Andy Boyer

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Category: Marketing (Page 5 of 25)

How to Make the Front Page of Mashable

December 27, 2012 /

I’m going to take a wild uneducated guess, than somewhere between 50-500 start-up tech companies sent press releases, emails, tweets and carrier pigeons to Mashable in the last 2 days, trying to get someone to cover them. Some of them were full of fluff I’m sure, but some of them likely had real news, about doing real things, and expanding into real markets with real customers.  You know, real stuff.

Somewhere between 50-500 of those companies were ignored.

But fear not, because in the same 24 hour period, Mashable showed us how to make the front page – have a famous relative and do something outlandish on Twitter.

Item 1: The Zuckerberg Family Vacation Scandal

I’m sure Randi Zuckerberg is a great and smart person.  I’ve never met her, but I have no reason to believe that if she wasn’t a Zuckerberg, she still would have been a successful marketing person at some other social media company.  She’s probably witty, funny, smart, a great business person and a joy to be around.

But so are several thousand other women in the Bay Area.  It wasn’t “Randi” that was covered here.

Instead, it was Mark’s sister who got press in Mashable for a Twitter dust-up over a holiday photo (and a boring photo at that).  Let’s not pretend that the Executive producer of the Real Housewives of San Francisco would be covered for a Twitter spat.  But when you are related to Mark, anything you say gets picked up, and probably more sadly, it gets shared.

Item 2: The Avery Johnson Jr. Tantrum

It’s not enough that professional athletes and coaches need to monitor their own social presences, now they have to worry about their kids’ social media accounts.  Who knew Avery Johnson had a son? None of us, until he got mad about his dad getting fired.  Amusing perhaps, but that’s it. Not much else incriminating on his feed, so that’s that. Except… Mashable’s journalists rush to the rescue, discovering he is a high school junior. Thankfully, we have a full account now on Mashable.com about this breaking social media and technology news – ‘Kid upset that Dad gets fired.”

The Moral of the story:

We read tech pubs and like to think we’re reading things that are more substantive than Perez Hilton.  But when it comes down to it, the folks we’re reading aren’t much different than Perez’s correspondents.  They have their fingers on the pulse of the families of the newsmakers.  And we’re choosing these non-news articles. So lesson to be learned – get someone’s relative on your team.  Doesn;t matter if they are a cousin or sister or son or mother.  Get them a consultant position.  Have them erupt on Twitter.  You’ll get instant awareness for them and your company.  Hmm, maybe there’s a business model here.  Representing the relatives of famous people to get them social media gigs…..

Jack Dorsey on User Narratives

September 22, 2012 /

It seems like such common sense when Dorsey says it, but too often, we start building products from the wrong perspective.  Dorsey reminds us that the product needs to be built based on a story of how each customer will use it.  Think about the products you regularly use, or places you regularly go, and see if there’s a simple story behind each one.

 

The Importance of a URL That Makes Sense

September 2, 2012 /

I’ll preface this with two notes:
1) I don’t like picking on marketing or advertising teams in this blog.
2) I have no data to tell me that these guys aren’t geniuses whose campaign is killing it.

But, I want to use this ad at Century Link Field to show why a good url is important.

I have seen the ad about 30 times now, have made comments out loud, took a picture, started to write a blog post, and STILL can’t remember the url.

 

You can do 100 better things with this url.
1) Buy VisitTanzania.co and redirect it to your crazy url

2) Buy an offshoot, such as ComeVisitTanzania.com.

3) Build a page such as Facebook.com/VisitTanzania

4-100) etc…

For all I know, trips to Tanzania from Seattle have increased 120x and they are going to send me an email telling me why I’m wrong.  Even if they have, I’d encourage marketers to grab a url that makes sense before investing 6-7 figures in a stadium deal.

 

President Obama Hits Reddit

August 29, 2012 /

I’ve blasted the Obama 2012 team in the past for their relentless email spamming. So, I have to give credit to a little piece of brilliance that should go down in the campaign Hall of Fame.

While the Republicans are rallying their base in a conference center in Tampa, President Obama was holding court in the virtual world, hosting an AMA on Reddit. As of 3:00pm PDT the post had 17,378 points (62% like it), with 43,822 up votes 26,444 down votes. There were more than 12,000 comments.

It’s hard not to come away impressed that while the Republicans are involved in the “old way” of engaging people, Obama is leveraging the “new way” of reaching out to his base (and stealing eyeballs from them). The Republicans are kind of left without a way to fight back. If they put Romney on Reddit during the DNC, they’ll look like copy cats. If they don’t have Romney do a AMA, they look scared, like they don’t trust what he would say. That’s check and mate Democrats.

Meanwhile in Tampa, Google is reporting that they have received the most searches ever for the term “Reddit” from a single geographic area. (No, not really.)

A Quick Recap of Startup Riot Seattle

August 11, 2012 /

I took an afternoon this week to check out Startup Riot at the Sodo Showbox.  This was the second year the event was held in Seattle, and I’ll say both years I’ve had a great experience.  The event has some unique touches; sprinkled between the 30 3-minute pitches, are 2 keynotes, several networking opportunities, and a long lunch in which you can walk around and meet new people.

Rather than just recap the whole event, I took some notes on what start-up marketers could learn from some of the 30 presenters, both when pitching to customers, or investors.  Note, the majority of this post is also up at www.relaborate.com/blog.

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It’s gutsy to take the plunge into the entrepreneurial waters.  It’s even scarier to get up in front of 250 people, explain your entire company in 4 slides and 3 minutes, and take 3 more minutes of grilling from some judges.

But that’s what 30 brave entrepreneurs did Wednesday at Startup Riot in Seattle.  To reward their courage, Startup Riot judge and keynote speaker Andrew Hyde asked everyone in the audience to blog about at least one of the companies.  Blogging – well that’s something we can do. So here are a few things we learned about marketing your company, from both the judges and the start-up CEO’s who took the stage.

1) Show your excitement in everything you do: More than once, the judges asked the entrepreneur, “Are you excited about this project?  If yes, then show us.  Prove to us with your passion that this project will work.” This means in every powerpoint, blog post and meeting you attend, make sure that your excitement for your idea is contagious.

2) What is your 5 second 1-liner?  Can you explain what you do in 5 seconds?  Cindy Wu described her company, Microryza, as “Kickstarter for Science.”  That’s easier to remember than, “We built a platform where people can fund scientific research, in an online market and where scientists can go and present their projects to try to receive funding.” Can you describe what you do in 5 seconds?

3) Prove you are the team to do it: Parend Paresh may be tackling an unsexy problem with VendScreen.  But, it is so obvious that they know what they’re talking about, I would invest in a heartbeat.  VendScreen is a touchpad that will be attached to vending machines and enable customers to pay for sodas or snacks by phone or credit card.  Neat idea maybe, but why will it work?  Well Parend explains his domain expertise, illustrates his partners’ domain expertise, and then tells a fact that all vending machines are going to be required by Federal law to put nutritional information somewhere on the outside of the machine.  The fact that he knows this obscure legislation demonstrates that he knows the market for vending technology, and knows how to capitalize on emerging trends.

4) Talk about your wins: iHearNetwork, led by Paul Simonds, is a startup with 3000 users.  Not only that, they have a 125 Daily Active Users and 250 Weekly Active Users.  Taskk, has 7000 users already in a totally different market, adding 2000 in the last month. When you are a startup, find a number that you can trumpet.  I don’t know if 3000 or 7000 users is a lot for the spaces these companies are in, but I wrote the numbers down. They sure sound good. And as one judge said to Placeling’s CEO, “If you aren’t bragging, you sound small.”

5) Show your product: Personify makes it easy for people to find social good opportunities and volunteer events.  They already have 500 users.  And yet through their presentation, they never showed us the product – which is actually quite lovely. People want to see that the product is live and working.  Don’t make them imagine what it will be like.  It’s too much work.  Show your product everywhere you can.  Your product is your story.

6) Explain the problem: Tim Hermanson of Arch started his presentation with a shot of a traffic jam.  He asked that since we all have these digital devices in our pockets, why couldn’t anyone, anytime, see something that was happening in a different location so that we could avoid these traffic jams.  If I was stuck in that traffic jam, why couldn’t I anonymously upload a photo from my location so others could see my pain and take another route?  With the problem framed in a simple scenario, I can now understand the solution. The product becomes real when there’s something I can identify with.

7) Understand your competitors: Shawn Burke of Crowd Picsell wasn’t just asked to name some competitors, judges wanted to understand what he did better then them.  If you are a customer, you want to know exactly what the benefits are of one company over the other.  Don’t make the customer guess. Be the best at something, and explain exactly what it is that makes you the best over all others.  It’s hard to lose when you are the best.

8) Tell a good, humanizing story: Jon Poland created Crowdegy, joining an already crowded survey space. But, he explained why his product would succeed by telling a story about his 5 year old. In his story, he shows his 5 year old how to use his product, and then the next day his 5 year old asks, “Daddy, can I play the dot game again today?” Jon got the point across: His product brings visualization to surveys, is fun enough to do over and over, and is so easy a 5 year old can do it.

There were a number of other startups to keep an eye on.  Check out the whole list at StartupRiot.com.  And if you were there, did you see any companies that stood out?

 

“First, Ten”

May 31, 2012 /

Old Seth Godin quote that I recently was reminded of:

“First, ten. This, in two words, is the secret of the new marketing. Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you…Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.”

The Reach of a Tweet

May 1, 2012 /

So I work in social media.  I teach some social media.  I play around in some social media channels.  I own a blog with my own name as its url simply so I show up in Google searches.  Through all these years playing around in social media as a profession, I’ve never really made it a huge focus of my personal life.  Maybe I’ll make a connection here or there.  But nothing substantial.

And yet today, a simple tweet seemed to strike a chord with people.

All day long Occupy Seattle mayhem shut down streets downtown.  People couldn’t get home from work.  Rogue anarchists broke windows.  Children couldn’t be picked up from school.  Store clerks feared for their safety.  Middle class parents – and their bosses – had to figure out what was best for their kids, their businesses and their co-workers.

I was unaffected by the chaos despite being right around the corner from it.  I took my wife home from her surgery but thought to myself, “Thank God this mayhem didn’t affect us getting to the hospital, or home from it.” I tried to rid my mind of thoughts of how angry I would be if I was stuck in traffic due to a protest, while my wife sat groggily in pain in the passenger seat of our car.

I scanned the Twitter stream and noticed that people who supported OWS had lost patience with OccupySeattle.  OccupySeattle wasn’t about a revolution anymore.  What started with good intentions but no real purpose, had transformed into an incubator for people with negative intentions and directed purpose. The movement had created a dark side, or at least allowed the dark side to breed.

And so I said:

Dear #OccupySeattle. The 99% has gotten together & decided we need better representation. Thx for the effort.  Good luck w/ future endeavors.”

It was exactly 140 characters.  My point was pretty clear.  Whatever goodwill the original Occupy movement had generated had been pretty much decimated here in Seattle.  The most liberal town in America was saying, “WTF are you guys doing? You are totally destroying this.”

Meanwhile,  my most nagging thought as I hit “Tweet this” was whether I should be using “has” or “have” for the verb.  I was out of characters, so I went with the former. It was a quick line, and after I sent it, I had all but forgotten about it.

A few hours later, it’s become the most retweeted thing I’ve ever sent out. For the first time ever, I started trending in Seattle.  People we retweeting this because they agreed with the sentiment.  And yet two tweets back at me stand out:

To the 1st repsonse I counter, “I agree. To the normal everyday 99%, the rogue hooligans have nothing to do with OWS.  However, Occupy Seattle has little to do with OWS as well.  Somehow OccupySeattle has developed an identity of its own, and not in a good way.”

The 2nd response made me realize I had struck a nerve with some folks.  I run a small business, invest in a startup and teach at a University.  I enjoy creating commerce and inspiring others to do the same.  More commerce means more transactions.  More transactions means more jobs.  More jobs means more wealth for everyone.  But to this person, I was simply “snarky.”  Trying to build small businesses and encouraging entrepreneurship isn’t enough. I’m evil because I don’t want to join or represent a revolution with no goal or purpose.

It will be interesting to see if this tweet fades away into the night as May Day passes.  Maybe more and more people will agree with the sentiment and retweet it.  Or, will we see more of the negative side of #OccupySeattle come out tomorrow.   Either way, it’s a great social media lesson in progress.

The Magic of Saying Nothing

January 13, 2012 /

Sometimes, you generate interest by simply not saying anything.  All it takes is one person to be excited about the unknown, and that excitement can spread.

I don’t know anything about Wendr.  In fact, here’s everything I know:

That’s my old friend from New Orleans, Marc Calamia, seeming to be excited about Wendr.  I clicked through and landed here:

 

They’ve told me nothing.  No reason for me to join.  But also, no reason for me not to.  So naturally, I signed up.

Sometimes we just want there to be more cool things, and we’re willing to give up an email address to hear about them.  Moral: Don’t underestimate the fact that people want to like things.

 

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