As you may know Tomoson has been getting a lot of spam promotions lately which are degrading the brand and reputation of Tomoson.  We have heard your complaints and have taken action to increase the quality of promotions posted on Tomoson.

As of Wendsday 12-7-11 Tomoson has started manually approving all promotions posted to our site.  Before a promotion will go live it will be reviewed by a person and approved or denied within 24-48 hours (excluding weekends and holidays).

For those of you who thought this is how it should of been from the start.  We apologize for our mistake managing the promotions and hope this will help get our reputation back to where it was in the past.

What Constitutes A Promotion?

This will obviously change as our team gains experience but here is what we are starting with.

1. Must be a product that can be shipped or emailed via the message center
2. If the product is emailed (ebook, software, ect..) it cannot be the free trail version or limited package.  It must be the full paid solution or book.
3. If the product is an ebook it must be over 90 pages of useful information that cannot be easily found on the web for free.  (Easily found= 1-3 separate Google keyword searches)

What Will Happen To Promotions Posted Before This Date?

We will be going through the promotions posted in the last week and making some edits but most of them will remain, because they will slowly filter out as new verified promotions take their place.

What We Need From You

We are looking for comments from the community on  what we define a promotion as.  Please add your thoughts and other criteria below in the comments.   As comments come in it will help us continue to modify this definition.

Thanks for your continued support and use of Tomoson.

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We wanted to make this post after acquiring an investment to make improvements to Tomoson.com.  Besides a lot of feature updates we are looking at integrating a new color scheme and navigation.

We are looking for your feedback on the ruff mockups we have below.

Please make comments on these things.

1. Colors: which do you like better and why?
2. Do you like us calling the promoters advertisers?

Design 1  (aka: Chuck Norris)

Design 2 (aka: Steven Seagal)

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Giving bloggers the ability to run contests after they write a review has been helping promoters get the word out about their product.  Tomoson has made some updates allowing promoters to better manage the contests on their promotion.

What is a Contest? A contest is run after the promoter has already shipped a product to the blogger and he/she has written a review.  Once the blogger writes the review and verifies it, the promoter can send out A SECOND PRODUCT to the contest winner.  Bloggers will run contests on their website to attract more readers and fans.  This obviously helps bring large amounts of readers to their blogs which brings more eyeballs to a promoter’s product (a win win situation).

IMPORTANT: Contests are OPTIONAL and promoters do not need permit them on their promotion.  On the other hand if you do allow it MAKE SURE you plan on sending a product to the blogger’s winner.   After the first product review is done the blogger will send you the winner’s address via Tomoson and you can export that address in the using the same green button.  Export contest shipping addresses

How To Setup Contests When Creating A Promotion

1.       Select Blogger Contest: When you are making a promotion Tomoson will have the option to select if you want a blogger contest.  If you select yes enter the number of products to giveaway to each APPROVED blogger.

2.       Select Contest Expiration Date: Now a new set of dates will appear.  Select a contest expiration date which tells the bloggers the last day they can get you a contest winner address.  The date needs to be long enough after the review time, so the blogger can run the contest correctly.  If you don’t the system will not allow you to select the expiration date.  After the expiration date the blogger cannot give you a contest winner address and you do not need to send the contest winner a product.

3. Select Contest Shipment Date: The last date is the contest shipment date which tells the blogger what date you will be shipping the products to the contest winners.  You will want to select this date after the contest expiration date, so you only need to export the addresses once.

How To Administrate Contests

Now that you have setup your contest administrating it is easy.  The promotion profile page will show what dates the contests are set to so bloggers will know when to expect updates from you.  As you mark products shipped the bloggers will get updates so you don’t need to worry about sending emails.

When you get to those dates simply export the shipping addresses of the contest winners, ship the products, and mark them shipped.

Learn How To Mark Contest Products Shipped

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A lot of promoters were asking for the ability to see blogger review urls and sort bloggers by the date they applied.   We made some updates to Tomoson and now both are online to use.

Blogger Review Link

After a blogger verifies his/her review you will be able to see the link above the review.  Now you can read the post on Tomoson.com and click a link to go directly to the bloggers post.  You can see an example of  the Review URL below.

Date Applied

We change Tomoson to default the most recently applied at the top of your account area.  Promoters now also have the option to sort the date applied from ascending to descending and show applied, denied, or applied bloggers with a single click.

Date Sorting · Review Link

Now promoters can sort bloggers by their statistics easily.  When a promoter goes to one of their promotions they can click on the stats & sorting button.

Once on this page the promoter can organize each field by the level of importance.  For example, let’s say I feel blogger category is the most important.  I can click on filter and get a window allowing me to pick the blogs within specific categories.  If you want to change the categories simply click the filter link again and edit the selections.

After picking a category, the promoter feels Twitter followers are the next most important stat to the promotion.  Select the drop down above twitter followers (high – low).  The system will now sort the Twitter followers within the categories you have selected from high to low.

Now the promoter wants to see who has the most Facebook friends and fans.  Select the drop down and sort the friends/fans from high to low.  The system will recognize the sort according to the order you sorted them.  Giving more weight first thing selected (groups in this case), then Twitter followers, then Facebook fans/friends.  This means the promoter can organize bloggers by what stats they think are truly important.

Once the promoter has the bloggers sorted simply check the box next to each bloggers name and click approve.  After that’s done the blogger will get an email with a notification of approval.  Download the shipping addresses, mark the products shipped, and let the bloggers write the reviews and verify them.

Filtering · Sorting bloggers

As a promoter you have the ability to mark products shipped after a blogger updates an address.  After a blogger updates their Tomoson.com account with a contest winner or review address, the system will send you the promoter an email.

After you get this email log into your account and click on the promotion title to see what products you need to ship.

After you click on the green (export shipping addresses) button you will get an excel document with all the address information for each blogger.  You will be able to see if it’s a blogger address or contest winner and if you have shipped to them already.

Once you ship the products you can mark the product shipped in two ways

1.       Click the red link called mark product shipped and it will update each blog individually.  Each blogger will get an email letting them know the product was shipped.

2.       Check the boxes to the left of each bloggers name and click: Mark MULTIPLE Products Shipped.  This will notify everyone checked with an email in one click.

contest

Finding out what your facebook fan page id is simple.  All you need to do is follow these steps.

REMEMBER: this is optional on Tomoson.com, you can use friends instead with the f connect icon.

Step 1: Log into your facebook account and click downward facing triangle in the upper right and click on your facebook page.

Step 2: Click Edit Page under the page you want to pull the fans from.

Step 3: Copy the url at the top of the page next to the id= sign.  You can see an example of this below.  Your URL may look different but as long as you copy the id NUMBER after the equal sign you will be all good. Once you do that you can paste that into Tomoson and you’re done.

Step 4: Go into your page permissions and make sure you don’t have any age, country or other restrictions.  If you are not sure about this a good way to test it is log out of facebook then try to go to your pages direct url (ie www.facebook.com/tomosonreviews).  If you are required to log into facebook before seeing your page this means you have your permissions set incorrectly and Tomoson will not be able to grab the number of fans you have from your page.  You can also read the comments below made on July 18th below for more detail on the issue.

ARE YOU STILL GETTING 0 FACEBOOK FANS? Here is something you can try.

Solution for this problem might be: Set your “Age Restrictions ” in the Page “Settings” to “Anyone +13”. This will get rid of your error message.  This public profile is not visible.

Here is link to forum for people with similar problems: http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?pid=225632

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After working with a lot of bloggers we noticed that they didn’t like the large sponsored by Tomoson links on their blog posts.  We changed around the system so it will now only show one link on the bottom of the review.  The link will say ” this is a free product giveaway” and link back to tomoson.com.  We adjusted this feature so it wasn’t so intrusive and would comply with new review guidelines online.

Please watch the video to learn more

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After a lot of feedback from bloggers we made some new improvements to Tomoson.com.  The biggest complaint was the lack of “To Do” dates.  When will a promoter approve people, ship, ect…  We listened and added the dates shown in the image below.  As these dates get hit people are notified via email so the blogger and promoter will know what’s going to happen next.

If you go to any promotion on Tomson.com you will see these new additions to the promotion profile page.

——-Dates Added ——

Bloggers Can Apply From: These are the dates bloggers will have the opportunity to apply for the product review.  At this time promoters will be gathering bloggers for preapproval or auto-approval.

Final Blogger Selection Date: If there is a preapproval stage this date is the day the promoter will select the final set of bloggers to be approved or denied.

Product Ship Date: Date the promoter will be shipping all products to the bloggers.

Review Verification Time: Shows how long a blogger will have to use and write a review on the product.

Thanks again to everyone providing feedback making Tomoson.com better, and as the great Tracy Morgan once said:

“Live every week like it’s shark week”

approval · dates · tomoson · verification dates

First off I want to say thank you to all the bloggers that submitted feedback and helped make some important changes to tomoson.com.   Yesterday when a mass email was sent out requesting application to the promotions on Tomoson a lot of bloggers got denied.

Rightfully so, a lot of bloggers got annoyed with the lack of information that was provided to them in regards to why they were denied.

There were two bugs with the software.  One was not pulling in the correct information from the bloggers twitter followers.  If the username was not written exactly how it is on twitter (CAPS  and all) the software would not recognize it.  This caused a lot of bloggers to have no followers and get denied.

The second bug delt with compete.com.  We were using their api to pull in website traffic stats and preapproved bloggers.  Compete.com has some issues with their stats and were not pulling in correct information which caused a lot of your websites to not show any traffic.  This also caused the denial issue.

HOW WE FIXED IT

We did a couple things to fix the issue based on your feedback.

1. We removed the compete.com api and will not be requiring website traffic.
2. Adjusted the code so bloggers don’t need to update the twitter username exactly
3. We added prerequisites to the website so everyone can see what the required statistics are before they apply for a promotion.

Again thank you so much for your support and please look for more updates on promotions and new additions to Tomoson.com in the coming weeks.  In the mean time please don’t hesitate to provide more feedback and ideas on how we can make the system better.

REMEMBER: anyone you referrer to tomoson.com can earn you $25 if they upgrade to a paid membership.

bloggers denied · bug fix