1. What is IGBN?
   

   IGBN, Internet Global Business Network, is a B2B cloud-based social application supporting and complementing all businesses' marketing needs. Through our application functionalities plus the social platform, business partners can integrate together as one. Individual companies can manage marketing and other communication needs in one simple cloud-based platform.

2. Who can use IGBN?
   

   Any small and medium businesses (SMB), actually, as long as you have marketing needs.

3. Why should we use IGBN? Can we use other social network?
   

   IGBN is designed specifically with business requirements. Though not all business needs are the same, but the core needs are similar - to improve work effectiveness and boost productivity of marketing.

   For example, fashion industry has a strong urge to form a trade show oriented private community to cater for the social hooks among buyers, sellers, manufacturers, designers, and the trade show organizer and industry experts etc., and the industry itself also needs a public industry-level community for trade show announcements, trending news etc.

   Another great example is software startups can create their own private community for users who use their technology. Instead of sending individual questions to the company's support, users who used to have similar problems can help contributing for a solution. In general, a public software industry community or sub-community can help advertising the software startup's solution.

4. My business is operating only in, say, Hong Kong. How does IGBN work for me?
   

   We currently provide regions like USA, China, UK, Germany. You can always select a region in the public communities. Most of the posts or feeds there should be related to that region. Private communities may or may not be available for all the regions.

   IGBN allows you to switch and view posts in a different region. We are sure that some day you might want to look for partners from other parts of the world to expand your business.

   Contact us if you would like us to support your region.

5. What industries does IGBN support?
   

   Eventually we would like to support as many industries as possible. We need businesses interested in using such industry, or any show or exhibition organizers providing contents for the industry, or additionally industry media to provide news for the industry. Contact us if you would like us to support your specific industry if it is not currently on our list.

6. What language(s) do you support?
   

   Our interface is currently in English. But you can always create posts in your own language in UTF-8 form and IGBN will be able to recognize and display properly.

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1. How do I sign up to use IGBN?
   

   You can directly sign up IGBN in the Sign Up Section in the Login Page.

2. Do I have to sign up with a company?
   

   Yes. Our community is to be built with business-to-business needs.

3. Why do you need a group code during sign up?
   

   The group code is optional. If you are registering with IGBN with a known private group to join, you should have been given a group code by the private group administrator. You should enter the code at sign up. If you leave the code blank, you can still sign up and access all the public communities. You can always join another private group/community in the future.

4. How do I know if my company has signed up IGBN?
   

   Once your company is signed up with IGBN, your company should be assigned an IGBN company code. IGBN use this company code to distinguish companies with the same name. When you need to register a new user account under your company, you need to get this code. At sign up, enter the company code.

5. What access privileges do I get if I am signing up with an existing company?
   

   Your account access privilege is user-based, not company-based. Each user can register to follow a different set of companies and join different communities.

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1. What is an Community?
   

   An IGBN community is a group or a channel. Every company that joined IGBN automatically owns a private community. A user can create a channel or a sub-community under the user-owned community.

2. What are the difference between a Public and a Private Community?
   

   A Public Community works like an Industry Channel. They are always available for any users. All IGBN users can view the contents of a public community. Your company, brand or product news can be broadcasted via a public community. Perfect for a FREE advertisement.

   A Private Community is set up as a company channel, or is set up by custom as a particular organizational channel, e.g. to support a group of trade show participants. They may belong to a region. Some of these communities can be searchable. Some of them are open to joining, and some of them are closed communities, depending on the settings of the community by the owners.

3. How do I join another Private Community?
   

   First you need to know the existence of a private community. You can look up private communities that are open to search and request to join. Or you may be given a group code (for operational security purpose) and you can join by entering the group code.

4. What is an IGBN post?
   

   An IGBN post serves as a FREE message between you and your intended readers. It can be an announcement, an advertisement, or a question or a request from anyone in the community.

5. Why should I post in IGBN?
   

   You need to expose yourself for others to follow your company, in order to form YOUR and THEIR business circles. Your followers are your potential business partners who showed interest in your company. It is currently required for them to see your posts in order to discover your company and then follow you. In the future, there can be other means for users to discover your company (e.g. paid advertisement) but posts are certainly the free way to tell others about your presence in IGBN.

6. What can I include in an IGBN post?
   

   An IGBN post can include a message of maximum 1024 character, unlimited number of images, unlimited number of videos/audio files and unlimited number of attachment files.

   The message is text-based. Do not use HTML code. You can include a URL link in your message and the URL will be clickable when we display the post. You can post in your preferred language but you need to consider the region you are in. That means if you are in USA region you may want to use English such that most people can read your content.

   Currently, post images with format jpg, gif, png and bmp will be supported. Images with image size greater than 1920 * 1028 pixels will be resized. Moreover, image files that are bigger than 10MB will be compressed. Uploading such images will be very time consuming. If you are using broadband, an upload speed of 2.4Mbps (Mega-bit per second) with realstic overhead of 50%, it already takes approximately 1 minute to upload a 10MB file. For slower upload speed, the upload time takes a lot longer. The upload can even fail for other technical reasons. Moreover, we will not display the images with the such a huge resolution anyway.

   As for videos/audio files, it has the same limitation of 10MB file sizes. Most of the common video/audio file formats of mpg, mp4, etc. will be supported. We recommend you to do not upload large videos with your post. You can upload and store them with other online service like Youtube, and you can include a link in your post. We support specifically for Youtube links and we can embed and display your Youtube videos/audio link directly in your post.

   For business need, you may need to attach other files, and IGBN supports it. Here are a few good examples:

   • include your brand portfolio in PDF format, directly for others to download and view.
   • include Word/Excel document files.
   • include a zip file for a software patch.

   We do not allow executables which can be hazardous and can be breaking internet security.

7. Why can't I attach files when I reply or comment on a post?
   

   Right now we do not support attachment functionalities on replies and comments. We would like readers to find the attachments directly in the post itself without going through all the replies and comments. But we can consider any modifications if we find some business needs in the future.

8. What other information can I find in a post?
   

   You can find the user profile and the company profile of the poster.

9. What are the benefits to follow a company?
   

   By following a company within your community, you show interests in that company and you can build yourself a business circle. You can filter to get only the feeds from your followed companies, which means you are checking these companies in a priority. When you want to view posts from all posters, you can select the option to show all posts in the community. You can set up the default behavior of how to view your post in your account setup.

   The companies can view who are following them, and start to build business relations with them at the same time. These companies show interests in your company and they can be your direct social-marketing targets. Other companies in the community are in the industry and they can still be your potential marketing target.

10. Is it important to build my company profile?
    

    Absolutely. Your business profile directly reflect your company image. Not only it can show your potential customers and vendors who you are and where you are from, it should show how long you have been in the industry and what role of businesses you are actually doing. People have more confidence when you put truthful information on your company profile. Moreover, include more photos about your company. We do not impose a limit. The images will show up in your company profile slide show. You can show your company offices, brands and product photos.

1. What is an Event?
   

   An IGBN event can be a user forum, an online webminar, a trade show, an exhibition, a conference or a general meeting. Attendees can be fixed or joined at will.

2. What is an Event Scope?
   

   Any IGBN event is associated with a scope. The event scope denotes the visibility of the event or meeting. The 4 scopes are:

   • Draft/Personal: only the creator can view the event.
   • Company: the company event or meeting can only be viewed by users belong to the same company.
   • Private Community: Only those who subscribed to a particular private community or channel can view the event or meeting.
   • Public Community: These are most likely industry-wide events (i.e. trade shows or exhibitions) that is open for public enrollment.

   You can also use the scope to prepare the content of an event or a meeting before publishing it to your audience by updating the scope.

3. Is an Event Region-specific?
   

   Yes. The creator can specify the region that the meeting is visible. For example, your trade show is held in San Francisco and it is mainly for U.S. attendees. You do not need to show this trade show to the world. Users from other regions can still look for news or events from another region and find out about your event.

4. Why can others edit a meeting or an event on IGBN?
   

   We believe an event or a meeting can be set up by collaborative effort. At the set up time, the creator may only know he needs to set up a meeting, but does not have a clue about where or when the meeting or event is going to be. These information can be added by some other users who are also responsible for setting up the event.

If you have more questions about IGBN, you can ask us by one of the following methods:

• If you have a technical or product question, send a mail to support@smartcloudsoftinc.com.
• If you have a general question about IGBN, send a mail to info@smartcloudsoftinc.com.
• If you have already registered for IGBN, you can go to the public community "IGBN Global" and post your question(s) there.