It’s Time for A Noise Canceling App for Business Owners!

If ever there was a need to be able to filter signal from noise, it’s right now, in today’s out-of-control world of social media and digital marketing!

Consumer Noise

Every day, consumers click the Facebook “Like” action 4.5 Billion times, post 350M photos and visit almost 100 Million local business pages.  750M consumers access FB now via their mobile phone. Yelp boasts over 100 Million users, 80% of which consult the site when making local purchases. Yelp’s mobile app users alone drive more than 10 million calls and driving direction requests every month. On average, a Facebook consumer has over 150 friends and a Twitter user has over 200 followers.

Business Noise

Facebook now reports that more than 16 million small businesses are active with Facebook pages. Foursquare, a relative newcomer in location-based applications, boasts more than 1.3 million businesses and 33 million users who have “checked-in” 3.5 Billion times, leaving a trail of 30 million tips.

We’ve all known that word-of-mouth is the single best and biggest form of effective marketing.  Today, the mobile phone combined with the social web has forever changed word-of-mouth, making it more powerful and more dangerous. Word of Mouth marketing used to pass one-to-one among friends and neighbors; today every comment, photo and review is amplified and published.

Sales Noise

Recent research has suggested that the average small business owner gets more than 30 calls per month from companies pitching them on new digital marketing products.  To pile on top, a search on AngelList identifies over 1,500 new start-ups building new products they intend to sell to the “SMB market”.

Hitting a Wall

At Closely, we’ve worked with small business owners and marketers to really understand how they deal with the staggering wall of noise.  In reality, the noise is deafening. Combined with the incredible pressure of day-to-day operations, most business owners feel like they are falling further and further behind, and their anxiety is all too real.  While they see the opportunity, the complexity and noise leaves them frozen!

A Better Vantage

In 2012 we stepped back to focus our attention on helping small businesses cut through this noise, with a smartphone app that pulls all social, promotion and consumer review activity together into one simple experience. We designed it to filter out everything but the key information about you and your competitors.

With Perch, you can immediately track all activities about your business, and customize your own personal Watchlist of competitors and nearby businesses. Then, at your fingertips you’ll have full tracking of all Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Google +, new promotions, daily deals and Instagram photo postings, as they happen.

Perch is designed to cut through the noise, and give you just the signals that directly impact your business. Down the road we’ll help you compare your performance with competitors and discover what make sense for you to be doing, based what your customers and your competitor activities.

We launched our new Perch mobile app late in 2012, and it’s been named the #1 new Mobile Business App at the SXSW conference in March, and a “must-have” app for business owners, Forbes Magazine.

Best of all, it’s free!  Follow these links to claim your Perch for iPhone and Android phones.

Perry Evans, Perch Founder and CEO

Since the early days of the Internet, Mr. Evans has led the formation and development of MapQuest, Jabber, Local Matters and Closely. A common thread of location-based technologies and products that disrupt and re-align local advertising and small business services runs through these ventures. Mr. Evans is a Board Member of the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at Colorado University in Boulder, and is a past recipient of the Ernst and Young Software Entrepreneur of the Year Award