Welcome to "The Remix Session," a soon to be regular feature for my blog, where I will give you access to my discussions with entrepreneurs, CEOs, designers, artists - people who I came across in my travels who have great vision and are doing innovative and inspiring work.
The Kwanzoo service allows marketers to quickly build interactive quizzes and polls and serve them on their website landing pages, blog, facebook fan pages and affiliate sites to engage users, trigger social sharing and turn them into customers.
The company is in private beta. Currently, about 1500 companies and agencies are testing the service.
Tim Andren: Tell me about Kwanzoo. It's such a unique name, I know there's got to be a story behind it.
Mani Iyer: Well if you've seen the film 'Jerry Maguire,' Cuba Gooding Jr.'s concept of 'Kwan' (love, respect, community, and money) was the inspiration. We did a play on that word and came up with Kwanzoo.
Andren: I love Jerry Maguire and just about anything Cameron Crowe creates. Any movie that involves sports that I also get credit for on date night is a bonus! So how did you guys get started?
Iyer: When we first started, we were really focusing on building a site around trivia games and quizzes. Kwanzoo started out as a consumer site, then this whole world of widgets happened. We started widgetizing everything that we had in terms of our features, functions and capabilities.
Then we hit on the idea that what consumers want is really interactivity. They want rich, interactive content. They don't want blatant advertising - banner ads and display ads, most people are tuned out from them. What people really want to interact with is interesting, engaging content.
Andren: My mom was a huge John Lennon fan I find that his famous quote applies to many aspects of startups: "Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans." You're hitting on something so important in business, the idea of listening to your customer base and adapting your offering for them. Your product is B2B though, how did you structure your model for this?
Iyer: We just kept on evolving and came to the idea that 'Why not build an online service, where you make it really easy for marketers to create engaging, interactive content and they can then make it available to their users.' The users share the content back with their friends on social networks and the marketer's brand goes along with it.
Andren: You're weaving the offering into the preferred style of interaction. So many businesses waste their money with static banner ads when websites these days are so interactive with video, social and other dynamic options.
Iyer: Right, this is an indirect, subtle way of advertising - as opposed to a kind of an 'in your face,' blatant manner, which has been an issue with traditional display advertising.
Andren: I couldn't agree with you more. Having found that, the end client of today has graduated away from static websites and they're a lot more comfortable with the idea of banner advertising and opt-in e-mails. When I say 'comfortable', I guess, what I mean is that it's no longer relevant. It's the stuff that gets ignored with our selective vision.
The same goes for opt-in e-mails, I mean, I just know personally that I recognize them immediately and ignore them, like poisonous berries or something. Like you said with banner ads, that's the noise...that's the area online that I want to avoid when I'm searching for the information I want or engaging with the people I want to connect with.
Andren: How does customization play into this product of yours?
Iyer: Right now we support the first interactive ad unit called Quiz App. Your ads are so called 'personality quizzes' where essentially the user is profiling themselves. At the end of a series of questions, the quizzes are designed in a way that you can present a relevant offer to the user.
For example in distance education, 'what online degree is best for you?' The result of the quiz will point a user to a specific program.
Andren: I do a lot of marketing work in education. I've seen how this career advice tool works, only in the past it had to be programmed with Flash or something.
How did you know that you were going in the right direction with this new approach for Kwanzoo?
Iyer: We watched the evolution of Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. The adoption was growing, but what we saw was missing in the marketplace was an easy way for small or large businesses to reach into that new audience. We found a gap in the marketplace for these interactive content units and ad units that marketers could create and embed on their own website that would direct their internal customers.
If they have an e-mail list of several thousand customers, now they send out a Quiz of the Week or Poll of the Week which is embedded on their website or blog post. We ran a series of tests last year and saw that these interactive ads, quizzes, polls, and such tend to draw pretty high engagement anywhere from 0.3 to 0.5% relative to standard banner ads which are .03 to .04%. Kwanzoo has seen from as high as 0.7 to even 1%.
Really, it's less about pushing the message and more about finding out what the user is interested in.
Andren: That's what interested me the most when I knew we were going to have this conversation, was hearing you speak about trust. The survey that you spoke to about peer recommendations versus standard advertising. Could you speak a bit more about that?
Let's kick of the Remix Session with a discussion I had with Mani Iyer, CEO of Kwanzoo.
Kwanzoo offers rich, engaging content for today's connected online user.The Kwanzoo service allows marketers to quickly build interactive quizzes and polls and serve them on their website landing pages, blog, facebook fan pages and affiliate sites to engage users, trigger social sharing and turn them into customers.
The company is in private beta. Currently, about 1500 companies and agencies are testing the service.
Kwanzoo Presentation At Leadscon Las Vegas 2010
Tim Andren: Tell me about Kwanzoo. It's such a unique name, I know there's got to be a story behind it.
Mani Iyer: Well if you've seen the film 'Jerry Maguire,' Cuba Gooding Jr.'s concept of 'Kwan' (love, respect, community, and money) was the inspiration. We did a play on that word and came up with Kwanzoo.
Andren: I love Jerry Maguire and just about anything Cameron Crowe creates. Any movie that involves sports that I also get credit for on date night is a bonus! So how did you guys get started?
Iyer: When we first started, we were really focusing on building a site around trivia games and quizzes. Kwanzoo started out as a consumer site, then this whole world of widgets happened. We started widgetizing everything that we had in terms of our features, functions and capabilities.
Then we hit on the idea that what consumers want is really interactivity. They want rich, interactive content. They don't want blatant advertising - banner ads and display ads, most people are tuned out from them. What people really want to interact with is interesting, engaging content.
Andren: My mom was a huge John Lennon fan I find that his famous quote applies to many aspects of startups: "Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans." You're hitting on something so important in business, the idea of listening to your customer base and adapting your offering for them. Your product is B2B though, how did you structure your model for this?
Iyer: We just kept on evolving and came to the idea that 'Why not build an online service, where you make it really easy for marketers to create engaging, interactive content and they can then make it available to their users.' The users share the content back with their friends on social networks and the marketer's brand goes along with it.
Andren: You're weaving the offering into the preferred style of interaction. So many businesses waste their money with static banner ads when websites these days are so interactive with video, social and other dynamic options.
Iyer: Right, this is an indirect, subtle way of advertising - as opposed to a kind of an 'in your face,' blatant manner, which has been an issue with traditional display advertising.
Andren: I couldn't agree with you more. Having found that, the end client of today has graduated away from static websites and they're a lot more comfortable with the idea of banner advertising and opt-in e-mails. When I say 'comfortable', I guess, what I mean is that it's no longer relevant. It's the stuff that gets ignored with our selective vision.
The same goes for opt-in e-mails, I mean, I just know personally that I recognize them immediately and ignore them, like poisonous berries or something. Like you said with banner ads, that's the noise...that's the area online that I want to avoid when I'm searching for the information I want or engaging with the people I want to connect with.
Andren: How does customization play into this product of yours?
Iyer: Right now we support the first interactive ad unit called Quiz App. Your ads are so called 'personality quizzes' where essentially the user is profiling themselves. At the end of a series of questions, the quizzes are designed in a way that you can present a relevant offer to the user.
For example in distance education, 'what online degree is best for you?' The result of the quiz will point a user to a specific program.
Andren: I do a lot of marketing work in education. I've seen how this career advice tool works, only in the past it had to be programmed with Flash or something.
How did you know that you were going in the right direction with this new approach for Kwanzoo?
Iyer: We watched the evolution of Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. The adoption was growing, but what we saw was missing in the marketplace was an easy way for small or large businesses to reach into that new audience. We found a gap in the marketplace for these interactive content units and ad units that marketers could create and embed on their own website that would direct their internal customers.
If they have an e-mail list of several thousand customers, now they send out a Quiz of the Week or Poll of the Week which is embedded on their website or blog post. We ran a series of tests last year and saw that these interactive ads, quizzes, polls, and such tend to draw pretty high engagement anywhere from 0.3 to 0.5% relative to standard banner ads which are .03 to .04%. Kwanzoo has seen from as high as 0.7 to even 1%.
Really, it's less about pushing the message and more about finding out what the user is interested in.
Andren: That's what interested me the most when I knew we were going to have this conversation, was hearing you speak about trust. The survey that you spoke to about peer recommendations versus standard advertising. Could you speak a bit more about that?
Iyer: Yes. In fact that is our core premise is that people online want rich, engaging, interactive content. They also want to know who the source is, which is why the idea of being branded is pretty important. So I know that this content comes from this business that I know about.
If I am then willing to share with my friends, the peer recommendation is much more powerful. The idea is that I do spend time reading my Facebook or Twitter feeds. If I see a Facebook update from a friend that talks about "I tried this (x) on this website..." and then recommends it to me, it's trustworthy.
Tim Andren is the founder of Guideas, Inc. an innovation and marketing company.
