SignMyPad – the PDF Document and Signature Solution

SignMyPad is a great app that is perfect for those in the sales industry, or those practicing law or real estate transactions. It allows users to fill in information in fields on a document as well as gain viable signatures from clients on-the-fly.

The Test

Running a test on an iPad shows that this is a very user-friendly and quick application for filling in text fields, dates, check boxes and more on documents. While other applications such as Smartnote may have a couple of more alternatives for the insertion of special characters, Smartnote is nowhere near as fast as SignMyPad. Since those in the real estate, law and sales industries are frequently only n need of check boxes, signatures, and text fields, this app fits perfectly.  If you are using the newest iPad OS, you should also have a bit more flexibility and functionality. Using it is s easy as selecting the type of items to enter.

• Date
• Radio Button
• Signature
• Check Box
• Text

Using the date option auto-enters the current date and a sales person should be able to create a full purchase agreement without spending too much time or putting clients on hold for too long.

Pros of SignMyPad

• Fast
• User-friendly
• Flexible
• Functional
• Opens documents from email attachments or Dropbox

Cons of SignMyPad

• No landscape option
• In some instances copy and paste does not work across documents

About SignMyPad

This app was created by Autriv Software Developement and is available for $3.99. The newest version allows for saved signatures and a clean folder interface for users.  Even if signing documents isn’t an everyday thing for you in your industry, the convienience versus the price makes this a must-have app. A Pro version for $19.99 includes geo-tagging options for saved PDF’s.

This app is available on iPad and Android.

Author:

@BasilPuglisi is the Executive Director and Publisher for Digital Brand Marketing Education (dbmei.com). Basil C. Puglisi is also the President of Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. A Digital Brand Marketing Consultancy that manages professional and personal branding for Fortune 500 CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers and Small Business Owners.

Sources:

• TWiT.tv 
• News Coverage of SignMyPad
• SignMyPad Whiteboard

The Discovery Mode of Mobile – Elliot Nix Speaks at #SMWsmac

Elliot Nix, Senior Account Executive, for Mobile Google started out his set with a distinct reach into the depths of where mobile is really taking us. He shares in a couple of different examples about how it is effecting not only those of us who are amazed and appreciative of today’s technologies in relation to the more traditional formats we grew up with, but even how it is affecting those who have never known some of the more traditional media forms that many of us grew up with.

Kids Know the Darnedest Things

One instance was where his daughter  announced that she wanted to visit her Grandma that day. He explained to her that a visit to Grandma’s just wasn’t on the schedule for that day. Everyone has things to do, he just couldn’t get her there that day. Asserting her independence, she told him that she could get there herself. She asked him for his phone. She brought Google Maps up on his phone, clicked the bike path directive button, and showed him exactly how she could get there. A bit shocked by the fact that he didn’t know that option existed, even though he works for Google, showed him a pretty cool lesson about how are kids are learning to get around in this digital age, that for them, has never been anything but.

There is a discovery mode and a different level of interaction that is expected when it comes to mobile for the future of everyone’s business.

To A Child, a Magazine is an iPad that Doesn’t Work

The other story Nix shared was the one about a viral video that shows a baby playing with an iPad, and then playing with a magazine. Although she is very little, it is clear to see when faced with the traditional magazine, she is perplexed as to why it isn’t functioning. She can even be seen making sure her swipe finger is working properly.

Smartphone Usage is Skyrocketing

Nix shares that with the number of Smartphone sales and usage continuing to rapidly climb, not having mobile interaction on site for your business could be fatal. With roughly over 1 million new Smartphone devices activated daily, we are swiftly turning into an entire generation of folks into full-time mobile interactivity consumers. Nix relates that every time a new mobile device such as an iPad or long awaited Android release occurs, there is a clear spike in mobile sales and interactivity.

Mobile search is about saving time and interactive efficiency. Having any created apps optimized for quick search and discovery is imperative. Nix highlights the importance of analysing and recognizing customer behavior on mobile devices and then subsequently turning that information into actions.

To watch Elliot’s entire set including a highly informative question and answers section as well as a checklist of great practices for mobile search marketing, please check out the video from the #SMWsmac event.

Author:

Joy Lynskey is the owner of JRL Solutions, a copywriting and content management company based in Bedford, Virginia. JRL Solutions hosts a Freelance Writers Education Blog that is managed by direct and guest posting. Joy is the Content Manager and Editor for Puglisi Consulting Group at Digital Brand Marketing Education. Joy regularly works in SMM via freelance consulting  private clients with their social media campaigns.

Sources:

• Mobile site optimization resources for download
• Google Outlines Mobile Trends at Advertising Week DC’s ADWKDC
• Why Build a Mobile Site?
• A Magazine is an iPad that Doesn’t Work
• Mobile Search Marketing
• Mobile Search: Beyond the Portal

Social Influence Panel Shares Industry Knowledge at #SMWSMAC

With social influence playing such an important role in who is determined to be an expert on any given topic, Social Media Action Camp would not have been complete without an expert panel of social influence professionals.

Michelle Ross of the Brand Partnerships Team at Klout spoke to attendees a bit about what it takes to produce the Klout score itself. Much of Klout’s employee-base, around 85% is dedicated solely to the development and management of the intricate algorithm that helps to determine a user’s score. Michelle mentions too that Klout is in actuality, sponsoring brands who are looking for the more ‘everyday’ type of user when it comes to directing Perks and marketing efforts.

“Brands are so excited and hungry to connect with influencers who are not the traditional famous blogger, journal, or celebrity. “

Ben Farkas is the U.S. Director for Synthesio, a global social media monitoring service that was founded in Paris in 2006. Ben shared that their U.S. office having just recently opened may be one of the reasons why they aren’t a more easily recognizable name in the States, but that they are likely soon to be. Ben shared that what Synthesio has a focus on is in leveraging the wealth of data available on social networks.

With such big names to represent such as Microsoft, Toyota, and Nike, there is no doubt that Synthesio has been tried and tested when it comes to how to monitor all forms of media channels. Everything from forums, blogs, Facebook, and basic mentions are monitored in real-time to help the ad agencies to continue to fuel their entire organizations. Ben shares his thoughts on what social media really is becoming to many businesses.

“Social media is the DNA of the organization, of any organization, that’s what it is becoming.”

It is also fairly cool to know that as one of the official sponsors of #SMWsmac, Synthesio was actually tracking our hashtag and the social influence of our event and will provide us with some of the analytics for the event in a couple weeks.

Anthony Napolitano, Director of Sales at StumbleUpon, shares that StumbleUpon’s service answers two questions. One for consumers and one for advertisers. The one for consumers is in supplying a collaborative format for sharing all of the content from the web. As businesses of all types produce blog articles, images, and other forms of content, they are sent out to all of the different distribution channels such as social media networks. However, how can one individual possibly consume all of the content relevant to their own industries or interests?

Quite simply, there isn’t enough time. StumbleUpon allows its users to aggregate all of the best content for their personalized needs. StumbleUpon is not indexing web content, but letting users do that for them. So while hitting the Stumble button means that you may not know what you are about to see, you will know that it will be something incredibly relevant to your own interests. StumbleUpon can be highly beneficial for those content creators as well. While many tend to rely on the same resources for their industry news, using StumbleUpon can help introduce users to other options for relevant and reputable content beyond what they have already become familiar with.

If you would like to watch the full panel, head to the livestream video for the social influence #SMWSMAC panel.

Author:

Joy Lynskey is the owner of JRL Solutions, a copywriting and content management company based in Bedford, Virginia. JRL Solutions hosts a Freelance Writers Education Blog that is managed by direct and guest posting. Joy is the Content Manager and Editor for Puglisi Consulting Group at Digital Brand Marketing Education. Joy regularly works in SMM via freelance consulting  private clients with their social media campaigns.

Sources:

• A Chat with Klout for the Entertainment Industry
• Synthesio Monitoring Expands to the U.S. and Welcomes Ben Farkas as U.S. Director
• StumbleUpon Hires Anthony Napolitano, Director of Sales and Oliver Hsiang, Director of Strategic Partnerships

Group Commerce for Publisher-Based eCommerce Solutions: #SocialCommerce

Recently, I sat down to an impromptu interview with the CEO of Group Commerce, Jonty Kelt, to learn more about what publisher-based ecommerce solutions can offer to more traditional form of media that may be lacking digital presence.

What is Group Commerce?

Group Commerce is a platform for publishers who want to integrate ecommerce into a successful element of their business. Group Commerce serves three groups that help to make their ecommerce program work.

1. Consumers
2. Merchants
3. Publishers

Group Commerce’s technology was designed to support, from the ground up, the unique lists of needs that brands and media companies require. Their enterprise-grade platform doubles as a command center for a publisher’s ecommerce program as well. There is nothing else like it anywhere.  Group Commerce understands exactly what it take to succeed. The professional services offered provide all of the needed elements to ensure that their publishers succeed in ecommerce.

Founded in 2010, Group Commerce is backed by several popular names such as Carmel Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Spark Capital, and Bob Pittman. Group Commerce has some top-notch clients in names such as Chegg.com, Boston.com, CBS Local, DailyCandy, the New York Times, and many more. Based in New York City, Group Commerce now has over 100 employees in 11 major cities.

When asked about the publisher based ecommerce solutions provided by Group Commerce, Jonty Kelt shared with me, “We created group commerce with a mission to enable audience owners, to succeed in ecommerce. This is anyone with an audience, website owners, newsletter businesses, TV, radio, print and more. The brands have to engage with intelligence and integrity, so that they add value to their relationship with their audience. This can give traditional or ad based media companies more revenue stream, more engagement with their audience, attract new audience members and for some solid media based businesses, it can give them more relevance in a digital world.”

Before we wrapped up our interview I definitely had to pose to him a question that is near and dear to publications like DBMEi.

Since there is such a huge market now for content relating to the practices of digital marketing, social media and other similar services, how do you see Group Commerce fitting in for the smaller publishers? How can you begin to monetize platforms such as multi-blogger sites like DBMEi?

Jonty Kelt: We currently have an initiative in our engineering department focusing on building a ladder of service solutions which will enable smaller publishers such as bloggers, smaller websites and audiences to turn ecommerce onto their sites as well.

How Can I Get in on Group Commerce?

Group Commerce is rather picky about the publishers they work with. For the most part, applicants must have several of at least six unique qualifications.

1. Verticality
2. High brand engagement
3. Strong local voice
4. High user transactional intent
5. Size
6. Locally segmented

Since its launch, Group Commerce has raised millions in funding and Kelt plans to continue to expand the company’s reach into 2012.

Sources:

• Business Insider: Social Commerce Summit
• GroupCommerce
• Basil C. Puglisi
• Transcript from Interview

#SocialCommerce: Jonty Kelt Interview Transcript

Business Insider hosted the Social Commerce Summit on Feb 7th, 2012 at Chelse Pier, during that event I had a chance to sit with Jonty Kelt, the CEO for Group Commerce. Here is a transcript from that interview with a general article to follow on Feb 19th at 5pm, right here on dbmei.com.

About the event:

Since the immersion of social media into digital commerce, incredible opportunities and options have opened for business owners. Socially marketing your products and services can come with its own challenges though, so the Social Commerce Summit, or SCS, has a focus on presenting some incredible tips and tricks along with the best practices common to businesses successful in this form of marketing.

The SCS will provide the platform for experts in their industries to share their own best practices and ideas that have been built upon cutting edge trends and technologies and are the products of incredibly successful Fortune 500 campaigns and strategies.

The Interview: (Recorded by Basil C. Puglisi, Transcription done by Joy Lynskey)

JK: Started the company 2 years ago with a vision for media companies that are publishers, that they should engage in ecommerce.  They have great brands, reach, authority over some topics with certain groups, engaged audiences. Those things we believed could be translated into an ecommerce business, alongside the traditional types of advertising businesses. We created group commerce with a mission to enable audience owners, to succeed in ecommerce. Being as broad as possible. This is anyone with an audience, website owners, newsletter businesses, TV, radio, print. The premises of what we are saying here is that the brands have to engage with intelligence and integrity, so that they add value to their relationship with their audience. This gives ad based or ad revenue fueled businesses, the opportunity to have an ecommerce business alongside of it. This can give traditional or ad based media companies more revenue stream, more engagement with their audience, attracts new audience members and for some solid media based businesses, it can give them more relevance   in a digital world.

We have only been live for about 15 months and currently have about 15 live  , all of them traditional media companies. [name companies] A lot of the brands mentioned began with one or two people managing which has now, a year later, turned into teams of 20 or more employees managing their ecommerce. Now that they have seen it can work, many are now aiming for 9 figure revenue businesses.

BP: So what group commerce is offering is the opportunity for them to survive in the digital era with obvious subscription services failing, people are less willing to pay for subscriptions but instead prefer to get content for free. So this is a way to kind of fill the gap ?

JK: In some cases that is true. Some of our customers were already digital, such as Daily Candy, and this is just tacked on. Other services do not have much of a digital business presence and this can be a way to augment their traditional business and help them to survive in a digital world.

BP: So what are some of the verticals that you guys are seeing, in ecommerce that’s targeting general vs specific.

JK: So very simplistically we have two target segments, vertical such as; thrillist.com for young men, dailycandy.com for young women,  active.com for endurance athletes, and then local media, which tends to be more horizontal,   the new york times for new york, boston.com for the boston area. The vertical ones are leveraging vertical authority, such as dailycandy is an expert on what young women want, that brings to bring great content and comments. Different than boston.com doesn’t have a specific audience. They have everyone, young and old, uptown and downtown. so they have to use their local authority to find the best merchandise and present it to the best audience.

BP: Do we see a higher conversion rate with vertical specific content versus the general content. We talked a bit about how Boston was able to generate something relevant to Boston being Boston based locations. I imagine some of the verticals when they’re talking about how to sell products outside of geographical limitations

JK: So local is normally services, nationally is normally product.  A local can offer local services, and even local product. National, we see more products since national cannot usually offer local service.

BP: Mike Wallace was a big speaker over at Boston.com, you guys had him join you, what does it mean to bring this type of person into your fold?

JK: Our company is about 100 people right now. In order to pull off what we are focused on we have to have really high-quality people with different disciplines, technology, merchandising strategy, sales, finance, hr, account management, and Mike Wallace was actually a customer of ours at Boston.com.  Mike is a born leader, he has executed on the vision extremely well at Boston.com, and we got on extremely well. He loved the vision we had. After about a year and a half of working with Mike, we had conversations with him on having him help us with our business. We wanted him to use his knowledge on how to actually build a program for boston.com in a group commerce setting.

BP: So his official title is..?

JK: Vice President of Publisher Sales which means finding new publishers who would like to participate in this. Finding new publisher partners is his main focus right now.

BP: So one of the things we are talking about when looking at ecommerce is that we have a lot of conversation about daily deals, selling locally, lot of conversation of the push vs pull. Push being here is an opportunity or offer, I may take advantage of it later. Vs the I am standing in the middle of boston right now. Push vs pull mentality, selling in advance, vs I’m standing here I am looking for something to do, where is the best deal or value for me? So have you guys seen the platform showing that push vs pull.

JK: We have been very focused on push. Our customers, Boston.com, New York times, they have very powerful media, they have a voice in many touch points, social media, email list, web page, printed editions, so they are leveraging that and the fact that they have ecommerce now and are offering great stuff. With respect to the on demand, I am in the middle of boston and looking for a great deal right now, that type of pull is not the type of commerce we are currently offering, because we have been more focused on the push.

Groupon and LivingSocial are two of the things that you are referring to with respect to standing in the middle of Boston and having thirty things available around you, is just not reality yet. That is something that we have not been focused on, specifically because we have been more focused on the push. I like to consider the word pull being that when the customer is aware that dailycandy now has stuff on their website to buy, they go there of their own volition, it’s pulling them there. Rather than them having to be interrupted with an email. And that is the holy grail really, for what we are trying to do. We are using a public outlet to push awareness of what are the deals in front of them, which creates buying behavior.

It takes time for our customers to educate their audiences, some of them have only been going now for a little over a year.

BP: There is this huge market now for content relating to the practice of marketing, social media, etc, how do you see you guys fitting in for the smaller publishers? How do you start to monetize platforms such as multi-blogger sites like this?

JK: We have an initiative in our engineering efforts to build a ladder of service solutions, which will enable smaller publishers, bloggers, small websites, etc to turn ecommerce on.