Intuit's Small Business Product Failure

Perhaps you've seen the recent spate of commercials from Intuit touting its new website template and hosting offering on television. Designed to appeal to small business owners, the service is affordable, flexible, and provides a wide selection of prefab templates from which to choose. Sounds terrific and very appealing, indeed.

Because many of my customers are start ups and they might not be very web savvy, I thought I'd check out the offering myself. With a spare URL or two and an interest in kicking the tires of this sort of offering as a testbed, I went to intuit.com to sign up. Great looking site. A nice piece of video demonstrating many of the main features of the service. Sold. I selected a user name and password, hit continue and "Server Error, Try again later" hit me right back. "Huh", I said to no one in particular. Not the kind of message you want from someone who'll be hosting your site. "I'll try again", I said. After all, the web is still pretty fickle sometimes, I reasoned. Same drill, same answer.

Couple of hours later I did indeed try yet again. I input the fields for user name and password and hit enter with great anticipation. This was going to be cool. "User name already in use". "Huh", said I. I guess I must have managed to get the account set up in spite of the earlier error message. So I tried to log on as a regular account holder. Things took a turn for the especially odd when Intuit said it didn't recognize me. On the one hand it knew me because it recognized my user name but on the other it wouldn't let me in.

Being the helpful company they are, Intuit puts their toll-free number on the page. So I called. To make the long play by play a little less long, we got to the bottom of the issue after just a few minutes. I was flabbergasted to learn that users of Mac computers can't use this service. That's right, some 10% plus of the world's entrepreneurs can't use this web-based service with a web browser interface because we're using the wrong operating system on our computers.

So beyond simply recounting my frustrating afternoon, here's the marketing upshot of all this. First, the days of tying your software product to either a Mac or to a PC are over. People have no patience for this Red State/Blue State bigotry any more. Especially if your product is software as a service (SaaS) funneled to the waiting world via the agnostic web.

Second, if you're going to exclude large numbers of prospects from buying your product, make sure that tidbit is not buried deep within some FAQ somewhere. I'll make you a deal, Intuit - Don't waste my time and I won't blog about how you are likely wasting the time of hundreds of thousands of small business people.

Third, and this applies to everyone, when you're entering a highly fragmented and competitive market, don't come half-armed. Just because it might be hard doesn't mean you can punt on major criteria. When you're operating on the web, be sure that users of different browsers can access your site and have a seamless experience, for example. Or if you're a restaurant serving only vegan dishes, don't name yourself "Pete's House of Every Food" because somebody's gonna get miffed.

The other marketing lesson is that no matter how good a job you do with ads, sites, and the other things that bring prospects in, if your product managers or operations folks can't deliver the goods, you've done nothing good for your company. Intuit will take some significant hits for this sloppy roll out and ironically, the better the marketers are in driving traffic, the worse the impact on the Intuit brand will be.

As for me, I'll be testing another firm's web template/hosting service and reporting on that effort in a future post.

Social Marketing Coming of Age

Social marketing is real, it is effective, and it is here to stay. That's what I tell all of my clients today. Not news to you? Well, the reality is that companies have only just begun to leverage social media networks with any skill at all. Though it seems like we've been hearing about this new fangled thing for a long time, it remains a shiny new and generally misunderstood area of marketing.

In large measure, that's because the people executing social marketing strategies are not very good marketers. They are born-again tech people jumping onto what they rightly perceive to be a profitable bandwagon. But as I've mentioned before in earlier posts, social media "specialists" tend to be intentionally vague about the activities in which they'll engage, hoping to maintain pricing premiums by making the field an art - more magic than science. But as business people are finding, it's not so awfully difficult after all.

So on a practical level, what should you, a business owner, do? First, recognize that social marketing is simply a new set of tools that allow you to reach out to prospects in new ways. You can use these tools to help prospects and customers advocate on your behalf. You can reinforce your brand, you can develop out of this world testimonials, you can empower customers in ways never before possible.

Second, set up a Facebook page for your company and invite customers to join your group. Buy any one of the zillion books on leveraging Facebook, like Facebook for Dummies. Quick read and full of useful little tips for getting started.

Third, set up a Twitter account, and begin "tweeting" regularly. Be brief, be value-focused, and have fun.

Fourth, listen. See what people are saying not just about your company, but your competitors, your industry, and about completely unrelated businesses - that'll give you the chance to learn about what other companies are doing to good or bad effect.

Finally, iterate. Make participation a regular event, much like getting brochures updated and printed every quarter, you can now update your messaging once, twice, three times a week. You can address "big topics" in your business as they arise, not months later. Unlike static literature, the elements of social media are dynamic, timely, and oftentimes unexpected.

Don't let any snake oil salesmen make you think that there is any magic involved with social media marketing. Think instead that these are like sales conversations you can have with lots of customers simultaneously. You're still doing the same key thing here as you've been, hopefully, doing all along: engaging with your customers is meaningful ways to drive behavior and to gather critical information. No magic, just a new set of tools for making it happen.

Start today. Doesn't have to be anything too complicated. Just get the ball rolling and momentum will build.