Olney, United Kingdom is a delightful little town in north Buckinghamshire in the United Kingdom.  We are close enough to London for the local delicatessen, Much Ado,  to raid Covent Garden and Billingsgate for us every Wednesday night and we are far enough away to be a town of truly unique shops.  We have a Co-op, and our Tesco opened today – yep on 4 March 2009!  We don’t have a Boots.   We have a few big names in the form of banks, two real estate agents and a shop providing clothes for riding horses.  Otherwise, we are  town of independent shops providing high fashion, contemporary art, designer crafts, intriguing books, hand made furniture, antiques, carpets, interior designers,  fresh food and gifts and an extraordinary number of artists, photographers, composers , writers and charities.  Supporting this Bond Street in the Shires are the usual supporting cast of childcare, pet shops, hardware stores, garages, toy shops, plumbers, gardening centres, gyms, accountants, PR specialists, printers, graphic designers, webdesigners,  pubs, restaurants, opticians, churchs, etc.  I realise writing this list that I need to be able to automate this!  I’ll do better next time!

I like living here so I launched a community site on Ning, which you probably know is a versatile platform that permits Google Analytics.  As ever, hands-on experience is a great teacher.  Launching a community site even in a fairly prosperous self-contained town like Olney is hard-work.

1. Two rival sites developed immediately, one on Ning and one was defunct forum that has been revived. Shall I link to them?  Yes, in the spirit of 2.0, I think I shall.  Two rival sites are proof of concept, I think?
2. I used the name Olney100 which gave us the number 1  search spot – for a month.  Then oddly we have vanished.  I don’t really undertand this.
3. Our main source of traffic is still direct and when visitors arrive looking for us, they explore deeply and spend 10 to 30 minutes looking around.  I know the effect of a regular weekly blog by Much Ado on my expenditure.  There mouth watering descriptions of delicacies from Covent Garden have snaffled my fresh food budget and I am a kilo lighter as a result!
4. The Sign Up seems to lose us traffic and I have set up a guest account.  Should you come visiting use olney100 at gmail dot com with a password of olney100.  I am going to adjust the front page to let anyone in.
5. We got 4 times normal traffic during our Pancake Race which is a minor international event.  Community events are important and helping the community find and run events is as important as SEO.
6. Inevitably our bounce rates increased during the Pancake Race.  They are otherwise very low at 20% to 30%.
7. The site has encouraged a few people to use Twitter and blogs but not in the numbers we might expect.
8. I also help people out with IT hassles and I’m pleased to say that with the help of James at BT, I reduced the internet bill of one of the members by 400 pounds a year!  Half an hour well spent.
9. One restaurant sensibly delegated all their social media to one of their staff, Helen Hines,  who is a natural connector. She blogs for the “Courtyard” weekly and has launched a page on Facebook.  Until a month ago, I didn’t know that we had an Olney group on Facebook.  I wondered if Facebook is competition for Olney100 but I also thought that the goal of Olney100 is to support social connections and prosperity.   Providing smooth interfaces with the world is what we are about!
10. Quite quickly I stumbled over old animosities in the town.  That’s a good sign because it means I’m under the skin of things but I’ll have to report back on how they are resolved in the social media space.
11. I’ve talked to a couple of large firms about advertising on the site to finance it.  Younger staff members were curious but unable to read the site at work!  They had to do that at home.  So far the feedback that I have been getting is that the town is not big enough to advertise in.  This seems peculiar to me – if a market is big enough to trade in, it is big enough to advertise in.  I think, and watch this space, they mean that old marketing techniques are too expensive to use at local level and I suspect they don’t have models to do cost-benefit analyses of community based websites.  Any ideas on this?

That’s all for now.  I’d love your comments and suggestions and do pop over and have a look.  We are Olney at Olney100!  Guest log in using olney100 at gmail dot com with password olney100.