Recently, the fact that I have a semi-successful blog has caught wind around my office. I was asked this week to answer a few questions on blogging that will be used in some presentation about why we should be using blogs for communication in the corp world. I hope the presentation reaches some people, but I thought I’d share my answers here…
1. What is the easiest part about blogging?
The easiest part about blogging is that it’s fun. I enjoy taking the time to reflect on a subject and funnel my thoughts into something that I believe will help or be constructive for someone else (the reader). In my 3+ yrs blogging I’ve gotten much better at diagramming an idea and communicating that idea to others.
2. What is the most challenging?
Staying focused can be very difficult. When you start a blog you have choices to make: Who’s my target? What are my goals/metrics? Why am I doing this? Keeping the answers to those questions in mind is critical to writing a good blog. I write posts for the GEHC IT blog that will expose the employees to something that they’ve not been previously exposed to or to give them helpful hints/tips on specific IT things. In short, you have to give them a reason to come back.
3. What are your goals/initiatives as far as professional blogging?
This is difficult to say. First, I’m not at all a professional blogger. Second, I think this term “professional blogger” can confuse some folks. Professional bloggers are blogging for a living, for profit, I blog to stay fresh, improve my writing, and generally increase my voice to the world. It’s still debatable whether or not I have any thing worthwhile to say :)
“I probably don’t call and have phone conversations with people as much as I did because I already know what they did on Twitter. I’m in constant contact with them.” said 26-year-old Ryan Graves, owner of Renliv LLC, a Web development and Internet consulting firm. “Now, with Foursquare, you don’t need to tell me where you’re going.”
The other day, for example, Graves said he couldn’t reach friends by phone or text messages. So he jumped on Foursquare and learned they had checked in at Halligan’s in Lincoln Park. He just went there and met them.
Great article @littlewern, and thanks for letting me help.
I’ve been thinking a lot about customer development over the past few months. It’s a new way of thinking as a company, it’s a new way of approaching marketing, product building, and customer service. It’s changing, or maybe already has changed, the way companies think about the relationships with their customers, and it’s never been easier to employ this strategy than in early stage technology companies. And that’s exciting.
One of the smartest pieces of startup advice I’ve heard in a while was Andy Rachleff of Benchmark Capital saying, “The most important thing to look for in a founder: Authenticity”. (thanks to @TristanWalker for pointing me to this quote) The same goes for evaluating a startup as a whole, is the corporate philosophy of the company true to it’s actions? Is the company authentic about what they tell customers and partners? Take Comcast for example: They say they are listening to customers, they have a large team scanning twitter to make sure that customers voices are heard, but they sure as hell don’t seem to be listening to customer feedback about their phone support, or cable and internet packages. In short, it’s terrible. They’re not using customer development to drive their product offerings. True customer development focused startups make this a priority, and that helps them brand themselves as authentic.
Companies that that make learning a priority are exciting and they’re the type of companies I want to work with.
Today I was in a mtg about how GE will work to reach out to potential job candidates. Surprisingly, the recruitment practices are on the cutting edge of listening and reaching out to candidates and meeting them on the platforms that they use. They’ve abandon the “they’ll come to us” mentality that will fail every time. I don’t care if it’s a 2 person startup or a Fortune 2 behemoth, you have to listen and engage in customer feedback at the customers level or you will no be able to accurately road map your product.
Similarly, with the work I’ve been doing with Foursquare the team is very interested in the user feedback. To the point that they are intimately aware that the game must develop with user feedback in mind for it to remain compelling. With the recently inclusion of deals ‘in-game’ it’s only become more valuable for users. In the past it was just fun, now Foursquare is benefiting users financially, and that has staying power.
LEARNING companies solve problems quickly while remaining true to their strategy. LEARNING companies keep users and customers happy even when they don’t give them everything they want. LEARNING companies focus on long term value and they don’t let their products get stale. LEARNING companies measure the metric of user/customer engagement and realized that there is valuable data to be measured there. LEARNING companies listen.
If there is one thing that will be consistent with my career, I want to work for LEARNING companies.
This blog post is not meant to be insightful or meant to share an opinion on any particular topics. It’s sole intent is to ask you your opinion. I have a question.
Is the casual style of writing that comes along with blogging a good thing or a bad thing for society?
Some times I still have my parents read over my writing and usually their reaction is that it’s too informal. I write like I speak and often times that means grammatical errors, slang terms, and off the cuff remarks. What’s the big deal? Well, recently there was a phenomenal blog post on the Fake Steve Jobs blog about ‘why mainstream media is dying’.Whoever the fake Steve Jobs is, he wrote…
And to all those people who go around wringing their hands and saying what are we going to do when the “real newspapers” all die and we have to get our news from Gawker and HuffPo and TechCrunch? Friends, I think we’re going to be just fine.
Part of it is the form of the media itself. If you’re a reporter at the Times, you get one story, and a fixed number of inches, and you’re smothered by layers of editors. At TechCrunch it’s one guy who can get his teeth into something and there’s no limit on how many articles he can do.
I love this. He points out that the agility of the informal publishing platform of a blog is what will allow so many people to eventually make the “standard” journalism world irrelevant. But back to the question, is this casual style bad for the overall reporting of news and how society consumes it?
I think not. I think that a less formal style of writing will eventually be the way that most of us consume the news. Obviously good writing will rise to the top, and that’s why I encourage current newspaper journalists to team up, leave their paper, and start a top notch blog with higher quality writing and coverage. But the print is going to die, it’s just a matter of time, and it would sure scare me to work in a known dying industry. But if that journalist is really good, they readers will come.
Finally, for those of you who think students don’t know how to write in full sentences, you are the people who probably don’t understand how to use text as a persuasive medium.
In summary, I think that the style of writing that is most affective is changing. It’s more casual but like most successful things these days, it’s more personal, it’s more comfortable, and it’s more fun. Looks like I did end up sharing an opinion. But, like I stated at the start, what I want to know is what do you think? Is this style of writing that I employ and that so many others are beginning to use good or bad for readers?
Thursday night I had the pleasure of meeting Charles Adler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, the New York based group funding platform. Kickstarter serves as a way for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, and explorers (as they say on the site) to make their dreams come true, post a project, and collect the necessary funding for it. Similar to others like it, projects much reach their goal in order for any of the funding to be collected upon.
Kickstarter has taken off because of the quality of projects they host and the high success rate for projects that do collect on funding. They’ve also given the power to the people, fundraising on a grand scale is no longer for big non-prof corps. The Kickstarter interface is clean and simple, the concept is one that people understand, and there’s almost always a project that you can identify with and support.
Recently, I contributed to a project call the beta cup project. Check it out and think about contributing…
About this project
We want to find solutions to the enormous problem of disposable coffee cups. The hard part it making something that is still convenient, while ending the waste.
We believe there are lots of people with good ideas – you might have a few yourself. After all, so many of us drink coffee every day, some of us must have thought about this, right?
We’ll ask people to rate and review the ideas and invite the best to create prototypes. We’ll reward the best, with prizes. The prize will help the winners begin the process of getting their ideas to market.
All money raised here on Kickstarter will be used for prize money only (Who will check? We hope you will).
Why is this important? In North America we consume 58 billion paper cups every year, which represents 60% of the worlds total cup wastage.
These cups are not being recycled and most end up in landfill. With less than 2% of us using reusable mugs, we have a serious problem on our hands.
For more information please see http://thebetacup.com or contact me, Toby Daniels, directly.
P.S. Maybe helping fund the prize is not your thing. Don’t worry, there will be lots of ways to help out. Please let your friends and family know about betacup – more than 65% of us are coffee drinkers, so there is bound to be some interest. Who knows, maybe they have already dreamed up the winning idea.
In a recent project, I’ve been doing customer development here in Chicago to help out Foursquare. If you’re not familiar with customer development it’s gathering feedback from potential customer on what they’d like to see from your product in order for it to be of value to them. It’s been a fun experiment in biz dev and a wake up call to the difficulties of door to door sales pitches, but I’ve received a lot of great feedback. Below I’d like to share more of the findings of the experiment. Here’spost 1 andpost 2.
Restaurants are scared of new
The overwhelming theme in speaking with restaurateurs is that ‘new‘ is scary. The reason why new is scary is because new costs them time. Time seemed to be their most valuable asset and learning takes time, changing takes time, adopting new takes time. In the tech world it may even be our business to know what the next trend will be, that doesn’t matter in restaurants.
Problem: I’ve found that only savvy business owners get the benefit of online. Forget iPhone apps and mobile social computing, they may not even have a web enable device in their restaurant at all. A few solutions to these problems rose to the surface in my discussions that I think will ease the adoption issue of a new technology.
Solution: Remove the need for opt-in participation. This at first might sound scary but hold on. This isn’t a “we’re going to force you to participate” play, it’s a “we’re going to help you whether you like it or not play”. If foursquare found existing deals that bars and restaurants were running to pull into the system they wouldn’t need to convince bars/restaurants to opt-in. If you know Thursday is $1 beer night at the local watering hole because of the drink specials app, post that deal within foursquare. Then when the user goes, they’ll say to the bar tender, “I found this deal on foursquare, this is awesome”. The user becomes the sales rep, and the bar becomes intimately aware of the value foursquare provides.
Cost of current coupon system
As a part of this round of feedback, I spoke with a marketing professional who sells to restaurants often. I wanted to know what his challenges were and how he overcame them. As always, if you’re doing something tough you might as well get smart experienced folks to give you advice. Why bang your head against the same door they did?
In this conversation I learned some techniques to make my pitch ’sexy’ to bar and restaurant owners.
Showing them their costs. By figuring out what they were already spending on coupons, deals, and existing promotions it was very easy to show them the value of foursquare. Many restaurants spend $500/month or more on ‘Money Mailer’ and other coupon systems, and they have metrics on the amount of people that actually take advantage of the deals. Well guess what, with foursquare the cost of distribution (virality) is significantly lower, thus inserting foursquare as your promotion system returns a much higher ROI. It’s simple, bar shares a deal with foursquare, foursquare share the deals with users, users come to your bar. 1, 2, 3. Cash money.
Limiting the downside of excess coupons
One thing I found when talking to bar/restaurant owners is a fear of the downside. I think maybe they’re pessimists by nature, not sure. Either way, a common concern they had with the foursquare model is, “what if too many people come in for the deal, how can I control it?” They were worried that the Mayor would change everyday and they’d be stuck giving out tons of freebies. A feature that was requested more than once is the ability to record the # of times a person takes advantage of the deal giving them the ability limit abuse. Whether by limiting point incentives or other “in-game” techniques, I don’t see this as being a long term problem.
Last night I got an email from Amazon for being an AmazonAssociate. They wanted to bring my attention to the fact that they’ve (finally) integrated Twitter into their associates bar so that I could share products on Twitter. Yea, it’s pretty late to this game but it’s good to see a giant like Amazon admit that they can’t survive on their own. Social is something that everyone is going to have to embrace to survive.
Today we are excited to announce the launch of a new feature called Share on Twitter. You can access Share on Twitter from the Site Stripe and post to your Twitter account from Amazon detail pages in just two clicks.
The Share on Twitter feature is easy to use. Simply log in to your Amazon Associates account and then visit any detail page on Amazon.com. By clicking on the Share on Twitter button in the Site Stripe, a new window will open and an Amazon-generated message is pre populated in the ‘What are you doing?’ text area of your Twitter account (you may be asked to log in to your Twitter account). That message will include a shortened URL that already includes your Associates ID. You’ll have the option to edit this message or simply hit the ‘Update’ button to post to your Twitter account. When Twitter users click on the link in your post and make a qualifying sale, you’ll earn referral fees. That’s it.
Also, did you know that you can stay connected with Amazon Associates by following us on Twitter, becoming a fan on Facebook and joining our group on Linkedin?
Please tell us what you think of our new Share on Twitter feature using hashtag ‘#AMZNSOT’ on Twitter or contact us via the contact form. We want to hear from you!
Sincerely,
The Amazon Associates Program
Side note: In my opinion Amazon is a perfect acquirer for AdaptiveBlue who makes the in browser social tool GetGlue.com. It’s a perfect opportunity to immediately bring their customers all together and have probably the largest social network on the web. Yes, with the Glue technology implemented correctly they could surpass FB and the social graph would all center around REAL PRODUCTS. The potential is ridiculous…this topic will get it’s own post in the future.
These days it seems like 25% of the ads on TV are for app this or app that. The iPhone app store just hit 100k in applications. Now the Verizon/Motorola/Google Droid comes out and says iCan do everything that the iPhone can’t. You know, Droid Does. One of the coolest things about this Droid phone is the fact that the app store will be just as open and the internets. If you know how to build an app for it, do it, no controlling application or approval process from Apple, Google, or anyone else…at least that’s what they say.
So, where is the money to be made in the App Economy? Well obviously the content creators, the folks who have the most data, whether that’s news, images, or a social graph. Those will always win. Then there are the builders, those who build the best apps will get the most attention, tons of shops have already popped up as the app developers, web developer just doesn’t market as well these days. Mobile is , so if you’re a developer and want to stay relevant, I’d be mastering the iPhone SDK and the Android 2.0 SDK (software development kit). Then come the aggregators, these folks make things easier on the users, and this is what I want to touch on today.
People always complain that the iPhone app store sucks to navigate and they’re right. It’s terrible. Nobody really knows what the Droid app ecosystem will look like because it’s going to be user generated and the users just aren’t there yet. One huge opportunity regardless of platform is application discovery. The proven model of discovery in almost any vertical these days is through the social graph. This means, what apps are my friends downloading, I want them too.
Enter, Appolicious. The social graph for apps. They’re creating compelling ways to discover new apps through a Facebook enabled social network and an easy tool to upload your entire (iPhone only for now) app collection…and if they’re smart, which I believe they are, there will eventually be no limit to which app ecosystem you’re interested in. Within Appolicious, when I search for foursquare I’ll eventually see both their iPhone app, their native Android 1.0 app, and their new Droid app, and also their Palm Pre and Blackberry apps (yet to be released). I want all apps, all platforms, and all my friends reviews.
How many app developers, content creators, and others will want to get a piece of that pie within Appolicious’s soon to be powerful network of people who own apps? Answer: All. This will likely become the most powerful site for application promoters and marketers because this will be the primary tool for application discovery. You might have said, “yea but Apple will just do it and wipe them out”, this application ecosystem diversification is exactly what will give Appolicious staying power.
Alan Warms, the Chicago based CEO of Appolicious, wrote an interesting post back in October about how free apps are the future (I agree) and this statement shows he clearly has a good grasp on where this application economy is going and how best to participate in it.
With yesterday’s announcement (10/15 Apple announces in app purchasing), every company out there can offer a free iPhone App, thereby reducing the friction of driving adoption, knowing that over time they can work with their consumers to find offers that make sense for both parties.
Alan is taking a big bet on Apps, and I think it’s a safe one. Applications, through the increase of mobile computing will become the quickest, easiest way for users to reach the web and the content they need. They’ll increasingly see their smart phones and mobile devices as their tool box to accomplish specific tasks and their apps will be their tools. We all know how much easier a job is with the right tools.
Here’s an interview Alan did with Robert Scoble about Appolicious.
This weekend @Mollstar and I had a long (relative to the amount of time I can usually get her to talk about the web) conversation about how we don’t really understand who plays all these Facebook games. Other than Poker from Zynga, which I play a decent amount of, I don’t understand who grows virtual farms, zaps their friends with black magic, and others. Then, on Halloween, Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch posted a follow up post to his question to Anu Shirkla of OfferPal at the Virtual Good Summit about the ethics of many adverting trends within the virtual currency markets. His post covered examples of these ad schemes and a very entertaining video of classic Arrington antics at the event. You may like him or hate him but you can’t deny he’s kind of a bad ass.
Then the next day on Nov 1, Tech Crunch followed up with quotes from two respected entrepreneurs who admittedly said they’d executed these types of ad strategies in the past and weren’t proud of it. One even said, “I’m surprised it took this many years to be reported by the “media”. These kind of scams have been going on for years…”
Then Dennis Yu the CEO of BlitzLocal wrote a very honest post about scamming Facebook and the 3 most common ways to do it: 1) Downloading a spyware tool bar, 2) Tricking users to give up their email using ‘you’ve won a “free” camera, just tell us you email address’, or 3) Getting a users phone number by using ‘thanks for taking that IQ test, give us your phone number so we know where to send it’, which charges a user $20/month.
The next follow up was from Zynga’s VP of Biz Dev Andrew Trader who stated that about 1/3 of Zynga’s revenue comes from advertising. This is the same advertising that Arrington calls ’scammy’.
Next Mark Pincus, who I wrote about last week, responded to Arrington’s claims with a very thoughtful post about the industry and openly admitting that yes, some players on these social media platforms are ‘scammy’ advertisers and they’re creating bad user experiences. He also raised a point I hadn’t thought of; there are many users who don’t have access to online payment methods (broke kids) who are still interested in making in game purchases. So they’re able to take survey’s and perform tasks to earn in-game-currency. Pincus says this about the worst offender:
In fact, the worst offender, tatto media, referenced in the techcrunch article, had already been taken down and permanently banned prior to the post.
There is no doubt that social gaming is entering the mainstream culture and there is a business to be created around fun….
As we evolve to a world where people connections are the basis for the largest consumer services, we will face more challenges. I’m confident that with so many smart people (and critics) we will overcome these.
I hope that I could catch you up to what’s going on here and make it easier for you to follow than reading every post (although you can of course). As I stated last week in my application economy post I really think that Pincus is a sharp entrepreneur. He understand that you can’t just F’ the user and still build a great business so I’m excited to see how he responds to this in the longer term. I wouldn’t doubt it at all if Pincus were to push Facebook to adopt the standards that Arrington et al. are calling for.
Hi. I'm Ryan Graves and this is my personal blog. I'm an entrepreneur living in Chicago, working in San Francisco, but from San Diego. My wife blogs too, and I <3 my family.
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