a Platform for Common Ground

SocialChord is built on the principles of Common Ground.

When people engage in conversation with each other, they uncover common ground, which in turn nurtures a broader perspective of life and empathy for those we share life with.

The “social chord” is made up of many notes: government, journalism, the arts, education, spirituality, family, and a universe of other human interests and organizations. SocialChord brings these diverse human experiences together by creating online communities that mirror image the communities we create in our offline, analog lives.

Instead of building online social networks around brands or ideas, SocialChord builds them around towns, governments, schools, industries, news stories, movements and businesses that already have a “social network” but need a better way to bring it online.

The power to mobilize and collaborate around collective intentions is a key ingredient to a healthy society, and the mission of SocialChord.

Benefits For Communities, Partners and Investors

For Communities: Local Communities, Interest Groups, Organizations and Businesses that are looking to create and grow online communities are faced with two challenges:

• The expense of building or buying the software and hosting for their community
• The marketing budget and strategy to attract new users to their community

SocialChord addresses both of these challenges by:

• Providing leading edge technology solutions that allow communities to quickly and cost-effectively “communitize” their organization online for reasonable monthly fees. This allows organizations to launch their communities quickly and without large up front resource and financial costs.
• Cross-pollinating our network of online communities. SocialChord members are exposed to a community of communities and can move freely between them with a single log-in. This exposes our client communities to potential members/customers without very little effort on their part. And as the SocialChord community grows, exposure for our clients grows as well.

For Partners: SocialChord online communities are designed to mirror people’s existing communities. Our approach to business development is to partner with influencers within these existing communities. These partners become “curators” of the community, leveraging their real world relationships to drive membership and participation online.

SocialChord provides partners incentives to curate our communities through revenue-sharing compensation plans. By distributing our business development we reduce overhead and marketing costs associated with recruiting local businesses and consumers on a global scale.

For Investors: SocialChord is embedded in several developing online markets: social networking, local search, local advertising and “social shopping”. Several companies have proven the potential for wealth creation in these markets, such as MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo and Google. But these markets are still young and relatively untapped.

SocialChord believes in applying solid business practices that focus on social value, customer service and profitability to achieve success in these markets and create a rich and stable valuation.

SocialChord will welcome an exit for its investors that is both lucrative and serves the interests of our customers and our mission to be a positive influence in the market and society.

SocialChord Project Portfolio

• Municipal Networks – SocialChord is building online communities for towns and cities in the US, and eventually around the world, that seek to find common ground within how government operates and interconnects in a more 2.0 way. These online communities are designed to mirror image the existing civic and social structure of the local community.
  • The networks offer citizens, government, educational, family, spiritual institutions, community organizers, journalists, small businesses to corporations and interest groups a place to gather and collaborate in solving problems as a community and creating opportunity to make government more accessible and connected online in the 21st century.
  • These communities present a unique solution to the absolute need and issue of online local advertising and search success to local resources.   Local advertising to search success is still in its earliest stages of capability and presents one of the largest opportunities for both SocialChord and the communities it supports.
  • SocialChord is on track to launch several prototypes for large towns in NY, NJ and Maryland.
  • SocialChord is also connecting to interested municipal networks and state government departments and services (NY, MD, PA, AZ)
• The X Community – X is an existing community of metro D.C. artists. The community comes together monthly to showcase a variety of art, perform their art, and/or compete as artists.  The core of the movement embraces digital, analog and performance artists and musicians to create together. SocialChord is developing the online community to compliment the live event and enable this community to grow creatively and economically online.
• LosEstadosLatinos.com – In partnership with the grandchildren of Cesar Chavez, the influential Ybarra family of California; SocialChord is building an online community for Latino families to share, network and connect online. Latin culture is based on large, intimate families that find themselves increasingly disconnected as family members travel across geographies to live and work. Providing these families with social networking solutions, additionally optimized for mobile devices, will address a core need within the Latino U.S. culture, which is the fastest growing users of the Internet by 2012.
• 2Young2Retire.net – 2Y2R is a network of nearly 200 trained life coaches that share a mission and methodology for helping baby boomers find purpose and opportunity in their second half of life. SocialChord has succeeded in networking this community of coaches on our platform and is preparing to launch a public facing online community for anyone who is not interested in retirement.
• The Federation of Independent Journalists and Media Producers – Independent media faces challenges of money, resources and unified communications that prevent these independent producers from scaling their stories to the level of coverage and distribution achieved by corporate media outlets. SocialChord, in partnership with a large number of independent producers, is developing the backbone platform to unite these independent entities to respond and scale quickly according to the need for in-depth journalism across the world.

New Brunswick Journalism Contest

Rutgers University and New Brunswick High School Students

We are organizing a city wide journalism contest. The contest gives students the opportunity to learn from professional journalists and work as an investigative reporter.

Participants will be required to attend various town meetings, take and submit meeting minutes to the site, video interview members of the community and eventually publish their personal story.

There are many things in New Brunswick worth writing about. We encourage people using this site to write/blog about a variety of interesting and productive topics. For the purposes of this project, we are asking that the students tackle the issue of gentrification. 

Gentrification is when wealthier people take over a town and lower income folks are left without affordable living conditions. This topic brings issues of race and class to the surface. The issue of gentrification is also a universal issue and the work our student journalists do will help towns arond the world better approach the subject.

Students who participate will have a chance at winning scholarship money, as well as exposure to major universities and media companies. Students will be judged by the activity their work generates online and by an esteemed panel of accomplished journalists.

If you are interested, please enroll on the site and begin using the tools to publish your ideas.

Introducing SocialChord

SocialChord is an Internet platform designed to unite local communities. This is the next generation of online social networking. SocialChord provides our existing towns and cities with a gathering place to bring attention to their unique challenges, collaborate to develop solutions and lobby government and private organizations to bring about change. SocialChord addresses the challenges of local online advertising by creating online communities that foster adult memberships engaging in inherently local conversations.