StepRep Blog

Well, dang it. Over at the Spokesmonster blog this morning I posted what I thought was the latest in StepRep update news:

• We discovered a handy trick for getting your StepRep widget stories to show up on your Facebook profile.
• We recently (finally) managed to buy the steprep.com domain from the dude who’d brazenly snatched it out from under our noses back in late 2008.

Then about five minutes after I hit “publish”, Shawn over on the StepRep development team sent out an email announcing that a new update had just been deployed. Grr! Now I gotta write a whole ‘nother blog post.

Oh, well, beats working.

1. Optimization. Shawn and his witch doctors have rattled their monkeybones and danced the dance of the feathered serpent, and now, he tells me, the pages in StepRep will load a little faster.

2. My Content. It seems that some of y’all found it a little crazy that there was a category for “My Content” but there was no button to allow you to easily move stories into that category. Well, you can stop tearing out your hair – there’s a “My Content” button now.

But don’t worry, you can still assign domains to zap directly into “My Content” by going to the Links tab in the Settings screen.

3. Terminology. There are a number of little wording changes throughout the site, designed to make things clearer (hopefully) to new users. Most of these won’t affect you. But one new term might throw you a bit:

Promoted.

Here’s what it means. We’ve been finding that a lot of people just don’t get the widget. They don’t understand what it does and they don’t understand why they should use it. As I’ve explained before, the purpose of the widget and your StepRep public profile is to create multiple links to – and thus increase the search ranking of – the stories that you want people to see.

Which is another way of saying, you use the widget and the public profile to promote stories.

So we went ahead and changed the “Add to widget” checkbox to “Promote”. When you check off a story, instead of going into a category called “Widget”, it’ll appear under the “Manage Promoted” link on the right-hand side of the screen. And of course, it’ll appear on your StepRep widget and public profile.

We’ve got some work to do to make the new terminology consistent throughout the site, so bear with us. As always, we’re interested in hearing what you think about the changes, so don’t hesitate to leave comments, tweet us at @steprep, or use the Feedback link in StepRep.

You’ve probably noticed, if you’ve been paying any attention to our marketing exertions here at StepRep, that sometimes we’ll refer to the service as StepRep by MyFrontSteps. You might have also spotted some references to an enigmatic something-or-other called Homebook by MyFrontSteps.

What the heck are we talking about? What are “StepRep”, “Homebook”, and “MyFrontSteps”?

Maybe I’ll start by breaking it down graphically:

The MyFrontSteps Community.

MyFrontSteps

MyFrontSteps pays my salary. It’s the name of the company that’s putting this whole shebang together.

It also lends its name to the MyFrontSteps Directory, which (as you can see from the elegant illustration above) is the bridge that connects service providers on StepRep with their customers on Homebook.

This all probably requires a bit more explanation…

StepRep

When we launched StepRep, it was a reputation monitoring service, and that was it. Even now, most of the people who sign up for StepRep are primarily interested in finding out what people are saying about them online.

But StepRep has evolved into more than just a reputation monitor. Our tagline is “Monitor, manage, and build your online reputation.” One of the ways you’ll build your reputation is by connecting with your satisfied customers and their friends in the MyFrontSteps community.

Now, maybe you don’t have customers; maybe you don’t have a business. That’s okay. You can still use StepRep to keep track of what people are saying about your garage band or your attractive lawn or your angry bullhorn rants from the steps of City Hall.

But basically, StepRep is for people who provide a service. Or as we like to call them, “service providers”.

Homebook

The MyFrontSteps community includes everyone on StepRep plus everyone on Homebook. So what’s Homebook?

It’s a place to hang out and talk about your home. For starters, that will mostly mean sharing photos with your friends. In the future it might mean contests, discussions, decorating tips from experts…all sorts of stuff.

Homebook’s most innovative feature is the ability to share your list of trusted service providers with your friends. Next time you’re looking for a good plumber, instead of thumbing randomly through the phone book, you can go into the Directory tab in Homebook, drill down to the list of plumbers in your location, and see at a glance which ones your friends have used and recommend.

There’s more. In a month or so (we’re working on it right now), Homebook users will be able to request quotes from StepRep users. A little further down the line, StepRep users will be able to offer additional incentives in the form of referral fees (discussed in greater detail in a recent post on the Spokesmonster blog).

Where do you find Homebook? It’s not a website – it’s an application you can add to your Facebook or MySpace account:

Homebook on Facebook
Homebook on MySpace

(If you’re not on Facebook or MySpace, there’s a standalone version too, at myfrontsteps.com.)

The price is right…

Sometimes we get so excited about all the neat stuff we’re building that we forget to emphasize something fundamental: All this stuff is free. We’ve got a plan to make a little money later on by taking a small percentage of every referral fee that gets paid. But the referral fees are optional; everything else we offer up gratis. Why?

Just because we love to give.

Maybe you could express your gratitude by signing up for Homebook, trying it out for a few days, and giving us some feedback…

After examining a couple months’ worth of comments and complaints from users like you, our greasy-tailed keyboard-monkeys have soldered and screwed together an update that makes StepRep even easier and more fun to use. Let’s go over the improvements:

1. Got a question about how to use StepRep? If it is a question that is asked frequently, perhaps it has been addressed in our new and imaginatively-titled Frequently Asked Questions section.

2. You know how the buttons on each story used to say Good, Bad, and Watch? Well, it turns out people found that kinda confusing. So we’ve changed the terminology to Positive, Negative, and Neutral. Hopefully that makes it a little clearer.

3. There are new filters to allow you to organize stories by date and by where the story originated – websites, images, Twitter, or news.

4. Are you a Twitter junkie? Now there’s a Tweet This link on each story so you can quickly share it with your followers.

5. We’ve added a new category called My Content which will automatically separate out blog posts and updates from URLs you designate. So if you’re a frequent blogger and you’re tired of seeing your own posts show up in your StepRep results, relief has arrived…

6. Now you can trust and endorse fellow StepRep users by clicking a link on their profile in the MyFrontSteps Directory. And, of course, they can trust and endorse you back!

7. There’s a new Executive Report that will show up in your email once  a week (or as often as you choose; you can change the frequency in your account settings). The report lets you know what’s going on with your StepRep account – how many new stories have been found, how many users have trusted or endorsed you…and so on.

8. You already know about the StepRep widget, which allows you to broadcast positive links to your website or blog. Well, now there are two new widgets – one to display your Trusted Services and another to display your Member Stats. In coming months, as the MyFrontSteps community grows, these widgets will be increasingly useful for connecting to your fellow service providers and bringing in new business through your StepRep account.

9. Speaking of the widget. If you’ve got a WordPress.com hosted blog – like me – then you might have noticed that the widget, consarnit, could not be added to your blog. WordPress does some hocus-pocus on its pages that erases the code that makes our widget work. Well, now there’s a WordPress.com workaround: You’ll create an RSS feed for the stories on your StepRep widget and paste that link into a blank RSS widget on your blog. We’ll have a detailed how-to up on the FAQ page pretty soon. In the meantime, if you’d like instructions get in touch with us.

9½: Oh, one more wee thing: there’s a new Spokesmonster video that talks about some features we’ll be adding in the near future to allow you to offer quotes and referral fees through your StepRep account.

We’ve been pretty busy, haven’t we? But if there’s some feature you think we’re still missing, don’t hesitate to let us know – post a comment here or on our Facebook group, tweet us, or just send us a message from the StepRep feedback page. We’re already hard at work on the next update…