The Chamber's New Site Is Live. Your Listing Is Now Yours to Edit.
The Chamber has replaced its website with a platform. Every member can now manage their own listing, post to the member feed and register for events.
By Melville Chamber of Commerce ·
The Melville Chamber of Commerce has replaced its website. Not redesigned it. The site that went live this month is a platform, and the difference that matters to every business on the Chamber roll is this: the page about your business is now yours to write, and you do not have to email anybody to change it.
Every member can sign in at melvillechamber.org/members with their email address.
"A chamber is only as strong as what it can actually do for the business that joins it," said Ted Macaluso, the Chamber's executive director.
Your listing, without asking anyone
Hours, services, the description, the phone number somebody should actually call, your logo, your photographs. Change any of it and it is live on the member directory the moment you save.
Two additions are worth a minute of your time. A listing can carry a booking button, pointed at whatever you already use, so somebody can go from finding you to a calendar in one tap. And if writing about your own business is the job that never gets done, the listing assistant will draft a description from what the Chamber already knows about you, which you then edit into your own words. It suggests. It does not publish anything on your behalf.
More than one person can hold the keys. An owner can add a manager, a marketing person or a bookkeeper, so the listing does not go stale the week somebody is on vacation.
A feed the whole membership sees
Hiring. Moving. Launching something. Members can post it, with a picture, and it appears on the Chamber home page and in front of every other member. Three posts a day, which is enough to say what happened and not enough to become noise.
This is the part the Chamber is most interested in watching. A directory tells you who exists. A feed tells you who is doing something this week, and that is usually the thing worth a phone call.
Search that understands the question
The directory search no longer only matches words. Ask it to fix my roof, or who can do payroll, and it reads the question and returns the members who do that work, whether or not their listing happens to use your wording. Nobody types the same phrase as the business they are looking for, and until now that mismatch quietly hid members from the people trying to find them.
Every event, and a seat held for you
Breakfasts, Business After Hours, panels and the Expo all sit on one calendar, with a registration form that holds a real seat rather than a note that you might come. Confirmation lands in your inbox with a calendar invite and directions, and a reminder follows before the day, so the parking and the door are in your hand rather than in an email from three weeks ago.
Yours to use, beyond the site
Members are welcome to say they are members. The brand kit has the badge in every size and format, ready for a website footer or a storefront window, with the markup to paste in. Press and partners can help themselves to the media kit, whose figures are counted from the Chamber's own records every time the page loads rather than typed once and left to go stale.
If anything here is unfamiliar, the help section covers every part of the site, written as tasks rather than as a manual.
The apps are next
An iPhone app and an Android app are in testing now: the directory with a call button on every listing, the feed, your listing editable from wherever you are, and every event with a tap to register. They are not in the stores yet. Leave your address on the app page and the Chamber will send one email the day they are, and nothing else.
What to do this week
Sign in. Read your own listing the way a stranger would, and fix the part that is wrong, because something on it is. Add the photograph you would want a prospective customer to see. Then post once to the feed about whatever your business is actually doing in September.
The platform was built with Wave Agency, the Melville marketing firm the Chamber has worked with since 2017. "We stopped building a website and built the platform underneath it," said Keith Tucci, the agency's principal.
"The room is already built," Macaluso said. "It only works if you walk into it."
