February 10, 2011
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.
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Filed under 5 Questions For, Innovation, Local, Marketing, Mobile, Social
Tagged with coupons, fanminder, local, Marketing, mobile marketing, small business, sms marketing, social media, social media marketing, text marketing
February 3, 2011
Now that we got quantification and some basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) housekeeping out of the way, step two in our journey to SEO nirvana is one of my favorites: keyword research. Clients I work with often have strong, albeit narrow, perspectives on what words they want to “own” on google or the other leading search engines. After years of experimenting and monitoring, I have found there are often too many words that could conceivably be SEO targets for optimizing their site around. The result of keyword research should be a very clear delineation as to which select words are targeted for optimization on a page-by-page basis.
Here’s the magic keyword selection formula . . . all thing’s being equal, you should target keywords that have:
- High volumes of search traffic (in your geography)
- Low levels of competition
- High current ordinal rankings (for your website) on search engines
- High levels of your website-specific search traffic (e.g. what are the terms visitors to your website are searching on to find you and what search terms do visitors use on your site itself)
- High performance in Search Engine Marketing campaigns (e.g. high rates of clicks generated and/or conversions in any Google AdWords, or equivalent, campaigns)
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January 25, 2011
“Out in the woods
Or in the city
It’s all the same to me
When I’m drivin’ free, the world’s my home
When I’m mobile.” The Who
The Cloud
Cloud computing or “The Cloud” is Internet-based computing, whereby shared servers provide resources, software, and data to computers and other devices on demand, as with the electricity grid. Cloud computing is a natural evolution of the widespread adoption of virtualization, service-oriented architecture and utility computing (and certainly a phrase that many believe have hit the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” in Gartner’s Hype Cycle).
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January 13, 2011
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.
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January 10, 2011
In my consulting practice in working with software and Internet companies on strategy, product innovation and marketing issues, I often get approached by smaller, early-stage companies who, without a doubt, have needs for assistance. The rub for me professionally is that, because of where they are in their maturity (and funding) cycles, they often don’t have cash resources to hire “consultants” per se. In turn, I have made it SmokeJumper Strategy’s policy to not provide consulting services in exchange for equity. I have attempted this a couple of times in the past and it doesn’t work out. (I know the risk is I turn down equity in the next Google or Facebook, but I’m willing to live with the odds of that happening).
I do love working with early-stage companies and the entrepreneurs responsible for them – there is nothing more exciting, challenging and rewarding when you can see ideas come to fruition or changes in a product to better fit a market or insights about a market drive the direction and engineering efforts of a new product. This feeling is universal in all the spaces I’ve worked in: consumer, enterprise, education and developer tools. I’ve struggled with how to help entrepreneurs who I know and who have approached me to get involved at an earlier stage with regard to the fact I am a consultant and to a large extent am “coin operated” in delivering the services SmokeJumper Strategy provides and the fees that charged for their provision.
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