Sproutit.com: Small Business Blog of the Day

This is a weekend bonus to make up for not writing about a blog on Wednesday (shame shame on me). Today I'm reviewing a website that has wide small business appeal, but uses that appeal to draw attention to a specific product.

What it is
The Big Act is the blog for the company Sproutit.com. The company's product is called Mailroom. From the home page for Sproutit.com:

Mailroom can organize your email and suggest replies to save you time and keep you better in touch with your customers.

Features
The folks at The Big Act love to talk about Web 2.0. From a glance at the past couple of months, I would guess at least 60% of posts touch on the subject. Mixed in with these discussions are good product placement posts and we also find some interesting things about the company (such as part of their company is located in Prague).

Favorite Post
The post is called Riya Asked for It and discusses which browsers are compatible with the new Riya photo website. I liked this post because it invoked an emotional response from me.

Chris, the author of the post, was quite upset that Apple's native browser, Safari, was not yet supported by the site. He then makes the following statement:

Any web company should know some basic facts about internet users.

1. 3 browsers come to mind (IE, Firefox, Safari) one of which, really sucks.
2. A greater percentage of Mac users are online vs. Windows users
3. Your first customers should be the loudest and easiest to reach, a.k.a. fanatics

Simple formula: Mac user = fanatic

On the surface, Chris appears to be flexing his technical knowledge and marketing savvy, but instead, I think Chris is just showing a typical "Mac cult reaction" that the majority of us PC users think is silly. This is especially surprising considering Sproutit is aimed at business owners, the vast majority of which use PCs, not Macs. Finally, it's easy to point out the flaw in his argument that while a greater percentage of Mac users are online, Mac users make up less than 5% of the computer market. I don't know about you, but I'll take 40% of 95 customers over 100% of 5 customers any day.

Further Comments
I found this website because the owners of the company emailed me to let me know about it. I like the company. They are friendly people and their blog is definitely worth a read and probably an RSS subscription.

One minor annoyance with the site is that it appears at first glance that you can't leave a comment on the site. If you go to the home page and start reading the stories, there is nothing to tell you how many comments each story has received. It is only when you click on the headline of a story and read the story as an individual page that you see its comment capabilities.

Tags: Sproutit | Sproutit.com | The Big Act

Comments

[Charles Jolley]

Hi! Thanks for reviewing our blog. I just wanted to let you know that we do show the number of comments on the front page. It appears to the left just below the author's picture and a list of keywords. If you click on the comments link, it will take you to a page to add a comment yourself. We'll look at moving some things to make it more obvious though.

[Brian Brown]

Aha! I knew I had to be missing something. I'll be honest, I struggled for a good two minutes trying to find the comments the first time I read a post and finally gave up. I'm glad to see that they are there.