Global Neighbourhoods

Monster in a Bottle

As he uncorks his integration of the Stormhoek and Microsoft brands, maybe Hugh should change the name of his blog to "Graping Void." He could also give the Microsoft Blue Monster a name.  It's a shame Moby Grape has been used.

BlogHer, ScrapBlog, Contests, Horses, Pigs, Cows and Braided Marketing

Like Tara Hunt, Scrapblog is a client of mine and like Tara, I usually think contests are pretty lame in a social media environment.  They are often tools of mass merchants trying to resusitate fading brands. But also like Tara, I think the one that Scrapblog has just jointly announced with BlogHer has some interesting twists.

Yesterday, I was at a workshop where attendees discussed the difficulty in
braiding new and traditional marketing together and I expressed doubts
that you could do much of it. In this case, I think they've done
exactly that.I like this one because I think both companies and the user win more than some goofy prize. Here's what's happening.  Scrapblog has long realized that it's primary users are women on line, about three-fourths of them.  Not only that, but they spend more time on the Scrapblog site and make more Scrapblog. BlogHer is the largest community of women online and the people who run it need to keep finding new things that will be either useful or interesting to its millions of users.

So the two companies made a deal and Scrapblog could have employed members of its team to design Scrapblog templates that seemed appropriate for the BlogHer community.  That's called targeting and it's how traditional marketers do it.  Instead, the two companies thought, why not let BlogHer community members design Scrapblogs and have the winner gets a free most-expenses paid pass to the upcoming Blogher conference, a prize you have to assume a lit of BlogHer members would want?

So users get introduced to a creative means of expression.  Scrapblog gets closer to a community that they may be more suited to than say, NASCAR racing fans, BlogHer women get a shot at a free pass and everyone wins. Scrapblog gets user generated content that BlogHer gets to offer exclusively.









Technorati Tags: tara hunt, blogher, scrapblog

Kawasaki spreads Truemors at SVASE

[Guy Kawasaki at SVASE. Photo by Shel]SVASE

I spent a few hours over SVASE (Silicon Valley Association of StartUps) yesterday at the Microsoft Mt. View Campus. It was a professionally produced event, spotlighting promising startups in front of an audience comprised mostly of VCs. I saw five presentations from Boorah,  DivinR , Jaxtr , kongregate and TelID .  I saw reasons that each of these companies could succeed. It was a little difficult because they all had calibrated to present to venture people, meaning they had to drag out tired PowerPoint presentations and list team credentials, when each of them could have more easily plucked my magic twanger by emphasizing the beauties of their products and strategies rather than previous employers of team members.  I wish a couple would hire me to coach them on presentation or better yet, just take note of the charismatic keynoters who preceded them, a guy named Kawasaki.

Kawasaki simply reeks of charisma. After his former employer, Steve Jobs he is consistently the most interesting and valuable speaker the tech community has yet to produce. He was there to talk about Truemors, his newest company. His talk was originally billed as, "How I Launched a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for only $10,918.09," but there must of been cost overrun. It was revised to  $12,107.09.

His key point was that truemors went from site registration to live in just 7.5 weeks for $12K  plus pocket change, as opposed to the usual $2 million and 6-12 months.

He told approximately 25o attendees the idea for Truemors was inspired by Hot or Not, a  social media site started by two guys at a party who disagreed on whether a certain person of the female persuasion was or was not hot. They took her picture, sending emails to 40 friends.  They asked them to vote on the hotness of the woman in the picture and invite friends to do the same.  Overnight, 40,000 people voted.

Fascinated by the overnight success, Kawasaki set out to create a business on a minimalist strategy. He said he saved six months by not writing a business plan and not parading up and down Sand Hill Road pitching investors.

He outsourced virtually everything. Kawasaki found Electric Pulp in South Dakota who designed and developed the online polling mechanism and then the site in a few weeks. His logo was designed by Logoworks, another online service for $400. He spent $1000 registering 55 domain names.  He could have cut that in half, but he did not like the implicitly sexist GoDaddy Superbowl ad, so he used the more expensive Network Solutions where he already had an account. His biggest expense was $4800 in legal fees. He warned that if a company succeeds, cutting corners in this area can be a fatal mistake.

He stated with apparent pride that his total marketing budget was zero and yet Truemors was flooded with 250,000 page views in its first day. Ah, but it seems to me, that Guy Kawasaki invested a great deal of time in marketing and the marketing got attention because of the significant currency of his personal brand.  Kawasaki is a one-person marketing machine and if he charged his own company what he's worth an hour, it probably would be a cost equivalent to what a traditional PR agency would have charged to help with the launch. Kawasaki has better access to editors and bloggers than just about any PR practitioner and the launch of Truemors was a heavy media play.

The site has been praised by some but vilified by many more. He complained that he was criticized by some bloggers for allowing crap and hearsay to be posted and rebuked by others for removing crap and hearsay.

Still other bloggers point out Truemors has generated so much noise so far is because Kawasaki is the guy who's doing it. His retort: "That's obvious." He's right. I visited Truemors  because it was Kawasaki's new thing. I decided to attend the SVASE event because I wanted to hear what he had to say about it.  Hell, I made sure to put Kawasaki's name in my headline above because it might spike in my daily Google juice. We are all self-promoters, but it only works if you like what we are promoting.

In the end, Kawasaki's name will not sustain Truemors. In the end it needs to provide a product and/or service that is valued and sustainable by some sort of revenue model. So far, Truemors has not done so and the enhancement of Kawasaki's personal brand may have already faded. Webware's Rafe Needleman, showed me Truemors' Alexis graph, which looks much more like a Bell Curve than a hockey stick.

Kawasaki had four takeaways:

1. There is no such thing as bad PR.  His point was that most bloggers had ripped his new company and generated huge traffic in doing so. He overlooked the fact that his own blog is the 14th favorite in the Western world and its a favorite of over 550 other bloggers.  He also  overlooked the fact that he is an experienced PR machine and one of the inventors of product evangelism as it is practiced in the technology community. Let a couple of brilliant computer scientists try doing what he has done and they will have a much greater likelihood to fall flat on their faces.  While Arrington covered Kawasaki three times, without Kawasaki asking.  Other startups grovel for the sort of coverage that Kawasaki can get on his own with little or no effort.

•    12 K goes long way. Absolutely true. Companies all over the world can use the efficiencies of the Internet to go further faster and cheaper than has ever been true. Kawasaki was followed by CEOs who all showed they were using classic approaches and conventional wisdom to raise money and go to market. There are new efficincies and disintermediating the money lenders and high marketing costs is a tactic that morecompanies should consider.
•    Remote teams work. The relationships we build over the internet are not virtual, they are real.  And we can share just about everything over the internet short of touch, taste and smell. Startups have an enormous opportunity to build global teams at low cost.
•    Life is good for entrepreneurs these days. Kawasaki is a poster child for "Life is Good." But he is right.  There are more opportunities today than at any time in my 28 years working as a tech consultant (4 years more than Kawasaki).

Help! This site is being hijacked

I was just informed that when you type in http://globalneighbourhoods.com, you get hijacked to a link farm. I have the site registered with GoDaddy and auto forwarded to my core url of http://redcouch.typepad.com.

I need your help because I have not a clue how they can do this and who or what I contact to fix this.

Ben McConnell knocks the Times for Knocking Citizen Journalists

Under the clever headline of "Chicken Little Pecks Again," Ben McConnell at Church of the Customer takes on the NY Times recent piece about the dangers of citizen journalism, in which the only people quoted are those who like to believe they are in command and control of the message.

I have never been big on the Journalist v. blogger debate. I kind of think their are blogging journalists, and people paid to fill newspaper space who are far from journalistic. But I have noticed an increase in what I consider the sour grapes of some newspaper writers. A couple of weeks ago, a Boston Globe sports writer was up in arms about 38pitches, a blog by Boston Red Sox pitching great Chuck Shilling.  Apparently a professional athlete was unqualified to write about professional athletics. I wondered what that guy would have said about Mark Cuban.

The times are changing even if the Times is not. Their readers and subscribers are beyond there command.


Technorati Tags: church of the customer, ben mcconnell

Marketing to women online

A couple of days ago, there were headlines declaring that fashion has eclipsed technology as the most popular e-tailing category. It's about time. I can remember back in about 1995, when "e-tailing" was a new and sexy word, and everyone was writing about buying stuff in their pajamas and the traditional newspapers were posting the inevitable warnings of it not being safe. I was working with my first online retailer, a start-up named Virtual Vineyards and the founder and I were manning a small booth at a conference in New York City. Next to us was another pioneer retailer.  I think they were called Amazon.com.

I chatted with some guy named Bezos who told me that the challenge would be to get everyday people to buy online and we would know that was happening only when consumer goods outpaced computer sales online. It turned out that selling books online was a more lucrative idea then selling artisan-produced wines online and the Bezos guy did pretty well.
But still the #1 item online for an entire decade has been computers.

I don't know know if this observation is politically correct or not, but guys buy computers and cars.  Women buy shoes and accessories.  Bezos, was fortune because both men and women buy the stuff his very large store now sells.

For a decade, I've been wondering when the tables would turn. Back in 2000, Pew observed that the surge of women online would change the Internet and would change what happened there because women were more social than men. In 2004, Shop.org listed a barrage of statistics that would argue the Internet was the eCommerce purview of women and that this was altogether fitting because women did the shopping.

Now, in 2007, we finally see evidence that a trend that is nearly a decade old is proving to be true. Perhaps it took so long because computers have cost so much more than shoes or handbags. Perhaps it is because computers are lasting a little longer now that so many of the requirements are moving online.

The buying power of women online is rising.  When you look at demographic breakdowns, you discover, that in higher age categories, the people who shop online are men, and when you look at younger age categories the shoppers are female. Selecting a 30-year-old woman for a customer seems a wiser course than trying to sell to a 60-year-old guy.

And the success for companies focusing on marketing may be on the hot path. Take Riya, for example, a company I helped position as a photo search company when it launched in Fall 2005. The media loved them. The blogosphere loved them. The problem was after the first wave of coverage and adoration, they found they had very few repeat customers. They went back to the drawing board repositioned themselves, coming back out of the box as Like.com, a visual shopping network aimed at women who wanted to find something to buy that looked like a garment or accessory in a photo. I have no current data, but I am told that response has been strong and growth seems to be ongoing.

Most recently, I've been involved with Scrapblog who just went live a few weeks ago.  Slightly to their surprise is that three-fourths of their users are younger women who are using the service to creatively share personal milestones with a small handful of friends and family. This has changed the company's thinking and its opportunities. First, there's a whole lot of companies offline and on, who want to market to young women, and they seem to be lining up with business partnership offers. Second, Scrapblog can adjust its marketing to this identifiable group and third it can begin to design new content and features to this group.

These are just two examples that I am close to. I'm certain there are a great deal more. It has very much surprised me that it has taken this long for women to outspend men in the online marketplace. But then things always take longer than I think they will. By now, I thought blogging would be about as common as using a telephone. It is not.  But I remain convinced it will be.  Its just going to take longer than I had thought.

Farecast upgrades its site

I've written a couple of times previously about farecast.com, whose online service has helped me save money by predicting accurately whether plane tickets would be going up or down. Mike Fridgeon, Farecast VP marketing pinged me this morning to let me know it upgraded its site with a whole lot more traveler's options, such as alternative airports, one-way, cabin class, eliminating dreaded red-eyes and filtering out tight connections.

In features and options, this new rev has pulls it ahead of Orbitz and kayak.com , not to mention it's primary asset of telling you whether its wise to buy your ticket now or later. Farecast's frosting is that it tells you whether plane tickets are going up or down with about 75% (audited) accuracy and they'll even sell you insurance to cover if they are wrong. Personally, I think Farecast has a prettier face than Orbitz and other competitors.

Founded last August, Farecast claims over three million visitors.  According to Mike,  the service has saved people $10 million as a direct result of its predictions.

I believe that online predictive technology, another infant industry is going to emerge with speed in numerous areas in the coming months. For example, I'm working with a San Francisco company, My-Currency, which has not yet launched. My-Currency will help prospective home buyers determine whether the price of houses for sale in a particular neighborhood will be rising or falling in coming months.

Thanks Hugh. It's worth a thousand words

Hugh MacLeod, has drawn one of his inimitable masterpieces in honor of our upcoming "Starting the Conversation" workshop series starting June 11 at SAP headquarters in Palo Alto.

Josh's Dictionary of Corpspeak

In Naked Conversations, Robert and I invented a few words.  Ine, which we enjoyed was "Corpspeak," referring to language used by large organizations that no one else on Earth would ever use. Before us, of course, Cluetrain also mentioned it, and before them, George Orwell had some fun with it in a little book called "Animal Farm."

My friend Josh Hallett seems to have started a dictionary of corporate euphemisms and circle-speaks. This would be a very funny piece if it weren't so true.

Why can't companies just have a simple naked conversation with customers and the public?


Technorati Tags: josh hallett. hyku

Could Microsoft Assimilate Hugh Macleod?

I have a few things in common with my favorite illustrator, Hugh MacLeod. We both try to be humorous, edgy and generous with our blogs. [He succeeds more oftan than me.] In return, we hope somehow to pick up enough business to survive economically.People vastly overestimate what either of us make, or in Hugh's case, what I think he makes.

Hugh and I chatted briefly about this at the San Francisco blog dinner last week, but because of his recent affiliation with Microsoft he seems to be getting a certain level of unjustifiable crap lately. At the same blogging dinner, someone who should know better referred to Hugh as "just another Microsoft flogger."

More recently, at the Girl Geek Dinner, he recently wrote, Sarah Blow told him that before he arrived at the event,people were speculating  there was speculating on Gaping Void "being assimilated by Microsoft."

I think the reverse is more likely, and good for Sarah for telling Hugh what was saying when he was not present to hear it. Hugh, as usual took the comments in stride down the high road. I don't blame people for speculating.  That's what people do.

Personally, Hugh gives me something for free. He makes me laugh more than once a week. He manages to bite the hypocrites without being cruel.  He gives me insights into not just blogging but the human condition without it feeling like a tutorial.  He does it for free.

My thanks to Microsoft, Thomas Mahon and Stormhoek for allowing him that luxury.  Thanks to you who bring him in to consult for money and for you who buy his Street Cards and T-Shirts.

My only question: If I start drawing funny pictures, will you do the same for me?

Technorati Tags: hugh macleod, microsoft