What is LazyFeed? This new startup out of the Bay Area is designed to offer people a more convenient way to get information from “relevant” feeds. According to Gahng and the website, it’s a means of offering individuals the opportunity to “accidentally” stumble upon something new.

How does it work? Basically from what I saw – and they’re still in the final push (as of this writing) for making changes that they haven’t revealed yet – the interface is pretty simplistic. Once you’ve logged into the site, you’re greeted with your “homepage” that gives you what are trending topics that LazyFeed has parsed from the blogosphere, but not from Twitter and offers you the option of learning more about the top 10 trends. If that’s not your cup of tea and you don’t see your topic there, you can enter in tags in a search bar. That’s actually the cusp of what I’ve gathered LazyFeed to be – they look through the web to find content that is tagged similarly. So for example, if you’re on the application, you’re able to see a lot of blog posts, photos, videos, etc tagged with the same keyword(s). I did notice though that some of the more “credible” websites were not accounted for though, such as the New York Times, TechCrunch, Mashable, Washington Post, Huffington Post, etc., although they are still apparently crawling through the rest of the web to index the content to make it more relevant. Once you have looked up a topic, you’re able to save it similar to a bookmark along with individual content you like to reference later.

Real-time? This whole phenomenon of real-time updating is something that I think LazyFeed is trying to incorporate into their platform. Part of their website is programmed to display when new additions are made to the tags that you find interesting and have bookmarked.

Why is LazyFeed even interesting? To the individual it’s a really remarkable tool for you to use. If you’re always wondering what’s going on in the world, compared to Twitter’s trending topics, you’re not subjected to just conversations. LazyFeed will offer you the chance to look at the actual content surrounding those respective trends. Take Sarah Palin’s recent surprise resignation. Rather than scouring through Google, Bing or even Yahoo for information about what blogs are saying – often some rather irrelevant, you can log into your LazyFeed account and look up a specific tag – in this instance perhaps “SarahPalin” which will produce a list of content that has been tagged accordingly. You’re able to get a whole array of content with a simple click and even get continuous updates. However, it does seem that they don’t want to address archiving information at this stage as the content is displayed in chronological order with the most recent automatically placed at the top of the page. As a result, it’s my impression that LazyFeed is just about current events and pushing out information related to those topics. Anything longer than a couple of days would require exorbitant amount of scrolling (time consuming) or as I’ve been told by Ethan Gahng: “Go to Google.” Amazing…

The quirks. Initially the whole startup looks sound and for individuals to use it makes total sense. From a business perspective, you might need know that it’s little more than buzz monitoring at its most basic level. The folks at LazyFeed understand that and they don’t seem to mind it at this stage. So why should you, as a business care still about this product? It’s because it’s cheap buzz monitoring. If you happen to be in the automotive industry, you can use LazyFeed as a method of understanding the sentiment people are having about industry issues like, hybrid vehicles, General Motors, Japanese cars, etc. and then frame your conversation elsewhere accordingly and possibly get ahead of the curve.

Some advice that I would have given to someone about how to monitor your brand online would be through searching on Google or Yahoo about what people are saying about your brand on blogs, websites, social networks, etc., but it seems that LazyFeed has consolidated the whole idea to one site and even incorporates the tag concept to help shape how you find information. Saves you multiple steps, I’d imagine.

LazyFeed offers you the option of looking at either their trending topics that they’ve accumulated through their journey across the interweb or allowing you to connect to sites. You can “connect to sites” using one of four ways: RSS feeds from your blog or any other enabled site you may come across, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Twitter. Once imported, you’re able to look at content that fits those keywords you have for whatever feed/site you’ve connected with. Sort of like a personalized feed reader, I suppose.

What can be improved? When I saw a demonstration of the application, I found it pretty simple – literally. It’s not that complicated to find things to do, for the most part. One thing that I did come across was the ability to link out to external sites. When I came across a post I wanted to read more on and possibly link to and/or bookmark, I clicked on a icon that read “page” only to discover it only refreshed the site! The real external link is at the end of the blog post title! Other issues that I found was related to usability and adherence to best practice to follow the “two-click rule”: users must be able to get from where they are to where they need to be within two clicks. And as of right now, it’s a free model since I’ve been told that since they’re just launching, there’s no immediate plans for monetization.

From what I gathered the content provided would also be real-time. Unfortunately based on what I saw at the demo, only a portion of LazyFeed is indeed “real-time”. The rest requires some action on your part to refresh the site. Maybe I’m defining the term incorrectly, but I imagine the constant auto refreshing of information similar to FriendFeed is real-time – LazyFeed does not seem to offer that in the truest sense, although I don’t think that’s a major reason to avoid the site. After talking with them about that, I was assured by the CEO that it would be something they would consider modifying in later phases.

Lastly, did you know that you’re not able to share your information with others? It’s not a social media website. It allows you to import content from social media sites, but when you want to share it with others on Twitter, Facebook or others, you’re out of luck. Right now they’re methodology is to have the system be truly focused on the individual – the only way I’m able to share my feeds I’m monitoring with others is by giving them my access login or showing them what’s on my computer right now.

Would I use it? I imagine that if I, as a business, am interested in learning more about what people are saying about topics I’m interested in, such as social media, website, marketing, photography, etc., then I would consider using it – after all, it’s easier than constantly scouring the web looking for information. Overall, LazyFeed lives up to its name and provides content as simply as it intends.

And no, it’s not a competitor to Google Reader. It’s not the same thing. With Google Reader, you’re already looking at feeds you’re interested in. With LazyFeed, you’re given totally new feeds you may or may not have been aware of and might find something new to read. The goal of LazyFeed, according to Ethan Gahng, is to make finding content “serendipitious”. It’s the accidental discovery of information when using the site that will be the biggest reward. Being the constant surveyor of information online, that’s lazy enough for me.

LazyFeed will be open to a private beta group beginning on Friday, July 10. To put your name on the waiting list to test out the site, visit their website. They will also be presenting at this year’s TechCrunch CrunchUp event in the San Francisco Bay Area.

To get it out of the way, as if you couldn’t tell, the tone of this blog series will not be stuffy, terminology laden, or over your head with jargon.  Steven Fisher came to me and asked if I’d like to tackle a blog.  I expressed my concern, because my approach isn’t necessarily…for the faint of heart.  I tend to be blunt, direct, and to the point, but with a sense of humor.  I believe if you’re going to be spending the money on it…marketing your business should not only pay for itself, taken seriously, but you should have a bit of fun as well.  Steven reassured me that the blog will be geared not to designers, but people either in their first years of business or who just want to think about expanding the visual branding of their company.

I understand that things like bleed, taglines, font weight, scope creep, appropriate resolution for a web banner or large printing run, and a wide variety of industry related terms may turn you off or confuse you.

So relax.

If those type of terms do pop up from time to time I’m going to find an easily understandable comparisons to put them in plain speak for you.  Please don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying this is going to be the “See Spot Run” of blogs in this genre, but if you’re reading this, you’re someone who is interested in learning more about how to get your business out there to the masses, may have had some frustrations dealing with marketing your business, and have some fun while you do it.  This series should feel like a conversation with someone over a cup of coffee and not something you need to jump up and grab a dictionary for at every paragraph.

I’m bringing over ten years of experience in fields of marketing and design to help be the translator between the business owner and the designer as well as the marketing and the customer.  Being of the rare breed of designers who balance well between print and web (there’s a world of difference between the two and in future posts you’ll learn why), I tend to focus on designs with a focus on sales and marketing for my clients.  As a large portion of my work experience has been with startup companies, I spend a lot of time finding creative solutions to help business owners, marketing managers and startup companies effectively understand why a visual brand is an extremely effective tool for their business that not only needs to be created, but maintained and nurtured.

So grab a cup of your favorite beverage, of course mine being coffee, and join me each week for a rare glimpse into the mindset, expectations and opinions of a professional graphic/web designer.  Some of my posts will run parallel with some of the blogs here on Network Solutions, but my goal is to support them to help you get the most out of your business. I look forward to give you some topics that may spark some thoughts or conversations. I also look forward to hearing your horror stories, successes and thoughts on each topic.

Until next time…stay wicked.

I was able to spend some time with him recently and here is a transcript of our interview:

Steve: How did you get the idea for StickyStreet?
Tiago: After the time off traveling, we settled in the Washington D.C. area because the schools here are excellent and my wife loves the international culture. We bought a salon for her and in helping her computerize it, met Anthony Angell who had an amazing concept: Salon Geeks, which is a creative and consulting firm for salons and spas around the world.  The beauty industry was (and still is) years behind in using technology to make their marketing smarter, and I saw this great opportunity to work with Anthony to create something really useful through Salon Geeks. One of the first things we noticed was that most Salons and Spas could not afford to create any sort of sticky factor for their customers because the loyalty programs out there were way too expensive, complex, or very rigid in their structure.  Because retaining customers was one of Anthony’s prime directives to Salon Geeks clients, I thought, “Hey, why not write a few lines of code to store customers’ points on a database!” More than 40,000 lines of code and three years later, we have a new company called StickyStreet.com and a growing and ever broader world-wide customer base.  It’s really taking off from cafés in Australia, to salons in Singapore, wine stores in Texas and work-at-home-mom operations everywhere. One of our users tracks over 1 million teenagers on our program.

Steve: You seem to be the only Customer Loyalty system that is sold in the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. That is extremely unique. How else would you compare and contrast against the competition?
Tiago: Most of what could be considered competition are either credit card processing companies that rely on their physical equipment and charge thousands of dollars and per-transaction fees, or gift card printers who focus on selling plastic cards and have some Dilbert-engineer ugly interface and very basic program to support the plastic business. We focus on creating a platform that allows small business owners to implement the loyalty, membership or gift card programs they want to implement. Also, unlike other competitors, our “launch” time for most programs is a matter of minutes – not weeks or months so a small or large business can get started almost instantly.

Steve: You utilize a “Freemium” model that has an entry point where a small business can join for free and grow into a paid model. Do you use templates for standard customer loyalty programs that customers can “snap-in” to their web site?
Tiago: Our “Web Loyalty Link” feature is a few lines of code that a business can add to their web site that allows their customers to find out their loyalty program or gift card balances in real time. This creates a reason for customers to continually re-visit a business’ Web site and we also call that “The Sticky Factor”, because it allows a business to re-market to this customer usually more cost effectively than print, mailing or other media forms.  From the “admin” side of the application, a business can create any number of campaigns based on a few basic loyalty and gift card program templates that they then customize to their needs.

Steve: Is there the ability to do custom development and configuration?
Tiago: Yes, for some of our larger clients, we have a custom batch-input that interfaces with their weekly database activity reports. For another, we have customized the “visits” template to “stars”, and there is always the ability to customize the Loyalty Link output through a combination of coding on our side, and CSS on the client side.  Mainly, though, the program is supposed to be flexible enough that little customization is needed.

Steve: How do you handle integration with Point-of-Sale systems?
Tiago: Even the large credit card processors must rely on the separate action of using their hardware, separate from the POS transaction.  Because of security issues and the wide assortment of POS manufacturers and software, it’s practically impossible to convince the manufacturer to allow some sort of API that would let their software communicate that a transaction occurred. Of course, we’re all ready to accept such integration, but I haven’t seen much interest due to the understandable security fears and walled garden mentality.  But for all our customers, it’s not really much of an issue, since in almost all cases, StickyStreet is already loaded in a browser and it’s only one “alt-tab” away.

Steve: What is your philosophy on building customer loyalty?
Tiago: We start from the principle all else being equal, a customer will come back, more often, and be less likely to leave, if they have some sort of potential worth invested in the business. What’s key is to understand how much of your business can profit from increased loyalty.  We had a client who implemented this great loyalty program only to realize that over 90% of their customers were already regulars. In this case, a loyalty program was the wrong marketing program to implement. We sometimes help our clients and advise them, but StickyStreet was created to be very do-it-yourself, so in most cases, we don’t really even know what businesses are doing with their campaigns. We focus on providing the tools a small business needs to do what they want to do. We’re amazed at just how smartly busineeses are using StickyStreet.com

Steve: What kind of customer loyalty programs can a small business run that would help them grow their business?
Tiago: Our web site gives you the starting list that any small business can choose from and run multiple programs. Check this list out:

• Reward client referrals.
• Sell & track gift cards any time of the year.
• Implement a Points Reward program for products or services.
• Keep track of, and reward good ideas or behavior.
• Create Gate Keeper campaigns to penetrate hard-to-reach markets.
• Reward employees that bring new business or customers.
• Launch a “Buy X, get one free” promotion.

Mainly, though, I would advise a business to first decide what their goal is: Is it to acquire new customers by rewarding those that bring them to you? Is it to retain more of your existing customers?  Is it to increase their frequency of visits/purchases?  Based on a well-defined goal, then you can be more creative in thinking of a program to implement.

For example, one of my favorite uses of StickyStreet (other than the free account teachers can have to reward their student’s good behavior) is the “Gate Keeper” campaign where you reward a receptionist, hotel concierge, etc. who have access to an audience you may not have had access to otherwise, for sending people to your business.

Steve: What would you like to see happen over the next 18 months for StickyStreet.com?
Tiago: A greater integration with the other SaaS services out there through a shared API structure.  I think it would be great if when a common Freshbooks and StickStreet client’s customer pays their invoice, their points, visits, or whatever get automatically recorded on StickyStreet.  I think the SaaS industry has a killer app for the Enterprise market if some sort of meta-API structure can be created to easily link all these amazing functionalities together.  More realistically, I look forward to completing our first round of venture capital funding, so we can quickly implement some really cool enhancements, new features, a solid API, and especially, and internationalization.  There’s a lot more coming from StickyStreet!