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TurboTax Launches ’Friends Like You’ Socnet

 

Posted on February 3, 2010
Angela Natividad

 

About three years late on the "everybody should have a proprietary social network!" train, TurboTax launches Friends Like You, which promises to make it easy for "people with similar tax situations to share their tax prep experiences and opinions with each other."

The platform is powered by online recommendation tool Friendlyzer, which draws reviews from sites like Facebook and Twitter to give the site a transparent and super-sharey vibe. (The first review we saw gives TurboTax two stars and labels the service "decieving." The user complains that while it’s easy to use, the total at the end is different from the $29.99 you initially expect to spend. This is followed by a glowing five-star review titled "Turbo Tax is my best friend.")

Reviewers are profiled by family life (married/student/etc), prior tax preparation method and general financial status (whether they own their own home, for example). Material on the site can be shared across the usual array of socnets and voted up or down with little thumbs.

In the event that you forget who this is all for, a sub-navigation bar — shown at top — encourages you to "See what people like you like about TurboTax!"

Guess you can’t hate on TT for trying to make taxtime feel less like solitary penance. And it only stands to reason that people are gonna want to connect with taxpayers in similar straits, if only to compare to what degree they’re getting jilted this year.

We’re jiggling in our boots.

In the unlikely event that you need taxtime to be even more social, sit around and wait until February 7, when TurboTron launches. The latter will feature sports announcer Chris Berman, who’ll introduce "creative ways for people to engage and connect with the TurboTax brand and its customers."


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Comments

1. Wednesday 3 February 2010 attime 14:19, by Dan Barron

Dear TurboTax SocNet, Anyone out there know some cool justifications for filing my annual British Virgin Islands junket as a business expense? TIA. Also interested in underwater derivative tax swaps. Please include I.D. with email. Best, Irving R. Smith

2. Wednesday 17 February 2010 attime 18:03, by Christine :: TurboTax Social Hub

Christine from TurboTax here. Are you aware of the other social programs we run? The "Friends Like You" campaign is just the latest in a long history of innovating in social media for our category. You can see a piece of each of our social programs on a page we’re about to launch: the TurboTax Social Hub.

Some things you’ll see there include the TurboTax Live Community, which offers community-driven contextual help on every page of TurboTax Online (it’s helped over 10MM people for free) and the TurboTax Inner Circle, a community whose feedback helped us launch 30+ new features in this year’s product. While the Live Community is focused on providing support and the Inner Circle is focused on product development, the "Friends like you" program focuses on taking naturally occurring behavior (product recommendations between friends) and replicating that behavior online.

As I’m sure you would agree, we strongly believe from an ethical stand point that all reviews should be posted, not just the happy ones. In fact, one of our biggest challenges in user testing was that our ratings were so high (the averages were and are all in the 4+ star range) that people thought we were leaving out the bad reviews. You’ve seen yourself that isn’t the case.

In the end, even though taxes aren’t all that sexy, it’s a shared experience among all Americans. We’re doing our best to make the experience as delightful as we possibly can. I invite you to reach out to me if you have any questions, I’d be happy to talk to you. You have my email via my registration here. My Twitter account is also @TTaxChristine.

Many "happy returns" to you.

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