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!

Here are the top 4 things that small businesses must put on their 2010 marketing ‘todo’ lists:

1. Monitor Online Mentions

More and more people are blogging, posting, and twittering about their experiences, good and bad. Small business owners must monitor the web for these mentions and respond.  First off, it’s good karma to thank people for nice comments.  They will be impressed that you are listening.  Secondly, there is only one way to deal with negative comments or reviews, and that is to respond.  A positive, helpful and humble response will go a long way to turning a potential negative into a positive in the eyes of other readers.  Obvious plug: StepRep is great for this!

2.  Connect to Everyone you Know

You may ask what’s the point of friending everyone on Facebook, following people on Twitter and connecting on Linkedin.  Simply, each platform provides a way to communicate with your connections and you will find different acquaintances on each network.   Social publishing solutions will allow you to easily create one update and publish to multiple accounts.   There are other solutions that create innovative ways to leverage your connections too. MashedIn for example lets you show people how they may be connected to you.  This is like getting a warm introduction to someone who is otherwise an anonymous visitor on your blog or website.

3.  Communicate

Small businesses have to make use of their social networks.  If you go through the work of creating connections, use these platforms to push updates to your followers.  The follow up step here is to engage in conversation, but don’t worry about putting the cart before the horse.  It only takes a few minutes to publish an update.  What should you publish?  Keep updates relevant to your followers and be interesting.

4.  Ask for Recommendations

A lot of business owners are hesitant to overtly ask for recommendations.  In the past, a lot of website owners published testimonials.  The problem with those is that few people trusted that “Bob from Dallas” was a real people who provided that testimonial.  Online ratings or reviews have provided a more reliable solution for consumers.  Not all review sites force users to use a verified account, meaning it is easy to game many of them.   But in a late 2008 study of 2,445 US online consumers (by NATRO), 82% considered user-generated reviews “extremely valuable or valuable”.  Further, EConsultancy showed that 90% of people trust recommendations from people they know.  So reviews and recommendations from places like Facebook Fan pages, LinkedIn or StepRep are hugely valuable.

For businesses that are not really leveraging technology to get the word out, it does not take a lot of effort to start managing reputation and building connections that can pay off in terms of real future business.  It just takes a small commitment to take the first steps.

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.

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:

What have you been up to lately, friendly technicians?

Well, Michael, you may have noticed that we’ve improved the StepRep login process.

In olden times, there was only one way to sign up  for StepRep – with your Google account. For folks who already had a Google account, this was great; one less password to remember. Everyone else had to go create a Google account in order to join StepRep, which was a confusing chore. Many new users found themselves lost in a labyrinth of signup screens and gave up in frustration.

You can still sign up using your Google info, but now you have the option of creating a completely autonomous StepRep account.

For existing StepRep users, you’ll be logging in like this:

If you want to go on logging in with your Google account, click the little G at the bottom of the green box. If you try to enter your Google info into the fields at the top, you’ll be prompted to create a StepRep-specific password which will be associated with your existing StepRep account.

Exciting stuff! What other improvements have been made in the most recent StepRep release?

Well, we’ve made some pretty significant changes to the Recommendations screen. We want to make it easier for users to build their recommendation networks, so they can promote and be promoted by their colleagues and share in the magic of StepRep rewards. With that in mind, now you can search for StepRep users by keyword and location. Here’s how it looks:

If you know the name of the user you’re trying to find, you can just type it into the first box. If we can’t locate the person you’re looking for in our directory, you’ll be prompted to invite them to join StepRep.

By the way, friendly technicians, I just noticed an error on the Recommendations page: the word “colleagues” is misspelled.

That’s how you told us to spell it, Michael.

Zoiks!

If everything goes according to plan, soon customers and advertisers on local “StepRep-powered” Yellow Pages websites will have access to all the features that StepRep users already enjoy:

• Profile pages that display recommendations from customers instead of anonymous (and usually cranky) reviews.
• Search results organized by social context, so customers can see how they’re connected to local businesses through their friends and their friends’ friends.
• One-to-many communications enabling customers to pose an open question to an entire service category.
• Reputation monitoring for businesses to keep track of what their customers are saying about them on other sites.
• StepRep rewards, a success-based advertising model that incentivizes customers to recommend businesses to their friends.

The idea is to restore the Yellow Pages to what they were in the pre-Internet era – the first place you turn to when you need to find a local business. I drew a little comic strip that covers the basics. (Thanks to Tavis and Nicole for modelling for me.)

Thataway, on the Spokesmonster blog, I have some cartoon fun with Microsoft’s new Windows 7 Launch Party campaign.

It wasn’t a spooky, life-or-death, Dan Brown-style secret. We discussed it openly around the office and with our friends. But we didn’t blog about it or talk about it in public.

The secret concerned what StepRep was. When we launched, we told everyone StepRep was a free reputation monitoring tool. And of course, it is a free reputation monitoring tool. But that’s only part of it.

The big secret was how we were going to make any money off our free reputation monitoring tool. People wondered, were we going to start charging a subscription fee? Would we make our users look at ads? Sorry, we said. Can’t tell you yet. It’s a secret.

That went on for months, and it sucked. We’re not naturally reticent people. But we had to keep it on the down-low while we built the product so that, instead of telling people what StepRep was all about, we could just show them. (Also, we were worried that someone would come along and steal our great idea.)

We’re not quite done building. But we’re far enough along that we no longer have to act all mysterious and vague. Now when people ask what StepRep is all about, we tell them to go try it for themselves. They quickly see that it’s not just a free reputation monitoring tool.

It’s a better way to advertise.

I’m glad we no longer have to hide this, because transparency is essential to what we’re trying to do. We want to be transparent about how we make our money, and we want to bring the benefits of transparency to the advertising business.

Whenever a StepRep user pays a reward to a customer, we take a ten percent transaction fee. That’s it. That’s our revenue model. Maybe someday in the future that percentage will change, but if it does, we’ll always be upfront about it.

We want every transaction in our system to be that transparent. Say you’re a realtor. Jenny’s selling her house. Her friend George suggests that she get in touch with you. When Jenny looks at your StepRep profile, she sees 1) how many people trust you, 2) how many of her friends trust you, and 3) how large a reward you’ll pay.

Jenny knows that she’ll be splitting the reward with George. She knows whether or not George’s advice can be relied on. When she looks at the list of her friends that trust you, she makes the same assessment for each of them – can I depend on this person’s judgement?

So Jenny hires you. You sell her house right away, because you’re awesome. You take your fee. You pay the reward to Jenny and George. We take our ten percent of the reward. No secrets, no surprises.

Isn’t it great when we’re all open with each other?

Well, over in MyFrontSteps land, we just completed our big name change. A while back when we launched our Facebook app we decided to give it the name Homebook. That name only led to confusion. Now it’s just called MyFrontSteps. So much easier.

Also, on the Spokesmonster blog, I have some thoughts on health care reform. Really! …Well, no, not really.