Fred's Blog

Promote Word-of-Mouth

7 May 2011

Word of mouth is a great way to market your company. It is free, it comes from a trusted source (a friend), and it spreads really fast.

There are lots of things you can do to help word of mouth happen. Here are two ways to get started: conversation starters and prepping.

Conversation Starter

This is anything that helps people start talking about your company. Typical examples are t-shirts, stickers, pens, etc.

For DoneDeal the conversation starter is often an email someone sends to a friend with a link to a specific ad on DoneDeal. Or they might share an ad on their Facebook page. The ad might have a cool or funny photo, or it might show a cool car, cute pups, a bike with super-duper go-faster-stripes, or anything else interesting.

Emails and Facebook entries can be great conversation starters, but real-life items can work even better. For example, we often use prizes for competitions as great conversation starters (t-shirts, beer koozies, balloons, etc)

Prepping

Prepping is when you coach people to tell others about your company. You educated them with stories and anecdotes that they can bring up during conversations.

For example, customers who know how your company got started might discuss it with a friend over a beer. Any interesting facts they know about your product or company help them talk about you more often.

So, go on, tell your customers more about yourself, your life, your company, and your product.

Read more about Word-of-mouth marketing on the clever TrendWatching site.

Forgiveness is Easier than Permission

6 May 2011

Fred Productivity 1 Comment

I like this quote:

It is easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission

If something seems like a good idea to you, go straight ahead and make it happen. Most of the time people will love what you have done. And in the odd case when people are not happy it is easy to say sorry.

Much bigger and cooler things would happen if we all stopped asking for permission, and just got things done instead.

Try DoneDeal in 3D

1 Apr 2011

Fred Other important stuff Comments Off

3D glasses We are testing a new technology on DoneDeal, where you can see the site in 3D. It creates a whole new experience when you browse a web site, and it enables us to create totally new and different ways of navigating and using a site.

It is early days yet, this is only an initial pilot test. But we are very excited, and we really believe this is the future of web browsing.

Please have a look, and let me know what you think. Read about it on the DoneDeal blog.

Attentrons

21 Feb 2011

Fred User experience Comments Off

A previous post explained that it is often better to remove features than to add new features.

Neil Hunt from Netflix uses a canny term “attentrons” to explain why this is the case:

I have this mental model of particles of attention that a user brings, a finite quantity that they will spread around according to what catches their attention. I call them “attentrons”. An extra tab or button will attract a bunch of attentrons that are not then available to focus on other areas. So the tab had better be *better* than the competing areas of the site to avoid diluting the results, or it’s better off removed.

Read his full post on Quora.

Doing Business on the iPad

16 Feb 2011

Fred Productivity 2 Comments

I must confess, I am a massive iPad fan. The iPad is great for games, but it is also great for business stuff.

Here is a list of the apps I regularly use on the iPad for business:

Note Taker – for hand-written meeting notes. After each meeting I email these notes to Evernote, which means the handwritten notes can be searched online.
GoodReader – to read documents for meetings. It connects to our Google Docs, Dropbox, email, and shared files accounts, so I can easily get to any document.
Reeder – to read a handful of online blogs.
Toodledo – for my ToDo list.
FastEver XL – to quickly save notes to Evernote.
Mindmeister – for planning and organising with mindmaps. All mindmaps are stored online, so I can update them from the computer as well.