The Parrut Blog

\Don't Work. Be Hated. Love Someones

tyabernethy — Mon, 28 May 2012 02:04:25 -0400

An amazing speech to a graduating class. Words of wisdom we could all live by.

Written by Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook (1988), was the guest-of-honour at a recent NTU convocation ceremony. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008.

I must say thank you to the faculty…

What we talk about when we talk about "talking about this"

chris-j — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:07:00 -0500

In addition to audience acquisition, Parrut drives user engagement. This is evident in the sustained increases our clients have experienced with Parrut’s Facebook App. But what’s it look like?

Well, there are a couple of places to look. First, you see it on Parrut Analytics. A spike in ‘Likes’, sign-ups and sharing is obviously a sure sign of engagement.

And then there’s that thing right there on the left side of your Facebook Page called “talking about this”.

Most of the companies we speak with understand this as a measure of engagement. But there’s a little confusion on the definition.

The metric’s name sounds as if it’s counting mentions across Facebook. It’s not. It’s counting unique users creating a “story” about the Page in the trailing seven day period.

Users create a story about a Page when they do any of the following: Like a Page, post on a Page wall, comment, share a post, mention the Page in a post, tag a photo, or check-in.

So what kind of increases have we seen with our clients? Nearly 100% in recent campaigns after launch, with smaller but still significant increases sustained even after the campaign ends.

The companies that are successful at driving this number up treat it as a process, continually engaging users with great content, direct interaction, and regular sweepstakes and promotions. Give us a shout to hear more or just go ahead and sign up to get started.

And Here We Have...Parrut for Facebook

chris-j — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:06:00 -0500

We’re really excited to introduce our Facebook Promotion App. Publishers and brands can now run their sweepstakes directly on their Facebook pages, driving fan growth, member sign-ups, and engagement.

It works like this: you have to Like the page to start, you enter your email to get your first entry, and then you earn additional entries for sharing on your wall, on Twitter, or via email. If you’re already a fan, you can still enter, and rack up additional entries by sharing.

The benefits are many. Publishers and brands get fan growth, membership sign-ups, and user engagement, along with loads of in-stream marketing. Fans are rewarded for following with the chance to win something valuable. Speaking of which, we’re referring our customers to our Big Prize Theory. Same applies here: go big.

So let us know if you’re interested in getting started. We’ll have some more news really soon on this front too.

The Tortoise and the Hare (and the Parrut)

chris-j — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:55:02 -0500

Happy new year! Whew, it’s been warm in the Northeast. With no need to tend to the fire at Parrut HQ, we’ve had plenty of time to dig through some recent sweepstakes data. We’ll be sharing some of the more interesting findings in the next few posts.

First up is a look at speed to open by channel. We’re talking about the time elapsed from when a user shares/sends and when the recipient clicks on the sender’s unique link (created by Parrut). In other words, how long does it take to generate a real lead?

We know Twitter feeds move faster than Facebook, so we we weren’t surprised to see Twitter shares in Parrut sweepstakes getting a quicker response. But the difference is quite profound.*

The median “open” on Twitter occurs just 30 seconds after the “send”. As compared to nearly four minutes on Facebook. And more than 39 minutes on email.

Wow. That’s eight times faster than Facebook. Looks like the Parrut’s found its Hare.

(* Note: The data set we looked at numbers in the tens of thousands of sweepstakes shares. We appreciate that this isn’t tens of millions. Not to worry - we promise to report back when we have that much data too.)

Parrut co-founder quoted in Mashable.

chris-j — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 22:51:23 -0500

Mashable chats with Parrut co-founder Tarek Pertew on next year’s tech predictions: How will Digital Change Small Business in 2012? (See #6 on daily deals.)

Tarek points out how companies are increasing their focus on their own content and new social marketing technologies to drive long-term, sustainable customer acquisition.

"Models that don’t create “real” value fizzle off eventually. “Real..."

tper2 — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 19:58:00 -0500

“Models that don’t create “real” value fizzle off eventually. “Real value” in deals space for consumers is hyper-local and relevancy. ‘Real value’ for merchants is yield management and exposure to unique customers. that’s it.”

- Sharad Verma - commenter on this TechCrunch Article

Cyber Monday creator cites social media sharing as driver of top online shopping day

chris-j — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:11:29 -0500

Last year, Cyber Monday sales topped a billion bucks. Tomorrow’s supposed to be bigger yet, maybe hitting $1.2 billion per Andrew Lipsman at comScore. And it’s estimated that 76 million (!) people - 6 out of 10 - will shop for gifts while at the office.

But it wasn’t always so. 2010 was the first year that Cyber Monday was tops for online shopping. Previously, it had only once ranked in the top 5 online shopping days of the year. So what’s behind the ascent?

Scott Silverman just wrote a great post on this for Techcrunch. He ran Shop.org when it coined the term Cyber Monday. He draws the correlation to the growth of Facebook and Twitter, and specifically the explosion of peer-to-peer sharing of deals and promotions.

He also notes that the Cyber Monday fruits are disproportionately going to the retailers that have invested in social (the 25 US retailers with the most Facebook fans have a combined 260 million fans).

Pretty amazing.

Parrut’s customers are across this spectrum. Some are making their first investments in social. Others have sophisticated social strategies and lots of followers, and they’re using our platform to improve their sharing functions, or leverage our analytics and ability to make product iterations quickly. Regardless, they’ve recognized the critical role that peer-to-peer sharing can play in their growth. It seems that Cyber Monday may highlight that dynamic more than any other day of the year.

"[Focus on] interaction. Not merely a click that leads to a sale. I’m talking about any sort of..."

tper2 — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 11:39:55 -0500

“[Focus on] interaction. Not merely a click that leads to a sale. I’m talking about any sort of interaction with you or your organization, whether it’s an online chat, a phone call or navigating your site. Too often, online marketers are focused on pennies per click instead of long-term value per engagement.”

- Seth Godin

[Check out the Parrut shout-out on NY1 by reporter Asa Aarons,...

tper2 — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:29:00 -0500

[Check out the Parrut shout-out on NY1 by reporter Asa Aarons, who also interviewed one of our co-founders, Tarek.]

As we wrote about recently, Parrut was a featured sponsor of the Silicon Alley Talent Fair in NYC this past Friday, 11/11/11.

For us (and I’m sure many others) the event was a huge success. We expect to sit down and have longer conversations with a handful of the many bright candidates we met and perhaps add another member to Team Parrut!

In addition to meeting great people, we enjoyed nice music and hung out with our new friends Nancy & her African Grey Parrot, Rusty (pictured above).

Q3 was humongous for ecommerce. And it's all user growth.

chris-j — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 16:55:57 -0500

We expect strong ecommerce growth for a long time to come (it’s one of the principal reasons we started Parrut). So we were weren’t shocked by headlines of the comScore Q3 report, but a few things did catch our eye.

The 13% year-over-year increase for Q3 makes four quarters in a row of double digit increases in the US. The last time we saw four quarters in a row with 10%+ growth was the run ending with Q2 2008.

It’s a pretty remarkable statistic when you consider the economic backdrop for that period vs. today’s environment. ‘07 and ‘08 were, of course, the end of an extraordinary run up in economic growth, stock market gains, and discretionary consumer spending.

But the last three years have been pure sludge. Consumers have been hanging on to their dough, and unemployment has been stuck at 9-10%. (Sure, consumer spending had quietly ticked up for nearly two years straight until the June surprise, but that doesn’t seem like enough of an offset to the unemployment issues, stagnant wages, and general uncertainty.)

So what did it then? Turns out its all user growth.

comScore cites a 22% year-over-year increase in the number of online buyers, noting that nearly 75% of the all Internet users are now buying something every quarter.

Wow.

Parrut featured in Inc. Magazine!

chris-j — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:45:47 -0500

Thrilled to see Parrut featured in Inc. as one of 10 New Web Tools to Make Life Easier!

Silicon Talent Alley Talent Fair

tper2 — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 09:15:19 -0500

We’re sponsoring the Silicon Alley Talent Fair (SATF) on Friday at The Altman Building on 18th street off 5th avenue in NYC. Parrut’s hiring, and SATF has become a top tech event in NYC. We’ll be one of nearly 100 hiring startups. Make sure to stop by or register, as we’re expecting almost 1,000 attendees.
Parrut will be running specials and giveaways on both our social referral program and our custom sweepstakes product at SATF. Currently Parrut is powering the SATF iPAD2 Referral Contest. Jump in on it today!

See ya there.

The inverse relationship between prize value and customer acquisition cost

chris-j — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 20:56:00 -0500

Toss the right prize out there for your social sweepstakes, and the sign-up growth is explosive. The largest successes with our sweepstakes product have been driven by broadly desirable prizes of considerable perceived value.

Nearly all of our campaigns with high caliber prizes have yielded couch-change customer acquisition costs.

So send a cable over if you want to chat about the right prizes or incentives for your social sweepstakes or refer-a-friend program. contact@parrut.com

Enter the bird.

chris-j — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:38:00 -0400

We’re Parrut and we’d like to introduce ourselves.

We built Parrut to provide sustainable online growth tools for merchants. We’re a growing team in New York with a diverse set of backgrounds (we come from retail, publishing, tech, payments, and finance). Like everyone, we’re blown away by how quickly merchants – big and small – have adopted social commerce as a different way to advertise and grow.

Our first product is a sweepstakes promotion tool that drives subscriber growth. Clients get the ability to launch a campaign to their email subscribers in minutes along with a clear dashboard that tracks results and offers an illuminating look at social recommendation patterns (we’re rolling out some pretty fun stuff here soon).

This is our start, and now other products and features are in the works. Each will be geared towards the same goal: enabling sustainable customer acquisition through social interactions and controllable promotions.

We owe a big thanks to the companies that have helped us get started, and we’ll highlight some of them in future posts. Of course we’re always looking for more early partners, so let us know if you’d like to give it a whirl or just chat.