On Monday, our development team will start developing sales lead capture functionality. In a nutshell, lead capture is about capturing who looked at a particular document, and with the consent of the edocr community member, pass his or her information to the publisher of the document.
This only works if more and more people registers with edocr.com than simply consume documents without registering. First task is for us to encourage more visitors to register. Second part includes obtaining the consent with final parts on developing tool kits that the publisher could use.
We will also be attempting to use Google Chart API to represent traffic graphically.
We would very much like your thoughts on the followings:
- Any concerns you might have on release of data. Remember, we need your consent to release your email address.
- If you have experience in implementing Google Chart API, is there anything we should be aware of other than the documents provided by Google?
- What tools would you like to extract the leads?
Your participation on this vital development is much appreciated.
If you are a customer of edocr.com, you can now join edocrExclusive Private Group on Twitter.
How To Join This Group
Go to edocrExclusive and click on the "send request" button. We must approve new members before they are permitted to post or receive messages from the Group. Please note this service is only for paying customers and not for those who use edocr Free service.
How To Post
At the beginning of your Tweet type "d edocrExclusive". This will send a private message to the group, which Twitter4Groups will then forward to everyone else who is following. Do not use @, this makes the message public to everyone.
Use Case
We hope this will allow our customers to communicate easily with each other improving trading and perhaps extend the goodwill by offering discounts to other customers where it makes sense.
As part of our preparations for exhibiting at Technology World 2009 on 23rd and 24th November 2009 at Coventry, UK, we have produced a new leaflet highlighting our current focus on sales lead generation through documents and the priced options we currently promote.
Embedded above is the new flyer on the left hand side followed by previous flyers. The middle one was prepared for Internet World held in April 2009 in London. Below is the full document, A5 size in terms of print.
Why should you consider edocr.com?
This section highlights 5 benefits we provide:
1. Maximised Exposure - We can bring significant traffic to your documents by simply being published on edocr.com.
2. Distribution - Your documents can be bookmarked to 198 largest websites in the world from Facebook and LinkedIn to Twitter. In addition, the documents can be emailed to mail lists. This can be done by you or anyone else who come across document.
3. Free SEO - Indexed by Google, Bing and other search engines, documents are easily found through search engine listings, increasing the traffic to your documents.
4. Prospect Power - Anyone who finds your documents of interest can contact you direct without waiting for approval or knowing the corresponding contact details.
5. Sales leads capture - You will soon be able to run campaigns based on sales leads captured.
What I realised by producing this flyer is that messaging on edocr.com home page and associated pages need to be updated. It seems work never stops
For an unknown reason, the image sizing module within edocr.com have malfunctioned over the last few weeks. As a result, your picture would not have re-sized to suit your account page or your document pages. This has only affected accounts created recently.
If your picture is displayed without resizing, it will look like the following image, in terms of giant size.
In this case, please upload your picture again, and it should re-size automatically.
Please don't hesitate to contact us if you come across any problems with this process or any aspects of edocr.com.
edocr.com will continue to evolve and grow thanks to our valued customers. We want to help them beyond the growing capability of edocr.com by developing an exclusive club for CxOs of our customers, where edocr Ltd will take an active involvement in introducing parties where we believe new revenue relationships can be established. We know this may become a challenge to manage as we grow from our current customer base today to many thousands tomorrow. Whilst we cannot predict the future in how this exclusive group will evolve, we will do our best to build a powerful ecosystem around edocr.com by getting our hands dirty.
Let me introduce some of our customers demonstrating the diversity and potential for trade between each other:
1. First Hosted Ltd - NetSuite VAR
2. Horwath Clark Whitehill - Top20 Accountancy Service
3. Latitude Group - SEO specialist
4. Northern StartUp 2.0 - Ecosystem for early stage tech companies
5. Aaron & Partners - legal services
6. ThinSpace - ThinClient solutions
7. Calon Associates - Lighting controls
8. Accountis - e-invoicing and payment solutions
We will explore how this could be setup on-line through edocr so that we can improve communications.
We need to have many thousands of customers going forward. If you like what we are trying to achieve, please make recommendations to your customers, suppliers and friends, so that we can build our business, and continue to help you grow yours.
Some of edocr.com customers have requested the ability to replace an existing document with a new document. We would like your help in firming up the specification. Lets take the following document as an example:
Our thoughts on the matter:
1. The flash document URL shall remain the same. This is important from SEO point of view, as for "customer manual", this document page appears on Google.com's first page
2. If the document is linked (including bookmarked), the URL shall remain the same for the link to work.
3. If the document is embedded (which we may or may not know), then the embedding codes should not change.
4. On edocr.com, for each document, there is a specific, .jpg, .swf and .pdf files, so with (3) in mind, the new document must replace the existing .jpg, .swf and .pdf files
5. If replaced, is there a need to maintain the old document file? If so, the .jpg, .swf and .pdf have to be renamed, which I believe is not easy within Amazon S3 environment, where edocr.com document store is based at.
6. If old files are maintained, what purpose would they serve? The reason the document is updated is to ensure public has access to the most up to date information. Retaining old files will only bring confusion to the reader.
7. The traffic information including stats must be retained.
8. Tags, document category, document rating and any comments must be retained.
9. Is there a need to add a statement to document description to highlight that the document was replaced on a particular date and time?
10. Of course, you can manually change tags, document category and document description
11. The document title shall retain the same as this is reflected in the URL
Are there any other requirements we missed out? You thoughts are very much appreciated.
edocr.com provides two ways to upload your document files, these being, single upload and bulkupload. Bulkupload is currently restricted to 25 document files per upload, but you may use bulkupload as many times as you wish to publish your full document inventory to edocr.com.
We also have an internal tool that allows unlimited number of document files to be uploaded. If you wish us to upload your document files either using bulkupload or internal tool, please contact us today for a quote.
edocr is built with three key components, the front-end (edocr.com), the document processing engine and storage. When a document file is uploaded, it goes through a set sequence before the processed document is available for distribution and interactivity.
Once a document file is uploaded, edocr creates a flash document page with its unique URL. Until the document is processed, the flash document page will continue to display the message "The flash page is under processing. Please wait." as shown below.
Whilst the message is displayed, the document page will continue to attract visitors, which edocr tracks and store for 16 weeks. Once the processing is completed, the message will disappear and flash document will be available for view.
Current bulk upload settings alert edocr team when a document takes more than 60 minutes to process. Depending on our resource availability, we can intervene to resolve any issues. If the document is not processed within 720 minutes, the publisher is informed of failure to process. At this point, the document is automatically purged from the queue.
I hope this explanation makes sense and happy to hear any comments you might have.
We had problems sending this newsletter due to a bulk e-mail issue. We will attempt to send it again to our community in the very near future.
This newsletter covers:
1. Making your documents work harder for your business
2. Your company profile on edocr.com
3. SPECIAL OFFER: Too busy to upload, tag and describe! Let us help you.
4. Launch of Tweetdoc.org
5. FREE OFFER: Promotion of your documents
1. Making your documents work harder for your business
Almost all organisations worldwide produce documents for external use irrespective of whether they are a Small-to-Medium Business (SMB) or a multinational. Some of these documents are produced for sales and marketing (e.g. brochures, case studies, white papers, press releases and articles) whilst others are produced for operational (user manuals, data sheets, certificates and guidelines) and reporting purposes (financial reports and statements, business reviews, and safety and environmental policies).
Having produced these documents at a significant cost, organisations fail to achieve an acceptable return on investment due to lack of compelling distribution channels available to them. Such channels are limited to corporate website, e-mails, post or hand out at meetings and conferences. In the case of e-mails and post, recipients are already known to the organisation. Meetings and conferences are attended by a small number of individuals. What channels are available to reach out to those who are not known by the organisation? Almost none, other than the corporate website, which in almost all cases do not cater for an organisation’s complete inventory of public non-sensitive documents as websites have never been designed to hold large number of documents.
On the other hand, edocr.com ensures that any document uploaded, works hard as possible ensuring higher return on investment.
edocr.com provides a highly interactivity environment for publishing and distributing an organisation’s public documents across the Internet. Once uploaded to edocr.com, both the organisation as well as the growing edocr community and visitors who come across the documents start to distribute to friends and colleagues as well as to the world’s most popular social networks such as Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. At the same time, Google and other search engines ensure that the documents are found easily, giving the organisation significant global market place, which they could not reach out through their document inventory in the past.If you have not taken advantage of edocr.com fully, why not start uploading your full document inventory today?
2. Your company profile on edocr.com
For £25 per month, we provide you a company profile which can be listed against appropriate business categories on our directory. Once you add your employee accounts, all the documents uploaded by employees will be displayed fully categorised, and each document will begin to work hard for your business. Why not subscribe annually and save the cost of two months subscription? Visit http://www.edocr.com/prices for more details
Here is what Steve Livingston, Tax Partner at a top 20 Accountancy Firm, Horwath Clark Whitehill (http://www.edocr.com/organisation/horwath-clark-whitehill) in UK said about edocr.com:
"Not only does edocr.com offer us the possibility of a 'one-stop-shop' for all our business advisory publications on an easy to navigate platform but it also allows us to extend our reach to potential new clients with added interactivity. This added interactivity allows us to have two way conversations with businesses about the issues raised in our publications which should help build relationships and provide useful feedback on current business needs. We can then adapt our service offerings accordingly"
3. SPECIAL OFFER: Too busy to upload, tag and describe! Let us help you
To our surprise, many organisations continue to make simple mistakes that have drastic impact on how your documents are found within edocr, search engines and other social networks. Some of these include: leaving file names as document titles with hyphens and underscores; inadequate tagging with missing name of organisation, subject matter, and document type; lack of document descriptions; selecting inappropriate document categories, and not adding a forward web link to your website.
For a limited number of organisations, we are able to upload your documents on your behalf to give optimum results ensuring higher return on investment. We can offer a special introductory price of £100 for 100 documents.
If you wish to run specific marketing campaigns through edocr.com, do get in touch today for a quotation.
4. Launch of Tweetdoc.org
At edocr.com, you can configure your accounts to automatically publish your documents to Twitter. With the integration by Tweetdoc, now you could create a report on your brand or a competitor or market on tweetdoc.org, and upload the report to edocr.com for distribution and interactivity. Here is a sample of Tweetdocs on edocr.com
5. FREE OFFER: Promotion of your documents
edocr.com has nine document promotional spaces on home page, document directory and business directory. Get in touch immediately if you would like your documents displayed in promotional spaces free of charge for a week. We reserve the right to reject requests if requested documents are considered not appropriate for promotion.
Best regards
edocr Team
Most of us would have heard of Twitter by now and some of us have taken the trouble to send a tweet or two, follow a few friends and colleagues’ tweets and be followed by few others. Twitter has become a phenomenon with over 23 million unique visitors accessing twitter.com directly in July 2009 with global rank rising to 43rd largest website in the world. But most of all, its success comes from the adaptation by technology world, where new applications are being built on daily basis using twitter.com API. These vary from twitter clients, which allow better access without ever having to visit twitter.com to applications such as tweetstats.com, which provide analysis of your Twitter account. Most of these applications are built in the US whilst the biggest audience for Twitter comes from London, UK.
Today, Manchester, UK based software developer Martin Rue is launching tweetdoc.org, a simple tool that helps companies produce documents in pdf format facilitating brand monitoring, competitor and market analysis and event monitoring through the power of Twitter.
Startup 2.0, the northern eco-system for tech entrepreneurs setup by the Founder of edocr.com, is helping Martin to explore business applications of tweetdoc.org
Today, tweetdoc.org is also launching its integration with edocr.com, a global document publishing, distribution and interactivity platform, based out of Daresbury Innovation Centre, which is based between Manchester and Liverpool. The integration allows uploading documents (e.g. brand monitoring report) created by tweetdoc.org to edocr.com by clicking a button. Once uploaded, edocr.com creates a thumbnail and flash document that can be embedded on websites and blogs. The built-in distribution tools allow the document links to be e-mailed to as many friends and colleagues as you wish, as well as bookmark to over 50 largest social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Digg and Stumble Upon. Suddenly the document you uploaded begins to penetrate through the Internet bringing significant traffic, leading to potential sales opportunities for your business.
Manoj Ranaweera, Founder & CEO of edocr.com commented, “We are glad to be working with tweetdoc.org which can help our customers understand how to monitor their brands, competition and markets on twitter. From technical perspective, tweetdoc.org has allowed us to prove that our investment in developing an OAuth based API is finally paying off. We were ahead of Twitter in launching our API, and this is the first time it has been used by a Twitter application. Twitter plays a key role in our strategy as it has become a channel for distributing links of documents hosted by edocr.com. As such edocr.com has a built-in auto-tweet functionality that each user can configure. This allows document title and link to be displayed on twitter upon uploading a document to edocr.com bringing instant traffic by multitude of twitter clients and applications”.
Martin Rue, Founder of tweetdoc.org commented, “Though tweetdoc.org was initially intended to help people document their twitter based events, exploring the business use cases has been very exciting. Integration with edocr.com now provides a complete solution for people wanting to monitor anything from what is being said about their company to what’s happening in their particular industry – and through edocr.com, allows an end to end solution for distributing this information, as well as permanently storing it.”
Do let us know how you plan to use tweetdoc.org and its integration with edocr.com? A number of sample documents could be found from here
References:
- The Next Web: Save Twitter Search results forever with Tweetdoc
- TechCrunch Europe: Monitor your brand or event’s Twitter impact with tweetdoc.org
Just like any other web 2.0 proposition, edocr.com also struggled to come up with a viable commercial model for some time. We knew from the outset that our strategy would be to generate revenues on the first day our product would allow us to do so.
Most strategies are driven by available resources, mainly around level of capital at one's disposal. Given that we were self-funded, we did not have the luxury of spending significant dollars (actually sterling pounds) by enriching our product with features. We had no choice but to allocate all our resources to get the product ready for commercialisation, which we achieved on 1st June 2009.
At early days, we had number of potential strategies to pursue, some of these were:
- Sell documents: ironically, this is what one of our competitors chose recently, entering into a market dominated by Amazon.com
- Licensing: we rightly declined to pursue this
- White-labeling/branding: delayed, but nevertheless an opportunity which got our attention
- Pro Account: not pursued, but may revisit when it becomes a compelling opportunity
At the end, by remarkable coincidence, we decided to launch Company Profiles and the associated edocr.com Business Directory, a model no one else have thought of until edocr.com. At this juncture, we started paying more attention to the needs of organisations than individuals, even though we deal at individual level.
Having said all above, what is above got to do with the title of this blog article? Well having come up with a commercial model, how do you know whether anyone would buy it? Would you consider paying for your own services? Do you believe the services you sell provide a value? Well, in my case the answer was a compelling Yes Yes Yes.
In addition to edocr.com, I also run eveo Ltd, which has been an early user of edocr.com. Rightly so, eveo Ltd became the first customer of edocr.com. This allowed me to view edocr.com from a completely different perspective, and really question the value it provides. The end result is, value-focussed customer-centric product delivery.
Here are some of the types of documents hosted on edocr.com platform and embedded on eveo's website:
- Invoices, yes you heard right. eveo Ltd have streamlined invoices for its events, which attendees can download from edocr.com.Entry point is embedded invoices on event pages.
- Brochures
- Press releases
- Partner offerings including partner marketing collateral
- Third party documents creating a rich resource base
We are also entering into building exhibition lists thanks to eveo Ltd, exploring possibilities through forthcoming Technology World 2009 Conference, where in fact, edocr Ltd would be an exhibitor.
It is not always possible for one to become its own customer. However, if you could achieve this somehow, you could begin to crique your own product from a completely different perspective, which can only result in improving your customer value proposition.
Keen to hear any thoughts you might have on this issue.
