Earlier this week I published a case study about how we used Blue Ocean Strategy for Smartpen here in Australia.

This was a really interesting project for us to undertake as it allowed us to utilise the skills we developed following our training with UCSI-BOSRC.

This presentation is the first in a series that we’re producing around this project and what we’ve learnt from it.

We’ve focused on the basics of Blue Ocean Strategy and how the core outcome of the work was the development and execution of a detailed social media strategy. The social media strategy is the key bit, as this underpins how we created the uncontested blue oceans.

I happened across a really interesting article about social media experts and how to differentiate the good from the bad.

In reading the comments I can across Martin Edic of Techrigy. Aside from the fact I thought he was quite within his rights to provide a link to his product (maybe more subtle next time Martin…) it made me click through to his website and have a look at the product SM2.

Social media monitoring is something we’ve had a few customers ask us about and we’ve looked into products like Radian6. We’re actively looking at adding a product like this to our product eco-system to help build out our social media expertise.

I‘m going to give the SM2 product a test drive so I’ve registered an account under our Smartpen business. This will give me a chance to see how it goes tracking some Livescribe keywords. Google Alerts seems able to find 6-10 articles a day on Livescribe so it’ll be interesting to see how SM2 goes.

They also had an interesting blog post on Twitter and the cult of MLM

I’m pleased to announce (belatedly) that we finally launched the Smartpen website yesterday. We got the site live with a full set of products and accessories along with our own database of knowledge and FAQ to help our local customers.

We still have a couple of minor quirks to iron out – namely getting the software to display the sales price consistently and updating some of the images to be better quality – but overall, we’re live and taking Livescribe orders in a more automated fashion.

The team put in some long days to get us to this point and we were really pleased to get some early positive feedback from visitors and customers – specifically the feedback from Rob Vos and Anita Swift.

As we’ve communicated to everyone who’s found us, we’re capturing every single piece of feedback and using this to fine tune how we engage with our customers and also how we ultimately engage with BigAnt and Livescribe as to where the Livescribe Smartpen is going.

What changes are we working on?

1.       On the site, we’re working hard to iron out a really annoying glitch as to how the RRP is displayed. For reasons unknown, the software “might” show a price that is ex-GST, or it “might” show a price that is inc-GST – we’ll have this resolved by the 3^rd November.

2.       Some of the product images are a bit ordinary. We’ll spend some time over the weekend toying with these so that we can display really nice, clear images.

3.       How we account for delivery is still clunky. The software allows us to create a complex formula that “might” generate a more balanced delivery fee charge. This clearly needs more work and more data as to our actual freight charges. We’re probably going to move away from Australia Post due to the limitations as to what we can package and send.

a.       Just so you understand – we treat delivery as cost recovery. But this gets hard  to determine as we have items that are cubically large but light, items that are smaller but much heavier, and some small items that are also light.

I suspect we’ll default to a delivery fee that is blended for the larger and smaller items.

What else will we put on the site?

1.       We’re working to expand the product descriptions so that we can give a better indication of what each product set comprises

2.       We will be updating the FAQ to include some specific content to help Mac users understand how to use the product.

3.       PayPal as a payment option – I was convinced we wouldn’t be asked to accept PayPal but go figure day 2 and someone enquires as to whether they can pay via PayPal…

Your feedback is important. If you have any comments or suggestions please drop us a line or add a comment to this post.

We’re starting to see more and more traction from our social media efforts in relation to the promotion of the Livescribe Smartpen. We’ve been advised that the Livescribe product is going to be featured in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper. We’ll post a more specific link tomorrow.

Great news but with a slight dark cloud hanging over it…

The story came about after Age journo Charles Wright contacted us about the Livescribe Smartpen product that he’d heard about. I always appreciate it when people (be they users, prospects, or customers) can see beyond the shallow dazzle portrayed by the big box retailers and seek out suppliers like ourselves who focus on customer service and customer experience management.

So we took the time last week to catch up with Charles for a coffee in St Kilda and to supply him with an evaluation pen. I won’t seek to quote Charles but he’s clearly impressed with the product; so much so that he’s referred a number of friends to us so they can purchase a Livescribe pen for themselves.

It’s really good to see respected journo’s of Charles’s calibre picking up the Livescribe pen and ‘getting’ the potential so quickly. The story is likely to generate some nice demand for us (and the evil empire) though given we’re in the twilight zone of current stock vs. fresh supply at the higher purchase price we’ve got a tough job to manage tomorrow.  Bear with us if you find us out of stock…

As a TEC member, I’ve had the privilege of hosting Tim Martin from 2 Sticks Digital Marketing as a speaker at my TEC group earlier this year. Tim gives an engaging, yet simple presentation where he talks about all things digital marketing.

Here at Smartpen, we’ve taken all of Tim’s advice and applied them to the launch of our Smartpen website. As we prepare for the official launch of the site we were really pleased to see our efforts pay off with the site achieving the top organic listing on the Google search term “Livescribe Smartpen”.

Smartpen achieves #1 ranking in organic Google results

You can contact Tim at 2 Sticks (03) 9018 5672. He’s got some really interesting stuff on his blog. I recommend Tim to anyone looking to get their heads around the Web 2.0 world.

Here’s some of Tim’s work from YouTube

With the recent decline of the Australian dollar, we’ve received news from our partners at BigAnt that a price rise is imminent and most likely to come into effect from 1 November.

As you’re all no doubt aware, the Australian dollar has been in decline since around April of this year. The following graph gives a good indication of this:

This graph shows the decline of the AUD over the past 90 days - Thanks Uncle Sam

The cost of importing the Livescribe product range has subsequently increased quite dramatically. We’ve worked really hard with BigAnt to get as much stock into the country as possible. However, from 1 November, prices will increase. Check back on the Smartpen website for updated price details.

We still have stocks available of the 2GB pens, A4 notebook packs, ink refills, and A5 journals.

We finally got our hands on the first shipment of Livescribe Pulse Smartpens last week so we’ve been extremely busy filling orders, playing with our new gadget, and getting the word out.

If you haven’t seen the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen yet, have a look at the Salesnet website where we’ve created some content and excitment around this amazing new piece of technology.

Everyone we’ve been showing the pen to has been really excited and has turned into advocates for us – a special mention to Meyrick Adams from Gen3Media who’s determined to sell a million units for us…

We’re hoping Gizmodo will do a review for us soon. I’ve also asked Adam Wallace from Too Easy to drop in here and give us a review as he’s a happy new user.

If you’d like more information on the product, let me know and we’ll get in touch.