Last night I walked over to Webster Hall for the NY Web 2.0 Meetup hosted by NYC NextWeb. The presenters brought their A game to introduce some remarkable startsups, making up for lack of free booze. One particular service stuck out:
Only a week out of the Alpha box, founder Jason Im described HeyCosmo’s personal assistant service as your interactive “bitch”. He demonstrated the Concierge and Blaster applications, which combines social networking, location-based features and the telephone to help you get things done. An example of how HeyCosmo hopes to better your life would be finding a service and also scheduling an appointment for a time that works on both ends. It does so by making the phone call for you. That’s not to say that all the work is taken off your hands – you still have to tell the service what your requirements are so that its robo-call technology can convey the message appropriately and set up appointments on your behalf.
It’s location-based features helps you find nearby services and places for you and your friends to meet up. HeyCosmo will also help select a time for group outings, enabling your friends to enter in numbers (i.e. 2 for 2:00) to indicate their availability. Chief designer David Im tells me that there will be more than twice the amount of applications offered through HeyCosmo in the near future, including a blind dating service. Crazyblindsdates will have some competition.
HeyCosmo has a long road ahead. Their first obstacle towards mass adoption will be to overcome most people’s hatred of robo-call technology. Most restaurants will hang up the phone within seconds upon hearing a robot asking them to press 1 if they have a table for 30 at 9pm (that seemed to be the case during the demo last night). From a marketing perspective, I think HeyCosmo can tackle these chanllenges by ripping a page off the Yelp manual and focusing on a grassroots, offline-online strategy for raising brand awareness. Mainly, hiring community managers in major cities to do the following:
- Foster relationships with restaurants and other services
- Build a localized network of influencers and brand ambassadors
- Distribute stickers (and other premiums) that businesses can use to show that they support the service
- Reward brand ambassadors with monthly events in their favorite venues (this also strengthens relationships with venues)
- Seek local sponsors to help you fund the brand’s offline activity
They could also use a copywriter to fix awkward copy and grammar mistakes on their site.
Melanie Notkin, recently founded Savvyauntie, a community for “non moms”. Melanie delivered impressive research behind this often overlooked demographic. She also showed some impressive short term results in traffic using social media (zero ad cash). The sound effects on her presentation were a bit too much (piercing at times) but she made up for it with her incredible charisma.
Anthony Casalena, Founder of Squarespace, gave a brief history and product demo. The platform seems like a dream come true for RSS and HTML retarded bloggers like myself. Anthony was defensive when an audience member asked him about his poor customer service. A bit too defensive. Anthony: “I can’t believe you’re asking me that in front of 200 people!” Some advice to Mr. Casalena – a person who is interested enough in your brand to communicate any issue, specially in front of 200 people, is a potential customer and likely brand ambassador. This is how the interaction should have gone:
Audience member: I heard your customer services is not very good.
Casalena 2.0: I’m sorry to hear that you or someone you know had problems with our customer service. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. We’ve grown exponentially in the past 12 months and have made significant investments in our customer service offerings. I would love to get together with you after the presentation if you’re free and offer you a month free trial to test out our platform and customer service for yourself.
A proactive response that puts people’s needs first is key. What Anthony overlooked when responding to that questions was that in addition to the 200 people in the room, web-savvy audiences can often broadcast their thoughts to thousands of people within seconds. In this case, the audience member was Julia Roy, social media blogger with Twitter influencer. After the presentation, CEO Dane Atkinson came over in an attempt to ameliorate the situation, offering Julia a direct line of communication.
hashtags: #heycosmo, #nextweb
YouTube Audio Preview & Martha Stewart comment
October 8, 2008 by socialmediaguy.com
Last night I had two memorable discoveries on YouTube:
1. I was disturbed by Martha Stewart’s sick and twisted baby food costume video.
2. I noticed a new button under the commenting box labelled Audio Preview. Press it and your comment will be read back to you by a text-to-speech program. The audio conversion sounds a bit robotic and awkward but I go a kick out of it when I wrote the following comment on Martha “go back to prison” Stewart’s video (click on the image below for a video of the audio preview):
Click on the comment for a video of my reaction to the audio preview
Based on a Twitter search for audio preview it looks like this has been around for about 24 hours.
Posted in YouTube | Tagged audio comments, baby costume, martha stewart, text-to-comment, Twitter, youtube audio preview | 4 Comments »