Marketing Mystic

TiEcon 2008 panel on 'Taking on the incumbents'

Moderator(s):

Guy Kawasaki, Garage Technology Ventures

Panelist(s):

Chris Larsen, Prosper Marketplace, Inc.

Peter Luethi, Jet Airways India Ltd.

Sanjiv Malhotra, Oorja Protonics

Marten Mickos, Sun Microsystems Inc.

                               

This is the first time that I’ve ever heard or seen Guy Kawasaki in person. He sure is funny and sharp as heck. Overall, the panel wasn’t all that interesting but Guy was extremely entertaining with his quips on how ‘German service is an oxymoron’ and in this web 2.0 world , ‘nothing’s a secret but there’s no verification either’. Most hilarious was when he kept trying to get Peter Luethi (Jet Airways) to confess which airline he would use if he were flying to London. I think the discussion would have been all more interesting, if he was on the panel rather than moderating it. Here are my key takeaways from this discussion:

Operate under the radar.

Incumbents usually have the attitude that the newcomers are not worth bothering about. This works in favor of the newcomers, who can fly under the radar and grow quickly until they get to a point when the competitors start noticing them but they are big enough either to thwart them or get acquired. Marten Mickos (formerly of MySQL) was very entertaining and offered some great insights. MySQL approached Oracle and Microsoft both to find an ally in its effort to take on IBM. (MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems).

If you can’t kill them, partner with them.

If your market has multiple incumbents. Consider partnering with one competitor and offer something that they are not able to offer. In other words, complement an incumbent’s existing offerings rather than taking on the incumbent head on.

Your enemy’s enemy is your best friend.

Don’t try to go it alone. If you have multiple incumbents, partner with one competitor to take on the other. Understand your market’s competitive dynamics and leverage that to create synergies that help your growth.

Rally support from your customer.

Find the underserved need in your target market and fill that gap. Go to the customer directly and create demand for your product by focusing on that. Jet Airways is trying to fill the need that no other airline currently, which is to bring back the ‘luxury’ in aviation by offering amenities and facilities that make air travel more enjoyable.

TiEcon 2008 panel on 'Creating Buzz'

Scaling: Building Buzz and Winning Customers

   

Moderator:

  Matt Marshall, VentureBeat

Panelists:

  James Joaquin, Bridgescale Partners

  Krishna 'Kittu' Kolluri, New Enterprise Associates
  Dave McClure, Stanford University
  Indu Navar, Serus Corporation

 

This was a great discussion on how to create buzz and acquire customers. Here's a brief list of key takeaways from this panel:

- Influence the influencers. Invite bloggers, analysts, reporters, and your other key influencers into your world, share information on your business/product so they can evangelize your business for you.

- Let the metrics lead your way. Most people agree that marketing is a combination of art and science. Having clearly-defined metrics will ensure your costs are in alignment with the projected returns. Pick a few key conversion metrics that represent your customer and that increase value to you and increase your value to your customer.

- Use analytics to make decisions. Test different pages, messaging, keywords and use conversion metrics to determine which ones are working and which don’t.

- PR is often overrated. Find creative ways to create higher returns on a low budget. PR can be very helpful but it comes at a steep price and it’s ineffective if your product is not ready or it sucks. WOM is extremely effective for marketing on a shoe-string budget. Some quick and dirty (and cheap ways) to build buzz - daily blogging by employees, hire out-of-work writers to write up your PR, hand out funky t-shirts, or any other creative giveaways to get folks talking about your business/product.

- Make sure your product is ready and your marketing campaign is effective. Get statistically relevant data on your customer, iterate, and go to market quickly. Depending on how large your audience is, use the most effective medium. Word of Mouth is extremely effective in driving adoption on a bootstrap budget. Design your marketing campaigns to hit as many of these as following - High Volume (#), Low Cost ($), High Conversion (%).

- Great buzz isn't everything. Last but not the least, remember that great buzz doesn’t necessarily mean it will translate to online activity that you want. So don’t go crazy on just creating buzz, make sure you focus on whether it also translates into activity that you want.

PS: Check out Dave McClure’s blog for some great content (He’s brilliant!!!) 

Does Second Life need a corporate makeover?

I got on the virtual world bandwagon a few years back and tried Second Life, but it didn't stick. It was too much work, too confusing, not enough motivation, so I gave up. Recently, I decided to give it another try, so I logged back in. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the UI is sleeker and it's not as confusing as before, that being said, the learning curve is still darn steep.

 

LA Times recently did a great story on companies who are on Second Life and they all seem to be veteran technology companies. It's obvious from the home page that SL is serious about pitching to businesses, and they have managed to get some well-known brand names IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Intel among the major brand names on the platform.The marketing/business strategy for SL is to bring on businesses who leverage it for internal communication and drive traffic by pitching the site to their employees and customers. However, in order to make it a sustainable success, SL needs to bring more businesses on board.

Few years back, SL had created a huge buzz as the coolest place in cyberspace and consumer companies were flocking to it in droves. However, the companies soon realized that the virtual world audience was more extreme than the mainstream. The LA times story says,

Where people are, marketers want to be. Two years ago, companies such as American Apparel and footwear maker Adidas started filling Second Life with stores and buildings. The virtual world's early inhabitants, who largely disdain anything with a corporate tinge, rebelled by launching terrorist attacks and starting gunfights in the shops. Faced with empty storefronts and ridicule, many companies pulled out.

The first time I logged in a few years back, I was confronted by a gal who asked me if I had any money. Then I ran into another gal who warned me against hitting on her boyfriend. WTF?! This time around, I got invited to a sex dungeon and I don't even want to know what's coming the next time I log in. Since organizations have their own private island/location, they are 'protected' from the riff-raff of the surrounding worlds but it doesn't help the site's image, if it continues to be associated with insidious content.

I think, Second LIfe would drive a higher rate of adoption if they cleaned up their risque image. There's a serious disconnect between the audience they are trying to woo and images portrayed on the site. The tattoo-covered gangsta-looking dude right above their pitch on 'Your Organization in Second Life' on the home page doesn't exactly evoke warm-fuzzy feelings. How conducive are corporations to let their employees slink around semi-nude and replete with piercings, even if it is in the virtual world?

I think someone at SL should take a serious look at:
a) Make it easier for mainstream businesses (the non-geek companies) to get started on SL
b) Yes, sex sells and that's what made SL so notorious in the first place, but if that's not the business it wants to be in, SL should either get rid of the sexually explicit content or launch a new brand/site with a cleaner image. 

Creating separate worlds/islands helps corporate-types avoid having to deal with rest of the chaos that is SL, but until it cleans up its act, SL's risque brand image will always work against it, especially when it's trying to bring on new businesses.

What do bloggers owe their audience?

It's usually the blog posts that get my attention but this weekend, it was the fracas in the comment section on Guy Kawasaki's blog post that got me thinking. Guy posted on how Houston has the "funniest Web 2.0 babes" and he went on to share this hilarious introduction by Jenny Lawson of Good Mom/Bad Mom.

... What does matter though is that Guy Kawasaki kicks ass. That Guy Kawasaki is totally famous. That Guy Kawasaki is a genius who looks a little like Jackie Chan and could probably take you out with a roundhouse kick if he wanted to. And, most importantly, that Guy Kawasaki is here with us tonight.

So without further ado, I give you…Guy Kawasaki.

You can read the full introduction on Guy's blog. For sure, it's very funny stuff and and I am glad he shared it. But I think the verbal free-for-all that ensued in the audience ie. the comments section is worth a mention. Here's what I am talking about:

...This post had nothing to do with changing the world and everything to do with Guy telling us how great his is. No feed reader in the world can sniff that out. You read a para or two to see what's up. Nobody was trying to be rude. Nobody died. You dn't have to defend Guy. Read the blog and appreciate the fact that it's free. We're just asking for some consistency.

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Wow - if you hate Guy's blog - why stick around and complain? Move on! ...I like this blog and regularly read it. I am thankful for the free gift. I pay no money to read this blog. If I don't find a particular post useful, I can move on. That's why they invented feed readers - or come to think of it - Alltop!

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....Self-serving and off-topic posts are Ok once I a while, in the same way occasional contextual advertising is acceptabl. However a balance must be maintained.

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Denis says -  "when one posts to a blog he should largely post for the benefit of the readers."

I say BS to that! The question begging to be asked and answered is - what if anything, do bloggers owe their audience? When an author writes anything it's going to be self-serving. That's the point of self expression. Do you think that every great writer in history wrote to please everyone? No, one writes about what one wants to write about. Period. End of story. Get over it.

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Wow, that's some debate! The question at the heart of this fracas is - what if anything do bloggers owe their audience? Wikipedia's definition of blog(ging) is,

A blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.

In other words, a blog is supposed to be personal. But as blogging has evolved, there has been an emergence of 'blogberties' and professional mega-blog sites like the Technorati, GigaOM, Mashable, Huffington Post who have turned these 'personal musings' into a lucrative business. These professional blogs have an uncanny resemblance to the traditional news media networks. The emphasis is on constantly spewing content or being the first one with breaking news. But aside from the behemoth blogs and small select group of professional/B-List bloggers, blogging still largely remains an individual endeavor.   

Bendy3008 blogged about the relative unimportance of blogging and social networks based on Edelman's Trust Barometer survey, which shows that consumers still find traditional news media, business magazine and newspaper articles to be the most credible sources of information on a company and/or product while blogging and social networks rank very low.

While individually, some blogs and bloggers have tremendous influence and credibility, it hasn't translated to the blogosphere in general. Technorati claims to be tracking over 100million blogs and there are 175K  new blogs coming up everyday. That's heck-of-a-lot of content out there and it's challenging to separate the good ones from the bad. Not only is the volume of content staggering, blogging still remains a highly unstructured media. Bloggers control the format, content, frequency of their blog posts but there is no standard format or consistency.

On the other hand, traditional media has a very structured format, you typically don't hear the news anchors or talk show hosts veering off-topic or devoting an entire episode to a discussion of their personal life. If that happens, how long do you think you'll stick around before you flick the channel? So, while you get a very narrow view of things, traditional media still continues to be a much more credible source than most of the blogs out there and for a good reason.

I truly believe that the essence of blogging is keeping it human and keeping it conversational. Rankings do matter, but there's a fine line between being 'customer-oriented' and pandering. As an avid consumer of blogs and a newbie blogger myself, I am acutely aware of the time, effort, and dedication it takes to churn out quality content. The advantage of blogs vs. traditional media is that there's a great deal of value in getting unadulterated content from someone's who's not trying to pander to the masses or obsessed with ratings.

I don't think we've heard the last of this debate. As blogs evolve, so will the audience and the expectations will go higher rather than lower. The blog audience has many choices, if they find that a blog doesn't meet their expectations, they will vote with their feet or in this case... their mouse.

Why enterprise social networks don't work

Knowledge Management has been around since the 90s and every so often it makes a prime-time re-appearance. Last week it was on Techcrunch, who featured UK-based Trampoline system's Sonar Dashboard, a social network utility for large companies being touted as 'Facebook for business'. Adding a coolness factor to the social enterprise networks by riding on the coat tails of a popular social site is a clever PR ploy but here's why I am not buying into the hype.

I am a big fan of knowledge-capture/share systems but no matter what fancy name you come up with, these systems have the same fundamental issues. We all know that employees aren't just sitting there waiting for a cool tool so they can share their information with thousands of co-workers. Sure they update their Facebook profile gazillion times a day, but that's personal and it's fun. In the professional context, what's the incentive for keeping your profile updated? And do you want to be the slacker who's constantly overloading the corporate site with boring details of his/her inconsequential project?

Trampoline Systems acknowledges this lack of inclination on part of the employees and says,

Automation is critical to enterprise social computing. Employees are less inclined to update profiles at work in comparison to consumer social networking. SONAR Dashboard is connected to SONAR Server, which analyses a company’s email and documents to discover the key themes and relationships hidden in electronic information.

TBH, this 'automation' reeks of corporate snooping. Over the last year, I interacted with at least 20 different teams in my organization and every day I find new individuals who impact my work. Unless you read my emails, you probably won't know what I am doing or the projects that I am working on. So I am leery about how effectual this feature really is going to be. The text in the screenshots of the Sonar Dashboard or social maps (even those on Techcrunch) is not legible, so it's impossible to tell what these relationships or the profiles really look like or what information is being extracted 'automatically'. That just adds to the intrigue and ambiguity of their product and how it really works.

Some companies already have social 'sharing' features built into their intranet, where employees can add pictures, profile information, discuss questions, but you typically see the same handful of folks posting information most of the time. So the companies need to figure out how to encourage mainstream adoption, ie. how to get a critical mass of their employees to use and leverage the social network to make it meaningful.

Lastly, there's a question of churn. I can see how the Sonar Dashboard could map my relationships to other divisions/groups and that's valuable but those relationships are constantly evolving, people leave the companies or take up new roles, so the question is how regularly will these maps be kept updated?

I saw all the accolades that Trampoline has received, so naturally, I was curious as to who their customers are. There seem to be only a couple of firms who've signed up so far.

Trampoline’s clients include the Raytheon Company, a top 5 global management consultancy and the UK Foreign Office.

I can see this Sonar Dashboard and others like it, being very effective in a company with low churn and fairly stable processes and Raytheon seems to fit that description. In addition, law and consultancy firms also would highly benefit from this system, given the knowledge-intense nature of their business. However, companies in fast-paced environments, where things are a bit more fluid, would have a tremendous challenge in getting such a system implemented and getting any value from these types of systems.

I think it's essential for larger companies to put some system into place encourage information-sharing and making it easier for employees to tap into their geographically-dispersed knowledge base. Call me old-fashioned, but I think there needs to be a cultural shift and incentives should be put into place to get employees to share information. As much as I think technology is great, but it can't solve a company's process and cultural problems. If the company culture is not inclined towards collaboration and sharing, no fancy-schmancy system is going to help the company. Any technology, including social-networking utility is a means to an end, not the end unto itself.