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

We have just opened up Tomoson.com and the site is ready to start having bloggers review REAL PRODUCTS.

Please go to www.Tomoson.com to view all the newest promotions.  We are continuing to add new products to the mix every week so please keep on checking back weekly.

This is a site made for bloggers so please click on the feedback button at the top of the page with any suggestions you have.  We’ve already got a lot of great feedback and will be adding new features to the site weekly as well.

Enjoy the website,

Tomoson.com

No tags

Sponsored by Tomoson.com

this is the best product ever!!!!!

Sponsored by Tomoson.com

No tags

Send Tomoson a referral, earn $25.  NO LIMIT

Hello Tomoson Bloggers,

Have you written a review or given away a product on your blog from a company that would be interested in trying our new service for FREE?  If so we will award you $25 for each promoter that signs up for a paid membership!

Promoters Register Here:  https://www.tomoson.com/dev/free-account

Update:  Tomoson is ready for beta testing!  But we need your help finding companies that want to giveaway products to bloggers to review & giveaway.  Please contact companies you have written a review or given away a product for to see if they want to beta test our service for FREE!  Just remind them to include your blog in the “referral” field so you receive credit!

Thanks again,

The Tomson Team

No tags

We have recently finished our message center in Tomoson.com and want to hear what you guys think about it.  Please watch the video below and let us know if there is anything we are missing or should fix.

HERE IS HOW YOU CAN TEST IT OUT (watch the video below first)

1. Log into your tomoson.com account
2. Go here and ask a question in the lower left corner: http://www.tomoson.com/dev/view-promotion/new_promotion_testing_message_center
3. Within a few hours (DURING NORMAL BUSINESS HOURS) someone in our team will respond to your question.
4. After that you will get an email with the answer to your question and you can start to interact with the message center more.

And because we all know how funny movie quotes should close out any blog.  Where did this classic line come from?

“I want to go somewhere, where the salmon instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano.”

message center · testing

Stats don't always tell the full story. (image by KevinzHengli)

Thank you for the feedback on both our logo and sharing of stats. We wanted to highlight this comment from Kelly from Kelly’s Lucky You:

Now, the third one, yeah, it’s fun but it doesn’t tell me who you are! When I looked up synonyms for “beta”, I got “dubious, experimental, flaky, mostly working, new, pre-release, suspect, testing, unready”

The beta comment is a great point. What does Beta mean to us? Beta means we are testing the platform with a few bloggers and promoters to ensure a few things:

• The platform is easy to us for both bloggers and promoters
• That helps connect both bloggers and promoters and provides equal value to both
• Third that it makes the web a better place.

It’s our goal to get out of Beta as quick as possible.

On Bloggers and Stats

As a blogger myself I know how a blog can play a role into your daily life. While every blogger has their own personal reasons for blogging at the core it comes down to having something to say. If you have enough interesting things to say and can entertain people will begin to follow you. Thus you gain an audience– this is what promoters are really looking for.

I do think it’s important to remember that promoters have limited resources and limited products to give away. So when they look at the landscape of bloggers they are asking themselves what is the best way for us to get the word out? They are really looking for what is called the vocal minority–finding a small subset of a market and making them aware of their product or service. As a blogger you fit into this vocal minority (or at least that’s the hope from a promoters standpoint).

Stats Don’t Tell the Full Picture

So on one hand stats are important but on the other they aren’t. How are stats not necessarily important? As a blogger or even someone engaging in a social network you have a level of influence. With certain stats like Facebook fans, Twitter followers, RSS and newsletter subscribers you can gauge at least some form of reach or audience. While that does sow some level of influence that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Take two bloggers who blog with the same consistency. They both have Twitter accounts. Blogger one has 3,000 followers and blogger two has 200. Objectively you could say Blogger one has the most influence and audience. But that is not the full story–when you look deeper Blogger one is using Twitter to really push communications whereas blogger two is truly engaging with a good percentage of her 200 followers. Also one of her followers writes for her local paper and often includes ideas she gets from the blogger in her columns. Blogger one really is not interacting and thus doesn’t have influence over her audience.

So Who Has More Influence?

The other aspect of influence is among your peers, friends and family. This is where numbers don’t always tell the full picture.  If you take Blogger two she might influence 6-8 of her friends on Facebook that never show up on some statistic. We bring this up just to explain a little more on how stats do play into how a promoter views your blog and your efforts. Sometimes we get so caught up on numbers that we don’t dig deep and say what is really going on.Also with Blogger two and the newspaper writer this is a form of what we call influencer of the influencer. One person influences someone who has a larger audience but you would never know that without knowing the connection between the two. There is no stat I know of that is going to tell you this influence effect.

In the end a promoter is looking for a blogger to review their product and give an honest assessment of it’s feature and uses. They also are hoping that in reviewing the product the people that you influence will either purchase or continue the conversation around their product.

Does This Help?

We wanted to share a little more on why stats are important but also why they are not. Yes we know kind of like answering a question with a question. This is important because not only do we want you the blogger to have success we also want a promoter to understand the value of engaging and interacting with all levels of bloggers on Tomoson.

Is this post helpful? Should we do more posts like this where we go a little deeper into the aspects of both promotions and blogging?

Movie Quote: “Surely you can’t be serious!”…  “I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley.”

bloggers · influence · promoters · social media · stats

Tomoson is all about connecting and helping manage promoters and bloggers who want to review products.  This being said promoters need to make an educated decision on what bloggers are best to review their products.

Tomoson would like to know besides publicly known information like your twitter followers, Page Rank, and Alexia ranking; would you provide Promoters other statistics about your blog to get a Free product to review?

Here are some of the statistics promoters have been asking for.

1. Facebook Fans
2. Reader Demographics
3. Your Gender
4. Your Age
5. Your Blog Type (tech, mommy, ect..)

Please comment below on your thoughts and feelings about some of these fields.

And because I like funny movies can you name this movie?  (I know this has nothing to do with Tomoson.com but it’s fun )

“It’s a jump…. to conclusions mat.”

blog · blogging · sharing stats

After hearing some comments about the Tomoson logo we wanted to make a blog post to see what the rest of you thought.  Originally we made this logo but we got feed back that it was too boring and wasn’t any fun.

ORIGINAL LOGO

Next we worked with our graphic designer and came up with two other logos based on the feedback.  We made this logo because it had a unique icon that symbolizes increased sales when using Tomoson.com.  Obviously it also looked like a T but we didn’t think the obvious needed to be stated

INCREASED SALES LOGO

The third logo was coined the fun logo.  If you look at any of the large websites out there you’ll see they don’t make things too fancy.  They use a unique font and brand one of the letters, facebook.com and twitter.com are perfect examples of this.  This lead us to the logo below which is more fun but simple like we wanted.

TOMOSON FUN LOGO

Internally we liked the fun logo best (that’s why you see it on the website) but we want to hear from you the pre-users.  Please comment on the blog below and let us know what you think.  Even if you don’t like any of them please tell us and give some constructive critisisum.

As Derek Zoolander and Hansel said, “It’s a walk-off”   

logo · tomoson · walk-off

As a marketer you are always looking for new ways to increase search engine rankings, build links, and add content about your product online.  Tomoson stratifies all those needs in one location.

Here is how Tomoson can help

Build More Backlinks:  Tomoson.com is a blogger management tool for promoters looking to get more reviews on their products.  Promoters can select from a list of bloggers on one website all willing to write a review on their product.  When these reviews are written most bloggers will link to the website they got the product from (your website).  As this is done by more and more bloggers it will build keyword rich backlinks.  You can even suggest what keywords you want the blogger to link back to your website with (optional).

Tomoson even allows you to track what links have been made, where bloggers are linking, and what keyword is being used.  In the end this will provide you with a high quality analysis of what links are being built for your search engine campaign.

Create More Content About Your Product:  Any SEO expert will tell you content is king; the more content you can have written about your product and company the better.   Tomoson can exponentially grow the content being written about your product with blogger reviews.  As you send out products to bloggers they will write reviews on their blogs generating more buzz and content about your product.

Increase Search Engine Rankings:  Tomoson will help you increase your search engine rankings because of the two reasons above.  As bloggers are writing content about your product and linking to your website with keyword rich backlinks.  Your website will slowly gain momentum on search engines that your competitors can’t stop.

Look for the Tomoson.com Official Launch coming soon!!!!

No tags