Closely for Business impresses local business owners in Bellevue

July 23rd, 2010

I had the pleasure of spending some quality 1-on-1 time with dozens of new Closely for Business (C4B) users this week in Bellevue, WA.  The Bellevue Chamber of Commerce has launched an innovative new program called BizNow! that allows local businesses to tap into the power of social media, with Closely being the featured vendor in the program.

Few things ae more rewarding to a product manager than to hear enthusiastic reaction to the product.  So, this trip was VERY rewarding for me.  A number of our value propositions resonated well with the audience including the following:

  • C4B’s streamlined dashboard allows the busy small business owner to quickly create offers; manage those offers with capabilities such as Expire, Restart, Duplicate and Edit; and track performance with statistics that are easy to digest.    Add in scheduling and the ability to dissimiate offers seamlessly to FaceBook and Twitter and C4B provides considerable time savings.  Lack of time to devote to disparate social media channels was a big concern for many businesses and they were delighted that C4B addressed that pain point.
  • Among our newer features is a website widget that displays all live offers and updates in real time as new offers are created.  How many times have you been to a business website and seen offers that expired months ago?  The C4B website widget provides an elegant way for business owners to pop a small snippet of code on their home page so that visitors will alway see their latest offer.  This feature received rave reviews from the audience.
  • The C4B live offer page garnered a few “oohs” and “ahhs” of appreciation.  As one participant said  “I can create something that looks that good from filling out a form?”  The live offer page provides a compelling presentation of the newly created offer and includes social sharing functions for FaceBook, Twitter, Email and SMS. 

I gained a wealth of knowledge from the great folks at BCOC and the business owners who came to see our presentation and learn more about how Closely can help them meet their goals in using social media.  I’m looking forward to my next trip (I’m sure Perry has something lined up soon!) and meeting more local business owners.

Posted in Customers, Product | No Comments »

We’re looking for a rock star web engineer – is that you?

June 23rd, 2010

With success comes the opportunity to create great jobs in a great company.  We’re fortunate enough to be enjoying such success and we need to add the best and brightest to our team. 

After a successful launch at DEMO Spring 2010 and active Beta feedback from local businesses and media partners, we’re stepping up the development of our product roadmap.  We have ambitious goals in a dynamic and growing market and are looking for an infectiously curious and talented front-end web engineer with passion, persistance and extraordinary problem-solving skills to join our product engineering team. 

Here’s the profile of our ideal candidate:
  • 2-3 years experience designing and developing Web 2.0/ AJAX-driven applications required
  • 3-5 years expert hands-on knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, and JSON required
  • 1-2 years experience parsing, rendering and defining JSON data interfaces
  • Advanced JavaScript and object-oriented knowledge
  • 2-3 years experience with JavaScript framework libraries (such as jQuery, YUI, Prototype or Dojo)
  • Ability to debug, troubleshoot, re-factor and componentize code as projects grow in complexity
  • Knowledge and experience with MVC design pattern and its application in JavaScript required 
  • Knowledge and experience with cross domain and cross browser compatibility issues required
  • 2-3 years experience with RDBMS and SQL required
  • Groovy & Grails U/I and front-end development experience is a plus
  • Experience with JSON and NoSQL data stores a plus
  • Previous start-up experience (success and failure!) a plus
  • Experience working with third party Javascript API’s a plus

 

Closely offers a highly competitive compensation package including premium benefits, a generous stock option plan and more.

Qualified candidates should send a cover letter and resume to jobs@closely.com with Front-end Web Engineer in the subject line.

No 3rd parties, please.

Posted in Jobs | No Comments »

Daily Deals: Shiny Object Effects

June 23rd, 2010

The incredible momentum of GroupOn has predictably drawn a swarm of new players to the bright shiny object, setting up shop to copy the Daily Deal model and empower existing media companies to compete with GroupOn.

The SMB recall of GroupOn as a brand, as noted by Greg Sterling, is truly impressive for such a young service. Clearly, performance-based lead generation via deep discounts is compelling to fatigued small businesses in today’s economy. I’s guestimate that every major US metro market will have a dozen active daily deal providers by the end of 2010.

Projecting Forward

A few things feel predictable in the face of this market swarming behavior.

Deal terms will become more SMB-friendly – a requirement to make the concept digestible by a larger segment of local merchants.  A very small fraction of businesses can deal with thousands of discount customers swarming them via one campaign.   As competition heats up, and with traditional media companies moving into the space, the SMB will be offered deals that accept limited quantities, commissions will be ratcheted down, and payment terms will be faster.

This will all contribute to Daily Deals becoming a more acceptable model to a larger audience.  However, it will also reduce the attractiveness to the second and third tier providers.  Small businesses will be barraged by competing sales teams which will increase the difficulty for new entrants to gain mind share.  Incumbent media players acting defensively may determine the space a must win, which could lead to bundling practices that flattens margins for single ad product players.

The consumer deal volume will continue to increase.  Today in Denver I have six daily deal emails hitting my in-box, none of them particularly well targeted.  Targeting and filtering of deals will become a primary space for innovation, and will be needed to not begin to lose the engagement of consumers in deal browsing and sharing.

While email is the currently dominant channel of deal delivery, how deals reach local audiences will diversify as various media players exploit their particular path.  Display advertising, portal/mail feeds and mobile services will all give consumers access to a growing variety of deals. Consumers don’t much care where they find the deals, and social sharing will be powered everywhere.

Three, the small business will become fatigued with deep discounting and annoyed by the sales channel noise.  Many businesses I’ve talked to view this price discount behavior as necessary/interesting campaign during desperate times, but don’t view it as a long-term marketing model.  I believe deep discount pricing will naturally settle into being a selective use tool.

Projecting Past the Blunt Instrument Phase

The early success of Daily Deals will be instrumental in accelerating the introduction of live local marketing.  These deals validate that enticements work very well to drive leads, and demonstrate dynamic social engagement – teaching small businesses the importance of social and real-time marketing.

I intentionally called Daily Deals a blunt instrument for a couple of reasons.

The daily deal coupon is really only applicable to a fraction of local businesses. Home service businesses, several forms of retail, and many local activities simply don’t fit the purchased discount coupon marketing formula. Marketing extends well beyond coupon promotion.

Additionally, the Daily Deal model, working via traditional media paths of email and coupon printing, is not well aligned for the fast approaching world of real-time LBS.  Check-in and local mobile search are very core methods of audience access; these more casual and spontaneous social models are quite different from the current world of Daily Deals.

As the social graph becomes more integral to local marketing, the techniques for localized smart targeting will get really interesting. Consider being able to selectively entice and reward your customers based on their referral value to your business; consider being able to stimulate demand whenever you need it the most. Consider being able to drive demand driven by live feedback of how and where consumers, and your customers, are collecting.



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Posted in Group Offer, Local_Social | 2 Comments »

What’s in a Place (Name)?

June 1st, 2010

One of the critical goals we’ve started with at Closely is to drive maximum exposure for every live offer published by a small business.  At the proverbial end of the day, every SMB wants to maximize their local reach. Our aim is to take the complexity and friction out of this – creating a rich single point of entry for a continually expanding network of distribution.

Several development building blocks that have to come together to make this happen.  Today, we’ll briefly talk about just one – the business place directory.

Much has been written lately about the lack of an “open database of places“, and how critical this component is to the future of location based services. I strongly advocate this need, but I’ve also worked in and around this problem for over a decade and see no near-term solution that is truly open and universal.

The most interesting (and only!) place-based global directory is Google’s Place Pages.  Nobody can ever accuse Google of aiming low  – creating a page of rich aggregated local reference content for every place in the world seems to be the mission of Place Pages.

Up until the recent Google IO conference, the Place Pages asset has been unavailable to developers. The announcement to open up this asset as a live web dev service in July is a very promising move. However, much still remains TBD and the set of use restrictions suggest a less-than-open starting point move by Google. And, it’s no secret that many location-based developers have grown increasingly skeptical of developing too much reliance on Google tools.

So, what’s a guy to do – today?

Aside from monitoring and experimenting with the Place Pages API, and actively supporting the industry development initiatives like Open Street Map, there are practical options for developers in the US market.

Some of our best assets remain behind the scene

From day one, we designed US business registration into our application service to be synchronized with a local business directory.  In the US, we’re fortunate that a small number of competitive vendors have invested substantially in the collection and maintenance of a national business directory. We’ve chosen to build Closely in a way that is synchronized with the directory from our partner, Localeze. Obviously, we feel it’s the best for our application. To us, it offered the best combination of maximum distribution and deepest descriptive content in key business categories.

So, why is this important?

Here’s what we get out of building our application synched with a directory database.

  1. Random Content vs. Synchronized Content. If you use Foursquare and try to check in at an airport, you see the challenges of free form user-generated data models – users have entered dozens of places, and content that may be valuable to one user is tagged randomly to different instances of the same general place. [not trying to  knock 4SQ here - it's simply a case-in-point, and I know they are innovating around this model]. Synchronizing a business as a single unique entity with an authoritative business name and address serves to intuitively align user applications cleanly into one logical place, easily shared and synchronized.
  1. Increased Usability. Getting SMB’s to enter content into any application is a major usability challenge.  By designing our application to allow the business to rapidly “find themselves” speeds up the process, removes SMB content entry and generally improve accuracy. We’ve designed our application to automatically use location and category information as well as value-added content such as Hours of Operation.  In small business applications, ease-of-use is mission critical. EVERY step you can remove will materially impact your success.
  2. Integration Foundation. By having a business “claimed” in a widely distributed directory, we  improve the scope of opportunity for syndication of offer content created via our service.  As we’ve said, maximum distribution is critical to our future, and having a foundation that is used by hundreds of other search, mobile and social web services gives us a real edge.

This is just one of our key building blocks, but having fully completed directory integration just now, we felt it was worth a little explanatory bragging ;)

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Posted in Product | 1 Comment »

The Coming Wall of Noise

May 10th, 2010

Facebook’s “Like” product launch, with its’ associated Open Graph API, represents a truly a pivotal moment in social media.

However you view this news, it’s a pretty safe bet that it will result in a widely expanded network of sites that drive an enormous increase in “like actions”.  This, in turn, will drive an exponential increase in the volume of actions (noise) that offers to enhance and/or clog a consumer’s Facebook News Feed.

Another Brick in the Wall

For the most part, it appears that almost anything that is posted by a business today on its Facebook Wall finds its way to the News Feed of its Fans. However, when you project forward, it’s not so obvious that this will continue to be a valid assumption.

It’s not clear how the Facebook News Feed will handle a Business’ posted content when the volume of Like-induced content hits a deluge of new noise from around the web. Competing with cool videos, news and cat photoz will indeed be a challenge.  There is a related risk that consumers will start to hide business-oriented Likes as they cross their busy personal News Feed.

Search Industry Deja Vu?

Facebook manages a set of algorithms which continually decides (for you) what is to appear in your News Feed, much like Google maintains a relevance algorithm for your Search results.  It’s a critical value-add to the consumer experience, and it’s probably a safe bet that some form of popularity will continue to dictate how anything gets above the noise.

We can look to the evolution of the search marketing business to project the impact of this behavior. I would bet that businesses will face a less certain ability to promote their content into their followers/liker’s personal news feeds. The probable impact will be increased visibility for FB’s advertising products. The Facebook audience can be very highly targeted through their Display Ad products. We can speculate that this is a desirable outcome for FaceBook – separating commercial intent into ad products distribution versus personal news.

Where to Go?

While it’s reasonable to anticipate that a business will increasingly be pointed towards Facebook Ad Products, only time will tell how business spending will or should behave.  This shift creates both opportunity and risk.   It’s highly likely that a new value proposition for spending on “News Feed SEO services” will become part of the social marketing landscape (services designed to boost the organic ranking of a particular item into consumer News Feeds).

How a small business interacts with their social network in the coming 2-3 years will undoubtedly morph.  Will Facebook’s impressive reach and unique targeting abilities give it a sufficient edge?  Will Small Businesses succeed in creating better “opted-in” channels through which it distributes offers to local consumers?  Will search and social media placement migrate into more unified advertising options that carry compelling simplicity and ROI?

Will Twitter be a Good Diversification Play?

While Facebook maintains a dominating position in social involvement with consumers, these new changes may be increasing the argument for a parallel bet on Twitter.  Facebook’s new direction has the potential to make it a less predictable tool for delivering offers and specials to your customers. By contrast, Twitter (to date) represents a more explicitly opted-in consumer live marketing distribution tool.  The delivery of content is not subject to the delivery algorithm whims of Facebook’s News Feed.

We’ll Be Watching

Our mission is to stay on top of these trends and changes, and help organize the best tools and places that expand the quality of their social networks and the ROI of social media spending.  We pride ourselves on staying ahead of this fast moving space, and adapting to the changes with simplified and effective live marketing solutions for small businesses.

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Posted in Local_Social | No Comments »

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