Betterific is Like Reddit for Customer Feedback

The Launchpad is a series that introduces Mashable readers to compelling startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Betterific

One-Liner Pitch: Betterific gives consumers a platform to offer feedback on how to improve their favorite products and companies.

Why It's Taking Off: It's like Reddit for customer suggestions online.

It started with a fitted sheet.

Micha Weinblatt was making his bed, and struggling to figure out which side of his fitted bed sheet was the width and which was the length, when he came up with a simple solution: Companies should include a label on the sheet to note which side is which. That led him to another thought: How does one go about sharing an idea like that?

"What do you do with that idea, short of starting a linen company? You could tweet it or Facebook it, but you don't have much of an audience there," Weinblatt told Mashable. "We started looking around, and saw there was no great place to share ideas and make products better."

With that in mind, Weinblatt and his two co-founders, Brad Cater and Jonathan Schilit, decided to develop Betterific, a website that serves as a platform for consumers to offer feedback on how to improve their favorite products and companies. The site, which launched in public beta last month, provides users with a simple prompt ("Wouldn't it be better if...") and then lets the community vote the idea up or down, similar to Reddit.

While the project is still in its early stages, users have already posted more than 2,200 ideas to the website, which range from a suggestion for Amazon ("Wouldn't it be better if Amazon offered a print and e-book combo when you purchase a book online?") to a suggestion for airlines in general ("Wouldn't it be better if airlines had a sign that said please wake me up for my meal?") One of the most popular suggestions to date is for toilets: "Wouldn't it be better if toilets had a 'pedal lift lid' like a lot of trash cans so you wouldn't have to touch the seat to lift it up and down?"

Weinblatt said users also make suggestions for how to improve Betterific, some of which the team has started to implement; they include: letting users tag one another in posts, and building private forums within the website so companies can solicit feedback from a select group of users.

Now that customers have started to post to the website, the team is working to fill in the other side of the equation by reaching out to big and small companies. The goal is to get businesses to embed part of Betterific on their own websites, so they can tap into the community's feedback, as well as that of their own customers.

Beyond that, the Betterific team hopes to build out features that let companies engage with specific users to follow up on their suggestions. This way, Weinblatt said the Betterific community could serve as a true "brain trust" for companies, which is good for engagement on the site, and perhaps just as importantly, for giving the startup a valuable asset that it could monetize going forward.

Betterific went through the DreamIt Ventures incubator program in New York late last year, and is currently looking to raise a $650,000 round of funding. The team is also working on an iPhone app for the website, which should be released in the next two months.

A Beginner’s Guide to Public Relations

Public relations has always been important for small and large businesses alike – without a solid ground game through which you can cultivate a positive attitude about your company or brand, you risk letting your competitors define you. In an increasingly mobile and technology-filled world, having a public relations campaign for your website and online presence is just as important as it is having one for a brick and mortar institution. For those seeking to improve their online public relations, continue reading to find out what the process entails and how you can form a successful campaign with minimal resistance.

What Is PR?

While many web enthusiasts think of ‘PR’ as being PageRank, PR also means public relations, and affects every aspect of your marketing, traffic and sales. Many utilize PR as a way to increase free exposure for their company through other outlets, such as newspaper, radio, blogs and television. The goal of PR is to enhance the level of exposure your business receives while also framing it in a positive light. By pinging a website or business’ best characteristics to the rest of the world, you can slowly but surely develop a PR campaign that relies on viral content, word of mouth and first impressions.

Public Relations for SEO

A detail oriented public relations campaign can do remarkable things for your organic search engine rankings on Google and other search engines. Studies have shown that well thought-out press releases and announcements that are search engine optimized can bring a load of benefits for your site in the short, medium and long-term. This gives you not just an opportunity to plug your business or website and showcase its positive attributes, but can also give you an extra opportunity to improve your search rankings by pinging a website’s basic information, keywords and new offerings all in one press release. Syndication of such press releases by other sources only add more clout to your SEO and PR strategy.

Contacting News Outlets

Most local news affiliates and newspapers love to offer publicity to businesses that have an interesting angle to cover. If you are the founder or current CEO of a company, it is vital that you make the initial contact, as reporters and editors are far more likely to be receptive to an angle pitched by the company’s chief than by a social media developer or contracted firm. In any email or personal conversation, you will want to showcase why the outlet in question should cover your business and be sure to include a general press release covering the event or promotion for which you are attempting to gain attention.

Conclusion

By developing a strong writing technique with which you can distribute effective press releases, combining the approach with elements of search engine optimization, reaching out to interested parties through social media and also contacting traditional news sources for potential coverage, you can begin to put into place the foundational blocks of a strong public relations campaign. While it will certainly take dedication and time to achieve the best results, following this advice will help steer you in the right direction.

Five Great Ways to Get Customer Feedback

Having a lifeline with your customers is vital in order to maintain a good relationship with them. Many times, we will hear from customers when something is blatantly wrong, but in many cases, marginally dissatisfied customers do not speak up; they instead vow never to give you return business and may spread their dissatisfaction via word of mouth. When you open multiple avenues for dialog and proactively encourage individuals to comment, you can help reduce the rate of this occurring. Below are five great ways in which you can encourage your customers to leave feedback, helping you manage your business more effectively.

Offer Contact Forms

Whenever your customers place an order, do they have a way to leave you feedback anonymously after the transaction has been completed? By implementing a program that can handle these submissions (a ticket management program is the best option for pinging servers with these comments when there is a high amount of traffic), you can provide a personalized approach to each customer’s comments and concerns.

Provide Forums for Discussion

While some businesses are weary to provide a public outlet for consumers to discuss their products’ disadvantages, having a place where problems can be discussed shows customers that you do in fact care and are taking proactive steps to rectify any issues they may have. By being attentive, polite and giving leeway when there is the option of doing so, many irate customers can be flipped into return business – if the problems are handled in the right way.

Send Out Surveys

Whenever a customer buys a product from you, do you provide them with a survey or questionnaire that asks them to report their feelings on the product and overall transaction? If not, you are missing out on valuable feedback. Whether it is in paper form in a brick-and-mortar institution or online and through email, always be sure to solicit responses from every single customer. By having the largest pool of feedback possible, you will be sure to get an accurate representation of how your customer base feels.

Setup Live Chat

If you are constantly involved with your business throughout the day, then setting up a live chat option is yet another way you can provide an outlet for consumers to inquire, complain or just get a feel for the product before they make a commitment. Rather than pinging servers on your own domain with added demand, you also have the option to acquire live chat services for a relatively inexpensive rate from a slew of international companies that provide the service – leaving you free to do other things.

Utilize Social Networks

Finally, the use of social media to handle comments is a great way to gain customer feedback and will be used by customers if promoted. Since many users are already on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms, it is very simple to convince them to communicate with you via the page in question. In many ways, this can be a two-fold benefit: some will end up liking your page as they come to leave comments, which will result in them receiving future updates from you in their status feeds.

What is Ghost Banning and How Can You Avoid It as a Marketer?

We all may be guilty of promoting our own projects and businesses on other websites, but most of us follow a golden rule of sorts: always be constructive, incorporate your plug into the subject material very naturally and do not be a nuisance. Generally speaking, this is enough to prevent anyone from deleting our comments or blocking us from contributing in the future. With the internet becoming more and more sophisticated, however, some protocols have led to the act of ghost banning. What exactly is ghost banning and could it happen to you? Continue reading to find out just how this might affect your future marketing.

What Is It?

Ghost banning is a relatively new aspect of blocking an individual’s activity without actively alerting them to the situation. Often referred to as a smarter way to deal with malicious or mischievous people, ghost banning in many forms will still allow affected users to post and otherwise interact with the website or profile in question – with the caveat being that their published content does not actually show up for other users to see. Usually, this form of banning affects people who are pinging links to various sites over and over again, alerting administrators to the possibility that they may be spammers.

Still, the art of ghost banning is not perfected and even if it were, there is ample room for the protocols to ultimately impact people who are not spamming. One example would be someone who posts on a blog that deals with a controversial topic, such as politics. Perhaps the individual posting has had numerous comments flagged or down-rated, which can send off alerts to any system that utilizes ghost banning. Your account may temporarily be ghost banned while administrators have the time to sort through your comment history and determine whether or not you are a spammer or just an innocent casualty.

How To Avoid It

Virtually all major social networking sites have some form of ghost banning in effect – most of us simply never trigger the mechanisms that bring it into enactment. Still, many blogs and primitive social networking hubs like Craigslist do use this as a way to thin out spammers. What makes them take a second look at your account? The single biggest factor in getting ghost banned is pinging links more than once in a given period of time. The length of time varies with each network and pinging a link more than once is not necessarily going to get you ghost banned, but it is the single-largest indicator in how sites isolate and flag accounts.

Sharing a variety of different links can actually help you – assuming they are from different domains. This gives the impression that you are actually sharing and not spamming; after all, why would a spammer suggest a dozen different websites to their “friends”? If there is the ability to interact with the platform in different ways – such as liking others’ posts, sharing different types of multimedia and following other people – then engaging in these actions will help solidify your account as a legitimate user and not someone who solely shows up to spam.

Automating Your Pinterest Marketing Strategy

Reaching out through every social media medium possible is a necessity for success in the online world. If your business or website is currently reaching users via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others, then you know how much of an impact a properly-coordinated marketing campaign can have. Many people do not have the time to juggle several different social media outlets, though, so the question is: how can I simplify this process? Fortunately, those using Pinterest have several options for automating their marketing strategies in order to maximize profitability and time, as covered further in this article.

Automatic Followers

With the number of Pinterest users more than doubling in the past year, it makes sense to begin networking with other users who have like-minded interests. There are many automated following software options available that can be used to find people who are interested in your content and then automatically begin following these people. The unspoken rule when it comes to following other users on social media is that the more people you follow, the more of those people who are going to return the favour. By using this approach, you can passively grow your audience without having to micromanage things.

Schedule Pins and Updates

We all know how frustrating it used to be to keep consistent updates on our Facebook pages – before scheduling options were implemented. With Pinterest, you have access to the same technology, although it has yet to be implemented directly into the Pinterest interface. One of the most popular ways to do this is by using Pingraphy, which gives you the ability to schedule pins down to the minute. There are also a variety of metrics included with Pingraphy that allow you to see who is pinging links on your Pinterest profile, as well as clicks, like and the overall reach your profile is achieving.

Revamp Your Site’s Images

The extent of automating your Pinterest approach should not stop at your Pinterest profile. One ingenious way you can grow your Pinterest following is to add plugins to your website that allow users to pin any given image on your website. One of the best suites available is Pinterest Image Pinner, which works with any WordPress site and creates a ‘Pin It’ button for each image displayed. While this may not necessarily grow the amount of traffic your site receives by a large amount, it will allow your traditional web users to have more opportunities to connect with your Pinterest profile and lead to more shares and pins that can ultimately result in more traffic over the long term.

Display Your Pinterest Elsewhere

While it is easy to add ‘Pin It’ buttons to all of your site’s images (as mentioned above), what about displaying the contents of your Pinterest profile directly on your website? There are several plugins available that can be pinging links from your Pinterest in real-time, including the Pinterest RSS WordPress plugin. Simply install this to your WordPress site and in a few minutes, you can have all of your updates streaming directly to any and all web pages on which you wish to display them.