I wasn’t going to link to the Richter Scales’ awesome “We’re In Another Bubble” video, but after reading Mike Arrington’s thoughtful big-picture post today, I thought it would be an appropriate counterpoint. Together, his article and that video define the yin and yang of the whole crazy technology startup game.
Here’s an excerpt of Arrington’s post on the shadow of the dot-com crash and how the impact still affects people today:
Entrepreneurs who didn’t go through the crash don’t carry that burden. They don’t have memories of looking their employees in the eye as the laid them off. They were never trashed on F*ckedCompany for making ridiculously stupid decisions. Basically, they’re optimists, as any entrepreneur should be. They have no baggage.
And as a result they do exactly what they should do - they take big risks and hope for a big payoff. For the venture capitalists it’s even more important. They need one or two big wins in every fund to generate enough profits to keep their limited partners happy. A gun shy entrepreneur may not take appropriate risks at appropriate times, and the chances for success plummet.
I’m definitely a bit tainted myself. What I saw happen to startups in the first bubble makes me hesitant to raise money (we never have), hire too many people, or generally spend money (our offices are still in my house). I think less about growing the business sometimes than I do about losing what we’ve built so far. That’s part of the reason why I hired Heather as CEO to take over the business side of things. She’s conservative, but knows when its time to take risk and grow the business.
My interactions with Edgeio, a company I co-founded and which went into the deadpool last week, were similar. It seemed like every board meeting I was saying the same thing - stop spending money, stop hiring, stop. I was out voted, and the company followed its own path. The fact that they ultimately failed, though, doesn’t mean I was right. The investors felt that the time to spend and try to grow was now. It doesn’t matter that Edgeio failed, what matters is that it is the right approach if you are trying to make something big. If you want to be conservative, don’t be a silicon valley entrepreneur.
I don’t blame Arrington one bit, because I completely understand that mindset. Fear of failure is poisonous. You can tell yourself any kind of lies you want in an effort to justify your choices to yourself, but if you can’t remember the last time you swung for the bleachers and took a big risk on something, then you’re probably a victim too.
Which is not to say that this video isn’t also true. Some excess and stupid choices are a necessary part of the process. Remember the normal distribution curve? Outliers in both directions are inevitable.
If you live and work in the Valley, this is the life you chose — the excess and the fear, the hits and the misses. You need to be able to take it all in stride, because sooner or later it’s going to be your turn to be the hero, and the goat.
I like to think I can handle it all, but I know I still have work to do in not letting fear shut me down. What about you?
I’ve migrated off of Movable Type, but it’s hard to stop paying attention to a company whose products I used for four years. Today, Six Apart launched what they’re calling the Movable Type Community Solution — a set of white-box social media tools built onto the Movable Type blogging platform.
It’s an interesting move that should help solidify their place as a provider of enterprise-class tools. And given the realities of the marketplace, it’s a smart one. The window of opportunity for unseating WordPress as the principal provider of blogging tools on the consumer end is very firmly shut right now. Rather than trying to fight a losing battle in WordPress’s face, they are instead choosing to go where WordPress is not and get firmly entrenched there.
A very judo-like move — flow to where the antagonist is not. Let’s see if the execution matches the strategy.
When a currency falls as precipitously as ours has, it is, in no small part, a referendum by foreign governments (and their private investors/traders) on a country and its government. We know that the current administration is not particularly popular overseas. Its no coincidence that since they took office on January 20, 2001, the dollar has fallen ~35%.
The dollar has not fallen because foreign governments don’t like George W Bush (although he’s undoubtedly unpopular). It’s the policies this administration has implemented that have caused the dollar to weaken.
Here are my notes from the interesting and fun session Jeremiah Owyang & Chris Brogan gave on social media strategy today at BlogWorld Expo.
Topic today: social media and creating a coherent strategy.
What keeps you up at night? What do you want to know?
J: Definition of web strategy: long-term decision-making for your website that includes three areas: users & community / business objectives / technology.
B: People talk more about how to use services to push content. Few people ask “how do I listen?” You need to listen as well as make noise.
J: Here’s how you can listen.
-Use Google Alerts for yourself AND your competitors
-Use Technorati, Google Blogsearch (there are many others listed on J’s blog) Radian6 another new one to look at.
-Track regularly; weekly if not daily. You don’t want to find that your biggest customer flames you 2 weeks ago and you said nothing.
Once you’re listening, take a look at: Who is talking about you? Track them in a centralized way (spreadsheet or database, for example).
Start tracking early so you can create benchmarks. This helps you measure success.
B: Find the people with bullhorns and turn them into party hats. Example: Dell Ideastorm, Saturn cars at BlogHer. Customers spend time and attention on you; make that valuable for them.
J: Use tools to help energize your customers and empower conversations, but the tools themselves are not as important as your strategy.
B: What if you had 2 fairly similar USB flash drive companies, and one of them came with all sorts of cool stuff? You’re differentiating by extending products and making them more people connected.
B: The elephant in the room – what do you do if someone says something bad about you? If I wrote that Blogworld Expo is stupid, what should Chris Calvert do? First off, say thank you for the comment.
J: Let’s imagine there is a really big elephant in the room. Example: A video company that stole content. What they did – they took the well-deserved beating they got and said thank you.
Case Study: Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign.
An integrated campaign theme across ALL mediums and regions. They embraced parodies. They also launched a campaign across school systems to educate young girls about beauty. Successful.
Case Study: Hitachi
Integrated system across a number of organizations within Hitachi, throughout the product cycly.
Hired a company to provide reports on initial state of the social market vis a vis Hitachi.
Took on thought leadership by launching a blog (CTO blogger). Integrated it into the rest of their marketing.
It took time!
Figured out how these could be sales tools:
1) “Living white paper”
2) Door opener for sales – they could send the CTO blogger’s posts as conversation openers
3) Ongoing training
4) Rapid Response tool
Notes: they did not force registration for comments and did not pre-moderate, only pulled spam and swearing.
Created a “User to User” support forum to build community.
It built community AND reduced support costs; win!
B: Veering off to talk about Zoomr & how their launch went so badly. They turned on uStream and live cameras, showed themselves working hard to try to fix the problems. It generated a ton of sympathy and turned the bad PR right around.
J: Back to Hitachi & showing the forums. It integrated podcasts, videos, even stuff from competitors. He took a camera and shot videos of people at work, uploaded it, it became very popular.
J: Strategy on the next level – he created an industry tool, the Data Storage Wiki. NOT Hitachi branded (but had J’s name and title on it). Linked to everything a customer could want to help them pick a vendor, from all media and across a number of competitors. It got a lot of positive press & reception.
B: In short: Be helpful! The more helpful you can be, the better it is for you in the long haul.
Some baby steps & takeaways:
-Understand the Elephant
-Bullhorns into Party Hats – make a party or join theirs
-Develop a Plan
-Be Holistic – these tools work in a lot of different ways. This is not just about marketing.
-Just Tools – it’s about the connections. Don’t get hung up on the technology.
Q&A:
First figure out where the party is before picking the appropriate tools to help you join the party.
For example, Facebook has more people [than Ning]. But can you engage them there? Do you need lots of people or do you need the right people?
Twitter. Also a good microblogging tool, kind of like a chat room. More of a personal tool than a professional one? Some thoughts about twitter etiquette – don’t just post links, also engage and communicate. Be careful of the SEO repercussions of Twitter.
How do you get people to care? You can’t force them. Best bet - find what they care about and help them get it.
What about small businesses? How does the corner store do this stuff? Example: Chris’ mom, a jewelry artist. She started with a blog & talking about why she started making jewelry. Now the blog is on her business card & she gets ~20 customers a day visiting it.
My notes from Paul Gillin’s session at BlogWorld Expo.
One link from one blogger can drive more traffic than an email sent to 30,000 people.
Example: the Vincent Ferrari AOL cancellation video. In the old days this would have been an anecdote over dinner, but since he was a blogger, he posted it to YouTube, his blog and to Consumerist. It went viral and Ferrari went on Today, Nightline, and got a ton of coverage in the media.
Example: the Dell exploding laptop batteries. Less than 2 months from first photos published online to a 4,000,000+ battery recall.
Who are the New Influencers?
Examples – Google Blogscoped, AdRants, Fark, Craigslist(?), MommyCast
What makes these guys influencers? Quality content, unique voice. They tell stories and have passion for their subject. It’s about being specific.
[me: Craigslist isn’t a blog, though.]
New media model: immediacy. Getting new info up fast! It redefines a paradigm that had previously been set by the long lead times of print.
The nature of high-growth markets is a lot of churn. It makes it hard for marketers to place bets & know where to put their money. Last year it was MySpace, this year it’s Facebook. Next year, something else.
It’s traffic and it is very sticky.
“Newspapers aren’t dying, our readers are” [lol]
Change point: fast networks, cheap technology (both hardware & software). Allows new types of services to emerge. Also Google and how they figured out how to monetize sites of all sizes. Software is mostly free, means you don’t need to spend half a mil on Oracle when MySQL is free. Makes startups much cheaper.
Seth Godin = “Small is the new big.”
Smaller, focused sites with an engaged customer base are better than big sites. New media model is emerging –smaller markets, larger margins, low fixed costs, but no barrier to entry and lots of choices. Thus – very competitive and quality is the differentiator.
This compares to old media – big budgets, big markets, high barrier to entry, but also high margins.
New journalism – customers are also participants. Editors still necessary.
The new marketing – Influence points are proliferating. Harder to figure out your focus, because you probably don’t have the time to have conversations with them all.
Influencer’s motives are different from the MSM. You cannot control the message the way you used to.
Conversation is key.
Old tactics do not work anymore.
Example: Dell. “22 Confession”. BAD idea to turn it over to the legal department and to send a takedown notice. Just made things worse. The old threat tactics do not work.
The good news: the blogosphere is forgiving – IF you’re willing to step up and admit it when you’re in the wrong.
Joining the conversation:
This is the good news. You can get involved.
If you do get involved, you can have some real success in reaching your customers directly, without media filters.
Content and credibility are king.
Segmentation is not going away. Get used to it.
Leadership will emerge but will change over time.
These are my session notes from the panel discussion “Pr Do’s and Don’ts” at BlogWorld Expo.
Moderator: “We’d like this to be a very open and sharing session.” But then went ahead and asked a long list of pre-set questions. She was more than a little underwhelming, actually.
Intro the panelists
Mike Prosceno from SAP
Jennifer Cisney from Kodak
Henry Copeland from Blogads
John Earnhardt from Cisco
Joe Beaularier from PRWeb
Brian Solis from FutureWorks
Q: “What’s the difference between how bloggers cover company news versus journalists?”
Solis – more personal opinion and feeling than fact.
Earnhardt – blogs are more like trade publications in technology than anything else these days.
Q: “Does every company need to reach out to the bloggers in their space? What are the benefits?”
All: yes.
SAP: Another route to converse with the market. You’re talking to a microcosm with the market, allows you to have a 360 degree conversation. Financial implications, product development, how you bring that product to market. It helps not just get your message across but also listening and taking that information back with you when you go to market.
Cisco – you can really take the temperature of what people are thinking in successful posts.
Kodak – shows that “yes, we get it, we are becoming a digital company”
Q: “What is different about what you plan for blogger outreach?”
PRWeb - Don’t do it assuming that they’re going to be at your beck and call. These are human beings who may or may not like your brand, may or may not be interested. Ask permission.
Cisco – really, no differences. Get a knowledge base on the bloggers, learn who to deal with, how to deal with them.
SAP – recognize that people who are good PR professionals before web 2.0 will be good professionals now. It’s about relationship building and that has not changed. There’s a difference between dealing with ZDNet blogs and community bloggers. Some are looking for news, other are looking for interaction.
Solis – not many good pr people have good skills. It’s about figuring out who you want to reach and why. A press release should not be in blogger relations at all. Get involved by commenting, reading, figuring out where you want to be, then reverse engineer. Come up with stories that will matter to them. Personalization. Know how people want to be reached.
Kodak – OUTREACH. Don’t try and pretend to be something you’re not, that’s spammy.
Q: “What about bloggers who say something negative? How should you respond?”
PRWeb – Directly. Link to the negative comments, respond to them. Get a conversation going, ask for detailed feedback.
Blogads - it’s good to have the right enemies sometimes.
SAP – excluding sheer maliciousness, it can help you come to some consensus. Your friends will come to your defense.
Q: “What is the worst thing a PR person can do when coming to a blogger?”
Solis: Not reading their blog & not knowing why you’re going to that blogger.
[repeat of some information from the AM session]
Q: “Has the blog you started changed over time?”
Cisco – yes.
Blogads – Read Cluetrain manifesto, it got me blogging.
[Lost the train of conversation for a sec, conversation migrated to codes of conduct.]
PRWeb: it’s nice to hear from individuals speaking about their expertise, in a natural voice.
SAP: talking about building their conversation community. CEO wants to meet with bloggers now. Engage online as well as offline; face to face still matters. Comment threads can be just as interesting as the post itself.
Q: “How does a blogger get on the company’s radar?”
SAP: just like we get to know the blogger community, bloggers should take the time to get to know the people at the company.
Blogads: be careful of backlash, bloggers do not like to feel used.
Cisco: separation of church and state (ads and content) matters.
SAP: difference between private blogs and commercial blogs. Advertising is more appropriate on commercial sites.
Opening to questions from the audience. Finally.
Q: “How do you learn to be successful in this new space?”
Solis: A lot of PR people haven’t been groomed this (web 2.0) way and have been failing in public because they don’t know what they are doing.
Cisco: Doing a lot of internal training to help people get it.
PRWeb: there is hope. I was stunned at the number of new media, social media sessions at the PR annual conference recently.
Jeremy Pepper (in the audience) – so many people don’t get it, and it’s even harder with segmented teams & overspecialization. What happened to the generalist?
Solis – in a way outreach is a new form of customer support.
SAP – True PR should belong to everyone in your company. It’s about how every employee talks about the company. Try to understand the issue or problem and solve it, not to push a message.
Q: “Do you worry about companies who are bad actors soiling the space? Will that make things harder for you when dealing with bloggers?”
SAP – people will do it, I’m sure.
PRWeb – there will always be bad actors, you can vet them out without too much trouble. It won’t tarnish the opportunity.
Blogads – slightly less optimistic – look at PayPerPost. The low road is being taken and seems to be doing well.
Q: “How do you use a blog to become a thought leader?”
PRWeb: David Meerman Scott does this well.
Solis: Depends on whether you really are a thought leader. Your opinions might suck. But seriously, you need to promote yourself as well as have good content. It’s a process.
These are my notes from the Corporate Blogging panel at BlogWorld Expo.
Debbie Weil, moderator:
Executing a corporate blog takes work. Policy, lots of decisions to make.
Technology is the easy part. A balance of creative and strategic. How do companies speak to their customers?
We’re in the early stages of a revolution.
FEAR - of being criticized, of losing control. Biggest block to adoption. Actually, a blog is a way of increasing control, not losing it.
Very few CEOs have the skills and disposition to blog. Hence ghostblogging.
Kodak blogger (Jennifer Cisney):
Kodak started a corporate blog (A Thousand Words) about a year ago. PR / CorpCom lead the charge. They host the blog offsite & focus on content. It is NOT a CEO blog, it’s mostly about photography and people who love it. Minimal editing after content is submitted. Every post has a photograph in it. Also a connected photo gallery. Lots of storytelling, very powerful, not a lot of product focus.
A Thousand Nerds - a newer, more commercial / technical photography blog.
HP Blogger (Pete Johnson):
HP IT is a showcase for their customers, so they are hosting internally. Large numbers of internal blogs - around 50. Very distributed approach. “Anyone who can make a business case for a blog can have one”. Describing different things people at HP do with their blogs - ranging from why HP is not in Second Life to templates you can download for your inkjet printer. Working with the HP standards of Business Conduct — proprietary information disclosure, proper crediting of information quoted, dealing with requests for support.
Cisco “Blogger in Chief” (John Earnhardt):
About 2 years since they started blogging. Started with the government affairs group - small team trying to increase their reach. It was hard to keep going so they started talking about issues a little beyond their scope & eventually it got notice. Currently 15 official corporate blogs. They are trying to do CEO blogging with video since Chambers is “more of a talker than a typer”. PR is attached to each blog to stay on top of it although they do not vet content before publishing. They have requirements for bloggers to make sure blogs are sustained once started. They treat key bloggers like reporters and treat them similarly in terms of outreach and support.
Southwest bloggers (Paula Berg, Brian Lusk):
They knew there was online conversation about Southwest and wanted to get involved. “We’re not afraid to take risks.” It is a major time commitment & took a while to get the balance right. Been great for getting notice from journalists. It’s a virtual focus group, they get immediate and passionate feedback, as many as 700 comments. The miniskirt issue was blog crisis management but they feel they did not do a good job managing it. They have some limits to their comment policy — no swear words, no personal attacks, no “where’s my bag from flight X?” — but try to be not too controlling. They try to do a blog post consecutive with every press release in order to give customers a place to comment. They run every blog post by an exec before it goes live.
Some common themes: blogs are generally an extension of PR not advertising. Try to drive individual customer support issues towards the proper channels. CEO blogging is hard and probably not the best way to go. Some comment moderation is appropriate. Be upfront about the grund rules and what customers can expect from the blog to avoid issues down the line. Comment moderation - everyone does it, but it’s about 50/50 between allowing comments to go live before moderation and screening all comments before they go live.
Notes from the Q&A:
Company culture comes out in a blog. If you have a lousy company culture do not expect that you’ll be able to paper it over in a blog.
Traffic is a metric but not the only one that defines success.
“The Ghostblogger” raises the issue of blogging and authenticity. The panelists didn’t like it that CEOs are ghostblogged - he defended the practice. General consensus seems to be that blog posts should not be scrubbed and crafted because that’s “inauthentic” and just like regular PR. Blogging should be different.
Noted today: a report on the state of PCs in Japan. The interesting part of the report:
“The household PC market is losing momentum to other electronics like flat-panel TVs and mobile phones,” said Masahiro Katayama, research group head at market survey firm IDC.
Overall PC shipments in Japan have fallen for five consecutive quarters, the first ever drawn-out decline in PC sales in a key market, according to IDC. The trend shows no signs of letting up: In the second quarter of 2007, desktops fell 4.8 percent and laptops 3.1 percent.
NEC’s and Sony’s sales have been falling since 2006 in Japan. Hitachi Ltd. said Oct. 22 it will pull out of the household computer business entirely in an effort to refocus its sprawling operations.
“Consumers aren’t impressed anymore with bigger hard drives or faster processors. That’s not as exciting as a bigger TV,” Katayama said. “And in Japan, kids now grow up using mobile phones, not PCs. The future of PCs isn’t bright.”
Is this a sign of things to come? Will the personal computer go the way of the dodo in another decade? Possibly, although it seems to me that Japan is a bit of an outlier when it comes to a passion for cutting-edge gadgets.
Perhaps the takeaway here is a reminder: consumers care more about what they can do than the tools they do it with. If they can do everything they need to on a cell phone, or with a DVR attached to their TV, then those tools will outsell PCs.
As for me, I’m a little old-fashioned. I like a full keyboard and a bigger screen when I’m writing blog posts, editing photos, or reading feeds. But 10 years from now, who knows what cellphones will be able to do?
UPDATE: Tony Hung weighs in with some good points.
There’s a clear benefit for Google: more eyeballs, more advertising revenue, and more industry entrenchment. There’s also one for established brands and thought leaders with big audiences. They can further aggregate (and presumably monetize) their traffic.
What I don’t see as clearly is how all this benefits your average end-user. What does OpenSocial do for me?
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