Managing a home takes a lot of planning and organization. Some of us are better at this than others. Good plans and better organization become even more important when your family's activity level grows exponentially as younger members enter the age of near-constant after school activity. Clothes get a little more expensive, gasoline costs increase, dinner time shifts from day to day, and your calendar seems to fill up fast. Even weekly grocery trips get a little tough to schedule!
Digitally minded household managers will find what seems like an infinite number of productivity apps, services, sites, and methods online. Combing through them one by one might prove frustrating, since not all are geared toward home and family organization. In fact, plenty are perfect for business, but not for home. The Cozi family organizer meets the needs of busy families in a way other calendaring sites and apps cannot, at least for the time being.
From the Cozi Website:
Cozi is a free online organizer and mobile app that helps you manage the family schedule, organize shopping lists and to do lists, and capture favorite memories -- all in one place. Especially designed for busy families, Cozi is accessible from any computer, mobile phone or tablet. All you need to get started is a free account and because Cozi is shared, you only need one account for the whole family.
Cozi is a social company. It interacts with users daily, and it works hard at building brand loyalty.
Like many other modern companies, Cozi wants to know how its customers feel and what they're saying about it on the social Web. Using social monitoring tools from Lithium, it's been able to measure product effectiveness over time and compare performance against competitive products. Analyzing past data, it's been able to determine which features were well received and which needed improvement.
"Social media monitoring helps us best when the problem goes beyond one person," Carol Schiller, social media director at Cozi, told me recently. "For example, if we launch a new feature, and it turns out that 50 people have the same question on some aspect of it in one day, social channels are the best way to get an explanation out there to everyone quickly."
Cozi handles this kind of real-time monitoring and response using free tools from Facebook and HootSuite for Twitter and blog comments. It uses a Lithium tool for tracking trends over time and "casting a wider listening net than for real-time response," Schiller said. "Social tools can and should deliver insights and capabilities that benefit every division in the company, and at Cozi, that is exactly what is happening."
In the social realm itself, an active social presence certainly is important to Cozi. "But it would be absolutely ridiculous to say that Cozi's success online is due to its presence and participation in social media. After all, if your product stinks, social media is only going to let everyone know that it stinks faster."
Instead, "Cozi is successful because we have built a terrific product that truly helps families manage their busy schedules and tasks," she said. "So people talk about us online and we listen, good or bad -- mostly good -- respond, and work every day to continue making our customers so wildly happy, they can't help but tell other families about us. So far, I'm happy to say, it appears to be working."
Social media analytics are still quite new but are already proving valuable for online business. When you have a good product that people want to discuss, it's worth monitoring sentiment over time. Your next move can be a win if it's the one your customers desire most.
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