Start-Up Watch COD: ChoozOn helps marketers deliver offers to their brand fans

The web has become one of the primary deal delivery vehicles – so much so that there are hundreds – perhaps thousands – of deal sites and apps presenting offers to consumers. But the complexity of the space has made it more difficult for consumers to find deals for the brands that they want.

Many brands are now including deals and offers in their mix of communications intended to reach existing users. For such brands, a start-up called ChoozOnmay be a valuable marketing tool.

ChoozOn is a community designed to match people to offers for brands and categories that they love. Users join, identify the brands that interest them, and suggest friends to populate offer subcommunities and deal clubs. The site does much of the heavy lifting of surfacing deals for consumers. They scrape the major and minor deal communities as well as identify the store-loyalty-card-linked-offers for which the consumer is eligible. The site then presents these offers to the consumer in a variety of ways.

Users can give permission to brands to tailor offers to their specific interests.
A deal alerts service offers the opportunity for consumers to opt in to receive hot deal alerts as they become available.
A “check first” feature enables people to look for offers just before they embark on a shopping trip.

A second source of offers and information comes from the network of friends that the user has created. These people can share offers and deals they find with one another, so that all can benefit from the best stuff they find.

Here’s their intro vid.

In the past, I have used this space and others to rail against the dealification of all online marketing. Put simply, I am sick and tired of the explosion of deal and offer focused start-ups because such venues often DESTROY brand value by providing universal access to more and larger discounts. We appear to be careening toward a time when consumers won’t buy anything unless there is a deal available.

But I don’t have that kind of negative reaction about this service. I like ChoozOn.

First, it’s primarily geared to helping retailers, where deals have long been the key inducement to incremental shopping visits. “High/Low” retailing is a widely accepting industry strategy, versus EDLP. In my view, ChoozOn isn’t increasing the amount of inventory sold on deal – it’s simply moving the deal communication from ROTO and newspaper to online.

Second, the idea behind ChoozOn is precision. Focus offers on specific audiences. This enables retailers and brands to tailor offers to specific individuals, better meeting their individual needs. While the site is also going to surface that 75% off offer you made on a deal of the day site, well it’s not their fault if you’re an idiot.

Clearly I am not the only marketer that likes what they see here. They’ve signed up almost 1000 retailers, and they are still in Alpha. So clearly they have something going on. And their expressed purpose of making the online deal world “smarter” jibes well with brands using strategy to deliver deals instead of throwing spaghetti at a wall.

In short, ChoozOn appears to be a good way to get tailored offers into more hands, which can make a lot of sense for a store or a brand. It’s helping brands create ongoing relationships with loyal users based upon tailored information and incremental value. And the social component may well help brands identify new consumers anxious for the benefits you can provide them.

Start-Up Watch COD: Zerply gives people virtual personal storefronts online

One of the most exciting uses of the connected web is for professional networking – the opportunity to get connected to people with an interest in what you do. Linked In, of course, is the mac daddy of this space, connecting tens of millions. But other teams and start-up companies are also offering fascinating and distinct professional networking services that are worth a look.

 

I recently read about a global start-up called Zerply, and liked what I found. The concept behind Zerply, according to their site, is to connect people who really love what they do. The site enables anyone to create a customizable profile with more creative freedom than is available from a Linked In or a Facebook. Users can begin the process by linking to Facebook or Twitter, and then providing information about themselves, why they do what they do, what motivates them, and the like.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that a company with employees spread around the globe has attracted users from every corner of humanity. The site appears to offer a special appeal to designers and entrepreneurs who leverage its freer and more graphical approach to express their individuality.

As you peruse profiles, you begin to see what makes this such a vibrant community. Rather than focusing so much on credentials and professional experience, the site seems to showcase capabilities and uniqueness front and center. Further, what you find is that there are great talents scattered everywhere, not just in “creative cities” and leading companies.

In just a quick look around I found people in a variety of different life situations who are clearly passionate about interests that might make them great creative and other resources for organizations. In my first nine profile views, I saw students,  teachers, web workers, programmers, and more from lands as diverse as Brazil, Britain, China, India, Italy and of course ‘Merica.

While as of this writing the feature set is still in development, one can already see the broader range of content that will eventually be part of the site. It’s well organized, graphical, and customizable.

Will it give Linked In a run for its money? I actually don’t see that as its objective. Rather, they seem to be saying that some of us at least are more than resume entries, and that some additional tools and capabilities can help people express who they are just as well as it showcases what they do and have done. More About.Me than Linked In, at least so far. I’ll be checking back often to see where they take this.

Start-Up Watch COD: Ginza Metrics makes SEO management easier and more efficient

A dear friend of mine who was cutting her teeth in brand management while I was soaked in Anbesol on the agency side periodically sends me emails explaining her frustration as a senior marketing exec trying to make sense of digital. She once sent me this little missive about SEO:

“We send $12K a month to a special SEO agency that does…something…at least I hope they do something. I get reports that I don’t understand about issues that are poorly explained. Gradually our company rises in search rankings, but very gradually. But on some other words we drop. I call them Wink and Promise Associates. Not one person on our team…not one…has any idea what they do or whether they do anything at all.”

I love her emails because she pretends ineptness when I know she is a genius. But SEO does tend to be a black box for many people.

Which is really silly. It is perhaps the most critical activity for making a website deliver better results, but detachment from it leads to a perception that it is a whole lot of nothing. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is, of course, a real science, and has a set of clear and manageable activities that can make a big difference to your business.

A start-up called Ginza Metrics is not only doing a great job demystifying the space, they are also making more effective SEO management accessible to even small businesses with a SaaS offering that is remarkably powerful.

Getting started with Ginza Metrics is very simple. You visit their site, input the URL(s) you wish to manage, and tell them which of several leading analytics platform you are currently using. From there, you identify the keywords that are most relevant to you and the dashboard gives you a simple and accurate display of your ranking on these KWs on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You can also tell the service to use your site map to identify the pages, and an XML feed to identify the KWs that are relevant. They even color code the rank indicators so you can see where you are climbing (or sinking.)

Ginza Metrics also helps to show you which KWs lead to conversions so you know where to focus your attentions. From there, they offer a set of recommended actions and show which pages need fixing to improve your rank. This is key because Ginza Metrics helps optimize to the page level, getting site visitors to the content that is most relevant. This is definitely not an offering focused only on your homepage.

The service also helps with global SEO management by optimizing pages in multiple languages. And for agencies, you can manage multiple pages and programs from a single account.

Pricing is quite reasonable. Small sites with a limited set of KWs can participate for as little as $49 a month. Very limited versions of the service are even available for free. The pricing increases with the number of pages, KWs, and user “seats.” Enterprise versions also come with account manager support.

What I most liked about this service is how it both demystifies SEO and makes driving improvements actionable and ongoing. And its many pricing and service plans make it relevant to small business, enterprise, and agencies alike. Check them out! Whether you a skeptic like my dear friend, or an SEO veteran looking for an easier way to manage the challenges, Ginza Metrics seems to have you covered.

Start-Up Watch COD: SocialBase makes social media management easier and more effective

Social media isn’t a doddle. To do it right requires multiple organizational participants, platforms, content types, an editorial calendar, and processes to manage the flow of information across and throughout the organization.

On too many occasions this year we have seen the result of loose social media management – inappropriate and incorrect messages get attributed to organizations. Apologies abound, pink slips fly, and agencies get fired.

While no platform can solve all of the problems or address all of the opportunities, SocialBaseoffers a great means of improving your control and effectiveness whether you represent a small organization or a large brand concern.

The core idea behind this offering is a dashboard that brings together all of your social presences and connects the social media manager to others in the company who are relevant to the social effort. The manager outlines tasks, needs, and permissions, and uses the platform to get the inputs they need to run all of the social presences effectively.

For example, the service pings a team member assigned to produce a blog post, reminding them to produce the content. Upon delivery, the platform can drive it through a permissions and approval process, time its release, and identify where it appears across the social footprint.

On the flip side, the platform surfaces relevant consumer messages about the brand from across the web. The social manager can read the comment, respond if they are so authorized, or deliver it to other individuals like customer support or legal for follow up.

Multiple presences can be managed from the single dashboard – meaning multiple social media types as well as multiple accounts within specific social platforms.

I am sure the value prop is clear to you – instead of time consuming logistics and manual management, SocialBase makes it easier to be more effective with a more focused set of resources.

Here’s a powerful and succinct product run through:

The service is delivered at three levels and price points. The entry level offering is called SocialBase Solo, which costs $50 a month. For a higher level of capabilities, including team collaboration, more complex task management, and assignable work flows, the cost is $200 a month. For full service support at the enterprise level, the cost rises to a still reasonable $2000 a month.

Do you NEED a service like SocialBase? Well, consider this. Most enterprises are relying on a few “social media managers” or an agency to provide the most public face of the company. Do you think spending $200 or $2000 a month is too much for a major brand to empower such a team and also offer real oversight and control? Ignoring for a moment the risk of a more chaotic management approach, how effective do you believe a team can be if they spend the bulk of their time trying to manage all this through email, IM and the like? Wouldn’t it be better to empower them to better satisfy consumers? A few months ago I wrote about a similar service called Spredfast that I also have heart for. I urge you to spend a little time finding out more about these sorts of platforms and what they can do for your organization.

Start-Up Watch COD: Legolas lets you to buy audiences like you buy context – pub direct

Audience buying has made a huge difference to so many brands. The idea of zero-waste planning and execution holds tremendous appeal, especially in an era in which we all need to drive more results from the same dollars.

Exchanged based buying has its limitations, however:

• Planning challenges of buying impressions real time versus in predictable quantities
• Limited range of creative options
• Concerns about environment and brand safety
• Preponderance of “bottom of the barrel” leftover inventory

To be sure, some exchanges and DSPs have been making headway on these issues. But there are still plenty of hurdles, ESPECIALLY for brand marketers who are focused primarily on brand metrics.

Enter Legolas. Legolas bills itself as the first audience futures marketplace, using a unique media sales platform to help brands and agencies buy audiences in advance from publishers they like and trust.

Instead of focusing on leftovers and RTB, Legolas offers a sort of automated RFP process – only its focus is on audience-based media transactions. Here’s how it works:

1. The buyer identifies the audience they want to purchase. To do this, they can use first and third party data, including site visitation data.
2. Legolas forecasts the amount of inventory they can buy from specific pubs during a given period.
3. The brand identifies a ceiling price for the campaign, and the platform “rfps” the approved list of pubs, inviting them to bid on a campaign. If a pub chooses to participate, they set a price they are willing to sell at (below the brand-set campaign max.) Other approved pubs also make their bids.
4. The timed reverse auction expires, and the Legolas platform develops five possible spend combinations from the bids.
5. Brand chooses one of the approaches, or makes certain changes to the recommended allocation, and makes the buy.

For pubs, the process is self service. Brands/agencies can choose a self serve option or work with the Legolas account team to formulate their plans.

Let’s talk for a moment about the advantages that this system offers for brands and pubs.

Brands: The opportunity to buy high quality inventory of all types – in set quantities by pubs – restores a sense of control to the planning and buying process that has been lost in some exchange-based buying. Further, because the brands identify the sites that interest them, they have much greater control over site and page quality, as well as true transparency about where the ads will run. And they can do all this for AUDIENCE, meaning that zero waste buying can be a reality for brands with even the very highest quality standards.

Pubs: Legolas lets pubs capture the true value of their inventory because they can earn rates that reflect the quality and composition of their audiences. While the exchanges offer a value advantage over the rates that pubs were getting from networks, they only did so for very standardized units, and only for last minute buys. Further, they can pre-sell inventory as they would with context. Finally, because the pubs are RFPed by named brands, each site can set its proposal prices without the fear of undermining their direct sales efforts. If a brand RFPs them that is already buying contextually from them, they can set prices in Legolas auctions accordingly.

I am a big fan of anything that helps pubs get the true value for their audiences. I am also a big believer in the power of environment to enhance or attract from the BRAND BUILDING VALUE of advertising. With Legolas, brands and pubs have a win-win. Both buyers and sellers benefit from a transactions system that gives each group what they need most. Hard not to like that.

Start-Up Watch COD: Bunchball is out to gamify a broad range of your brand’s online experiences

There are many actions that we hope consumers will take. Besides clicking to buy, of course. We want them to rate things, consume content, endorse our products, tell their friends about their experiences using our products, etc. We can’t MAKE THEM do these things. Those days, if they ever really existed, are long gone.

Bunchball is a company that helps companies make desirable actions far more likely. They do this by “gamifying” the process on our websites and in social experiences. The principle is simple and powerful. Specifically, Bunchball rewards consumers for taking these actions with a variety of tactics calculated to appeal to universal human motivations and impulses.

We all like recognition and rewards. With Bunchball, a company can motivate consumers to do things like consume more content by giving them points, badges, and the like when they do so. Further, by introducing competition into the mix, they can make participation more exciting and stimulating.

The core of the Bunchball offering is Nitro, a gamification platform that you implement on your owned media. Nitro drives on site participation in a variety of ways:

• Challenges
• Trophies
• Badges
• Achievements
• Points
• Leaderboards
• Virtual goods
• Virtual rooms
• Customizable Avatars
• Trivia
• Poker-like experiences
• Social media notifications
• More

While there are different ways to integrate Nitro onto your site, the easiest is the Nitro toolbar that offers, tracks, and rewards users as they act. Since the toolbar lives in front of your content, it requires less integration time and activity.

Let’s explore an example to see how this works. A visitor enters your site and learns that they can earn points and access to special content if they take certain actions. As they do so, they receive immediate feedback and virtual rewards like badges. As they continue to act, they earn points to use toward related branded merchandise and offers only available to such participants.

Perhaps not surprisingly, entertainment brands have been the most active in implementing Bunchball early on. By rewarding users for consuming, rating, and distributing content, people can get closer to the brands they love while also serving as important social marketing tools for the properties.

Brands as diverse as Playboy, Comcast, USA, and Hasbro have all seen success using Bunchball, as have retail brands like Victoria’s Secret.

Probably the best way to compartmentalize this in your head is to see gamification as a broad extension of social and casual online gaming that have taken the web by storm. The key, in my view, is to recognize how many people look to the web for activities and entertainment as much as they do for information. People want to be a part of brands and like it when the process of doing so becomes fun, ongoing, and engaging.

I think gamification is a lot more than a flash in a pan – it’s a trend that I expect will help refine and guide consumer experiences for the forseeable future. It appeals to the competitor in all of us, and offers both instant and delayed gratification. What could be a more powerful combination?

Start-Up Watch COD: appbackr is the wholesale marketplace for apps

Many talented people have made good money developing and selling mobile apps in the iPhone and Android stores. But as the number of apps has increased, so have the number of challenges.

Quite simply, it’s gotten harder and harder to get noticed, and the costs in time and money to promote an app have increased.

appbackr is a wholesale marketplace designed to help developers and would be app backers (backrs in the parlance) by enabling them to connect and transact with one another. The backr purchases a quantity of app instances at a wholesale price, and then resells those instances at the full price. They make money on the spread between the wholesale and retail prices, while the app developer gets paid immediately for their work.

It’s essentially a three step process:

1. Developer posts their app in the marketplace. The wholesale price is based upon the retail price and whether the product already exists today or is in development. The developer is not sellingproviding an ongoing right to sell copies of an app, only the right to promote the number of app instances purchased via the appbackr marketplace.
2.  A “backr” purchases instances of the app at a wholesale price, and then promotes them in whatever means they choose. At the moment of initial wholesale purchase the developer receives a cut of the purchase price immediately.
3.  As apps are sold, the backr earns the bulk of the profit, while the developer receives an additional payment per app as they sell. Backrs are credited with sales in one of two ways. If a developer chooses sequential payment, the first buyer of apps is credited with the first sales on the Apple or Android markets. When their quantity of apps is sold, the second buyer is credited with the next sales and so forth. The other payment method gives backrs a percentage of sales on the Apple and Android markets based upon the percentage of app instances that they purchased divided by the quantity purchased by all backrs.

appbackr charges a reasonable commission per sale to make money.

Because a concept app may not have a set launch date if it's still in development, the potential return to the backr is much higher. Concept apps have a potential profit of 54% while backing a finished app has a potential profit of 26%.

Here’s the very clear video intro:

Developers who participate in appbackr must be a registered Apple and/or Android developer.

For the app developer, the marketplace provides immediate revenue to pay salaries and fund app improvements or additional apps. It also takes the “risk” of marketing activity out of the question for them. Because the people who make apps are generally NOT marketers, this risk reduction is a serious benefit.

While backrs are assuming risk in this model, it is likely that they may have special capabilities that make them ideally suited to promoting certain kinds of apps. Access to a network of potential users, for example, can make the process of publicizing an app and converting prospects a whole lot easier.

I think this is a powerful model that can help spawn continued growth in the app space while allowing more people to participate and profit.

Start-Up Watch COD: EyePredict’s EPflow optimizes catalog item displays to your objectives

When you are selling multiple items online, one of the key challenges you face is to design your online catalog screens. Naturally, different items have different price points and profitability, or relevance to larger numbers of people. How do you decide what goes where?

Well, certain rules have been known for decades. Bigger tends to get noticed more. Top right hand area on the screen is better than bottom left, that sort of thing. Lots of companies sort of punt and copy Apple’s home page for their own, and then mimic other stores for interior pages.

Another common approach is to try to make everything a priority. You know the drill. Blinking, starbursts, red discount messages and the like all over the page. Which, of course, accomplishes nothing beyond giving the consumer too many competing pieces of stimuli.

I am reminded of the words of one of the most talented marketers I know, Joanna Abel of FreeWheel, who used to tell her clients “When everything is top priority, nothing is top priority.” I love that simple but critical truism.

EyePredict is a start-up focused on using neuroscience to optimize catalog displays for its customers. The idea is to provide them with your objectives and item assortment, and their EPflow platform optimizes the specific placement of items based upon those criteria coupled with what they know about the things people notice and why.

According to the company, some of the digital merchandising “rules” we all live by are incorrect, or at least oversimplifications of what it takes to get people to notice things. All this comes into play particularly when you are placing many items on a page. It’s all well and good to put the high margin, high penny profit item above all the low margin items if there are only four things on the page. But what about when there are 10 or 20?

EPflow isn’t using simplistic models of where people generally look – rather they are optimizing the placement of EVERY item based upon its many characteristics.

Nor are they using click tracking or eye tracking. Rather, they are drawing upon extensive research into the topic that enables them to try thousands of item placement combinations in a few seconds or minutes. No waiting months for research results.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach, they have undertaken some massive testing to determine the business impact of their tool versus other approaches. You can probably tell that I am way way way out of my element in explaining this, so why not let them explain it themselves…

What I found appealing about this is that it represents neuroscience with an actual…you know…purpose. One of the disappointing aspects of much neuroscience research is that it is qualitative in nature. Interesting and nice to know, but not as actionable as one would really want. These folks have figured out a way to make neuroscience effective and relentlessly actionable. Hard not to like that.

Start-Up Watch COD: Yext Local delivers “Power Listings” for local businesses across the web

Different gets noticed. We all know that. If everyone else is in a white shirt and a repp tie, you’ll stand out in blue. And when a consumer is confronted with dozens of options for the same service, little differences between your listing and the others can dramatically boost your conversion rates.

Yext is a business built squarely on this truism. The idea behind Yext is to make a local business listings stand out by adding additional pieces of information so that consumers notice one listing over others and are more likely to convert. Using Yext, the business owner can manage multiple listing presences from a single venue, and even monitor their online reputation across social media with email text alerts.

Some of the added value services Yext offers in its Power Listings offering include:

• Placement of your listing across directory sites
• Opportunity to review/edit basic information in your listing like address and phone number
• A “Verified” designation indicating that the contact information has been reviewed for accuracy
• A special offer statement enabling the business to make a promotional statement
• Opportunity to add additional information and content to a listing like a url, photos, and hours.
• Optimization of a listing for mobile search
• Tracking and reporting that indicates how many times your business appeared in search results and was clicked on

Since there are a variety of online listing services online that deliver information to consumers about small business, Yext works with many of the leading platforms, giving small businesses the opportunity to stand out more on some or all of these sites. Specifically, Yext can enhance a listing on:

• Yelp
• Yahoo!
• Citysearch
• MapQuest
• Superpages
• Yellowbook
• WhitePages
• Local.com
• YellowBot

While the particulars of the listings enhancements vary somewhat based upon the particulars of each platform and agreement, in each case the opportunity to enhance the listing is quite clear and vivid.

Because Yext is a cross platform solution, it offers a solid set of advantages for small businesses looking to drive more clicks and converts. First, you can manage your enhanced listings across sites from a single location. Second, the service charges a set monthly fee, so you don’t end up paying for clicks you might have gotten organically. Third, the pricing for Yext is significantly below the cost of manually purchasing enhancements on each platform. Finally, the service offers additional added value products like reputation monitoring that can help small business owners spend less time on online execution and more delivering great products and services.

Start-Up Watch COD: Hunch Creates A Personalized Recommendations Community Through Their Massive “Taste Graph”

Reviews of products and services have become a currency of the web, helping consumers make more informed purchase decisions. If they have a serious fault, it is that recommender and reader may have wildly different tastes. Without understanding the perspective and lifestyle of a recommender, it can be challenging to identify the posts that are most relevant to you.

Hunch is a start-up that wants to address that particular issue by developing a deeper understanding of what makes you tick, so that you can have a better and more relevant experience online. They also seek to create a super ratings community, encompassing more product categories and playing more of a constant role in members’ lives.

All this understanding of you comes from connecting your FB and Twitter accounts to the service, along with information that you provide directly to the site. By collecting information on countless numbers of members, they are able to uncover what they call taste graphs, which relate to correlations between preferences for one type of thing and the likelihood of preference to other things. For example, consider this from a story on the company fromRWW:

…according to Hunch CEO and co-founder Chris Dixon, liberals do prefer arugula while conservatives opt for iceberg lettuce. The connection between lettuce preferences and political orientation is something that Hunch has uncovered through its taste graph and recommendation engine, something that Dixon describes as "the most sophisticated system ever built for predicting human preferences."

 Members join the community and identify categories that are most meaningful to them. At the time of this writing, the site offered specific recommendations in the following categories:

• Art
• Food and Drink
• Movies and Entertainment
• Music
• Gaming
• Books
• Home and Garden
• Men’s Fashion
• Women’s Fashion
• Tech
• Other

You and other members can read each other’s profiles and reviews and decided whom to follow. After you make ten ratings, the site will also identify individuals that have similar taste to you. As you consume information on the site, their engine is identifying your likely preferences, and updating its taste graph to reflect your actual preferences as they are revealed.

I wanted to see how good the engine was, so I joined and answered literally 685 questions relating to everything from political POVs to whether I am an over the top toilet roll person, or under the bottom.

I liked the experience that resulted. When you are transported into the community, you can turn on or off various product categories and consumer reviews that are recent and relevant to your likely preferences. Recognizing that my test was n=1, I found the content the site delivered to me engaging, and eclectically appealing.

As with all social communities, there is a hard core set of recommenders that are more engaged with the site and have delivered hundreds of recommendations. These people have also amassed thousands of followers, which doubtless also impacts the taste graph.

Brands can also apply to participate in the site. They currently make their money, however, on rev share with certain sites that sell goods the community members organically recommend. So, for example, reviews of books are linked to Amazon, as well as other review sites that members identify. Additionally, they have many partners who use their relationship with Hunch and its insights to make their on site or in app experiences more personalized and relevant to individuals.

A really fascinating community building a set of information that may have a profound impact on how we experience the web in the years ahead!