There is no doubt that 2010 is all about mobile, geo-location and ultimately reviews, either through actually writing them or word-of -mouth generated by a check-in which is usually accompanied by a Tweet. This post is a compilation of my thoughts from a couple of events that randomly seem to fit together.

First the power of reviews and why I include them in a post entitled “Check-In Currency”. Reviews are the one area where Google knows they dramatically need to improve in order to have search become more complete. I don’t think this is conjecture on my part because it is no secret that Google recently tried to purchase the review site Yelp. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Search is pretty awesome these days, you can search for most local businesses by name and be directed to a page that includes the phone and address, hours of operation as well as a Google Map. There will often be some pictures posted and perhaps the odd review. I don’t think you could ask for much more. However try to do the same search for local coffee shops and you get a listing of them and even though there are some ratings its tough to get a real semblance of which one is best, perhaps closest but best, I’m not so sure. So if you’re Google you don’t want to lose people to sites like Yelp, because, while you’re Google. So you first try to acquire them but get rebuffed, and know everyone realizes that reviews are worth a big pile of cash to Google and everyone cares about something Google really cares about.

Moving on to why reviews and check-ins are tied together.

Foursquare Mayor Deals

If you’re Yelp you better figure out a way to fight Google and that is going to take (1) money and (2) a dramatic increase in the number of reviews. The first part was simple enough, Yelp recently went out and raised a bundle of cash. The second part however is not so easy. But Yelp was sneaky and realized that they needed to make you think of their app every time you visited a new establishment, and as such make a review. How to get users to always think of Yelp when they went to a new spot?Yelp took a look around and realized that Foursquare was doing a pretty amazing job at making it semi cool to check-in at each location. So Yelp went ahead and released a new version of their iPhone app that takes direct aim at Foursquare’s “check-in” feature. Whereas Foursquare was not asking users to review places directly, you don’t have to work very hard to realize that each time someone checks-in and Tweets it to the world it ends up being about as good a word of mouth review as you could hope for, even better since it goes to a huge potential audience. So Yelp went right at Foursquare’s check-in feature and built it into their

iPhone application. It may or may not work but it makes me fairly certain that check-ins and reviews are going to be linked for quite some time.

Finally I’ll sum up with why this all builds to the idea of “check-in currency.”

If you’re a savvy business owner and you realize that if people Tweet every time they visit your establishment it will be great for business then you’ll put in place a system that actually rewards customers for checking-in at your establishment. Case in point both Tasti D-Lite who has added Foursquare check-ins to their loyalty program and what are now regular advertisements in the Metro newspapers (see image) that reward both check-ins and the Foursquare “Mayor” of each establishment. The establishments have now actually given check-ins a tangible value, something Foursquare has to be extremely pleased with. So check-ins now literally equal currency, it’s quite an amazing little phenomenon.

So you’ve got a business idea or maybe even for the most advanced in my readership, a business plan. You’ve heard a lot about your elevator pitch and the many ways in which to raise money. So the next step in your plan is to get mainstream buy in for your idea. Yet how do you do this if your idea is complex and new? You need to break down your idea into bite size and intellectually digestible pieces. The person you are pitching to must intrinsically get your business the moment after you pitch it or the pitch flat out was not worth it. So how to explain a tough concept? Why not spend a fair bit of dough (this was not entitled the “free way to get noticed”) and get some experts to help you tell your story. If you really want to go for the gold, how about the guys from Epipheo Studios who were good enough for Google, twice.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDu2A3WzQpo

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwVX42Amcak

I’m not just talking about any group of talented individuals because if you need a guy who is awesome I’d just send you to Marc Lostracco, but if you need an agency who knows how to explain technology or even say Rosh Hashanah, go visit the kind folks at Ephipheo.

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.

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?

WooThemes - Antisocial

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.

I came across this article in Print Magazine and thought it was pretty interesting when you think about the design elements. Basically Print asked four design firms to come up with the design for packaging and branding a pack of dubes. Besides the fact that it is a cool idea in general, when you actually step back and think about it, this is uncharted territory. Nobody has ever really tried to brand Marijuana and so these guys were playing in a completely new ballpark. Of course you can go to Amsterdam where coffee shops have different names for their marijuana but even there almost nobody advertises and the closest you get to branding is the coffee shops themselves becoming chain-like. Therefore, it was interesting to me to see four graphic design firms get a chance at “building a better baggie.”

The four firms chosen for this little task were – Lust, a graphic design practice in Amsterdam established by Thomas Castro, Jeroen Barendse, and Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen; the New York office of Base, which worked with its branches in Europe; the Oslo firm Strømme Throndsen, winner of the 2009 Award for Design Excellence for its flour packaging; and The Heads of State, a two-man operation run by Jason Kernevich and Dustin Summers in Philadelphia.  The brief was simple: What would a legal pack of marijuana cigarettes look like?

So here they are, let me know what you think. Personally if I was walking by the Heads of State would win. Base looks like something I could get today and put a sticker on, the one by Stromme I think is cool but it looks a bit too much like the packaging for an energy powder (or crack) to me. The one by Lust, well I guess it’s good to know what you’re inhaling.

As always, I am interested in your comments and please RT this if you’re on Twitter.

Base - Click To View

HoS - Click To View

Strø - Click To View

Lust - Click To View

I came across this article in the New York Times almost a month ago and have been meaning to blog about it ever since. For those not familiar, a brief synopsis of the storyline at play.

For the past several years people in countries around the world have begun to purchase bottled water in astronomical numbers. According to some research 12,000,000,000 (12 Billion – that’s 9 zeros) gallons of water were sold in 16 Western European countries in 2007. For the North Americans in the audience your fact is that between 1997 and 2007 per capita consumption of bottled water more than doubled to 29 gallons.

As we have seen in most if not all of these countries, the environmental and economic impact of these empty water bottles is a huge headache for municipalities.  Now put yourself in the shoes of the Mayor of Venice. Beautiful Venice has no roads so trash must be collected on foot and while plastic bottles can be recycled, the process is not exactly perfected. Trash collection on the mainland in Italy costs $84 per ton. Collection in Venice where it is collected by men with wheelbarrows along the canals costs $335 per ton.

So what has the city of Venice done? Did it ban plastic bottles or start charging a premium (see Toronto’s policy of charging 5 cents for platic bags) to those who use them? Nope, the city went in a completely novel direction and decided to brand their tap water. For years many people have claimed that bottled water was marketing and hype at its greatest or ugliest point in that you were paying 12 cents for the water and another buck fifty for the name on the label. So putting that theory to the test officials in Venice decided to meet bottled water’s branding with some of their own and renamed Venice’s tap water “Acqua Veritas.”

Ok so you are thinking, “who cares if they rename tap water, that’s not branding” which would be true, but the Venetians understood your skepticism and backed up the name change with a slick logo and a billboard ad campaign that included local politicians. Even taking a page from comedy 101 which teaches you to poke fun at yourself, the advertising campaign plays on the fact that tap water is often referred to as “the mayor’s water” and has used this as a slogan where prominent Venice personalities are pictured with a glass of Acqua Veritas and the phrase “I, too, drink the mayor’s water.”

I decided to highlight this campaign not only because of its novel nature, but also to remind that there are often times where a brand (in this case any bottled water) has taken control of an industry and most would write off other brands (in this case tap water) where the other brands are not dead, they just need to reinvent themselves or reeducate the public. In the case of Venice’s tap water they have done both and to some early success.As Silvia Vatta a 25 year old student noted, “we used to use bottled water because we grew up with it at home and didn’t know any better.” Now Ms. Vatta is a regular Acqua Veritas drinker and the number of Venetians who drink tap water has risen 7 percentage points over a two year span.

My point to this post is that while we might see some companies as industry leaders who cannot be unseated, it is only that way because we let our perception become reality and don’t think we can change the “staus quo.”  What we seem to forget is that the status quo today was probably not the status quo five years ago and something worked to change it. Whether it is a marketing effort or collective social conscence (e.g. going green being top of mind today when just 5 years ago it was for “tree huggers”) that moves that status quo my point is that it can and does move.  Think about your own industry or even walk into your local grocery store and scan the drinks shelves. Ten years ago we had Gatorade but little else that would be considered a specialty drink. Now I step out at lunch and see people chugging everything from “Viatamin Water” to “Viatmin Enriched Coke” – So kudos to Venice for a well thought out and well executed campaign, now if they would only fly me down to do a taste test.

As always your thoughts, comments and feedback are appreciated.