As a start-up there is always a trade off between how much time and money you invest in your look and feel versus what you invest in honing your product, technology and the value of that technology to your market. At PhlooQ we invested all of our efforts into product and made no effort to hone the site or brand of the company.
So here we are signing up partners, rolling the product into the marketplace...and we have no Web presence.
As a backgrounder, PhlooQ offers online publishers a free service to massively increase the engagement between their Web site and their visitors through social engagement ads and social engagement widgets. (if you want to see it in action go to http://phlooq.com and click on the Q).
In short the PhlooQ service can draw a visitor's entire social graph to a web site. For a single visitor with a social graph of 100 people publishers should expect to have their site marketed to 1,000 new potential visitors.
Here is how it works, the publishers places the free widget aside an event, a venue, or location and when the visiting user clicks on the widget the user can see who they know that might be going to the same event, venue or location.
The system then sends a message to the visitor's entire social graph letting their social graph know that they are interested in the venue, event, or location. If anyone in their social graph clicks on the link in the message the link will bring them to the publisher's site. And once they engage with the widget, the cycle repeats itself.
The system also sends the widget with the list of people at or nearby your place, event, or venue of interest to your cell phone. This way you can just look down at your cell phone to see who is at or near the event you're attending.
The system both on the Web and on your phone lets you click to call people in your social graph, text them if they are fellow widget users, and send them a notification to their social network if they are not users of the PhlooQ widget.
Also of use to the user is the Widget's built in mechanism for broadening your view of your social graph. Sometimes no one you know will be going to the same exact event as you -- so the Widget lets you look for fellowship in the local neighborhood, community, zip code, city area, or region. This means you can send a quick note or even call someone to go with you to somewhere you want to go.
For the publisher PhlooQ provides engagement reports and analytics and also provides ways for them to reach out to Widget users to make them offers of goods and services that are hypertargeted to their specific venue or neighborhood.
The publisher's job used to be--"get the eyeballs to my site." Now with PhlooQ the game changes--as we enable publishers to bring a visitor's entire social graph to their sites, without being intrusive. In fact, this mechanism for being the semantic expression of the user's interests creates a natural flow of the user's social graph that makes the users thankful for the link back to the publisher.
In some ways this is the holy grail of advertisement: for a fan of the publisher to automatically recommend their interests from whatever they do across the Web and across the "real" world to their friends--and have their friends thankful for the recommendation!
Here is a quick narrative that might help:
The event promoter for the Rock-n-Roll Cafe adds the PhlooQ widget to his Web site where he lists his schedule of events. As people visit his site they click on the widget titled “See who's going?” Each individual as they add the widget in a one-click sign-up now messages all of their friends. For example if a user named Brian signs up, PhlooQ sends a feed to all 237 of Brian's friends that “Brian is going to the Rock-n-Roll Cafe.”
For Brian, as he signs into the Rock-n-Roll Cafe widget he sees a list of people from his social network who are going to the Cafe. From within the widget he can call them or text them. If he sees friends nearby he can invite those friends to the Rock-n-Roll Cafe as well.
Additionally PhlooQ aggregates all of his affinities in a widget in his social network's interface--the Rock-N-Roll Cafe gets listed with his other affinities. In this way he can have his interests aligned with people he is connected to so he can easily connect with them. Lastly right on time, every time, PhlooQ sends a link to his mobile phone or iPhone so he can see a list of people associated with the experience right there in place, in the moment.
Okay so I am currently talking with several design groups that have made the first cut. I interviewed a dozen or so folks I was interested in having build our Web presence and then solicited proposal from the following groups: Kasman/Squillante, Bay Creative, and Skona. There may be one or two more groups that end up getting a chance to submit a proposal, as I'm still vetting a few others.
What I can say is that I have a good feeling about the three design firms I am currently vetting. They are all so different in their personality but in different ways I am enamored with each of their approaches. In my next post I'll chat a bit about my experience vetting the proposals. The budget is tight, the need for quality is high and time is running out! We are going live with a dozen or so publishers in the next 30-60 days so the work has to be done one way or the other!
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