Crayons & Aspirin

I attended a half-day seminar by Mike McDerment, the CEO of FreshBooks, yesterday. One of the things he talked about was crayons and aspirin. He says that every good web app is either a crayon, helping you create something new or increasing revenue, or an aspirin, relieving pain by making things easier or saving time. I think he is spot on.

FreshBooks is an aspirin. It takes the pain out of invoicing. SalesForce.com is a crayon. It provides tools that help do more with your business and increase sales and revenue. Both are great web apps.

If you are a small business...

If you are a small business, FeedMagnet is a crayon. We add value to your business by letting you showcase the buzz and energy around your business. We don't relieve any pain in running your business, but we help you get more out of your marketing and leverage your fans.

If you are a marketer...

If you are a marketing professional, FeedMagnet is an aspirin. You are on the hook to figure out a social media strategy for your company or your clients. FeedMagnet provides a ready-to-go solution that you can turn on right away to start leveraging social media for marketing.

If you already have a social media strategy that includes pulling in social content for marketing, we are an extra-strength aspirin. The pain of having to build a system that can talk to all the social media different social tools out there and make sure content you don't want doesn't sneak through into your feeds is immense.

And even if you did build a custom system for the task, you would have to keep it up to date as new tools like Google Buzz and Gowalla gain in popularity. FeedMagnet takes the pain away by costing less than custom development and staying up-to-date without requiring expensive upgrades with each new feature we add. You pay for a monthly subscription and the service just gets better and better over time.

Of course, there is still something very crayon-like about FeedMagnet - even for marketers. Having the tool set to do incredible things with social media content opens all kinds of doors for creativity and marketing innovation. It just helps that it relieves pain at the same time.