what's the best way to create an online group and share information amongst the members?

[flloreda]

I want to create a group on real estate agents so we can share leads, opportunities and market information. A blog won't do it, facebook won't either, and an email alias/group there is no way to track information easily...and creating or bulding an app from scratch doesn't make much sense either. There has to be an onlin service that can help me get there....

[SG Elite]

Blog.

[Ivy]

You can probably go to some kind of chat line that deals with the same.

[jdkilp]

Believe it or not, but we're a rather sophisticated consulting organization, and we use Yahoo Groups for a few things. You can have discussion thread, maintain file storage, and even have rudimentary CRM capability (with the database tool). It's very easy to use and free. And, you can set it up so that as soon as something is posted there, it sends an email to everyone (optional).

We do have our own server, of course, but we have several sub-contractors that we don't want to give server access to, and this works great.

[Suzannah]

You could try a forum.

[luvthedrew]

You could create Yahoo group. But generally you need email addresses from people you want to invite. I would start a group and then posts the invite on your blog and share it with people whenever possible. It may start out slowly but could grow very rapidly with each person also spreading the word and inviting their friends and colleges.

Good luck.

[Morgan M]

Yup, yahoo groups is the dealio for you.

[Crocodilian]

A lot depends on volume. Free is a good price, and for anything that was relatively low in volume, I'd recommend a Google Group.

Google has two excellent things going for it:
-- messages are searchable, so its essentially a free form database

-- Google Maps are extremely good

it is an email group, the search feature means its actually a database.

The most important thing would be to be consistent in the way that you enter data. You might create threads for neighborhoods or topics.

The alternative is to go to a bulletin board forum system, like the Invision Power Board. This has some advantages, but some disadvantages (not free, no mapping . . .)