Seems like these days I barely have time to absorb, blog about, and Twitter my excitement over the latest StepRep update before it’s shouldered aside by yet another StepRep update. Every two weeks or so they push out a new version. The changes are usually pretty small, but they make a big difference to usability.

Take this week’s improvements to the Customers tab. You may have been ignoring this tab because, if you live in an area without many MyFrontSteps users, the tab probably contained nothing but an empty page.

But now, there’s a handy filter that allows you to filter by location (city, state/province, or country) or by service category. It looks kinda like this:

So if, like me, you’re located in MyFrontSteps world headquarters – Saskatoon, Canada – and every day you’re inundated with Asks of questionable relevance, you can use the filter to focus only on the ones that interest you. Or, if you happen to be one of the five lonely StepRep users in West Virginia, and there’s no action in Charleston or Wheeling or wherever, you can flick the filter to Pennsylvania or Ohio or Kentucky and see what’s going on over there.

Other changes

We also spent some time styling the Homepage. Now when you respond to an Ask your identity will be visible to everyone. If you’ve uploaded a photo to your profile, your photo will appear right there next to your answer, with the word “Expert” underneath. What an ego boost!

Sometime very soon we’ll give you the option to make your replies anonymous to other service providers.

PS. If you have no idea what I’m rattling on about with this whole “Asks” business, you might want to read this post from a couple weeks back.

PPS. Or just log in to your account and check out the improvements.

It’s a bit risky to give your promotional cartoon a title like “Goin’ Viral” when it might not, in fact, go anywhere. But seeing as the cartoon is meant as a kind of meta-commentary on the concept of “viralness”, I think the title fits.

“Goin’ Viral” tries to explain, at the most basic level, what MyFrontSteps is about for consumers. As our CEO Brendan King says in the video, “MyFrontSteps connects homeowners with local experts that their friends trust and recommend”. Speaking to all you StepRep users out there – you’re the experts. As for the homeowners, they’re just starting to trickle in. Their numbers will be increasing soon.

If you’ve logged into your StepRep account lately, you’ve been seeing a steady stream of questions from MyFrontSteps early-adopters. We encourage you to get out there and answer them. Mix it up. Show everyone how smart you are. Maybe pick up some new business. StepRep is about building your reputation, and here’s a perfect way to do it.

Anyhoo, the cartoon’s over on the MyFrontSteps Blog.

The worst thing about the new “Asks” feature in StepRep is the torrent of bad puns it has unleashed around the office. I’ll leave it to your imagination.

The good thing is, these Asks seem to really be taking off. If you take a look at your StepRep homepage (which I discussed last week) you’re going to see a whole ream of questions from all over the world. (So far I haven’t spotted any from outside North America, but StepRep does have quite a few users in Europe, so I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.) Just now – mid-afternoon, Monday June 22 – I can see Asks from Boca Raton, Florida; Vancouver, BC; Arroyo Grande, California; and Weddington, North Carolina, among many other locations. Many of these Asks have multiple answers, both from local experts and from helpful folks halfway across the country. It’s pretty cool:

Now, since these Asks are just getting started, we’ve got the filter set pretty wide, which is why you’re seeing questions pertaining not just to your area of expertise, but to every area of expertise – and not just in your local area, but everywhere. In the near future we are planning to give users the ability to filter the stream themselves, so you can look at Asks from your state alone, or in your profession alone. Give us a little time and we’re gonna make this thing really cool. We’re on our way.

If you haven’t logged into StepRep for a while, maybe it’s time you checked it out again. There might be somebody out there who can use your assistance.

If you’ve recently logged into your account, you may have had a “What the heck’s going on?” moment. Instead of being popped right into the Reputation Monitor, as usual, you found yourself on a screen that looked sort of like this:

Mwuh? Wazzat? Where am I?

Don’t worry, you can get back to your comfort zone by clicking the orange Reputation Monitor button at the top of the screen. But while we’re here, let’s explore this new homepage you’ve landed on.

What you’re looking at is a feed of your most recent activity in StepRep. Right now that means you’re probably seeing all the latest stories that the Reputation Monitor has dug up. But as StepRep and the MyFrontSteps community continue to grow, those search results are going to be crowded out by other new stuff:

Trusts and Endorsements

As we keep on telling people, StepRep isn’t only about monitoring your reputation and managing your presence on Google and other search engines. It’s also about building your referral network by connecting with your customers, their friends, and your fellow service providers.

Whenever your network grows – when somebody adds you to their Trusted List or endorses your services – it’ll show up on your feed here on the homepage. You can see who you’re connected to by clicking the orange StepConnect button.

Asks

We could’ve called ’em “Questions”, but we didn’t want to pre-suppose how customers chose to use the feature. An Ask might be a question, a call for help, or a request for an estimate on a project. An Ask is an open discussion thread where anyone in the MyFrontSteps community can throw in their two cents.

Pictures can also be posted inline, so that customers can be more explicit about what they’re talking about: “Here’s my window – how much to have blinds installed?” That kind of thing.

If you click on the orange Customers button, you’ll see where these Asks are coming from. There might not be that many in your hometown right now – heck, there might not be any. But when you do start seeing Asks that pertain to your area of expertise, we hope you’ll take the time to respond to them. It’s a great way to connect with new customers and pick up business.

Pop over to StepRep and check it out.

Robert Scoble, Vanessa Fox, Alice Myerhoff (of Inman News) and Jennifer Pahlka (of Web 2.0 Expo) answer the question, “What have you done to make your house a home?“

Sometime over the last few days, while my back was turned, the developer guys pushed out a new version of StepRep. It’s hard to keep up with ‘em.

As usual, a lot of the changes will be invisible to slobs like you and me. But there are two big changes that I should draw your attention to:

Promoting stories to Faceboook

A couple weeks ago I alerted you to a workaround for getting your StepRep widget to appear on your Facebook profile. Now there’s a way to publish stories right into your Facebook stream.

Each story now has three options under “Promote”:

• Add story to your widget and profile page.
• Send the story to Twitter.
• Publish the story to your Facebook stream.

When you click on “Publish to Facebook” you’ll get a little pop-up asking for your Facebook credentials (unless you happen to be logged into Facebook already). Then you’ll have the option of adding a personal message to the story before it appears on your profile, where it will look something like this:

Interacting with members of the MyFrontSteps community

Most of our users probably don’t pay too much attention to the little orange buttons across the top of the screen, the ones that say “StepConnect” and “Referrals & Quotes”. That’s okay; so far there hasn’t been much to do on those screens except watch some Spokesmonster videos.

But if you click on “Referrals & Quotes” now you’ll see…well, depending on which city you live in, you might not see anything at all. But I’ll show you what it looks like for my hometown, Saskatoon:

Y’see, the table displays questions from folks in the MyFrontSteps community – specifically, from our new Facebook application Homebook. Click on the entries and you can interact with whoever posted the question. You can offer an answer, request more info, or post photos. Your replies will be visible but anonymous to other service providers, but the customer will be able to see who you are.

Right now when you visit this screen, the questions may or may not be relevant to your business; but as the action picks up in your town, we’ll narrow down the table so you only see questions related to your line of work.

This probably isn’t something you need to worry about right away. We’ll soon be adding a way to notify users when a potentially interesting question comes in. Just letting you know that, as always, there’s cool stuff coming your way in StepRep.

Over on the newish MyFrontSteps Blog I talk about our shiny new Facebook application, Homebook. As I’ve previously described, Homebook is:

• A place to blab about your home with your friends.

• A more efficient way to find local services, by hooking into a network of service providers that you and your friends trust.

But I don’t want to go over it all again; go check out the other blog. Did I mention there’s a picture of a monkey?

…Or better still, you can go right to Facebook and try out the new app.

Over on the Spokesmonster blog I itemize the three flavours of bad review. When bad reviews appear on your site it’s really tempting to just hit delete and make ‘em disappear. But is that really the best way to deal?

Well, dang it. Over at the Spokesmonster blog this morning I posted what I thought was the latest in StepRep update news:

• We discovered a handy trick for getting your StepRep widget stories to show up on your Facebook profile.
• We recently (finally) managed to buy the steprep.com domain from the dude who’d brazenly snatched it out from under our noses back in late 2008.

Then about five minutes after I hit “publish”, Shawn over on the StepRep development team sent out an email announcing that a new update had just been deployed. Grr! Now I gotta write a whole ‘nother blog post.

Oh, well, beats working.

1. Optimization. Shawn and his witch doctors have rattled their monkeybones and danced the dance of the feathered serpent, and now, he tells me, the pages in StepRep will load a little faster.

2. My Content. It seems that some of y’all found it a little crazy that there was a category for “My Content” but there was no button to allow you to easily move stories into that category. Well, you can stop tearing out your hair – there’s a “My Content” button now.

But don’t worry, you can still assign domains to zap directly into “My Content” by going to the Links tab in the Settings screen.

3. Terminology. There are a number of little wording changes throughout the site, designed to make things clearer (hopefully) to new users. Most of these won’t affect you. But one new term might throw you a bit:

Promoted.

Here’s what it means. We’ve been finding that a lot of people just don’t get the widget. They don’t understand what it does and they don’t understand why they should use it. As I’ve explained before, the purpose of the widget and your StepRep public profile is to create multiple links to – and thus increase the search ranking of – the stories that you want people to see.

Which is another way of saying, you use the widget and the public profile to promote stories.

So we went ahead and changed the “Add to widget” checkbox to “Promote”. When you check off a story, instead of going into a category called “Widget”, it’ll appear under the “Manage Promoted” link on the right-hand side of the screen. And of course, it’ll appear on your StepRep widget and public profile.

We’ve got some work to do to make the new terminology consistent throughout the site, so bear with us. As always, we’re interested in hearing what you think about the changes, so don’t hesitate to leave comments, tweet us at @steprep, or use the Feedback link in StepRep.

You’ve probably noticed, if you’ve been paying any attention to our marketing exertions here at StepRep, that sometimes we’ll refer to the service as StepRep by MyFrontSteps. You might have also spotted some references to an enigmatic something-or-other called Homebook by MyFrontSteps.

What the heck are we talking about? What are “StepRep”, “Homebook”, and “MyFrontSteps”?

Maybe I’ll start by breaking it down graphically:

The MyFrontSteps Community.

MyFrontSteps

MyFrontSteps pays my salary. It’s the name of the company that’s putting this whole shebang together.

It also lends its name to the MyFrontSteps Directory, which (as you can see from the elegant illustration above) is the bridge that connects service providers on StepRep with their customers on Homebook.

This all probably requires a bit more explanation…

StepRep

When we launched StepRep, it was a reputation monitoring service, and that was it. Even now, most of the people who sign up for StepRep are primarily interested in finding out what people are saying about them online.

But StepRep has evolved into more than just a reputation monitor. Our tagline is “Monitor, manage, and build your online reputation.” One of the ways you’ll build your reputation is by connecting with your satisfied customers and their friends in the MyFrontSteps community.

Now, maybe you don’t have customers; maybe you don’t have a business. That’s okay. You can still use StepRep to keep track of what people are saying about your garage band or your attractive lawn or your angry bullhorn rants from the steps of City Hall.

But basically, StepRep is for people who provide a service. Or as we like to call them, “service providers”.

Homebook

The MyFrontSteps community includes everyone on StepRep plus everyone on Homebook. So what’s Homebook?

It’s a place to hang out and talk about your home. For starters, that will mostly mean sharing photos with your friends. In the future it might mean contests, discussions, decorating tips from experts…all sorts of stuff.

Homebook’s most innovative feature is the ability to share your list of trusted service providers with your friends. Next time you’re looking for a good plumber, instead of thumbing randomly through the phone book, you can go into the Directory tab in Homebook, drill down to the list of plumbers in your location, and see at a glance which ones your friends have used and recommend.

There’s more. In a month or so (we’re working on it right now), Homebook users will be able to request quotes from StepRep users. A little further down the line, StepRep users will be able to offer additional incentives in the form of referral fees (discussed in greater detail in a recent post on the Spokesmonster blog).

Where do you find Homebook? It’s not a website – it’s an application you can add to your Facebook or MySpace account:

Homebook on Facebook
Homebook on MySpace

(If you’re not on Facebook or MySpace, there’s a standalone version too, at myfrontsteps.com.)

The price is right…

Sometimes we get so excited about all the neat stuff we’re building that we forget to emphasize something fundamental: All this stuff is free. We’ve got a plan to make a little money later on by taking a small percentage of every referral fee that gets paid. But the referral fees are optional; everything else we offer up gratis. Why?

Just because we love to give.

Maybe you could express your gratitude by signing up for Homebook, trying it out for a few days, and giving us some feedback…