We had a fun day with some unexpected media coverage from the good folks at ReadWriteWeb. While some of the information was a tad incorrect (funding) and it’s not quite the same as being the most interesting man in the world, we were excited to win the readers poll 5 Tech Companies That Raised Money Today: Which Interests You Most? We were next to some awesome companies so we were honored to get the nod.

For all of our new customers that have joined the SocialGuides family today, welcome.  We also want to thank ReadWriteWeb for giving us some love.

One of the challenges of running a small business is that while you might have drunk the kool-aide of social media marketing, you still don’t have time to be spending all day on Twitter & Facebook - you’ve got a business to run.  You certainly don’t want to miss out on outreach to customers though either.  So today we are releasing an update to our dashboard that completely integrates all of your Facebook & Twitter outreach into one ease use product.

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Quick… you’ve got 30 seconds to tell us what your company does. [ramble] [ramble] [ramble] social commerce [ramble] [ramble] [ramble] social media [ramble] new customers [ramble] loyalty [ramble]…

You know the drill. And trust us, we could talk about SocialGuides forever (it’s hard to help it, we love what we do), but frankly sometimes it’s just easier to see what we do. So there it is - SocialGuides in 4 slides (below).

Let us know what you think (it’s best viewed if you go under the menu tab and view in full screen).

Managing your customer relationships on Twitter can be a bit hard at times. Sometimes it’s finding the right new customer leads to reach out to - a coffee shop in santa cruz, probably has little interest in a tea drinker in London. Or other times it’s making sure your following existing customers - hey if someone has said something nice about your business, the least you could do is follow them back. Or other times it’s cutting your losses and letting go of people that aren’t interested in your business - hey you can’t win them all.

So we created this little tool. It’s beta, it’s a little buggy, and deffinitly needs some refinement. But we figured what better way to figure out what to refine, then just to release it and let our customers tell us. Right now you can do the following things:

• Find new fans to follow. You may already have people talking about your company on Twitter but you may not be following them back.  Discover who they are and follow them with a simple click of a button.
• Discover new customer leads to follow. Search by keywords to discover people that you aren’t following yet but could be your next great new customer.
• Unfollow those who’ve said thanks but no thanks. Discover the people who you’ve been following but have decided not to follow you back. Unfollow them with a simple click of a button (yes sometimes a harsh harsh world).

Please let us know (via email: “talktous at socialguides.com” or through twitter: @socialguides) if you have any questions or ideas about this tool - it’s still pretty early.  For now while we are testing we’ve limited it’s use to once per day. So, if you like it and want to use it more, let us know that too

So we’ve got a confession to make. We cheated. That’s right we cheated. When a customer would initially setup an account with us, we’d have them fill out a form, then we’d sort of create an account behind the scenes (wizard of oz style). Then magically in a little bit they’d be able to login (through an admittedly weird process of using your twitter username & password [something us geeky types call oauth]). Anyways it was all a little too ducktape and bailing wire-ish for our tastes, so we decided to fully automate the process.

Now, as a business, you can newly get access to our social dashboard and social deals, by simply creating a SocialGuides business account in two simple steps. 1) Enter your info. 2) Associate your Twitter & Facebook credentials. And BAM your done. In the dashboard and ready to go. See doesn’t that feel nice? Instant gratification. Will it change your life? Perhaps not. But we’re stoked. And oh ya, the dashboard is still free, so get it while it’s hot. http://www.socialguides.com/new_business_user

So in case you haven’t heard there’s this rather small (600M people and counting) little social network called Facebook. Yet you probably haven’t heard our team at SocialGuides talk about Facebook publicly, much. Why? Well because our name has the word “social” in it…so umm there. Well, no, in all seriousness it’s simply because as small teams go, you have to stay pretty laser focused. So we made a concerted effort to start first with Twitter, because we thought helping businesses build, manage, and monetize the customer relationships within the more open platform was the best place to start. And so now, with our dashboard, listings, and deals products we think we’ve done a really great start at covering the basics of the customer cycle with Twitter. But, obviously…well…there’s been a giant elephant in the room, Facebook. So without further ado we’ve introduced our first Facebook integration into SocialGuides.

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One of the most common questions we get from businesses exploring the idea of using social media as an outreach avenue to new customers is: isn’t Twitter just a bunch of people in a noisy room shouting at each other? Of course you might be surprised at my response…
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Everybody is offering deals right now, it’s sort of all the rage.  And today SocialGuides is throwing our hat into the arena. Why would we offer another group buying deal platform? Well were not.  You see at SocialGuides we believe the there is amazing opportunity in social commerce for SMBs, but it’s not by doing some flash in the pants gimmick, it’s best served as part of a larger relationship building plan.

So how do SocialGuides deals work?

Log into the SocaiGuides dashboard and setup a deal in as little as 30 seconds.  It’s self serve and there’s no upfront fee! Nice, right?

Once it’s setup, the deal then get’s pushed through the social channels on Facebook and Twitter - taking the existing fanbase and turning them into loyal paying customers (promotions are one of the main reasons why consumers follow businesses in social).

Now here’s where the fun part starts. For your fans to get the deal they have to share it with their friends on Facebook or Twitter. By offering a great deal you’ve basically activated them as your word of mouth marketing department.  It’s the perfect social bartering system. They give you a loyalty action by telling their friends about the deal and you reward them with a great offer. It’s a win-win.

The deals bring pre-paid customers and their friends to your venue.  This gets them talking about you more, gets them coming back more and creates a cycle of positive word of mouth across social media. Think about it - why is Starbucks so successful? It’s partly because they are the social cafe, not just another coffee shop.  So that’s what SocialGuides deals area all about - giving businesses the tools to be able to spark genuine social activity, interest, and value creation.

Awesome right? Ya we are excited too! Want to know more? Just signup with the SocialGuides or apply  to view our next scheduled demo.

Dashboards are all the rage in good web applications these days, so we thought, hey we want one too.  Well…that and we’ve been doing a lot customer development with our favorite business clients.  The question: how can we at SocialGuides help you manage your customer relationships on Twitter better? The answer: by helping us understand Twitter in a context of what matter most to a business.

You see there are lot’s of Twitter clients out there. Some are for power users on their desktops, some are for on the go consumers using their mobile phone, and some have lots of bells and whistles for big fancy enterprise businesses.  But what if you are a small to medium sized business? Well that’s what the SocialGuides dashboard is for. It’s a stripped down Twitter interface for working with just the things that matter most to a business operator - customers.

Our first pass (and trust us there will be lots of refinement) is focused on three things. Monitoring, Engaging and Discovering the conversation you should have with your customers.  So let’s explore:

• Monitoring.  We’re a really proud of this one because we take all of the touch points of your business on Twitter and present them in one single stream.  Say you run our favorite little save the world retail shop called Trade as One.  Well on Twitter you might have said, “hey guys come check out our grand opening”. Or someone might be saying “@tradeasone so when is your grand opening?”. Or Someone else might be saying “I just went to the Trade as One grand opening and fell in love with the company”.  The first is something you said, the second is something someone said directly to you (which you should respond to) and the third is something said about you - not necessarily something you might respond to, but good to know.  We are really excited that there’s one easy place (Hint: SocialGxxx) for you to see all three.
• Engaging. Within our Dashboard you can also post directly to Twitter to respond to all the groovy customers that you’ve discovered from that cool monitoring stuff from above. If it seems easy and straightforward - because it is.  Oh but wait, we added a few bells & whistles because, well, we couldn’t resist.  When the posts go to Twitter they automatically get small little short links that drive them back to your social business listing page.  Which is great because you want customers there (see the cool social listing page post). It also (if there’s room) adds your name and address so if you happen to be reaching out to a new customer, there’s a little context to who you are. Nice.
• Discovering.  We’ve added a panel on the left that shows who you’re top fans are on Twitter.  This is really cool because it helps you discover folks that may be your biggest advocates and you may have never even known the poor souls. It’s all organized by how often someone has mentioned your business on Twitter, which as you might imagine are folks you really want to share the love with.  So you’ll see them listed in order of how often they talk about you, that way you can give them a shout out, a little follow back love, or maybe even a cookie (I mean who doesn’t love cookies?).

As always, we’d love to hear feedback and things you want to see the dashboard become. Because, basically we are building this for you. Our goal is to only build products that you want & need - you guys are in the driver seat. Oh and one more thing… it’s all free! (at least until sometime later when the accountants tell me it cant be