Put Your Neighbors To Work With Zaarly, A Local Market for Odd Jobs. Let’s say you need to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture. You dislike doing it so much that you would be willing to pay somebody $50 to put it together for you. Perhaps one of your neighbors is an unemployed carpenter who would take the offer. But how are you going to find him? This is the basic problem Zaarly tries to solve.
“Every person is in a bazaar,” explains Zaarly co-founder Bo Fishback. “And they don’t know what’s for sale and what’s not.” Indeed, the name “Zaarly” is a play on the word “bazaar.” If an experiment at SXSW is any indication, it’s also something that people want. “We have a shot to foster a behavior people have always wanted to do,” says Fishback. Ironically, the mobile and browser apps aim to facilitate in-person transactions without revealing the identities of the participants.
Fishback admits that the whole idea might freak some people out at first glance, and that there’s a level of trust involved. Breaking free: Yammer announces embeddable activity streams. Users of Yammer, a social networking service for enterprises, can now embed Yammer feeds and activity streams into just about any business application through the use of embed codes, the company announced today.
The feature functions similar to the way YouTube users embed videos on other websites. It’s a few lines of code that fit snugly into an HTML or JavaScript code. The site then calls out to Yammer to pick up any information about a specific feed and publishes it into a widget built into the website. The feed works both ways, too — any information entered into the widget is sent back to the main Yammer website. It’s a feature you probably wouldn’t find on Facebook, the most popular social network in the world, because it could pull users away from the main Facebook website or mobile application.
The company uses a freemium model — which gives companies a free taste of a stripped-down version of Yammer in order to hook employees on the service. 73 Essential Social Media & Tech Resources for Small Businesses. As a small business owner, your time is limited. Each week we put together a roundup of essential social media resources to help you stay on top. We wanted to give you even more of a leg up with this megalist of our top small business resources from the past few months, including social media, tech, startups, marketing & advertising, dev & design and mobile posts that were written with small business in mind.
STARTUP SCHOOL.
Ciekawe. Games. Ideas. Gobble raises $1.2M for “peer-to-peer lasagna” If you’re a workaholic at a tech startup (or anywhere else), it’s probably a challenge to make sure you’re eating tasty, healthy meals, at least if you aren’t being fed by the chefs at a company like Google. So a startup called Gobble just launched an online marketplace where you can order home-cooked meals for pickup and delivery. Gobble is currently in beta testing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it also announced that it has raised $1.2 million in funding.
On its frequently asked questions page, the Palo Alto, Calif. company describes itself as “peer-to-peer lasagna” and says it can serve both individuals and companies that want to feed their workers. When I was growing up, I remember my parents (both workaholic engineers) would sometimes order meals from friends. This is a similar idea, but on a larger scale and searchable. Users go to the site, enter their geographic area, then see a list of meals they can purchase.
Foursquare Checkins Get Customers Gas Discounts. Here’s one way to bring location-based checkins to the masses — use them to shave off a few dollars at the gas pump. Murphy USA, a gas station chain with 1,000 locations situated in the parking lots of Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, announced Wednesday that it’s offering $2 off a $20 purchase of gas with a Foursquare checkin. To sweeten the deal, the chain is also offering a free pack of Stride gum. The chain announced the deal on its Twitter feed and Facebook Page. The offer comes as gas prices have hit $4 a gallon in many areas of the country. And Murphy has been at the forefront of social media marketing in a category not known for such outreach. Startup Tweets You Offers Based On Where You Check In.
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Local Response Quick Pitch: Local Response tweets deals to customers based on where they check in. Genius Idea: Scanning Twitter for location-revealing checkins from Foursquare, Foodspotting, Instagram and other services. While your friends might not care about the photo of your lunch you just blasted to their Twitter feeds, it could be valuable information to the restaurant where you're eating.
Local Response wants to help businesses collect and respond to their customers' public posts. In other words, when customers check into a store on Foursquare, the store can send them a coupon while they are there. "The consumer has already publicly expressed a relationship," explains Local Response president and Media6Degrees co-founder Kathy Leake. Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark. Gnip is the Social Media API. Hunch. Gigwalk.
5 Killer Social Media Tips for PR Pros. The Social PR Series is supported by Vocus. Vocus helps businesses get heard and talked about on social media and beyond. It brings you all the conversations that matter, without information overload, and lets you find influencers fast. Take a quick online demo and see what it can do. So you've got the social PR basics down, and you're following and engaging with relevant media and influencers. Maybe you've even developed a few social media campaigns for your company or clients. Here are five social media tips for PR professionals. 1. While you can't always predict what news or events will become a #hashtag that people will follow, it’s a pretty safe bet that events like the #Oscars or #adtech will have a large group of people following the hashtag before, during and shortly after each event.
For example, indie fashion site Moxsie.com timed a Twitter-based “Fashion Police” contest around the #Oscars conversation, inserting contest-related tweets into the mix. 2. 3. 4. 5. Get Hired With Help From Your Social Network Friends. Top Prospect, a startup that helps members find jobs for their social network friends, is enhancing its social recruiting service Tuesday with improvements for job seekers and job matchmakers alike. As a primer, Top Prospect is a four month-old startup that rewards users with referral bonuses — $10,000 to $20,000 per position — should they successfully recruit their Facebook or LinkedIn contacts for open jobs.
The site currently features more than 80 companies — including some of the hottest startups and venture capital firms — with 300 plus open listings. All in all, that translates to more than $3.5 million in referral bonuses up for grabs. On sign up, users, a.k.a the social recruiters, connect to Facebook or LinkedIn to view a feed of job listings, suggested friends that might be suitable for each available position and the amount of the award. The social recruiters can then get the ball rolling by recommending contacts for jobs. 10 Proven Strategies for Greater Likeability on Facebook. Dave Kerpen is the CEO of Likeable, a social media agency that has worked with more than 200 leading brands including 1-800Flowers.com, Verizon and Neutrogena. He is author of Likeable Social Media. We all intuitively know what likeability means. We have friends who are easygoing, good listeners and there when we need them. But what does it mean for a brand to be likeable online?
Now more than ever, when a "Like" is arguably more important than a "link," brands must demonstrate core values of responsiveness, transparency and likeability across Facebook and other social networks. Listen to your customers and prospects. 1. The number one benefit of a brand’s involvement in social media is the ability to listen to conversation about its brand, competitors and target audience’s wants and needs. For a good case study on how listening in social media has impacted millions of dollars worth of sales, check out IBM’s Listening for Leads program. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Airbnb Taps Facebook, Lets You Crash With Friends Of Friends. Airbnb, the vacation rentals site where users can rent couches, countries and everything in between, is personalizing the rental search experience with the help of Facebook's social graph starting Tuesday.
"Social Connections completely transforms the search experience on Airbnb," the startup says. "We've added a new filter, allowing you to quickly and easily find connections you have in any city around the world. " Social Connections is a new filter that returns places where there is a link between the user and the host through a Facebook connection. The idea is to give users insight and information about how they are connected to hosts and other travelers. Users can opt into Social Connections to more easily find places to rent from hosts who are direct Facebook friends, hosts who are friends of friends or hosts who share the same alma mater as they do. "With over 1.5 millions nights booked through Airbnb so far, chances are someone you know has already used Airbnb," the company says. How retailers and brands will evolve through social e-commerce.
One of the big shifts in online shopping last year was the emergence of social e-commerce. Brands and retailers started to realize that social networks aren’t just a means to extend their visibility but also a way to pull in more revenue. The infrastructure of the Internet now enables the sharing of information among networks at a velocity and scale that has been impossible in the offline world. Consider the following statistics: 90 percent of people trust recommendations of friends above any form of advertising.U.S. A plethora of social e-commerce solutions have hit the market and are evolving as quickly as the social networking phenomena. To help bring some clarity to this trend, we can divide social e-commerce into three distinct phases: first, second and third generation social e-commerce. Phase one: Social distribution. Customer network optimization: The new SEO In 2011, we expect that all retailers and brands have a slice of their budget set aside to deploy social e-commerce.
FindTheBest unveils a fun way to rank dogs, motorcycles, and more. When I last talked to Kevin O’Connor, who sold his online ad company DoubleClick to Google for $3.1 billion, he was trying to expand his new startup FindTheBest by adding as many “comparison apps” as possible. Now, FindTheBest is also experimenting with new ways to show off all its data. The Santa Barbara, Calif. company’s goal is to become the definitive destination for finding the information you need to make choices, whether it’s buying a smartphone or choosing a school. The site’s data is arranged into charts (aka comparison apps) showing the relevant facts about each item. And if you find the charts a bit overwhelming, the site has added other ways to compare products. For example, FindTheBest just announced a new feature that lets you build slideshows ranking items on the site. To help attract some attention for the feature, it asked some well-known figures in the tech world to contribute.
FindTheBest has also added a question-and-answer feature. Social curation finds an audience: Pearltrees reaches 10M pageviews. With its slick visual interface for bookmarking content, Pearltrees is unique enough that I’ve been both impressed and slightly skeptical that a mass audience will actually use it. But it looks like the site has found plenty of users. The French startup just announced that it crossed two big milestones in March: It has more than 100,000 users curating links, and it received more than 10 million pageviews. Not only does that show the concept is resonating, but it also suggests Pearltrees could reach the scale where it can build a real business around advertising or by offering premium accounts for publishers. When you share links on Pearltrees, they show up as little circles called Pearls. (The site can also automatically add links that you share on Twitter.)
You then organize those Pearls into larger groups of related content called, yes, Pearltrees. Pearltrees has raised 3.8 million euros in funding. SEC may let startups use social networks to raise money. The Securities and Exchange Commission may adopt rules to let internet-age technologies be used in fund-raising. The agency is considering whether to let fast-growing companies use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to raise funding by tapping thousands of investors for small amounts of money, the Wall Street Journal reported. The move is part of a larger review by the Securities and Exchange Commission into whether to ease decades-old constraints on how companies can issue new shares to the public. The new funding techniques, known as “crowd funding,” could usher in a new era of capital abundance for Silicon Valley’s startups. The technique has spread from artists looking to fund their creative works to entrepreneurs trying to bootstrap companies without giving up control to venture capitalists.
Crowd funding could be a cheap source of cash, competing with angel investors who specialize in giving seed rounds to start-ups. [image credit: Small Business Trends] 5 key ingredients for startup success. (Editor’s note: Tod Whipple is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of StartupAddict.com. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.) So you found the next big idea and think you have the startup chops to execute it.
You’ve already figured out how to bootstrap your startup your venture, calculated the burn-rate and crafted a game plan for the next 12 months. Now what? Take a step back, cleanse your palette and prepare to digest five key ingredients for startup success. 1 cup of startup team (well blended) – People will be the single most important asset in your startup. Passion and attitude should be just as important as skills. Stay true to the lean startup methodology and do not hire prematurely or bloat your burn-rate before you have a road map for the other four ingredients. Heaping portion of market fit – Understand your customer’s problems and build a solution around them. 2 scoops of metrics – Customers are the bloodline to any business and their feedback is invaluable.