I’m Tired of One Night Stands
February 21, 2011 by admin · 6 Comments
At the risk of mixing metaphors, Luke Hohmann recently described Groupon, Living Social and other daily deal sites as enticing businesses into one night stands. At first I laughed but as I thought about my direct experiences with a plethora of group buying sites, I think he may be right. There is no doubt that these daily deal sites can deliver a deluge of coupon-grubbing customers to a small, local business’s door step. But at what cost? Negative margin, stretching service delivery to breaking point, alienation of regular loyal customers, attracting customers who don’t spend more than the deal amount and won’t ever come back are some of the well documented potential pitfalls. (And hopefully not STD’s!)
I often describe Groupon, Living Social and other daily deal sites as providing small businesses a large, fishing drift net to cast broadly into the ocean; the result is you will no doubt collect a lot of sea life, but only some of which will be the targeted species you are actually fishing for. Luke’s metaphor is certainly more colorful and may, in fact, be truer than mine.
Fanminder | 5 Questions for Paul Rosenfeld & Tracy Grover
I met Paul Rosenfeld last year when he came to pitch Savvy Cellar Wine Bar & Wine Shop before it opened in Mountain View, CA on the merits of his new mobile marketing service called Fanminder. Always being one to extend and try new things and wanting to dip our toe into the mobile world, I said yes (plus Paul is very passionate and convincing). He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fanminder. He spent about 15 years working for two of the best companies catering to small businesses — American Express and Intuit. At American Express Paul helped lead its first gift card program for merchants and worked in the Small Business Services division. At Intuit, he was General Manager QuickBooks Merchant Account Service; QuickBooks Online Edition; and led development of the FinanceWorks online banking suite.
Tracy Grover is Co-Founder and COO of Fanminder. Most recently, Tracy was Vice President of Product Management for AccountNow. Previously she served as Director of Marketing for LoopNet, which automates online marketing tools for small real estate businesses to help them compete with the big guys. Before that Tracy built, launched, and marketed online banking solutions for small businesses (for Bank of America & Silicon Valley Bank), a secure mobile application used by doctors & public officials (Certicom) and the first mass market online credit card, NextCard.
I recently sat down with Paul and Tracy and fired off 5 questions for them . . . .
1) What was the genesis of Fanminder?
Paul: Tracy and I started Fanminder literally in the teeth of the recession, in October 2008. We had very good paying jobs – I was the Chief Marketing Officer and Tracy was the VP Product Management for a local start-up. We saw how all the larger, Fortune-sized retailers were rushing into mobile and social marketing but when we “walked down main street” we didn’t see any local businesses doing anything.
Journey to SEO Nirvana | Step 1 of 5
In my recent blog post “This Cobbler’s Child Is About To Get Some New Shoes“, I aired my dirty laundry (and what is known of most Consultants, Teachers and Parents – “do as I say, not as I do”) in that despite offering strategic and practical online marketing advice and services for my clients, my own website is not well optimized for search engines. (There are reasons for this, such as my business is driven through relationships and my professional network, not the website. But I still feel like I should have a site that adheres to best practices I espouse). Alas, I’m going to chart a very practical path towards search engine optimization (SEO) bliss! Come with me . . . it’ll be fun (or if not fun, hopefully relatively painless).
So Step 1 is some “Housekeeping”. This consists of getting the site prepared for measuring (hopefully) the astounding improvement we’ll witness in the coming weeks and months. This is key so we can baseline current patterns and measure future performance.
Yelp’s Douchebaggery Issue
January 3, 2011 by admin · 5 Comments
Yelp has a douche bag issue. This is not new. But a recent experience made me think about it in a new light.
Savvy Cellar Wines, a local wine bar located in Silicon Valley that my wife runs, has been relatively active with social media: facebook, twitter, location-based services, review sites, etc. In theory, I believe that social media and the act of putting publishing tools into the hands of the masses is a good thing. However there are aberrations and, in practice, the theoretical ideal is sometimes not achieved – businesses can being unjustifiably vilified by anonymous (or semi-anonymous people), left with little recourse. Let’s walk through a humorous example. (Warning: some of the language is colorful and not for the proper or feint of heart.)
This Cobbler’s Child Is About To Get Some Shoes
This High-Tech Cobbler is intent on making shoes for my children this holiday season. Let me explain. As a busy consultant and owner of several small independent businesses, I rarely get to focus on the online marketing efforts of my consultancy, SmokeJumper Strategy. I often hear from clients who I’m delivering SEO, SEM or Social Media services to that my website must be super well optimized for search engines. I have to embarrassingly tell them “no actually.” Well like the Cobbler who is so busy making shoes for paying customers that his own children run around barefoot, my website runs around the Internet with no SEO-optimized shoes on.