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.
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?
You’re probably already familiar with this line attributed to the Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker:
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.
Hold that quote in your head for a moment while I relate an anecdote about Marshall McLuhan. You’ll remember McLuhan as the Canadian philosopher-cum-guru who coined the phrase “The medium is the message” and enshrined the distinction between “hot” and “cool” media (and had a cameo in Annie Hall).
In 1965 the journalist Tom Wolfe followed McLuhan on a speaking tour of America and watched him blow businessmen’s minds with his gnomic pronouncements on the future of the media. Wolfe describes one such encounter:
McLuhan is sitting in the Laurent Restaurant in New York with Gibson McCabe, president of Newsweek, and several other high-ranking communications people, and McCabe tells of the millions Newsweek has put into reader surveys, market research, advertising, the editorial staff, everything, and how it paid off with a huge rise in circulation over the past five years. McLuhan listens, then down comes the chin: “Well…of course, your circulation would have risen about the same anyway, the new sensory balance of the people being what it is…”
Here’s a scary thought. What if John Wanamaker was being overly optimistic? Maybe business owners should count themselves lucky if they can say with confidence that only half the money they spend on advertising is wasted.
Sometimes it’s possible to tell when advertising leads to a sale. Often it’s not.
Maybe your new radio ad brought in a dozen new customers, or maybe those customers would have found you some other way.
Maybe your business is booming because of that billboard you put up on Highway 11, or maybe it’s spillover traffic from that new Starbucks next door. Or maybe it’s word of mouth. Or maybe it’s…”the new sensory balance of the people”!
But what choice do you have? That’s the way advertising works, right? You pay for an ad, and you hope the increase in sales is greater than the outlay of buying the ad.
But what if there were another way to advertise?
What if you only had to pay after the fact, once the transaction had been completed?
What if your advertising dollars went directly to new customers…and the past customers who had referred them?
What if every time you closed a deal, it was broadcast on your customer’s Facebook page for all her friends to see?
You might think StepRep is just about managing your reputation. But that’s just one little part of our vision of changing the way businesses advertise.
We’ll be talking more about this in the coming weeks. Here’s a quick video that gives the broad outline.
If you’ve recently logged into your account, you may have had a “What the heck’s going on?” moment. Instead of being popped right into the Reputation Monitor, as usual, you found yourself on a screen that looked sort of like this:
Mwuh? Wazzat? Where am I?
Don’t worry, you can get back to your comfort zone by clicking the orange Reputation Monitor button at the top of the screen. But while we’re here, let’s explore this new homepage you’ve landed on.
What you’re looking at is a feed of your most recent activity in StepRep. Right now that means you’re probably seeing all the latest stories that the Reputation Monitor has dug up. But as StepRep and the MyFrontSteps community continue to grow, those search results are going to be crowded out by other new stuff:
Trusts and Endorsements
As we keep on telling people, StepRep isn’t only about monitoring your reputation and managing your presence on Google and other search engines. It’s also about building your referral network by connecting with your customers, their friends, and your fellow service providers.
Whenever your network grows – when somebody adds you to their Trusted List or endorses your services – it’ll show up on your feed here on the homepage. You can see who you’re connected to by clicking the orange StepConnect button.
Asks
We could’ve called ’em “Questions”, but we didn’t want to pre-suppose how customers chose to use the feature. An Ask might be a question, a call for help, or a request for an estimate on a project. An Ask is an open discussion thread where anyone in the MyFrontSteps community can throw in their two cents.
Pictures can also be posted inline, so that customers can be more explicit about what they’re talking about: “Here’s my window – how much to have blinds installed?” That kind of thing.
If you click on the orange Customers button, you’ll see where these Asks are coming from. There might not be that many in your hometown right now – heck, there might not be any. But when you do start seeing Asks that pertain to your area of expertise, we hope you’ll take the time to respond to them. It’s a great way to connect with new customers and pick up business.
When you click on “Publish to Facebook” you’ll get a little pop-up asking for your Facebook credentials (unless you happen to be logged into Facebook already). Then you’ll have the option of adding a personal message to the story before it appears on your profile, where it will look something like this:
Interacting with members of the MyFrontSteps community
Most of our users probably don’t pay too much attention to the little orange buttons across the top of the screen, the ones that say “StepConnect” and “Referrals & Quotes”. That’s okay; so far there hasn’t been much to do on those screens except watch some Spokesmonster videos.
But if you click on “Referrals & Quotes” now you’ll see…well, depending on which city you live in, you might not see anything at all. But I’ll show you what it looks like for my hometown, Saskatoon:
Y’see, the table displays questions from folks in the MyFrontSteps community – specifically, from our new Facebook application Homebook. Click on the entries and you can interact with whoever posted the question. You can offer an answer, request more info, or post photos. Your replies will be visible but anonymous to other service providers, but the customer will be able to see who you are.
Right now when you visit this screen, the questions may or may not be relevant to your business; but as the action picks up in your town, we’ll narrow down the table so you only see questions related to your line of work.
This probably isn’t something you need to worry about right away. We’ll soon be adding a way to notify users when a potentially interesting question comes in. Just letting you know that, as always, there’s cool stuff coming your way in StepRep.
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:
(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…
StepRep Beta Helps You Monitor, Manage, and Build Your Reputation.
SASKATOON, SK, January 8 2009 – With the explosive growth of new social media like Facebook and Twitter, it’s never been more vital for businesses to keep track of what people are saying about them on the Internet.
“People are rating your services on sites like ServiceMagic and Yelp,” said Brendan King, CEO of the Canadian Internet startup MyFrontSteps. “They’re blogging, and commenting on each other’s blogs. One comment can be seen by tens of thousands of people. It’s really upped the stakes.”
MyFrontSteps has just released a new service called StepRep, located at steprep.myfrontsteps.com, to help small businesses and independent contractors manage their online reputation. What makes this service different from others that have come before?
The price, for one thing. StepRep is free. And it was designed with simplicity in mind, to encourage non-tech-savvy users to give it a try.
“Small business owners might think, hey, I’ve got a low profile, no-one’s talking about me,” said King. “But when you don’t have a large online presence, the effect of each comment is magnified. It’s even more important to keep on top of what people are seeing when they Google your name.”
StepRep sends out an alert via email whenever a new result appears, allowing users to respond to blog posts or comments immediately.
Results can then be sorted and managed, and positive items promoted using a “widget” that can be added to the user’s blog or website. These search-friendly widgets draw search engines toward positive results and away from negative ones.
For users without a blog or website, StepRep provides a simple profile page that displays positive stories.
StepRep is only the first part of a larger strategy to connect businesses and their customers through social networks. In March, MyFrontSteps will launch Homebook, a place for homeowners to share photos of their homes and get ideas for design and renovation. Homebook users will be invited to link to their trusted home service providers on StepRep.
StepRep and MyFrontSteps are products of VendAsta Technologies, a software development team based in Saskatoon, Canada. In August 2008 the startup received $3 million funding from Victoria Park Capital to develop a social networking initiative that would combine the founders’ expertise in software and real estate services. Their website is at www.vendasta.com.
For more information please contact MyFrontSteps CEO Brendan King at 306-955-5512 ext 102.
A while back we abolished our last secret.
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