MANILA, Philippines -- Next to having your own company website, the “in” thing now is to be part of an SME business networking site, a take-off from successful social networking sites like Facebook.com, Friendster.com, MySpace.com, Multiply.com, and LiveJournal.com.

This is exactly how SME Solutions, Inc., an IT-enabling company owned by Planters Development Bank, envisioned Bizster.com.ph to be. Still in its beta mode, Bizster has attracted already over 200 members and subscribers after just two months in cyberspace.

This early, Russelle Trinidad, SME Solutions’ sales and marketing head, says that a number of their network participants are already realizing benefits from logging in and using the Bizster site.

Just recently, Edwin Que of Winspire Marketing, a fledging importer and retailer of oral care products, signed up for SME Solutions to design his company’s website after noticing some visible exposure from his Bizster posting.

Like most social networking links, participation in Bizster is for free. SME owners need not spend a single centavo to have their profiles including a gallery of photos uploaded.

Should the Bizster member want its own website, SME Solutions is capable of designing for a modest fee of P8,000 per year hosted in the sme.com.ph site; add P4,000, and SME Solutions would register a unique domain name for the company. “It’s a graduation of sorts,” Trinidad says, when a Bizster decides to expand its web-based marketing and advertising playground.

Bizster now gets 20,000 to 40,000 hits per day, says Trinidad, from about 12,000 unique visitors every month. Still a far cry from vastly popular social networks, but encouraging enough for the Planters bank subsidiary formed in 2000 whose mission is to help Filipino entrepreneurs use information and communications technology as a tool in enhancing their business.

The Bizster home page gives the reader a quick view of new members that have signed up. The professional and clean look was designed to make one linger and explore featured products or services. Members are classified in terms of what they offer or promote.

SME.com.ph, the brand name that SME Solutions supports, had been through some teething pains during its first three years, a period where the company was “testing the waters,” said Trinidad. Last year, the company broke even, and things are looking upbeat this year.

“SME.com.ph is now ranked as among the 20 most popular business networking sites in the country. And we aren’t doing too poorly in the world’s ranking,” says Trinidad. They have so far more than 150 websites for members.

Aside from designing web sites for its members, SME.com.ph also offers resources and tools that would nurture SMEs to grow. The accounting and timekeeping software packages developed by the Planters Bank subsidiary allows for affordable financial and operational automation systems for most growing companies.

Trinidad says SME Solutions will soon be offering a payroll software tailor fitted to the unique Philippine labor market and its business operating environment. This would complete the basic suite of SME toolkits that most start-ups need when pushing for higher growth.

On the SME.com.ph site too is a section that matches people with business issues or queries with experts in the fields of human resource, franchising and business management. Advice is free and best of all, sensible.