About Blue MauMau
Welcome to the Blue Maumau franchisee community, designed to serve your franchisee information needs better than anyone else. This website is designed for you -- to share insights, stories, comments, news and information on buying and running a franchise. Members help each other in all aspects of the business.
We have spoken with many franchisees and franchise buyers, who have asked for the honest truth in franchising instead of the old propaganda song and dance. We do that by handing over the news stories to insiders willing to be citizen journalists for franchisees. We do so by keeping our online community open to ALL voices in franchising.
Franchising is big. It includes many different industries -- food, lodging, service, retail, etc. Franchising contributes one and a half trillion dollars to the U.S. economy, of which there are some 800,000 franchise units. It's a big community with large resources that we intend to channel to serve your individual needs!
We want to provide the information, community, and tools to help individual franchise owners run their business. If you are a future franchise owner, Blue Maumau provides a large community and resources to assist in your individual needs of selecting the right franchise from a wide range of choices.
Owners and buyers have asked for the following tools in doing this so we have compiled a group of leading-edge programmers to do it. These are:
- Creating an online "fun" community of franchise buyers and owners
- Delivery of Internet technology to make life easier in getting franchise information
- Real-time and frank news pertaining to franchising with reader comments
- Being able to rank the usefulness of the information so that you can know what fellow members of the franchise community are thinking
- Being able to contribute your own franchise news and stories
- Organizing franchise news and contributed stories (web logs) by industry. So, fast food owners don't have to read articles about running an automobile franchise. This includes being able to personalize the Blue MauMau web site so that you read only what is relevent to you.
Our franchise members value your honest, from the heart, take. You can contribute by writing news stories, asking or answering questions in the forum, sharing a weblink to a great franchisee story or you can take a more passive approach by simply reading and soaking up all the news and insights from other members. You have a choice of contributing anonymously, using a pseudonym or your real name. Again, this site is built for you so please tell it like it is.
If you have ideas on what news and franchise investment tools you would like to see on this site, send an email to editor@bluemaumau.org
Mr. Blue Maumau
The Editor
Comments
Blue MauMau, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, RipOff.com, and Consumerist: What do these things have in common? They are examples of social media.
The old news media and trade journals, particularly after the industrial revolution, required significant capital in order to publish. They were a bottleneck to the masses in receiving information. On the other hand, social media are relatively cheap tools that enable anyone (even anonymous small business entrepreneurs and franchise owners) to publish or access information.
The change is revolutionary. Where traditional media often needed weeks to process and publish, social media empowers individuals to report in real time. Broadband allows multimedia reporting, not just print. And it allows crowd sourcing for front line information to be passed that was not nearly as accessable using traditional media.
The above video explains what social media is. Blue MauMau, a social media site, allows members to share content and news. It allows members to blog. Readers can rank the content quality of their contributed articles. And it allows reader comments and insights. Readers can actually rank and comment on some 2,450 franchise systems. Blue MauMau has Podcasts, Vlogs (like this one), forums, slideshows, book reviews, book purchases, a wikipedia (we call it ours franchipedia) and much more.
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Even Though Blue MauMau Has Blogs
I often hear Blue MauMau referred to as a blog site. That doesn't seem quite right in describing our social network. Here's why.
See? That definition doesn't quite fit Blue MauMau. As much as we encourage franchisees writing online diaries in our social media, very little writing of franchisee personal journal entries happens here. The verb form in Webster's New Millenial Dictionary seems to fit our situation a little better.
Ah... chronology of thoughts. Each of our members have a page that records the chronology of their specific entries and thoughts. (Just see www.bluemaumau/blog/USERNAME, substituting their login name where it says USERNAME. Spaces are replaced by _) Every one of our registered members have their own "blog" page (example). But those entries are not necessarily just opinion or thoughts.
Actually, opinions and thoughts are often expressed in our forum threads and news comment areas.
Besides, when an opinion is shared by a known authority in the field like we have here at Blue MauMau, it is called a column - not simply an opining blog.
Is the online version of the New York Times a blog? How about the online Franchise Times? I don't think so.
And neither are we. Our model is similar to OhmyNews , an online international newspaper that has hundreds of thousands of citizen journalists who shine a light in every nook and cranny by contributing the day's news. The front page news part of our site is best described as volunteer citizen journalism. For example, CEO X Steps Down from Company Y. Besides, articles are often contributed by industry thought leaders and journalists.
Then, of course, we have shared UFOCs, shared weblinks, a shared calendar of franchise events, shared videos, shared slide presentations, shared book reviews, a shared franchise wikipedia, and shared franchise reviews.
A blog? Yes. We have them. We encourage them. But that just doesn't quite fit in describing our complete site, does it?