For any issues regarding sales, please email sales (at) yourchalkboard.com and issues regarding technology, support (at) yourchalkboard.com

We will respond to your queries as quick as we can.

We thank you for your support over the past two and half years.

Till another time,

Chalkboard Team

We started along the line of thinking that Anuj indicated on how we can leverage Facebook to communicate to our consumers.

“One of the things we have never had at Chalkboard is a consumer facing dashboard to let users interact and engage with the small and medium businesses. We created the Chalkboard Facebook App to act as a one stop shop for our users to find out the todays specials around them, what their friends have been viewing, examples being freshly brewed coffee or newly imported beer and accordingly decide where the best place to hang out would be. Taking advantage of Facebook’s Social Graph and the recently announced Facebook Actions we hope to increase the sharing and discovery of specials coming from our merchant partners and induce a form of virality that will help them attract more customers. Another important use case we have tackled with this app is the ability to choose your location to find out the specials around that location rather than having it fixed at your physical location. Our design philosophy while building the application was to create something that lets users view, share and access content in as many few steps as possible.”

After all, Facebook has 800M users all over the world and the challenge now is to leverage the platform to help our small and medium businesses to engage with their customers using the social graph. Hence we started on building a Facebook that allows the consumers to discover new locations and engage with the small and medium businesses using our follow function. With the follow function, we gave the choice to the consumers who might want to subscribe and get updates via email and Facebook on the latest Today’s Specials to the location of their choice. In addition, we added a “recommend” function that allows any consumer to refer a location with an interesting Today’s Special to their friends. We also built an activity feed for the user to monitor what locations their friends are currently checking out:

As the app utilizes the geolocation capability on HTML5 browsers, we built an additional function called “Change Location” where a user can change the location of where they are to see what might be there in another location of their choice. Particularly for older browsers which are not geo-location compliant, the function will be of help.

The view we have for this Chalkboard app is an utility app to discover what is around you and engage with the businesses directly. The feedback from the consumers will be valuable to the businesses and help them to improve. However, this is only the beginning of the story because we will be introducing a few new features in the next couple of weeks to demonstrate how this fits into our roadmap in the future.

1. HTML5 Location Awareness not working on Safari browsers (version 5.1.2) with Mac OS X Lion

If you experience problems in determining your location using Safari browser, here are the steps we suggest you to do:
1. First empty your cache and close all browser windows.
2. Restart Safari.

We have done a few tests to show that the Safari browsers in Lion are not working properly. We run Chalkboard Facebook App together with the HTML 5 Demos for Location and found that the browsers Chrome and Firefox are showing the correct location while in Safari 5.1.2, it’s showing the location from the last location which the user is logged in. We have reported the bug to Apple and hope that they can resolve this HTML5 bug in their browser as quickly as possible.

(To be updated).

In the new dashboard interface, we have placed three tabs: Dashboard, Locations & Your Specials. On the Dashboard, we now illustrate two basic statistics for the SMB Owner: (a) Seen – how many people who have seen your business listings and today’s specials and (b) People – how many people who have contacted/visited your business by clicking through the listings, making calls to your location, getting directions from where they are to the business location of interest and sharing of the listing & Today’s specials via Facebook and Twitter. We have also incorporated a to-do list which will help the SMB owners to maximize the distribution thru Facebook (which we will explore in the next post about our updates on Facebook) and simplify their update mechanisms via twitter and sms as well.

In the process, we have created a simple interface that allows the SMB owner to update their latest Today’s Specials with a select list to allow them to choose the locations, although by default, we select all locations, and select the start and end dates with a Calendar interface. That is right below the display of the logo, name of company, the payment package and statistics page.

We added an activity feed to update our customers on a couple of things: (a) How many people have actually seen, visited or contacted their locations? (b) Where are these people when they are assessing their location? (c) which publishers’ mobile apps or websites are the SMB owners’ business listings and today’s specials shown? and (d) Who are the consumers who have followed the businesses as loyal followers via facebook and email? In the activity feed, we sought to made these updates to make sure that they know what they are getting with $0.99 a day. This is important because Chalkboard’s mission is to help small and medium owners to drive more walk-in traffic and spread the word around not just locally, but also socially and instantly too. Of course, this is not the end of our efforts. While our customers do not understand CPM or CTRs which are complicated digital marketing metrics to them, we strived to make the metric as simple as possible for them.

We have two other tabs “Locations” & “Your Specials” which allow the SMB owners to manage their portfolio of locations or go thru the history of their Today’s Specials (and which medium they have sent it from). The SMB owner now gets an overview on how each of their business performs. Under the locations tab, we provide three important features which make it simple for the retailer to manage things: (1) a simple search interface that will allow them to make changes and post updates of Today’s Specials if they are looking for one location among a hundred locations, (2) the same set of statistics broken down for them, and (3) a better version of the heatmap, which tells them from the color scheme on how many people are actually looking at the location from different locations. Finally in the “Your Specials” tab, you can now view the history of the your specials.

While re-imagining the dashboard, we went through a lot of iterations to make it simple to use and also wanted the merchants to know what their surrounding environment are like. With a new leaderboard in the dashboard, we want to let the SMB owners know what other business locations around them (within 1km in the country) have new and updated Today’s Specials. That is important because we have observed from our data, the SMB owners who updated more than an average of 3 updates a day have 20-30% more customers coming back to them. These SMB owners usually put up Today’s Specials which are product launches and less likely to be deals which seem to indicate that they can attract more loyal followers through our social share mechanism.

Of course, we are going to improve this dashboard from time to time, but we also hope that our customers will provide us new feedback and thoughts on the dashboard.