I will be speaking about Social CRM at a WTA meeting this week Thursday http://www.runmyclub.com/WTA/eventcalendar.asp?id=205840 and speaking about student entrepreneurship and starting up GoBuzz while Max and myself were in school at the BizStarts Milwaukee Student Conference on April 16th: http://www.bizstartsmilwaukee.com/StudentConference.htm
Hope to see you there!
Dan
As the unemployment rate hovers at 9.7% I wanted to interject my view of the economic outlook from a stoop in the small town of Watertown, Wisconsin. When I was working as a Graduate Assistant for the Marquette Golden Angels we had Jon Fisher come in and speak at the Marquette Business Plan Competition Banquet in mid April, 2008. During the speech, Jon made reference to this chart:
Jon had the thesis that we were heading toward unemployment of 9% by April of 2009. At the time, unemployment was hovering around 5%. His assertion intreagued me enough that I passed the statistics along to my Econ Stats professor who supported Jon’s findings. As unemployment raced upwards over the next year, Jon ended up within .1% of the actual unemployment number 1 year later, a very impressive prediction. A report published by Ben Bernanke on April 2, 2008 pointed to a “somewhat higher” unemployment, not quite the findings that could have helped us prepare for such a massive unemployment spike.
Where to next?
In August of last year, Jon said we would top out 10.4% unemployment and start heading back down. In October we peaked at 10.2% and since have come down to 9.7%. I don’t deny that unemployment will continue to decline, but I do believe it is going to be a long downhill road to recovery. In larger cities it is easy to be optimistic about unemployment turning around because you can see people gaining jobs. As larger cities begin to see points of optimism I would like to direct attention to the small county where I am working, Jefferson County, Wisconsin. A county of 9,700 that recently lost a Briggs and Stratton Plant (530 jobs) and quite a few more jobs at a furniture manufacturer amid smaller job losses across the board. In a county like this it is easy to see where jobs have gone and where new jobs are going to come from. The manufacturing jobs have gone abroad and are not coming back in the immediate future. If housing starts pick up this could get Jefferson back to a sustainable level. Without a pickup in the housing market the only way jobs will come back are if manufacturing labor becomes affordable enough for someone to start a plant in Watertown which will take a change in mindset by the previously gainfully employed manufacturers. This isn’t a problem unique to Watertown, it is echoed in small towns throughout the country. I don’t have any stark opinions but I am patiently optimistic and I am interested to see what Jon predicts next.
Today Google launched a brand new extension to Gmail. It is called Google Buzz which is not to be confused with GoBuzz. It actually looks like a really cool product and one we will be testing out as soon as it is available (I signed up this morning but haven’t seen it show up yet). I have to imagine Twitter is a little worried today especially as growth has slowed in recent months. Chatter and Yammer seem to be safe for the time being as they are more geared towards private business groups. Come Buzz with us:
http://www.youtube.com/feb0910googleevent
GoBuzz and Google Buzz that is.
This video doesn’t relate to GoBuzz but it is powerful enough to share. Below is the information shared on Youtube:
The lovely and amazing performance poet Gabrielle Bouliane performs for the audience at the Austin Poetry Slam.
This would be her last public performance.
Gabrielle was diagnosed with Stage Four Cancer shortly before this video was filmed. Our dear sister fought hard, but she ended her fight January 29, 2010. She was surrounded by family and friends, and her passing was in a very quiet, peaceful room full of love and affection. She was so brave.
Please share this video with everyone you know. I am sure it would tickle her to no end to have this video get as viral as a video can be. Tell the world.
We have received alot of feedback in recent months and this week we launched a vastly overhauled website for GoBuzz. We would like you to try out our new version and let us know what you think.
Enhancements include:
1. Speeeed. It’s faster. It will save you time.
2. Visual Interaction. We tried to make GoBuzz both more efficient for finding information about your contacts, clients, and prospects. For instance, we added article snippets so you can make sure the article is about the correct person or company before clicking through to the article.
3. Add Contacts More Easily. You can now add and track contacts from Linkedin, Gmail and Outlook!
4. Groups. Set up Groups to more quickly find business intelligence relating to a group. Say for instance, you are walking into a meeting with the
members of GoBuzz. You can click on the GoBuzz group and see information relating to Zack, Max and Dan as well as GoBuzz. When you walk in and meet with us, you will be much more prepared and informed.
5. Feedback. We have a tab for feedback on the left side of the screen. We are using a company called uservoice.com. Please click on the feedback tab to let us know your thoughts.
6. Email. We have set up a system to send out ONLY results which we believe you would find useful. Please let us know if you find our
emails un-useful.
Thanks for reading about our enhancements, now Go Buzz with your network!
www.gobuzz.com
http://www.twitter.com/msgobuzz
I have spoken with several people who asked how we found and secured the domain name GoBuzz.com. Anybody who has spent time trying to find the right domain for their product realizes how much of a headache it can be, especially if they feel that they need a name before they get going. The reason we were able to get GoBuzz is because we had time and an open mind. We had no budget for finding a domain name. We didn’t find it until 6 months into the process and we captured it as a deleting domain through SnapNames.com. I generally look through the pool.com hotlist once a day which shows deleting domain names. I also have a couple short keywords which I search for every day. By looking through deleting domains you can see that for any original idea you have, somebody else had the same idea at least a year ago. This is yet another indication that the only value in a startup lies in execution. If you are struggling for a name, don’t sweat it, keep working on your product and the name will come. My 4 suggestions for finding the right domain:
1. Look at the pool.com hotlist every day. Also, find 2 or 3 short words which describe your product and search for them in deleting domains every 7 days on pool.com (I like to do an advanced search with no-dashes, no-numbers, and less then 10 characters).
2. If you really like a name, backorder it on all the big sites (snapnames.com, pool.com, enom.com)
3. If you only like the name a little use GoDaddy.com (cheaper)
4. This article will give you much more information on how to capture an expiring domain.
Good Luck, if you have any questions, let me know.
We got our first server up and running yesterday. Clarification, Max got our first server up and running yesterday, I was the one asking “what is Ubuntu?”
Anyway, his name is Pug, not to be confused with my band “the Pugs” from my time down in Chicago or Pug Mahones our favorite local dining establishment. He is loud, fast, and serves as a good coffee table for our office.
Anyway, I need to go and start learning linux.
Dan
The wikipedia entry for Customer Intelligence takes a very mechanical approach to customer intelligence:
Customer Intelligence begins with reference data – basic key facts about the customer, such as their geographic location.
This data is then supplemented with transactional data – reports of customer activity. This can be commercial information (for example purchase history from sales and order processing), interactions from service contacts over the phone and via e-mail.
A further subjective dimension can be added, in the form of customer satisfaction surveys or agent data.
Finally, a company can use competitor insight and mystery shopping to get a better view of how their service benchmarks in the market.
By mining this data, and placing it in context with wider information about competitors, conditions in the industry, and general trends, information can be obtained about customers’ existing and future needs, how they reach decisions, and predictions made about their future behavior.
In the definition provided by Wikipedia, all customer interactions and data serve towards an end of an individual transaction. The definition does not look into the long term association between costumer and company. In the eyes of GoBuzz, “costumer intelligence” does not reside in an understanding of a consumer’s transaction history and future transaction potential. Instead, GoBuzz focuses on a more holistic approach to customer intelligence and long term network growth. To networking professionals any relationship could potentially be a means to an end and thus bringing your entire network a little closer can result in an exponential rate of business growth. Please test out our product and let us know how it helps your “customer intelligence”
Please welcome the newest member of our development team straight from the Waupun Correctional Institute, it’s our new handy dandy development server which we won in a Wisconsin Surplus Auction. We haven’t had a chance to crack into it yet, we will let you know if we find any interesting information on it. Hopefully the pickup will be the last time any of us visit prison but we can’t make any promises. Happy New Years from GoBuzz!
We have a long way to go before GoBuzz lifts off the ground but I wanted to take a moment and provide a snapshot of our current numbers. As of January 1st 2009, GoBuzz only existed on paper, under the name Mendotasoft. We released an Outlook version this summer. We decided in October that it would be best to put the Microsoft Outlook version on hold until we have a larger support group. In November we released Version .1 of our web-based product. At the end of January we will be releasing version 1.0 of the web-based product. Please stay tuned…
The Year in Numbers:
GoBuzz Users: 30
Contacts Being Searched: 11,818
Article Matches: 205,000 articles found
Revenue: low 4 Digits
Cost: low 4 digits (larger# then revenue)
Trips to Pug Mahones: 3
Average site visits per week: 150
Average time spent on the site: 13:15 minutes
Thanks for everyone’s help so far! We could not have gotten to this point if it wasn’t for all of the advice we received from experienced entrepreneurs and all of the feedback we have gotten from users.
