Attracting New Customers via Mobile Coupons: It’s a winner!

So, all of us are now realizing that we’re becoming, at least in this one way, more like the rest of the world;  our use of cell phones is going way up, and it’s become our lifeline to functioning competently in the day-to-day.  Here’s what I’ve been adopting myself,  either for my personal use or as someone on the lookout for ways to help small businesses establish some presence — sans the obnoxious, ‘in your face’ behavior, of course.  I will cover mobile in the next series of posts.

Mobile Tools that help me save money: Coupons via mobile  are taking off like never before.  From a small business angle, this means that getting involved in coupon opportunities has the capacity to do more than just give my customers a break during these recessionary times.  It also has the potential to build customer loyalty, give you visibility as a featured, local, neighborhood destination, get both interested individuals AND their friends into the act (many coupon tools have social forwarding built in), and even give you a bit more of that “here’s a business that’s hip” persona (translated: you get to to tie into young (20’s-30’s), single, educated women in the way they find is uncomplicated and cool).What I like:  Groupon or Living Social, both of which feature a SINGLE coupon for purchase every day.

It works on the principle that there is power in a collective — that a certain mininum number of people expressing interest will make it financially viable to offer a good deal and ensure that a deal will come to pass.

You might think that collective purchasing would work best for businesses people already know a bit about, but actually, the most active audiences are people seeking new engagements, and a quality business could very well fit the bill.  I know I find many offers showcase the creative or unique, which certainly gets my attention and interest.

One statistic from Groupon shows merchant feedback with the average check size 60% greater than the Groupon’s value, and that most participants are first-time customers.  If this fact continues to be true, it behooves small business owners to be at least as far along as they can be in terms of being able to field excellent service once interest on a couponing site is sparked.

Here’s what I like.  Check them out!

Groupon Contact: 877-788-7858 Ext. 2
Living Social Contact: 202.408.1745 x1117, deals@livingsocial.com

Oh, and for some information on the general state of couponing, here is an excellent article by Mashable.

Collaborate!

It’s been a while since I’ve taken a look at the world that has grown up around collaboration.

I think, like us all, I know a program here and there, and use what occurs to me to involve others more, usually by incorporating a tool which simplifies a process or finding a user-friendly framework for sharing content. There’s tons out there.

There’s an excellent diagrammed map at Mindmeister, for instance, that charts the different activities called forth in collaborating these days — everything from document-sharing to white boarding to private social networking platforms to workspace tools for collaborative writing and reviewing.

But after you glimpse into this universe of how people are currently conceiving collaboration, it’s good to identify what would compel you to make such a shift.  At the most basic level, think how you, one single artist to another or you, one group of creative folks to another, might benefit from greater exchange.  I’ll share with you a few scenarios.

Scenario #1: Suppose you are working on developing the website to help promote your work.  Ordinarily, you might scan a few websites of people in your network or those whom you admire, bookmark particular pages for later viewing, make mental notes of those approaches, text, and visual components which are most likely to be successful for you, and perhaps, once you developed your own site, pass it on to a few friends for review.

Now, imagine a more collaborative approach using your network.  Twiddla embraces a good example of this (they call it co-browsing).  A team of people can get together on a Twiddla page and browse your site while participating in discussions, adding annotations, sharing files and chatting along - all in real time.  It’s like adding a whiteboard layer over any uploaded image or website. Through the use of the tool, you might engage via audio, real-time chat, website mark up and the ability to brainstorm new elements from scratch. You can save what you come up with, and get the feedback all in one pass. A true time saver.  And guess what? It’s free. (Along the same lines, there is Envolve, but they are still in beta, stay tuned!).

Scenario #2: You’ve come up with a number of new product ideas and frankly, you’re not sure which of the ideas has the most legs. You need people to share their insight on what you should go with.  In addition, you want to hear from potential customers some detail regarding their perceptions and have them feel included in your development process. After all, it’s all about knowing your clients better, isn’t it?

Typically, you’d approach things this way: You might ask for some direction from those you already know well, posing your questions unsystematically, maybe via some impromptu, informal feedback mechanism.

So again imagine that same scenario, using UserVoice. You discuss an idea on your blog or website, invite people to vote on each idea and like a forum, you get detailed comments but with the addition of a final count of how many people responded, and many more actually participating — even those you don’t know very well. You’ll know which ideas really were embraced and why, and the whole thread of the conversation will be there to view by everyone who cares to read it. Since Uservoice can live wherever your customers gather, after the initial signup, they can just offer reviews right there. Finally, you’ll get a quick idea of who all participated and realize the best ideas quickly, since they will quite literally rise to the top of the list.

Scenario #3: You want to organize an event to showcase your work.  You’ve designed a half-day set of client activities. Others will be presenting and you feel it might be nice to coordinate/collaborate on some parts of the day’s events as well.

It’s natural to start with what you’re used to doing, chatting on the phone with your co-creators, and identifying common areas of support.  However, it often turns out one or both of you had a different sense of things and didn’t quite communicate as intended.  Oh, well.

But imagine that this time, you would go about setting up your mutual participation differently. Imagine having the flow of events mapped out.  Mindmaps are now tools for collaboration, meaning you can work on the same map at the same time online.  You can mark the steps, identify who does what, and have a reminder map for later. Check out Comapping.com and  Mind42 and see what I mean. Does it get you further?  Clarity, a clean way to delegate tasks, and a permanent record, for instance?  If it does, it’s a collaboration idea worth embracing.

So, try them out.  All of them, as they fit you.  You’ll be including others, and maybe even having a better time.

Community Cafes: Outstanding hangouts for networking and work

Every now and then, I get the feeling I know nothing about my community. It’s when I am not working a “regular job” or when I am more invested in imagining my future than creating one, that I can feel the disconnection.

I tell myself it is only a matter of weeks before I’m going to take the world by storm but then, another week whooshes by as I get caught up in a ridiculous avalanche of goal-driven detail. What then?

Then–and please don’t take this in a pollyanish way–I know it’s time to skip off to cafe land. I go because I recognize how much I want to be reminded I’m a part of the community, not only by address, but in-person. I go to get out of a rhythmic rut.

Turning that corner many times over, I have confidence I can now be of help to you. I checked out YELP to get started in choosing where to go but I found that the reviews were all over the board–some didn’t reflect the actual experience, some chose criteria I didn’t care about, some were for the younger folk alone. So, I came up with my own criteria. Here’s what I wanted to know:

1. Did the cafe have a nice, welcoming, energy flow in terms of its spatial arrangements, cafe culture, attitude toward my being there, sometimes for a good part of the day? We all need to keep the energy flowing, and there are qualities to a place that often go unconsidered in this regard.

2. Did the cafe have a nice conversational hum–that is, not too quiet so as to implicate me as a culprit for actually engaging with my day and yet, not too loud that I couldn’t hear myself think? There’s a way of being comforted by the crowd but also not becoming the crowd killer. I needed to bet on the former.

3. Did the cafe serve food that wasn’t getting a kick out of bloating Americans? Funny how I think this must now be an international past time but there’s no need to serve up details, mine or yours, is there?And, here’s the point. If I’m going to be there for a while, I can really use some good but simple foods as opposed to only pastries, pastries, pastries. Did I mention pastries? How about a simple salad with lemon dressing? Or a peach from time to time?

4. Did the cafe take a bow to the community; that is, express some of the personality of the people who make up the neighborhood as well as the passions of the owners? An openness to providing some visual or auditory interest or to sharing what else is going on in the community is never going to get old.

And centers for community we still desperately crave, stated or not.

5. Did the cafe go the extra mile, and consider how different people like to congregate? Today, I’m a slouch and need some couch coddling. Tomorrow, I am meeting up with those small business owners, and wouldn’t it be great to introduce an informal element into our relationship by taking them to a comfortable, yet dignified place made for great conversation?

6. Could I imagine myself striking up a conversation with anyone and how easy would that be? Truth is, we could always use a few more friends, and cafes are one of the few remaining holdouts for unpretentious, casual, authentic conversation–face-to-face, that are true opportunities for exchange in our day-to-day. We don’t often do it, but I think most of us want to know it’s there.

What about you? Is this your criteria? Interested in my discoveries about what matters to solo workers as they gravitate to cafes?  I’m compiling some visuals of what cafes here really have appeal.  Stay tuned.

Coworking: A More Rewarding Collaboration and Community Opportunity or Not?

I just shared with you my criteria and assessments of the local cafe scene as a collaborative space. Indeed, cafe spaces have great potential for both the solo, work-at-home consultant and those pulling together meeting space for the team.

Ironically however, right after finishing the post, some coworking literature found its way to my mailbox. It seems here’s something else vying for my attentions and consideration. But I’m wondering–does it add value or complication to my life, make me more of something I want, like becoming more productive and connected, and how much smarter is it joining one of them versus my now old standby, making the rounds with the cafes?

First of all, for those of you who don’t know the idea, coworking is a cafe-like community/collaboration space for designers, makers, prototypers, DIY’ers, writers, and independents. And boy, is the concept growing, as identified by Todd Sundsted. And check out the number of places cropping up across the U.S. already!

The concept is this: People want to self-organize and receive the benefits of affiliation but they also want to make individually-determined time commitments, feel out some alternatives, and choose a context that, unlike the last job they came from, is now enabling the good fit. This may come down to essentially renting a desk for the day, week, month. And what a desk it is!

By opting in, you also typically gain access to all the standards of an office: meeting rooms, whiteboards, mailing, faxing, message center services, etc. In addition, some of the spaces have some very interesting extras, like cafes that are within their own walls, and scheduled evening presentations where people explore complementary collaboration tools and professional information. No need to submerge into that echo chamber of isolation that seems to come part and parcel with working at home.

It might even be said that coworking is a next level commitment toward one’s own advancement. You rent a space for a time you can commit to (with some coworking entities–there are even limited time frame arrangements to check out for free). At which point you can begin to gauge if the commute, the new people, and the added stimulation make sense to you. Many people attest  that the more you affiliate, the less you have to wonder where your next interesting exchange is going to come from. Remember, that unlike the old corporate, take-it-as-it-comes job, people are very often creative and coming from disciplines you may not ordinarily have connection time with. Again, joining a coworking space can be a way to get in touch with what helps your own productivity the most.

But then, we come back to the question about whether coworking is somehow a truer, more rewarding form of collaboration and community, versus the cafe where you may already be pulling together folks for community table congregating or securing a savory seat by the window just for you. What do you think? What have you found out about the way you work? How well do you work in these various venues and what raises your productivity to the max?

Creative Bridges to Community: Top Project Builders to Learn From

Amy Sample Ward has done us bridge builders a great service.  She has created a collection of case studies around the topic of Social Media for Social Good, which is, essentially, organizations that get behind a social cause writing about their goals, approach, etc.

But aside from gathering what people are doing in the name of social good, I think these studies provide readers with excellent examples on how to go about making creative bridges to our communities. She, along with Beth Kanter, presented the winners at the NTEN (The Nonprofit Technology Network) this past March. but you can check out the full range of submissions here.  A wonderful idea bank for social media connection!

Founder Dating: what’s not to like!

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I can’t believe it.  For so long, I have attended events, hoping to serendipitously cross the path of someone with compatible interests with whom I could chat up my ideas for a business, but nothing as yet has come to pass.  Either the people only partially shared my interests or the timing was off or a personal knowing was missing to enter into the kind of committed work relationship that sharing a business needs.  I began to curse my departure from those natural peer circles at graduate school where access to partnering seemed more the order of the day.

So, here’s a connection that I just ran across that got me excited and maybe will do the same for you.  It’s called Founder Dating, and  basically you put forward an idea you have, and see if others might also be interested in going to business with you around that idea or something similar.  It’s not like one of those schemes where you vote up or down a business, thereby conveying your belief in its viability (although hey, I’ve got nothing against them).  Or sites like KickStarter Online, where you can make a pitch for a particular project, and get people to back you, essentially a variation on voting for the good idea but better, because here, there is actually a pathway for some real funding.  Or events like Women 2.0, where you gather with others to shape your idea in-person in the hopes of improving the quality of the idea in this first place.

No.  Founder Dating is actually a service that aims to bring together super talented entrepreneurs with different backgrounds and skill sets to start innovative new companies. All too often,  we know people with similar backgrounds and skills sets to our own.  So to find co-founders who come with complimentary skill sets, with an interest in launching similar ideas; well, that kind of service actually fills the gap I’ve just described.  Check it out by submitting an application.  And see if you might find your way to a San Francisco or Seattle to take it further!

Gallery Grievance: Your social media ideas not gonna work here…

Yesterday, during my walk in a new neighborhood in San Francisco, I popped into a gallery along the avenue. There were some pretty nice paintings on the walls–colorful, professional, rich with storytelling potential (you know, the kind where you can look and make many associations because of  the juxtaposition of symbols, characters,  and other visual elements).

The gallery owner was stoic enough about the loss of people dropping by (hard times, these days), but I couldn’t read what she was after by communicating her disappointments to us. The gist seemed to be that no one was buying and there was only a once a year event where people in any numbers dropped in. She loved the one-on-one exchanges but those were dropping off too, paying rent was no picnic, etc.

Well, hardly the expert but feeling her angst, I wanted there to be a solution for her. Of course, I introduced the idea of having events in the space and promoting them wildly over the net, but as soon as I put it out there as a possibility, she rejected it. “I’ve tried all that. Blogs, emails, getting just a taste of paintings at an online site and thinking they’d seen something already, what a waste of time! My business is a direct, highly personal business. That’s how things have happened before and how they will happen again”.

At this point, my boyfriend was feeling I had spoken a little too long about the glories of web marketing but as he hustled me out of the gallery, I couldn’t help lingering just a second more. I glanced back at all those paintings ripe for discussion, the need for adult community centers where we live, and the what if what was on the web was a very animated discussion about the event itself, featuring a new form of gallery interaction that used the painting space as a means to create deeper engagement with the art and artist?  Perhaps as a nightly series discussion group?  Perhaps as an inquiry into the actual value of making and/or being exposed to aesthetics in our own lives?

What if?  Have you any thoughts about this? Any ideas for a successful intervention?  Or is she right–is the use of the web for this kind of gallery promotion a total waste of time?

Serious About Collaboration? Here’s another great way to go…

In another post, I talked about those single event situations when you might want to collaborate to work more efficiently.  But what if you might like to embrace collaboration as an ongoing strategy for how you approach what you do? And what if you would like to amass feedback on a much larger scale?  Perhaps you’ve just installed a public space project and you want to know how it can become something much more than it is at present but you’ve got a small team and to gather all that data feels far more than you feel equipped to do?

I’ve run across a great tool for that.  It’s called Hubbub and the idea of it is described pretty well here.  You can introduce/post ideas, vote on them (even demote them if you don’t feel ideas are worthy), collaborate in developing them via chat, influence their direction, and bring an aspect to resolution, all by getting on board with this online ramp to collaboration.  If you’ve ever sworn that crowds are far smarter than individuals, this will be it for you.

Still in early stage development, it is nevertheless worth a watch.

SF New Tech Night Out: a Mobile Education

Looking forward to SF New Tech’s event in San Francisco in this second week of the New Year.  The focus is on emerging mobile apps.

What will be exciting to know about are the more practical apps that are coming onto the scene.  Things like Rx Personal Caregiver (a reminder to take medications!)  and RadioWeave (which gives you access to radio on the go as well as social channels like Twitter.  Hmmm).  There is also an app which will allow you to record your health progress as you undergo a health intervention, called Polka, and a game that will set up a scavenger hunt scenario for you as you explore a city.  Since I’m developing something for people visiting places like San Francisco, I’m hoping for some interface between actual city spots and the scavenger app.

What I also like about SF New Tech besides the high energy in the room for things newly emerging is the fact the Myles, the organizer, makes himself available for email and follows up each presentation with a brief survey using Wufoo that also tabulates your answers immediately, giving anyone who completes it an idea of how your response compares to the rest of the people attending.  I think it’s fabulous — a small but important gesture not to lose audience feedback around a shared activity.

Taking Advantage of Local Spaces — Even Your Home!

Networks, networks, networks.  All forward possibilities — even those which center around our private social spheres — are dependent on our ability to expand them. To create a draw, now you put out the message to all on Facebook, Twitter or any other social network so everyone you already trust can learn what you’re planning.

Still, that’s just one piece.  What I find really thrilling is the idea of using networks to really pull resources where they are needed as much as to put an overflow of resources to better use. 

Take, for example, the introduction of house concerts from the site, Concerts in Your Home. As more and more people in a neighborhood reject converging on a crowded, bar-like scene which may lack civility, the chance to actually hear another person in conversation given noise levels which fight against it, and the comfort factor of familiarity, an entire generation of folks are opting for a better alternative. 

That’s where the idea of “Concerts in Your Home” holds promise.  It simply makes far better use of creative resources.  The musicians come to you, where the spaces are more intimate, with your network providing the pull. It’s a product of Texas but they’ve got good company with the number of artists who are beginning to offer similar services.  Heather Gold, storyteller and comedian, performs on both coasts yet on her web page, she elicits interest from individuals who might be interested in doing home concerts as well.  She even asks for recommendations from her network for possible future themes. 

Is there any doubt that both the creative professional and the home viewer are benefiting?  What additional assurances might you need to make this idea a go in your neighborhood?