Three months ago we took part in the Grasshopper / KISSmetrics Phone Number Challenge, an experiment with placing a phone number on our home page. This slight change to our homepage was meant to show whether we could increase sign ups. The hypothesis of the challenge was that by having a visible phone number on our home page, the trust factor would increase and therefore sign ups would too.

According to Jonathan Kay from Grasshopper Virtual Phone Systems who proposed this concept:

“People feel more comfortable with brands that they can put a face behind. Even though you might purchase a product exclusively online, having a phone number on your site and the ability to talk to a real person (who cares) in turn makes you feel more comfortable taking out your wallet (or recommending someone else to) for this brand.”

After placing a phone number with supporting call-to-action text we ran a simple A/B test using KISSmetrics.

The results were positive although not statistically significant:

• 53.96% of sign-ups originated from the home page variation with the phone number.
• 46.04% of sign-ups originated from the original home page without a phone number.

Conversion Increase: half of a percent. Since the trend is positive we’re going to include a bigger, more visible phone number when redesigning our homepage and try another test.

“Even though we didn’t receive a lot of calls I believe that having a phone number visible on the website gives more credibility to our product and trust to our visitors,” concluded Davorin Gabrovec, Flowr CEO.

We’d like to thank Grasshopper and KISSmetrics for choosing us for this challenge!

Read more about the testing on KISSmetrics blog.

We got to another final! By entering the VentureBeat‘s “Fast Pitch” competition for cloud-focused startups we will be pitching at Under the Radar Conference. The competition is taking place November 10th at the Microsoft Conference Center in Mountain View, California.

Eight finalists including Flowr will be presenting to Venture Beat’s team, “along with 300+ decision makers from some of the biggest and most influential brands, agencies and marketing companies,” according to VB’s announcement. “Under the Radar takes a comprehensive look at the true innovators fueling the explosion of emerging technology and new business opportunities.” It’s exciting to be a part of it!

We have some more all-nighters ahead, but we definitely love it!

Being selected as the E2.0 Conference 2011 Launch Pad finalist we won the opportunity to showcase Flowr at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, the leading event for companies looking to transform their business through social business tools and platforms. We have three minutes timeslot to present from the main stage to the Enterprise 2.0 audience of business and technology decision makers, evangelists and adopters of cutting edge technologies.

“We would like to congratulate Flowr and all Launch Pad participants for their innovation in the Enterprise 2.0 market,” said Paige Finkelman, Enterprise 2.0 Conference General Manager. “We look forward to hearing more from each of our selected finalists on stage in November at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara.”

The finalists were selected by The Enterprise 2.0 Jury followed by community voting so we would like to thank all of you who voted for us and shared the voting.

We hope to see you in Santa Clara!

We entered The Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad competition that lets companies present their innovative application. As one of the seven semi-finalists chosen by the Jury we are now running for the final round that will take place at Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara, CA. Finalists will give a short demo of their applications live on the keynote stage. With your help we can be one of them.

In his article in Smashing Magazine, Rian van der Merwe reminds us that collaboration is our job as well as any other’s job. “It only works if everyone in the organization is open about their processes and workflows, without fear of being judged unfairly.”

Why improving collaboration matters at all? According to her experience Jem Janik states that “improved employee collaboration does help a company achieve its goals”. In CMS Wire she writes about setting measurable business goals as “the first step towards a successful community”. Her advice is to start with your company strategy as well as consider what’s not working today with reversing those realities as your objectives.

According to Dr. Graham Hill “companies need to develop their collaborative capabilities before implementing collaboration tools”. In his guest post, hosted by ZD Net author Michael Krigsman he presents “Ten principles for effective collaboration” concluding that technology can be an enormous help if it really fits the style of collaboration that has already been developed.

When it comes to implementing social collaboration platform in the enterprise IT professionals are challenged by a new role. The Brainyard Columnist Debra Donston-Miller sees social networking in the enterprise as “a particularly challenging technology nut for IT to crack because so much of it can and does exist outside of the IT department’s orbit.” IT department should take the lead “during the process of planning, implementing, maintaining and even extending organizations’ social collaboration platforms and presence”.

“Social collaboration is a culture that companies have to develop in order to become leaders in dynamic business environment. Without the culture, collaboration tools and platforms interfere with the workflow. In Flowr, we would like to overcome that. We are developing a solution that will encourage teams to recognize the potential of collaboration and will develop their social collaborative skills hands-on,” Davorin Gabrovec, CEO Flowr comments on the issue.

After a busy season of launching new features and improving Flowr user experience it’s now your turn. We would like to know what you think about Flowr even if you’re not a user (yet). Whether you’d been using it for collaboration or just took a tour now it’s your opportunity to have your say.

We are wondering what you like and what you don’t as well as how we should improve Flowr. Don’t hesitate to comment on anything you think might help us to develop a better collaboration platform.

Take a survey. It will only take you a couple of minutes. It’s anonymous, but we won’t forget your valuable answers!

p. s. You might get a cool Flowr t-shirt – a happy participant will be randomly chosen

With upgraded “invite contacts” feature Flowr enables you to add contacts from your email address book. Now you can quickly invite colleagues to your network with no need to type each address.

Import is possible from MS Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail as well as from address book in any other application that supports .csv or .vcf export.

You can also add a personal message to each invitation. Don’t wait – invite your coworkers and start collaborating!

We have added new feature for email sharing which enables creating email aliases – additional emails connected with single user.

The feature simplifies sharing via share@theflowr.com. You can now extend sharing information with different email addresses not directly connected to your Flowr account. In order to do this, you have to create email aliases where you might share from (your other email accounts or other email such as info@, support@ etc.).

You can create email aliases in Settings: settings tab > email_sharing.

Why is this important? If you want to share email message or content from your email you send it to share@theflowr.com. Based on email you shared from Flowr searches for matching email address associated to your user account in Flowr network. Now you can connect your user account with additional emails (one or more) and Flowr will match them as well. We added this feature having in mind that networks are sharing content via email addresses such as error@ support@ info@ news@ etc. It’s also convenient if users work with different email accounts.

Email aliases feature enables the following options:

• You can add or remove email alias any time you want.
• You can use more then one email alias for user. There is no limitation for number of alias per user.
• You can’t use email for alias if somebody else is using this email for his primary email.
• Two users can’t use the same email alias. Email alias must be unique to one user.
• If user is banned all his email aliases are also banned.
• You can’t login with email alias. Email aliases are only used for email sharing (sending emails to share@theflowr.com).

We are in a summer mood these days! The sun is shining and holidays are coming. After busy spring with successful launch of new edition and refreshed website we are now ready to take a breath, but only for a while.

We would like to share our joy with you so we prepared a special summer offer. We want our users to enjoy Premium experience with Flowr so we offer the Premium plan with 40% discount. You will save more than $300!

Our special offer is valid if you upgrade your account to Premium by July 1st* (then we’ll take some time off – but don’t worry, our support will be available as usual).

With Flowr Premium you will be able to:

• Invite unlimited number of users.
• Use all the Premium features such as custom branding, analytics, custom filters, priority support and much more.

Go to your account and upgrade to Premium using the discount code (settings – account – upgrade).

With Premium experience you can collaborate with your team even more effectively. What’s better than enjoyable collaboration during summer days? Though we hope you’ll take some time off, too and get fresh ideas for the following months.

* No risk, 30 days money back guarantee. Special summer discount is valid until July 1st.