Hello and welcome to Ezypzy!

Congratulations and thank you for signing up for your Ezypzy account. We know that most people don’t usually read these sort of welcome messages, but we hope you will anyway, as we would like to tell you some of the ins and outs of your new Ezypzy account.

So you’re signed up with Ezypzy… what now?

Start off with your contacts database

You could start by entering in your contact details. There are a few ways you could do this: adding them one by one, adding them in bulk, or importing them. Instructions for bulk adding can be found here, and instructions for importing here (along with a nifty video here).

Don’t forget to TAG your contacts! Tag them as how you would like to remember them. Here are some examples how you could do this:

Is he a colleague? Tag COLLEAGUE

A relative? Tag him a RELATIVE

Danny introduced her to you? Tag her DANNY’s FRIEND

… and she’s an attractive number that you want to get to know better? Tag her a HOTTIE

Well, you get the idea. The main thing is to tag them so that the next time you want to search for them and all similar contacts, all you need to do is click the right TAG, and you’ll see a whole list of them. You might also want to think about how you want to use Ezypzy: this will certainly help you figure out what tags to use. You might want to use Ezypzy to organise your wedding, so you’ll want to tag your contacts as Bridesmaid, Helpers, Caterers, etc. If you have a Band, then you might tag them as Fans, Bandmembers, Club Owners, Gig Managers, and so on. Check out our blog at http://blog.ezypzy.com for ideas on how to put Ezypzy to use.

Use the Custom Fields feature in each Add Contact Form to add as much information as you wish. Create templates for each type of contact you would like to have… for example, you might wish for all your “Employees” type contacts to have the field “Work Experience”, or all “Relative” contacts to have a “Relation to you” field (so that you figure out which one’s your second cousin once removed, and which is your third cousin’s father in law… or something like that).

Going on to Listings

Listings is a way you can get information out to your users on-demand. How does that work? Here’s a scenario.

Let’s say, in a week long music event where performers change each night, and are at different locations. So, the user create a Listing for “Performers Today” . The user can then enter in the relevant details, and assign “PerformersToday” as the EzyKode. Next, the user post up in posters, bulletin boards and wherever: “To know who is performing today, type EZY PerformersToday and send it to 36881″.

Immediately and automatically, when the public sees the code, and upon sending the Text Message request, the public will receive an Text Message reply with the relevant details, in this case: “Performers Tonight: Mindy Smith at Stage 1 @ 7pm, Jewel at Stage 2 @ 7.30pm, Deana Carter at Stage 3 @9pm”.

Another scenario would be if you wanted to sell something, like, a house. Classifieds and signage space is pretty limited, right? So you could put it on the “For Sale” signboard “For more information about this house, and to receive images, send EZY HOUSE001 to 36881”. This means you would have to create a Listing Item for the house, set HOUSE001 as the EzyKode, and insert all the details you wish your users to have.

When a request for information is made via the Listing, the number will be captured, and Ezypzy users can choose to add this person to their contact list, effectively becoming a lead generation tool. People who have used Ezypzy to manage their clients have found this especially useful, as each time a request is made, they can follow up and convert the Lead to a Client or just manage their Client relationship better.

Send out Text Messages

Once you have entered your contact details and have Tagged them appropriately, you are ready to start broadcasting stuff! Just click on any of the tags to send out group Text messages.

Don’t forget to top up your Ezypzy credit so that you will be able to send out messages.

Tasks

You can create notes, and can convert a note to a task by simply assigning a due date for it. In addition to that, reminders can be set and you can choose to receive those reminders via Text Messaging or E-mail. These Notes can be just general notes, or can be tied to a Contact or a Listing. Just click on “Add a Task” which appears at the bottom of the Contacts page, or on each Contact Details page.

Get to it!

So there you have it, the ins-and-outs of your Ezypzy account. Please check the website and our blog from time to time, to updated about the new features of Ezypzy, as well as to get ideas on how you may use it.

This idea pretty much applies to any event that requires voting. No, you can’t vote through Text Messaging using Ezypzy (at least, not yet! But it is on our Future Features list), but you can certainly use it for campaigning. If you’re doing some similar voting thing, then just replace the words “contestant” to whatever you wish.

Okay, so let’s say you have Beauty Pageant going on. Create a Listing for each contestant. What sort of information do you think the public would like to know about them? Add those in. You might also want to include ranking information, like, how many votes they have right now, or what position they are in, is it a decrease or increase, etc. If I were running the beauty pageant, I might put in something like:

Name: Alisa Pan
Age: 23
Occupation: Marketing Student
Organisation: UPM
Hometown: Kuantan
Height: 157cm
Talents: Song and Dance

… and I might include a photo for WAP push.

Then set ezykodes for each of the contestants. Lets say this is the GirlNextDoor Pageant or some such thing, so I set the ezykode as gnd-[name]. Like, gnd-alisa.

Now for the marketing bit! You might want to put it out on billboards or on TV, “To know more about Alisa, SMS ‘ezy gnd-alisa’ to 36881. Or you might want to do T-Shirts! Get Alisa to wear them.

So maybe when the public tries to find out more and makes an SMS request, they might get something like this!

“GirlNextDoor 2009 (gnd-alisa): Alisa Pan, 23, Marketing Student @ UPM; Hometown:Kuantan, Height:157cm, Talents: Song & Dance”.

And they’ll also get a photo. Which would already be resized for mobile devices, perfect for setting as a phone wallpaper.

You can easily use the same concept for electoral events, like, for your college council elections (in this case, you might want to tell people about which faculty they are in, what year, what major, etc). I’m sure you can think up of other ideas how you can use Ezypzy in this case.

When we first came up with the concept of Ezypzy, we thought it was for Real Estate agents. Later we figured there are others who will find uses for it too, but even so, Ezypzy is still a really powerful marketing tool that property agents could use.

You’ll want to create Listings of all the properties you are trying to sell. Lets say you have two houses, three apartments on your list. Each of them probably have already been assigned some kind of code, like HSE881. If not, assign your own. These codes can be use as the Listing’s Ezykode. Enter the relevant information regarding that property into that Listing, like, number of rooms, bathrooms, built up area, etc. You might not want to include every single thing into your Text Message, and some editing might be necessary. In the end, your Text Message might look like this:

“Serviced Residence, AskingPrice: RM310K, RentalPrice:RM2K, Rooms:3, Bath:3, Fully Furnished, Vacant”

You might also want to include a photograph of the apartment.

Enter something into the Title part, for example, your agency name, your name, but make it short as you don’t want to eat up too much Text space.

Next, Advertise! Put up, very clearly on the signboard or poster or in the classifieds where you are advertising this property: “For more information and photos, SMS “EZY HSE881 to 36881”.

So, when interested buyers come across the house, they’ll see that line and when they give it a try, they’ll receive a reply like this:

“Leo Properties Ltd (HSE881): Serviced Residence, AskingPrice: RM310K, RentalPrice:RM2K, Rooms:3, Bath:3, Fully Furnished, Vacant”

Nifty? Hey, but we’re not done yet!

Everytime a request is made, you’ll be notified via the dashboard, as well as in the Reports section. The mobile number that made the request will be displayed, so you can then choose to call them up, thank them for their interest, arrange for a viewing. And when you have their contact details, you can just click on that number in the the Reports, and save them as a Contact in your Ezypzy database!

Once you have them as a Contact, you can keep them updated whenever you have a similar property available, via the Mass SMS/E-mail feature. So, you might also want to tag them, for example, if they asked about an Apartment, tag them something like “APARTMENT POTENTIAL”.

Okay, so now you know how Ezypzy can work for Real Estate agents, go sell some houses! Oh, and if any of us at Ezypzy ever are looking for a place, please do cut us a nice deal!

We’ve got another client and this time its a car distributor, Naza Peugeot Malaysia to be precise!

They have just won the Peugeot distributorship for Malaysia and would like to gather the details of all current Malaysian Peugeot owners. So part of their strategy was to create an online form where these owners could key in their info.

Since we already did something similar for Dreamgirls, this should be cakewalk. Of course we had to put in an extra item for this form. Car details.

Why I call it extra is because we initially used our custom fields for this and realised, “hey arent people allowed to own more than one Peugeot car?”.

So that’s why we had to add a special Car Details fields group for them, much like how we did it with the addresses, which is a standard ezypzy contact field group.

As usual, we also tagged the online registrants as ‘online’ and on top of that, we also tagged them according to their car model so that Naza would be able to quickly list out all contacts who owns a particular model.

So right now we just need to add in the Export Contacts function, and Naza should be happy with our service.

This is pretty interesting. Got a call from a close friend’s brother recently about helping them out with their upcoming website, www.malaysiandreamgirl.tv, which is pretty much an online reality model search series. First of its kind in Malaysia.

We of course jumped at the opportunity to work with them… for obvious reasons >:)

Anyway, started off by helping them source and set up their streaming server. I tried out the Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server, but it was a bitch to set up, so I scrapped that. So we went with the Wowza Media Server instead, which was easy to set up, easy to configure, streams flash videos smoothly and best of all, super great support. I emailed them regarding some problem and got a reply within the day (thanks Charlie!).

So after getting the streaming server up and running, they wanted to do an online audition and newsletter subscription form. That’s when I introduced ezypzy to them. Because in essence, those who are auditioning for the show are Dreamgirl’s contacts, so are their newsletter subscribers.

So we suggested to them that we could make a publicly accessible version of Dreamgirl’s Add Contact form and whoever registers through this form, they will be automatically added into Dreamgirl’s ezypzy account’s Contact list and tagged as ‘online’, so that they know exactly who registered online.

As for the newsletter, same concept with the audition form, except newsletter subscription form only has one field.

The other feature we would need to add would be a special subdomain for individual ezypzy users. So for instance, Dreamgirl’s online forms will only be accessible via http://dreamgirl.ezypzy.com.my/ (subdomain follows the username) .

Its official, everyone loves ezypzy here.

After my last post 5 days ago, we’ve been figuring out how ezypzy could be used during the Monsoon Cup, little did we know, our users figured out most of it by themselves.

Here are just a few cases of how ezypzy is being used here.

1. T-Best, the Monsoon Cup organisers, already have close to 400 contacts in their ezypzy account currently. They are using ezypzy to mass email important press releases or announcements to the people in their contact list. They are also using it to mass SMS the latest race results to everyone in their list.

An interesting thing happened when we first demonstrated it to them, we clicked on the ‘tbest’ tag in the sidebar and sent out a test message to everyone in the ‘tbest’ list, and immediately everybody’s phone in the control room started beeping in unision, which drew some really surprised looks from everyone and a smile from us

In addition to that, they have set up an ezypzy listing item to allow people to request for the next race schedule. All they have to do is SMS ‘ezy nextflight’ to 36881 and immediately they will receive an SMS detailing the upcoming races. We just set up the ‘nextflight’ PixKode today, but the response for this has not been that great yet, only 3 requests so far and 2 of them were from us Maybe they think they have to pay for the received messages, even though we mentioned only standard SMS charges apply. Malaysia is quite famous for stupid SMS scams. Hope the response will pick up the next few days.

2. Weber Shandwick, the global PR company and official PR company for Monsoon Cup Terengganu, has been keying in all their media contacts into their ezypzy account, both local and international media professionals covering the Monsoon Cup. Then they use the mass SMS feature to blast out events or photo ops that might interest the journalist & photographers. In addition to that, they also have all their media contacts’ details at hand for quick and easy reference.

3. People Dynamics are the partner company that provides the manpower for temps and hospitality hostesses for Monsoon Cup. They have about 30 people under them and have been using ezypzy to mobilise their team, which are often spread out all over the marina and city. For instance, they will send out a mass SMS to inform them of an impending briefing or maybe when a sponsor VIP arrives, a group SMS sent to the hostesses who have been put in charged of that sponsor… By the way, these hostesses are the non-dodgy type, just a bunch of pimple faced college kids.

4. The broadcasting team seems to be using it for something as well. I don’t have the details as I had to fly back to KL recently. But I think they are using it to mobilise their team, because the broadcasting and video production crew is about 20 people strong and spread out as well.

So far about 2500 SMS messages have been sent in the past 4 days. Which is waaaaaaay more than what we had anticipated. We’ve also had people from Europe asking us when they can start using ezypzy over there, not just for the other international Match Racing Tour locations, but for other big scale events as well.

At least we can put our “nobody’s going to use ezypzy” fears to rest for now and sleep better at night!

I’ve been meaning to start this blog for ezypzy for months now but never got around to doing it. However, now is a good time as any seeing that the beta version is finally ready and we have secured our first real beta tester, the Monsoon Cup Terengganu, the world’s richest sailing event right here in Malaysia.

This year’s event is even more momentous because it is the last race and title decider of the World Match Racing Tour sailing series. Kenneth, my colleague, and I are here in Terengganu in the thick of the action, figuring out how the organisers can use ezypzy to manage this prestigious event.

We took a drive up to Kuala Terengganu from Kuala Lumpur 2 nights ago. It was a 450KM journey and it took us approximately 7 hours to arrive, with stops for food and all. Checked into Primula Beach Resort, which isn’t too bad. My room had a bathtub, so that always puts a smile on my face.

The next day (which was yesterday 23rd Nov) , we were explaining to the organisers what was ezypzy about and what it was capable of. You see, until thus far, only their IT manager knew about it and recommended it to the rest of the team, but everyone was clueless on what ezypzy was about. Heck even we’re clueless about it ourselves sometimes.

So we showed them the site, showed how they could easily create their contact list, and then how they could tag them and mass email/sms to their contact list. Immediately they assigned a temp, to key in all the business cards they have been collecting into ezypzy. She took less than 10 minutes to figure it out, which was a success in itself because she is a real computer newbie. We figured out she was a newbie right away because after she was done, she saved the web page (i.e. File->Save As), then opened it again and asked us what happened to all the data she keyed in.

Instead of trying to explain to her the whole mechanics of a web based application, we just told her that all the data is saved elsewhere, she just needs to hit Save button on the web page itself.

Anyway, later in the day, they wanted to send out a couple of press releases to everyone in their contact list. Now, ezypzy was never meant to be a newsletter or emailing application. Yes we do have a mass mail feature, but that’s for sending a quick and simple text email to your contact list. So we had to tell them that they couldn’t format the way their email message looked like. However they did require to attach at least one file to the email, a feature we did not even plan to have. So within 2 hours, Terry, our kickass programmer back in KL, whipped something up and voila, we had a mass mail feature with a single file attachment, and we blasted out press releases right after.

Those were basically the highlights of yesterday, a really great feeling to see the fruits of our labour finally being used by someone other than ourselves. We started this journey since February 2007 and lots of things have happened since then. But being the lousy blogger that I am, I never chronicled our journey since the beginning. But then again I’ve always been a rebel, so screw it, I’m going to chronicle the start of our journey in retrospect.