Real Time Digital: Episode 3
In our third episode, Emily and I discuss Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and how his Facebook hoodie with a mysterious insignia was found on eBay. We also feature interviews with the CEO at DealNews.com, Dan de Grandpre, and Steve Greenwood of online private sharing and real-time collaboration service Drop.io. If you missed hearing it live, listen here!
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Announcer: You are now logged in to Real‑Time Digital presented by TheJARGroup.com, online marketing with measurable results. Welcome two of the JAR Groups’ savviest Internet marketers, Emily Liedblad and Lauren Garcia. Listen as these digital divas analyze hot trends and chat with the in‑crowd of the digital world. Real‑Time Digital starts in real time right now.
Emily Liedblad: Hello loyal listeners, welcome to Real Time Digital hosted by TheJARGroup.com. We are your digital diva hosts Emily Liedblad….
Lauren Garcia: And I’m Lauren Garcia, welcome.
Emily: So glad to have you back with us. We hope everybody is enjoying the nice summer weather. We know we are. OK. So first off on our web hotlist is Mark Zuckerberg, who as you all know is the CEO of Facebook. The CEO, and founder of the company. So apparently during the digital D8 conference last week, he was in the hot‑seat being interviewed or something on some type of panel, and he at some point took off his hooded sweatshirt.
Which, the person who is interviewing him, discovered had this weird logo type badge sewn into the lining of the sweatshirt. And of course, she pointed it out, and the tech world got a hold of it, and got a picture of it, and there’s just been like blogs all over the place about what this secret logo badge could mean.
Lauren: Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of different people talking about is it Illuminati? I’m like, what kind of symbol is this? Obviously it’s a Facebook symbol. It has their mission statement, their unofficial mission statement in it. But, I think it’s crazy because as you know, it’s now ended up on eBay, the sweatshirt.
Emily: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, so apparently once this blew up in the media, and people have said some pretty ridiculous, outlandish accusations and suggestions about what it could be. But, regardless of the meaning, one of these ended up on eBay, and you’ll never guess how much it’s going for?
Lauren: Tell me.
Emily: Over $4, 000 for quote unquote “an exclusive Facebook hooded, size XL”. And, whoever the seller is, they describe it in their little summary as, “the same exact one worn by Mark Zuckerberg at the D8 conference. I was gifted this hooded by a friend and employee at Facebook.” So if you are really interested in seeing it with your own eyes, you might want to hop on eBay and up the bid, if you have a few extra thousand dollars hanging around.
Lauren: No big deal. No big deal.
Emily: That’s ridiculous. And I think that goes for being not hot. That’s a little ridiculous.
Lauren: Yeah. Mark Zukerberg’s sweatshirt is fairly hot, and he was apparently at the conference. But, paying 4K for a hoodie, not hot.
Emily: Yeah, definitely not hot. I don’t know if it was supposed to be a secret. But people weren’t happy about it. It’s pretty funny how something like this can become such a major issue. Well, what else is hot?
Lauren: Well, going off of that, Facebook continues to be the subject of much buzz. Bangladesh lifted their Facebook ban after about a week. So, that’s good, I guess.
Emily: So they had put it on and everybody’s Facebook disappeared for awhile?
Lauren: I guess. I’m not really sure how stuff like that works countrywide. But, obviously I’ve heard a lot about China blocking things. And so I guess Bangladesh just lifted their Facebook ban. I think that was for images and like cartoons surrounding religious figures, so, touchy subject.
Emily: What’s not hot, going off of that. I just read an article about how China just blocked Foursquare. Be lucky or be fortunate, be glad that we live in a country where you can show yourself in pictures playing beer pong on the roof, or getting low at the club.
Lauren: Not sure if you want to put those pictures up there for your potential employers to see!
Emily: Yes. Self‑regulation is key, definitely.
Lauren: And with all this freaking privacy options on Facebook, it’s always tricky, but get in there and figure it out.
Emily: Yes, it’s important.
Lauren: So what else is hot?
Emily: You know what? I guess we should actually jump ahead to what’s not hot on this one. So what’s not hot is that we are currently in the 51st day of the BP oil spill, which is just an unfathomable disaster.
Lauren: Crazy.
Emily: And federal authorities are estimating that over 798, 000 gallons of crude oil have been gushing into the sea every single day.
Lauren: Every day. An insane amount. I can’t even…
Emily: It literally makes my blood boil every time I think about it. And I am happy to report that on the what’s hot side of the situation that people in the digital world are definitely taking action and figuring out how they can use social networks and social media to really help out with the gulf oil spill.
Lauren: Definitely. I think people are really stepping up to the plate. We’re seeing these different apps coming out. I was just looking at one today, it’s called The Oil Reporter, and if you’re in the area you can take a picture, or a video, or report what you’re seeing so that you can alert people that this is another area that needs help, this is what’s going here just to make sure the word is getting out. Also, I was reading about Tumblr. It’s made its dashboard black now to raise awareness and also money to support the oil spill. I guess users can donate right on the dashboard, which is awesome. It makes it so easy and accessible just to reach out and help in whatever way you can.
You can donate to different kinds of groups. The ones listed are Save Our Gulf, the National Audubon Society, Greater New Orleans Foundation. These are all great causes, and this is affecting so much wildlife and the environment…
Emily: Destroying tons of diversity in wildlife that’s really distressing. If you can, get out there and get onto the National Wildlife Federation website. See what you can do to help volunteer and raise funds, whether it be a few dollars or just want to donate some of your time. Any bit helps.
Lauren: So what’s coming out of a very not‑hot situation is some hot social media coverage and support, I guess.
Emily: Absolutely. Well, going off of that, it’s a grim thing but definitely a huge, huge, huge topic of conversation today so we thought we would mention it, but we’re super‑excited to feature our guest today.
Lauren: We have Dan, the CEO of DealNews, and later we will have Steve from Drop.io.
Emily: Exactly! So stay tuned with us, and we’re going to feature some awesome interviews right after the break.
Announcer: Real Time Digital will be back after this download from our sponsors. [radio break]
Announcer: Welcome back to Real Time Digital, presented by TheJARGroup.com, online marketing with measurable results. Here are you digital divas, Emily and Lauren. [music]
Emily: Welcome back to Real Time Digital, hosted by www.TheJARGroup.com. We’re your digital divas Emily and Lauren, and we’d like to welcome Dan DeGrandpre to the show from DealNews.com. Welcome to the show, Dan.
Dan DeGrandpre: Hi, thanks for having me.
Emily: Absolutely. So, you’re from DealNews.com which is actually just right down the street from The JAR Group offices. Why don’t you just go ahead and start off by giving us a little bit of background telling us about how DealNews got started, and what exactly it is.
Dan: Deal News is a bargain shopping website. People can use us to find news on deals, kind of like, “Where every day is black Friday” is our tagline. So, any time that a store has a particularly good price on a deal ‑‑ on a product, I should say ‑‑ we help people by telling them about that information. So news on deals, that’s all we do.
Lauren: So Dan, how do you find these hot deals?
Dan: Oh, a lot of ways. We have some software that goes out there and looks at this kind of information. Once we started to gain some size, a lot of the retailers started coming to us and saying, “We’d like to get rid of this product, would you list this on your site?” And, of course, then we also look at what else is going on out there. We check out the other sites out there that help people shop online, to see if there’s anything out there.
Lauren: Awesome.
Emily: That’s awesome. I’ve got to say, I love Deal News. I peruse it many times a week, and… My main question, that’s just burning is, do you ever find yourself hoarding up on these deals? Like, do you have 18 luggage sets, or like 50, 60″ screen TVs?
Dan: It’s totally dangerous. This is like… When we hire somebody, we tell them, “By the way, the big danger of this job is you see this stuff usually before we actually post it on the site. So the danger is you’re going to buy stuff.” And that’s a big deal! [laughs] People will do a lot of this… I try to keep myself buying things that are $10, but I can’t always do that. But I don’t have multiple luggage sets, but I used to. I seriously did. You brought up luggage sets: I had like three different luggage sets that I got the real good prices on. Some like high-end Samsonite and some other ones, and I was like, “Look, I’ve got to streamline this,” and wound up giving it away to family.
But, all kinds of stuff. I haven’t gotten to the point where I have like eight TVs in my home, but I’ve got like…
Emily: In every room?
Dan: I’ve got like seven computers at home. And in a New York apartment, that’s a lot of computers, you know?
Lauren: Yeah!
Emily: Well, people must be really looking forward to your holiday gifts and birthdays.
Lauren: Oh my gosh.
Dan: [laughs] Yeah, we do pretty well on the Secret Santa kind of thing, because it’s under $10 or whatever.
Lauren: Oh my gosh. Yeah, I can imagine. That’s hilarious. I want to be involved in your Secret Santa, exchange. [laughter]
Emily: Can you expand it to neighbors as well?
Dan: Absolutely.
Lauren: Dan, how did you determine that something like this would be profitable?
Dan: We actually… We’re kind of different than most online companies that are out there, because we’ve been around way too long. I should say it better than that, but it’s true. We’ve been around 13 years, so we actually started the company in 1997. It’s kind of funny. We’re actually proof that you can actually run a .com through two busts. You know, through the .com bust of 2001 and the things that have been happening over the last 18 months or so, and still manage to grow.
And we’ve been able to do that because… Part of it’s been some luck, like finding this idea back in the day. And back in the day we had to change the model, because when we first started it was all banner ads, revenue on the site. And it was designed to do that. It was designed to be the kind of site where people would want to advertise, and the retailers were the ones advertising.
And then around oh, five or six years ago, we changed to be more of a performance marketing model, where we used more of CPA, CPC, affiliate program, that kind of revenue. So it was a real big change actually, about five years ago.
Lauren: Right. So, what are the differences then, or what is the difference between the two .com busts as you put it, and how has ‑‑ aside from the advertising ‑‑ how has DealNews evolved through those two?
Dan: Well, we’re… Probably one of the things that’s helped us out a lot is that we’re recession resistant, in that people actually look more for our kind of information when they don’t have money. And that’s just a nice place to be in that situation. It’s not just benefited us, it’s benefited a lot of companies, like Groupon or Gilt, and a lot of others who are far larger and grown super fast. But it’s also been useful for us to be diversified. No one client constitutes even 10% of our revenue. We have a lot of revenue diversification, so this last bust when, if you remember Circuit City, the retail store going under?
Linens ‘N’ Things going under. These things didn’t hurt us like they might have. I know some sites that work in the deal and coupon space had some big problems when some particular stores either went under or started to cut back on their marketing spend. And we didn’t have any kind of anchor client that was killing us because we had really good diversification. And so, revenue diversification is really important. It’s kind of like if your business model’s based entirely on Google and the algorithm changes, that’s trouble. That’s a big deal. And we don’t have those kinds of problems as well because most of our traffic is repeat visitors. Less than, I think it’s like a quarter of our traffic that comes from search.
Emily: Yeah, no, cool. I was just looking and it looks like DealNews.com has over a hundred… Or, one million unique visitors. So that’s great. [laughs]
Dan: Yeah, I think our internal reporting is close to two million this time of year. It depends on which service you use. And Christmas, it’s five million. Five million’s a lot. Five million’s a pretty good place to be at. It’s in the top 500 or so, some kind of big number. But it’s still… We’re still very targeted, so we’re able to do a lot because people… One of the stats we love to trumpet is that the typical DealNews visitor buys something online every three days or less. Seventy‑five percent of people who come to our site buy something online every week. So that’s a lot of online shopping going on.
Lauren: Wow!
Emily: That’s huge!
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: Incredible.
Lauren: And it says a lot about your business too and the retention and loyalty of customers and everything.
Emily: Yeah. Congratulations on that! That’s huge.
Lauren: Yeah.
Dan: Well, I’d like to take the credit, but it’s really just good people. We’ve got about 50 employees and they’re just really smart people. They’re really, you know, the ones who make us look good.
Emily: In terms of all these other deal sites that are out there, how do you differentiate with, you know, there’s like so many. Like you were saying, there’s Groupon, which are slightly different, but then in the same channel there’s like SlickDeals and Fatwallet. What’s your competitive difference at DealNews?
Dan: Sure. Absolutely. Well, we’re not user driven and those things are. And there’s a couple differences there for the users and then some differences on the business side as well. You look at somebody like Groupon. Groupon, they’re aggregating information about local stores. Groupon’s somebody that we might want to do a partnership with, you know. If Groupon has these local deals, we can work with somebody like Groupon and all the other local deal of the day sites as opposed to somebody, let’s say Fatwallet. People are more likely to want to visit them or us and maybe both actually. A significant portion of our users will use more than one because it’s really easy to move around. And a lot of their users float back and forth between each other.
The thing about the difference between us is that we’re editorially driven. We’re kind of old school in that respect in that we choose what goes up on the site. And then we do that in a way where our users are happy. So we do a lot of data mining to see what deals are performing really well. And then make sure that we list those kind of deals. And that simple formula, focusing on that, focusing on high quality, we tend to ban stores that are not reputable. We tend to spend a lot of time researching every deal making sure that the price is actually the best price on that product because if you could just float to Amazon and buy it for less, there’s no point in us listing it. So we do that kind of research before hand. And that’s a different, you know, tact than a user generated site.
A user generated site has a lot of advantages. It doesn’t have what we have, but it has different advantages like, for example, the users will be more likely to tell you whether or not the product is very good. They would be able to tell that right in the thread. So it’s a different kind of information. Ours is, you know, very user driven. You just don’t see it from the site. If you look at the hotness ratings from our site, those are user driven. And they are what drives what deals we list on our site.
Lauren: So, I mean, given that in your user interaction (I know that you guys have a Twitter and Facebook account) do you really use that to do user interactive marketing?
Dan: Absolutely. You know, Facebook is just a community for our fans. I don’t think Facebook yet is where people engage in commerce so much as people are just talking about things that the companies and the people that they love do. And for our fans on Facebook we try to engage them by doing things like, “Tell us about what’s going on, about DealNews and list your opinions.” We have surveys through there. And then, of course, we just do a lot of normal kind of Facebook promotions like giving away free T‑shirts. In fact, we had a free T‑shirt give away where somebody was coming up with taglines for the site. Just write on the wall to win something. And one of the taglines was, “It’s like Internet porn for my wallet, ” was what they called DealNews. And we thought that was really funny so we printed it up on T‑shirts and gave them away on Facebook all over again. And so using Facebook that way. And the Facebook users thought it was freaking hilarious, right? And so that was just really one example of something that we’ve done with Facebook.
Twitter’s very different, right? Twitter is real time information and conversation. It’s not the same kind of thing. And honestly, we’re still working on Twitter right now. We’ve only got, I don’t know, total maybe seven thousand followers to all of our quoted things, maybe, ten thousand, somewhere in that range. That’s not very many, not in this day and age, at least.
So, we’re trying to figure out how to get more and more there. We actually have some role apps, some changes coming up in the next couple of weeks.
Lauren: Very cool.
Emily: Great. Well, I guess we’ll look forward to seeing some sweet DealNews apps on the horizon. Anything else in the works for DealNews?
Dan: There’s always stuff even though we’re already into Black Friday planning. It’s just the way it is. We’ve got to prepare for the day after Thanksgiving. We start that prep pretty much in January, and as we get closer we have more and more development geared up. We actually have a large development team on staff, and a lot of the work they’re going to be doing over the next four months is for Black Friday.
Lauren: Planning ahead.
Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I can see why.
Lauren: Yeah, absolutely.
Dan: You’ve got to.
Emily: Yeah, absolutely. So, just to wrap up, we’re almost out of time. But, one last question. What is the sweetest deal that you, at least, in your opinion have seen on DealNews?
Dan: You know, that’s funny. It actually is a really old deal. It’s not that we haven’t seen great deals since then, but I’m talking about 10 years ago.
Lauren: Oh, yeah.
Dan: Things were different 10 years ago because…how do I say this honestly? VCs were stupid. That’s the nicest way that I could say it. VCs decided to give truckloads of money to online retailers to essentially give away to their potential users. They basically would pay any price for client acquisition. You probably have heard of WebMD. One of WebMD’s promotions was they gave away New Balance shoes worth 80 bucks, just give them away. You’d go register at WebMD. You didn’t have to purchase anything. You didn’t have to look up an illness. You just got shoes worth 80 bucks. That was great. That’s not the best one.
There was another store that basically gave away‑‑they were kind of a department store called Value America. And in essence, they gave away $300 for free. This is essentially what they did. So, you ask me what the best deal ever gotten was?
It was from venture capitalists through this company called Value America. At the time I bought a PC and a Compaq. And I remember it was like, it’s a Compaq, but it’s free! So, I basically paid nothing for it and got an entire PC for nothing. You don’t find those deals.
Emily: No, not so much anymore.
Lauren: That’s awesome.
Dan: There’s amazing deals but not like that. So, I’m sad to say that that era’s over and people decided they wanted to get saved.
Lauren: Oh well, you’re still coming up with quite a few pretty sweet deals as it is.
Again, I thank you so much for taking the time to be on our show. It was great to have you.
Dan: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Emily: Thank you so much.
Announcer: Real Time Digital will be back after this download from our sponsors. [radio break]
Announcer: Welcome back to Real Time Digital presented by TheJARGroup.com, online marketing with measurable results. Here are your digital divas, Emily and Lauren.
Lauren: Welcome back to Real Time Digital, I’m Lauren.
Emily: And I’m Emily!
Lauren: We’re from the JAR Group. We’re now here with Steve Greenwood from Drop.io. He is another DUMBO‑ite. That is DUMBO like we talked about in the last show, Down Under the Manhattan‑Brooklyn Overpass.
Emily: [laughs]
Lauren: Isn’t that it?
Emily: Yeah, down under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.
Lauren: Oh, the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. It works out, same thing. Anyway, we’re really excited to have Steve on the show, so welcome Steve.
Steve Greenwood: Hi, thanks for having me. I also always get that acronym wrong, as well. [laughter]
Emily: That’s funny.
Lauren: Whoops! Well, anyway, we’re happy to be here and it’s a cool space. I guess if you just want to start out by giving us a quick introduction to Drop.io, the background explanation of what it is and how it came to be.
Steve: Sure. First, hello everyone and thanks so much for having us and finding Drop.io interesting enough to share with your audience. Basically in short, Drop.io is based in DUMBO in New York City. We’re a venture capital backed company. What we do is help make file sharing really easy. We were selected by Time as a Top 50 website last year. And what we do is power constant sharing between millions of users online today for thousands of different uses. We can get into that in more detail, as you like.
But in addition, we also have different product applications we’ve built on our own API plus we allow third parties to also engage in our API. We have this very simple way people can engage in content sharing and that is what we do very well and make it easy for others too.
Lauren: Awesome. So who then, is your target audience and how have you been marketing to them?
Steve: I think what’s really interesting when we look at how you market and promote different businesses and services, one of the things we thought very strongly about at Drop.io is that we want to provide immediate utility and usefulness to users. And so our marketing is creating a drop for free. You go to Drop.io and there’s no marketing message, there’s no advertising on the site. You literally go to our home page, there’s an open field there where you can name your drop whatever you want and click “create drop”. And then you now have this drop where you can add any content to it, any sort of way whether it’s a video, a photo, audio, a document. We can convert it into a web friendly format and you can share it any way you want.
And what’s so amazing again, back to that marketing question, is we first provide the user immediate utility and then what happens? They then share that drop with others, whether it’s coworkers, it’s clients, it’s friends, it’s family. They then experience Drop.io and how easy it is to use and then they use it.
At the end of the day, that is our primary source of marketing. It’s just providing a really simple service that provides utility for people.
Emily: That’s awesome. The product speaks for itself. That’s the best thing you could possibly have.
Steve: Yeah, I think in an interesting way we are entering this age of authenticity where it’s you are who you are. What’s great about Drop.io is we give you right away what the service does. You click a button you now have a place to share content.
Emily: Awesome.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: I feel like Drop.io hasn’t gotten to where it is today without being totally ahead of the curve. You’ve had some really interesting partnerships with other companies as a way to enrich your services. Tell us a little bit about how you’ve had partnerships with other companies and applications to enrich Drop.io and that service offering.
Steve: I think one of the partnerships we’re really proud of and happy to be working with is Yahoo. Yahoo has over a hundred million email subscribers, I don’t know the exact number, but they are, I think, the largest email service in the world today. It’s a very simple thing. Their email service is great but what they’re looking to do is provide additional value to their subscribers and they saw that Drop.io could be a great application to add into their platform.
And that’s what we did. We worked together to integrate the Drop.io functionality into Yahoo. Now every Yahoo mail user, with a click of their button, while they’re logged into Yahoo mail, can create a drop. Upload any photos or videos and the thumbnails of those images will display in their email.
When they send that email to someone else, the email comes in just like it normally would but below the text they’re written in the email body will show a link to view the drop with the content but also those thumbnails.
I think that’s a great application both for us, and continuing to be able to share the service more broadly and also for Yahoo and for their users as a way to provide them with additional utility.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: That’s great, really cool. You guys have been ahead of a lot of the trends especially when it comes to this type of digital integration with other platforms. So that’s really cool. I also saw that you were one of the first services to release a Facebook connect integration. It’s probably a few years ago by now but it allowed users to publish updates of any sort made to their jobs onto their Facebook feed. That was probably really revolutionary when you guys decided to do that integration. Where do you get these foresights and what opportunities do you see for the near future?
Steve: I think it’s really cool that the “io” in Drop.io stands for input and output.
Lauren: Oh!
Steve: So what we try to do, we have all kinds of fancy graphs we can show people about it, but basically you have a drop which we talk about as a point of exchange on the Internet and there’s ways you want to put content in and there’s ways you want to take content out. Ways of putting content in can be directly going to the drop and clicking the add button and uploading stuff. Each drop also has it’s own email address, so you can email into the drop and any attachments that are connected to that email will also be in there. Each drop also has it’s own voicemail number so you can call into a drop, reporters do this a lot, there’ll be a recorded interview with their phone by dialing their drop’s voicemail number, conducting their interview and ending that phone call. That phone call will then be converted into an MP3 file in their drop.
We have a whole bunch of ways people can input content. What you were just talking about with Facebook, is there’s a whole bunch of ways to output content. Whether it’s output via email notifications, text notification, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. So literally what a drop is a really simple way to share content, and again the application while you’re in it is really simple.
We convert the files into a web‑friendly format so you don’t have to be concerned about what software people have on their computer or this or that. They just click a button and it plays. Or you see it or you interact with it. And then the same thing goes for how you put content in and you push content out.
Lauren: Very cool. And Drop.io is 100 percent cloud application at this point, right?
Steve: That’s right.
Lauren: So how do you rival other cloud applications like Google for instance and keep your offering with Drop.io ahead of the game?
Steve: And Google’s an awesome company. [laughter]
Basically, the way we focus on what we do is there’s a lot of value to our users and to us as a company in being very focused. As we said, and probably when we hear back on this recording, we’ll have said many, many times that what we do is power content sharing. So by having a very clean focus on that and just doing that one piece of functionality really well, it helps us really carve out and build a service that does that one thing better than others. So that’s what we focus on. That’s what we do, and that’s what our incredible development team spends their time working on.
Emily: What are some of the fun uses? Or tell us a really funny story about how you’ve heard Drop.io being used or just something that’s just amusing.
Lauren: A funny anecdote.
Emily: Yeah. [laughs]
Steve: Yeah, it really ranges. It’s fun. You have really good applications like teachers who’ll use it to share homework, and architects who’ll use it to share drawings. One of the really interesting ones, we had cattle ranchers using us to collect bids for selling their cattle. And they were using a drop as a hidden upload feature. So people were privately submitting their bids, and then the cattle rancher was able to receive those. I think the reporter ones are really fun. So a friend of mine was covering the presidential campaign. I asked her. I was like, “Oh, how do you guys deal with recordings and sharing files when you’re on the road?” She hadn’t connected the dots about Drop.io. She’s like, “Oh, we use this really simple service, Drop.io.” I was like, “Wow! That’s amazing!”
[laughter]
Steve: It’s pretty amazing the different types of uses people have. What was another really? Film producers use this a lot, too. It’s really interesting. Every day on a production set there’s something that’s developed called “dailies” which has a collection of the different shots taken. They want to share them both with people there but then in a geographically dispersed team. So what people use is Drop.io to share those files day in and day out to throw the file or the video up there or photos, whatever, and then get the other people to interact with it in real time.
Lauren: Then also we wanted to ask about PressLift. This is a new product you’ve recently introduced into the mix. So if you want to just tell us a little bit about that, how it came about, and how it stems off of Drop.io?
Steve: Yeah, so this is such a natural story. So again, what we do is we’re power content sharing. We grabbed the service, Drop.io, where people use it in all these different ways. Well, one of the ways people were using us were by communication professionals or PR pros who were taking their text press release and saying it wasn’t enough and that they needed to share a video, or a photo, or an audio file, or something else. So what they were doing was creating a drop, putting in the videos and photos, then taking the URL of their drop, and then sharing it along with their text press release. That made a ton of sense. This is the world where communications is changing very rapidly, and you need to tell your whole story and you bring it to life.
So we decided we would build a new application on our own API called “PressLift.” It is the simplest way to create a press release today in that you have all your custom branding, you have unlimited multimedia, the really great search engine optimization and Twitter and Facebook integration, all that sort of great stuff.
But fundamentally it’s just powered by Drop.io, and it’s powered by API. But it’s geared for this one particular audience, which is the communications pro who’s trying to create a press release that is social media enabled and that they can then send to journalists and bloggers. So the journalist and blogger will get not only the text as part of that that they always expect.
But now they’re getting everything else they needed but with one click to view any sort of video or photo, one click to download it, and one click to grab an embed code. So in this world of making things social media enabled, making them multimedia rich, and then also real time trackable, that’s what PressLift’s really about.
So when you connect it to Drop.io, where there’s millions of users, thousands of uses, PressLift is designed for just one use of creating a press release. You can imagine both with us at Drop.io and third party developers who can build on our API all sorts of applications.
Lauren: Awesome!
Emily: Yeah, that’s really cool. That’s really awesome to hear about that kind of evolution of the service and just where it’s going. So just going off of that, what can they expect to see from Drop.io in the future? And just more of this effortless evolution of what‑could‑be type of thing?
Steve: Yeah. It’s really exciting. There are hundreds of different individual product applications that we have engaged with users on who are interested to build. And hopefully what we’ll see is third parties take advantage of our API and build applications they want, whether it’s in the advertising space, whether it’s in workload management, whether it’s with teachers. Who knows what it is? But there’s a lot of things we’re looking at in working with third parties and doing things internally, and then hopefully people will just surprise us and develop all sorts of great things we could never have thought of.
Emily: Seriously. Well, we are…
Steve: I mean I think…Yeah, go ahead.
Emily: That’s OK. I was just going to say we’re definitely going to be looking forward to that.
Steve: Yeah. Me, too. I think what’s really fun about this world we’re in today is there is so much engagement within communities. So we don’t just build a product and then go off somewhere. We’re actively engaged. It’s so exciting to see how people use Drop.io, how people use the API, and see all the things that are going to come to be.
Lauren: Awesome! Well, everything sounds fantastic. I’m excited to see what comes next.
But Steve, thanks so much for being on our show, taking the time to talk with us about Drop.io and PressLift.
Emily: But is there anything you want to tell our listeners before we part ways?
Steve: Yeah. Well, first thanks again for having me, and hopefully this is interesting. If you’re interested to learn more, please check out our website at Drop.io. Feel free to email me at Steve@Drop.io.com or on my Twitter handle, SGreenwood. And thanks very much.
Emily: All right. Thanks so much, Steve. We really appreciated having you as a guest on our show, and we hope to be talking to you more soon.
Steve: Good. Thanks very much.
Lauren: Thanks, Steve.
And for everyone else, make sure to tune in next week for Real Time Digital…
Emily: Yup.
Lauren: …hosted by The Jar Group.
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