My Forrester Groundswell Awards Entry Page

This page satisfies the Forrester Groundswell Awards submission.

Feedback Jar is a way for customers to communicate with each other and with their local merchants. Customers can help answer questions, share ideas, and resolve problems with products and services they use in their community. We also encourage merchants to join the conversation with their customers.

Presenting at the Silicon Valley New Tech

Today we will be presenting FeedbackJar at the Silicon Valley New Tech at DLA Piper in Palo Alto at 7 pm.
Come to this free event and grab a slice of free pizza!

DLA Piper
2000 University Ave
Palo Alto, CA 94303

FeedbackJar.com and Jippidy.com Mercury Lounge Happy Hour!

We’re happy to announce we’ll be having a joint happy hour with our partners Jippidy.com.

Come out and meet us at:

Mercury Lounge
1582 Folsom Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Thurs, Aug 13
6-9 pm

Free Stuff:
6-7:30 free wine & mojitos
7:30- 9 complimentary hors d oeuvres

RSVP here

Presenting at (geek-biz-pixel) Sessions Mixers!

We will be demo-ing FeedbackJar at the

(geek-biz-pixel) Sessions Mixers

Located at Atmosphere in San Francisco on July 28.

Come out and mingle with us starting at 5:30 pm.

For more information, click here

You can register here for this event.

Please contact us if you want a discount for the event.

Online Message Boards for Merchants

One can find countless message boards covering myriad of topics. The key is harness these communities to build a loyal customer base. I will give you four points to most effectively engage your audience and to market your business.

Right audience
Search on Google for message boards or forums your target audience would go. Once you find the correct message board, create an account and start talking with the users in that community.

Don’t spam
Since forums are about fostering community, you don’t want to anger the users by spamming them or getting them to buy your product. However, how would you market your business without spamming? The answer is to have a post signature with your company link. It also helps to have your company link in your user profile as well. Overtime your account will have enough impressions such that you’ll be accepted by the community.

Listen
Pay close attention to what your potential customers want. Customers tend to be vocal on things they don’t like. Take this opportunity to win your customers over. They will be glad and praise your business for doing so.

Share
People usually go to forums to share ideas and get help. Answer any questions you may have even if the answer is to refer the customer to the competition. It’s also a good way to market your profile and win the trust of the community since you’re there to help.

Remember online communities are about open conversations. You’re not going to like everything everyone says. Do your best to engage these communities with honesty and transparency.

Yelp allowing businesses to respond back and how it affects FeedbackJar.

For a long time Yelp has allowed businesses contact reviewers privately, but according to AP News, Yelp will start allowing businesses to respond publicly to customer reviews in the next week or two.
This of course is a result of the bad publicity Yelp has been receiving over the past few months.
With these new changes, how does Yelp make sure the businesses are not just writing rebuttals to customer feedback? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for improving customer satisfaction, but Yelp has spent millions branding itself as a review site. Will we see Yelp move into a different direction in the future?

I know some of you are curious how these changes will affect FeedbackJar since we already allow businesses to respond back. Well, first of all we’re not a review site. We’re a crowdsource customer support community. We allow customers to help other customers with products and services they use from their local businesses. For example, if a customer wanted to know if a dish contained a certain ingredient, that customer could post a public question for a particular restaurant. Other customers or business employees from that business can view and reply back. Users can also sort the type types of feedback by question, suggestion, or problem.
As far as we know, Yelp doesn’t offer that feature since it’s focused on reviews. Also, we’re developing a widget for businesses to post on their homepage, so customers could post feedback without going directly to our site.

Getting started with Facebook for Small Businesses

As of today Facebook as well over 100 million registered users. No wonder it’s the definitive social network in the world. With that said, more and more small businesses are relying on the power of Facebook to market, make contacts, and build relationships.

To get business owners started, I’m going to give some 5 tips on using Facebook assuming you already have a Facebook account.

1. Create Fan Page
Click on the Facebook about link. There will be a link to create your own fan page. Upload pictures and updates on the fan page to let your fans know you’re alive.

2. Create Group
Facebook also allows you to create a a group page. The group page is a little more intimate and allows you to have discussions with people in your group.

3. Create Events
With in your group page, you can create events for your business. The event will be propagated to your group members, which will give you opportunity to have more face-to-face interaction with your customers.

4. Spread the Word
Once you have your fan and group page set up, invite as many people you can to join. Add your fan and group page link on your business website. Search other fan and group pages that are relevant to your business. By engaging those communities, you can draw those members to your profile.

5. Have fun!
Social networks are fun! I always enjoy meeting new people whether it be in person or online. I mean that’s why they call it a “Social” network in the first place.

Great Launch Ideas for crowdsourcing sites from Hacker News

Posted a question on Hacker News today. I asked the community if they had any good launch ideas.

You can view the post here

Got some really good insights from the following HN users:

AndrewWarner of Mixergy

Here’s what I learned from the interviews I did on Mixergy:
Jon Bischke told me he launched his community on eduFire by asking his personal contacts to add content first.
Seth Godin told me that you need a heretic message. (Yelp’s message was that communities trump experts.)
Jason Siminoff told me he had Google alerts go off when bloggers talked about his industry–and then engaged them personally.
Jason Fried said 37signals decided to teach what they knew as a way of drawing people in.
Mateo Gutierrez told me that he always searches his sites’ records for influencials and then he gives them power so they can encourage other users to participate.
Derek Sivers said launch your site and don’t worry if it’s crappy and no one uses it at first.
Douglas Atkin told me that he studied cults and noticed that the ones that let their members talk to each other were more likely to grow.

andrewljohnson
The key to Yelp was their content acquisition strategy. Yelp is of course the classic chicken and the egg type website, so they needed clever ways to get things rolling.
They incentivized them with things like private dinners, free dinners, and inside information that only the top Yelpers could see for a time.
Another trick was the founders of Yelp used their site extensively - if you want to get into the content game, be prepared to write some content - if just to demonstrate what your site should look like.
Putting aside Yelp’s strategies, here’s my number one launch idea for you - do a small launch before you do a big launch.
We’ve been working on www.trailbehind.com since April, and our first launch was May 1. By the time we have a big launch this summer, in time for the hiking season, we are hoping to avoid the flameout problems of big launches.
Remember, a Techcrunch hit comes and goes, but a Google search is forever.

zach of LA Life

- A small percentage of internet users potentially interested in your site will find it.
- A small percentage of those who come to your site will become regular users and create content.
- A small percentage of those who create content will account for most of the site’s content.
I presume you want to find those people in the last category fast — and you probably don’t have the resources to let the funnel above just work.
So find them, cajole them, steal them, hire them, reward them, make the site engaging for them — basically don’t sweat the content side for a while until you have enough content to break a sweat over.
You really are creating two sites. One for consumers, the second for creators. The better the consumer site is at being a content site, the more traffic you get. The more features the creator site offers for user-rewarding social interaction, the more content you get.
Look at how Yelp rewards their frequent users in every detail, using techniques that are not unfamiliar to game designers. Check out Amy Jo Kim’s explications of this topic: http://www.slideshare.net/amyjokim/putting-the-fun-in-functi… http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/2006/03/how_game_…
The best thing about getting highly active (you could say passionate) users is that they become champions for your site and bring it up in other contexts, not just blogs but in workplaces, among friends with similar interests and other potential champions.
But my most practical tip would be to mine existing interest groups via messageboards and labor to introduce their champions to your site. You see this on Yelp in how vegans and vegetarians are very active users. You can do the same thing for people who know about an entire vertical business segment of their area — they’ve visited every ham radio store, every bookstore, every coffeehouse, every diabetic food store, whatever. People who already, mentally, have a list of feedback they want to ask. It’s a bit more challenging than reviews, maybe, because people more often have lots of opinions to give than questions to ask. So you may have to find some way around that, say to organize campaigns for active users to create and join to ask en masse about some issue they care about.

Thank you Hacker News community for all your help!

Twittering for Small Businesses

Twitter is a great tool to listen and reply to what people are saying about your business. Here are some points on how small businesses can use Twitter to create free buzz.

1. Update Posts
Keep your customers in the “know” by posting updates on your twitter account. The more engaging the post; the better since that will result in more re-tweets. You want more re-tweets since that creates a word of mouth effect. If I see a bunch of users tweeting about Nick’s Diner, I would more likely investigate that restaurant.

2. Searching Tweets
You can find what people are twittering about on search.twitter.com. It’s a great resource to find tweets on your business and follow those twitters.

3. Re-Tweeting
Once you find and follow your target audience, you can now reply/re-tweeting what they post. This will help you get noticed and will results in more people following your account.

Blog Etiquette

Embedding yourself into the blog community can be very beneficial for your business.
In order to get bloggers to write about you, you have to join the conversation. Here are 3 steps for engaging your community.

1. Leave Comments
Commenting is key getting to know the blogger and other readers as long as the comment is relevant to the topic. Don’t leave spam or snarky comments. Remember it’s a community you want to be part of.

2. Return the favor
It’s always good to link back to another blogger whenever their mention you in their posts especially if they just introduced a large audience to your blog.

3. Guest blog
Once you have enough traction, you maybe asked to be a guest blogger. Try to make some time and write a post for a fellow blogger. It will at least help you build more relationships and gather a larger audience.