Jot Thought

We’ve been dabbling with Twitter lately and the verdict is still out in terms of it’s overall value.  There are definitely times when it seems like more of a distraction than a valuable tool.  There are also times when it’s just unavailable for long stretched.

But the other day, I came across a curiously powerful use for Twitter - better understanding customer needs, and especially, the language they use when expressing those needs.  I posted on our Paybackable blog about the specific example of where we foudn this useful, but the crux of it is that you can use a great little tool called Tweetscan to search the public timeline.  On a lark, I typed in “expense reports” and got a ton of posts (aka tweets) from everyday people complaining about doing expense reports.  I did it again this morning and the consistency in language is impressive.  You can check out my blog post about the insights this generated for us.  If you want to quickly see the results of the search, try it yourself.

No, this isn’t the most groundbreaking breakthrough in customer insight gathering, but still a nice little addition to the arsenal.

Well, it took us about a week longer than we thought, but we just released a major upgrade to Paybackable. There are 2 key elements to the release:

1. The ability to create company accounts and add employees
2. We added paid account plans

We also rolled out a new look and feel that was created by real designers, as opposed to Kevin hacking around.

So we’ll be giving DHH’s “advice” a whirl and trying to actually charge money for a useful web service.

If you know any small companies who want to simplify their online expense reporting, please send them our way