Your next great business idea may be staring you in the face

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How many entrepreneurs woke up and said to themselves. Eureka! I’ve got a great idea. I’m going to set up a business so that I can spend all my time doing invoices.

The answer? None. Er. Check that. Maybe one. Michael McDerment .

Four years ago, Michael founded Freshbooks which offers small businesses online invoicing.

Look around your current business. You may find a new, better business opportunity

In this video clip from Freshbooks’ appearance at Third Tuesday Toronto, Freshbooks founder MIchael McDerment gives heart to anyone who dreams about leaving behind the sell-it-by-the-hour business model. He was running a services company and found that he needed an invoicing program. So, he built it. And that’s the foundation of what today is Freshbooks.

See other posts and videos of Freshbooks’ appearance at Third Tuesday Toronto:

Dave Fleet had a good overview of the event: A Fresh(books) approach to social media

Freshbooks: Don’t talk about the product. Talk about what it means to people

Freshbook Execs listen and respond to customers

Third Tuesday Ottawa is back

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We’re back. After several months hiatus (darn that burst appendix!), we’re restarting the Third Tuesday Ottawa social media meetups.

It seems that almost every day, we hear an announcement of a new social media tool, social network or open standard that the inventors tell us we soon won’t be able to live without. At this month’s Third Tuesday Ottawa, we have a panel of Colin McKay , Ryan Anderson and Brendan Hodgson to lead a discussion of which social media tools are most useful and which are just code looking for a reason to be.
So, if you’re confused by all the shiny new objects and want to know which you should use or, better yet, you want to share with others your views on which are useful and which don’t make the grade, join us at the next Third Tuesday Ottawa on May 5. (Yes, it’s a MONDAY. But that’s the day we could get the speakers and book the ClockTower.).

We’re looking forward to seeing you there.

As always, special thanks to our sponsors, CNW Group . CNW has supported us through this entire season – and their contribution has enabled us to keep Third Tuesdays as free events for the social media community.

I'm moderating a session at the CMA's Word of Mouth Conference

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On June 12, I’ll be moderating a session at From Mass to Grass, the Canadian Marketing Association‘s annual Word of Mouth Conference.

From Mass to GrassThis looks to be a great day packed with some of Canada’s top experts on word of mouth marketing and social media. Sean Moffitt, the Chair of the conference has a post with a rundown of the speakers and sessions.

And if you join the From Mass to Grass Facebook Group by May 1, you will receive a $50 discount off the registration fee for the conference.

I’m looking forward to hearing and spending time with the outstanding lineup of speakers that Sean and the program committee have booked for this year’s conference. Sean tells us that the roster includes:

– Richard Bartrem, Westjet’s VP  Culture & Communications – our moning keynpote talking about “Caring Owners – Driving Word of Mouth Through Employee Empowerment and Enagagement”

– David Usher, award-winning musician and entertainment social media participant and resident expert in a segment called “Behind the Music”

– Douglas Rushkoff – Narrative Lab Founder, award-winning docuumentarian (“Merchants of Cool” and “The Persuaders“), author (Media Virus and Get Back in the Box) and new media expert

– Julie Cole & Tricia Mumby, Founders- Mabel’s Labels “Word of Mouth Works in the Mama Market” – and their amazing Canadian grassroots success changing the way we think about  and market to mommies

– Chris Matthews, Specialized Bikes – Vigilante Organization – Global Efforts in Building brand Awesomeness and a Sense of Brand Community – a guide for large companies on how to evoke the passion of your customer base regardless of your size

– Jim Button, VP Marketing, Big Rock Brewery – tales of great craft beer community tapping word of mouth building from its grassroots headquarters in Calgary

– Su McVey, VP, Marketing Planning, TD Bank Financial Group– changing the face on how banks market to their audiences

– Scott Brooks, Chief Evangelist and Co-Founder, ConceptShare – kickass BtB success and the power of testimonials built from of all places, Sudbury, the new hotbed for collaborative creative building

– Mike McDerment, Co-Founder and CEO, Freshbooks – an extraordinary story of a bootstrapping Canadian company turned global success that has taken the pain out of accounting and invoicing clients

– William Azaroff, VanCity – a not-for-profit example of what you can do when you say “yes we can”, the triple bottom line success of VanCity credit union and a webby award nominee sponsored social network “Change Everything”

– Deborah Kaplan, Executive Director, Zerofootprint – for those that have been sleeping, “Green is in” – learn how Zerofootprint is enabling companies to change and buzz about their green credentials

– Malcolm Roberts, President, Smith Roberts Creative Communications – the mastermind behind the United Chruch of Canada’s “Wonder Cafe” and Ontario Colleges “Obay” teaser campaign

– Ross Buchanan, Director, Molson Coors Relationship Marketing – how Canada’s iconic beer company makes successful forays into word of mouth worlds and watchouts for those who tread there too

– Dan Hunter, Partner, IMI International – yes, you can measure word of mouth and what a bounce you can get vs. the traditional stuff, Dan shows you how

– Dave Balter, President, BzzAgent – one of WOM’s pioneers demonstrates the ironclad argument for the ROI on word of mouth

A great lineup. I hope that I’ll see you there. And remember to register before May 1 to obtain the $50 discount.

Freshbooks: Don’t talk about the product. Talk about what it means to people.

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Freshbooks has been very successful in establishing an online community of fans, customers and promoters. Third Tuesday Toronto moderator Michael O’Connor Clarke found 1,664 blog posts mentioning Freshbooks. He asks, how has this Toronto-based startup cultivated this level of awareness and attention?

Says Freshbooks’ Saul Colt : “We have a really good product. But we don’t push our product…. We want to tell the stories of our customers and make everything about the company compelling. … We try to push the unique values of our company, the different sort of things that we’re doing and that’s the kind of thing that gets people talking.”

“Invoicing isn’t the sexiest thing in the world. But there are amazing stories that come out of how we are saving people time, how we are making their lives easier. … We’re actually letting people do the thing that they love doing. When you were a kid, no one dreamt of doing invoices. You dreamt of being a PR person, or being a superhero or whatever. So, we’re actually letting you do that stuff and we’re saving you all this time while you’re doing it. We’re giving you your life back. We’re giving you your job back. So that you can do what you actually want to do. And that is why people talk about us, because it’s much more than just a product.”

Later in the evening, O’Connor Clarke asked Michael McDerment to tell The Triscuits story. Brief version: A resident of Fiji responded to a blog post McDerment had written about Triscuits, indicating that he can’t get Triscuits on Fiji, but that he’d love to. McDerment sent him a box of Triscuits. The fellow on Fiji wrote a blog post about McDerment’s gesture which was picked up by other bloggers – and Freshbooks ended up being talked about positively because of it.

Says McDerment, “It was born out of doing just what seemed natural. How would you like to be treated? Well, this is how.”

Adds Colt: “It’s really about being authentic. … Stories like that you do not because you’re hoping it will grow into something. You do it because it’s part of what you are. And that’s really part of the personality of Freshbooks. … And that’s also why a lot of people talk about us, because the company actually has a personality as opposed to a faceless, nameless corporation.”

Interested in reading more about what Freshbooks’ Michael McDerment and Saul Colt have to say? You may want to take a look at: Freshbook Execs listen and respond to customers .

Freshbooks execs listen and respond to customers

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What’s one of the secrets to success for a startup company fine tuning its offering to respond to customer needs? At Third Tuesday Toronto , Michael McDerment and Saul Colt of Freshbooks said that the top executives of the company regularly take support calls from customers.

This was “born out of necessity,” says Freshbooks founder McDerment. “I read the first three and a half years of every support request that came through. We were a pretty small company at that time.” Now that the company is growing, new support systems are being put in place. But, McDerment insists that the involvement of senior executives in support calls “is conscious and it is something we’re going to hold on to. … Just to ground you, it’s huge. Because otherwise, you start thinking, ‘we don’t need to change the products. We just need to sell more.’ …“ I’m doing more support now than I ever used to because I’m afraid of losing that touch.”

Here’s the clip. (Yes, the lighting is bad. But the content of what Michael and Saul were saying was just so strong, I really wanted to share it. We’ll get better lighting for future Third Tuesday events.)

But execs aren’t expected to be up to speed on technical issues, are they? How does Freshbooks ensure that their execs have the technical knowledge to respond to the support calls they take? Says McDerment, “For the most part, tech support for us is answering simple questions and holding people’s hands. … We build teams … a marketing person, a development person, a management person all doing support on the same day. So they get to spend time together, communicate, collaborate, get things done, get all the answers within a team.”

Now, you may be sceptical about whether the company actually lives this every day. Well, spontaneous validation was provided by Connie Crosby , a Freshbooks client, who spoke up to offer her story about how Saul Colt had responded to her support request late on a weekend night.

Impressive.

I’ll post more Freshbooks at Third Tuesday Toronto clips over the next week.

I'll share the highlights of New Comm Forum

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I’ll be spending today and tomorrow at New Comm Forum in Santa Clara. Every year, the Society for New Communications Research brings together some of the leading thinkers and practitioners of social media to talk about the latest developments and to try to decipher the coming challenges.

This year’s roster of speakers includes Joseph Jaffe , Katie Paine , John Cass , Shel Holtz , Richard Binhammer , Todd Defren , Maggie Fox , Albert Maruggi , Susan Getgood , Mike Manuel , Darren Barefoot , Brian Solis , Kami Huyse , Geoff Livingston , Joseph Carrabis , Jim Long , Tom Foremski , Shel Israel , Steve Lubetkin , and Giovanni Rodriguez . That’s not even half of the speakers.

I’ll record video of as many sessions as I can attend and I hope to share the highlights over the coming weeks. (Yes, weeks. Video is a real chore to review and edit and my video posts take a lot longer than you might think to get done. So, I tend to do them only when I have a large stretch of uninterrupted time to review the recording, pull out the best parts, write the blog post and then update the edited version to youTube.)

Stay tuned.

Freshbooks at Third Tuesday Toronto video series

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Freshbooks is an online invoicing and time-tracking service that is making book-keeping and invoice preparation a lot easier for small businesses.

Freshbooks Founder Michael McDerment and Saul Colt , Head of Magic (yep, that’s what his business card says) recently gave the Third Tuesday Toronto participants an insiders’ view of how they have built this Web 2.0 startup.

In the next series of posts, I’m going to publish video excerpts from their presentation, each of which has been edited to capture a single topic or theme. I think you’ll find Michael and Saul’s clips chock full of good ideas and tips for setting up a successful small business and harnessing social media to promote it and connect with users.

FriendsRoll and TopLinks at DemoCamp Ottawa

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We presented FriendsRoll and TopLinks at DemoCamp Ottawa8. This was our first public coming out of these apps and it was a real thrill to stand in front of our community and talk about our idea and how we’re brought it to life. On top of this, we got some great feedback from the DemoCamp attendees, including some suggestions for improvements that we’ll definitely incorporate in future releases.

For those new to the story, Friends Roll and Toplinks are free WordPress plugins that we hope will revitalize the blogroll. TopLinks uses your internal WordPress database to show the blogs and websites you link to most often in your posts. FriendsRoll lets your readers show that they are part of your community. Both plugins display this information in your blog sidebar. You can see my FriendsRoll and TopLinks in the sidebar of ProPR.

Steve Lounsbury, who was the principal developer of FriendsRoll, and Julie Haché, who played the same role for TopLinks, joined me in the DemoCamp presentation. I hope that this video of our presentation gives you a better sense of what we are trying to achieve and also a sense of the atmosphere of DemoCamp.

Thank you for Ian Graham , Peter Childs and the whole crew of volunteers who organize DemoCamp Ottawa . Your efforts have brought our community together in the best of ways.

More about DemoCamp Ottawa

Ottawa DemoCamp Roundup

DemoCampOttawa8

Inside PR live at Third Tuesday Toronto

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The next Inside PR podcast will have a distinctly different sound to it – the hum and crackle of a live audience.

Terry Fallis, David Jones and Inside PR panelists Martin Waxman, Julie Rusciolelli and Keith McArthur recorded Episode 106 at Third Tuesday Toronto. And the room was packed with members of the Toronto social media community who participated in the episode, asking questions, offering comments and generally cheering on the production.

Episode 106 will be posted next Tuesday. To whet your appetite for the complete show, here’s a video segment of the panelists setting up and opening the podcast. The lighting is poor and from the rear (audio producers don’t always set up the room with video in mind.) But one thing you can see is that the only apparent element of advance scripting is David Jones reading the opening sequence from notes in his Moleskin. They really do make this stuff up as they record it.