Enhance your Business Page on Facebook with Discourse 2.6!

We will start 2012 with a big bang - new release of our software!

This post will describe first of the big changes that we have introduced in Discourse 2.6

Discourse for Facebook (public beta) - The best add-on for your business page on Facebook!

Why we have created this Facebook integration? Because there is no way to have a private & secure communication channel with your fans on your fan page today. Because there is such a great opportunity for turning Facebook into a great sales & support channel for business and turn your fans into actual happy customers!

You can start using our Facebook integration right away. Just jump to your workgroup settings (maybe makes sense to create special workgroup to support or sell to your Facebook fans?) and click on the Facebook logo.

First customize your Fan Page welcome view:

Next step is just to select Fan Page on which you want to install Discourse.

Below you can see a Fan Page landing page sample - you can choose your own logo and welcome text - we let you put there HTML so customization can be pretty deep. Below you will see sample landing page - on our own Fan Page

So you probably want to know how Discourse looks like for your customers?
Take a look at this beautiful way of exchanging files, pictures, messages, comments and tasks with your clients (click on the image to make it bigger).

Next up - we will describe:
New Notifications
iPhone app (private beta)
Workgroup navigation with All Workgroups view


Stay tuned & Happy New Year!
Discourse Team.

Private Communication with Your Brand Fans on Facebook

Got a fan page on Facebook with thousands or tens of thousands of fans there? So what do you do with sales leads that you generate there. Or customer requests? Do you have a prive space to discuss problems or opportunities with your fans?

NOW YOU HAVE!

Discourse is opening closed beta program for brands that would like to engage their fans in private conversations on Facebook.

You can share files, documents, tasks, messages and custom updates in private and secure workspace - only with hand picked person - upon his/her request.

Everything that you share there is visible only to invited people!

You can store whole conversation history in our system as well as additional information about your customers.

Your customer can invite additional people from his side - you can as well if it's necessary.

Do you want to be part of our Beta program? 

Just go to our Facebook page and sign up thru our private and secure workspace!

WTF is NPS??

Last week we've been discussing concept of EgoDollars - how you can employ this concept to promote your products using your most influential users. Today I would like to talk a little bit about NPS - Net Promoter Score.

Net Promoter Score can help you understand how many people would like to recommend your product and how many people would not only not recommend your product but also actively tell their friends to use something else.

If you connect both concepts (identification of most influential users and checking their attitude towards your product) can result in very powerful knowledge of whom should you target and ask for reference or ask why he/she don't like the product.

How to check your NPS?

Simply build a survey and ask your users! You can embed your survey into your Discourse workspaces (i.e. right after login ask your users to select one of the numbers in a neat modal box). We will store this information in our system and will show you the results in a neat report (let us know if you would like to have access to this feature!). 

Calculating your NPS is very easy - get percentage of people who selected number 0 to 6  and percentage of people that selected 9 and 10. Subtract your detractor percentage from your promoter percentage. The result is your score.

Ideal score is of course 100 (100% of people select 9 or 10 and 0% of people select anything else). 

This should be your ultimate goal, but of course we all know that it's pretty much impossible to achieve.

Anyway - we wish you good luck! Remember - Discourse can help you significantly increase your customers engagement and satisfaction! :)

Google Docs integration is coming!

Very soon you'll be able to attach your Google Docs documents to Discourse workspaces!

Got $0 marketing budget? Make it 10.000 with EgoDollars!

Economy is not getting any better. If you have a marketing budget today, chances are that it'll be slimmer tomorrow and completely vanish in a week from today.

Got a few minutes? Read on to learn on how to improve your budget with a new kind of currency - currency that is completely immune to inflation or depreciation - meet EgoDollar.

An Andertoons Cartoon

What is EgoDollar?

In 1999 I had a meeting with a guy who was an Open Source evangelist for SGI. He told me about a very easy to understand concept of EgoDollars to explain why people work on OpenSource projects. They don't get paid in "real" money. They get paid in EgoDollars - the more prestigious projects or harder from technical perspective problems they solve, the better their EgoSalary is.

Super simple.

But I'm sure that you will not be surprised that you have people among your customers who want to be paid with EgoDollars as well, right? I mean a typical customer is looking for Dollars - like discounts, special offers or gifts. But there is a special type of user that would be even happier to get EgoDollars payout instead of a discount!

How can we tell which customers want to be paid in EgoDollars?

Identify Alfa Males/Females

First you have to identify which of your users have accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or any other social network. If you use Gmail you can use Rapportive.

If you use Discourse you know that we select and let you link your customer's profiles from external sources like LinkedIn or Facebook.

Currently we are testing on more thing - we use LinkedIn integration to get hold of Twitter user name of your client or prospect. Then we scan Klout for influencer information and we give you a list of Alpha Clients sorted by Klout influential score (it's a private beta feature - want to join? Shoot me an email to smartupz@smartupz.com).

If you have a list - the rest is pretty simple:

1. Make those users happy
2. Ask for reference
3. Make it easy to share info about your product


Let's go thru the list and see how we can achieve those steps.


Make your Alpha Users happy!


Paying in EgoDollars takes some discipline and a little bit of investment. First of all you should figure out which items have highest EgoDollar value. For us this works pretty well:

• Access to private beta of upcoming release
• One-to-One skype calls to get feedback about new features
• Giving extra storage and/or user licenses for $0

You'll be surprised how well this works - especially the first point.

Ask for reference


Your Alpha users will be happy to share your product feedback with you and not only with you. Easiest way to ask them for reference is to ask three questions:

• Who is an ideal customer for our product?
• Do you know anyone who could benefit from using our product? 
• What you tell them?

Answer to your last question would be your reference quote.

Make it easy to share info about your product


I know it's a cliche but let's face it - you need those "like", "share" and "follow" buttons and you need to drive attention of your users towards them.

In Discourse we store customer reference quotes with their profile information (again - private beta feature). We present those quotes to the users that are among "influenced_by" or in social graph with our Alpha Clients. Makes biggest impact.

SSL for everyone!

New workspace layout for external users

External users will see this engaging, branded workspace interface.