvCommunity. Something that the
mvCommunity can use to advertise itself, in our opinion.
This is not a scheme to scam you out of your client lists. In fact, for
those of you that understandably, don't want to release your customer names,
we offer you a way of contributing, maintaining the anonymity of customers
and getting some free advertising. If you want to participate, supply us
with a list of your clients, but ONLY include your internal client number or
some other code that can uniquely identify them to YOU and their zip code.
This way you are not releasing any customer identifiable information to
anyone. And, in return, when anyone clicks on the map marker, we will
display "This location is verified by Your Vendor Name Here."
Please explain to me if we are missing how this would violate A) your
confidentiality with your customers and B) how we would be able to poach
from this type of list. We do however see a downside to this. There will
be an increased chance of duplication.
We are working on a routine that multiple vendors could run against their
list to produce a uniquely identifiable code, based on user name and zip.
The trick is how do we make it so that the code can't be reversed engineered
by us to reproduce the Customer name and zip. I'm open to any ideas or
suggestions.
We have been made aware, this morning, that some countries zip/postal codes
are a bit more accurate than the US and the location revealed is too
accurate. We are working to rectify this issue, but if anyone else has
concerns such as this, please let us know.
As we originally stated in our announcement, what really is going to make
this site powerful is the participation of the mvCommunity. We are happy to
work with you to address any concerns that you may have. We know that this
site can benefit the entire Global mvCommunity with your help. The stronger
this site is the more it will benefit us all.
A posting in CDP, asked why should we be trusted. Well for most of you we
haven't earned that trust, so I'm not asking you to trust us, I'm just
asking you to participate in the process for now and we plan to earn your
trust as time goes by.
Again, thanks for your time and feedback.
Sincerely,
Curt Stewart
mvCommunitymap.com
A world view of the MultiValue Community
(p) 262-432-3897
(c) 262-227-9619
www.mvCommunitymap.com
Mapping MultiValue Users Worldwide!
View my LinkedIn R Profile
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