iZoca Communities – Your Town, Your Voice
Community Founder's Key
Today we released iZoca Communities. This new architecture provides groups the ability to share information with their own home town. Users can navigate to virtually any community in the United States by typing the name or zip code of the community into the search field. Organizations that want to promote themselves can post events, start discussions and share photos with their geographic community.
As individuals, people are connected to a variety of groups that share information publicly and sometimes only among members. The iZoca World Connector was created as a means for people to connect to all their groups and communities to stay up-to-date with information they want share.
Founders
iZoca is giving away keys to your community! If you are among the first ten people to create a group and promote content in your community you can achieve the recognition of becoming a founder. A link to your name will be listed on your community’s page where you can promote yourself and your business.
Todays Fix
We released a patch earlier today that is meant to decrease page load times for some of iZoca’s more active groups. Thank you for bearing with us through this transition!
Delayed Load Times
Some groups on iZoca may experience some delayed load times when accessing their groups. We are working hard to reduce load times and plan on having a fix in place soon. Thanks for your patience and we apologize for the inconvenience.
iZoca Gets a New Look
iZoca.com is the first social networking website for communities and groups providing people the ability to more effectively communicate with their world. iZoca was developed to help us connect and share information like we do in our lives. By nature, we typically participate in multiple groups including ones for work, special interest, volunteerism, team sports, and family. The iZoca platform is uniquely designed to help diverse groups communicate more effectively and efficiently online.
Business and non profit organizations have a strong need to be heard in their community without costly marketing efforts. The soon-to-launch iZoca “Community Pages” will provide groups this ability. These hyper-local pages provide organizations a forum for promoting themselves to a broad audience; for free. For example, non profit groups seeking donations for a fundraising event could simply post a request to a community discussion forum. The event itself could be posted to a community calendar and photos posted to a community album.
iZoca currently has the support of numerous organizations including the Blue Star Moms, the Military Courtesy Room at Albany International Airport, the Empire State Youth Orchestra, Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Capital Region and the Salt Lake Valley Motorcycle Riders. One trait all have in common is the need to share information in a targeted fashion: either among a trusted group of people or with their community.
iZoca was coined from the name “Zocalo” which is a town square in Mexico City. It was later adopted by other surrounding plazas in Mexico. iZoca is a derivation perfect for a social networking website that connects people to their community. We invite you to try the new iZoca.com and explore the possibilities.
Hyperlocal Communities… Coming Soon!
We will soon be releasing a new look with greater emphasis on groups. iZoca has been adopted by many who want to share information in a private setting. Later this year, iZoca will provide public groups a way to get the word out when we launch hyperlocal community pages. More details about our plans are explained in this video.
Whats been going on…
We have been making quite progress with the continued development of iZoca.com and we are getting very close to completing this next phase! The next piece of architecture is all about providing groups and organizations a voice in their community. We will be sharing more on this as we approach our launch date.
Meanwhile, there has been a few notable groups that have formed. In particular, the Military Courtesy Room (MCR) at Albany International Airport has adopted iZoca.com to communicate with the 100+ volunteers who staff the room each day. The MCR, founded in memory of John McKenna (http://www.jmckennamilitarycourtesyroom.org), is a VIP room for military personnel in transit. The private group on iZoca is used to schedule, share photos from their events and discuss issues that are important to the volunteers. Many of these volunteers have loved ones serving the United States military.
Another group that has formed on iZoca.com is Mothers and More (http://www.mothersandmore.org). Mothers & More is dedicated to improving mothers’ lives through support, education and advocacy. Today they held their 2nd annual Power of the Purse at the YWCA in Troy New York and it was a huge success! The volunteers from this chapter distributed 100′s of new and gently used purses to the residents at the YWCA. Plenty of food was donated by local merchants. They had a DJ and hair stylists volunteered to provide their services for the day.
We are very honored that Capital Region Mothers & More and the Military Courtesy Room has chosen iZoca.com for their communication needs!
iZoca Now in Beta, Share Documents!
This past October we quietly launched our beta version of iZoca.com. With this latest release we have provided more information about how people are using iZoca to connect, collaborate and coordinate with multiple groups in their lives with our expanded “learn more” page. Our latest feature is group document storage and viewing. Depending upon how your group is organized you can share your documents publicly or privately. Groups now have a variety of useful tools to help their members communicate with each other. These features include document sharing, photo sharing, calendaring, discussions and more.
Since the release we now have over 600 registered groups on iZoca and that number is growing every day. These groups range from informal social groups to national non profit organizations and businesses. It only takes a few minutes to set up a group and invite others to join and iZoca’s ease of group creation has encouraged people from across the United States and beyond to use our platform.
We appreciate your continued use of iZoca.com and look forward to future announcements on our development efforts!
Public Pages
Today iZoca launched new architecture that provides groups the option to have content such as photos, discussions and events available to everyone and anyone, even those who are not members of iZoca. This “public page” release is important because now individuals can participate in groups that have both private and public content. iZoca’s unique group networking architecture provides members the ability to stay connected and up-to-date with all their groups through the use of tools including the iZoca Calendar.
Groups and organizations can now make group content on iZoca available to the public to promote their mission, products and services. Individuals are currently using iZoca groups to communicate with others of similar interest and now with this latest upgrade, people browsing to iZoca can explore these groups and obtain information about topics and discussions that interest them. If they would then like to participate in these groups they can simply sign up for iZoca and join.
Now on iZoca, members can join groups with a variety of privacy settings and strategically target their information. For example, family photos from last week’s picnic can be shared privately with your family, discussions about a block party can be shared solely with your neighbors and Jimmy Buffet’s touring schedule can be made public for all to view and enjoy. Information is delivered to iZoca members in an easy to use format to keep them up-to-date and connected to the groups of people in their lives. We invite you to join iZoca and begin exploring new ways to connect your world!
Fitness Groups on iZoca
Working behind the scenes at iZoca provides an interesting glimpse of the types of groups being created on the website. There are some obvious groups being formed, like ones for family, but we are also finding other affinity groups popping up as well.
One example includes fitness groups where members who belong to them are embracing and utilizing the website to better communicate and schedule. Fitness and sports activities usually go hand in hand with a training schedule or calendar. There is a running group in the Albany region who posts races on the iZoca calendar in hopes of generating an improved turnout.
Runners and athletes naturally seek out similar minded individuals to discuss personal goals and gain advice. Groups of this nature can provide encouragement to those in training.
There are even some unique athletic groups on iZoca including ones for Tae Kwon Do which require a complete class schedule to help students achieve specific goals.
To check out fitness groups on iZoca:
• Log in on iZoca
• Click on “Find a Group” located on left side of “My World” page
• Click on “Categories”
• Click on “Fitness and Health”
Also feel free to create your own fitness group! It doesn’t have to be a formal club, you can just invite some friends who love being active as much as you.
Jeff Goronkin
Susan Bardack
