By Bruce Felps
Staff Writer

Sharon Adams, Owner of Adams Communication

Sharon Adams found a niche and scratched out a profitable market. Adams, a Lake Highlands resident for about seven years, launched Adams Communications more than 20 years ago after the birth of her son, Weston. Last month, she marked the fifth anniversary of her company’s online companion, socialwhirl.com.

Adams’ firm specializes in promoting nonprofit agencies, such as the American Red Cross and The Wilkinson Center in East Dallas. She said her involvement in nonprofits began with an invitation to help with the women’s auxiliary of the March of Dimes. After that, her volunteer efforts snowballed and produced a burgeoning business.

“I also joined the Arboretum Women’s Garden Council and Mad Hatters, and people kept asking me to do [public relations]. I finally said I am going to have to start getting paid for this.”

Paying clients, which now number about 10, continued signing up for Adams Communications’ services, and her media contact list grew.

Adams would collect photographs from her events, often shot by her son, Weston, who is a professional photographer, and use her media contacts to have them placed on newspaper society pages.

As newspapers started streamlining society coverage, Adams was forced to create another niche for her promotional efforts. She turned to the Internet and launched her website, socialwhirl.com. She posts numerous event photos on the site, which acknowledges the volunteers’ efforts to raise funds and promotes the nonprofits’ missions, she said.

Adams also contributes a society column, Inside the Scene, to dallasblog.com, better known for posts on local politics and government. Scott Bennett, founder and co-owner of dallasblog.com, said her posts draw additional traffic to the site even though they differ from its typical content.

“She seems to be well connected and knowledgeable about the social scene in Dallas,” he said. “We’re pretty focused on government and politics, but we wanted to expand. We get a lot of viewers or traffic off her. When she posts something, she usually gets a couple of thousand people, give or take a couple of hundred, reading it, and her folks usually go see eight or 10 other pages.”

Meanwhile, Adams’ own  site has gained momentum, registering more than 4 million hits during 2006. It also registered more than 264,000 page views during the year, and nearly 130,000 unique visits, defined as different individuals accessing the site, for an average of about 370 people visiting the site each day.

Leilani Han, a spokeswoman for Nielsen/NetRatings Inc., which tracks traffic on websites in a manner similar to the one its sister company uses to gauge television viewers, said socialwhirl.com ranked low compared to larger organizations such as AARP, which tops the list for November with more than 3 million visits, but performed well for a small operation.

“I would say that for a one-person organization, especially one that is very local, 130,000 unique visitors in a month is pretty good,” Han said in an e-mail message.

Adams, though, remained modest about the Web success and her foresight to incorporate the Internet into her work with nonprofit agencies.

“When I started moving to the Web, it was not so much that I’m brilliant, but my niche was getting smaller and I had to expand it,” Adams said.