Monthly Archives: August 2011

Aug29

Wednesdays.com Launch is…Just a Launch

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Wednesdays.com Launch is…Just a Launch
Wednesdays.com Launch is…Just a Launch

My friends at Wednesdays.com launched last week into a blaze of YCombinator Demo Days, Steve Jobs’ retirement, and for good measure, Hurricane Irene coverage. In short, they didn’t get the “Tech Crunch effect.” Thank God for that; they’re lucky they didn’t, because the Tech Crunch effect, often also called “the Scoble effect,” is both distracting and misleading to a young company.

What is the Tech Crunch effect? It’s what the relatively few lucky startups who are covered by Tech Crunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Scoble, and a couple of other major tech blogs experience: a huge surge in traffic that can even take the servers down and makes the founders feel they are off and running.

But they’re not.

I think I’ve been involved one way or another in about a hundred launches, and I can tell you a few things for sure:

1) the Tech Crunch traffic goes away after it causes your servers to overload and gives your visitors a bad first impression.

2) the people who come from major tech blog coverage are usually not the right people to build a business around. They’re like the people who like to be seen at the latest hot club, and then leave it cold for the next hot club. That’s why the night club business is hardly ever sustainable. It’s built on flash and trendiness. Good businesses are often not trendy. I am composing this post in Evernote, a very un-trendy app that happens to be incredible useful and has locked me in.

3)the launch is the first step in a long slog across the chasm.

4) entrepreneurs are as misled about the launch as they are about outside financing. Both continue to be wildly overrated in how much they contribute to the success of a business.

For Wednesdays, the launch did two good things, no matter how much or how little publicity it has received so far: it provided a forcing function to do usability testing and get the product out the door, and it therefore made possible some necessary fixes to the user interface.

Andy Chen and Hugo Olliphant are former PayPal engineers, and if it weren’t for the “launch” they could have kept improving the product forever, doing private betas with their early adopter friends. But early adopter friends are the same people who make up the Tech Crunch effect: they sign up and try out many things they may never really stick with. They’re not as good at helping you build a sustainable company as people who may never read a tech blog, but who have more time and inclination to form a lunch or dinner club. Like alumni of the same school, or employees of the same company, or old friends from Iowa who have all moved to Phoenix.

The launch date forced Wednesdays to freeze the product as of August 24th and remove the wraps from the new site. Now the public can really try it.

And now Wednesdays can implement their marketing plan.

Marketing plans are all too rare in San Francisco. I’m an old school girl, and I don’t believe that if you build it they will come. I believe you have to identify “them” and go after “them.” And publicity is probably the least effective, most random way in the world to find good customers.

How do I know this? I owned a large PR company for seventeen years. Brian Solis owned one, too. Do either of us do that now? No, because we know all too well what its limits are, and what ELSE has to be done. Brian’s name for this is “social business,” and the verb is “to engage.,

Despite all the big blogs, the newspapers, and the magazines, there’s no substitute for engaging with your customers and making them your evangelists.

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Aug24

3 Cool Marketing Tools for People with No Time

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3 Cool Marketing Tools for People with No Time
3 Cool Marketing Tools for People with No Time

I often help companies with their launches and marketing planning.   I fell in love with Flowtown a year ago. I used it to market the last Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference, and when they changed their product focus to Timely, I began using TImely to schedule my tweets. Although my formal relationship with Ethan and Dan ended a long time ago, my use of the product didn’t. I still use Timely every day.

Last night I got an email from Ethan announcing a beta test of a connection with Facebook. I tried it, and of course it works. Timely also has a PRO version, with which you can manage an unlimited number of Twitter accounts. It’s embarrassing, because I’m only one person, but I have five different Twitter accounts — divided along the lines of my different interests. (dogs, health care, Arizona entrepreneurship, etc). So being able to schedule things is often helpful. And no, I don’t robotically send out the same tweet fifty times.

This morning I found something  useful through DuctTape Marketing: a new toy called Blastfollow.. This little tool allows me to follow a group of people with common interests (shown through their use of a hashtag) in one fell swoop. I just used it to follow a list of small business marketers. You could use it to follow prospects, customers, or people on Twitter who can teach you something.

Now I’m working with Wednesdays, which l launches  out of private beta August 24.. Wednesdays helps people form “social meal” clubs with friends, business associates, alumni associations, and just plain other people. Several years ago, Keith Ferrazi wrote a book called “Never Eat Alone,” about the power of social meals for business.  Because we’re stuck behind screens all day, we never get out of the office for lunch or even dinner anymore, even if we work together. Yet everyone knows that a single face-to-face meeting can significantly deepen a relationship.

I wonder why many businesses don’t realize how common it used to be to take a prospect to lunch. As a result of working with Wednesdays, our company is going to resurrect its practice of monthly meals with entrepreneurs and their ecosystem, For seven years, we held monthly “Stealthmode dinners,” and then we stopped. Why? Because they became too difficult to schedule when the restaurant we met in suddenly closed. Wednesdays will take care of all that for us — taking the RSVPS, finding the most convenient restaurant, making a reservation,  and collecting the money in advance. It will even give us a chance to make some money from the dinners if we wish.

So here’s your to-do list for an effective customer acquisition campaign:

1)Use Blastfollow to find the people you want to meet

2) Keep in regular touch with them through Timely, creating a conversation

3) Then start a lunch or dinner group through Wednesdays

If this doesn’t increase both your business and theirs, I  owe YOU a lunch.

Small business is not typically an early adopter of web services. But taking advantage of all these new online  products,  can make the most of scarce time and energy. Scheduling tweets used to be laborious. So did finding the right people to follow on Twitter. So did scheduling lunches. All these small problems add up for a person with limited time. It’s a real relief to have them automated.

 

 

 

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Aug20

The Long Run

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The Long Run
Runners before the race at Verrazano-Narrows B...

Image via Wikipedia

I first heard about “The Long Run” one night on The Daily Show. I rarely watch Jon Stewart long enough to see his guest, but when Matt Long,  a limping bald guy, came out on the set, I wondered only briefly what he was doing there before I was riveted. Yes, like many of Stewart’s guests, Long was on a book tour. But in the ten minutes he spent with Jon, you could see Stewart’s respect for him. Long only had time to recount the basic outlines of a terrible story:  how he, a firefighter, got hit by a bus while riding his bike on the way to work, and how during the long recovery he despaired of ever being a whole human being again. That is the subject of his book, and it isn’t just any book.

 

Because it sounded like an inspiring story, I downloaded “The Long Run” from Audible. Inspiring doesn’t begin to describe it. t finished listening to the book in two days; I haven’t read a more gripping book in years, even though I knew the story in advance. Matt Long wasn’t only a fireman who owned three bars in Manhattan and  had helped save a life on 9/11, he was a marathoner and a tri-athlete. After the bus hit him, he was also an anonymous man tangled in the wreckage of a bicycle under a bus, impaled on the bicycle seat. Rescuers had to saw him apart from the bike, lifting the bus first.

 

As someone who never quite got the hang of swimming, but ran eight marathons and saw a friend finish the Lake Taupo Ironman in New Zealand, I identified a lot with how Matt’s life went before the accident — the camaraderie of training buddies, the long runs, the permission you give yourself to eat as much as you’d like, the beers and the endorphin highs.

 

What I couldn’t imagine was his life after Chapter 2, when he qualified for the Boston Marathon in 2005. In the first chapter, Long was talking about his big Irish family, and in the second about his training regime and the New York City Marathon he ran to qualify for Boston. He finished New York in 3:13. My best time? 3:27.

 

But I gently aged out of marathon running after more than twenty years. In Matt’s case, by Chapter 3 of “The Long Run”, he was violently ejected from running and virtually everything else in his past by his own  blood and guts (literally), more than sixty blood transfusions, forty-odd surgeries, and a colostomy bag. When he was brought to the hospital on the day of his accident, he was given a 5% chance to survive. He spent about five months in the hospital and in rehab.

 

The doctors told him that if he hadn’t been so physically fit at the time of the accident, there was no chance he would have lived. Between the amount of blood he lost, the extent of his injuries, and the time he was in a coma, almost anyone else’s heart would have given out. But Matt Long was, ironically, trained for his accident.

 

The story of his way back is amazing. It involves the love of his family, the commitment of his friends, and the culture of the New York City Fire Department. It also demonstrates that there is meaningful life after near death and partial dismemberment. and it does it with brutal honesty. ‘The Long Run” is no walk in the park — not to live through, and not even to read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Aug14

Matt Mullenweg Gives the State of the Word

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Matt Mullenweg Gives the State of the Word
Matt Mullenweg Gives the State of the Word

Don’t ask me why, but I have been to every WordCamp San Francisco. My badge actually says “First Class” this year. And every year I get to watch Matt Mullenweg grow up with his invention, the WordPress community. This year the conference is three days long, and it appears to be a mix of people I recognize, and newbies who don’t know as much as I do (which is very, very little).

Matt did a survey this year, and found out something really new: WordPress is a job generator. 2800 people who answered the survey now make their living through WordPress. Wonder what percentage of people who didn’t bother to answer the survey also make their living from WordPress? At any rate, it’s a large number, and I think it illustrated the future of work: these people don’t work for WordPress; they work with WordPress.

 More stats:

170,000 sites have been built

Most WordPress developers have built more than 25 sites each

Many have built over 100

Most of the developers think WordPress is easy to use, but the # 1 complain is plugins, some of which are not secure and aren’t updated.

So WordPress has decided that of the 15000 plugins in the repository.any not updated for two years will be deleted.

People are coming to use WordPress as a content management system more than as a blogging platform. 92% of respondents use it for both

Matt’s still young enough to believe in what he does, and what he wants to do is create, as he said, “an open source spectacular.” Because he has the community, he feels a virtuous loop drives innovation.

This year Matt talked a lot about “desire paths.” A desire path is a green lawn without paving that only gets paved where the users have trampled across it to get from one place to another. In WordPress, the Release 3.0 had a new theme, customized post types, a leaner interface, and an optimized UI because users requested it.

The best thing I saw this year was the release of Jetpack, which combines a bunch of commonly used features from WordPress.com and makes them available as a single plug-in for WordPress.org. Matt said that was because plug-ins and theme are manifestations of desire paths in WordPress.

To illustrate this he quotes from Stewart Brand‘s “Learning Buildings,” in which he turns the phrase “Form follows function” from architecture to “Form Reforms Function – Perpectually.” He wants WordPress to be adaptive.

What comes next?

1)An open unified mobile experience, relying more on HTML5 and CSS3

2) A better marriage of reading and writing experience

3) A more responsive responsive admin panel

4) A better NUX (new user experience) rather than SUX

5) Better media handling (DRAG AND DROP IMAGE UPLOADING)

 

And…last but not least: auto-updating without versioning,  the thing I gathered Matt looks forward to most.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Aug12

Marketing a Freemium Product to Small Business

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Marketing a Freemium Product to Small Business
Marketing a Freemium Product to Small Business

Most tech companies who target the small business market know very little about small business, at least in the micro sense. Sure, they’re small businesses themselves when they start out, but they’re tech companies, and that changes the game for them immediately. Your average tech startup is not standing behind a counter waiting for a customer to appear, nor is he cleaning swimming pools or performing chiropractic adjustments. It’s just different for a tech company.

You just can’t build a business without knowing who your customer is and feeling her pain, so when the Jimdo team told me they were leaving the office to go on a road trip to get to know their customers better, I figured they would learn a lot. Especially Christian Springub, the co-founder, who moved here from Germany less than six months ago. For Christian, driving north on I-5 from San Francisco to Portland, Chico, Redding, Salem, Eugene,  and Corvallis was his first chance to see the United States. He’s a quick learner. I debriefed him yesterday.

The entire office team left in Christian’s van on very short notice, so some things about the trip worked better than others.

Things that  did work:

Getting out of the office to see what businesses in other cities looked like, and how they operate. Once you see how hard small business owners work and how little time they have to be technically literate, you recognize why they hire web designers even when do-it-yourself  site creation tools are out there.

Meeting local business owners informally and hearing their stories.

Meeting with local business organizations and understanding their missions and what they do for small businesses. Some of the organizations  were better without a previous appointment, which would have been difficult to arrange. The Chambers of Commerce, for example, would meet immediately, but since they were interested in having Jimdo join each one, they would not have accepted an appointment  knowing that  Jimdo wasn’t a membership prospect.

Meeting with the Small Business Development Centers, who were thrilled thet Jimdo would produce a webinar for them.

 

Things that did not:

Local press outreach. The local press were not interested in out of town visitors on a road trip.

Meeting more than one customer.  In a week on the road, Jimdo met exactly one customer, although they invited all their customers to meet them. But Jimdo customers bought a self-service product, they’re happy with it, and they don’t have to meet the company’s founder. They probably don’t have time to meet the founder. In short, they didn’t care!

Finding partners in the local web development community.

Key takeaways from the Jimdo Road Trip:

Not every small business is interested in being a global business, or in doing business with a global business. Many people are proud of their cities and regions, and want to try to do business locally. There’s a growing “buy local” movement. Those people want a personal connection with their vendor, which is challenging for an online tool with a freemium model and a DIY message.

Social media is just arriving as a potential small business marketing tool in towns that are not tech centric.

The web design community in small markets is not interested in re-selling a self-service product, because there is no upside for them in empowering the customer.

Person-to-person marketing for a self-service product doesn’t compute in most people’s minds, and is not scalable. Many of the organizations Jimdo visited were surprised they’d even go on the road.

And yet, most non-technical small businesses also can’t comprehend building a web site all by themselves.

For Jimdo, this trip has meant testing telephone support for new customers, to help them get over their “fear of flying.” and establishing a web-based small business resource center.

When I work with a company, I expect them to be in permanent learning mode, but sometimes they are not. Jimdo is. And what’s more, they are excited about it. 

 

 

 

 

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Aug7

Social Business: Get Out of the Office

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Social Business: Get Out of the Office

Michael Brito has an excellent presentation based on this book Smart Business, Social Business, in which he points out how difficult it is for organizations to become social, and what that effort will mean in terms of organizational change.

Since 1995, Brito says, the internet has empowered customers. But now, only fifteen years later, are businesses truly trying to reach out and engage. And it’s hard, for a large organization to turn the ship around, says Brito.

That may be true for large, old organizations. Here the advantage is definitely on the side of the small, the new, the nimble. Larger organizations must break down silos, invent new processes, and protect against wayward employees who are not close enough to the organization’s vision to embody it. In many organizations, the only customer that’s heard from is the disgruntled customer.

Small organizations don’t have that problem. They can be social businesses from the start. They can literally get in the car and seek out the customer. They can connect and get to know him.

Last month, my friend Ryan Kuder wrote and asked me to suggest a venue for a Bizzy meetup in Phoenix. After I did that, I got interested in why he asked, as Bizzy is a mini-review app that signs up customers automatically. It turns out Ryan was going on the road with some members of his team to get to know his customers. You can see photos here. Their road trip was 2700 miles.

Bizzy’s team is home now, but Jimdo’s team is just going on the road. Jimdo is a free web site creator with 4,000,000 users in Europe, Asia, and South America that just opened a US headquarters in San Francisco. One of its co-founders has actually relocated here.

Jimdo has traditionally made its product road map from online customer requests, but they decided to go a step further in the US, and find out what their US customers think, so they can tailor their customer acquisition strategies better. They aspire to be local as well as global.

Jimdo is one of those companies who, profitable and successful, exemplifies the new customer engagement mentality. They are not afraid of the customer, and they build no walls. Everyone answers the customer service lines, and everyone pitches in on the marketing effort. This is the major advantage companies built during the Web 2.0 era already have that’s difficult for the companies Brito talks about in his book to imitate.

After getting their feet on the ground for a few months, the Jimdo team decided to go on a 5-city tour to meet their customers in person. If the five-city tour works out for them, they plan to expand it. They’ve named it the 5(00) city tour.

The team spent a week identifying potential places to visit, and doing deep research into existing customers, potential partners, and relevant interest groups in those cities, reaching out for opportunities to meet people in person. Using Podio, a useful aggregator of information, everyone on the team got busy contributing. I saw the cities get posted, the media contacts get identified, and the interest groups and meet-ups get scheduled.  It all happened lightening fast.

However, it still appeared to be in the planning stages. And then I got an email last night from Christian Springub, the co-founder, saying THE ENTIRE TEAM was hopping in his van the next morning to go up Interstate 5 toward Oregon for seven days to …engage!

Imagine a large company deciding to do this, and how long it would take to plan. Yet once the Jimdo team decided engaging with customers (and prospects) personally was a good plan, they were on the road in a matter of days. It’s because smaller companies are invariably closer to customers, more nimble, and less fearful.

These forays give new meaning to social business. To develop customer advocates, you must know the customer as well as the customer knows you. And to do that, you have to get off social media as well as on it.

Jimdo will be filming, blogging, and shooting pictures up I-5, and you can follow the tour and the learning here.

 

 

 

 




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Aug1

Most Small Business Facebook Page Fans Not Local

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Most Small Business Facebook Page Fans Not Local
Most Small Business Facebook Page Fans Not Local

Every once in a while I get a press release and I use it as an excuse to write a blog post. Unfortunately, the company that send me this one, Roost, will probably not be pleased with what I’ve done with their report.

The Roost Local Scorecard, which was released today, is an analysis of the Facebook fan pages of  800 small businesses. What did it find? That only 15% of the average local small business’s “Likes” on Facebook are local. From that you can extrapolate that the Facebook pages of most small businesses do them little or no good for targeted marketing efforts.

This is one of those conclusions that — since its executive team comes from Flixter, WalMart, and Merchant Circle — Roost should have already known.

Because in the last decade I’ve worked with over 600 entrepreneurs and small businesses, I know how difficult it is to build a local community on a network as large as Facebook. I also know how little real knowledge most small business people have about social media. At best, it goes like this:

Small business puts up Facebook page

Page vendor or business owner tells everyone “go ask everyone to Like our page. We need 25 likes to claim our name.”

Someone from small business starts to post content to the page. Typically, either deals or product offerings.

Very few people who receive information about the deals go to the Facebook page.

Likers of the page who did it as a favor to their former classmates or their family members mute those irrelevant one-way deal posts in their streams, so Facebook’s curation eventually makes them disappear.

Business owner or marketing person looks more widely around her for potential people to “Like” the page.

Rinse and repeat, losing all the local people in an effort to get more “Likes.”

Change the wording to “Followers” and you have the typical Twitter behavior.

Why doesn’t this work? Because social media isn’t about platforms and dashboards, it’s about community and closeness. At its best, it’s about the butcher who asks you how your dog is doing on the raw food, or the nail salon that asks you if you want this broken nail repaired free while you wait for your pedicure. It’s about personalized service, neighborhood concerns, and the same bartender in the bar for twenty years.

Let’s take a farfetched example: let’s pretend my neighborhood sports bar set up a Facebook page. It would only invite people to the page who have already been to the bar more than once. The bartender himself would man the page, posting ball scores, special televised games, recipes for the chili you love in the bar, or news about someone from the neighborhood who had been in the hospital. You’d be invited to the page only if you were already a member of the community. So the bar would be targeting its existing customers and giving them reinforcement for their business. There would be “scarcity.” because you could only get invited into the page if you frequented the bar, so new customers might have an incentive to come back, and a community might form.

Bars are like that. Hair salon and barber shops have always been like that. Local restaurants are, and so are some car washes.  Bookstores, too. They are inherently social businesses.

But many businesses think they can just slap the bandaid of social media on their existing businesses, without realizing that for social media to be effective, social business has to be the real name of the game.

So if you  don’t plan for your business to be social through and through, and to build a community of your customers, don’t bother with a Facebook page.  Or a Roost platform to monitor it.

 




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