Start-up marketing
A few days ago I had the pleasure of sitting with the VP Marketing of a well known, established technology company in Seattle that everyone would know. The firm is a leader in their field and is backed by some of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. She was interested in how we marketed Imagekind, gained traction with users, artists and press. She had been telling me how the company was working on a variety of email campaigns, direct mail pieces and other traditional marketing components. This particular marketing executive was high energy, experienced and a master of the craft.
But there was something interesting about this particular conversation…
What seemed like a “natural” marketing strategy in at least one respect for Imagekind wasn’t at all an area of active participation for this established company.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
With all new start-ups, you have a limited budget, limited staff and a myriad of other constraints. In our case, there was not going to be any direct mail pieces or large PR budgets until we mastered the art of social media marketing. It is necessary for several reasons. First, it is important to figure out how to get others to understand why they should have a vested interest in your success. Additionally, it is most helpful to have your customers and partners develop a vested interest in your success. Finally, it is your network of users that are your most efficient QA and testing resource.
In a nutshell, social media marketing should be the most important marketing priority for start-ups before moving into other areas. Even big companies are now realizing that they need to staff up for these kinds of positions. So, start-ups need to insure that they are present and accounted for when it comes to the free-flowing discussions moving around the web.
Ben Wills did a decent job of trying to encapsulate what Social Media Marketing was all about with his so-called “5 Pillars“. All to often though, and unfortunately, is that buzzy nomenclature is used to describe otherwise common sense concepts. He calls the pillars:
1. Declaration of Identity
2. Identity through Association
3. User-initiated Conversation
4. Provider-initiated Conversation
5. In-Person Interaction
I tend to like to say things plainly. Social media marketing allows you to:
1. Better tell the world who you are and what your purpose and intent is
2. Provides a basis for those with your interests to associate themselves with you
3. Assumes you accept that business is about a two-way conversation with your customers
4. Expand your ability to initiate your own conversations with customers
5. Provides a great platform to get face to face with your customers at events
And herein lies the mystery for me. Why would a marketing veteran NOT place this kind of marketing at the top of their priority list in all cases? Why is a direct mail campaign more interesting than engaging online dialog with your customers and prospects? The answer is simply that things are perhaps not as intuitive as they may seem. Most VP’s of Marketing still aren’t blogging and the ones that do probably weren’t doing it 2 years ago. Thus, traditional marketers are still trying to fully embrace what it is all about. Before allocating your marketing budget, hiring a PR firm, sending out any direct mail, paying designers to develop slick brochures, engaging in product give-aways and hiring celebrities to endorse your product, these are the questions that should be answered first:
“Where on the internet do my constituents congregate”?
“Am I regularly involved in the conversations with them at these sites”?
“Do I understand what my online reputation is”?
“Do I have an online reputation”?
“Do I know how to alter my reputation to better reflect what we want it to be”?
“Do I know how search engines are treating me”?
“Do I have an army of invested customers helping us row the boat towards our goals”?
“Do customers understand what is in it for them if they embrace our vision work help us communicate it”?
“Do we have sufficient resources and budget to maintain timely conversations online”?
“Do you ‘own the airwaves’ in your sector vis a vis your competitors”?
“Have we identified the key influentials out there that can help us get more traction”?
“Do we accept that a stay-at-home-soccermom can be far more powerful than a celebrity for our company”?
“Do we realize that a blog is not a toy? It is our customer sounding board and we must take it seriously”?
“Do we accept that PR firms do not define our identity”? Customers words do that
Social media marketing is a slightly fancy way of saying that we accept that modern day marketing is first and foremost about the importance of two-way communication.
Forget fancy brochures. They don’t talk back. Instead, prepare to get dirty. Spend more time online talking and less time putting stamps on direct mail. When it is all going really well, a lot of people will write about you and say nice things. A lot of people will even link to you from their websites. Then journalists will take note of this movement and will write about you too. All of this behavior should then correspond to increasing interest and that will correspond to sales. Knowing how to adjust the levers of online reputation, knowing how to track it and knowing how those actions influence revenue is essentially the cornerstone of online marketing in this day and age. Even for established companies.
Inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers
What a fantastic website. Ever seen TED? TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. The site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. Almost 200 talks from the archive are available and they add new videos each week. Beautiful website too.
The great Google disaster?
Ouch. On Tuesday Google closed down 4.6% to $464. More importantly though, could be these latest reports that growth of paid clicks on Google in the U.S. went from 37 percent in October to 0.3 percent in January. Is the sky falling? I would say Yes. And I would say No. In actual fact, most people would observe that Google appears to be tightening the reins on clicks to combat click fraud and generate better clicks in general. Once Google gets a handle on this issue, it is very likely that the stock could come back up.
Consider some key findings for click fraud data reported for Q4 2007 by Click Forensics:
- The overall industry average click fraud rate rose to 16.6 percent for Q4 2007. That’s up from the 14.2 percent click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 16.2 percent for Q3 2007.
- The 2007 industry average click fraud rate grew by 15 percent over the industry average click fraud rate for 2006.
- Q4 2007 click fraud traffic from botnets was 15 percent higher than click fraud traffic from botnets in Q3 2007.
The bottom line was becoming clear. Google needs to put a stake in the ground now before it becomes all to obvious for paying publishers that an increasing percentage of click leads is coming from bots, unemployed slackers and unsavory international sources.
Traffic in the publisher networks like Google AdSense is apparently nothing to write home about. Over 70% of the sites that make up networks are made-for-ad sites or parked domains. The bulk of click traffic from these sources is probably worth exactly $0. However, it could be argued that Google is not doing enough to help advertisers get a handle on these types of garbage sites. Maybe Google has enough economic incentive to avoid taking a militant stance at this time. But that can’t last. Advertisers aren’t stupid. If the quality of their ad spend continues to look as bleak as it does right now they will either cut back on their spending or they will move money elsewhere. Either way, it would not bode well for Google’s already battered stock price.
Oh, and by the way, you may be wondering something. If these made-for-ad landing pages in fact DO NOT provide valuable traffic to advertisers, why do these stupid things still exist at all? Fair question. Google, in part, is to blame. When they launch incentive programs like AdSense for Parked Pages they are effectively arguing “Wasted Advertising Dollars for Garbage Pages and Invaluable Leads”. Oh sure, Google on the other hand has tried to put an end to the pure arbitrage business but one wonders if it is really enough.
At the end of the day, this story will end like so many others and it is not a complicated trajectory. When customers stop feeling like they are getting value from their spend they will change their habits. When they change their habits, money is redirected. When money is redirected, stock price is affected.
I believe Google understands and is committed to improving advertising quality. How that belief will map to yet more ongoing efforts and programs that thwart growing click fraud and while delivering increasing value to consumers are the big questions that investors are trying to find answers to.
Get yourself funded
Why Isn’t There A Network or Hub Connecting Venture Capitalists With Startups? Well that’s just the question that AsktheVC tried to answer with this blog post. The article was interesting but the comments suggested a few links that I thought readers might be interested in. Know of other companies that connect investors to entrepreneurs? Send them to me and I’ll post them.
Check out:
http://www.gobignetwork.com
http://www.fundability.com/
http://www.fundinguniverse.com./
http://www.younoodle.com./
Seattle’s most influential bloggers?
Well at least I can’t say I’ve never been nominated for something. Thanks to Marcelo Calbucci, the founder of Sampa and the driver behind the Seattle 2.0 blog for pulling together the top blogs in the Seattle market. Great idea Marcelo! Gonna Digg it!
Get inspired!
Don’t we do our best work when we’re inspired? The Netdiver Best of the Year is sort of the Time magazine “best of” for websites. These are not awards for web apps but rather for innovative design. Even if you aren’t a design freak I think some of this work pushes the boundaries of what is possible in a web browser. Mostly, it is just a lot of beautiful stuff.
What do to when you aren’t sure what your servers can handle…
Crossing the line from an original idea over to real world performance struggles should be easier than it is. But, time and time again my observations suggest that 25-40% of available development bandwidth goes to maintaining and optimizing what you built and NOT to ongoing new feature development. Pages get slow. Users complain. Errors become more prevalent. Traffic spikes impact sales. It’s all a big struggle. For everyone.
I’ve been wondering how I would plan in advance for these challenges and that’s led me to reconsider how I would plow forward on a new idea. More details in this regard later because it impacts everything from design decisions to PR plans. Anyway, it goes without saying that your ability to conduct some manner of testing wherein each user is simulated by a separate thread with his own session information shall be important to understand how efficiently your app and hardware platform is.
I’ve been evaluating various tools for this purpose and am trying to collect information from others in this regard. The tests that I think are meaningful would include:
- Maximum number of users the webserver can accommodate before producing error messages.
- “Entire website performance at the normal (expected) load.
- Single URL tests of a webserver or web application to identify and discover elements that may be responsible for slower than expected performance.
- Testing for specific web pages which can be requested simultaneously without problems like database deadlocks.
Which tools do you use for NON Microsoft platforms? What other tests do you deem important? Let me know. I’m curious. Being curious is what we do here.
Don’t put a stake in the ground…
I think this is a great article. Thanks to old friend Mika Salmi for forwarding it.
In a world where flickr was originally started as a game and imeem was started as a software utility, it doesn’t make sense to stick a stake in the ground and not be flexible with your vision. Just getting started is the most important part. Where you end up may well be a success but might not have anything at all to do with your original plan.
Be nimble. Keep an open mind. Gravitate to opportunity.
University of Washington: Creating a Company
John R. Castle is the Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at the Michael G. Foster School of Business over at University of Washington. I shared some slides with him which he’s going to use in some of his materials and he shared the course overview that he is teaching titled “Creating a Company“. This looks to be a really great class. Might be of interest to some readers?
Click here to download the course description in PDF format.
Life according to Erik Benson (aka Buster McLeod)
Interestingly, oddly, I haven’t yet met Erik Benson of 43things.com though I have met his co-founders. Ok, maybe Seattle is bigger than I thought. In any case, I was wandering around the interweb this morning and came across his personal site. I actually thought his “manifesto of 12 things you can do to make your life more interesting” was thoughtful, useful and worth sharing. So, with all credit to Erik, here’s the list:
1. You must not dilly-dally.
2. You must be your word.
3. You must have good intentions.
4. You must admit to being the maker of meaning.
5. You must not feel sorry for yourself.
6. You must have a vision that you are striving for.
7. You must tie creativity and experimentation with survival.
8. You must be the change.
9. You must rally others with your vision.
10. You must stake your reputation on your better self.
11. You must be responsible for your own failure and success.
12. You must be comfortable with big failure.
What happens to your blog post once it’s posted?
Ever wondered that? What’s all this talk about ping servers? How do search engines crawl your new post? My blog is getting scraped? Republished? Huh?
This is simply a fantastic diagram that shows how your blog content can propagate across the webernet.
SEO whitepaper for WordPress
Just tripped over this over at http://weblogtoolscollection.com/. Might be a worthy read for anyone interested to learn the basics of SEO for Wordpress.
Carrie Hill and Mary Bowling of Blizzard Internet Marketing has released a WordPess SEO Whitepaper that is available for free in PDF form. The white paper goes over the usual suspects such as the use of pretty permalinks, SEO Plugins and socializing your blog. The whitepaper also gives quite a few tips and tricks to help configure your WordPress powered blog so that it is SEO friendly from the get-go. This is an excellent read for those that are brand new to WordPress or for those curious to know what they could do to improve the SEO on their own blogs.
Go download the SEO whitepaper for WordPress.
The value of “strategic intuition”
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about intuition and its immense – yet hard to quantify characteristic. Intuition, I suppose, is generally understood to be the counter point to a more analytical decision making process. This theory of the “left brain/right brain” structure and functions of the mind suggests that the two different sides of the brain control two different “modes” of thinking. It also suggests that each of us prefers one mode over the other. By now, most of us already know the personality types.
- Logical
- Sequential
- Rational
- Analytical
- Objective
- Looks at parts
Right brain:
- Random
- Intuitive
- Holistic
- Synthesizing
- Subjective
- Looks at wholes
In exceptional cases, the world comes to know of Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and others who certainly seem left-brained in that they are uncommonly analytical but also seem to possess a strong intuition that allows them to channel huge amounts of corporate resources towards large problems and “be right” more often than not. And, making high quality decisions more often than not is really what separates the players from the rest. I’d like to argue, in fact, that strategic insight is more important than being a world class technologist as it relates to web start-ups. It has been said that Seattle could compete with the Silicon Valley more effectively if only we could increase the scope and sophistication of our technology education paradigm. Having a richer technology education environment seems as important to a budding tech scene as cocoa does to chocolate cake. It’s important! Technologists (e.g. developers/computer scientists) may well be the perfect “catalysts” for the next great online businesses.
Having said that, I’m still apt to argue that past the seed stage, a broader ability to think reigns supreme. In order to be more “whole-brained” in their orientation, budding tech entrepreneurs should try to take from their schooling equal appreciation for the arts, creativity, and the skills of imagination and synthesis. It would seem that businesses become great when all cylinders are firing in uncanny sequence and with above average efficiency. This includes development, marketing, sales and support.
I think intuition is sometimes confused by observers as “luck.” Two interesting, albeit relatively small, examples come to mind. First, was the widely publicized story of the 21 year old who started a site after a few hours of brainstorming called http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com The idea was simple and caught on like wildfire. Basically, he set up a site and intended to sell “pixel ads” until he had made a million dollars. The goal was achieved in months. The second company that came to mind as I wrote this was the now famous “AmIHotOrNot” site. These two sites, along with so many other similar examples (like Twitter, Pownce, digg and others) were conceived as either sudden flashes of inspiration or as a subconscious analysis of past experience. For example, it is highly unlikely that the first time Kevin Rose of Digg pulled up his favorite news site that he immediately noticed obvious problems. In fact, he probably noticed nothing at all. More likely, he spent years consuming information from existing websites and grew accustomed to clicking around to get to the information HE was most interested in. We do it with the giant Sunday edition newspaper each week. I grab the business section and my wife quickly goes for the editorial or entertainment portions.
In the case of the milliondollarhome page, Alex had already amassed enough knowledge about the internet, online advertising and traffic building subconsciously that he had already begun to lay the foundation for a totally original online ad platform even before he realized the idea for the site. He just didn’t know that this consumption and storage of information would yield opportunity or he did not know how the opportunity would manifest itself.
Intuition is like that. When good ideas bubble up, you’ll often be sitting in traffic or you’ll dream about it in your sleep. It may seem like an epiphany but it is really the outward manifestation of your brains ability to manage thousands of seemingly unrelated data points and reinterpret them according to what it thinks you really want. I really believe that embracing and extending the power of strategic intuition is perhaps the most important leverage you could exercise.
There are a lot of reasons why investors often like to see technologists paired with a right brained marketing type. It isn’t that a developer can’t read marketing books and learn how to build a SWOT analysis or an MRD. Many developers who start companies do it because they are interested in learning more about business on the front lines. “Why do people buy products and how did they come to make the decision?” But from my observation, there is something else that a right brained marketer brings to the table beyond his mastery of the marketing basics. It is intuition. It is “presence of mind,” where you free your brain of all preconceptions about what problem you’re solving and what solution might work. Some people have certainly learned it on their own, without even knowing what exactly they’re doing. But like all other complex human actions, you are born without it and over time your brain learns it.
Leveraging a highly cultivated strategic intuition ability is perhaps an entrepreneur’s best marketing strategy. When you embrace presence of mind you accept the incredible power of the mind and its ability to reach into its file cabinet to deliver the information you need to make good decisions in the face of ambiguity. Left brained people often struggle when challenged to find clarity in ambiguous situations just as right brained people often struggle to articulate a product spec with the right amount coherent detail which satisfactorily captures the importance, goals and non-goals of the envisioned feature.
When I worked for RealNetworks in the 90’s, I had the opportunity to go to work in Europe during a time when there was no infrastructure yet in place. With all of Europe before us and little tactical direction to draw on, we had to make some critical decisions. “Where shall we focus on resources? On what verticals? In what countries?” I recall spending some preliminary time in the Nordic regions, hopping from Sweden to Finland to Denmark. Along the way, I wasn’t particularly trying to address the more strategic questions that related to an overall direction. I sensed opportunity based on a few brief emails and phone calls. Each subsequent meeting in the region confirmed the sense I had. I wasn’t rigid in my development of a sales plan. I didn’t believe I knew enough about Europe to be rigid. Over time, I began to develop some observations. The first was, “I like this area. It’s like Seattle in many ways with the water, climate and smaller urban topographies.” Further sub conscientious notations were made. “The people here seem particularly aggressive about digital media and its potential relative to some of the other regions I’ve visited.” “The people here seem to admire the possibility of an American business cooperation more so than in other regions.” “The people here seem to embrace the idea of risk in a manner that is more American and more along lines that I understand.” “The people here want their English to sound more American.”
All of these things went into the mental file cabinet. What came out was a bit of a business plan to spend time and money marketing to nordic telecoms. What also came out was a good deal of revenue. Working with former executives from Microsoft, I can tell you that making decisions based on “gut instinct” isn’t always a popular explanation. If there aren’t bar charts and analyst reports to support your theories you’ll often find yourself chastised in this technology industry. Yet, at the end of the day what’s truly admirable is your ability to analyze a much wider range and depth of information than would be considered “normal” and infuse that with a “sixth sense” that cannot possibility be constrained to an excel spreadsheet. When things can’t be quantified in a spreadsheet, many people get nervous. That would be a mistake. This goes to the heart of the value of a right brained individual in an organization.
Presence of mind means accepting that even the most minute details are used to craft valuable epiphanies. Accepting the epiphanies that often come as a “flash” of insight feels like an overwhelming discovery of opportunity. Your resolution to act on flashes of insight is obviously necessary. I can only speak for myself. I tend to develop packaging, presentation, marketing and PR strategies with intuition being an important pillar in the framing of the plan. “I just know” what will work best is an extremely important sense to be able to cultivate and very few people will want to state “I just know” with the right level of confidence. In the end though, “I’ll just do it” is the only manifestation of intuition that really matters.
Friend launches the Alben Post
I used to work with Alex Alben at RealNetworks and also did some work for him when he ran for Congress in Washington State. He’s a great writer and I’m glad to see him finally start blogging. If you’re interested in the collision of old media and technology or just want a worthy political read then Alex’s blog will be worth a bookmark.
More on “what’s wrong with Seattle anyway?”…
Not everyone reads comments on a blog but I felt the two comments to my last post “What’s wrong with the Seattle start-up scene anyway?” were insightful and I didn’t want them to get lost in the comment basement. I think the theories here seem as good as any others I’ve heard. For a “business guy” I believe I’m more technical than most at least insofar as I can actually DO some things myself and I don’t rely on devs to handle every tiny request for me. I generally understand what devs are telling me in status meetings and I’m able to have a reasonable two way dialog with them to arrive at decent solutions. So, I love technology. That said, I still need to think about whether or not founders themselves need to be technical. I think we as entrepreneurs need ready access to world class development resources. But, I don’t think the world needs more technical founders. Most projects simply will not require, or benefit from, a CEO who is a developer. Just my two cents. But the comments here are good and the links from Glenn’s response are worth following.
From Glenn Kelman of Redfin:
Kelly, in my opinion, the most important change Seattle could make is to invest more in the University of Washington’s computer science department so that it competes with Champagne-Urbana and Irvine if not Stanford, MIT and Berkeley. Most entrepreneurs here have been imported from elsewhere by Microsoft and Amazon, and many are not technical founders. The entire investment thesis of, say, a Sequoia Capital (fund computer scientists under 35 attacking large markets), is more difficult to implement here as a result.
See:
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/06/how_to_kick_sil.htmlAnd of course! http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2008/02/the_next_silicon_valley.html
And, thanks to Todd Dean of Keiretsu Forum NW
I have many comments on the topic “what’s wrong with the Seattle start-up scene.” First I would like to address that the Northwest is one of the most active areas if not the most active area in the country for entrepreneurship and companies being funded currently. We (Keiretsu Forum) have a very clear view on what is going on locally, nationally, and internationally regarding start up companies. So let me address a couple of the questions above. 1) Entrepreneurs lack the resources and capital they need. 2) Entrepreneurs have more access to capital and resources due to the climate of the communities in for example Silicon Valley. 3) As for the comparison of Facebook and YouTubes we do have Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks to name a few. 4) We do have many education resources but in my opinion we still have a ways to go in the area. I’m happy to elaborate further if you should have a meeting, forum, or get together to collaborate and share our points of view??