I'm excited to be part of this event next Wednesday here in Seattle. The agenda is packed with great speakers and is being put on by the Seattle Direct Marketing Association.
I'm on a panel discussion on blogging: "Winning in the Blogosphere: Successful Posting and Engagement Strategies"
We've been doing a lot of interesting things at Gist related to blogging, Twitter, and other on-line ways to engage and I look forward to sharing my thoughts.
Great friend (and mentor) Jim Clifton has a nice post up about the disappointment he sees in software as a product. Jim gave me my first software product management job and has a broad perspective on the topic having built software, funded new ventures, and now consumed it as a small business.
I couldn't agree more that the most important thing to understand is the broader process you are either enabling or disrupting. If you (or your sales team) lack the domain or business process understanding, you will have lots of first meetings and very few next ones.
One of the companies that I am working with is confronting this reality head on. Every start-up I have been a part of has learned the lesson (the hard way) that staffing up with a large national (and many times mediocre) sales team for an emerging technology company is a recipe for disaster. Here's my previous post on Being Intellectually Invested that touches on this.
Why is this? I suppose it seems like the right thing to do and I have consistently found investors drive this thinking. After all, "how hard can it be, pick up the phone and sell."
Here's the challenge: if the company does not understand its product/service within the context of the market and market needs, this approach will fail. Sales reps will be terminated, soon the pressure is on both the VP Sales and VP Marketing to explain the poor performance, and both will go before the CEO gets the pressure from the investors and is shown the door.
These cycles of usually good people are expensive, an organizational distraction, and build absolutely no comfort with those to whom you are trying to sell.
While it may seem counter-intuitive to have fewer rather than more dedicated sales people early in a company's lifecycle, the true cost of adding and losing sales professionals before the company has really figured out how to sell is much more significant than any "lost" sales because of fewer feet on the street.
Once the sales path (or model) is understood, then it's time to spend some bucks on a process and metrics driven VP of Sales and quota bearing sales reps (QBSRs).
This is a fascinating post in which CPA Scot Justice (The Virtual CFO) talks about his blog and Twitter usage as marketing tools stating that 75% of his business comes from these efforts. Bill Seaver of Nashville-based MicroExplosion Media made this cool video and great to see this type of thing coming from Nashville (where I was born and mostly grew up).
The true test of any technology or innovation is its application to the mainstream or practical users. Scot is definitely on the front end of the curve but the adoption of these tools by a CPA who is himself a small business is an indication of things to come.
The rules of marketing are definitely changing as are the costs to reach and engage customers. The bar is much higher so if you don't have the expertise or lack authenticity you'll be found out quickly and treated without mercy.
I just finished using Crowdspring for the first time and am very impressed. I needed a logo for one of the projects I am working on and decided to give it a shot after reading a few positive pieces on it.
It is pretty straight forward. Post a project, set a price ($200 minimum, I believe) and designers submit ideas. There is a forum for feedback and guidance as well as a really simple way to approve and pay the creative. I posted a basic logo project for just over the minimum and received well over 50 submissions including many original concepts as well as iterations of the same ones.
A clean logo can go along way to project your company's brand and Crowdspring offers a great way to add professional design to any project – so please, no more Powerpoint drawn logos…
I have professed my affection for Hood River, OR based Full Sail Brewing repeatedly on this blog. I love the area and having great beer and a great view while there makes it all the better.
In recent months, my 'friends' on Facebook have grown significantly as has the frequency of my visits (part of a broader trend?) While tinkering with the Groups capability I decided to search on my favorite brewski and lo and behold there were similar fans that had already set up a group. That group grew to over 100 people from all over but, curiously, no one from the company.
Just today, I got a message from this group sent by a Full Sail employee. He found the group and wanted to know if we wanted to hear from him/them about what is going on. The response back (apparently) was overwhelming. His approach was real and authentic.
So, why am I sharing this?
This group of fans/loyal customers grew organically meaning we all found each other having one thing in common – a love of their beer. We had no incentive to join and really expected nothing in return.
This is how you can use Facebook as part of a marketing plan. The difficult thing to get your head around is that it can't be done artifically or with one-way marketing techniques. The forum is dynamic and collaborative and if it loses its authenticity either from the participants or the company, people will bristle and it will stagnate quickly.
Folks are already weighing in on the nature and frequency of the messages being sent. They are actually telling the company how to market to them. Very cool.
I was told there would be no math.
Contrary to the title of this post, this is not about math per se. It is about a way to think about how a product is consumed and advocated by your customers. For the math on this, check out this post from Robert Zubek.
Essentially this is a measure of how "viral" your product is by measuring how many additional users you acquire from each subsequent user. You have done very little to acquire these customers other than create a great experience for the initial user and have a great product. Get it?
On-demand/SaaS delivery models allow people to access products and information about those products and the problems they solve at will with a browser and internet connection.
You can build product functionality to facilitate this with "share this" or "refer a friend" capabilities and, of course, ask your customers to bring you new customers as 'word of mouth' is the holy grail in a modern marketing plan. It is hard to create this artificially but is amazing to watch when it happens organically. One of the companies I am working with is seeing this happen and it is really fascinating to watch.
I also like this post by Josh Kopelman on what to do "After the TechCrunch Bump." The herd that follows posts on sites like this are not target users finding value in your product that they want to share with others. They are more akin to wildebeests following the lead animal across the plains of the Serengeti making a huge amount of noise, gone before they got there, and leaving behind a great deal of destruction and waste.
Looking to learn how to incorporate blogs into a communications plan? Want to understand a best practice approach to responding to blog postings and comments both good and bad? Seeking ways to feel good about your tax dollars spent on defense? Look no further than this really nicely done graphic brought to you by the US Air Force (via Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research).
My other option for the title of this post was 'Why Cuil Failed' but I didn't want to clutter the title with a phonetic explanation: Cuil = cool. Or not.
If you don't know what Cuil is, no worries, as they are now on a deathwatch. There is, however, a lesson to be learned from their grand adventure.
They launched to much excitement that they were a better search than Google and even a "Google killer." A big claim…and big story. A true threat set to unseat the king of search and with the brains on board to do it. The only problem? It didn't work well enough. It didn't measure up to the hype.
It is always important to sell a vision but you must have the ability to back it up to some degree. There is plenty of time to sing the praises of how much better or innovative you are than the other guy once you actually have the customers and experience to prove it.
The backlash comes quickly and severely in a connected world especially since technology products and services are becoming more consumable leaving users to try them and form opinions outside the span of marketing's control.
Cuil peaked before it was able to deliver leaving any incremental improvement to be seen as correcting a problem versus delivering a new capability.
Anyway, at this point it isn't really about better search. Google didn't create search, they wrapped a business model around it.
Maybe. Or as this article from the WSJ (thanks for sending along Michael) lays it out it:
When I started blogging almost two years ago it was for two core reasons:
Since then I have learned a lot, been confused a fair amount, and connected with some really cool people in addition to expanding my understanding of both the technologies I use and the subject matter I write about.
This article is a good read to begin to understand the changing landscape of marketing and how new technologies allow established concepts to be expanded upon and new practices to emerge.
Venture Vice 
