Andy Boyer

Blog

  • The Gas Man, Radio and the State of Sports and Media

    No, we won’t get to cover everything listed in that lofty title.

    But I want to comment briefly on the news a few weeks ago that the Gas Man, Mike Gastineau, left 950 KJR-AM after something like 21 years in Seattle.  The Gas Man goes waaaaaaaayyyy back – all the way to the days of the Babe, the Groz, Wheels, New York Vinny and Michael Knight in the Morning.

    Gas Man was a staple of my drive home diet for 15 years or so.  I think he provided some of the most compelling sports interviews (except for the lame John Feinstein infomericals each week. “Oh really John, you published a new book 4  months ago? Tell us more!”)

    So why did Gas Man have to leave?

    Quite simply, if you like the Gas Man, blame the Man Man for forcing his exit.

    Radio is dying.  A 3rd sports radio station is coming to replace AM 1090 now that the election is over.  And the Disney / ESPN money that got dropped into KIRO 710 basically has turned KJR into a 2nd fiddle.

    Over at KJR, the big checks need to turn into small checks.  And thus the cost of hosting content on drive time from 3-7pm went from Gas Man’s salary to Elise’s hourly wage.

    I’m sure Gas Man could have taken a pay cut to stay.  But who wants to do that? By the same token, Clear Channel could take a loss on a show to keep premier talent.  So blame them for treating radio like a Google AdWords buy, looking for the best CPC.

    So my meandering point is, thanks Gas Man for keeping me entertained – FOR FREE – for the last 15-20 years.  I hope however this radio thing shakes out, we figure out how to keep talented people on the air.

  • Unbalanced Schedule Could Play Huge Role in Pac-12 South

    This may sound a little like sour grapes, but it’s not.  This is n’t a complaint, merely an observation.

    Thanks to USC’s fall from dominance, the Pac-12 South is a very competitive race this year.  You have two distinctly bad teams in Utah and Colorado, then 4 teams with a legitimate shot to play in the Pac-12 championship game – USC, UCLA, ASU and Arizona.  So lets say they all sweep Utah and Colorado and everyone beats each other a couple of times in their other 3 games.  That puts everyone one game within each other in the division games, and causes the 4 games versus the North to be the deciding factor.

    Here’s where the unbalanced schedule plays a huge role.  Up in the North, you also have 2 bad football programs, in WSU and Cal.  But you have 2 teams who have spent time in the top 25 (Stanford and UW), one who has spent time in the top 10 (OSU) and 1 who is a National Championship contender (Oregon).  The 4 teams you draw out of this group of 6 are hugely important.

    So let’s look at the Pac 12 South teams contending for the title, and who they drew from the North:

    Arizona: Oregon, OSU, Stanford, Washington
    ASU: Cal, Oregon, OSU, WSU
    UCLA: Cal, OSU, Stanford, WSU
    USC: Cal, Oregon, Stanford, Washington

    If you are a UCLA fan, you have to be excited that the Bruins are the only ones who don’t face Oregon.  That’s 1 loss everyone else is getting that you won’t have. Not only do you miss Oregon, you GOT both WSU and Cal. So that’s 2 wins you should have gotten (but didn’t).

    ASU probably netted out 2nd best.  They get the Oregon loss, but they skip OSU and Washington.  They should get at least 2 wins in the mix from WSU and Cal.

    USC got a fairly tough road.  They have to face Oregon, Stanford and Washington – all tough games, with only one respite – Cal.

    Meanwhile, it’s the Arizona Wildcats who had to run the whole North Gauntlet, and they paid the price, finishing 1-3 against their Northern foes.

    It’s a quandary every 12 team conference faces, so this isn’t sour grapes on my part.  But here in Pac 10 country, we didn’t have this problem in past years.  When you have 1 team that is an outlier for being uber talented, and a couple teams as outliers as under talented, it really makes for a giant wild card.

  • Where are all the Blog Posts?

    So I’m getting this question a lot.

    “I thought you were some sort of social media guy. In fact, I thought you were part of a start-up that helps bloggers. What’s with your blog with no updates?”

    Excellent question. Easy answers.

    There are a few different places where I’m publishing these days.

    • For thoughts on start-ups and content marketing, I suggest you check out my posts over on the Relaborate blog.
    • For some coomentary on social media and marketing, you can check out my occasional posts on the Social3i blog.
    • For great insight to start-up marketing, I urge you to read the great content being produced by the UW MBA students in the Entrepreneurial Marketing class I teach.  They’re producing some great stuff on the blog there.

    Sadly, AndyBoyer.com falls 4th on the list.  We’ll try to get some content up here, but feel free to check out the other sites as well.

  • Jack Dorsey on User Narratives

    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

    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

    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.)

  • Recapping Grow Conference 2012 (#GrowConf)

    I love Vancouver. I think if you took the best things about Chicago and mixed them in with the best things from Seattle, then added in a touch of London for fun, you would end up with Vancouver. So, this report from Grow Conference 2012 is going to be tainted. It’s a great show, and if you read this blog, you are probably in the target market. So, I’ll try to limit it to the top 5 or 6 things I picked up there:

    – Oh Canada! The country has a program where if you invest in a Canadian based startup, you can receive up to 50% of that investment back in tax credits.
    – Oh Canada, part deux. There are a wealth of developers up here. Studies have found the AVERAGE Vancouver developer is stronger than the AVERAGE Silicon Valley dev. Now, they freely admit the TOP developers are in the Bay, but if you need competence, you can find it. Supply outweighs demand, so a decent dev comes in at $60-80k.
    – The Canadian Angel scene is funny, because there’s a lot of money, but most of it was NOT made in tech. Tons of money in Calgary made by people in the oil and gas industry. Tons of money in Vancouver from the real estate industry. So lots of money sitting on the sidelines, bu the holders of that money don’t necessarily know how to invest in tech.
    – I can’t explain exactly what made the Grow Conference more friendly than just about any other conference I’ve attended. There was pretty much no one that I talked to that I didn’t want to talk to. People were outgoing, lively and fun. It was probably the nicest – and maybe the smartest – mix of people I’ve attended a conference with.
    – BTW, the train from Seattle to Vancouver is great. It’s about an hour longer than it should be, but a pretty easy way to make the trip and still be productive. Amazing views.
    – From this point forward, I have a giant section of notes that I am keeping more private. Let your imagination wander. Email me if you want details.

    Now if you want a play by play of all the speakers on Thursday, I suggest you head over the TechVibes Live Blog. It is a much better recap than what I could pull together for you.

    If you get a chance, here are some companies I hope you will check out. I knew these guys before, but talking with their exec teams at lengths made me like them even more.
    – Liquid Planner
    – OfferUp
    – 9Slides
    – Freak’N Genius

    Thanks to the folks at Geekwire for convincing me to go. Time well spent.

    Pics to come.

  • Perfection

    20 years from now, anyone who is a Mariners fan will remember how they watched Felix Hernandez dispatch the final 3 Tampa Bay Rays to pitch the 1st perfect game in team history. This video from the Jackson General, the Mariners AA team, is tough to beat.

  • A Quick Recap of Startup Riot Seattle

    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?

     

  • Photos from Ichiro’s 1st Game as a Yankee

    Later tonight or tomorrow, I’ll get around to editing some of the notes I wrote from the game.  Here are some pics in the meantime.  Very surreal.