Fanminder Blog

Entries from September 2009

The Most Deranged Donut Shop in Silicon Valley

By Paul Rosenfeld on September 23rd, 2009

BestOfLogoIt’s official. Metro magazine has declared Psycho Donuts certifiably amazing and the best donut shop in Silicon Valley.

Our hats are off to Jordan and all the lunatics at Psycho.

Link over to their blog post to read a little about our upcoming Halloween Monsters and Mayhem Mobile Fan Club contest. Starting on 10/3 Psycho will be running a 4 week mobile promotional blitz complete with giveaways, prizes, monsters trivia, and even a spooktacular scavenger hunt!

Join Psycho’s Mobile Fan Club by texting “Psycho” to 244326. But if you do, make sure to go down to Campbell to pick up a dozen donuts.

Something to bark about: Welcome Wags & Whiskers!

By Paul Rosenfeld on September 22nd, 2009

Wags outsideThe Fanminder crew has been busy these last few weeks signing new merchants. Our tradition of writing a nice little story of each merchant has unfortunately slipped as of late because, well, there’s a backlog of new merchants to share with you.

We’re actually quite overloaded but squeezing in a story or two about our wonderful new merchants is a labor of love, as they say, so I let me share a little about Wags & Whiskers, a local pet supplies boutique located in Walnut Creek, Ca.

We recently visited Wags to set-up the store on Fanminder. While there, we watched in wonderment as Erika effortlessly re-stocked pet food, set-up Fanminder, and chatted breezily with several different customers. In fact, Erika’s demeanor, skill, and enthusiasm interacting with her customers was simply a marvel to behold.

No wonder then, that Erika sees Fanminder as another tool in her arsenal of staying close with her customers. Erika is utilizing the Fanminder Best Practices to promote her new mobile list at the checkout counter with signs, on her website with the our online widget, and by sending out an email announcing the service. Woof!

Welcome aboard Wags & Whiskers! We’re sure you’ll have a lot to bark about in the near future :-)

New Podcast: Interview with Gravity Free Radio

By Paul Rosenfeld on September 21st, 2009

Yours truly on the radio, check it out here:

http://gravityfreeradio.com/archives/208

That was fast. Time for CRM software

By Paul Rosenfeld on September 12th, 2009

For those of you not obsessing over Fanminder these days (and if true, why NOT, I ask?) we’ve been growing a bit weed-like these days. In fact, it’s all I can do these days to actually do WORK. So you may have noticed my tweetings, chirpings, statusings, and other typical blatherings have taken a nose dive in the last few weeks.

This is a good thing, dear reader, though you may not feel as snuggly with us as we’d all like, it does mean the business is starting to stand on some legs. Our cup is slowly running overeth.

So I’m happy to report we have passed the “let’s manage customers in excel” milestone. Many of you business owners know the pains at this point: Too much information in different places, such that it takes too much time to find it. Lost information. People on the team needing to touch different parts of the elephant…

So we need Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

Our needs are still basic: Keeping track of our merchant clients, owner info at these companies, and the various key touches they or we do with each other. Of particular importance is creating tasks and assigning them, such as “who’s going to design and print the table tents?” or “Review the Voting Contest with Merchant XYZ.”

With high expectations for the online CRM industry and a wallet full of Freemium dollars, I ventured out on the web. I tried a couple of hot CRM tools of the day, and at least one online service from a leader in small business software. Alas, the online tools I tested had bugs, were lacking an intuitiveness I’ve come to expect, and missing important features.

Tracy (co-founder) asked me to re-review Salesforce.com’s CRM offering. I was leery since my last review when I was fooling around a few months ago. I recalled this overly complex and kind of dated tool. Well, I’m happy to report it’s mostly love at first sight. What I love most about Salesforce is that it gets the basics right: There’s an account and each account can have mutiple contacts, notes, attachments and so forth. Tasks are easy to assign and create. Inviting people is a breeze.

The default settings weren’t perfect for me but within a few moments I was able to customize the fields to suit our needs. It’s in this area – customization, that the tool really shines. While I initially wanted “simple” I wound up spending about an hour configuring the tool, such as customizing the “Lead Sources” pick list. No other CRM tool had anywhere near this ability.

And its pricing is inexpensive, just $9 a month per user, although this climbs for 3 people or more, I believe. I’m going with Salesforce’s CRM solution.

Liveblogging Mobilize Conference: Innovation through Observation and Design Session

By Paul Rosenfeld on September 10th, 2009

2pm

Liveblogging panelists from Fjord, thinktank, Frog Design, Adaptive Path and Motorola

All text below are direct quotes.

Topic: What is going to be big in the next three years?

No one has cracked Mobile Marketing.

Augmented reality holds up a lens or window on the world

Tele-Health…you don’t always have a pencil but you do have a cellphone, always with them.

Integration of mobile platforms into the larger internet as barriers breakdown.

Exciting work in tying devices to each other, mobile device to television, for example, social TV.

Topic: What is a successful user experience for Mobile Device?

Amazon Kindle is best provisioning experience. – login and it’s yours! Book is already there…isn’t this just an artifact of only being able to read a book.

I was going on hike, used iPhone to find trail map, takes notes in evernote, publishing pics to Facebook (when did she have time to go on the hike?)

Topic: What does it take to do it well?

Gen Y grew up in it; Gen X has two feet in both; Boomers grew up in analog world. Interesting apps being developed for mobile aren’t meshing for audience who grew up with digital, instead for 30+ and less digital. Ask: Who really is your target audience?

Counterpoint: Cousin spent $1,000 on PC and $500 on phone > kids will spend alot of money on their phone.

Believed people will actively categorize their groups but wasn’t true. When people actively mapped it out, people didn’t connect as often as they thought and they wanted to.

Most unusual way to learn/do research?

What’s best place to get coffee? > Got wide variety of responses…people didn’t think we were researchers…we found best cup of coffee in London!

Lots of ways to do it on the cheap: Guerilla research involves friends and other cheap/fast ways. invited people to eat BBQ with paper towels as we researched paper towel use.

What are most interesting questions you’re asking and been surprised by?

How do you beat Apple at it’s game? > Apple recognizes how to make it easier and cooler than anything out there. How to use design as a differentiator and build the brand experience?

How do we design for 4G networked applications?

Look far beyond digital space to ways people live in the world and interact…

What’s surprised me is how clients are asking me to do research far beyond their own products, to other competitors and human interactions.

I’m always astounded when product development doesn’t have any connection or interaction to customer support.

Q. How will advent of true multi-touch change things?

A. Devices will get bigger as you’ll need 4 fingers.

Enormous challenge > there are no standards. You’ll need to learn a whole new vocabulary as a user across each different application. With every finger you add, the permutations get exponentially more complex.

One parting thought:

We need to get better at communicating rich information visually because screens aren’t getting bigger.

Make sure you give it to your 7 year old and 70 year old mom, then you’ll know if you have a great new product.

What purpose does your product serve in life of users. When and where and under what circumstances will people be using it?

What do you mean when you say “innovation”? > Do you mean long term game changing revolution or incremental change, it will affect design and research design approach you take.

Stop looking at mobile in isolation, but how it plays in pervasive ecosystem.