Before you can seriously pursue user acquisition, you need an amazing product. Specifically, you need to reach product-market fit. Oversimplified, more than 40% of surveyed customers should say they would be “very disappointed” without your product. Until you have achieved product-market fit, you only want to attract enough customers to test your product improvements. Extra customers just means more frustrated people.
He likes to meet entrepreneurs and help them. He especially likes to meet entrepreneurs who are building cool things on Facebook's platform. Zuckerberg also referenced Runkeeper, Spotify and Airbnb as startups that were "killing it."
He explained:
"The way that I got to know Kevin [Systrom] is they started off building on top of our platform. They had just a great open graph integration that made it so you could take pictures with Instagram and share them to Facebook and it's really first class…One of the things that I like to do is, with all of our big developers, I just like to reach out and get to know them personally. Partially because I'm just really interested in entrepreneurship and helping other entrepreneurs, but also I just want to get to know the people who are doing great stuff on top of our platform."
Joking that he was on the board and shouldn’t say too much, (Evan) Williams indicated some kind of engagement score may be coming, and that Twitter’s recent strategic shifts to a more-restrictive Twitter API access policy enable better measurement of engagement. If, after all, every Twitter client for consumers is created by the company itself, Twitter could much more easily determine exactly which tweets were requested by users, and make some pretty good guesses about which ones were actually seen and read.
For all the buzz around social media, one aspect has been largely ignored: the need for top business executives, especially CEOs, to personally get into the social media game. A recent survey by BRANDfog (PDF – 4.2MB) points out that when C-Suite executives become active on social media, it can increase brand trust, loyalty and purchase intent. In fact, 82 percent of survey respondents stated that they were more likely to trust a company whose CEO and leadership team engage on social media. And isn’t trust the most critical component of building relationships with customers?
...the problem most companies are facing in mobile today isn’t simply a lack of appreciation for the realities of demand in the app market. Applications, just like any digital initiative, must be grounded in clear strategies that harmonize specific business needs and user interests, while reflecting a pragmatic view of the marketplace. Most marketers are making the same mistakes in mobile that they’ve made on the web for years--expecting consumers to dedicate time and attention to their brand messaging without providing any valuable service or fulfilling any consumer need. Aside from the potential short-term PR boost and the value of educating employees with limited backgrounds in digital and mobile, building a branded app for the sake of having an app is a waste of time and money for everyone involved.And what are those strategies that work: Mobile as Marketing, Mobile as Service Enhancement and Mobile as a Business.
1. Publish your email newsletter to social accounts
2. Boost the chance that social and email content will rank high in organic searches
3. Make emails easier to share
In a study of 3,128 HubSpot B2B customers, LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.60%, four times higher than Twitter (.67%) and seven times better than Facebook (.39%).
"Americans seek deeper involvement in social issues and expect brands and companies to provide various means of engagement," said Carol Cone, Managing Director of Brand and Corporate Citizenship with Edelman. "We call this the rise of the 'citizen consumer'."
The study found:
• 30% of consumers believe government should 'do the most' to support causes, an 11% decrease Year over Year (YoY)
• 23% believe 'people like me' should do more for causes, an 8% increase YoY
• 87% believe that businesses should be more involved with social issues
• 74% believe a combination of brand and consumer 'doing good' for causes is the best option
• 47% believe brands are working with causes only for the publicity
A few weeks ago, a Swedish ad agency moved its website to Facebook and, before that, another agency based their web presence entirely on Youtube. Now, another agency has decided to ditch its website and establish its online presence elsewhere - this time on Twitter.
Investors were not kind to publicly traded government services companies in Q3 2010. In fact, you could say these companies took a beating from their investors. The federal services space took the brunt of it, with pricing down 19%, while defense prime contractors declined 5%. Even worse, valuation multiples are at the lowest levels in the past decade.
While this sounds like a lot of ‘glass half empty’ perspective, it isn’t all bad news. Recently ACG National Capital member Jean Stack of Houlihan Lokey wrote an article in Washington Technology regarding mergers and acquisitions in the government services sector. She, like so many others, predicted the M&A pace will remain strong into 2011 even though the industry has experienced downward momentum in pricing. Why? Companies and investors are cautious about organic growth prospects and are looking at M&A opportunities in order to support growth.
Mashup tool provider JackBe is working with Microsoft to create dashboard apps using Azure DataMarket. In our coverage of the DataMarket, we noted that it's a marketplace, not an app environment. That's where JackBe comes in. JackBe can run in Azure to help end users create their own mashups using data sources from the marketplace. JackBe shares an example app in a company blog post. The example is a logistics app designed to plan routes to keep perishable food fresh and incorporates the following data from the following sources:
There's a video on the blog post that explains how it works.
- Bing maps: with Navteq dynamic routing information and Microsoft's Dynamics CRM on Demand customer data;
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM on Demand: customer order data, and real-time Weather Central information visualized in Microsoft Silverlight, this App also supports write-back capability to the Dynamics CRM;
- Microsoft SharePoint: aggregating information on delivery trucks and their locations;
- And from Azure Data Market services: dynamic fuel prices and geographically correlated fuel station locations.
The advent of cloud computing and big data makes huge amounts of data available to organizations, but it's not always clear how to make practical use of it. Tools like JackBe can help turn all this data into something end users can work with minimal support from IT.
A good friend and long-standing client pointed me to a BtoB Magazine article about a recent survey entitled "The Impact of Social Media on Search." The nearly 500 marketers queried reported their most important goals for social media marketing as the following:Maybe not...
-Building brand awareness (81%)
-Increasing traffic to a Web site (77%)
-Generating leads (67%)
-Providing deeper engagement with customers (66%)
-Improving search results (57%)
I say it almost every day, but the real value of social media is enabling PR, marketing and sales to work together more effectively. Generating a warm lead out of a conversation with a group of people self-selected to be interested in issues the surrounding your product or service is a hell of a lot more likely to close than a cold lead generated from a palm card sent to 10,000 names on a spreadsheet or an email sent to 100,000 names in some rental email database.Some of the features to be found in Service Cloud 2 Sales Cloud 2:
Twitter integration: In Sales Cloud 2, uses may Twitter stream into Salesforce so sales people can engage in conversations with people and add that information into the sales funnel. In Service Cloud 2, customer support may follow Twitter and respond to people with real-time customer support.
Answers: This is a pretty cool feature. A Dell executive showed how an "Answer," tab can be added into Facebook where customers may pose their questions.
Mobile: A sign that moble apps are here to stay. Sales people may use the platform to send documents through the Salesforce platform.
Social media is just one of the tools that I use on a daily basis. To focus on just that and make it my identity would be like calling a runner a "sneaker guy." They might love their sneakers, but it's still the method they use to get from where they are to where they want to be. The way I use social media is similar ... I use it for marketing. I'm a marketing guy first and foremost. It's why my blog is called Influential Marketing and why you won't ever hear my introduce myself as an expert in social media. I use it often, and do know what I'm doing - but my expertise and my career is in marketing.So many people are fixated on the tools of social media that they are missing the big picture. Marketing is still marketing, you just use additional channels- channels with some different rules and best practices.
Hmmmm. Tempting.....but no.
This is one of the most high profile and rewarding beats in Sports because our coverage of the city's MLB franchise is at the center of our department's mission. It is also a very demanding job. It involves covering upwards of 140-150 games per year, in addition to spring training and the off-season.The beat writer is also responsible for regular posts to the Nationals Journal blog, which has a large and passionate following of baseball fans. A background in sports is not essential, though the ideal candidate would be someone who has high energy, a willingness to travel and a love for the game of baseball.
We would like to fill this position soon to give the writer time to acclimate before the start of spring training in Florida in mid-February.
As Twitter struggled to return to normal Wednesday evening, a trickle of details suggested that the outage that left 30 million users unable to use the micro-blogging service for several hours - at least in part - may have been the result of a spam campaign that targeted a single user who vocally supports the Republic of Georgia.
According to Bill Woodcock, research director at the non-profit Packet Clearing House, the torrent of traffic that brought the site to its knees wasn't the result of a traditional DDoS, or distributed denial of service attack, but rather people who clicked on a link in spam messages that referenced a well-known blogger called Cyxymu.
Micro-blogging service Twitter remains the preserve of a few, despite the hype surrounding it, according to research. Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content, a Harvard study of 300,000 users found. Estimates suggest it now has more than 10 million users and is growing faster than any other social network. However, the Harvard team found that more than half of all people using Twitter update their page less than once every 74 days.
Real time search is becoming all the rage, displacing some of the hype around semantic search and catapulting services like Twitter, FriendFeed and now Facebook into new realms when it comes to accessing its content. Today, search veteran Jerry Campbell is helping to launch Collecta, a service he’s claiming to be a true real time search engine unlike anything the world has seen.BTW, the author never included a link to Collecta in the article, which I find odd. Here it is- the site itself is pretty slick: http://www.collecta.comAs one of the minds behind the patented process that powered Summize, the Twitter search engine that was acquired by the microblogging platform and is now Twitter search, Campbell has long-standing ideas on how search and discovery should operate on the web. He’s seen the evolution of data-sharing as it pertains to things like news within he financial industry and has learned from organizations’ necessity to reach that “aha” moment as quickly as possible. It’s that “aha” moment Collecta is trying to give you, for any topic, in a very short amount of time.
Instead of focusing on Twitter or FriendFeed, Collecta performs its real time search for the wider web. From Wordpress to Flickr, Collecta searches comments on blog posts, images, and more. When you perform a search, you’ll find your initial results along with a time stamp displaying the time your search was initiated. Watch the page as it adds more results, each of which can be expanded to show the details of your search query.
Verizon has performed well despite not having the iPhone. On Monday, the company reported solid first-quarter results in its wireless business, edging out AT&T in net customer additions.Jeez.
All very sensible stuff...a bid odd coming from the #1 Kool-Aid mixer and promoter, but hey, we'll take common sense wherever we can find it.1) Study History - The history books are littered with manias (both financial and otherwise) that followed by reality setting in. The dot-com crash, of course, is only one. There are many others. Study them. Humans created human nature.
2) Diversify Your Sources of Information - God bless Techmeme. It does a fantastic job of tracking what the blogosphere is thinking about. But what if the global brain is dumb? Diversify your sources of information. Seek out those who at first you may disagree with. Nicholas Carr and Robert Cringley are two to start with. Find new blogs, ideally those written outside of SillyCon Valley and consider what they say.
3) Question Conventional Wisdom - Conventional wisdom is always right, right? Not. Read Freakonomics. If a lot of people start saying something is true, look behind the curtain and poke at what's there.
4) Don't Ignore Data - I didn't think it would ever matter, but my lack of love for math makes me wish I spent a little more time in school. Today, data rules. I am reading an awesome book on this subject called Super Crunchers. Skip what pundits are forecasting and look for hard trend data that shows how people are interacting with the Net. I keep a good collection here. Also take a look at Google Trends too. It conveys a lot about our interests. Notice how Second Life searches, for example, plummeted.
5) Talk to Real Humans - One of my favorite bloggers is Dwight Silverman. (I used to pitch Dwight during the Web 1.0 era.) Hailing from Houston, Dwight has seen many technologies come and go over the years. He constantly reminds me in public and private conversations to talk to real people - from Iowa or Planet Houston. When some of my colleagues started telling me to do the same, I got with the program. Do your sister or brother's friends Twitter? Probably not. Now that doesn't make it unimportant. Why? Because they all Google. Talk to both humans and geeks for broader perspective.
