Category Archives: Venture Files

Young TechStars Become Grizzled TechVeterans

Posted on by

I’m not usually one to cover breaking news, but this demands it. Not so much because Boulder-based SocialThing is a great company or that they are a particularly good example of a great company acquired by an even greater company. Frankly, it’s neither. But it deserves a huge congratulations nonetheless.

TechStars, a YCombinator-style early incubation investment co-op(?), has a major exit by being acquired by AOL. Hats off to SocialThing and the young entrepreneurs behind it for making a very quick exit in a difficult market.

SocialThing is a lifestreaming service, much like the more popular FriendFeed. It was launched in March of this year making it all of four months old. It is so new it is still in private beta (we have an account) and doesn’t support Internet Explorer!

AOL, on the other hand, is a company desparate for relevancy. They continue to downsize announcing even more layoffs and consolidations of their business last month. Most of the business has been consolidated to Ad sales and retired to the hallowed halls of Madison Ave, though their former Dulles, VA HQ still boasts some performing products (AIM, Meebo, etc).

The feel good story here is that founders Matt Galligan and Ben Brightwell have just grown up very fast. They are no longer relegated to incubator company founders that might never make it. They have created a succcess story with an early stage exit that now makes them veterans in this space. Veterans being entrepreneurs with a successful exit (my definition, loose as it might be).

So congratulations to AOL and more importantly, the SocialThing team. Good to be grown up now.

Viral Marketing”¦are you sick yet?

Posted on by

So often buzz words turn into marketing terms. Often enough, the strongest of the marketing terms become engrained into our everyday speech. Viral Marketing is one of the latest.

Marketingterms.com defines Viral Marketing as:

“œMarketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message.”

Ironically, medterms.com defines something that is Viral as:

“œInfection caused by the presence of a virus in the body.”

What amazes me is that a word, such as viral, when it applies to our body is something we don’t want, but when it comes to marketing”¦ we can’t get enough of it. Businesses throw thousands spend thousands of dollars to try to catch lightning in a bottle. Some work while some fall flat and never see the light of day beyond the board room. Alternate Reality Games, YouTube videos, and a wide variety of other tactics have been created to leverage this powerful marketing “œexperience”.

Viral Marketing as a practice is not new. Giving it a new name is. The different tactics and tools you use to create Viral Marketing range, but not the intention of it. It’s been called rumors, gossip, Word of Mouth Marketing, Buzz Marketing, and a long list of names all for the same thing. The purpose is to spread awareness of and create interest for any product, service, or entity.

So what is Viral Marketing and how can you apply to you, your business and anything you have that you need to get out to the public. Think back to a band that you had, or know, that was just starting out. Think of a party or event you wanted to get people to. Hell, think of the yard, or garage, sale you had that you really wanted people to attend. A small level of “œViral Marketing” was used to generate interest in these things. You told friends and neighbors”¦who, if they liked the idea, told friends and neighbors, and so on, creating a “œviral” spread of information “œinfecting” people with interest and desire.

The key factor in creating something that is Viral is that whatever it is happens to be appealing enough for people want to tell people about it. The problem with this is that it is really subjective. People on YouTube are famous for something completely accidental. They never knew that thousands of people would get into “œChocolate Rain” or “œSneezing Panda”, but they were never created to leverage a product. YouTube has become a wide avenue for things, but to me it will always be the Millennium kids version of Earth’s Funniest Home Videos. When you try to take something like the unintentional power of Viral Videos and apply it to a product, service or business the outcome could be wondrously huge or an effort in futility. There are huge successes, like the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) for movies The Dark Knight, created by 42 Entertainment, or Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, created by Double Twenty, or wrapping a bus stop with bubble wrap, with each bubble having a PS2 controller icon, to promote the PS2 by Sony. Or the monstrous failure of Sony of America when they tried to create a fictitious person to sing the praises of their company via YouTube which seriously pissed off several of the Sony interested or faithful. VIRAL MARKETING FAIL.

If you want to apply some kind of Viral Marketing to whatever it is you want to promote you need to understand several things before you even get started.

You have to really know your target audience and demographic for this really to take flight. Just like Word of Mouth Marketing, Viral Marketing relies heavily on trust and faith of those participating. Find someone who believes in your idea, product or whatever and you’ve just created someone who help spread “œthe good word”. Give them a reason to distrust your efforts, intentions, or goal and you will have just created a Viral Marketing Campaign rallying against your Viral Marketing Campaign.

You need to have a strategy in place for the full duration of the campaign. Whether it’s something like the opening of a movie or night club, a presidential campaign, or a bands new CD (god I miss tapes) you have to have a fully realized strategy from start to finish of what you will do to help generate and maintain interest. That means fresh content to further your campaign along. Whether you’re creating a storyline for your interested to follow over a period of time, a one time stunt to gain media or personal attention, or just want people to pass your message along. You have to have it well thought out and be able to understand the potential consequences, because their may be some.

You have to keep the momentum going. It’s going to be more like a roller coaster than any other marketing tactic you’ve used before. You need to give it time to get over that first hill and get rolling. Then you need to watch it and make sure that when it picks up speed you don’t delay the next phase of it and have people loose interest, because when you bring that next piece out and you have lost them”¦they are gone. Unless you can do something wildly unexpected to bring them back.

Finally, you have to realize also that you can’t fully control it. It’s the proverbial snowball rolling down the hill. But even with that snowball, you don’t know if there’s something underneath the surface of the snow to cause it to stop or alter it’s course. You can nudge it along, give it suggestion, but one misstep and you could loose more than you gain. That is ultimately why you need to have your vision and goals firmly in place before you take step one.

Viral Marketing is going to see some pretty interesting trends as this marketing avenue is developed. As with all good marketing strategies, you’re going to see a lot of carbon copies, a lot of failures and lot of fresh ideas. One I’m personally following is the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Captain John Smith for President. I can personally suspend disbelief long enough to see that their message is strong enough for me to want to share it, spread it and help them get this message going. That is the ultimate goal and success of any Viral Marketing campaign. The participant believes in the campaign, feels a part of the campaign, can interact with the campaign and feels a sense that what they did, no matter how large or small, was a direct impact on the success of the campaigns awareness and overall success.

So what Viral Campaigns have sparked your interest or ire? What do you like or dislike about Viral Marketing? I want to know. Actually, I want to challenge you to participate in a little Viral Marketing with me. If you like this message, as I see a few of you are following this blog, I would love to see a comment from you on it. I also want you to share this blog and have several of your friends comment. For the person who has the most people comments mentioned they were sent by you, and subscribe, I will personally send the winner a prize.

I’ve reached out to my audience, I’ve announced my strategy and I know my goal. Now it’s up to you. The deadline for this little slice of potential Viral Failure is one week. So”¦in the immortal words of W.O.P.R. “œWould you like to play a game?”

Identi.ca and the Art of the Launch

Posted on by

Ask any startup. The most difficult decision leading up to a public release is when and what? Some might argue that getting funding is the most difficult but a good startup avoids funding until later, if at all. Others might argue that the difficult part is getting the right mix of people and hitting milestones. That also is important, but not as important as the when and how.

Usually, a good launch product is the result of a perceived need. Or maybe a need not yet realized – it’s hard to say for sure. There’s some black magic involved in all that.

FriendFeed launched not long ago because there was an empty hole in Twitter – that was aggregation and conversation. FriendFeed figured out that, to be successful, it was going to target that emptiness in the highly popular Twitter experience.

Disqus and Intense Debate figured that, in order to be successful, they needed to target the missing piece in blog comments – that was reputation and reputation management across blogs. The two fight it out, post-launch, over which is going to differentiate it over the other.

In these cases, the timing of the launches was critical to the uptake. Twitter started experiencing significant problems and influential early adopters began getting itchy to be somewhere that scratched their itch.

Putting aside timing, the most important part of a launch is what. It’s feature-sets. It’s determining the balance between a fully developed roadmap of features and what is needed to “hook” early adopters and get them to stay.

Take Identi.ca, the new Twitter clone that is completely open source and is timely in that Twitter faithful are really, really close to burying the hatchet and simply abandoning it altogether. The timing could not be more perfect. Folks have been talking about distributing Twitter and relieving the strain of a centralized service at one time. Open sourcing the product does this, to a degree.

However, Identi.ca gets a big “FAIL” for its launch for a few very important reasons.

  1. There is no coherent way to deal with “replies”. Folks used to Twitter realize that when there is a river of content, and that’s what Twitter is, there must be a way to manage conversations. There must be a way to keep up with followers who are talking to you. In my working with Identi.ca, there is no way to do that and, while that might be coming, it wasn’t there at launch. Very conceivably, I’ve been lost forever and I generally have tons of followers as an early adopter. FAIL.
  2. XMPP doesn’t work. The one reliable way to reply that folks on Identi.ca were talking about last night was with XMPP, the protocol used for various IM clients including Google Talk. I could deal with replies that way if it worked but at some point, XMPP stopped working. I could receive, but I could not send. A one way conversation is a monologue. FAIL.
  3. OpenID integration must be seamless. I was pleased to see OpenID supported when I signed up. Unfortunately, today, I could not login with my OpenID account. If I can’t get in, I can’t use it. FAIL.

Some would say I’m being too hard on this startup. Screw that. Perform or get off the stage. There are very obvious and defined features that must be included in a microcontent site at launch. I’m not saying an entire roadmap needs to be worked out. No, get a working beta up and get testers in there. However, without replies, without reliable “offline” access (i.e. IM, SMS or client integration) I’m not going to stick around. Finally, direct messages would be a nice feature.

While I have high hopes for Identi.ca, I will remain there only to squat on the name “technosailor”. Bye, guys.

The Difference Between Designers and Marketers

Posted on by

A reader of this blog, recently, inquired about the difference between Designers and Marketers. I took some time to think about it and came to so many conclusions that it was Wicked Marketing entry worthy. This won’t be as snarky as my usual posts, but then again I’ve been known to surprise myself now and then.

The most basic definition of a Marketer is someone who promotes or exchanges goods or services for money. A Marketer is also known as a promoter, but in the very rare occasion a Marketing is also responsible for Public Relations (something entirely different, but yet the same). A Designer, on the other hand, is someone who creates or makes original print and web marketing materials, artwork and the like.

While the two work hand in hand on most projects very rarely are they the same person. A strong Marketer will have at least a working knowledge of the limitations of design. Marketers are responsible for creating, executing and tracking the marketing strategy and tactics a particular project or campaign. Marketers are also responsible for understanding their clients’needs, consistency of message, target audience and demographics, establishing milestones and creating, or outsourcing the creation, of the text content that is to be used on whatever piece, or pieces, is needed. When they have a concept in mind, they generally create thumbnail sketches or rough drawings of what the pieces they need will be to best communicate the ideas to the Designer who bring them to reality. Last but not least, marketers are also responsible for defining a strategy for and tracking the Return On Investment (ROI) to show the effectiveness of the marketing piece or campaign. First and foremost, Marketers are strategists, tactical analysts and sales people. A Marketer, for the purposes of defining the name, could be a person, team of like minded individuals or firm (larger than a team of like minded individuals, but smaller than a football team).

A strong Designer will have at least a working knowledge of marketing strategies, branding, the psychology of what sells or attracts and the different between how to design for print work or web. The Designer will translate the ideas created by the Marketer and the client to a visual medium. The Designer may suggest alternative marketing pieces, offer multiple variations of the initial design for choices, and suggest alternative mediums to assist in marketing the client (namely to their own benefit). Designers are responsible for creating the deliverables (marketing pieces), providing the pieces in formats for use on multiple platforms (if needed) and working with the Marketer to provide the best possible avenue to produce and create the designed items. A Designer needs to understand the clients budget restraints, voice, target market, avenues of use, and be able to communicate any questions, comments, concerns or ideas directly to the client. First and foremost, Designers are creative people. That means they are one part artist, one part mind reader and one part fortune teller. A Designer, for the purposes of defining the name, could be a person, a group of freelancers, a studio or a firm.

So now that we’ve outline, roughly, what they are; let’s go over how they work together. Generally a client will either source out their Marketer and/or Designer. If they have found their Designer first, hopefully, the Designer will suggest that the client uses a Marketer to come up with the strategy and allow the Designer to do what they do best”¦design. The Marketer will work with the client to determine their desired outcome, target audience, understand past marketing attempts, create a scope of work as defined (or limited by) a budget, and create the overall message. The Marketer will present a few rough ideas to the client for their selection or find one they feel strongly will best represent the client and run with it. The Marketer will then bring in the Designer to meet with the client, get a feel for the visual personality of the strategy and answer any questions the Designer may have regarding past work(s) the client has created.

From there the Designer goes away to that magical land called creation and waits for their respective Muse to hand down a few ideas. Mine tends to wait till the last possible second and then overload me with more choices than I can possibly present. Those ideas are then turned into rough drafts to present to the client. Notice I didn’t say finished works? The Marketer presents the ideas to the client who then has to choose one, or two. The designer gets any notes and feedback on the selection, returns to the land of creation and brings back a more polished product. This process could repeat several times. We’ll fast forward as thought they hit the proverbial home run on the first try.

The client signs off on the designs and the Marketer and Design begin their process of finding the best possible avenue to have the piece(s) created. Once done, the Designer steps out of the picture, tips his/her hat to the client and waits in the wings for the next piece, revision or what have you. The Marketer takes over at that point and, depending on the strategy, distributes to piece to the client or out to the avenues they determine them to go. After the run of the piece, the Marketer will look at the overall success of the project/campaign and report back to the customer with suggestions, improvements, or a finished report.

Please note I said “œGenerally” when this example started. Marketers and Designers are fickle people and the route that a project could take varies depending on both the Marketer and the Designer. The example was, in my opinion, the simplest route that a project could go without going into too much explanation. I only have so much space for text you know. Besides, I’m pretty sure you don’t want to get bored reading this.

Good Marketers and Designers are the mad scientists of their industry. They create pieces that sometimes won’t see the light of day for sometimes close to six months. When they create these pieces they have to look into the future and feel confident that these strategies and designs will still be relevant and appealing as they are when they created them.

What you need to understand, as I close this extremely long entry out, is that both Marketing and Design is subjective. Not everyone will like every concept or idea. These things are organic and can often take a life of their own. As a Marketer or Designer, you’re trying to get as many people you’ve never met to connect with something strongly enough for them to remember it firmly enough to tell other people about it, pull out their hard earned cash to pay for it and simply just engage them in such a way these pieces stand out in their day to day lives. Marketing and Design are not two things you should go lightly into assuming everyone can do. You’re bound to spend a lot of money on things that bring you very little if you do.

In closing, the difference between a Marketer and a Designer is vast, but ultimately you should feel confident in both enough to trust your business, project or event will be a success”¦whatever you decide that to be. I’d love to hear the experiences you’ve had with the Marketers and Designers in your past. I’d also like to know that you found this entry informative and educational. Drop me a line.

Who are you designing for”¦ you or your customers?

Posted on by

I called this entry “œWho are you designing for”¦you or your customers”, because most business owners can’t see that what they are asking a designer, marketing firm or neighbor down the street to do is create the image of how people who have different tastes and interests will perceive their over all brand. They say that first impressions are very hard to change, but triple that when someone picks up your business card, brochure, sees your ad in the paper or looks at your website before they even talk to you. Unless you’ve invested the time in your Brand Identity to ensure that it is reflective, and supported, in all of your marketing materials.

Let’s understand the difference between Brand Identity and Brand Image before we go any further. Your Brand Identity is how you want people outside of your company perceive your company. Your Brand Image is how people outside of your company are currently viewing your company. The two are separate, but the same. Your Brand Image should constantly be reinforced and supported by your Brand Identity. One can weaken the other.

Let’s face it, when it comes to how effective your marketing materials are”¦the initial perception people get is reality to them. You could be the best schmoozer in the world, but hand someone something that looks like you put very little effort into the presentation and all your schmoozing is for nothing. Convincing, begging and bribing may not drive the message home that your first round of marketing materials were done to be “œcost effective”, but instead they may came out making you, and your company, look less than stellar.

First and foremost your marketing materials should be created with your customers, current and future, in mind. When you sit down to have someone create your marketing materials, the building blocks of your Brand Identity, my best advice is to remove yourself from process as much as possible.

I don’t mean that you should not be involved, but you should remember”¦you aren’t trying to use these marketing materials to get you to invest into your company, product or what have you. Sometimes that means you need to leave the confines of your office, ask your best customer some good questions on how they perceive your business and start looking at your company, product or widget from the customers side of the fence.

Your design is an impression not a true test to your companies’capabilities, but like I said before sometimes all you get is a first impression. Make it the best one you can.

How accurately do you think your companies marketing materials reflect the over all view of your company as a whole?  Do your marketing materials work with or against the way your want your company to be perceived? How strongly do your marketing materials communicate the personality and ethics of your company?

But this worked four years ago?

Posted on by

I was sitting at the mall waiting for my niece to get out of a certain store that had huge round mouse ears, I watched a gaggle of tween-age girls walk by in outfits that I hadn’t seen, and honestly hoped never to again, since 1988. The leggin’s, oversized sweaters and neon bracelets in the hundreds made me think about marketing and design. Because let me be honest”¦everything does.

With that story out of the way, let’s get this entry rolling. I hate to burst your bubble right out the gate, but marketing trends are much like fashion trends. While as all trends do, often enough, come back around”¦ the revival of an old trend tends to be the very thing you hoped would never again see the light of day.

I love when I meet someone who hands me a piece of marketing material or directs me to a website that clearly hasn’t been updated in years. The design is outdated, the content is so old the addendum explanation ultimately could be it’s own piece, and more times than not the reason for this is that some head honcho, maybe even you, was really, really proud of it”¦a long time ago in a marketing plan/budget far, far away.

The reality is that today’s buyer is getting younger and younger. These potential clients are becoming savier to the lack of time or effort you put into your whatever it is. They really don’t want you to dust off the remaining brochure from four years ago you somehow still have and parade it around at a networking function. They want the latest and greatest.

I hate to regurgitate other people’s ideas. Rather than do that take a look at Kim T. Gordon’s The Hottest Marketing Trends for 2008. I agree with her points of engaging your customer, integrating your off-line and online campaigns and following your customers. The one trend that would seem obvious through her suggestions, but is missing is a trend to actively create new/fresh content. All of the trends that she mentions rely completely on having new information to share with each of these trends.

You’d be surprised how many business owners, marketing managers and sales people get stuck in the trend of repeating and regurgitating half a decade old pitches, gimmicks and what not without realizing that their clients see them as tired and old. The widget may work, the sales person may be able to sell sugar to a diabetic, and customer service staff may be the best in the world, but if your customer can’t get beyond the feeling of “œI heard it” or “œbeen there, done that and just had the same thing better pitched by your competitor ten minutes ago” then the new trend you’ll see is a lack of revenue.

What trends do you see today that should have stayed dead and buried? Do you know business owners or marketing managers that are still clinging onto that shred of hope that this could be the year for dusting off that tried, but not true piece? What new emerging trend do you see having legs in the future?