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Hey all,
Welcome to Talk Piqua! In about 30 minutes, we're going to be officially going public and you all will be getting a first look at our new platform, including this post I hope.
So I know this is different for many of you...doing everything on Facebook and Facebook groups has been the norm for many years now and we're kind of bucking the status quo by starting this website and putting it on its own platform. I have my reasons for doing it and I'm going to try to elaborate on that a little with this post. While I am getting more and more annoyed with Facebook as they continuously come up with bogus community standards, shove more advertising down our throats, and so on, that's honestly not the biggest motivator for starting a platform off of Facebook.
The biggest motivator was actually customizability.
I started the Piqua, OH community group on Facebook back in 2015. 8 years ago. In those 8 years, the ability to customize our group has not increased much at all where it was needed most which was the ability to break things up into various categories. We did get the handy Admin Assist feature which helps automate all sorts of tasks, but even that has very limited options while it has the potential to be massively powerful. Facebook's developers just seem to lack innovation and at times, common sense. We did come up with a work around that helped--creating sister groups using the same name followed by the group purpose (ie Piqua, OH - Classified Ads, Piqua, OH - Missing Pets & People), but the problem then was, now we had to remember to regularly follow and visit each individual group to keep things running smoothly. And when that proved to be difficult since we all work full-time, we had to ask for people to assist us in moderation. So now one group has one set of moderators, one group has a different set, and nobody is really on the same page. It just made little sense.
On Talk Piqua, we have everything categorized and it's all in the same place, so you pay us ONE visit and can access everything you need to access without joining multiple groups and remembering to visit each one. Since one of Facebook's biggest offerings is convenience, we knew we had to step things up if we even wanted a chance to compete with them for users. Granted, we're not looking to steal Facebook's 3 billion users. We're simply looking to attract enough of Piqua's population of 20,000 (and some of our neighboring community members as well) to keep this platform active, convenient, and enjoyable...so we added the Talk Piqua app to our arsenal of offerings.
It's nothing fancy or unique--it's basically just our website wrapped up into a mobile app. So instead of remembering to bookmark us and visit us often, you can simply add our app to your home screen and anytime you want to visit, just tap on the Talk Piqua icon.
So now, my vision for Talk Piqua...first off, it's a community hub. That's the primary vision. Think about all the Facebook groups that involve Piqua. We wanted to take ALL of that and wrap it all up into one community hub. If you see anything missing from the Community Hub that you think should be added, let us know what it is and why you believe it should be added. We'll discuss it and see if we agree. If not, our software actually allows you to create groups as well. You can still have a group about certain things on Talk Piqua even if we didn't find it appropriate to add to the Community Hub section. We also want to have a variety of community resources available right at your fingertips. We want to do more to promote Piqua's local businesses which is why our advertising consists of local business advertising and why we're going to regularly feature a local business in our Business Spotlight section. Part of the community hub section is dedicated to community discussion. It's entirely possible we will eventfully break that into more specific categories, but for now let's grow into what we've got and we'll evaluate how to break things down once conversations begin happening regularly. We have a merch section and an advertising section.
The merch is to give you guys something to wear to city meetings, protests, and community events to help show your unity. We aren't pushing any specific agendas here so those designs are just some early designs I came up with based on recent events, but if you have ideas for designs, let us know. We would love some ideas for merch that paints Piqua in a more positive light as well. The money raised from the merch sales is to help keep this platform going. Running all this isn't cheap and we're trying to recoup those costs. The advertising and VIP memberships are where we hope to primarily cover our operating expenses, fund our growth, and hopefully eventually raise enough money to generate an income from all this. We aren't going to create paywalls forcing anyone to pay for what should be basic features and we are hoping that by offering advertising packages for our local businesses that we can keep the ads on Talk Piqua relevant rather than resorting to something like Google AdSense which will display completely random ads it decides are relevant to our visitors, even if they're completely unrelated to Piqua.
Now that you have an idea of our current vision, I want to dive a little deeper into our future vision...
We want Talk Piqua to become a household name. When anything about Piqua comes up, we want people to think, "Oh, let's check Talk Piqua and see how others feel about that!" We want to become much more involved in the community. That includes community events, but also what can Talk Piqua do to help solve the problems of the community? One idea we've had it is to build up our own private committee of sorts that could make it our mission to help attract more industry into Piqua. This would be a committee of people with business experience and other relevant experience, who would have the ability to actually talk with people in these industries and reason with them, not just a bunch of citizens essentially begging them to come. While there's nothing wrong with that too, for this part of the vision, we would need people who actually have the power to negotiate and/or broker deals.
We hope to get enough Contributing Writers to join us that our news section isn't just a few articles a week, but provides regular updates on everything that's going on in the community. I don't want to try and compete with Miami Valley Today as we're not seeking to be a media outlet, but perhaps in the future we could find a way to collaborate together that would benefit both of us.
There's talk of partnering with an upcoming radio station. We'll see how that pans out as it is still several months, if not a few years, away, but it could be a neat feature added to Talk Piqua.
We want to help bring members of the community and members of the government/administrative staff all to the same table. There's a disconnect in Piqua. A big one. But it doesn't have to be that way. Between the community group we have on Facebook and my day job running Piqua's largest and most successful industrial park in town, I have a good relationship with both groups of people and I have the ability to help both sides come together. I really hope that we can help with that.
I'm not going to hide anything--I live in Troy now (technically Concord Township), but I am a proud member of the Piqua High School Class of 2004 (as are the 3 other members of the Talk Piqua team), grew up in Piqua, briefly co-owned a downtown Piqua business, will soon own property in Piqua, and have worked in Piqua since 2006. Despite my house being located in Troy, Piqua is my home and I want to see it thrive. If you support this mission, please join us. And please convince your friends to join us. This isn't just a business opportunity for us. This really is a mission and with your help, we CAN accomplish it and even expand it.
Thanks for reading.
Welcome to Talk Piqua! In about 30 minutes, we're going to be officially going public and you all will be getting a first look at our new platform, including this post I hope.
So I know this is different for many of you...doing everything on Facebook and Facebook groups has been the norm for many years now and we're kind of bucking the status quo by starting this website and putting it on its own platform. I have my reasons for doing it and I'm going to try to elaborate on that a little with this post. While I am getting more and more annoyed with Facebook as they continuously come up with bogus community standards, shove more advertising down our throats, and so on, that's honestly not the biggest motivator for starting a platform off of Facebook.
The biggest motivator was actually customizability.
I started the Piqua, OH community group on Facebook back in 2015. 8 years ago. In those 8 years, the ability to customize our group has not increased much at all where it was needed most which was the ability to break things up into various categories. We did get the handy Admin Assist feature which helps automate all sorts of tasks, but even that has very limited options while it has the potential to be massively powerful. Facebook's developers just seem to lack innovation and at times, common sense. We did come up with a work around that helped--creating sister groups using the same name followed by the group purpose (ie Piqua, OH - Classified Ads, Piqua, OH - Missing Pets & People), but the problem then was, now we had to remember to regularly follow and visit each individual group to keep things running smoothly. And when that proved to be difficult since we all work full-time, we had to ask for people to assist us in moderation. So now one group has one set of moderators, one group has a different set, and nobody is really on the same page. It just made little sense.
On Talk Piqua, we have everything categorized and it's all in the same place, so you pay us ONE visit and can access everything you need to access without joining multiple groups and remembering to visit each one. Since one of Facebook's biggest offerings is convenience, we knew we had to step things up if we even wanted a chance to compete with them for users. Granted, we're not looking to steal Facebook's 3 billion users. We're simply looking to attract enough of Piqua's population of 20,000 (and some of our neighboring community members as well) to keep this platform active, convenient, and enjoyable...so we added the Talk Piqua app to our arsenal of offerings.
It's nothing fancy or unique--it's basically just our website wrapped up into a mobile app. So instead of remembering to bookmark us and visit us often, you can simply add our app to your home screen and anytime you want to visit, just tap on the Talk Piqua icon.
So now, my vision for Talk Piqua...first off, it's a community hub. That's the primary vision. Think about all the Facebook groups that involve Piqua. We wanted to take ALL of that and wrap it all up into one community hub. If you see anything missing from the Community Hub that you think should be added, let us know what it is and why you believe it should be added. We'll discuss it and see if we agree. If not, our software actually allows you to create groups as well. You can still have a group about certain things on Talk Piqua even if we didn't find it appropriate to add to the Community Hub section. We also want to have a variety of community resources available right at your fingertips. We want to do more to promote Piqua's local businesses which is why our advertising consists of local business advertising and why we're going to regularly feature a local business in our Business Spotlight section. Part of the community hub section is dedicated to community discussion. It's entirely possible we will eventfully break that into more specific categories, but for now let's grow into what we've got and we'll evaluate how to break things down once conversations begin happening regularly. We have a merch section and an advertising section.
The merch is to give you guys something to wear to city meetings, protests, and community events to help show your unity. We aren't pushing any specific agendas here so those designs are just some early designs I came up with based on recent events, but if you have ideas for designs, let us know. We would love some ideas for merch that paints Piqua in a more positive light as well. The money raised from the merch sales is to help keep this platform going. Running all this isn't cheap and we're trying to recoup those costs. The advertising and VIP memberships are where we hope to primarily cover our operating expenses, fund our growth, and hopefully eventually raise enough money to generate an income from all this. We aren't going to create paywalls forcing anyone to pay for what should be basic features and we are hoping that by offering advertising packages for our local businesses that we can keep the ads on Talk Piqua relevant rather than resorting to something like Google AdSense which will display completely random ads it decides are relevant to our visitors, even if they're completely unrelated to Piqua.
Now that you have an idea of our current vision, I want to dive a little deeper into our future vision...
We want Talk Piqua to become a household name. When anything about Piqua comes up, we want people to think, "Oh, let's check Talk Piqua and see how others feel about that!" We want to become much more involved in the community. That includes community events, but also what can Talk Piqua do to help solve the problems of the community? One idea we've had it is to build up our own private committee of sorts that could make it our mission to help attract more industry into Piqua. This would be a committee of people with business experience and other relevant experience, who would have the ability to actually talk with people in these industries and reason with them, not just a bunch of citizens essentially begging them to come. While there's nothing wrong with that too, for this part of the vision, we would need people who actually have the power to negotiate and/or broker deals.
We hope to get enough Contributing Writers to join us that our news section isn't just a few articles a week, but provides regular updates on everything that's going on in the community. I don't want to try and compete with Miami Valley Today as we're not seeking to be a media outlet, but perhaps in the future we could find a way to collaborate together that would benefit both of us.
There's talk of partnering with an upcoming radio station. We'll see how that pans out as it is still several months, if not a few years, away, but it could be a neat feature added to Talk Piqua.
We want to help bring members of the community and members of the government/administrative staff all to the same table. There's a disconnect in Piqua. A big one. But it doesn't have to be that way. Between the community group we have on Facebook and my day job running Piqua's largest and most successful industrial park in town, I have a good relationship with both groups of people and I have the ability to help both sides come together. I really hope that we can help with that.
I'm not going to hide anything--I live in Troy now (technically Concord Township), but I am a proud member of the Piqua High School Class of 2004 (as are the 3 other members of the Talk Piqua team), grew up in Piqua, briefly co-owned a downtown Piqua business, will soon own property in Piqua, and have worked in Piqua since 2006. Despite my house being located in Troy, Piqua is my home and I want to see it thrive. If you support this mission, please join us. And please convince your friends to join us. This isn't just a business opportunity for us. This really is a mission and with your help, we CAN accomplish it and even expand it.
Thanks for reading.