Category Archives: Social Media
Front Porch Forum comes to Montpelier and Barre
Live in Montpelier or Barre? Know folks who do? Please send one and all to FrontPorchForum.com to check out FPF and sign up.
This fall, thanks to the Vermont Council on Rural Development and other partners, FPF has been able to bring its community building service to Vermont’s Capital region… and to the entire state.
Vermonters use FPF to connect with neighbors about snow plow recommendations, babysitters, finding lost cell phones, reporting break-ins, selling snow tires, sharing moose sightings and much more.
Please help us spread the news… we depend on word of mouth. Send people to http://FrontPorchForum.com. Thanks!
Helping Rutland and Middlebury Neighbors Connect
Front Porch Forum is now available in Rutland and Middlebury, Vermont! Please check it out and tell your friends, family and other contacts there to sign up this week.
In other Vermont cities and towns, people use their local FPFs daily to find lost dogs, recommend dentists, talk about burglaries, organize block parties, sell bikes, find babysitters, and much more.
FPF depends on word-of-mouth to reach folks, so please spread the word! Send people to http://FrontPorchForum.com
P.S. FPF is now available in every town in Vermont!
A post-modern return to citizen democracy
For nearly 20 years, the Orton Family Foundation has successfully helped people in small cities and towns navigate change in a way that honors their connection to community. Orton’s track record of using technology and process to yield strong place-centric results is truly impressive.
Given that, the quote below from Orton’s blog carries special meaning for us at Front Porch Forum…
FPF member and University of Vermont dean Susan Comerford is quoted in that same article. She says, “Front Porch Forum is a post-modern return to citizen democracy…(it) may well be the most important advance in community development strategies in decades.” She might be right.
But the coolest thing about FPF in my book is that it upends the assumed role of the Internet in our lives. It asserts that our online lives don’t have to be distinct from our offline lives that they can merge in healthy, useful, positive, reciprocal ways. And even better than that…Front Porch Forum encourages us to reconnect with each other in person, tªte- -tªte, to have conversations and shake hands and share babysitters and roto-tillers and generally help each other out. It pulls us out of our digital isolation and pushes us back into our front yards and onto the street, out to the park or the playground or the farmer’s market or the local garage to see what’s going on, to remember who we are, and even who we want to be, as parents and friends and citizens. It helps us be neighbors.
VPR Commentary: Online Networking
Hear, hear, Helen! Take a listen to Helen Labun Jordan’s Vermont Public Radio Commentary broadcast today…
Online recommendations… who to trust?
Consumer Reports takes a look at review websites this month, including Angie’s List, Yelp, and Google+ Local. While there’s a hint of conflict of interest of a review-based business writing a review about competing review sites, the authors do make some compelling points…
We think that the ability of A- and B-rated companies to buy their way to the top of the default search results skews the results. Cheryl Reed, a spokeswoman for the company, disagrees. “We don’t believe that,” she says. But Angie’s List marketing materials intended for businesses say that companies that advertise get “an advantage of increased exposure” that “can propel you ahead of your competition.” They get 12 times more profile views than companies that don’t buy ads.
Angie’s List encourages businesses to solicit reviews by giving customers free, postage-paid forms, stickers on thank you notes, and Web links embedded in e-mail invoices. But experts who study survey techniques say that can create a bias for positive reviews.
Angie’s List misleads consumers by prominently promising that “businesses don’t pay” and that it’s a consumer-driven service supported by membership fees. But almost 70 percent of the company’s revenues come from advertising purchased by the service providers being rated. Angie’s List tells consumers that it provides “reviews you can trust,” and takes steps to detect and remove fraudulent positive and negative reviews. But company investment disclosures say that “we cannot guarantee the accuracy of our reviews.”
On many Front Porch Forums, recommendations among neighbors for a wide variety of local businesses are a big ongoing topic of interest. FPF makes no attempt to aggregate reviews or score businesses… we just provide a platform for neighbors to connect and talk about whatever they like. Having a conversation with neighbors who are recent customers of a certain roofer/plumber/mechanic/etc. can be much more valuable than a couple of sentences typed by an unknown stranger.
Skunk vs. boy
#BTV #VT – My son was sprayed by a skunk acting strangely last night on South Prospect and Ledge. I called the animal control at the number listed on our Front Porch Forum. Thank you FPF for helping to keep us informed!
Posted by Catherine today in Burlington.
Lost calf reunited with mama cow in Williston
#VT – We see lost animal postings every day on Front Porch Forum across Vermont. Here’s a follow-up posting about a lost cat in Williston today…
Thank you everyone who responded! Suki is now home safe and sound:) I can’t thank you enough!
But in the same Williston FPF there was a different kind of lost animal posting…
We received mother and baby calf Saturday afternoon and the calf ran off minutes after it was unloaded. It has been seen on the VAST trail between Christmas Lane in Williston and Lake Iroquois. It is about 3 months old and brown and white. It will run as soon as is sees people but we need to try to get it back to mama who is calling for her calf. Please call if seen.
Followed by…
Are you missing a calf? She was in the pasture with my cows this morning-now inside the barn.
Needless to say, a happy reunion soon followed.
One Vermont bookstore blessing…
#BTV #VT – From Josie Leavitt of Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne… originally posted on the ShelfTalker blog:
I am blessed to live in Vermont for many reasons, but as a bookstore owner, one of them is access to an amazingly responsive free [service] called Front Porch Forum. FPF is an internet-based “regional network of online neighborhood forums.” It connects people with their neighbors.
It’s so simple, it’s brilliant. Make it easy for neighbors to talk to each other and they talk. You can only join the forum for your town, and this is great because then I’m reading about my town. I’ve gotten to know my neighbors from this. I’ve posted about a swarm of bees in my tree and what to do about them, asked for mechanic recommendations, and more importantly, used FPF as way to talk about the bookstore to people who live close enough to care.
This kind of targeted discussion is so beneficial to the bookstore. We can announce events, book talks, parties, etc. to just about every household in five towns because everyone on staff is a member of their neighborhood forum… There is something about the friendly nature of this type of free-ranging discussion with your neighbors that makes the FPF one of the [things] everyone reads daily. You can follow the saga of the missing Malamutes from the frantic posting that the dogs were lost on the coldest night of the year to the triumphant “they’re home!” posting three days later.
All of our events get posted to the forum and it generates a lot of attendance at events. The nature of the forum works best for spontaneous folks who only need three days notice to come to an event. What’s so great is the wide range of people who read the forum. Folks who’ve never been to the store will come to events because of a posting and then get on our mailing list to find out about future ones. This is a win-win.
About Blog
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more
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