OMG, time passes by so quickly! :) We wish you all an amazing year 2012! May at least some of your wishes come true!

We made our biggest dream come true! We built earthfaves, for End Users, Professional Experts, Business Owners! We built an iPhone App for End Users and soon we have the iPhone App for Businesses and earthfaves for Facebook ready, too.

earthfaves for End Users - a solution to always find the favorite places and insider tips from your social circles and experts, to support great businesses and to save some money there.

earthfaves for Business - a solution to grow cost-efficiently and sustainably by means of the most powerful advertising in existence: positive word-of-mouth in the social circles of satisfied customers.

We worked on it for almost four years. During this time, we could always count on the support from our families. You can imagine, doing this felt like being close to hell, more than once. But we used our talent, passion and our zen-buddhist-like patience to get through it. Friends stopped talking to us about it, external people thought we are crazy. But we knew we can make it, and we made it. We built earthfaves all by ourselves, with around 90.000 Euros from the founding team, from friends and family. All code was written inhouse, all designs were made inhouse, all ideas, decisions and features were made inhouse by:

Markus D. Schneider - Product & Project Management

Oliver Schneider - Art Direction, UI designs, Marketing

Daniel Stötzer - Development

Anna Roytburd - Web Design

Tim Klauck - Conceptual Design

Thomas Krämer, Barrett Conway, Markus Tetzlaff - Co-Founders & Legal/Concept/Dev/Sales

plus our numerous development interns, mainly from our great and beatiful IT-region SaarLorLux and from Madrid, especially:

Frédéric Klauss, Dorian Bauer, Rémi Sinicco, Markus Flesch, Pascal Jung, Fabrice Thiel, Moritz Strohm, Benedikt Kappes, Miguel Angel Escalona, María Lara Díaz, José Angel Garcia, Jesús Huerta and Diego Rubio.

So you might ask yourself, why did we do this? Here are some reasons.

• Because from the start, we believed in earthfaves.
• Because we believe that we all have the talents to do something special in our lives if we only believe in it - and put it into action.
• Because we believe that excellence can win over big advertising budgets if the right technology is in place.
• Because we want transparency about the good things in life so that we can all benefit from the talent, passion and creativity of those people who really provide exceptional products and services.
• Because we traveled a lot, and we know that every country has nice places and nice people to see and visit.
• Because we believe that together, we can chance the world to the better. This can work if we all share the best places and let others know why we love this place. This way, more and more people will visit these "earthfaves". Non-loved places will have to improve even quicker if they want to survive as positive word-of-mouth travels fast.
• Because we think that companies waste a lot of money on worthless advertising instead of investing in their most important people: their FAVERS and their FAVER FRIENDS.

We just updated the website with our new designs and all the information and tools about "earthfaves for Business", see footer menu. The direct link is www.earthfaves-prm.com .

Remember, it is all in D.I.Y. beta mode which means Daniel, Olli, Anna and Markus build earthfaves actually in their spare time, supported by our interns. So don't expect everything to work perfectly or to be superfast. Because of this DIY-Beta mode, we also never advertised earthfaves. We start to talk to investors now so that we can offer earthfaves to a broader audience.

If you are interested in trying out "earthfaves for Business" for free, send us an e-mail to info @ earthfaves.com . We are happy to get you into our "Pilot Program".

Olli just sent me the link to Top 10 Best Social Media Presentations, a great collection for all you marketers out there.

This is a great one: "What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later" by Marta Kagan.

http://huge7.com/top-10-best-social-media-presentations

earthfaves can now be auto-posted to your wall on Facebook! Every time you add a new earthfave, it will be automatically shared with your friends on Facebook. Just go to earthfaves.com, click the "Connect with Facebook" button, then edit your "Auto-posting to Facebook" settings under the My Account tab. Give it a try!

Olli, Normen and myself, Markus, we attended ITB last week, the worlds largest travel industry fair in Berlin. It is great to see how many regions have started to “emotionalize” their regions with “i/we love/like/heart you/our region”-like slogans – dozens!!! This shows that destination marketers learnt their lesson: “normal” advertising does not work as good as [...]

Inbound Marketing is a new book written by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot. It deals with Social Media Optimization, SMO – the actions business owners and marketers need to take to make sure that potential customers run into, interact and communicate with their brand as often as possible to win more customers that [...]

Hey, next success – we made it to the finals of the Gründermarkt at Forum Kiedrich in Wiesbaden! Markus and Daniel went there to present earthfaves in a 5-minute pitch, people loved it. The whole event was great and we made many interesting contacts for the future.

“When companies think of WOM, many times they will create attention-grabbing stunts to get noticed. That stunt may create buzz, but the buzz doesn’t last. It’s a one and done blip of marketing gimmickry. A longer-lasting way to create buzz is to foster advocacy relationships with customers. Which leads me to an important WOM TRUTH: [...]

According to a recent report from Nielsen Online, users of Social Media are increasingly utilizing their Social Networks to navigate the Web. The researchers at Nielsen – one of the world’s leading suppliers of marketing and media information – found that almost 20% of social consumers are using the networks as their “core navigation and information discovery tool”.

Instead of using search engines like Google or portals such as Yahoo! or MSN, these consumers are looking for content within social networks and are clicking from there. While the majority is still using Google and Co., 20% anyway is a significant figure. And with social media usage continuing to increase, we can only expect this figure to grow! For instance metrics firm Hitwise found that overall visits to social networks have increased by more than 60% within the last year, with the over 55 year old users increasing their social networking time by 77%.

“At the root of the changing nature of content discovery is the sheer amount of information that is available on the Web. If you want to learn more about the latest smartphone released into the market, your favorite search engine is sure to provide you with hundreds, if not thousands, of articles about the device,” writes Jon Gibs, Vice President of Media Analytics, Nielsen Online. “But with the increasing number of resources available, it’s difficult to know what you should believe or take at face value”. People tend to trust more and more “what their friends have to say and social media acts as an information filtration tool. This is key because [people] gravitate towards and believe what is shared with friends and family. If your friend creates or links to the content, then you are more likely to believe it and like it. And this thought plays out in the data.”

As mentioned in a previous post, this is exactly the direction we are heading at earthfaves: providing you with the ideal environment to exchange tips and recommendations for locations with the people you trust the most – your family, your friends, their friends, experts! We are working hard to improve our local search engine and to make it even easier to add your own “favorite” places on earth to the network, so that earthfaves will become your gateway to the web when it comes to finding recommended locations and destinations!

Social tools, networks and services are becoming more and more important for companies to track what people and customers are saying about their services. It is crucial to find the right environments to get into conversations with their customers to ensure a great reputation online. The integration of customer feedback and customer wishes gained in online conversations into marketing and product management processes ensures that a business stays competitive. By fostering positive word-of-mouth online, businesses win market share and step ahead of their competition according to a study from The London School of Economics and Political Science published already in 2005.

Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas created the first conversation prism last year, now a French and a German one are available, too. These graphics give you an overview on the different kinds and niches, great job:

USA

France

Germany

Japan

China

earthfaves is not yet in their lists – we are soon releasing our first version to tell the world about. Yanni here in the office asked me “to which prism segment would you add earthfaves?”, and I think we’d need two new ones:

1. “Social Geo-Bookmarking” along with Google myMaps. The most striking added value of earthfaves for consumers is to find out which places your friends and their friends love.

2. “Customer Recommendations” where we are first movers. The most striking added value of earthfaves for business owners is that we enable business owners to build up their own community of satisfied customers while our tools maximize their positive word-of-mouth and spread it across the web.

I just ran into two amazing articles I want to share with you – they tell you why our earthfaves location recommendation friend network and social local search engine are pretty clever technologies we will need to make fast and clever decisions we won’t regret in the future:

1. “Where is everyone?” by baekdal.com – a great, easy to understand journey through the history of information

…and a really worthwhile outlook into the near future showing through which channels we receive reliable information.

Some striking sentences:

“..we are currently in the middle of the most drastic change since the invention of the newspaper…”

“News is no longer being reported by journalists, now it comes from everyone. And it is being reported directly from the source to you – bypassing the traditional media channels.”

“We are already seeing an increasing number of services on mobile phones, where you can get information for the area that you are in. E.g. instead of showing all the restaurants in the world, you will only get a list of the restaurants in your area. This is something that is going to explode into in the years to come. In the world where we have access to more information that we can consume, getting only the relevant parts is going to be a very important element.”

2. The Future of Search – Social Relevancy Rank by readwriteweb.com

In our world where everyone creates news, the sheer amount and complexity of data and information a person has to deal with is a lot more than it used to be back the old days. Therefore we will use our social contacts as trust filters. Google, Microsoft et al are already working on technologies that make this happen. The perfect information filter might look like this:

We already did it with our earthfaves “Social Trust Rank”TM algorithm. If you search our local seach engine for recommended places i.e. earthfaves, we rank the results according to so-called “social trust levels” – the more “trustworthy” a person is that gives a location recommendation, the higher up in the search results it appears. This ensures that you can quickly find the hotels in New York recommended by your friends, their friends and other people you can trust and make a well-informed, quick decision instead of wading through 1000s of advertised hotels on Google, Expedia, Tripadvisor etc…trust friends instead of ads because this is what people do as studies show:

Recommendations from family and friends trump all other consumer touchpoints when it comes to influencing purchases, according to ZenithOptimedia. (AdAge, April, 2008)

Adult Internet users surveyed chose recommendations from friends as the one type of promotion they consider most worthwhile. (DoubleClick, May 2007)

86.9% of respondents said they would trust a friend’s recommendation over a review by a critic, while 83.8% said they would trust user reviews over a critic. (Marketing Sherpa, July 2007)

Build your own local recommendation search engine: sign up at earthfaves, add the places you love (to visit), tell your friends to do the same…then your search results will be “socially trust-ranked” like mine, see below, and you can be among the first to use a “social relevancy rank” local search engine.

We will improve the ranking in the future and add taste neighbors and influencers, btw.