Blippy.com – Will You Share What You Buy?
Through Facebook.com (my profile) we decided to share who we were, where we went school, our personal photos and more. Using LinkedIn.com (my profile) we decided to share everything about our business life and business connections. Twitter (my profile) allows us to share our 140 character thoughts. With FourSquare (my profile) we now check-in everywhere and share our location with our friends.
Now there is Blippy.com – the service that allows you to share your purchases. On the Blippy.com website the tagline is simple : Blippy is a fun and easy way to see and discuss what everyone is buying.
Here is a screenshot from my Blippy.com Feed:
At this point I am only sharing my purchased from iTunes. But if you want to share more of your purchases you have the following options:
Most of these services are not available in Canada but you have the option of sharing your credit card or banking transactions. As a Canadian you have the following financial institution support on Blippy.com – American Express, ING Bank, and Capital One (although it does not explicitly say Canada). Here is a screenshot of the financial institutions supported by Blippy.com:
This past week I was forwarded this site to my colleagues and friends asking for their feedback. Some of them thought it was quite innovative in terms of asking your friends for feedback on whether they liked or disliked a movie or song. Others thought it was inappropriate to share this information on the web and flat-out told me they never would post their purchases online. Other thought it was completely stupid that somebody who post this info and that others would actually want to read it. One thing for sure is that Blippy.com evoked a reaction.
I actually think this concept is interesting. Think about it – everybody shares with their friends and family what they like and dislike. Did you see that movie? What did you think of it? When people come over to my house, they ask us how do you like your massage chair or your 4-door fridge (these are 2 common questions we get from most people). You can read about my Inada Massage Chair purchase.
Does Blippy.com allow people from long distances participate in those discussions?
Could Blippy.com help you make better decisions by asking people in your network about a product or service?
What about asking a total stranger on Blippy.com what he thought of a restaurant you have not been to before?
Is this so different than facebook, twitter, foursquare or linkedin?
Could Blippy.com be the next social phenomena?
Will You Share What You Buy?
$100 in Free Gas Every Day For Sharing Your Opinion
Do you like to share your opinion? If so – launched today is the $100 a day free gas card giveaway from the YellowPages.ca Facebook Application – see full contest details.
Since the launch of this application, we have seen a growing numbers of users from across Canada share their opinions on restaurants, bars, dentists, health spas and this is a way to say thanks for those users to keep sharing their opinion with friends and family.
On a personal note, I appreciate that my blog has been very quiet in the last couple of months and for everybody who emailed me asking me what’s up – thanks for emails and your concern.
Besides being extremely busy in my position of Director of Online Services for Yellow Pages Group, I also made a move from Toronto to Calgary. Although the transition went extremely smooth, it is quite a ride to pick up your life and move over 3000 km’s.
Anyway, I will be regularly contributing again, with more of a focus on what is being launched by the YellowPages.ca Labs Development Team as we continue to produce some great work in helping Canadians buyers connect with sellers.
Update on Facebook and Local Search
As many of you know – my YP Labs team launched the YellowPages.ca Facebook Application back in May. I did a post on the television coverage by CTV – check it out.
So what is the determining success in developing a facebook application? In the facebook world it really comes down to the number of installs of the application and more importantly the number of daily active users. At the bottom of this post, I will share some numbers on local search applications in facebook.
Before I get into small application numbers, I want to highlight a feature about the YellowPages.ca application – building your own lists to share with friends and then map your lists. This application allows a user to create lists for private, semi-public and public on pretty much any topic. Here are some public user created lists:
Favorite Restaurants in Calgary – Map List.
Favorite Sports Stores in Montreal – Map List.
Favorite Toronto Restaurants – Map List.
Great Restaurants in Port Perry – Map List.
Places to Eat in Ottawa – Map List.
Some interesting lists, including one for my favorite places to eat in Ottawa.
Back to numbers of successful application usage. I grabbed these numbers from Adonomics.com, which aggregates usage on facebook applications. Here are some stats regarding application usage on facebook. Numbers are as of today.
The most successful application, in terms of installs is SuperWall with just under 43M installs and a daily active usage of 2%.
Funwall has the most active users at 1.8M from a total install base of 36.5M and a daily active usage of 5%.
Scrabulous (now being sued by Hasbro) has 3.9M installs and daily active usage of 506K or 13%.
So what about local search applications? First, from an expectation perspective, they are not even close to the above numbers. Facebook is still, at its core, a platform of entertainment. However, it is interesting to see how some of the local search player applications fair-out:
Yell Socialiser (UK) – 500 installs, 2 daily active users (0%)
Praize’n'raze (CDN and US) – 950 installs, 57 daily active users (6%)
YellowPages.ca (CDN) – 667 installs, 40 daily active users (6%)
Local Picks (Global) – 1.1M installs, 3349 daily active users (0%)
Lolodex (US) – 2800 installs, 15 daily active users (0%)
Can “OpenSocial” Bring Friendster Back into the Canadian Mainstream
Remember Friendster? One of those early social networking sites. Well as of this week, they have made a couple of key announcements that could help bring friendster.com from the depths of the Canadian Internet space to – perhaps a competitor to facebook? Well – let’s not get carried away, but they have announced opening up a developer network as well as integrating with OpenSocial – both positive steps in the right direction, however, probably a little late – at least in the Canadian market. For the full story please read, Friendster developer platform goes live with over 180 apps.
From a local business perspective – your best bet is still facebook.com as a vehicle to communicate with your customers and friends. With the launch of facebook’s business solutions – there is a very viable solution for local businesses to get involved in the social space.
However, what about friendster? You know, at one point, they had a great service but what they are doing now is reactive not proactive. They, like myspace, are in reactionary mode to facebook and this is a touch position for any business to be in.
Anyway, as a FYI – here is a 12-month media trend comparing facebook.com, myspace.com and friendster.com in Canada – the graph speaks for itself as to what Canadians are using and where local businesses in Canada need to be.
Facebook’s Usage – Impressive Growth
Currently at the Kelsey Conference in LA and had an enjoyable time listening to Chamath Palihapitiya, VP Product Marketing and Operations for Facebook. He was speaking about facebook and its product with respect to advertising – I am currently doing some testing and will have a future post on my findings with respect to their ad platform from a Canadian perspective.
Anyway, here were some of the stats regarding the growth of facebook.com that I found very interesting and impressive:
55 million active users (usage in the last 30-days)
250,000 new users a day
doubling every 6-months
over 50% of users are returning everyday
70+ billion page views per month
end of 2007 – 1 trillion page views per year
40+ page views per user per day
YellowPages.ca Expands Facebook Integration
This is a follow-up on a post that I did back on July 19 – titled “YellowPages.ca Launches Facebook Integration for Local Businesses” in which I profiled that yellowpages.ca had included facebook as part of their save and share functionality. However, in September, yellowpages.ca expanded one step further by integrating the “add to facebook” directly into the search results as well as the merchant page for each and every business in Canada.
Here are some screen shots of what this looks like. I used my mom’s business in Calgary called TheBraLady.ca. Here are the steps of how I got these screen shots:
First visit yellowpages.ca and do a search for bras in calgary. This actually loads a full page of results, but I captured just the result listing. As you can see, from the listing level you can add to facebook.
If you click on the company name this loads the merchant page for TheBraLady.ca. As you can see from the following screen shot there are two locations where you can “add to facebook” including the logo in the top right hand corner. Sorry for the small size – click on the link above to see the live version.
This is what it looks like inside of facebook.
As far as I know this is one of the first times that a company has allowed every single business in a country the ability to brand itself inside facebook – if you know of another integration – please send me a comment.
From a user perspective this is a great way to share a meeting location since all the merchant pages on yellowpages.ca have a map – when an address is available. From a small business perspective – this is a great opportunity to brand yourself within facebook.
Imagine – you set up a small business profile in facebook and invite your customers to connect to you. Why would they do that – because you are going to send out messages, promotions, coupons, etc. You use the add to facebook functionality to continue to update your friend list of these promotions. There is very little investment to make this happen and you potentially create a great viral tool.
If I had a small business – I would definitely take advantage of the many opportunities that could come from this integration. But that is just me – I tend to think a little differently.
FaceBook Camp Toronto
This is a live post at the FaceBook Camp Toronto – which is a collection of presentations and information for Facebook developers. You might be asking the question – why I am here? Simple, I am looking for ideas on ways that you can use facebook application development to build meaningful applications that can be used by local businesses to drive more business.
What I am not suggesting however, is that a local business simply puts something up on facebook and they will gets lots of business. Frankly the only person who cares about your business is you – facebook users certainly don’t. However, if you can build an application that has meaning for users – then you can probably turn this into real dollars.
Over the coming weeks, I am going to test out applications on facebook that have been developed by companies interested in making money but that have real application for users. I will keep you posted.
YellowPages.ca Launches Facebook Integration for Local Businesses
Coming soon to a Facebook profile near you – your favorite local business in Canada? YellowPages.ca – Canada’s largest online directory has launched their integration of Facebook for customers who want to save and share their favorite businesses by using their link function on Facebook.com. This is a good follow-up story to a blog posting from 2-weeks ago – Can Local Businesses Florish in Social Marketing.
So I did a test this evening and here is how the process works:
Step #1 – Visit YellowPages.ca and do a search query. I happen to look for a dentist in Calgary.
Step #2 – Locate the business of your choice that you want to add and select the “Save and Share”. In this case, I selected my dentist – Optimum Dentistry.
Step #3 – This launches a window where you select how you want to “Save and Share”. In this case, I selected Social Bookmarks and then Selected Facebook.
Step #4 – The listing is added to your facebook profile.
What I like about this service is that it is a simple way to share businesses in Canada with friends and family on facebook. For example, if you are planning a night out – you can add the link to facebook – share it with your friends to view the map and or driving directions for your business. A good example of a IYP leveraging social marketing to promote its customers.
Am I Media – Are You?
I have been reading the following posts about Facebook; the first one was Robert Scoble is Media as posted by my friend Sebastien Provencher who was blogging about the second post I have been reading tonight by Robert Scoble – titled Why Facebook, Why Now?
The profound statement coming from Sebastien was the fact that he considers himself “MEDIA”. This completely makes sense to me – if in fact you share information and use the Internet as a way to distribute that information. In this case, I suppose I am considered media as well.
This got me thinking – how can local businesses get involved with this. When I was with KS2 Solutions – I spent a lot of time coaching businesses that information can be a powerful tool to increase the number of relationships they have. These relationships, when nurtured properly will pay some very handsome dividends through word of mouth and referral marketing.
This was the strategy we used at KS2. We did not have a large marketing budget to do traditional advertising; however, what we did have was knowledge – knowledge that other people were willing to take time to listen to. So we starting blogging (many of those posts actually exist on this blog), holding seminars and doing an incredible amount of networking. However, we never asked for business in those forums, we simply provided information – we never tried to connect this type of networking with selling – those were two distinctive processes.
It worked well, our referral business grew and it had a direct impact our bottom line. We doubled revenue from 2003 to 2004 and then again in 2005 before we were finally bought out.
Now that I think back to what we did from 2002-2005 – facebook would have a been another forum for us to provide information. Facebook and other social networking sites – really do have the potential to help the individual blogger, small businesses and even large businesses if they act in a manner that is cooperative and knowledge based and not sales based – you might be very surprised at what comes of it.
Facebook – Can Local Business Florish in Social Networking?
Recently launched is Social Flowers – sending flowers though social networks. Well, one social network for now – Facebook. This is the start of a trend as we will see in the next 12-months many of the leading online retailers – building applications specifically to sell products through Social Networking – at lease that is my predication. If you want to read more about how the Social Flowers application works – please visit Social Flowers – Send Flowers Through Social Networks – this is an article written by Pete Cashmore.
On a more local level (here in Toronto) – a recent article on the Globe and Mail from July 5, 2007 written by DAVID GEORGE-COSH discusses one Yoga teacher whose class size has doubled since posting in the Facebook Marketplace –
Jane Clapp takes a moment between teaching fitness classes in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park to reflect on her unexpected windfall. In the span of a month, her class size has doubled to 15 participants, amounting to about $3,200 in new revenue.
Even more surprising is the source of Ms. Clapp’s good fortune – Facebook. Using a new feature on the popular social-networking website called Marketplace, Ms. Clapp promoted her classes and almost immediately former clients and old friends on her contact list noticed. A month later, business is booming.
“I love it,” said Ms. Clapp, whose ad has been viewed about 127 times. “I’m completely fascinated with how I can create an online business without any overhead at all.”
Click here to read the rest of the article.
This article also provided us with some interesting numbers regarding Facebook in Toronto.
By the numbers
7,715,040 – Users who have added the Top Friends application, the most-added application on Facebook
680,729 – Number of users on the Toronto network, the largest regional network on Facebook
15,714 – Total ad postings on the Toronto Marketplace network
My Thoughts:
To answer the question can local business florish in Social Networking – the answer is absolutely. However, the challenge for is the time and expertise required. Most small and medium sized business owners are very time starved and if they have the time, they may not have the technical expertise.
However, as a starting point, I would encourage any small business owner to build their profile on Facebook.com – just to start their understanding of what Social Networking is all about. Then invite your best customers to join and have them talk about their experiences with your business. In fact, if you have a unique product or service, build a group and really generate the buzz around it – one very interesting aspect of Social Networking is that people want to hear what other people have to say. Just ensure that you do it in a manner that is consistent with the forum that you are in.
Here are the top 5 Social Networking sites in Canada as reported by ComScore MediaMetrix – May 2007 – the numbers represent millions of users.
1) Facebook.com – 10,501
2) Windows Live Spaces – 7,481
3) Blogger - 6,720
4) MySpace.com – 5,200
5) Yahoo GeoCities - 3,986
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