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.

We’ve been doing a lousy job keeping up this blog. And it’s not because we have nothing to report.

Over on the corporate blog there’s a press release announcing StepRep’s new partnership with UniversalBusinessListing.org. This was the culmination of several months of relationship-building with UBL, and the first of what we expect will soon be many partnerships with companies that offer marketing services to small and medium businesses.

We’ve changed directions over the last six months. As you may recall, last year we spent a lot of time building and promoting an application called MyFrontSteps that was meant to help homeowners connect with home service providers.

MyFrontSteps and StepRep were conceived as two halves of a whole, a socially-intelligent matrix where service providers could connect to new customers, and homeowners could seek out reliable service providers, through a network of mutual recommendations.

It was pretty audacious, and it never really took off. We learned a lot from the experiment, and we built some incredible technology that we’ve since licensed to another company. But MyFrontSteps itself we’ve basically abandoned. (You can still head over to MyFrontSteps.com, log in with your Facebook or Google account, and have a look around.)

Here’s what we learned.

• Lesson 1. People have spent a lot of time building their social networks on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They don’t want to put in a whole bunch of effort to duplicate a network that they’ve already built.

This insight inspired us to develop MashedIn, a platform that tunnels through the barriers between social networks to reveal previously hidden connections.

• Lesson 2. The reputation management components of StepRep are extremely popular with small and medium-sized businesses. These reputation management tools, which we initially developed as gravy for our larger plan of connecting businesses and their customers, quickly turned into our core technology.

So we’ve concentrated on bulking up StepRep as a reputation intelligence tool. And lately we’ve made that technology available to partners of all kinds. Online directories, SEO companies, Certified Marketing Representatives, domain hosting companies – anyone who offers marketing-related services to small and medium businesses – can bundle our reputation intelligence tools with their existing services, or add them as an upgrade.

Meanwhile, anyone who’s interested in monitoring their online reputation can continue to sign up over at StepRep.com.

Huh. This blog post doesn’t begin to catch up on all the stuff we’ve been up to over the last few months. We’ll try and do better.

This blog tends to focus on all the changes and improvements we’re making to StepRep. We’re constantly trying out new features, testing and refining them – and occasionally throwing them out altogether.

But maybe we don’t spend enough time talking about the core of StepRep, the stuff that doesn’t change much from day to day because it’s already working pretty well.

Yesterday over on the Spokesmonster blog I described how StepRep was helping me keep on top of my sideline as a music video auteur. That tale involved a detour into the fringes of Zach Galifianakis’ facial hair, where all sorts of fun was found.

Today I am alerted to a flattering post on the wonderful Cat’s Eye Marketing Blog. Judy Dunn, who operates Cat’s Eye Marketing down in the Seattle area, relates the story of how she got a friend of hers hooked on StepRep. Lo and behold:

Five days later he called me out of the blue. I could feel his smile over the phone line.

“I just wanted to thank you, ” he said.

“For what?” I said.

“For leaving that comment about StepRep on my blog.”

Okay, now I was puzzled. It was a great tool, but a phone call?

Turns out my friend went in and registered, did a search for “social media” and “media buyer.” Up came a company looking for someone with those exact skills. He called, interviewed and three days later, he had a new job.

Heartwarming! Judy goes on to say:

I think sometimes we forget about the power of social media. We’re there. We’re talking. It’s fun. We don’t always know if people are listening.

Or when they will have something to say.

If it is your blog, or twitter, or Facebook, I would say, just keep putting your stuff out there. Yeah, it’s work and sometimes we get discouraged. And it can seem random and pointless at times.

But things can happen in an instant.

Things that will change your life.

Judy’s post is one of those little serendipitous surprises that helps to make all the hard work seem worthwhile. I hope her friend finds fulfilment at his new job, and I hope we’ll continue to hear from other folks who are using StepRep to build their businesses or get ahead in their careers.

Thanks for helping to spread the word, Judy!

Calling things by their right names

My job here is to write, and that means struggling with terminology. What do we call things? It’s important, in order to reduce confusion for StepRep users, that when we refer to things, we refer to them by the same name each time.

For instance, a couple weeks ago I wrote about how we’d been calling the various screens in StepRep “tabs” even though the tabs looked more like buttons. That probably confused a lot of people. So we fixed it.

Here’s another example. StepRep’s Reputation Monitor searches the internet for places where your name appears. When it finds a reference to you, you’ll see a link to it. You can then promote the link, so search engines will be more likely to sift it to the top in search results.

But what do we call these places where your name appears? We can’t call them “places where your name appears” because it’s unwieldy. So we’ve been calling them “stories”. But that’s a little misleading, because often your name will appear in a list, or a tweet, or a tag in a photo, rather than in a story. Also, depending on the context, we sometimes find it necessary to refer to these stories as “search results”. So we’re referring to the same thing by two different names.

Recently our CEO Brendan had the idea of replacing the word “stories” with “mentions”. This is more accurate than “stories”, but it sounds kind of dry and technical. And there are still contexts where it may be necessary to refer to these mentions as “search results”. So for now we’re still trying to figure out what to do. If you have any suggestions, send them along.

You and your business.

Still another example. Right from the beginning we’ve tried to find the right phrase to describe the audience for StepRep. For a while we called our users “service providers”, but a lot of people didn’t know what that meant. Lately around the office we’ve taken to calling them “SMBs”, which is short for “small and medium businesses”. But “small and medium businesses” is too wordy, and “SMBs” is meaningless to most readers.

Part of the challenge is that until recently, StepRep was designed exclusively for individuals, not businesses. When you signed up you created an account as you, not as your company. If ten people from your company signed up, they created ten different accounts, and there was no way to coordinate your promotional efforts.

Lately we’ve started to address this with the creation of Business Listings. This is in the very early stages, so don’t get too excited; we’re still figuring out how to make it work. But soon you and your nine co-workers will be able to link your accounts to a single profile for your company.

The main benefit will come through multiplying the reach of your Recommendation Network. StepRep is primarily about word-of-mouth advertising, and word-of-mouth is built on connections. New customers are much more likely to give your business a shot if they know someone who works there. Our Business Listings will make it much easier for those connections to surface.

I could go into a lot more detail, but I’ve already wandered off my original topic. One more thing. Soon we’re going to be introducing a new, super-easy way to show potential customers how they’re connected to you through the social networks they already use – Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It’s gonna blow your mind.

…Assuming we figure out how to describe it properly.

In my role of “guy who drifts around the office pretending to look busy” I’ve been overhearing a lot of discussion lately about tabs. The consensus seems to be that tabs are a great method for navigating around websites, except when they’re not.

We’re beginning to realise that there are too many tabs in StepRep. We’re going to be working over the next few months to reduce them. We’ve already taken some steps. This is how you’ve been used to navigating around StepRep:

We’ve always referred to these as “tabs”, even though they kind of look like buttons. Whatever you call them, people found them kind of confusing. Now they’re gone. Next time you sign into StepRep you’ll see a Toolkit with six big chunky buttons:

The idea is to put the main features of the site right up front where you can’t miss ‘em. You’ll notice we’ve created big chunky buttons for the Profile and Settings pages, which were kind of hard to find before.

As Tavis described last week, there’s also a new Help Us Out link on the Toolkit page, which I encourage you to click. You can use it to give us some feedback on the new navigation.

We’ll use this blog to announce future tab reductions as they’re implemented.

In other news…Annabelle Pepster!

Annabelle Pepster

Newcomers to StepRep are sometimes overwhelmed by all the buttons and links. This has been a failing on our part – we offer all sorts of cool features, but we’re sometimes lousy at explaining how to use them. Annabelle should help.

So far she only appears on the Reputation Monitor page, but she’ll be offering guided tours throughout the site as she finds time. Just look for this little link: