How to Leverage Big Brands for Your Small Business

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No man is an island, and no small business is either. As small business owners, we know that success requires reaching out to others. You can’t do it all on your own. At least… you can’t do it all on your own and be anywhere near sane by the end of the quarter.

When I say “reaching out to others,” I don’t just mean networking. What I’m really referring to is leveraging the big brands and power players in your industry through your company blog. By leveraging these brands, you’ll be able to boost your own reputation and solidify those leads you’re already working on.

A few pointers:

When You Talk the Talk, You Will Walk the Walk

When your blog audience sees you cover well-known, credible businesses, they automatically begin to view you in the same light. Check out how the Matchstic blog weighs in with opinions on what’s happening in the world of big business branding.

They’re a mid-size branding agency, but they regularly associate themselves with big brands through their blogs. Case in point: this recent post on Arby’s.

Talk the big brand talk, and your readers will naturally assume you walk the big brand walk.

Turn An Enormous Marketing Concept into a Bite Sized Point

Big brands make great examples in your blog posts. Because these brands are already well known, you don’t have to waste your words trying to convince readers that your point is legitimate.

In the previous example, Matchstic doesn’t have to waste time talking about the Arby’s company by explaining what they do and where they came from. Everyone already knows Arby’s is a legitimate business.

It’s easy for the blogger to jump right in to the meat of the story (no pun intended), and create a bite-sized takeaway. Okay, that pun was intentional.

Get Ready for the Re-Tweets

Big brands will help your small business blog get more social media attention. Which blog post is likely to get more shares?

• “4 Lessons I Learned About Selling Clothes Online”

or

• “4 Lessons From Target About Selling Clothes Online”

The second title, of course. I don’t know who you are; I know who Target is. That’s the blog post I’m going to read, and it’s the post I’m going to share.

However, spammers and spam robots think the same way. So, when you do share an article that drops big brand names, prepare for the fake Twitter followers and spammy comments. It’s not a big deal, but you should be aware.

Of course, you might even make contact with the company you mention. If you wrote a blog post about Target, you would definitely want to include an @Target when you tweet the article.

Don’t Be General. Get Specific.

This is always a good rule of thumb for blogging. However, it’s especially important when you’re talking about big businesses. Because you’re writing about a company that has tons of available information and examples, you have no excuse for not using it.

If you need the nitty-gritty financial info for your blog post/case study, head over to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission where EDGAR will become your friend. The more details you have, the stronger your content will be.

Don’t Take Competition Too Seriously

I know, I know, it’s business. But, really… don’t go out of your way to avoid mentioning a big brand or competitor if they have some content that can help you boost your own company’s reputation.

So, you sell jewelry and Tiffany’s sells jewelry? Everyone in the world knows about Tiffany’s. Not many people know about you. By linking to a Tiffany’s product page or some valuable piece of content the company’s written, you aren’t hurting yourself. If anything, you’re demonstrating to your readers that you care about providing valuable information more than anything else.

If You Can’t Say Something Nice…

Don’t say anything at all. There’s nothing wrong with blogging about what not to do. However, try to avoid picking out a specific company as your example. You never know what big brand competitor might be interested in buying your company in a couple of years.

Even if you have no plans of selling, picking on another company:

(a) Looks bad.

(b) Could come back to bite you.

There’s no telling what kind of distribution your post could end up getting.

How do you leverage big brands in your small business blog?

Internet Chatter Photo via Shutterstock

The post How to Leverage Big Brands for Your Small Business appeared first on Small Business Trends.

via Amie Marse

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What My Father Taught Me about Being an Entrepreneur – Forbes

My younger brother, Brent, and I are fifteen months apart. We grew up with a father obsessed with business and real estate. Any time we passed a lot for sale my dad would take his eyes off the road and wonder aloud if the parcel was a good buy. My mom had to remind him every time he had my brother or me in the car to pay attention and not let his eyes wander. He was constantly looking for the next “big deal” in Denver’s real estate market.

Other kids would play catch with their dad but not us. The only competitive sport in our house was Monopoly. My dad, brother and I would spend long weekends in marathon games at the kitchen table. Dad would coach each of us on how to best build an empire. He’d then go off to work on Monday morning and build his.

My dad was an entrepreneur. He started in the early 1960s as a salesman of western wear shirts and jeans. By the late 1960s he owned and ran a series of clothing manufacturers. I spent summers working in the factory and weekends selling “seconds” at the flea market. When I was old enough to drive, I’d come down to the factory after school for a few hours most days. By the time I was 18 years old I’d had a master class in entrepreneurial management.

The business lessons I learned from my dad still resonate with me today. Here are a few I’ve found most helpful in my own career as an entrepreneur:

1. Take responsibility. For my dad, it meant much more than taking responsibility for your own actions, it meant protecting those who work for you as well. He would never tell a customer that an employee mistake was the cause of some mix-up. He would call the customer and take responsibility for the error and the solution.

2. Walk around the floor. My father walked around his plant a couple times every day to check in with his employees. Not just the managers, but everyone he saw. He was interested in their lives, their families and their careers. The result was unheard of loyalty. He had employees who worked for him across multiple companies for over 30 years.

3. Use technology where you can to get an edge. My first exposure to a computer was an IBM System/360 installed at my father’s office for inventory and accounting. I was probably no more than 5 years old when I played my first game of tic-tac-toe against IBM. That moment started my lifelong interest in technology.

4. Have enough self-confidence to fail. My dad’s business was not always prosperous. There were incredible successes but there was also complete failure. After any setback, he remained positive, focused and committed to learning from the failure so that the next endeavor would succeed. Importantly, true to lesson number one, he never blamed others when failure occurred.

My brother and I are now both in our mid-forties and on our second joint startup (if you don’t count the snow shoveling business we had as kids). Almost two years ago we launched Inspirato, a private, luxury destination club, after leaving our first company, Exclusive Resorts, which we started together eight years earlier. We had the same teacher and the same lessons. But we apply those lessons in different ways—each of us complementing the other. The result is, I hope, something our dad would be proud of.

I don’t believe my dad ever set out to teach my brother and me anything about business. We learned by observation. My dad was so passionate about what he was doing it just rubbed off on the two of us through osmosis.

Norton Handler died three and a half years ago. His sudden passing left a big hole in our family. Everyday I miss talking with my dad. As we run our company, I hear him in the decisions we make and the culture we build.

via What My Father Taught Me about Being an Entrepreneur – Forbes.

via http://srkgupta.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/what-my-father-taught-me-about-being-an-entrepreneur-forbes/

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Reverse Customer Service Strategy

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I recently had a fascinating experience with my cellphone service provider that was a great example of reverse customer service. And it went a little something like this. . .

My children and I started experiencing call and text interruptions over a couple of days. These breaks in service were happening in my house. We’ve had this service for many years and have never had a problem like this.

Over a two day period I texted, visited and called the provider about this situation. Apparently they were working on a tower in my area and this was causing the problem. I mentioned to several people what I thought was a common sense customer service tactic that would have helped:

“Since you have all of our cell numbers, why not text us when you are going to be working on a tower? Then we’d know what was going on in the event we had reception issues.”

No one I spoke with thought it was a good idea. Frankly, I don’t think they understood what I was trying to tell them.

Guess what happened a day later?

I received a text message telling me I’d be receiving a text survey about the customer service I received.

Seriously?

They could use the text messaging feature to find out how my experience was with their customer service department but they couldn’t use it to keep me informed about the use of the product I was paying them for?

We Can Learn A Lot From This Experience

It shows that companies often spend more time thinking about what THEY need instead of what their CLIENTS need. That’s backwards. I know it may seem like they care when they want to be sure the customer service experience was good.

However, if they would focus on how their clients are experiencing the product or service they’d have fewer problems to handle.

Put Yourself In The Client’s Shoes

At the beginning, not at the problem stage:

• What might they want to know?


• What might they need to know?


• What information do you have that if shared with them, would make their experience better or not bad?

I think we are trained to offer our product or service in its most basic form. Then we establish a system for dealing with issues when and if they arise. We consider ourselves stellar if we then add in a follow up to that customer service experience. See, we really care!

Hold the phone! If you really cared you’d make sure my experience with the product or service was stellar; not the follow up to the complaint.

You can work on this backwards and implement a strategy that will prevent the reverse customer service experience described above. Think about your own business. Think about any and all situations when clients called or emailed your customer service department:

• What was their issue?


• Was it something you were aware of?


• Could you have avoided the call by sharing information?

If so, implement a communication strategy for reaching out to your clients. Don’t be afraid to tell them something if that knowledge will help them understand their experience. In all honesty, they’ll love you for thinking about them instead of yourself.

That is true customer service.

Upset Customer Photo via Shutterstock

The post Reverse Customer Service Strategy appeared first on Small Business Trends.

via http://smallbiztrends.com/2012/10/reverse-customer-service-strategy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SmallBusinessTrends+%28Small+Business+Trends%29

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Got big JSON? BigQuery expands data import for large scale web apps

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By Ryan Boyd, Developer Advocate



JSON is the data format of the web. JSON is used to power most modern websites, is a native format for many NoSQL databases hosting top web applications, and provides the primary data format in many REST APIs. Google BigQuery, our cloud service for ad-hoc analytics on big data, has now added support for JSON and the nested/repeated structure inherent in the data format.

JSON opens the door to a more object-oriented view of your data compared to CSV, the original data format supported by BigQuery. It removes the need for duplication of data required when you flatten records into CSV. Here are some examples of data you might find a JSON format useful for:

• Log files, with multiple headers and other name-value pairs.


• User session activities, with information about each activity occurring nested beneath the session record.


• Sensor data, with variable attributes collected in each measurement.

Nested/repeated data support is one of our most requested features. And while BigQuery's underlying infrastructure supports it, we'd only enabled it in a limited fashion through M-Lab's test data. Today, however, developers can use JSON to get any nested/repeated data into and out of BigQuery.



For more information on importing JSON and nested/repeated data into BigQuery, check out the new guide in our documentation. You should also see the Dealing with Data section for details on the new querying syntax available for this type of data.



Improvements to Data Loading Pipeline



We’ve made it much easier to ingest data into BigQuery – up to 1TB of data per load job, with each file up to 100GB uncompressed JSON or CSV. We’ve also eliminated the 2 imports per minute rate limit, enabling you to submit all your ingestion jobs and let us handle the queuing as necessary. In a recent project I’ve been working on, import jobs for 3TB of data that previously took me 12 hours to run now take me only 36 minutes – a 20x improvement!



We’ve published a new Ingestion Cookbook that explains how to take advantage of these new limits.



We’re initiating a small trusted tester program aimed at making it easier to move your data from the App Engine Datastore to BigQuery for analysis. If you store a lot of data in Datastore and are also using BigQuery, we’d like to hear from you. Please sign up now to be considered for the trusted tester program.



Learn more this week



Michael Manoochehri, Siddartha Naidu and I are in London this week talking about BigQuery and these new features at the Strata big data conference. Ju-kay Kwek will also be talking about BigQuery at the Interop NYC conference tomorrow. Please stop by, say hi, and let us know what you’re doing with big data.



We’ll also be producing a Google Developers Live session from Campus London on Friday at 16:00 BST (15:00 GMT).





Ryan Boyd is a Developer Advocate, focused on big data. He's been at Google for 6 years and previously helped build out the Google Apps ISV ecosystem. He published his first book, "Getting Started with OAuth 2.0", with O'Reilly.



Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

via http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/10/got-big-json-bigquery-expands-data.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GDBcode+%28Google+Developers+Blog%29

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More Funny Directions in Google Maps

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Google Maps no longer recommends to swim across the Atlantic Ocean if you want to go from the United States to Europe. Google found a better way: "sail across the Pacific Ocean".

Google's directions from New York to Paris are quite straightforward: go to Seattle, then swim across Pacific to Hawaii, swim again to Asia where you are directed to drive through Asia and Europe to reach France. After only 519 hours you're supposed to reach the destination.



{ Thanks, Anon. }

via http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/10/more-funny-directions-in-google-maps.html

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Too Many Google Results From a Single Site

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I don't know about you, but there's a feature that ruined many of my Google search results pages. It's not that Google can't return relevant results, the problem is that Google tries to be clever and detects keywords that are associated with a site. If it finds one, Google will return a lot of results from that site. In fact, sometimes you'll have a hard time finding results from other domains.



Ever since its launch, Google promoted diversity and used host crowding to show "up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name". Sometimes Google displayed a link that restricted the results to that domain or subdomain, but users had to click it. Matt Cutts wrote in 2007 that "we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen".



Then Google introduced sitelinks and started to show more pages from a domain. Two years ago, a Google blog post announced that "for queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we'll now show more results from the relevant site". Since that announcement, host crowding was a thing of the past and Google started to include more and more results from a single domain.



I complained about this back in 2010 and mentioned that this feature could become annoying, but now it's much worse. Sometimes you can find queries that return mostly results from a domain. For example, when you search for [apple itunes] Google assumes that you want results from apple.com and starts to return a lot of irellevant pages. Sure, you can still find results from other domains, but 31 of the top 50 results are from apple.com.

If you search for [yahoo mail], Google returns a lot of uninteresting results from Yahoo's international sites, instead of including news articles, blog posts, reviews, tutorials.

Search for [berkeley college] and 26 of the top 50 results are from berkeley.edu. That's just too much. Having to constantly add to the query "-site:dominantresult.com" is annoying, not to mention that most Google users don't even know about search operators and shouldn't have to use them.



And this annoyance is not limited to navigational queries. What if you're not in India, search for [sony led] and Google's top 7 results are from Sony India? That's what happened when I disabled Google Instant and set Google to show 50 results per page.

Showing too many results from a domain is a bad idea because a search engine should offer information from multiple sources, while results should be relevant and comprehensive. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but Google forgot to make the information accessible.

Query	Domain	Number of results in top 50
imdb ratings	imdb.com	49
imdb ratings are broken	imdb.com	46
google play	google.com	31
playstation	playstation.com	28
wordpress	wordpress.org	28
samsung led display	samsung.com	27

via http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/10/too-many-google-results-from-single-site.html

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What I want in a monitoring tool

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I started a new job a few weeks ago, and I'm now at a point where I'm investigating monitoring options. At past jobs I used Nagios, which I know will work, but I would like to look into other more modern tools. I am aware that #monitoringsucks, and I am pretty sure people have hashed these topics before, but here are some of the things I want from a modern monitoring tool:

• Ideally open source, of if not affordable per host per month pricing (we already signed up as a paying customer of Boundary for example)


• Installation and configuration should be easily scriptable


• 
  
  
  
  • server installation, as well as addition/modification of clients should be easily automated so it can be done with Puppet/Chef
  
  
  • API would be ideal
  
  
  
  


• Robust notifications/alerting rules


• 
  
  
  
  • escalations
  
  
  • service dependencies
  
  
  • event handler scripts
  
  
  • alerts based on subsets of hosts/services
  
  
  • 
    
    
    
    • for example alert me only when 2+ servers of the same type are down
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  


• Out-of-the-box plugins


• 
  
  
  
  • database-specific checks for example
  
  
  
  


• Scalability


• 
  
  
  
  • the monitoring server shouldn't become a bottleneck as more clients are added
  
  
  • 
    
    
    
    • nagios is OK with 100-200 clients (with passive checks)
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • hierarchy of servers should be supported
  
  
  • agent-based clients
  
  
  
  


• Reporting/dashboards


• 
  
  
  
  • Hosts/services status dashboards
  
  
  • Downtime/outages dashboards
  
  
  • Latency (for HTTP checks)
  
  
  
  


• Resource graphing would be great


• 
  
  
  
  • but in my experience very few tools do both alerting and resource/metrics graphing well
  
  
  • in the past I used Nagios for alerting and Ganglia/Graphite for graphing
  
  
  
  


• Integration with other tools


• 
  
  
  
  • Send events to graphing tools (Graphite), alerting tools (PagerDuty), notification mechanisms (irc, Campfire), logging tools (Graylog2)
  
  
  
  

I also asked a question on Twitter about what monitoring tool people would recommend, and here are some of the tools mentioned in the replies:

• Sensu


• OpenNMS


• Icinga


• Zenoss


• Riemann


• Ganglia


• Datadog

Several people told me to look into Sensu, and a quick browsing of the home page tells me it would be worth giving it a whirl. So I think I'll do that next. Stay tuned, and also please leave a comment if you know of other tools that might fit the profile I am looking for.



Update: more tools mentioned in comments or on Twitter after I posted a link to this blog post:

• New Relic (which I am actually in the process of evaluating, having paid for 1 host)


• Circonus


• Zabbix


• Server Density


• Librato


• Comostas


• OpsView


• Shinken


• PRTG


• NetXMS


• Tracelytics

via http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2012/09/what-i-want-in-monitoring-tool.html

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3 things to know when starting out with cloud computing

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In the same vein as my previous post, I want to mention some of the basic but important things that someone starting out with cloud computing needs to know. Many times people see 'the cloud' as something magical, as the silver bullet that will solve all their scalability and performance problems. These people are in for a rude awakening if they don't pay attention to the following points.



Expect failure at any time



There are no guarantees in the cloud. Failures can and will happen, suddenly and mercilessly. Their frequency will increase as you increase the number of instances that you run in the cloud. It's a sickening feeling to realize that one of your database instances is gone, and there's not much you can do to bring it back. At that point, you need to rely on your disaster recovery plan (and you have a DR plan, don't you?) and either launch a new instance from scratch, or, in the case of a MySQL master server for example, promote a slave to a master. The silver lining in all this is that you need a disaster recovery plan anyway, even if you host your own servers in your own data center space. The cloud just makes failures happen more often, so it will test your DR plan more thoroughly. In a few months, you will be an expert at recovering from such failures, which is not a bad thing.



In fact, knowing that anything can fail in the cloud at any time forces you to architect your infrastructure such that you can recover from failures quickly. This is a worthy goal to have no matter where your infrastructure is hosted.



There's more to expecting failures at any time. You need a solid monitoring system to alert you that failures are happening. You need a solid configuration management system to spin up new instances of a given role quickly and with as little human intervention as possible. All these are great features to have in any infrastructure.


Automation is key



If you only have a handful of servers to manage, 'for' loops with ssh commands in a shell script can still seem like a good and progressive way of running tasks across the servers. This method breaks at scale. You need to use more industrial-grade configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef or CFEngine. The learning curve can be pretty steep for most of these tools, but it's worth investing your time in them.



Deploying automatically is not enough though. You also need ways to ensure that things have been deployed as expected, and that you haven't inadvertently introduced new bugs. Automated testing of your infrastructure is key. You can achieve this either by writing scripts that check to see if certain conditions have been met, or, even better, by adding those checks to your monitoring system. This way, your monitoring checks are your deployment unit tests.



If the cloud is a kingdom, its APIs are the crown jewels. You need to master those APIs in order to automate the launching and termination of cloud instances, as well as the creation and management of other resources (storage, load balancers, firewall rules). Libraries such as jclouds and libcloud help, but in many situations you need to fall back to the raw cloud provider API. Having a good handle on a scripting language (any decent scripting language will do) is very important.



Dashboards are essential



One of the reason, and maybe the main reason, that people use the cloud is that they want to scale their infrastructures horizontally. They want to be able to add new instances at every layer (web app, database, caching) in order to handle anything that their users throw at their web site. Simply monitoring those instances for failures is not enough. You also need to graph the resources that are consumed, and the metrics that are generated at all layers: hardware, operating system, application, business logic. Tools such as Graphite, Ganglia, Cacti, etc can be of great assistance. Even homegrown dashboards based on tools such as the Google Visualization API can be extremely useful (I wrote about this topic here).



One aspect of having these graphs and dashboards is that they are essential for capacity planning, by helping you in establishing correlations between traffic that hits your web site and resources that are consumed and that can become a bottleneck (such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, network bandwidth etc). If you run your database servers in the cloud for example, you will very quickly realize that disk I/O is your main bottleneck. You will be able to correlate high CPU wait numbers with slowness in your database, which reflects in slowness in your overall application. You will then know that if you reach a certain CPU wait threshold, it's time to either scale your database server farm horizontally (easier said than done especially if you do manual sharding), or vertically (which may not even be possible in the cloud, because you have pretty restrictive choices of server hardware).



As an aside: do not run your relational database servers in the cloud. Disk I/O is so bad, and relational databases are so hard to scale horizontally, that you will soon regret it. Distributed NoSQL databases such as Riak, Voldemort or HBase are a different matter, since they are designed from the ground up to scale horizontally. But for MySQL or PostgreSQL, go for bare metal servers hosted at a good data center.



One last thing about scaling horizontally is the myth of autoscaling. I've very rarely seen companies that are able to scale their infrastructure up and down based on traffic patterns. Many say they do it, but when you get down to it it's mostly a manual process. It's somewhat easier to scale it up, but scaling it down is a totally different matter. You need to worry at that point that resources that you are taking away from your infrastructure are properly accounted for. Let's say you terminate a web server instance behind a load balancer -- is the load balancer aware of the fact that it shouldn't send traffic to that instance any more?



Another aspect of having graphs and dashboards is to see how business metrics (such as sales per day, or people that abandoned their shopping carts, or payment transactions, etc.) are affected by bottlenecks in your infrastructure. This assumes that you do graph business metrics, which you should. Without dashboards, you are flying blind.





I could go on with more caveats about the cloud, but I think that these 3 topics are a good starting point. The interesting thing about all 3 topics though is that they apply to any infrastructure, not only to cloud-based ones. But the scale of the cloud puts these things into their proper perspective and forces you to think them through.

via http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2012/09/3-things-to-know-when-starting-out-with.html

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The 7 Deadly Sins of Startups

Not all of these are quite "deadly sins", but the "47 common mistakes of entrepreneurs" didn't quite have the same ring to it. Enjoy.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Startups

1) Lust: Be not easily lured by the fun, sexy market. [tweet]



2) Gluttony: Many ideas makes mayhem. More startups die from idea gluttony than starvation. [tweet]

3) Greed: Pure pursuit of profits is perilous. Pick a problem you're passionate about. [tweet]

4) Sloth: The lazy shall languish in obscurity. Toilers triumph. [tweet]

5) Wrath: Don't get angry with your competitors. Attack the problem instead. [tweet]

6) Envy: Do not copy others out of envy of their strategy. Be yourself. [tweet]

7) Pride: Hubris kills. Humility has a power all its own. [tweet]

Which of these "sins" are you committing? Any others you'd add to the list?

Sent to you by Rohitesh Gupta via Google Reader:

The 7 Deadly Sins of Startups

via OnStartups by Dharmesh Shah on 9/13/12

Not all of these are quite "deadly sins", but the "47 common mistakes of entrepreneurs" didn't quite have the same ring to it.  Enjoy.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Startups

1) Lust: Be not easily lured by the fun, sexy market. [tweet]

2) Gluttony: Many ideas makes mayhem. More startups die from idea gluttony than starvation. [tweet]
3) Greed: Pure pursuit of profits is perilous. Pick a problem you're passionate about. [tweet]
4) Sloth: The lazy shall languish in obscurity. Toilers triumph. [tweet]
5) Wrath: Don't get angry with your competitors. Attack the problem instead. [tweet]
6) Envy: Do not copy others out of envy of their strategy. Be yourself. [tweet]
7) Pride: Hubris kills. Humility has a power all its own. [tweet]
Which of these "sins" are you committing?  Any others you'd add to the list?

---

Looking for other startup fanatics?  Request access to the OnStartups LinkedIn Group.  130,000+ members and growing daily.
Oh, and by the way, you should follow me on twitter: @dharmesh.

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Mouthee’s Social Recommendations Platform Makes It Easy To Share Word-Of-Mouth (Get It?) Reviews

Plenty of startups still believe there’s room in the social recommendations space, and now, another new contender heads into battle. Chicago-based Mouthee is today officially debuting its website and iOS application, which allow users to quickly share reviews of local restaurants and hotels, as well as movies, music and books.

Mouthee co-founder David Pritzker says he first had the idea for the service back in October 2010. “I had been talking with my co-founder Chad Silver – he and I were always exchanging recommendations of things between each other. We were talking about how we had gotten frustrated with the existing review platforms that were available,” he says. “We had both gotten into situations where we had relied on anonymous reviews that weren’t exactly all that they were cracked up to be.”

The other challenge is that there’s not a good way to share word-of-mouth recommendations between friends very efficiently, he says. Eventually, these frustrations led to the creation of Mouthee. “We’re really trying to combine the best aspects of review sites, on the one hand, with social networks, on the other,” Pritzker explains.

The iOS application has actually been available for a few months, but it was a soft launch. The company only told friends about it, and to date, there are just “several hundred” users on the service. However, the website version of Mouthee is only now going live.

Using the app (or website) is very simple. There’s a News Feed of recommendations, which you can filter by “nearby” or by your friends’ recommendations on the service. When you find something you like, you can also take actions to buy it via the app. For example, you can make reservations through OpenTable, buy a song through Amazon or iTunes, or purchase movie tickets via Fandango. These affiliate sales provide Mouthee’s initial revenue stream as well.

To leave a review, you tap the “Rec It” button fill out a few details, and tap on a cute icon for the rating (“All about it,” “Feelin’ It,” “Eh,” or “Not So Much.”) And you can search reviews in the “Get Recs” section, or use “Direct Ask” to ping a friend about what they would suggest. Unfortunately, these requests only flow through Mouthee for now, but Pritzker says that they’ll add support for SMS and emails “Asks” in the future.

It’s a handy, well-built app, but the more important question here is, how does Mouthee plan to compete in this crowded space? We’ve seen a number of social recommendation apps come (Tout’d,Livestar, Stamped, Tipflare) and go (remember Oink?) in recent months – what will Mouthee do to differentiate? For starters, says Pritzker, some like Stamped only focus on positive reviews, which he finds problematic. “They have a really cool approach…but the problem I see with that is that you’re dealing with an inherently skewed data set,” he says.

And the others? “Our key focus is really to make this as intuitive and as fun as possible,” says Pritzker. In other words, they hope you’ll use Mouthee because you like to – it’s that simple.

Because it’s based in Chicago, many of Mouthee’s local reviews are for places in that city, but Washington D.C. and NYC also make a showing. There are around 8,000 total reviews on the service today. You can download the app in iTunes here, or visit Mouthee on the web.

 

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The Biggest Misconception About Twitter Is That You Have To Tweet To Use Twitter

During a fireside chat at Federated Media’s San Francisco headquarters, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo sat down to talk with John Battelle in the warmup for Battelle’s first ever OpenCoSF event tomorrow, which is focusing on the spirit and ecosystem of tech.

Eighty-five different locations will be visited, which is a pretty new spin on an event. It’s basically a moving tour throughout the city and the startups that inhabit it. It’s officially “innovation month” thanks to Mayor Ed Lee, so Dick Costolo came to speak about just that.

Battelle asked Costolo about how it has been to find himself on magazine covers, The Today Show, and Charlie Rose. Costolo took it in stride and was very open about a “Chris Farley” moment he had at the Charlie Rose show:

I blanked and thought: This. Is. Awesome.

Costolo also discussed moving Twitter to its new offices, which some think isn’t in the best of neighborhoods. However, Costolo shared that co-founder Ev Williams was bullish on moving into the large, empty space. The office is actually quite gorgeous and the area it’s in is getting cleaned up quite a bit. It’s historic, and Twitter definitely wants to weave that into its culture.

Luckily, the city of San Francisco afforded Twitter some tax breaks which made such a huge move and build-out possible. Costolo said that when the company “did the math,” he realized that it would have to work with all aspects of the city to set up what it wanted to do in the building.

The two obviously have a great relationship, as Battelle poked fun by asking Costolo why Twitter hasn’t installed a slide in the new office as of yet. Costolo did get serious when it came to talking about keeping the company in San Francisco. He said: “Twitter is a city company,” and says that the company has three floors at the new office, which houses 1,200 employees.

When it came to the actual business of Twitter, Dick Costolo said that the company was well-positioned for the future with its ad platform. As far as the future of the service, Costolo feels like there’s a lot of room for growth. Battelle asked him what he felt was the biggest misconception about Twitter and Costolo quickly replied: “That you have to tweet to use Twitter.”

That statement is important as we watch the service transform itself into more than just a communication medium or a social network. It’s a news source, and a way to discover new people and things. Brands are frothing at the mouth to work with Twitter, and TV networks want a piece of the action.

Regarding how the outside world views Twitter and its size, the CEO isn’t worried about what people think so much. Making sure the company moves fast is the important part — he says the company spends a lot of time to make sure it drops “barnacles” that slow it down. Costolo is in charge, and the company continues to march forward loudly.

via: http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/11/dick-costolo-the-biggest-misconception-about-twitter-is-that-you-have-to-tweet-to-use-twitter/

 

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