Some of the best ideas are the ones that at the heart are really quite simple but it is in the execution that the winners and losers are separated. The “coming soon” page has been a staple of Internet business from the very beginnings of websites. As the Internet got more mature so did these pages, initially showing countdown clocks to launch dates and eventually including email signups and social media links. So if the idea was so simple, why then were so many companies struggling to be able to use their coming soon page to help build momentum and hype before launch? Sure many companies promised that if you signed up and tweeted a specific line you would get an advanced place in their beta launch list, but really nobody had come up with a way to make this all automated and effectively simple. Enter Launchrock.

Launchrock executes everything you want in a coming soon page to perfection. It allows you to customize the page with a your own logo and just enough information to tease what your company is going to be about. It allows you to include both an email signup and social media links. Best of all they have built in mechanisms to help you build the momentum and buzz you want for your startup before you’ve even gone live. By letting you set incentives such as inviting 3 friends to get early access to the site, Launchrock has taken the best of what has been built in disparate places and brought it together in an extremely simple and yet beautifully executed online application.

Still in beta, you can sign up to get your own invite and of course if you share with your friends you will get that invite even faster. I highly encourage you to check it out.

I was fortunate enough to hear Lee Lefever of Common Craft speak recently at Mesh Marketing in Toronto. He spoke eloquently about his business (a fascinating story) and described that he has been able to achieve success through what he termed “Mass Democratization”. It is a world where cheap tools combine with a home based business and a web only audience to produce a real revenue generating and full time income stream.

Lee has a fascinating story and there is a full post coming on his “Explainer Network” but I wanted to focus on a few of the many great communication takeaways from his presentation.

Starting with the fact that expectations are changing, there are too many sources of information and we care about too much stuff to digest it all, Lee and his team realized that the key to getting increasingly complex messages across to an increasingly disinterested audience was short web videos in “Plain English”.

The presentation contained some brief looks at some of the videos Common Craft have done and a discussion of the fine line between giving too much away on YouTube and wanting to license some of that same content but at the end of the day the key point was how much time is spent on the script and exact messaging of a three minute (or less) video. You need to really have discerned what you want to get across to a tight message and then let someone like Lee help you shape that into a package of ideas.

An amazing statistic Lee quoted a study at the University of Western Ontario (I would love the link if anyone has it) where by subjects both read information about a product and watched a short video about a product – after 72 hours only 10% of the readers could meaningfully recall what they read but 62% of the video watchers could recall something meaningful.

It seems to be a common theme for me but if you have something worth getting attention for then find great professionals to work with who can help you shape that message into something people will pay attention to.

Photo credit – http://www.flickr.com/photos/walleyjm/

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-A1l4Jn6EY

When was the last time you were deciding on a new restaurant, cafe or pub and didn’t turn to the Internet (whether at your desk or on your phone) to get directions, a review or even see who else might be there? Since I’m pretty nerdy the answer for me is that it would be completely out of character not to do a little online reconnasence work about the place before I suggest it to a group of friends. While I am on the far end of the spectrum that spectrum has definitely tipped to the point where I believe the majority of us now look up a place online before making a decision to go there.

Therefore, I am often surprised when I talk with small business owners and specifically owners of restaurants, coffee shops, bars etc how few of them are really aware that they have an amazing opportunity to promote their business by simply making it easy for customers to write positive (the negative reviewers seem to figure it out for themselves cuz their pissed) reviews or encourage a “check-in” on Foursquare, Yelp or Gowalla. Of course most of these businesses are already to be found on Yelp (and other review sites) but too few business owners have taken the time to beef up the user generated content (that makes up their listing) with their own images, descriptions and announcements. Even less of them seem to realize that there is a real bottom line business benefit to using these sites as a marketing channel and growing their brand by making it easy for the customers that love them to say something nice in an online review.

While it would take a lot more than my personal surveying to put hard numbers to it  (one study by the Yellow Pages Association and comScore found that local search for businesses, products and services grew 58 percent last year and reached 15.7 billion searches, more than a tenth of overall search traffic) I’ve made mention of my theory of “check-in currency” in a previous post so won’t dive into it here but in realizing how few of these business owners are taking advantage of this new digital currency I thought I would share some examples of businesses that are taking advantage of social media and local search to drive retail business and leave you with some simple tips that businesses can and should be using to promote themselves via online reviews.

There are many great examples of companies that are really using social media and local search to their advantage. As I have shared before Tasti D-Lite has integrated FourSquare into their loyalty program but you can also look to Jeff Diamond, co-owner of Farmstead Cheeses and Wines as a leader who makes sure he takes the time to reply personally to every comment/review left on Yelp. In one case, a reviewer complained that the person behind the counter was rude. Mr. Diamond sent a private message to the customer, apologized and asked for details. It turned out the employee who helped this customer was hard of hearing. By the end of the exchange, this onetime critic had joined the store’s wine club. He has since become a loyal customer. Or how about Danny Leclair, co-owner of Studio DNA hair salons in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, Calif., who uses Yelp and local search to promote special offers he said 50 percent of his new business now comes from Yelp, 30 percent from Citysearch and 10 percent from Google searches.

These businesses are not run by the most tech savvy individuals, but they’ve taken the time to invest a little bit of brain power in learning how to make the most of what are essentially free marketing tools. Telling you all this is of little value if I don’t leave you with some easy things you can do to boost your local and social marketing efforts today with $0 invested.

Starting at the very top of the heap lets talk Google and specifically Google Local which is now technically Google Places. The point is that you don’t want to miss having your proper store information, pictures, links etc on Google so that you show up when people try to find you specifically or even when they make a general search. Believe me your business seems a lot more important when it shows up on a Google Map and your competition’s business is nowhere to be found.

So visit Google Places and get your information in there. I would also recommend you ensure your listing at Bing is up to date

Head here at Yelp and take the time to watch their video and understand how to get your business online if it is not already there or claim your listing if someone else has review you.

Yelp also gives you some great tools to understand who is visiting your listing and offers you all the tools you need to respond to reviews. If you think you will have the time to consistently reply to reviews on Yelp I think that it offers an extremely personal way to let people know that your business is about people regardless of what it is that you sell.

Next go to FourSquare and claim your business and if you really want to be amongst the coolest kids on the block create some specials based on the number of check-ins at your location and of course reward the Mayor. Foursquare makes it very simple to do and you’ll be shocked how many of your iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Android toting customers appreciate your way of recognizing them. FourSquare will even help you get some stickers to promote that you are a welcome place for users and a great check-in location. People who check-in buy things and in the end you’re the winner.

Not only does FourSquare also provide you detailed stats like Yelp, it also has a proximity based mobile ad network that you will be a part of by offering FourSquare specials. These tools are again free so really what are you waiting for.

Of course every business should be knocking it out of the park with Facebook and nobody has laid it out better than Mashable here and Tamar here.

Finally, I’d highly recommend you begin Tweeting if you are not already using Twitter you read this guide by Mashable and started right away.

Remember that social and local can be your best friends if you take advantage of a few free tools and follow through on the best practices you find.

Good luck and thanks for reading.

Given my propensity for nerdiness and specifically my passion for entrepreneurial businesses in the online world I often get asked by friends, family and tweeps about what company or service I would recommend for this or that related to the Internet or online marketing. I am happy to give one of advice but find myself recommending the same companies and services time and time again so I thought it would be worthwhile to break down months of recommendations into a usable list of technologies and/or services I use or recommend you use in your business. I’ve tried to include some brief information on why I use the company/service and what I find valuable about that particular company but there are two things that you can be sure are true of any company that makes my list. First the company must be hell-bent on customer service, if there is one thing that every company (online or offline) should be passionate about, it is customer service and creating customer evangelists (I think I qualify as example A with this list) so if a company has made my list you can expect that while they might not be Zappos, they’ll treat you with respect. Second, to make my list the company/service has to be one that does not require a second mortgage on your home to use, if it’s on this list then in my estimation the benefits of use far outweigh the cost.

I’ve tried to break these down into some sort of usable categories and would be happy to expand on my experiences with any of these companies so feel free to drop a comment or ask anything that’s on your mind.

So here is my inaugural list of companies that rock!

Collaboration/Communication

What good is working in a vacuum or not being able to effectively collaborate with team members regardless of whether they are in the next office or a different continent. As a company like WooThemes has shown, with some ability to be tech savvy and the occasional early morning (or late evening depending on time zones) video call you can create and run a successful (and profitable) company across geographic boundaries with people you may or may not ever meet in person. Most who read this post will not be in the boat of the WooThemes guys but they’ve proven that it can be done and done well. So here are my favorite companies and tools for collaboration.

Skype

Traditional communication through the telephone and ultimately the dreaded conference call can and should be replaced by a better and cheaper method, the combination of ubiqutous high speed internet access and voice over ip has made there many better ways to communicate and collaborate with your team than simply using the telephone but Skype is still the most user friendly.

I am quite sure I do not need to give you an overview of what Skype is especially considering Oprah seems to love it, but if you want to communicate with colleagues (or friends) in a free manner there is no reason to look beyond Skype. With the smooth video to video calling capability you can not only collaborate in real time from across the world but you can do it face-to-face. For people who feel that it is important to have that “face time” with clients or colleagues there really is nothing more practical than Skype.

Yammer and P2 Theme

There is no doubt that Twitter has exploded communication across the Internet and that if you could harnass just one small bit of that communication in your own business it would be a very powerful thing. With that in mind I have two recommendations.

Yammer is Twitter but behind the corporate firewall and P2 is a WordPress Theme that mimics some of the functionality of Twitter. I have included both Yammer and P2 in the same area because although I think P2 is an excellent (and free) alternative, it requires that you or a member of your team have much more technical knowledge (you need to at least know WordPress) and it certainly does not offer the applications (e.g. iPhone or BlackBerry client) nor support of a paid product like Yammer. Both offer your team increased ways to communicate and collaborate, it really just comes down to the functionality and support you require.

Yammer

I’ll start with Yammer which I have described as Twitter behind the corporate firewall. I am sure the company would list about a billion different ways to describe it’s features but at the end of the day that’s the difference maker that I see in it and the value of Yammer is really in that it is a private version of Twitter. In organizations where people are in at different times or where teams are trying to collaborate with people they don’t often get to see face-to-face, Yammer can be a good way to ensure that those teams are talking and sharing links, resources and ideas.

If however you (or a team member) has some technical knowledge and you don’t really need the full feature set of Yammer then I highly recommend you check out the WordPress theme known as P2.

P2

I was originally alerted to this WordPress theme through an article written by Matt Mullenweg (if you don’t know who Matt is, he is one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, and Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web) entitled “How p2 Changed Automattic“. An article with that title from a person of that amount of knowledge and influence had it book marked in Instapaper (more on that below) for a long period of time before I got around to reading the article. With that said and if you’ve taken a moment to read Matt’s article you will immediately have a great use case for just what p2 is and why do I recommend it.

At the end of the day P2 is a free theme for WordPress that allows a traditional blog to to operate in a Twitter like fashion by supporting features like inline comments on the homepage, a posting form on the homepage, inline editing of posts and comments, real-time updates so new posts and comments come in without reloading, and more. I could do a more full job explaining the feature set, but there is a pretty slick video on the demo site that gives you all you need to know.

Go To Meeting

You really can’t talk about collaboration amongst team members without giving them a tool with which to collaborate or share documents in a conference or video call setting. With that in mind GoToMeeting is about as reliable and cost effective solution as can be recommended. The level of customer service and number of customers using the product (hence most problems are sorted out quite quickly) ensure that this is a service that will continue to advance. They’ll give you a 30 day trial and you can pay monthly so it’s a good service when you need it.

Rypple

Feedback is one of the most important things you can solicit from customers, colleagues and friends. The team at Rypple has made that pretty amazingly easy and slick. Using a customer acquisition model that seems to be based on employees at corporations falling in love with the service and then recommending it to their company – with the company paying to implement on a larger scale – Rypple is a company you should watch and get on board with.

Email Marketing

Mailchimp

For most small businesses email marketing or having a newsletter is one of those things they know they should do but don’t really know where to begin. I can tell you that email marketing works time and time again and getting started is not only easy, it’s also free. Sign up for an account at Mailchimp and you’ll be sending beautiful emails in no time. I can’t stress enough how much you should be working to get email addresses and beginning your email marketing. As you get more at ease read the Mailchimp blog and get some inspiration here.

Productivity

Perhaps my favorite items on this list can be found here, whether you’re a casual Internet user or hardcore these services will come in handy.

GetDropbox

Perhaps the most useful on the list, Get DropBox is a free service that will let you store files on the cloud and the retrieve them from any other computer or even your iPhone. It’s much better than emailing yourself and if you’ll have Internet it’s much better than any USB key. Go get yourself and account and you will not be sorry I promise.

Evernote

Whther you’re on a Mac or a PC, an iPhone or Blackberry, Evernote is another one that should be on both your desktop and your phone. We all have some method of keeping notes to ourselves, whether it is where you parked your car or your latest business idea, Evernote is the place to store them all. You can go so far as to take a photo with your camera and save it as a note with all the text shown in the photo searchable, it’s semi unbelievable. Notes sync with your desktop and phone and are basically available to you everywhere.

One non-business use for you is to save coupons as pdfs to Evernote and then have them available in store, the clerk can scan the upc from your phone.

Instapaper

This one is specifically for iPhone users but it’s an amazing and free little app that will allow you to access any web article from your phone while offline. You can all relate I’m sure, you’re working and come across an article you’d like to read but dint have the time. So you click read later and when you’re on the subway you’ve got a set of things to read. It’s a great app.

Twitter (Social Media) – Caveat, I do not know the customer service levels here

There are many who have covered the numerous Twitter clients and services better than I ever could (see this from Mashable, and this from Twitter) but I have a few services you should take a look at.

I’ll first say that my Twitter desktop client of choice is Tweetdeck and that on the iPhone I prefer Tweetie2 but here are some Twitter related sites and services.

Social Oomph

Previously known as Tweet Later, this company will allow you to schedule tweets days in advance and have them drop at a time of your choosing whether you are online or not. You can do some key word tracking using the site but that’s not its strong suit, it really is just a great service for pre-scheduling some tweets and then sitting back and watching them go.

Peashoot

There is no sense saying that you are going to use Twitter as a serious marketing vehicle if you’re not going to track your Twitter based campaigns and try to learn from them. Peashoot tracks your conversions and shows you how to improve your future campaigns. I’ve toyed with this but have not used it seriously yet but the company says it’s Audience Builder automatically follows people on Twitter who are relevant to you or your company. Over a matter of days Peashoot can increase your total audience size giving you more people to connect with and help spread the word about you or your company. More importantly the application lets you Measure ROI and respond to campaign activity. The company offers what it calls “Active Listening” technology whereby Twitter activity about your campaign is included in your campaign reports.

What The Trend

Trends on Twitter are a good way to keep yourself in the loop as to items which are topical and will hopefully draw visitors to your blog and comments if you hop on a trend and write something interesting. What the Trend is not one of those sites that you need to visit daily, but it’s a handy little place to get some topical blog post ideas.

**The theme on this blog has been updated since this post was written…To a WooThemes theme I might add**

With plenty of respect to Jason Schuller who designed the theme upon which this blog is built – and is amazing both as a designer and in the support realm – I will come right out and tell you that I am a WooThemes fan and you should be too. I work in the software industry and have been involved with my share of start up companies so it is not without some experience that I say these guys know what they’re doing. From collaborating with top notch designers (many of whom I’m sure they have never met in person) to outstanding customer support, the company is one that is certainly an example of a Web 2.0 mover and shaker.  Of course it’s not just a feel good story here, I do have some questions on how the brand is being built, so read on.I have first hand experience working with the themes provided by WooThemes and they are incredibly easy to work with out of the box, yet take one look at their showcase and you can see how someone with more talent than I can easily customize them. It’s the customer support when you are trying to tweak one of these themes where WooThemes more than excels. I am not sure if they pay every one who is a “support” representative in the forums, but there is a sense of community and I have posted an answer or two when I have known it. There is really nothing bad I can say about the company (I do not work for these guys) , so I invite you to check them out if your blog need’s an upgrade.

Where To From Here?

So I am not just espousing the greatness of WooThemes, I do actually wonder where to for this company and what kind of revenue they are making. On the revenue side, the themes cost $75 if you want one (plus one with their permanent promotion) and I would suspect that many who purchase these themes are semi to fully professional web designers who find that it is more cost effective for them and their clients to start from one of many many themes. So if your factor in the cost for a developer of $150 per theme (and I’m not including memberships just yet) there is a quick doubling of margins. I’m not sure what kind of revenue the subscriptions generate, you have to plunk down $200 to start, which is not very much if you are planning on selling your services. Another $20 a month and I guess all you really have to do is have 2-3 clients a year and it pays to be a member. So putting these numbers together the obvious question is what does demand equate to. I feel like I am a bit of an uber consumer on this front but I have to imagine this is going very very very we$$ for the team.

I’m extremely impressed with the company’s ability to collaborate with top notch designers from around the globe, but as a marketer I do wonder about whether a brand is being built. There is the WooThemes Twitter account which seems to be a bit personal, and there are all the individual designer’s pages – Adii Rockstar seems to be the biggest of these – yet if WooThemes was gone tomorrow or less drastic decided to change its name, would anybody care? Would much change? I don’t think that the world would crumble if any brand went in a different direction, but I think the indifference to the WooThemes brand is because of the fact that at the heart of it, it still feels like a company of individuals. Maybe I am just being picky, but I think that there could be more being done to build a Zappos like brand. After all, I have to suspect that regardless of the revenue numbers if the team could sell the company on more than just the revenue stream it would be worth sacrificing a little “rock star”
status.