Atlanta’s MFG.com, the world’s largest online marketplace within the manufacturing space, today soft-launched their new project: MFGX.com. In essence, it is MFG’s attempt to leverage to social media (specifically wikis, forums, ads, and jobs), to offer a value add to their customers and users.

I’ve written on the issues of B2B marketplaces and online communities before (here and here), and I’m glad to see MFG moving in that direction. This will be a very interesting experiment for them.

I really like the fact that they decided to brand it “adjacent” to their marketplace site (MFG.com), rather than making it part of the marketplace site itself. This will provide a nice way to offer some free tools to non-marketplace participants as well, and hopefully serve to drive new subscription traffic into their crown jewel at MFG.com over time.

There isn’t much content up there yet - but this will change in the short-term I am sure.
Cheers.