“Are you going to meet our newwww baaaaby?”

No, this isn’t the famous Seinfeld episode in the Hamptons with that ugly baby, o’ dear reader. THESE babies are gorgeous and all ours, and now, our customers.

<Beaming daddy>

So please meet the Twins: Publish to Facebook and Social Offer Page.

All kidding aside, with 150 million Americans using Facebook and fully 75% of small businesses reporting having a social networking page of one sort or the other, what complete Fanbase Marketing Service would be complete without publishing promotions to Facebook?

Publish to Facebook and Social Offer Page are the key features underpinning our Reach Fans Anywhere benefit. With these features, merchants will be able to greatly increase their reach to deliver value in all the places where their fans hang out – on mobile phones, Facebook, and online.

So what does it do?

Publish to Facebook + Social Offer Page turns your ordinary, static Facebook posts into gorgeous, dynamic offers that are redeemed in store and tracked in real-time.

How cool is that? Better: How needed is that?

Our customers can now engage their Facebook fans by publishing Fanminder Offers to their Facebook Fan Page or personal Profile. Fans click to conveniently ‘grab’ these offers to their phone via text message and share the offers with friends. Offers are redeemed at the business and the owner can track new revenues from social media. The details:

• One-click publishing of Fanminder Offers to Facebook.
• Send offers now, or scheduled for a future date.
• Create gorgeous-looking promotions automatically formatted for Facebook.
• Each offer generates a customizable Social Offer Page. Link to your Page from your website, emails, or anywhere on the web.
• Fans grab your offer from Facebook to their phone for on-the-go convenience.
• Fans can share your offers to their Facebook wall or send a link to friends.
• Automatically track all revenues, clicks, and redemptions in real-time.

We routinely speak with customers who have 500, 1,000 or 3,000 Facebook fans. We’ve heard of their pains involved in routinely going to Facebook, thinking of what to offer, writing the offer, and trying to figure out “What the heck is this doing for me??”

That’s now a thing of the past. Check it out and give us your feedback.

At precisely 3:45 we had our “speed date” with Avikk Ghose, head of Strategic Mobile Initiatives. Avikk was courteous, curious, and asked excellent questions. He was evidently WOWed by Tracy’s killer demo of our new Fanminder Offers and Publish to Social releases.

Later on we demo’d Fanminder at the cocktail reception. Another class event with lots of chances to impress Intuit folks and even other developers. We received many kudos about how simple our service and how timely a solution it is.

So all in all, the event was a big success, despite Brad Smith, CEO picking on lil’ o’ me in front of the entire room While we felt we were treated like royalty, the ultimate value of such an event is in the building of partnerships with Intuit or other developers. While the jury’s still out on Intuit’s take on Fanminder, we met other like-minded developers that we’re sure will turn into partnerships. And we had a nice lunch. Thanks Intuit!

“I represent the central engineering group, the security group, plus the business units’ use of new technologies. I’m focused on new initiatives, reusable platform software, India development center. Engineering co-reports to me and the General Managers.”

“I joined 15 months ago. My priorities are driving technology refreshes and updating it in areas it’s gotten behind in. Improving engineering productivity, and pushing innovation forward.”

“We want to run live experiments to see what works. The TurboTax season is 2.5 months’ long. We made 100 changes to the user interface based on 5% of the users. We dumped failed experiments and promoted successful experiments. The net consequence was $50M in revenues.”

“Our mobile vision includes the need to support up to 4 platforms – Web, Tablet, Mobile, Desktop. Each is different, have common platforms underneath them. Functionality might be different, ie, can’t view pretty graphs on the phone.”

“A lot of stuff came from BUs coming independently to web or from acquisitions. It’s potentially a problem for scalability and evolvability. We have tech refresh plans for each B.U. locked down. Sometimes it’s a multi-year roadmap, sometimes it’s all up to-date.”

“Central Mobile team did a map of all the mobile functionality and now are sitting with the head of the B.U., which are you building and which aren’t you building?

We’re grateful and honored to be only one of sixty three companies, out of an applicant field of hundreds, to participate in the day.

Reception

Intuit is hosting a killer spread. Tracy and I joked that Intuit knows the way to a start-up’s heart – through our bellies. We figure it’s a good way to spend a few hours if we’re given an opportunity to talk about ourselves, get fed, and see if we can get distributed by such a large company!

Alex Chris, Director of the Intuit Partner Partner (IPP) is on-stage pitching how IPP can be a platform and a channel for the developers in the room. Out of the forty developers there’s only currently four that are a part of IPP (yours truly included!)

The CEO of Expensify is shilling on behalf of IPP, talking about getting highly qualified leads from Intuit. He is sharing how it’s very hard to reach these customers and much less expensive to acquire through IPP than through other channels.

Three companies then took the stage to discuss their experiences: AuditMyBooks; Fanminder; and Profitably.

Next, Brad Smith took the stage. “We help change people’s lives. Company spends 10,000 hours per year visiting customers. We build solutions that are drop-dead easy.”

“We’re a part of the transformation from offline to online: Goodbye tax stores, login to healthcare providers… cutting across every category we’re in. Our chapter going forward is a connected services strategy. We get 60% of our revenues from these connected services.”

Jan Bosch - “We can’t do everything ourselves. We’re going to express what we’re interested in, and then ask you to tell us if you have something we would like. You as the entrepreneur will hear back from us within 48 hours.”

Scott Cook and Tayloe Stansbury interview

Characteristics of a good partner with Intuit:

Scott: Integrity, we run a squeaky clean operation. Humilty. Customer Focus. We’re hear to delight customers!

Taylo: Expand the mission of impacting customer’s lives so they never go back to the old way.

Advice:

Scott: Know your customer so well. Solving a big unsolved problem. Learn by iterating. Top talent.

Where is Intuit investing the most?

“We shifted from desktop to a connected services company. We’ll likely make the shift over the next 10 years from connected services to mobile. SnapTax – take a pic of W2 and file taxes! GoPayment – take payments from your phone.”

“What’s true is a lot of the value is created from user contribution systems, tapping into implicit contributions or volunteer of millions of users. People go to Facebook to see what other people have entered into Facebook.”

Are you involved with start-up companies? Scott: I do work with young companies through Intuit. I backed only one small company, Flip.”

What mistakes do start-ups make when they pitch to you? “Listening to customers, listening to folks at Intuit, listening for surprises. Also, we work by learning and testing.”

What trends in SMB has Intuit identified? “Tablet is interesting form factor. Make things a part of what they already do. It’s also a very lonely job, so helping people help them is important. Also creating a closed loop marketing system, according to Brad Smith. Our aspiration is help them save time, and help them make more money.”