Naturalfoodnet is a Community

Community value

I'm one of the people behind the software that runs this Naturalfoodnet community. In this blog, I'll try to explain why we do what we do and how it can benefit you.

There is a shift happening. In complex markets like this one, information is vitally important to how you do your job and how well you do your job. That may mean information on retail prices, new products, industry trends, legislation or just useful information on who is doing what and why. For the last many years, media companies have served this information in a simple fashion - on a page for you to read.

Now media companies are recognizing that part of what is important in their role is to enable you to interact with and hear from your industry peers, and let you express your own opinion and questions and answers and remarks to support your learning and to support what you read. Peer-to-peer conversation is the root of development of a market, and really the media did a fairly poor job of enabling this over the last 30 years. Trade shows have actually grown in popularity in the age of the Internet, when many predicted they would suffer. Magazines and newspapers have suffered. The reason is that professionals value meeting and conversing with other professionals - learning things from them, understanding their issues, meeting potential buyers and sellers - above reading editorial analysis of a particular topic.

The publishers of Naturalfoodnet recognize this need. They want to facilitate the conversations in the market, to enable you to meet buyers, sellers, partners, colleagues, to promote yourself and your products and to find products that can help your business. The features now available on Naturalfoodnet enable you to comment on articles and blogs, write your own blog (just like me!), post press releases, update your company information, participate in forum discussions and connect with other professionals in the community. Over the next few months we'll continue to add features to the website that will be aimed at enabling you to connect with other people and learn from them, as well as to express your opinion and remarks that may be of value to others. 

The system behind this website is called 'Firestarter' - you'll see the logo in the bottom right of the site. The reason we called it Firestarter is because we are all firestarters - we all start conversations and we all have something to say. This industry can improve through interchange and interconnection of professionals dedicated to improving it. We hope you benefit from what we've built, and we hope you start some fires!

Firestarter is also used by companies to facilitate internal conversations, idea sharing and collaboration. If you're interested in finding out about this, visit our website at www.firestartersoftware.com.