Building an “Eco-driving Community” on Facebook

November 22, 2009 · Filed Under Community, Eco-Driving, FuelClinic

We are working to create a greater community of eco-driving motorists and small business owners who want to connect and share their experiences using eco-driving techniques that make a real difference in their own lives.

FuelClinic has a membership of over 3,300 people who use the service to keep track of their fuel mileage by simply keeping their receipts from the gas pump, writing in their odometer reading, and later taking a few minutes to add that to their records in their FuelClinic account.

Our membership is active and engaged, but disconnected from each other because of the way the prototype site was built to ensure privacy. We’re now creating an option, and allowing users to choose to share their information with each other using the worlds largest social network – Facebook.

We’ve recently created a Facebook Page for FuelClinic (you’ll need a Facebook account to interact with the page), and will begin building our “Ecodriving Community” using the popular social network as the engine for this growing community. If you “become a fan” of this page, you’ll

At the same time we have quietly been developing a Facebook application connecting into FuelClinic accounts, so you will soon be able to post your mileage stats as a box on your Facebook profile, and you’ll be able to login to your FuelClinic account using Facebook – making updating your receipts much easier.

This is just the start of our community-oriented goals. We realize not everyone who wants to be an eco-driver is a Facebook user, so I’m designing some simple social options into FuelClinic2010.

Of course, you can always opt to keep all of your account information private if you are not interested in interacting with the larger community of FuelClinic eco-drivers.

Let me know what you think — add your suggestions for building an effective and interesting community of eco-drivers in the comments section of this post – or post your ideas on our Get Satisfaction site.