StepRep Blog

We’re always making improvements to StepRep. Sometimes they’re obvious, like when we alter colours or the page design. Other times they’re invisible to users – little tweaks to the code that make the pages load more efficiently, with the changes measured in milliseconds.

Today I’d like to talk about a change in the actual functionality of the software. You may have noticed it already on your Visibility tab. Here are some listings for my favourite Oregon bookstore, Salem’s Book Bin:

The function of the Visibility tab is to show you where your business listing appears so you can correct it if it’s wrong. Up until last week that meant clicking through to the listing to verify its accuracy yourself. As you can see from the screenshot above, now we’re taking some of the work off your shoulders. Wherever there’s a discrepancy with the contact info you’ve entered into StepRep, we’ll highlight the difference in red. This is handy because it’s so easy to overlook a swapped digit in a phone number, or an address that says “Avenue” instead of “Street”.

Note the message that reads, “Attention: Possible error in contact info.” We spent some time debating the wording of this message, because often the discrepancy won’t be an error per se. Here StepRep has identified a business listing where the name is displayed slightly differently – as “The Book Bin”, rather than “Book Bin”.

Red flags might also be raised over minuscule variations in how the address appears – “450 Court Street” versus “450 Court St“. We’re going to be improving the algorithm over the next few weeks so StepRep knows not to highlight irrelevant differences in punctuation or abbreviation. But we have to be careful, because we don’t want users to overlook variations that might confuse their customers. It’s probably best to err on the side of highlighting all the differences.

It’s funny how quickly a blog can get “stale”. It seems like only a couple days ago I last updated this blog, but no, it’s been almost three weeks.

But there’s been action in other corners of the vendastaverse. Last month on the Spokesmonster blog I shared some of our ideas for renovating the StepRep homepage. Then earlier today I told the story of a bizarre search result that turned up in my StepRep account.

Meanwhile on the company blog I’ve been releasing my notes from our weekly demos. Every Friday the whole company gathers in the boardroom and we show off what we’ve accomplished that week. Naturally in the last month there have been some fixes and improvements to StepRep:

Next, Brendan demonstrated how a persistent bug has finally been hunted down and squashed. For months we’ve been aware that StepRep would take an embarrassingly long time to load when you accessed it with Internet Explorer. Last week Dave managed to isolate the snippet of JavaScript that was giving IE the vapours and replace it with some Microsoft-friendlier code. As Brendan clicked briskly around the site in IE, it was obvious that Dave’s fix had been successful.

So if it seems a little lonely over here, it’s only because the party has moved to an adjacent room. Load up your plate with cocktail weenies and join us in the kitchen.

• Rethinking the Weebles
• StepRep and the secret plot for world domination
• Blogging Friday demos
• Blogging Friday demos again (now with pictures and music)
• Blogging Friday demos (and a field trip)

On a recent road trip up the west coast I broke down in Salem, Oregon, and spent a few hours, while the van was being repaired, browsing an excellent used bookstore called the Book Bin.

I remembered my visit several months later when Brendan initiated the Great Dog Food Experiment.

The name of the experiment comes from the expression “eating your own dog food” – which means that a company should use the products it makes. (According to Wikipedia, the phrase may have been inspired by “the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders’ meetings”.)

There are two reasons for this practice. One is that a company should stand behind its product – if you aren’t excited about using it yourself, you shouldn’t expect other people to pay for it. The other reason is that you learn a lot by interacting with a product in the same way that regular users do. If there’s something wrong with the way a dropdown menu works, it might not be apparent through testing, but it will come out through routine daily use.

Of course, StepRep is designed for small and medium businesses, and most of the people who work here at VendAsta don’t actually run their own businesses. It would be redundant if each one of us created a separate account to monitor VendAsta’s reputation. So a while back Brendan proposed that everyone “adopt” a company somewhere in North America, and use StepRep to monitor its reputation, just as if we worked there.

Among the adoptees are a restaurant in Vancouver, a resort in Florida, a bar in New Orleans, a realtor in Phoenix, and lots of small businesses scattered around our hometown of Saskatoon.

I adopted the Book Bin. Using basic information available online – phone number, address, competitors – I created an account for the store, and I’ve been monitoring its reputation ever since. Here’s a screenshot showing the Book Bin’s recent Share of Voice, measured against several competing used bookstores in Salem:

If you zoom in you can see that the Book Bin is doing quite well, edging out its main competitor, Escape Fiction, in the frequency that it’s mentioned online.

The insights gleaned in our Great Dog Food Experiment have informed the changes, still ongoing, that we’ve been making to StepRep’s user interface over the last few weeks. If you click over there and log in, you can see what I’m talking about.

Check out StepRep’s new look.

Better, right? We’re curious to hear what our regular users think of the changes.

PS. I’ve also been keeping track of some of the work we’re doing on StepRep in recent updates to the VendAsta blog.

We recently created this little one-page comic to help our partners explain reputation management to their small business customers.

So Brendan, our CEO, is down in Charlotte, North Carolina. Over the next few days he’ll be meeting with our friends and new partners at UBL. We’ll let you know if anything interesting comes out of that meeting.

On the plane he was reading the latest issue of Inc. Magazine, and he came across this article by Jason Fried called Why Is Business Writing So Awful?

When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you’re saying, “Our products are like everyone else’s, too.” Or think of it this way: Would you go to a dinner party and just repeat what the person to the right of you is saying all night long? Would that be interesting to anybody? So why are so many businesses saying the same things at the biggest party on the planet – the marketplace?

I can tell you why so many writers clutter up websites with boring, jargon-filled, imitative marketing clichés. It’s because they don’t really know what their companies do. I know from experience that there’s nothing harder than trying to write a marketing message when you don’t really know what you’re marketing. You need to be able to answer the questions:

What are we selling?

Why buy it from us rather than them?

If you can’t answer these questions clearly to yourself, you’re not going to be able to put the answers into words for your readers. Then you can forget about making your writing lively or interesting; you’ll be lucky to string together two coherent sentences.

Luckily you can always spread buzzwords and clichés over your bad writing like mortar over faulty brickwork. It helps cover the gaps where you’re not really sure what you’re trying to say. Very likely the page will be so boring that no-one will ever read it and realize how little sense it makes.

I don’t offer these observations from a position of superiority. I’ve done this kind of bad writing myself, consciously as well as unconsciously. I’m sure you can find examples all over the StepRep site. The only defense I can offer is that writing well is difficult, while writing badly is…not exactly easy, but easier.

In the same email where he drew my attention to the article by Jason Fried, Brendan made an attempt to clearly define what separates StepRep from its competitors in the reputation management biz. Here’s what he came up with. I think it’s good enough to share unedited:

• We might not be the best yet, but we will be.
• We will relentlessly improve our product.
• We will listen, learn, and make changes to StepRep, just as StepRep will help you do for your business.
• We are a development company, not a sales and marketing company.
• We care more about real value and performance than flashy stuff.
• We like to have fun, but we like to win. We will never stop until we win.