The OnSpot Social App – A Quick Look

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• Edited Video Transcript •

Hey there, how you doing this? It's Chris. I'm going to do a quick look at the OnSpot Social app. We're going to call this an examination. It's not really a review. For me to do a review, I'd have to dig into the software. I'd have to actually download it, play with it and all that good stuff.

I have a client in California that's interested in this particular piece of software and she wants my opinion on what I think of it. I think I can give her the answer she's looking for, and hopefully help you out as well, by simply taking a look at what I can see from their marketing.

So we're going to start there. But before I vent my spleen as to what I think, let's see what they say about themselves.

View OnSpot Social App Video Here

So where are we going to start with this conversation? Let's start with the use cases. What they basically say is that this can be used in store, at events and in the field.

And I can see where that would make sense. If you are a service area professional and you go out to your customer, like a fence contractor or plumber or something like that, then in the field might make some sense for you. Because that's where you would use it.

If you happen to go to trade shows, then you would use at events. But for this conversation, we're going to go look at the OnSpot Social app through the lens of a salon owner. There are other in-store applications, but we're going to stick with that one and everything that we talk about here.

OnSpot Social App Pricing

The conversation really needs to start at pricing. And the reason it starts there is because you need to ask yourself, how many devices are you going to have in play at one time?

Regardless of which plan you go with, let's say you have one that's in display mode that's sitting at checkout, then you might have one sitting over in the waiting area. Finally you have an iPad running the OnSpot Social App at each station. If we're doing a four chair kind of scenario, that's six.

So you have six running at any one time. That way every stylist can collect email addresses and do whatever they want to do with this particular system. That's the kind of calculus that drives the first part of this conversation.

How many instances of the OnSpot Social App do you need? Because until you know, you really don't know which one of these numbers makes sense for you.

And since we've made it to the numbers part, let's talk about that.

As any software as a service (SaaS) company, does OnSpot Social has two different models. You can either pay annually or you can pay monthly. And if you take a look at the difference in the pricing, you can see which one they want you to lean towards. They want you on the annual plan. And I can't blame them.

That's a lot of commitment and they put a lot into putting this piece of software together. So needless to say, they want folks that are around for the long haul. And if you are using this for a year, chances are, you will learn how to make it work. And that habit will get itself ingrained.

However, if you're doing the monthly, the thing to think about is do these numbers make sense for how you're using it?

Okay. So before I get lost in the sauce on this one, let's basically look at what you get.

If you're going with the OnSpot Social app standard plan, essentially what you have is three things that matter: digital signage, email collection and social media follows. So if you're going to be active on social media to develop your audience and if you're going to be using email marketing to reach out and maintain contact, then there's value there.

If you're not, then the question is, does this make sense?

OnSpot Social App – Email Collection

If you are going to do email marketing, the OnSpot Social App makes it very easy for you to collect email addresses. It's kind of seamless.

We do screens now. That's not a new thing. It used to be a new thing. When my kids were teenagers. That's a long time ago. So now we do things on screens. And this is built for people who are comfortable with screens. So depending on the decade that your clientele represents, they may or may not feel as comfortable using this app.

What OnSpot Social does is help you avoid needing to decipher someone's chicken scratch handwriting. They type it out. It's the way it's supposed to be. You don't have to wonder whether that's a zero or the letter O or a small L or a capital letter I. You don't have to worry about those things because it's clearly typed out. So there's obviously some benefit there.

The information is sent seamlessly into your software. So you avoid a bunch of little pieces of paper that may get lost. If you're doing email marketing, there's some serious value going on here. This streamlines, what is probably the most difficult part of that process. Getting the information from somebody, getting it incorrectly and then getting it into your system.

OnSpot Social App – Use Case: Salon Friction Points

So how are you going to use this? I gave you a scenario where you had six of those particular devices running at any one time. And of course it has to be an iPad. So you've got six iPads floating around the salon.

Well, what if you don't want to use six? Think about how you would actually use this going one to one, because if someone's filling out their email address, somebody else can't look at it.

If you happen to have one on display… I guess I keep saying this display thing. It's probably be a good time to take a look at that.

Click on the features tab and go all the way to the bottom of the page. You'll see where it says display, signage, and videos. Click that.

And what you'll see is that this is the OnSpot Social app configuration that I was talking about. So you can imagine an iPad sitting at your check and check out to greet somebody when they first come in. Or one sitting there in the waiting area with a slideshow going as they're sitting there looking at the magazines. You could put all kinds of things in that slideshow.

If there's a particular hairstyle that is suddenly in style, then you could actually have different versions of it flashing up to give people ideas. You can do all kinds of things. There's all kinds of cool video marketing that you can do to stick in front of people: current events, current events in the salon, current events in the community. All kinds of visuals. Remember, we're into screens.

So that's a good thing. However, just a caveat. If you've got that running at the chair, one-to-one, that's no problem.

But if they're sharing, perhaps one iPad per two chairs. If a customer picks one up, the other person can't use it, doesn't see it.

You kind of lose some functionality there. Showstopper? Probably not, but something to think about as you're deciding how many of these you need to put into play.

OnSpot Social App – Digital Signage

If you're a geek like me, which you're not, then you could simply put up a page on your website, have it displayed on an iPad and do the exact same thing as the Digital Display feature. However, it's not going to be able to be adjusted as quickly. You can't move it on the fly. And then of course, if you're not a geek, you can't contact me to quickly do it.

You can do these things from the dashboard that's already included in the software in this system. Which makes that piece really, really easy.

You see a picture online that you want to display in your salon. All you have to do is copy the image, throw it up there. Boom. There it is. Instant marketing, kind of a cool thing.

So that flexibility is a really nice feature of this. And if you want to get people into your social media, you can do that. If you want to have a contest or something, pump the brakes on that one, got to go back to the features for that one.

That depends on which tier of the OnSpot Social app you go with, but there is some benefit from sticking images in people's faces and asking: Hey, are you interested in this?

OnSpot Social App – Wish List

The real functionality at the standard level is email and lead collection. That digital signage is just to facilitate the email lead collection and social media.

This other stuff is nice, but it's not enough to push the dial in one direction or the other.

Once you get to Plus then you come down to Surveys and Reviews. Now that's some goodness.

The thing that I'm not happy about with Surveys and Reviews is that you can't push it out.

How many people do you know, are going to sit there and vent their spleen or tell you what they really think about you while they're sitting there.

You want to be able to remind later. Is that a showstopper? Absolutely not.

You can tie that functionality into the email and lead capture. So you can kind of do that that way, but it would be nice if it was just a feature of this level. That'd be kind of cool. The OnSpot Social app Plus level does come with a video player, social billboard, all kinds of cool stuff that kicks in here.

But for me, Surveys and Reviews is the main feature you get when you jump from Standard to Plus level.

And last but not least, when you jump from Plus level to Premium level, the main feature that you get is the auto email and text messages.

The difference between this and this. If I understand it correctly, email you'll capture the information auto email, they fill it out and all of a sudden you can have their software without your autoresponder automatically send out certain preprogrammed messages.

It's not a full blown autoresponder as you get with say Aweber, Constant Contact, or SendinBlue, But it does have a functionality to automatically send stuff out like coupons or things like that.

So when you're evaluating the OnSpot Social app, that's what you have to look at. The features that are available and the different jumps at each level.

Is the Review piece enough of a jump for you to go from here to here? Is getting the coupons and the auto email and text messages feature enough to get you to jump from here to here?

That's what your decision points are.

And depending on who you are, the answer is probably going to be yes, depending on what you're doing, depending on how developed your outreach is, you may eventually find yourself moving from here to here to here.

One of the things that would have been nice with the OnSpot Social app is the free trial. It does give you the full Monte. It gives you full access to all features, which is as it should be. Except it only gives you usage with one device. This isn't really a fault. I wouldn't have done it any differently, but you just need to keep this in mind is you can't get the full feel of how you would use it.

If you're going to have more than one device, you can't see where the friction points are of having one device versus having a bunch of devices going. So that's the only thing I would think about.

So you're going to have to use your imagination to see how you would actually physically use it in the, going through your day customer, to customer, to client, to client, to get a good idea of how many devices you need to have. So that using them, does it become clumsy? If that makes any sense? Hopefully it does.

Conclusion

Alright. So is the OnSpot Social app good software? Does it have great functionality? I think the answer is yes, but it has to make sense for you. You have to understand what you're doing and you have to really have the intent of doing something with the information it collects. If you don't, then this is just an expense.

If you really want to do your outreach, which you should, there's some goodness here. There's a lot of goodness here.

Okay. And that's my opinion, just based on what I've seen. Hopefully it helps you. If you have any questions or comments, just drop them in the space below the video. Then we'll go back and forth like that. Talk to you soon.

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