MarCom Professional – too high barrier to entry

ByLaurel Papworth

I tried to join Marcom Professional community but – and there was no warning, it was after I filled in the form – they require an email address of someone I know on the site. Well I know a bunch of people on there, and tried about EIGHT email addresses, but none of them worked….

I tried to join Marcom Professional community but – and there was no warning, it was after I filled in the form – they require an email address of someone I know on the site. Well I know a bunch of people on there, and tried about EIGHT email addresses, but none of them worked. So sorry, Brian, Trevor, Walter et al. you get to remain a boys club.

marcom

The About page is really poor as well – in the section that should be the personality or voice of the site is:

MarCom Professional is designed and hosted by a small independent company called Social Professional set up to do just this sort of thing. We’re all BIG Web fans and we decided to do this whilst kicking ourselves for not doing Facebook :-). Saying that, we wanted to create a more cohesive social network, one where all members have more in common than they do on generic networks.

You any the wiser? No? Thought not. No contact us, no names, no “Tweet us”. Nothing. The whole thing could be run by affiliate marketers, by spammers, by News.com, by… no real backstory, such a critical oversight in targetted communities, in my experience.

The site is incredibly rigid – once you have added your company name, you can’t change it.

As we want to keep MarCom Professional relevant specifically to MarCom, we currently don’t allow company details to be changed once they’ve been approved; we’re working on methods to improve this, but they’re not in place yet.

…but you can “drop them an email”. See what I mean? They’ve erred on the side of caution, far too much in my book.

Now I’m all for niche’ing down networks, barrier to entries are fine, targetted communications are important. But this is an example of when you let marketing people build a “community”. You end up with a bunch of marketing communication tools and very few community ones.

In case you are still in doubt – there’s no “Contact Us” that I could find on the site for me to express my concerns or challenges on the site. Hence this blog post.

12 Comments

  6. hi SC.
    Have they made any comments on this? …or maybe they don’t pick up the comments made obout their site, haha. Thnx for this!

  10. Hi Laurel,

    I’m one of the team at MarCom Professional. One of the massive headaches (and I mean MASSIVE) we had on starting the network was membership registrations by recruiters and headhunters. At one point they threatened to become the majority!

    That explains why we’re a bit more careful than the any-and-all-welcome-we-just-want-big-numbers brigade. And also, I hope, explains why you can’t register as one company and then make the switch. If you, or anyone else on this thread can come up with a superior way to moderate membership to keep out the headhunters, I’ll buy the grande lattes and will also throw in a muffin!

    Of course, it goes without saying that we’d love you to join and I can only apologise for the difficulties you experienced. If you do feel like trying again, and we hope you do although I understand if you don’t, please use my email address as the someone you know… philip{_at_}influencecrowd.com.

    Finally, you are quite right about the “contact us”. For example, I talk about being part of the team on my biography on the site, but that’s no good if you don’t know to click on me in the first place. So we will be updating the Contacts page today.

    Thanks for ranting about this… your feedback is most welcome. Philip.

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