MORE Twitter Spam - From ME & U!

I recently posted about a *NEW* type of Twitter spam that will be a problem going forward (see my previous post) .  This post is about an altogether DIFFERENT type of Twitter spam, and one you, me and especially Brands need to be aware of.

If you know my background, I am all about making products, and campaigns viral.  But there is a proper way to do this, and a SPAMMY way.  The devil is all about the details.

If you are part of the Twitterverse, than you already are likely familiar with needing to share your Twitter credentials with third party applications in order for them to function.  Most of the time, this is safe.  Some of these third party applications, in an attempt for them to become more viral are Tweeting on your behalf.  One example is www.wefollow.com  WeFollow is a simple directory of people who Tweet, that you can add yourself to.  After adding yourself to WeFollow they REQUIRE that you Tweet to your followers that you have added yourself.  I would prefer that they allow you to Opt-out from this, however at least they make it clear that you will be tweeting a message.  So it is my (your) choice in the end, if you want to stop the process in order not to send out their viral Tweet.

A few days ago, I had the misfortune of entering a contest for a Hyatt Hotel in Chicago.  They had hired a third party application to run their contest, "Twitter-Contest.com".  Twitter-Contest did NOT make it clear to me that they were going to Tweet on my behalf.  WORSE, and this makes me furious, They continued to Tweet their message to MY follows, using MY credentials every two hours, non-stop.  To stop this, I was forced to change my Twitter  password, so their spam app. could no longer Tweet their spam using my Twitter ID.

Spam apps. like Twitter-Contest.com RUIN it for the apps. (majority) that do NOT abuse using your Twitter credentials.  As more and more third party Twitter developers make an attempt to be viral, be VERY careful about this *new Twitter spam*.

You can follow and discuss this with me on Twitter, I am @A_F

Twitter SPAM - It's coming

First you need to know, I am not picking on Twitter - nor am I singling them out. If you have distribution - email,IM,Social Network - ANYWHERE there is a mass audience you can be certain the spammers will get there. Now I have been threatening to do a post on how Twitter is all about the "Soft Sell" , and this STILL is not that. But this is how they will spam you, and why it is a threat to Twitter.

As an experiment, to prove a point - I threw out a bunch of random Tweets, with Keywords that I thought might be bait for opportunists.

[NOTE I had intended to upload a Photo to post HERE showing my random Tweets - but got a message from Google that I had exceeded my limit <---guess Google is doing belt tightening]

Bingo! Within 5 minutes of my Tweets I was followed by no less than 5 new follows - all having bios and links to websites that pertained to my different keywords.

While this is not a big deal now, Twitter WILL, no MUST address this and cut it off before it hits. We know that within the next few months, the same coders who sold spam it yourself programs in the 90's - will write programs that automate the process of spam-following. Then expect to see HUNDREDS of new follows a day - all trying to sell you something.

How do you think Twitter should address this? Agree? Disagree, have ideas? Please let me know - I am @A_F on Twitter

SMALL BIZ - U have the MOST to gain from Twitter

I am certain I wasn't the 1st to discover Twitter, but if you do a search on this blog for "Twitter" I certainly think I was one of the 1st to highlight how it would/could be used. What does surprise me though is that small biz has thus far been so slow to adopt.

Small business - Twitter offers you a tremendous opportunity. Here is how I recommend you use it (everyone can use it differently, the following is only ONE suggestion...I realize not everyone shares my views).

1) If you are a brand (ie a restaurant or retailer), I personally believe (like) your logo to be your avatar (not a picture of you personally).

2) For your Twitter name (not to be confused with Twitter ID), I like it when it is a 'human' name, but perhaps associated with a brand. Examples are Phil from Cisco. If you are a restaurant, perhaps your name might be John the Chef.

3) I personally do not like when a brand uses Twitter to only broadcast their specials, and news. It is not only OK for some of your Tweets to be conversing about things NOT at all related to your business. Want to tell me you walked your dog this morning? That's not only ok, it is recommended.

4) If you're a local business, there are ways to build a local following. When I recently moved to Phoenix, from New York, I used lots of great tools/websites to discover and follow people local to me.

5) Have fun in your tweets! People love to see your human side. If you're able to poke fun at yourself once in a while, that's a bonus. No one makes more fun of me, then me!

6) LISTEN - There are many tools that make it very easy to 'mine' Twitter for a potential new customer. As a real life example, I once Tweeted that I had a meal at Tarbels (a Phoenix restaurant that locals rave about), and did not enjoy it at all. It was not long after that I received a Tweet from the owner of another (competing) restaurant. This other restaurateur did a few things that made me want to visit. First, they defended Tarbels, indicated they knew Tarbels owner personally, and that my bad meal muse have been a fluke. Then they GENTLY (Twitter is all about the soft sell, but that's a future post by itself), suggested I might like their steak Au jus (I forgot the actual meal they recommended).

7) Once you have built your following (you should always be looking to build it continuously), consider having contests. The devil is in the details, but I like one's that add a charitable component. Don't make it to difficult, but suggest a few simple components to qualify;
1) They need to follow you
2) They need to RT a message (i.e Follow @RAYPIZZA RT - I love Rays Pizza - To win free Pizza for a month).

8) Hold Tweetups. This works best for a bar or restaurant, but if you're creative ANY business can do this. A Tweetup is telling people there will be a joining of other local Tweeple at a certain venue, on a future date. Consider offering SOMETHING to those who attend the Tweetup (i.e. 1st 10 people who show up get a free... or ALL who attend will get 25% off ...etc).

Please tell me YOUR story of how you use Twitter in your business. If you do not own a business, please tell me of your experience with a business that you follow.

BTW if You are new to Twitter, or have not yet read - This is a MUST READ:

Twitter Ten Commandments:

You can talk to me here on Twitter.

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Twitter - Congratulations on your STARS (Here's Why!)

There is a lot of *noise* on Twitter lately with Ashton Kutcher hitting the 1,000,000 follows. Some people like it, some do not - most don't care.

But when you have the rockstars on Twitter (Kutcher, Oprah , Ellen Degenerous , SnoopDog , John Mayer, etc) and the follower counts are in the six-seven figure ranges you get something else. Stellar demographics from the sociosphere!. As just an example in it's simplest form, let's assume that I am an agency that will be launching an upcoming Rap Star, and his newest single. I will easily be able to data mine the social networks for not only 'mentions' of like artists, and other profiling - but sociographics that also include information like who I follow. I know this is only one more new piece of information, but in it's entirety, we finally have enough to create intelligent algorithms.

As I have alluded to in an earlier post (Facebook - Google's real competition), Social Networks will soon start to realize their true inerrant value. If you look underneath the hood at Twitter and Facebook, there's "Gold in them thar hills!".

Dude where's my Twitter?

OK - I have to admit that as someone who has been tweeting for a year, I was not threatened by Ashton Kutchers recent challenge (Calling out CNN that he would be the 1st to achieve 1,000,000 followers on Twitter). After all, I (we) can limit all the 'noise' by simply following who we want... If I want nothing to do with Ashton, I simply don't follow right? WRONG...

I am learning a few things that trouble me. First, I am hearing from MANY Tweeple that once you follow Ashton (as well as CNN), you can NOT unfollow. I am certain that Twitter will blame this on a bug, but come on! Wake up and smell the roses. @EV has a big announcement coming tomorrow... Anyone not yet realize yet that it is their first user to break the 1 million follower - and that this will not be broadcast on OPRAH?

It bothers me that we (The ORIGINAL TWEEPLE) have followed REAL people... yes, even celebs like @the_real_shaq who "@" you back - have a conversation, follow you, and are REAL. Now, all of a sudden with "Twitter goes to Hollywood" we are going to start seeing all these false celebs...many who have hired ghost writers, and the ones who ARE real...simply using Twitter as their tool to spam their fans.

The reason it bothers me, is that I am already experiencing a sea-change in the 'spamminess' of followers lately. EVERYONE has something to sell! I guess it is just the maturation of Twitter, but come on @EV do you have to be in bed with the whole scheme?

You can follow me (if your not a fraud) at Twitter, HERE

Twitter Sponsor Space confirmed

If you blink - You might miss it:



Acknowledged by @Twitter as a "bug" *WINK* .... But certainly points to a future revenue stream - at least in their thoughts

You can follow me on Twitter here

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To Mark or not to Mark....

CNBC would have you believe that investors want to eliminate the FASB accounting rule - 'Mark to Market'. This would allow our insolvent banking system to not have to raise additional capital - at a prohibitive / dilutive stock price - where the only likely investor to have that much cash would be the government ( totally socialiing our banking system). That thinking is, and would be wrong.

I myself, have been calling for FASB to "relax" mark to market rules since last year. Do not mistake relaxing mark to market with eliminating it. The market needs two things;

1) They want clarity, and accountability (mark to market is supposed to have provided this in theory).

2) They want marks that reflect HOW a company is holding an asset on their books (if they are holding an asset to maturity, and that asset is still paying as scheduled, it should not need to be markeded to market).

In reality, what the market wants (and what I hope we get from FASB) is both. We do it now with GAAP vs non-GAAP earnings... Think about it - Gaap vs non-Gaap allows us to view earnings per share for what they REALLY are (diluted via potential stock option conversions vs earnings without all those additional shares).

So FASB please give us what we want (and need);

1) Require banks to post a number on their Q's that reflect the CURRENT market for their assets - but only for the purpose of "clarity and honesty". From a capital requirement, let them mark it to a realistic date that they expect to hold that asset.

What do you think they should do? Let's discuss it on Twitter.

Banks! Misunderstood STEAL of the CENTURY

I first blogged about why if you did not believe in Armageddon you MUST be in bank stocks back in late November of last year (right when the XLF bank ETF bottomed that year in the mid 9's). Checking my stocktwits feed, you would read that I was at that time "nibbling in" using the XLF as my proxy for the banking sector.

Fast forward toa few weeks back, and you would see that I became VERY aggressive on the secotr, and I Stocktwit'ed that I was now in FAS (FAS is a Direxion "3X" levered ETF), a VERY agressive bet for anyone.




I really DID put my money where my mouth is (Pic below is an actual cut and paste of my Etrade account showing my FAS Position which I bought in the 2's and still own).



NOTE: I am NEVER a Pig (Bulls and Bears make money...Pigs get slaughtered) - But even being up 150% in my FAS position Banks are still CHEAP!

This is the perfect storm for banks. Unless you're from Mars, you HATE banks. No one understands banks. Last year, banks lost BILLIONS (each). So why buy banks? Well the first reason is the same one I reasoned back at the end of last year, and still maintain... Without Banks there IS no economy, without banks there IS no stock market, and without banks, there is ONLY Armegeddon. Think about this for a moment...No matter what you do either as a consumer, or as a business the banks have their hand in your pocket every step of the way.

Reason #2 - All those BILLIONS of dollars in write downs last year? ... Most will be reversed. Now that FASB/SEC is rethinking a more reasonable method for banks to Mark then Mark to Market, MOST of the previous write downs will materialize in the next few years as "write ups".

Reason #3 - Geithner "et al" have outlined a plan to get all of those toxic assets off the books of banks. Having traded markets professionally for 15 years, I believe this is tantamont to "sell on news" ... in other words, banks will rally at least all the way up till they actually rid themselves of these toxins.

Reason #4 - Forget the 10-20% of toxic bank assets and focus on the 80-90% of the GOOD ones... THINK for a moment... rats have NEVER been lower. Think you will not refi your existing mortgage, or loan? This is REAL $$$$ right in the bank's pockets!

Reason #5 - The Gov't has already spent over a TRILLION dollars, and will be spending TRILLIONS more... What sector (*hint it's investment banking) do you think will have it's hand deep into this stimulas?

Reason #6 - Expectations, think about it everyone is tuned to believe the banks will never ever earn another dime. This thinking could not be farther from the truth.

Reason #7 - Fatter then Oprah, One would think that the banks represented the epidimy of 'layoffs' but go into any bank branch and you will see that there are at least 3 customer servive reps available for every banking customer in line (what line?)! There is TREMENDOUS headcount that still will and can be cut at banks.

Reason #8 - Take reason #7 one step further...do we really need our bank to have a branch on every corner?? Expect to see many banks close many branches over the next few years (we still have over 85k + banks in the US, and we likely need not even half that number).

Reason #9 - Now that the market is closer to showing that a likely bottom has been put in, expect to see an uptick in corporate M&A's - Investment banking fees anyone?

Reason #10 - DON'T FIGHT THE FED!!! I know this last one is cliche, but really think about it... Money has never been cheaper, and the fed will continue to do everything in it's power to reflate... No industry benifits more from cheap money than the banking sector.

So does this mean straight up? No, obviously after I have made 150% being long FAS (Banks up an average 50%) a pullback would be expected. A good entry point now might be to start looking (entering) from a 50% replacement of today's move...perhaps low 9's for XLF or 7ish for aggresive FAS traders ( Look at the bigger picture though, and there is NO other asset class poised to move higher (percentage wise) from here than the banks. If I am wrong and the banks make a new low? ... God help us all.

Think I am off my Ghord? No Clue? Bring it...Leave YOUR comment or shoutout to me on Twitter:

@A_F

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Twitter (and Twitter Businesses) BE VERY AFRAID!

I was shocked to read about a Harvard Economist's study recently (Article is actually a hoax but read on - ). The study implies that the downturn in the economy is DIRECTLY correlated to a drop in productivity and tied directly to increased use of Twitter by people in the workforce.

While I completely laugh at this notion, if you have a vested financial interest in Twitter (either as an investor in Twitter, or perhaps you have/or are building a business based on the Twitter API), you need to know the history of Pointcast.

I first saw (used) Pointcast in 1996 and was blown away by it (as were most everyone else). Pointcast was a screensaver that "broadcast" news of interest to you into the screensaver. In 1997 Pointcast was all the rage. It's ubiquotous popularity reminded me of exactly the popularity and attention that Twitter is recieving now. Pointcast was gaining in numbers and popularity so quickly in fact that New Corp. very quickly made an unheard of (at the time) offer at that time of almost a half billion dollars to acquire Pointcast.

Fast forward a scant 2 months latter, and Pointcast is making headlines everywhere. Not because the service it offers is so cool - but because of all the corporate bandwidth (at the time bandwidth was both expensive and precious) the application was using. One by one until there was a groundswell, network admins. started blocking access to Pointcast. In short order the majority of corporate America had blocked access, and usage fell off a cliff. News Corp subsequently withdrew their offer, and Pointcast got sold on the cheap...going out on a wimper.

So for those whose financial lives depend on the Twittersphere...be aware, and never let go the lessons of history.

(BTW - I do not think Twitter and other social networks will be banned behind the firewall - but one should always be aware of risks that come out of nowhere)

Let me know what YOU think - You can find me on Twitter here.

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Twitter - it's NOT "What you are doing?"

I have said in much earlier posts that Twitter needs to do a better job of explaining themselves better to new users. I recently saw a stat that as many as 68% who sign up (or visit) Twitter never come back. And recently as this morning I saw an CNN anchor poking fun (she didn't understand WHY anyone would want to know that you just choked or coughed while having lunch).

Twitter at some point in the past few months must have read one of my older blog posts - and subsequently, they posted a video on their home page to explain how Twitter works for new
users.



.


Though this is a good first effort, they should realize that the TRUE value of Twitter is not always asking or answering "What are you doing?". While anyone is certainly free to use Twitter how they want - I can not help but think that for me the better Q&A is "What do I find interesting" or "What do other people in my 'trust' network find interesting?"




There is a key difference between the two, and though I welcome both, I tend to 'filter' out the noise. Once you build your Twitter network you will find that it becomes an invaluable source and wealth of information.

Using my own network as an example of this - I follow other people within my range of interests (Entrepreneurs , Marketing , Venture Capital , and Phoenix Arizona (since I now live here). How has Twitter helped me?

Using Twitter, I immediately know of almost every industry, or conference event. When I can not attend them, people I follow usually do - and do a fantastic job of "micro-casting" the event. It is almost as good as being there.

Using Twitter, I actually feel like I know people here in Phoenix. I have only attended a few network events - but there are MANY TWEETUPS and if you ever get the opportunity to attend, you will likely find as I have that 'face to face' the same people you have been tweeting with are just like friends you might have made using other methods in the past (i.e. childhood friends,school friends,etc).

Brands on Twitter are only beginning to scratch the surface of how they can use Twitter. If formally they marketed by sending out a press release - their new press release will be TWO WAY, VIRAL, and interactive.

Small business likely has the largest opportunity of all to leverage Twitter - and this will be the focus of my next post... You can be *alerted* when I blog next by following me on Twitter

Tricks to finding employment

Everyone who is, or has looked for a job (especially in this tuff economy) already knows job sites ... i.e. craigslist , Hotjobs , Monster , Careerbuilders , etc (Indeed is the best).

If Twitter is one of the tools you are using, you likely already know some of the key players there i.e. - @employerbrander @jobangels @jobshouts @ @jobhuntorg @jobsnob etc.

So These three tips will hopefully be an "extra" that you might not have thought of in your job search.

Tip ONE:

A picture really does say a thousand words, and most recruiters and HR people now days will LOOK at your online profiles - even if they request a resume. Consider spending a few dollars to have head shots taken professionally. If you can not afford professional head shots you at least need to make certain that in one of your online profiles (i.e. LinkedIN or Twitter) you look not only well groomed and professional but MOST importantly SMILE. I see a lot of online profile pictures that even though the intent might have been to look serious and professional - appeared to look "glum". NO ONE wants to hire a downer...even if you're feeling down about your employment situation make CERTAIN YOU DO NOT SHOW IT!

Tip TWO:

The early bird gets the worm. Here is a clever method to locate businesses that WILL be hiring BEFORE THEY EVEN POST THE POSITION!! Every city should have a business paper, or magazine (Here in Phoenix Arizona they have "Arizona Business") with all the listings of new business incarcerations as well as newly leased commercial space. [ I am certain there must be online services that provide this-if you know of any PLEASE leave the link in my comments section] These listings provide an excellent source of both newly forming businesses and businesses that are opening up new locations - or perhaps expanding. This will usually give you a multi-month lead time over other job seekers. Once you "filter" which businesses might be relevant to your experience put it to work using the next tip.

Tip THREE:

I am a hunter by nature (having worked as a stock broker for 15 years) and now with the advent of the Internet you have NO EXCUSE for not being able to locate a company insider. When all else fails try out Jigsaw (An online repository of business cards that you can search via location/title/company/etc) a "pay per business card" website.

Do not just hunt for "HR" people - but search within those companies for your peers as well. So as an example, if you are in sales - hunt down not only other sales persons - but the sales manager as well. Once you have located some goto guys - use the next tip.

Tip FOUR:

When I actively searched for a job, I would send out as many as 20 cover letters, resumes or introductions daily - ALL BY EMAIL. There is a better way. First thing you should do with those "goto guys" you earlier located is to search for them on the various social networks. LinkedIN is the best resource, however Twitter and Facebook can also work. LOOK and SEE if you have any common friends - after all NOTHING works better than being personally introduced when it comes to getting an interview.

Even if you do not find an "introducer", take note of their personal info (ie. there interests and hobbies) and see if you can find a commonality there. Once you have taken these steps consider the next (and last) tip.

Tip FIVE:

Remember earlier I mentioned I had sent out all my introductions and cover letters via email. That is ok, however please consider that for every position available there are likely HUNDREDS of others that are sending their resumes via email. Think about that...the odds are stacked against you right from the start. DO NOT BE AFRAID TO GET ON THE PHONE AND CALL THEM HUMAN TO HUMAN. I know that may sound strange, but many will appreciate that you made the extra effort to call. Especially if you are in a sales related position (many are) - they will appreciate that you are not afraid of the phone.

Good luck to all of you - I have been unemployed and it is not fun, and this time it is likely more difficult than ever. You will need to do EVERYTHING you can to get an edge.

PS - Don't forget to say "Hi" to me on Twitter.

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The WallStrip Edge - Book review

If Investors Business Daily's William O'neal (famous Momentum Investor) & Warren Buffet ("Buy what you know") had a bastard child - It would be Howard Lindzon.

In this blog post, the simplest of summaries, this is Howard Lindzon's secret to successful investing in his recently published book - The Wallstrip edge - Using Trends to Make Money- Find Them, Ride Them, and Get Off.

The Wallstrip Edge is only the second investment book I have ever read. I found it comforting that the one book that Howard Lindzon highlights in his book is that one investment book that I had read (I read it immediately upon receiving my Series 7 right before the crash of 1987). Reminiscenses of a Stock Operator The Jesse Livermore story penned back in the 1920's and also a MUST READ.

The Wallstrip Edge explains the how and why to;

1) Identify a trend that you are PERSONALLY familiar with (examples include Google,Apple,etc).

2) Wait till the underlying stock price makes an all time high - only THEN get on board.

3) Ignore valuation - (Howard makes an excellent and compelling commentary of why valuation does not and SHOULD not matter) and instead "ride the trend".

This is the formula Howard uses that enables him to find those rare winners that are able to move THOUSANDS of percent. The book goes on to explain his method for exiting a stock (gradually selling into the strength over time so as not to be a *pig*).

The only points in Howard Lindzon's book I did not personally agree with were his opinion that investors should not "short" stocks (downtrends are trends after all). I also do not share his view of not using technical analysis. But it is refreshing to learn that Howard Lindzon is part of a *new* breed of investors - not because of his investment philosophy but because of his real time transparency via Stocktwits. If you have been able to utilize Howard Lindzon & Soren Macbeth's excellent Stocktwits - you will see that the REAL Howard Lindzon trades both long and short. He also shows that his natural instincts for entering and exiting stocks is superb. This is something that can ONLY be learned from experience- It is an "art", not a science and it is here that Howard Lindzon shows that he is a true artist.


I highly recommend this book to anyone who has any vested interest in successful investing. Everything that Howard Lindzon explains in his book just makes sense.


Let me know what you thought of the book - "@" me on Twitter

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Open Letter to Twitter

Twitter will be the most successful NET company EVER. Let me say that again... Most successful ever. They will be the largest digital infrastructure (see an earlier post re Twitter is the Train Tracks of the 21st century) with the exception of the Internet itself.

I am writing this open letter because I believe that Twitter is successful in spite of itself. Management (IMO) has made some assumptions based on THEIR expectations - that are just wrong. When reading this, you might not agree, or you might agree with one point but not another. Regardless - I would LOVE to hear your comments or your Tweets either way.

This started when after following my 2000th person, and trying to follow #2001 I was unable to. There was no explanation...I just clicked on the follow button and nothing happened. This is fail #1...If you block at 2000 follows HEY at least send me to a screen telling me WHY I can not follow. For a week I was emptying my cache, reinstalling browsers, etc wondering why clicking the button did not work.

Fail #2 - Once I realized this was an intentional policy, I just assumed this was in some way to stop spammer accounts. I also assumed that whatever their "algorithm" for this was just flawed, and would improve over time. You should note, that up until last week my follow to follower ratio was around 1000/1500. Not a profile of a spammer. I also note that my perception (whether or not you agree) of accounts where there is a 1/10 follow/follower relationship is that the person has that "rock star" image of themselves and that they Tweet mostly to feed their ego...not for me, but I guess that works for others.

Me? I like to follow who I want. It is a RARE occasion when I would not follow someone back immediately (If after following I did not find benefit, I would simply unfollow). One of the best parts of Twitter (up till now) is that I can control WHO and WHO I DON'T want to follow. <--- This to me is the BEAUTY of Twitter, and surprisingly (I was FLOORED) that Twitter management doesn't get this! This was my email to @EV:

"...I do MANY charitable things on Twitter, as recently as this past week via Twestival – and next week I am bringing a campaign live on twitter (I am doing this free) representing a 12 year old blind boy who will be climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. You have no bigger fan who RT's and Tweets all the good stuff. Witness my latest blog post "10 Commandments of Twitter" which must have been good because it has been RT'd like crazy...OK so this is what I need from you. I have a 2000/1500 follow to follower ratio …I am OBVIOUSLY not a spammer …please grandfather me in until you offer it as Freemium. Bad to just lock me up..."

@EV 's Reply:

"...We don't remove that for anyone anymore. It sounds like you want to follow more people to get attention for your account. The follow limit is there exactly to restrict that kind of behavior. People do not appreciate being followed for that reason. Sorry. ..."

Ev.

WTF? FAIL #3 is who cares WHY I want to follow someone? Twitter has thrived on being OPEN - Yet you dare to DICTATE what/who/why people choose to follow someone? Since when does Twitter management speak on the behalf of their Tweeters? The beauty of Twitter is that if I found someone followed me just to "get attention for their account" AND I decided that I did not like that - I have MY OWN choice to simple unfollow that person.

FAIL #4 Twitter is not a governemnt - There is no and SHOULD NOT be a "lower class" "middle class" and "upper class" So please explain to me why MANY on Twitter aka the "Twitteratti" follow 10's of thousands i.e. jowyang , chrisbrogan,etc <---(Disclaimer they have done nothing wrong I only mention them because they are in my network and I am aware of how many they follow ).

For any of you who want to know why I want to follow more than 2000 you should note how I (everyone of us is differant) use Twitter:

1) I originally followed anyone I could find in the Social Media space ... This is an interest of mine, and also my proffession.

2) I also follow my personal friends and family...think of this as yet another group.

3) I recently found myself moving to Phoenix (where I knew nobody) from NYC - So I reached out via Twitter and followed everyone in Phoenix that I could. Had I not been able to do this, I likely would not have the new friends hear, nor proffesional oppertunities I have created via Twitter.

So I ask YOU to leave your comments here if you agree - more importantly if you think I am wrong. Most importantly if you DO agree, please Tweet @EV @Jack @biz and @Twitter:

"Let my Tweeple Go" #donttellmewhotofollow" - and PLEASE RT (if you agree)

I can't follow U back, but you r welcome to follow me @A_F

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Twitter 10 Commandments

I saw God the other day - he had just come down from the mountain (OK, so it was Camelback Mtn) and Tweeted to me in my sleep. He told me he had come to bring me the 10 Commandments of Twitter Here they are (in no particular order):

First Commandment



OK, for those who are Newbies on Twitter - you're forgiven, but only on day one. Twitter gives you a really ugly brown Twitter avatar by default. Change it, this goes a long way toward showing a "personality" behind a Tweet. I personally like real pictures of you however in some cases logos can work better for a brand.

Second Commandment



OK, the point of this one as I interpreted it is that you should never take yourself to seriously. It's ok to have typos on Twitter. It's ok to let your guard down and show emotions that you experience in real life. Let your Twitter network know the person behind the Tweets.

Third Commandment



Ya, ya I know some of you don't agree with me - but I follow very few people that have more than a 1 to 10 follow to followers ratio. One of my favorite aspects of Twitter is the engagement. If I can not have a TWO way conversation with you, your probably all about "you" anyway. Use an email list or blog instead.

Forth Commandment



When God shared this one with me, I think it was advise for a brand (be it personal or professional). It is very easy for people to "put you on the defensive". Even more so on a social network like Twitter. If someone tells you your brand (product) is crappy, or they experienced crappy service - LISTEN and learn. Although it is easy to just defend i.e. - "My product is not crappy, you must have just been having a bad day." Try asking them why, or what about their experience they found unsatisfactory.

Fifth Commandment



Ya I know, this sounds just like the fourth and Fifth commandment, but trust me it is not. This one is about how you interact with other's Tweets. If someone "@'s" you, reply. If someone you do not know Tweets about a topic you find of interest - join in the conversation. It does not matter that you know them or not - you'll likely find that you'll make a new friend.

Sixth Commandment



More than any other social network I know of, Twitter is FULL of charitable people. Lot of times Twitters are getting behind a cause. They use Twitter to either raise awareness, rally behind a cause or even raise money (Twestival is a great recent example). Not in a position to donate any money? Hey how long does it take to at least Re Tweet it to YOUR followers - perhaps they would want to donate.

Seventh Commandment



I took this one in vain for months! I signed up for a few services that would alert me when someone unfollowed me. Looking back it's like something I did when I was a little kid asking a girl on a date ("Oh ya, you don't want to go out with me? Well I think you are ugly!). Hey if you want to unfollow someone because they're no interesting, or offensive that's one thing. But think before you unfollow. If you followed them in the first place, it is likely because you found value in their tweets. Unfollowing them does nothing other than soothing a bruised ego.

Eight Commandant



OK this one is my favorite. Everyone want other people to Re-Tweet their Tweets. It is a could feeling to be popular, this is how you meet new people (who likely share your view or interest). The same way YOU like it so won't others. So Re-Tweet some of your favorite Tweeters.

Ninth Commandment



This one speaks for itself. After all, this is not some cult, and you are not some cult leader. It doesn't sound like you are really welcoming a new follow when you Tweet this - it just sounds dumb and somehow self serving...get over yourself.

Tenth Commandment



Everyone sells something on Twitter, whether you are supporting your brand, or a blog post,etc. You need to walk a fine line. It is very ok to promote something, just not all the time. Try mixing it up. Tell me about your kids or your dog. It's OK, I will be MORE likely to learn about your product or blog after I get to know you anyway.

Now before you forget these 10 commandments, start by practicing the 8th and please RT this blog post :-)

@A_F

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10 Years of Pain

Don't be a Chump!

It has been a very frustrating (not being as digitally connected as I would like) the past few months. I am only now back online (Thanks Cox Cable for a miserable experience getting Internet) due to my major life move (from New York City to Phoenix AZ). I am finally settled in enough though that I can start to blog again.

This post should serve as a wake up call to all you who might still be living under a rock. You need to know that I am not a pessimist (though you will find this post pessimistic in it's predictions). If anything, I am an optimist, and VERY bullish on my personal outlook. So before reading further make certain that you are aware - Everyone is in charge of their own destiny. We make our own fortunes in life.

I almost shed a tear with pride when I viewed just how many people piled in for Obama's inauguration. Another when I realized how great his popularity is outside of the USA. One gets a sense that his popularity is more of a metaphor with people - Obama = "Hope" & "Change".

Now this is not an attack on Obama (whom I personally like as much as any president), but more a realist's view of the world today. Economically speaking, the mess we now find ourselves in is the result of 40 + years of becoming a debtor society. 40 years of ANYTHING can not, and WILL not be unwound anytime soon. I do not care how many trillions of dollars you throw at the problem. So if your looking for Obama or the Trillions to rescue you (or the economy) you need to wake up and get real.

Think the stock market having declined over 40% is cheap? I did, but now am realizing that I too must have drank the "markets come back" Kool-Aid. We are in the 3rd inning of this debt-pression. You need to start thinking of the economy like a dying cancer patient on life support. The organs start to fail, one by one. The first economic organ to die was (is) residential real estate. Do NOT underestimate just how important of an organ this is. That past 40 years of debt was almost entirely based off of residential real estate. Now you have little or no equity in your home, so you stop consuming. Ya, I know you still need to eat. But many will "brand down" and what needs to be consumed will be commodity items that compete on price, not brand. When you stop consuming, these brands (the life-force of our GDP)lay people off. When you get laid off, not only can you not afford your mortgage, but you can not afford to pay your credit cards. When you can not shop with credit cards retailers go out of business. When the retailers go out of business the shopping malls go under. When the shopping malls go under a municipalities major tax base goes under. When the tax base goes under, the town/municipality is bankrupt. When the major towns (think NYC) go bankrupt, the states go under. When the states go under, the US is bankrupt. Lastly, when the US goes bankrupt, the world goes bankrupt.

...And so the economic ponzi begins.

I warned you that this post was going to be "gloomy-doomy" but I also mentioned that I am optimistic about my future. So while I do not think there is money to be made in the stock market (being a long term bull, or buying index/mutual funds)there is money to be made trading and/or being short.

Economically speaking,follow the money. If you worked for (and got laid off from) a company that made widgets, consider now working for a company that makes less expensive (or better ROI) widgets. If you sold stocks...consider now selling credit consulting services. If you sold real-estate, consider now selling refi's. Point here is that there will always be a growth area, and you need to identify now what those growth areas will be over the next ten years.

Health care, and more importantly HealthTech will be a place to be over the next 10 years. "Green" companies will be a place to be over the next 10 years. Companies that replace old infrastructure with "green" infrastructure will be hot (unlike green companies that make solar for example - think here like an Intel that will ultimately enjoy their next major sales up cycle by providing chips that consume way less power).

So in summary, even though we as a society are fucked - you don't have to be. Just follow the right road, and you will find your own prosperity. Good luck to everyone.

Andy

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The Great Debtpression

This blog is normally reserved strictly for my business strategy and marketing ideas for startups,entrepreneurs and VC's. I think that what the government is doing right now however (destroying capitalism as we know it) is horribly flawed, and important enough that I want to share my ideas on what they need to do now!

I originally alluded to my idea on Stocktwits (Created by Soren Macbeth and Howard Lindzon). Since all the bigwigs in Government, On Wall St, and at the Fed read Stocktwits, I am certain they saw my idea earlier. For those not familiar, Stocktwits is the first vertical on Twitter to be wrapped up and aggregated. It allows you to view and share ideas, and investment strategy along with some of the smartest investors out there. If you have not seen or tried Stocktwits yet, I suggest you do. Even if you do not have an interest in stocks, it should give you entrepreneurial types ideas on just what you can do on the Twitter platform, and what you can build for just a few pennies.





OK now to the meat of this post. See the graph above? What you are looking at is the DJI during the 1929 Crash and subsequent "Great Depression" overlayed with a graph of the NASDAQ starting from the 90's bubble and subsequently the current "Great Deptpression".

The experts will all point to how it is much different today, because we have learned from out lessons of the past (after the 1929 crash government tightened up credit). I say BULLSHIT, it is exactly the same, and the overlayed charts echo that sentiment.

While the Government IS doing things differently in reacting to this crisis, it is still doing it wrong. The Fed is pumping BILLIONS of liquidity into the markets. The Fed is (will) spend over (at least) one TRILLION dollars on recapitalizing the banking system before this is all said and done. This is KEY to the failure. Even in the face of all this money, we are watching the Banking system as we know it fall into the abyss one by one. While I recognize that the over 80,000 banks in the US is too many - Letting them all fail in this manner is just bad for everyone.

Without our banking infrastructure, there can be no economy. Let me state that again NO BANKS = SOUP KITCHENS AND FOOD LINES!

The reason that TARP and the recapitalization (socialazation) of our banking system is a failure is a result of their recent capital structures. Banks have (had) been leveraged and allowed to loan against there asset base way in excess of their capital base. That worked fine until the FASB changed the rules and instituted "Mark to Market", and underlying assets plummeted in value "the perfect storm".

For those who might not know, this is how it works. Banks are required to have a certain percentage of assets in relation to the amount of money they loan. Mark to Market requires a bank to carry those assets on their books at their CURRENT value. For the purpose of this post, look at a typical asset as someone's house. Let's assume that the bank made a loan for someone to buy this home a few years ago, and lent $500,000. Now, that same home is only worth $400,000. So that $500k asset on the bank's books needs to now be written down to "market value" - or $400k. As banks write down all of those underlying assets to reflect the current downturn in the housing market - they fall below capital requirements and technically become insolvent.

On top of the dozens of large banks that have already failed as a result, Citibank (once the worlds largest bank) is trading as a pennie stock ($3 per share). Though a Citibank failure by itself will not bring down the entire banking system, it is just the latest one to do so. The stock market as a result can and will do NOTHING but go down, as long as the ailing financials keep failing.

The government needs to immediately STOP the TARP and bailout. Even if this was effective (it is not), they are simply printing more money = Dangerous implications for the value of our currency (US Dollar), and the inflationary pressure that will ultimately result.

What the government can and SHOULD do is change/remove the "Mark to Market" rule that is currently in place. When I pose this idea to friends, they all suggest that somehow this is simply pushing the problem out to the future. To which I say RUBBISH!

Let's revisit our earlier example of a bank that lent out on a $500k asset now worth only $400k. Yes, we have been in a housing bubble, and yes the values can decline even further but hey - What do you think that home will be worth at the maturity of the loan (30 years)? You would be hard pressed to find anyone who thought that it would not be worth AT LEAST $500k, if not more.

So Government get rid of Mark to Market, and let the banks Mark to Maturity. Any bank marking to maturity should subsequently be required to hold that underlying asset until either it is sold at par, or till it's maturity.

This action will allow banks to recapitalize organically, and without further socialising our banking system and most importantly without printing Trillions of new dollars in the process.

How would you fix the banking system? Please leave your comment.

Do you agree with the logic of my argument, if you do please consider DIGGING it.


You can follow and be followed on Twitter here.

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Send To Phone

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]">

STOP THE BAILOUT!!!!

Help stop the Great Debtpression! Tell Congress to stop pissing away our money!!

Here are 6 important suggestions for congress.


1) Let Gov't fund mortgages DIRECT, banks only service them. It should be Every one's right to own (afford) a home.

2) Let banks fund OTHER things ie- Solar in the home is affordable if amortized over 30 years = new revenue stream for banks

3) Give EVERYONE (not just troubled loans) a haircut on their mortgages. Average it out dutch auction style...so for example, if it is determined that banks need to write down 60% of loan value = 60% less owed on mortgage for every current homeowner

4) Reverse TARP, and bailout., and let the weak banks fail but not before removing "mark to market"...should always have been "mark to hold date" Which means, if a bank commits to holding a loan till maturity then it is "mark to maturity" = TRUE mark to market

5)Gov't going forward should also have an equity stake (kicker) for ANYTHING it funds ...this reduces the burden on our children. A little bit of socialism is NOT bad.

6) No money for automakers unless shareholders get wiped out first. Gov't money MUST be senior.

Leave YOUR comments what would you have Government do differently?

Do you agree with this post? Then please DIGG it and let's let congress know they are WRONG.

Want to debate this further, you can find me here on Twitter.

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Your VC 's Hidden Value

As someone who has worked with numerous startups, founded a few, and written many business plans I follow the VC community. Most that I have ever met, talked with or corresponded with have always remained behind closed doors. For some entrepreneurs these VC's are fine. For others though you need to look beyond the term sheet to find the hidden value some VC's can add.

While writing this post, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures comes to mind. He is the perfect example of how I define "hidden value". Fred is "out there". Recently named the #1 man in New York tech, He Tweets on Twitter (one of his Union Square investments). He uses Disqus (another Union Square Investment) for people to leave comments (and have an extended conversation) on his AVC blog. He tags all his blog posts with yet another Union Square Venture investment, Zemanta. I am certain he uses ALL of his venture portfolio in similar fashion.

Fred Wilson has become not only a showcase but an eco-system for his investments. His very popular AVC blog is read by approximately 120k people per month. As someone who is a frequent visitor to Fred's blog, I myself find myself using most of his portfolio's tools/services. I saw how effective, and useful they were for Fred...so why not for me?

If you have ever launched a startup, you know just how hard, and how important it is to attract your early-adopters. This is usually the costliest(Marketing) part of your launch. Having a VC (or any investor) who can add "FredWilson" value (likely 10's of thousands if not 100k users) has found the hidden value not written in any term sheet.

What value does your VC (or if you're a VC) add? Please leave YOUR comments. If you think others might learn from this post, please DIGG it.

You can have a chat with me here on Twitter.

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Mashups NEW Content is King

I (like many) always like to see the "Next big Thing" early. I believe that for Media (content producers) the next big thing will be Content Mashups.

We are already starting to see it *trickling* in. The New York Times recently introduced "Times People " allowing its readers to mashup the content of original New York Times articles. Want to write a book with others? Try a service like WeBooks which allows you to co-author books with others.

I believe that this trend is only in its infancy, and we will watch it unfold into mainstream media projects as well. We will work WITH Hollywood in determining how a movie unfolds. We (collaboratively) will write the script, they will produce it.

I have been working on writing a business plan called 9thTrack.com 9thTrack would allow any professional musician (or label) to submit their original songs. Their fans would then alter the songs to their liking (Want to remove a piano solo? Perhaps you want to add a harmonica or your cool guitar riff?). Once altered it would be sent to that bands "staging" area, where the best versions would then be vetted. Top vetted versions would then be made available for sale.

Now, instead of having the Internet only pirate their sales of CD's, they actually have NEW revenue streams.

EVERYTHING will be mashed up! If you are interested in Mashing up the 9thTrack business plan, feel free to reach out to me and we can collaborate on that too! Oh ya, people are already mashing up business plans too - GangPlankHQ.com

Please leave your comments on what you see as the next big thing in content, or if you just liked this post, please consider Digging it.

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Business Development for Startups

Business Development is not some role where you hire someone to sell ad space or whatever on for your startup. So HR people take note, I can not stress this enough. Your Director of Business Development job, or VP of Business Development job is NOT the same role as a Sales Job.

The role of a Director of Business Development , or Vice President of Business Development is a strategic role. Your Business Development executive needs to be able to accomplish these core objectives:

1) Identify the different channels for their business development activities.

For example, when I headed up Business Development for RoboForm my business development encompassed different strategic partners, and different business channels. There were distribution business development deals (Bundling RoboForm's Freemium software on Sandisks flashdrives as one example). Getting a paid search deal to include Yahoo's paid search results in RoboForm's toolbar is another - and importantly different business development channel. There were (and are for you) many different Business Development Channels.



2) Identify who the *Key* players are in these repspective business development channels.

3) Structure how to best approach the deal (what's in the deal for me, and what's in it for my partner <--- You MUST read THIS post on Negotiation if you not already).

4) Close the deal.

Now all of this is likely straight forward, so what is the point of this post on Business Development? The point is that Business Development and the role of your Business Development executive is MISSION CRITICAL to not only your business, but more importantly the business plan itself!

When you decide what features you want to have on your cool new Web 2.0 social network, or your new *wizbang* software - consider leaving some out! "Huh? WTF did he just suggest?!" Yup, leave it out. This might give you the added oppertunity to structure partnerships for the missing feature. By NOT building/adding this internally or organically you have just opened the door for a strategic partner to bring you new users, or more importantly a revenue stream!

I will offer one example of this just in case my (rambling) point is not clear. When I was doing Business Development for RoboForm (a browser toolbar password manager), I closed distribution deals with the majority of browser vendors (think IE,Maxthon,Firefox, Avant as examples).

Looking at Avant for this example, they did not have their own Password manager built in to the browser, and instead offered their users a Freemium version of RoboForm. This ultimatly provided Avant with a seven figure revenue stream. Considering that there are not many obvious ways to monetize a free product such as a browser this is not a tiny sum of money.

After I left RoboForm Avant subsequently built (and added to Avant) their own Password manager. Want to guess what happened to Avant's revenue stream once they built it themselves...?

On this blog I give away my intellectual property, but the cost is not free. If you liked or learned from this post, please leave YOUR comments. If you do not have anything to add but still found value, please Digg it, Stumble it or just Tweet about it.

So that I can follow and learn from you on , reach out to me on Twitter here. Lastly, apologies for all the "Business Development" type google juice :-)

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Brands on Twitter

"I'll take that coffee to go"... Why not take Twitter "to go"?

Twitter (in spite of itself) has started to attract some brands to it's micro-blogging service. Most of these brands are using it to interact with their customers in real time. They also (correctly) use it to give their brands a personality (putting the human element into their brand/marketing). This form of marketing/customer service on Twitter just makes sense. Especially for the early adopters, who will receive free notable press and kudos as a result. This is the first generation of Twitter for biz.

Even though Twitter 1.0 for biz is still in its infancy, I believe we will start to see brands using Twitter 2.0 - as more become aware of its powerful reach. Unlike brands on Twitter (Comcastcares, DunkinDonuts,Starbucks) who go to Twitter for their interactions we will see a new form of Twitter usage by brands, where they bring the Twitter experience in house.

In a recent blog post, we discussed how one method for Twitter to monetize was a business development deal with Meetup.com. Twitter has "Tweetups" now, however they are informal, and organically organized.

If you own a brand why not invite Twitter (and their millions of users) over for dinner? Dunkin Donuts just as one example could arrange "Tweetups" at the local level. Now, instead of waiting for a customer to come in for a cup of coffee, they are inviting Tweeple to come by and join other like Tweeple for a social experience. A social experience that will sell coffee, and donuts.

Even if you are not a large brand with national/international exposure there is still always a way to make this work for you. Do you own a bar, or a local pub? Why not organize Tweetups at your place? Offer a free beer, or perhaps organize your Tweetups arround an 'experience' (how about a Tweetup at your pub for people to play Guitar Hero?).

Just because Twitter is a social network, it does not mean you can only leverage it's strength at Twitter.com. Think outside the box, and think about taking your "Twitter to Go".

How do you envision brands using Twitter in the future?

Embed Images in Twitter Tweets

Want to have some Halloween fun on Twitter? Try cutting and pasting the following Twitter Halloween Icons into your Tweets:

Want a Halloween Bat: >o<

Jack O Lantern: `O

Skull and Crossbones: 8-#

Frankenstein: [:-]-I-

Tombstone: +-(

Spider: ////Ö\\\\

Scary Moon: ( | )

Mommy: (|:|/)

Witches Hat: <|:~(

Vampire: :-[


Thanks @ Hajime

Business Development should start with your VC

We keep reading about the upcoming crisis for startups, and how funding will be more difficult to come by. I wrote a post, How to run Lean and Mean, here. Fred Wilson, a prominent VC wrote about it on his blog, here. I can only help if you hire me, but people like Fred are in an even better position to help.

Though Fred does not work for the companies he has funded, he is on the board of directors for many. Of the investments where he does not maintain a board seat, he at least has a relationship - and likely a direct line in to the CEO.

Now I am not writing this post to pick on Fred Wilson, I am only using him as an example because I am familiar with some of his investments, and some of their issues. Let's take a quick look at just a few of Fred's investments, and show how Fred could be a catalyst to business development initiatives that would benefit all.

Fred Wilson is an investor in Meetup.com. Meetup makes it easy for people to locate, create or schedule (off line) meetings using their platform. Meetup appears to be doing well. They are a leader in their space, they have 5M members, and help facilitate over 100,000 meetups a month. They charge $19 a month for someone who wants to create a Meetup. Seems like a good company, and a sound business model.

Fred Wilson is also an investor in Twitter. Twitter monthly unique users are currently over 1M. They likely have around 4 Million users in total, and are the fastest growing social network. As recently as this week, the Wall St. Journal proclaimed that "Twitter has gone mainstream". Unlike Meetup, Twitter has yet to divulge any business model, nor any form of monetization for their service.

This is where Fred Wilson as an investor in both Twitter and Meetup can help out his investments. Fred should be the catalyst in introducing them to each other, and should plant the seed for a business development relationship as well.

Meetup should port their service to run on top of the Twitter network. The benefit is that there is likely little overlap between their similar (in size) user base. So Meetup immediately gets access to an additional 4 Million users. More importantly it is a user base that is growing much faster then their own.

Twitter will be able to receive a revenue share of what will now be known as "Tweetups", and can leverage a Meetup platform that has taken years to build out. WIN WIN.

Fred Wilson need not stop there. Let's look at an even easier partnership he could introduce. Fred Wilson owns a stake in Zemanta, and he also owns a stake in Disqus. Both tools target the exact same customer base, bloggers. Both services are non-competing. Disqus is a "best of breed" commenting system for bloggers. It is also a syndication system of sorts. Zemanta helps bloggers by automatically finding other articles, and "tags" that are consistent with a blog post.

Fred Wilson could read an earlier blog post I wrote that describes a very subtle method to offer a second product after an initial installation. You can read about it here. The general idea though is that Zemanta and Disqus have many commonalities. They are both seed funded, and fledgling (small user bases). They both serve the same end user. Their products compliment each other. This allows for a very easy "you scratch my back, and i'll scratch yours" relationship. Fred Wilson should propose that they offer each others products (Opt In) at the end of each others installations.

VCs - What investments do you have in YOUR portfolio, where you could make an introduction? Entrepreneurs, what other startups do you know of that might COMPLIMENT what you have to offer?

I would like to get your take, please leave a comment here. Do you think other VC's or entrepreneurs might benefit from this post, then please consider Digging it here.

If you want to discuss this or other ideas in real time, you can find me on Twitter here.

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Blogging is dead come see your NEW BLOG

While clicking around the web the other day, I found an article on Wired discussing why blogging is dead. Immediate thoughts of "man, are they dead wrong" stormed through my head before I had even read the article. Reading it however revealed that the author had some good points. While the "Blogging is dead" mantra is sensationalism, I am starting to agree (somewhat).

I am by no means a professional blogger. Lack of advertising on the afpr blog, and more notably my lack of good grammar prove that! But what started out as an online journal of my random thoughts and comments, has now made it into the top 1% of all Social Media blogs. Now just when all my hard work promoting AFPR.com is starting to attract traffic, I am starting to think...why bother?

I have another blog I did not even know about. It is powered by a commenting startup called Disqus . Disqus while not ubiquitous across the blogosphere is used more and more often by more blogs as their commenting system. Now, whenever I leave a comment, the original blog author (or anyone for that matter) can reply back. Now the original blog topic never has to die. When someone replies to a comment I left, I am notified via email, and have the oppertunity to add to my comment.

I never realized it before now, but I have had more to say via commenting on other peoples blogs, than on my own blog. Disqus, and services like it will be the new way that many of us blog - it just makes sense. You can read my "Disqus blog" here.

What are the new ways that you blog, leave your comments , or move the conversation to Twitter by following me here.

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Twitter the railroad tracks of the 21st century

I just posted this (originally as a comment on Fred Wilson's blog)in answer to yet another call from people asking how Twitter will monetize? Amazingly, people STILL just don't get it.

What might be stupid is the question, since most who ask it have no vested interest in Twitter financially. I have blogged over 15 different methods Twitter can use to monetize. I suggested yet another one in an email to Jack Dorsey this past week. Twitter's ultimate value is in its network, and the ubiquity of it all (both users as well as different plumbing such as email/sms/IM etc).

Try this... I just now discovered that I will be moving to Phoenix in a few months from NYC. Using the Twitter network and one of their API partner's products I was able to build my own little social network on the fly (Link will show you everyone Tweeting from within 20 miles of Phoenix) TwitterLocal .

Now tell me, where else can you build a social network on the fly? As GPS enabled smartphones become even more prevalent, this will increase Twitter's value as the underlying network exponentially. And it's not even just about geographic. Using Twitter one can build a network around anyone, anything, any place (look at Twitter's election board as an example, or Stocktwits as another).

People should start looking at Twitter for what it is... Twitter is the railroad tracks (railroad infrastructure) of the 21st century. How much is that worth? What do you think Twitter is? If you agree, please consider Digging this post

Why not follow me on www.twitter.com/A_F

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Negotiating & Negotiation

Art of the Deal - Negotiation 101

Negotiation truly is an art. What makes it an art is being able to "read" your partner, and walking a fine line in what you ask for. Make no mistake about it EVERYTHING can be negotiated. Even in instances when price is not negotiable, consider looking outside the box - ask for other extras to be thrown in. There are many things that go into a successful negotiation and these are a few that stand out in my mind as being important:

1) Always, no ALWAYS attempt to let the other side make the first offer...this is regardless of who is approaching who first in the negotiation. This is important because right out of the gate, you have a center point that allows you to not offer too much immediately, nor too little. Make them show their hand first.

2) Know not only their business, and existing partnerships - but make it your business to know everything about their competition as well. Never forget, knowledge is power. The more you know the better the deal will be for your company. There is a secondary benefit in that the person on the other end of the negotiation, will not only respect you more - they will also have a better flow of conversation with you (socially). When two people click or clash, this will determine whether or not a negotiation ends before it even gets started, or gets to a successful deal for you.

3) Do not be greedy. Successful partnerships go much further then the initial contract often having amendments, and secondary contracts from the continual relationship as time goes on. It is important then to note that a successful negotiation is ONLY one where both parties feel happy about the outcome. Getting your company a "steal of a deal" in a negotiation can backfire, should it leave a bad taste in your partners mouth. Negotiation MUST be a win-win for all parties.

4) Make certain you are talking with the decision maker, and not a gatekeeper. Many times even though the party on the other end of the negotiation will tell you that it is their domain, and their decision it actually is not. When you get a rejection from these people, do not be afraid to approach someone else within their corporation. It just might have been that you were initially talking to their ad rep, who told you he was their business development guy - even though he was not. Great starting points to secure you are asking for the right person include sites (services) such as LinkedIn . When possible, try NEVER to go in via the switchboard operator.



5) Do not drop the ball. While some negotiations can be tied up over one email/phone/meeting/lunch, others can take a year to close. Do not get frustrated, and realize that many times (especially if your partner in the negotiation is large) you and your agenda are not the only thing on their plate. Often times, in a large corporation they will actually do a market research study, feasibility study or internal meetings to determine if they want to proceed. Even if they are the decision maker, high level negotiations often involve more then one party. Do not let your mind convince you that there are unspoken reasons why they are not getting back to you in a timely fashion. Just follow up...not daily to be a pest, but again, walk that fine line in your follow up.

Please add your comments, what works for you when you negotiate? If you think others can benefit from this post, please DIGG it. Lastly, you can find me on Twitter here.

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Facebook Vs. Google = Co-opertition

Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester's Social Media analyst just Tweeted about having met with Google. He went out of his way to make a comment that Google has invited Facebook people to the meeting as well. The "Tweet" seemed to imply that Google and Facebook are best buds. I don't buy it for a minute.

Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. Make no mistake about it, Google and Facebook are no best buddies, think of it more as Co-opertition.

Google has a talent for looking down field, it’s just that they are horrible about executing on their vision. Schmidt recognized the bizillions of page views that social networks get, and that might have been the original catalyst for Google’s initial Orkut (social networking) initiative, and once failed their now Open Social plan. Facebook owns this space, and Google wants to be best buds, but not for Facebook’s billions of page views.

Facebook will eventually become Google’s strongest competitor (yes, not Microsoft, not Yahoo, Facebook). This is not because of what Facebook is perceived as today (a social network with billions of page views). This is because as the web becomes “smarter” (phase #1 we are amassing an amazing database of information about everything and everyone), we will mine both semantically and intelligently (phase #2) the enormous data that is the “web”. Social networks have an even larger advantage in that their data contains more personal attributes. When married to general web (non-social) data, this new social intelligence will provide for an entirely different “marketing” experience then how we currently interact with advertisers and brands today.

Going forward, with the ability to take ones’ social network with you everywhere (phase #3) Facebook will have now gotten a potentially life threatening edge over Google’s bread & butter. I am not talking about Facebook the social network, or even about Facebook the marketing platform. I am referring to Facebook as the *new* Google adwords.

Facebook is putting into place all the pieces it needs to run it's own Adwords network. This means that Facebook will no longer be pitching to brands about marketing solely on the Facebook platform. It will mean pitching to brands that they now have the same global scale and reach that Google has, but with a better, and smarter algorithm to boot!

Google sees it, Facebook knows it, do not believe for a minute that these to 800 pound gorillas will not end up face to face, Mano to Mano at some point in the next few years.

What do you think? Please add to the discussion, or if you like this post, DIGG it. Want to comment elsewhere, Why not send me a Tweet?

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Startup Funding - How to be lean

The other day I read about one of Jason Calacanis 's posts about the lack of liquidity (and funding) coming in the startup space. I never like Calacanis's self promoting rants, but he raises an excellent point. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures sums it up nicely. Startups need to "get focused, get better, get leaner, and ultimately to get profitable". The following is from a comment I left on Fred's blog. I got so many comments on it (most via Twitter) that I decided to add it here as its own post. Here are a few ideas that I have used in the past that entrepreneurs can use to stay lean;

1) Don't pay the rate card - Whether it is online advertising, print or other - I was often able to negotiate steep discounts when paying for advertising (example was rate card was $24k I paid $6k / rate card $70k, I paid $10k ... It's all a poker game, when you first inquire, be a little aloof and ask them to keep you in mind when they have remnant inventory.

2) Don't buy CPM, or even only CPC - Make them a vested partner. When I built an affiliate channel, the most successful partners were ones that were revenue shares (they only made money, when they sold a product)

3) Don't waste your money on a meaningless booth at a meaningless tradeshow (I was dumbfounded by some of the companies that had paid for a presence at this years Web 2.0 in NY).

4) Let others do the heavy lifting - A lot of start-ups that I advise bring their social network business plans to my attention for my opinion/comment. They all make the same mistake, in that they are going to create this great social network around a particular niche. Why reinvent the wheel? If you need to be nimble early on, consider leveraging someone else's already existing social network (ie- make your service into a widget for FaceBook, or use Twitter as your member base). Consider that getting a new user to your service will likely eat up the majority of your cash. Save the driving new users to your site for latter when you have the cash.

5) Partner up with non-competing (even better complimentary) start-ups where you can share infrastructure costs. This can be anything from sharing office space, to sharing servers,etc.

6) Realize that your most important asset is not your programming expertise...consider hiring someone with a marketing background (*hint) early on. Most start-ups I speak with have ZERO marketing guys on board of their first 20 hires! A competent marketing person can often pay for themselves 10 fold by bringing you ideas, partnerships,etc that you likely would not have thought of on your own.

That's all the IP I feel like giving away today. If you want to pay me for it, here's what you can do. PLEASE COMMENT and tell me YOUR vision, or if you liked this Digg it. Want to comment away from this blog, send me a Tweet

How to attract blog traffic?? READ THIS!

Learn how to attract more traffic to your blog.

I have been blogging for a few years now, but mostly as an exercise in putting my thoughts down somewhere I could reference at a latter date. During the course of this time, I might have had a few dozen followers a week. It gives me a good feeling to know that other people read my posts.

More recently however, I have started taking my "Random Thoughts in Marketing" blog more seriously. I have started using tools outside of my blog in order to engage people other than myself to view,comment and interact with me.

I have started to more actively "get myself out there" using different social networks such as Twitter, FriendFeed & LinkedIn and so many more.

I use Twitterfeed to update my Twitter followers when I have a new blog post.

I encourage my readers (contributors as well) to Comment, Digg or even Tweet me.

(I bold-ed the aforementioned to highlight just how important this can be. Though I use the aggregating bookmarking icons like ShareThis, or AddThis I find that people like it when you keep it simple. So I give them a direct choice to the most important interactions).

I make certain that my more important posts are stumbled upon (yes, even if I have to stumble the first one myself).

I offer an RSS feed for my blog, and make it available to blog feeds.


Most of you likely already know of and use some of these tools. Here are a few more though that you might not have thought of.

A good portion of my traffic is not due to what I write on my blog, but rather what I write elsewhere. I set up alerts to monitor blog posts and articles of interest, and for which I believe I might be a SME. I make certain that when I comment elsewhere, I always sign it with my signature; www.twitter.com/A_F . Ultimately, if what I wrote about was of value, they will find their way to my blog eventually.

Peter Shankman runs an excellent service called "Help a Reporter Out", or HARO for short. Reporters, and members of the media use HARO to locate SME's. Anytime I believe I can add value, I reply to these reporter's requests. Being quoted in the press can go a long way toward getting street cred toward being a SME. This article in Software Developer Times quotes me, which in turn led to another reporter asking my opinion on Google's Android (GPhone).

Do not blog for the sake of blogging. Think about what you are good at, or have a passion for and specialize. Become a Subject Matter Expert (SME). Do NOT take your eyes off the ball. It is after all not important how much traffic you get, but how much of that traffic links to you, Tweets about your posts, and most importantly returns to read more in the future.

What works for you in driving blog traffic? Let us know. If you agree with me, please DIGG this, and as always be sure to say hi on Twitter.

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Web 3.0 your CONSUMER will design your product!

In earlier posts I commented on my vision for what Web 2.0 is, and what Web 3.0 will be. While I stand by those comments, they were more from an infrastructure standpoint. I want us to now think about the same question - how it relates to, and what it means to marketing your brand.

If ever there was a definition of Web 1.0, it was "advertising". At the advent of the Internet, most brands simply did what they had always been doing offline. Static one way communication, as dictated from marketing, or some advertising agency.

With Web 2.0 it gets interesting, and more importantly interactive. Now I hate using other's cliches, and I am certainly not the first to state this; Web 2.0 is about interacting, or as Chris Brogan often uses the term - *listening*.

Since most of us are clear about what Web 1 & 2.0 are, lets look for a moment about what Web 3.0 might be (recall this is all as it pertains to marketing a brand - a subject that came up during an excellent Chat hosted by @lindydreyer).

In my vision of Web 3.0 a brand will not put their product out there to discuss (they will, but that will be "So Web 2.0"). The consumer will instead tell the brand what to produce. One of the upcoming trends of Web 3.0 (IMO) is Crowd Sourcing. If you do not know about it, you should. In the future, people will apply their needs, and demands collectively. The sheer power of




these groups will shape everything from what you will be able to charge for your product, to what that product is. Think I'm crazy, then you need to visit Fusion Center. Fusion Center, is a business that was built entirely by a crowd of people who shared a passion for a product that did not exist. The resulting business has produced over 26 products - ALL thought up by the crowd. Not one product that they produced was based on an internal (to the company) thought . The resulting products are exactly what their consumer wants, and priced more efficiently then any products that have since entered their space.

What is your vision for marketing in a Web 3.0 world?

PLEASE COMMENT and tell me YOUR vision, or if you liked this Share It. Want to comment in private, send me a Tweet.

Mobile Tagging see the future NOW!

Most who know me, know my vision for the cellphone of the future. It will replace everything, and simply be a conduit device that interconnects anything that in turn is connected to the Internet.

For example, you will simply place it on a table in your living room, and it will pull video content from the web, projecting it on the wall (likely holographic eventually) and as such will negate the need for you to have a TV. I know, that vision is constrained by bandwidth, battery life an other factors. We will not be able to use that vision of Mobile for 5-10 years. But do you want to see something that's as fun, and is likely right around the corner?




Sekai Camera (World Camera in Japanese) is an iPhone-exclusive social tagging service developed by Tokyo-based mobile application provider Tonchidot that recently Demo'd their product at TechCrunch TC50

This video is a MUST SEE for anyone wanted to get a glimpse of their near (Mobile) future. In the video, their CEO, Takahito Iguchi delivers a presentation for the ages - garnishing a standing ovation for this crowd favorite at the end. The video shows Iguchi walking through the streets of Tokyo holding up an Iphone in front of him. On the Iphone display, we see "tags" embedded on top of the real time images he points his Iphone at. I do not believe it was clear to anyone (because of Iguchi's English language barrier), but it was implied that these tags were;

1) Geotags (location based)
2) User generated content





When asked how it worked, Iguchi replied "We have a patent!"...The room was hysterically laughing at his reply. Based on these two aforementioned assumptions, the so called expert panel panned the business model behind Sekai Camera. They asked and made comments like "What would happen if something that had been tagged , was not longer there?" (in one example in the video, Iguchi points his Iphone in a store's window at a Camera for sale, and is shown a tag telling him more about the camera). I believe that based on lack of vision, these panelists dismissed Sekai Camera right then and there.


The panelists got it wrong!! We will see something like this soon, if not from Sekai Camera, then from others. In my vision for this model, I have already answered all the objections that the panelists had. The tags will come not just from user generated Geo Tagging. The tags will also by via Bluetooth, RFID, Barcode scanning, and from databased (corporate) info. about the items.

"What about too many tags on top of each other...won't there become tag overload?" someone asked. No, this too is easily solved by having filters. Each user will be able to choose exactly what tags they would want to see, when they would want to see them, and how they are alerted that a tag exists. For example, I might be touring New York City, and I could filter my tags to only show me points of interest. So as I approach the empire state building, a tag would alert me. Clicking on the tag would show me a picture and title "Empire State building", and allow me more options;

1) Read about Empire State building (could be Wikipedia based).
2) See pictures of the Empire State building (perhaps pulled from Flickr).
3) See videos of the Empire State building (YouTube).

After I have had my little virtual tour, perhaps I am hungry for lunch. I could simply go to my filter page, and request that it show me "tags" for food around my location. As I point my Smartphone at a restaurant, I will be able to see;

1) The restaurant's menu (Menupages.com)
2) User generated reviews (Yelp.com)

Well you get the idea...I am just surprised that the panelists didn't. What do you think of Sekai Camera's business model (I think it is spot on and is the future), and what would you like to see for mobile?

Please leave your comments, Digg this, or Twitter me.

Everything, Everywhere FIOS & Facebook

People who have followed my blog over the past few years will recall my thoughts that part of Web 3.0 will be truly everything, on any device. So as I sit watching one of my favorite TV shows, Fringe - There will be a series of smaller boxes on my TV screen.

These boxes will consist of an Oovoo like box, for my video conferencing with my fellow Fringe peeps, an email box, a Twitter feed and other "widgetized" boxes I might add such as my Facebook.

Perhaps my brother will call me, a "phone" box will pop up from the corner of my TV screen and alert as to who is calling. Should I want to accept the call, Fringe will minimize and the call box widget will take over my screen's focus.



We will not see this type of convergence within TV's themselves natively for at least another few years. Recognize however how your TV (Cable) is being delivered today, and note that the tuner is more often then not in the form of a Cable box. Cable boxes run on software, and thus are programable. So while this functionality will not be embedded in TV's soon, it will be coming to your Screen soon, REALLLY soon! From a recent Verizon FIOS press conferance comes word that FIOS will this fall (read NOW) will be offering just such a service (well at least the beginnings) for a mere $4.99 extra per month.

Verizon will ultimatly monetize this further by allowing users interactive ability to perhaps purchase products they see within a TV show or movie, by simply pointing their remote at the screen.

Expect the first generation of this offering to be slightly lame. What excites me the most however is the prospect that following the Open Source trends we see elsewhere, Verizon will allow third parties to create "Widgets" that run in the cable boxes. Twitter (and other social media- are you listening...time to make a widget for FIOS.

What do you envision for an integrated focal point going forward?

Please leave a comment, Digg this, or interact with me on Twitter.

Twitter - It's really about your EGO!

In earlier posts about the real Twitter, and Monetizing Twitter we discussed how Twitter is different things to different people. We also suggested a few reasons for Twitter's success;

Momentum... There is already a mass. of users on Twitter, so I can easily find Tweeple I know to socialize with.

Open API's... By opening up access for other developers to make useful add-ons, Twitter has made itself the hub in an ecosystem. Not only does the increased functionality attract new users, and new uses for Twitter. These apps. add to the natural viral nature of Twitter by bringing in new users of their own.

Ubiquity... Unlike past communications platforms (Cellphone/Instant Messaging / Email) Twitter is ubiquitous. I can send and receive Tweets whether I am at my PC, on my Cell phone, or even via Instant Messenger (using third party tools).

But do you want to know the REAL hidden reason for Twitter's success? Shhhh, promise you won't tell anyone and I will let you know their secret.




Sure there are business uses for Twitter, I use it to announce new blog posts (many others do as well). But just like social networks in general, with Twitter it's all about the ego. Unlike other social networks however, Twitter magnifies this effect.

I call it the "TweEgo" factor. It is so prominent that there are already tools available to tell you just how popular you are. Twitdir shows you the top 100 Twitterers (most followed). There are also tools to show you just how pathetic (unpopular) you are.

Everyone wants to be popular, and on Twitter it's all about how many people follow you. Most of the Tweeple I follow play in the social networking sandbox...a space I am passionate about. There are Kings and Gods in my network. I follow @Chrisbrogan (he has over 14k followers), I follow @jowyang (Jeremiah has almost 12k followers). I also enjoy the musings of VC's, so I follow @fredwilson ...(Fred Wilson has over 6000 followers, but he follows back very view...good TwitGradr score). Want to follow a superstar? @Kevinrose has over 60k followers!

Now it's not just your TweEgo that makes Twitter a success, it gets even better...and you need to know this for your own business/marketing initiatives;

MEDIA - When you massage someone's ego in the media, you hit homeruns. Just ask @waltmossberg (new to Twitter but already almost 1k followers and no follows). The only thing bigger than Walt Mossberg's ego is the 2 foot long cigar that hangs out of his mouth. I would be shocked if Walt did not review Twitter for his very popular Wall St Journal column over the next few months. When he does, he will see his follower count go up over ten fold overnight! I expect media coverage of Twitter to explode over the next twelve months. This is HOMERUN PR for Twitter and it don't get any better than that!




PS - Make sure you follow me, retweet this post or Digg it! My TweEgo needs to be massaged!

www.twitter.com/A_F

Google Chrome Browser - What this means to YOU

Jeremiah Owyang over at Web-Strategist threw out some interesting ideas about what Google's new Chrome browser means. I tried to extend upon what he writes by looking at the implications that this will have - dependent upon how you interact with Google.


Over the US Labor day holiday, the beans were finally spilled on one of the best kept secrets of the past few years. Despite public comments to the contrary, Google has been working on their own internally developed browser. The resulting Google Chrome Browser has important repercussions for everyone. It is just that it is different depending on who you are.





You are Apple;

This means that if it were not enough of a conflict of interest (Iphone VS Google's Android) to have Google CEO Eric Schmidt sit on your board - It is now. Look for Schmidt to resign sometime in the next six months.

If you are Microsoft;

This means that if you ever considered making Internet Explorer open source in the past, now is the time... You can not afford to wait, not even another minute. Expect Microsoft to make Vaporware like noise over the next few months about cloud widgets to give IE closer ties to cloud based initiatives.

If you are Yahoo;

In a post way back in January we wrote about some of what Yhoo would need to do to be relevant. Now you can add to this list, you need to buy Mozilla.

If you are Firefox;

Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer...yes continue with your Google revenue deal, but learn how to monetize your Browser outside of a paid search deal. Leverage your large user base to form "spin-off" type "power of the crowd" businesses. Note to Firefox, hey you guys ARE a social network...you just haven't figured that out yet.

If you are Sun;

Realize that Java is even less relevant every day. First we kicked you out of client side computing because you were a resource hog. Realize that Java will now continue to be less and less relevant on the Server. What a waste of a good company... McNealy must have got hit in the head with one to many hockey pucks.

If you are a social network;

In a previous post, we talked about how that in the future your "social networks" would follow along with you in the browser. Truth be told, we thought it would be Facebook, or even more likely Firefox that would lead in this initiative. So if you are a social network, you need to know now Chrome is the first step in a series of moves that will make it unnecessary for your peeeps to ever visit your site (directly) again.

If you are an application developer;

Life used to be simple, eh? You knew that you should be developing applications for Windows, because that is where the 100's of millions of users were. Fast forward, and now you need to choose what platforms to support, and when. Of course it makes sense to develop for Windows still, but Apple now has a mass of millions of Mac OSx users, and if it a browser based app, write once for Safari, and it should work without much adaptation on the Iphone. There are over a billion cell phones in use world wide, however every phone requires writing to separately (yes even all those different flavors of Java are different phone to phone. Suddenly with Android coming, and a matching desktop browser you need to be here.

Lastly if you are a consumer;

There is always a bottleneck somewhere ... Think back 5-10 years ago, before what we now refer to broadband... Dial up was painffulllllyy slow, and when you tried to browse, the bottleneck was in your "last mile" connectivity. Once you got broadband, the lag time in reaching a site was likely in your PC (not enough ram, slow processor, etc). Before either of those issues though it was the software that was not "smart" enough to keep up with the ever faster CPU's being created.

Look for Chrome to optimize all these new "cloud" based application initiatives like Google Gears, etc. This is just another nail in the coffin for desktop based computing. In 10 years, likely 90%+ of your applications will reside somewhere outside of your home or workplace - but certainly not on your desktop.

What does it mean to you? Why not leave YOUR comment? Shy? Tweet Me your answer.

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Fixing Twitter

If you haven't already read my earlier post "Will the real Twitter please stand up?" you need to. But after reading that, there is a lesson that you (application developers) can learn. Twitter could learn plenty.

All one has to do is Google Twitter, and you will see that they are solely focused on fixing their scalability issues. I would argue that they should first put a "patch" on their usability issues. You only get one chance to impress, and I am certain that Twitter has likely lost over a million potential Twitter users who all voice the same thing; "I don't get it", "What do I do with it?" and "How would I use this?".





Unlike their scalability issue, this could be addressed easily, and quickly with a few introductory pages on their site. Tell the user the different ways they might benefit (remember, it's all about benefits, not features when marketing). Give them examples using different profiles ie - How a housewife might use it, How a blogger might use it, How a business might use it - Becasue especially with Twitter the user experience is differant for each.

Consider using screen shots in your tutorials, and even offering video. You can not do too much when it comes to first impressions, MAKE THEM COUNT!

Will the real Twitter please stand up?

Will the real Twitter please stand up?

OK, I know already – Twitter is a “micro-blogging” tool that allows you to post short 140 characters (or less) of text. There lies the problem. Twitter needs to do a better job of explaining that Twitter is a different experience for every user (both personal & business).

What Twitter is to me – I call Twitter an Operating System (OS), or if you do not want to be that generous, at least call it a platform. This is because Twitter is a child of the Open Source movement. OK, so it’s not truly open source, but they generously offer their API, which allows anyone to write applications that run on top of (or with) Twitter.

I also like to think of Twitter as allowing me to build my own social network on the fly. I use LinkedIn as my “business social network”. I use Facebook as my “family & friends” social network. There are hundreds of thousands of social networks. Their commonality is that they all revolve around a common interest. So for me, wanting a social network around my interest (Social Media), I used Summize (now owned by Twitter) , Twitterpack Wiki, and Twellow to search for terms related to my field i.e. – “social media,Web 2.0, Software, Marketing,etc”. I then reached out and followed all who showed up in that search. Bingo, I just built my own social network.

My Twitter social network does not necessarily have to be around a subject either. Perhaps I want to just see who is Tweeting in my vicinity, well now I can Twinkle and my social network consists of everyone within my geographical location.

I use third party tools such as Twitterfeed, so that anytime I post on my blog, my Twitter followers can be automatically notified (Here I think of Twitter as a much better form of RSS).

Sometimes I just use Twitter as my virtual water cooler. I listen to what other’s are Tweeting, and if something peeks my interest, I join in the Tweetersation.

When I am home, my family becomes my social network. I can simply send one Tweet, and both of my kids, and my wife know that “Dinners ready, come and eat”. When I coach basketball or little league, and want a quick, easy and painless method to communicate with the players and their parents I just Tweet them. The reason that this works better then any other platform (Instant Messaging, Email,Phone,SMS) is the ubiquity of Twitter. Think about that for a moment…With Twitter, my Twicipients can listen using THEIR choice phone, PC or Mobile. With past platforms it was usually one or the other. Using “next generation” tools like Phweet, I can even hold a VOIP conference call on top of the Twitter platform. So in this aforementioned example, I am using Twitter as an Event notification system.

When I am a salesman, Twitter allows me to datamine the Twittersphere and listen for opportunities. I can do a search using terms such as “cable sucks”. If I were selling FIOS service, this would offer me a great opportunity to be using Twitter as a lead generator.

I want to know who is the founder of Twitter…I use @cbbot and ask “who is the founder of Twitter”, and the Twitterbot replies “Biz Stone. So Twitter is a research tool. Other cool bots include;

@gcal ...Update your Google Calendar via a Tweet

@Timer ... Set reminders that then get Tweeted back to you at the correct time.

@Wordbot ... Unscramble Scrabble letters via tweet.

There are more being created every day.

I am a business…What better way to both put a human factor to my business then to communicate with my clients (and NEW clients) using a medium where they are? Zappos has over 400 employees using Twitter to communicate with their customers. How do you think interacting with these 400 people make you feel about their brand?

Why not let your customers interact with customer service via Tweets? Because Twitter is a distributed medium, your entire call center could be monitoring this for the quickest response times yet.

I have excess inventory, why not let users learn of special offers in real time – Tweet it to em!

I have a large knowledge base, using SPARQRL & the Twitter API anyone can now access that knowledge via Twitter. So for example, I might be shopping for a Nipon camera. I simply would send a Tweet to Shopzilla (or any shopping comparison service), and Shopzilla could reply with their list of prices and availability (keeping the retailer honest ☺ ). How about other knowledge bases (they ALL could benefit)…Flighttracker, could let me get updates about a flight via Tweets “American #4364” would return “American Flight #4364 landing LQA 4:30pm (on time).

Location Based Services (LBS) will make it even MORE interesting as more and more people enjoy GPS enabled phones. Ya, I know there’s already Twinkle, but LBS is around version .5 right now, not even 1.0. We will see realllly fun ways of interacting with the platform then. For personal use, I will be able to know who (from any of the many social networks I belong to in and out of the Twitterverse) is nearby me. I will be able to filter all of this; “Show me just my LinkedIn contacts, only those who are marketing executives, and only within 2 miles. How cool is that?

Businesses will benefit even more from LBS running on Twitter. Want to show me a coupon for a pizza as I walk by pizza hut? Go for it, I would welcome that (just make certain I can opt-in & out)!

Going Viral!

Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while might remember (before I got caught up and fascinated with Twitter) that my background is in consumer software marketing. So many of my older blog posts were tips on how to make your product viral, cross selling ,etc. Since this sort of thing is really my core competency, I will try to get back to more posts about social media marketing soon. Meanwhile, check out the awesome, non intrusive way these guys get YOU to spread their gospel and populate their product.

In the image below, notice (it even lets you opt out) the message that you automatically Tweet should you allow it.



In case the image is to small to read, the result is that Twiffid automatically sends a Tweet from you with phrases such as "Having fun at http://www.twiffid.com 26 minutes ago from Twiffid". They of course correctly let you put in your own substitute message as well.

Cool Twitter Tools

Phweet? Bot? For all the people who still don't get Twitter (this is Twitter's fault...shame on you for not having some cool example pages/videos for your new users). Developers are starting to do fun things with the Twitter Api. So while there may not yet be a lot of reasons for enterprise customers to take advantage of Twitter (See the always excellent and articulate Chris Brogan's post on using Twitter for business), there will be soon ...just as soon as you create one!

Here are just a handful:
Bots:
My favorite Twitterbot is CBBOT. CBBOT grabs data from Crunchbase (Crunchbase contains a database of information about Web 2.0 start-ups) using Crunchbase's API - Then lets you search that data semantically using Twitter. So for example, to quickly find out who founded Twitter, just ask Twitterbot account @CBBOT "founder of Twitter" would return info. about Twitter and it's founder, Biz Stone.

@Tipr lets you send restaurant bills, and it will tell you how much to tip
@ Wordbot lets you send a string of scrabble letters (ZJFDIRFA), and it will return a list of words you can make.

I expect to see many Twitterbots as business finally learns what they can do... How about sending a Tweet to flighttracker.com "American #3432", and getting updates about your flight...Shopzilla "Nipon Coolpix" and getting best prices for that cool camera your looking to buy. Your a business, why not create a bot to let customers mine your FAQ and knowledge base?

If you have ever used IM bots, expect to see all of them ported to the Twitter OS, in the mean time, there is a pretty good list of bots here .

Apps:
Probably the most ambitious app yet is Phweet. Phweet lets you make VOIP calls over the Twitter network. The best example of this was when someone successfully made a call using Phweet from an airplane.

Want to paypal someone over the Twitter network, try Tipit.

New and cool is Mozilla's Ubiquity ... Ubiquity is much more then just Twitter, but in a nutshell Ubiquity 0.1 will let users perform such tasks as e-mailing friends or colleagues maps of locations; translating text to a different language directly from a Web page; searching key sites including Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, YouTube, Amazon.com, Digg and Twitter; and finding and inserting reviews from local search site Yelp.

Another new (to me) one is Twiffid. Twiffid lets you (via Twitter) see what you Twitter friends are blogging about. Know of other good one's? Send me a Tweet

An important one (if you blog) is Twitterfeed. Every time you update your blog, Twitterfeed will automatically post to Twitter letting all your followers learn immediately of your new blog post.

Want the BIG list? Over 140 apps. are listed here

LinkedIn the new Ning

In an earlier post "The Verticalazation of Social Networks" I blogged about well...going more vertical. LinkedIn (as we said they would) has made yet another move closer to their vertical strategy. Look for them to offer more "Ning" like features over the next 12 months. For now they just announced that users of LinkedIn groups now have access to;

• Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members. (You can turn discussions off in your management control panel if you like.)
• Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
• Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which your members may choose to receive. (We will be turning digests on for all current group members soon, and prompting them to set to their own preference.)
• Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.

you DON't know Twitter

I took an off the cuff stab at trying to identify potential revenue streams (here and here)for Twitter as they garnish a large enough user base to monetize. It did not hit me till I had an Epiphany this morning over my morning coffee.

I have always preached that Twitter will be a big thing, a *next generation operating system (OS)*, and when you own an OS (think Microsoft) it is not a far reach to offer new services to your substantial user base.

So in a year from now, though you may not think of it as Twitter, when you read about Twitter's success it will be;

Twitter as the next Monster.com (Job listing board)
Twitter as the next Craigslist (location aware Tweets will be a huge assistance to this)
Twitter as the next Cars.com
etc,etc,etc.

See they have BOTH sides to an element of success, a large user base. And an ever growing large database. The ability to mine, and verticalize this database will give Twitter the opportunity to own any market they so desire (listings).

Want to see the first proof? ...and so it starts

How to monetize a Tweet (update)

This post is an update to my previous posts regarding Twitter and Monetizing Twitter. I have been debating with Don Draper via the Marketing Pilgrim Blog (original blog post by Andy Beal) why I believe Twitter can successfully monetize, and validate their business model.

Don and I disagree, but to be fair we are looking at different metrics, and time frames. Don keeps referring to Twitter's having 3.8 million users. I am looking at Twitter's user base 2 years out, where I can envision them having 10's of millions of users (my guess is 75Million to be exact). Why such a high number? If we look at their current adoption rate unique traffic has gone from around 500,000 users in December of 2007, to an almost 3,000,000 today (August 08). So let's put that in perspective (conservatively) they have grown more then 500% in only 8 months!! You need to also appreciate though that sites like Compete are only counting unique visitors to Twitter. I believe that very few users ever even get to Twitter.com More often then not, Tweets are via IM, Mobile phones, and MANY third party's using the Twitter API. A quick glance at the Twitter Wiki shows no less then over 100 services (software) that have already taken advantage of the Twitter API. New services are popping up everyday, such as Phweet ...Phweet uses the Twitter API to allow you to have conversations, and conference calls with your Twitter friends. My point here is twofold;

1) To estimate that Twitter currently has 3.8M users is likely an underestimate.

2) Twitter has become an Ecosystem that as a result has 100's of other software vendors bringing them millions of additional users, and unbelievable HYPERGROWTH.

Don in his posts refers to stuff like "1% click through rates". I believe this is short sighted, and leads one to believe that Twitter will sell worthless run of site advertising attached to tweets. That is not the advertising value that I believe Twitter will bring to the table. Let's look at a few hypothetical advertising revenue models for Twitter. Keep in mind my assumption is based on Twitter's FUTURE user base, and my assumptions of what that number will be. This following set of numbers is believed to be factual, based on a source close to the company;

Based on Total Users: 1+ million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day

So when I multiply out those 3 million/day Tweets x 75 Million users, I get 225 Million Tweets per day or 82 Billion contextual blurbs in a database. Granted, these are only numbers but at some point the numbers become large enough to be significant. Suddenly Twitter has a MASSIVE database to send out highly target ted ads to. As a user, I would prefer ads that are highly target ted and not just random.

Revenue Source 1)

Let's pretend for a moment I manage the budget for Coca-Cola. What would be the value to me if I could datamine all those 82 billion Tweets for mentions of keywords I believe to be important to me ... As a few examples "thirsty,drink,diet", or competitors names such as "Sprite,7UP,"etc. What if I could then send out a Sponsor Tweet, perhaps the Tweet would be a redeemable coupon. Let us also assume that my keyword search terms turned up over 1 million Tweeters of these terms (again, I realize these are made up numbers but it is just to make a point).

I might be a concert promoter like LiveNation and for an upcoming concert by The Who, perhaps I want to reach out to people who Tweeted about "The Who,Rolling Stones,etc", but who also reside or our in a certain town (remember Twitter will become VERY location aware as more and more smartphones are shipped with GPS)... Wouldn't that be more valuable to me as an advertiser then a blind $1 CPM run of site buy? My point is this;

Large user base + being able to associate them with products/demographics/location/context = More then just a large random user base. This is true not only for Twitter, but any company that has a database of information about their users. The more info, the more you can target, the more you can target, the more you can charge...

In my exchange with Don, I mention that I believe there are 100,000's of verticals going on within Twitterland. For example, today my fellow Tweeterers consist of only people within the Social Media space (that is my vertical today). Last week, I went to the Police concert and at that given moment the Police became my vertical. As a result, Twitter for me is like having a social network I can join on the fly. If my interest one day is sailing, I need only do a search to locate everyone else who has Twittered on that subject. A few "follow" clicks latter, and I have built my own little Sailing social network on the fly. I don't know about you, but just from advertising alone it seems to me there is substantially more here then $3Million per year (from Don's estimate) in revenue.

Revenue Source 2)

A Subscription service sold to corporations that want to monitor the *buzz (good and bad) about their brand. Lets put a realistic price on this service of only a few hundred dollars per year. A VERY doable number. I do not have an actual total number of "brands", but if you use the metric of trademarks, there are well over 500,000 ACTIVE trademarks amongst over 150,000 registrars. Think that is not a 7-8 figure revenue opportunity?

Revenue Source 3)

Freemium... Offer different Twitter options to different users. Perhaps (as MANY other software companies do) give the basic version of Twitter free. Want to make your Twitter location aware? $29.00... Want to have more then 2000 followers (power users & corporations)? $69 ... (I can think of 100's of ala carte options here that users would likely pay for)... Yet another 7-8 figure revenue opportunity.

Revenue Source 4)

Because third party services let me easily form different groups to Tweet different things to...
"I've fallen and I can't get up!" ...partnership with lifealert. $$

Notification Tweets for Alarm companies...

Sell "911" and alert services to Government, Schools & Corporations...

Revenue Source 5)

Do revenue shares with your API partners (a royalty off monies they make from using the Twitter API).

Revenue Source 6)

Port the massive database of Tweet knowledge on top of Yahoo's "BOSS" (open source search), and enjoy a better more knowledgeable search engine and make money via paid search

Revenue Source 7)

Datamine the Twitterbase and provide market research reports to corporate America...again, smells like yet another large revenue opportunity.

Revenue Source 8)

If you look in the bottom right corner of your Tweets, you will notice a hyperlinked comment ie- "from Twitterfeed" ... These tell you what application was used to send the Tweet. Twitter could charge it's API partners to make this comment more prominent (ie - publish it in red). Twitter could also use the Google Adsense method of letting it's partners "bid" for screen real estate to promote their applications better.

Revenue Source 9)

Private label version of Twitter for internal (behind a firewall) secure communication. IBM built their own version of Twitter to use internally

In Summation, when it is about advertising, do not think of conventional current advertising. Location aware, knowledge base,reach and ability to micro-target make their advertising inventory much, much more valuable then what you think of as today's online ads. Their revenue streams do not need to rely solely on advertising, and the 7 or so I just rambled off the top of my head should exclaimate that fact.

Congratulations, your ad SUCKS!

CNET has a story about Facebook's new 'Engagement Ads". One of the more notable features of the new ad format is the ability for Facebook users to interact with these ads. Now interacting with ads is nothing new, but it is how the users will interact that makes this exciting. Users will be able to give these ads a "thumbs up", "thumbs down", and most importantly comment on what they liked or disliked about an ad.

In the past, brands have been able to A/B test different ads easily. This was enabled because many of the mature advertising networks automatically use your ad that performs the best to be shown the most. But this did not tell an advertiser why one particular ad performed better then another. That (why one performed better then another) was left open to speculation, and usually decided by a closed team (Marcom,creative group or agency), and not by the most important people...the consumers.

Advertisements...welcome to a Web 2.0 world...its about time. In case you have been living under a rock - from a brand perspective old school was all about marketing TO them. In the Web 2.0 world we keep moving closer to letting the consumer tell US what THEY want. After all, hasn't it always been about giving the consumer what they want?

Engagement ads will give you yet another tool to help you along this path if you let them. Embrace them, do not fight the trend. When you get the thumbs down on your crappy campaign, learn from it, correct it. Watch the successful ones, and learn what they are doing that you are not (do not get defensive). For a much more in depth analysis of Facebook Engagement Ads, I strongly suggest you read this post by Jeremiah Owyang.

Monetizing Twitter

Via a Tweet, I just read an article about "The trouble with Twitter" (article tries to make a case for Twitter having very few methods of monetizing the service). I could not disagree with the author more. First there is the ridiculous comparison to Facebook valuation:

"...Compare that with Facebook, which has a perceived value of $300 a user—or at least it did last year, when Microsoft purchased its 1.6% stake for $240 million and the site had 50 million users..."

If your going to make a comparison, at least use "apples to apples". Microsoft's investment in Facebook was strategic... (kept competitor from buying Facebook, and allowed Microsoft a much needed advertising deal with Facebook). So to turn this investment into stating Facebook's value is $15 billion is rubbish.

The article goes on to imply that advertising is Twitter's best shot at revenue, and that even that will not monetize well. It continues to identify (and pan) 4 potential sources of revenue:

"Twitter could ask users to pay. It's been done before—competitor Pownce charges user fees for enhanced content—but is difficult to add fees once the service has been established as free."

Rubbish! When I came on board with RoboForm it was a freeware product (with a decent number of users). I successfully (and slowly) moved RoboForm to a freemium model from the previous freeware model (RoboForm PRO is currently $29.99). RoboForm today not only commands a whopping 90% share of the consumer password manager market - but it is likely the most loved product by its users with barely a whimper about users having to pay for what they previously had for free.

"• Twitter could get messages to pay. With millions of messages flying around, why not convince some to be "sold" as product placement? Blogger Steve Poland suggests that Twitter could insert text ads into every 10th or 50th tweet. But again, users would rebel."

To state that "users would rebel" is speculation, and the devil is in the details. I envision a Twitter where some Tweets are "paid tweets", and others not. This is no different then Google's paid search model. When you view a search result, some are organic, and others are paid for. In the future, companies who represent their brand on twitter will likely pay while non-commercial tweets would remain free. If there is a value to a brand in using Twitter (there is), they will pay.

"• Twitter could extract money from user data. Millions of people now share intimate thoughts via Twitter. Think of the market research potential. Companies are already mining these huge swarms of data. Dell has enlisted Visible Technologies to learn what users are tweeting about its products. But if Twitter itself tried to monitor user data, privacy concerns could quickly alienate users."

To invite the privacy Nazis to the party is equally ridiculous. Why should Twitter be thought of any differently to other companies that harness personal data (Facebook,Linkedin,etc). Again, the devil is in the details (users did revolt against Facebook's Beacon) however if down properly, and disclosed clearly in it's privacy agreements why not? The author does correctly point out that Twitter will end up containing swarms of data. You can be certain this will become a large revenue opportunity.

"• Twitter could sell ads. Twitter is already doing this in Japan.

Advertising is the most viable option, but the total potential pool is not huge. Social media sites are notorious for having low ad response rates, and advertisers will enter a new forum cautiously."

Yes, some social media sites have low response rates, however this will change over time (see my previous blog posts about Facebook and Going Vertical). The reality is much different though. Someone will "Tweet" about a great book they just read, and that Tweet will be tied to an Amazon affiliate link where others can purchase the book. Or perhaps the Tweet will be location aware - "Craving Pizza in NYC", and as GPS allows Twitter will attach ads from local pizza parlors in NYC.

I need to add that IMO, Twitter will be sold within the next 12 months, as Social Network Service Providers (most likely Cisco) recognize the true value of the Twitter communications platform.

So in summation, I believe that Twitter will enjoy multiple (and successful) revenue streams as its eco-system, and environment allows. This does not even include Twitter's potential for licensing their API in the future, syndicating there data, etc. When it comes to monetizing software the sky is the limit if you know what your doing.

*be sure to view my previous blog post regarding my vision of what Twitter will be in two years (It won me a Nokia tablet from Forrester's Web 2.0 guru, Jerimiah Owyang).

How many social networking strategists does it take to change a light bulb?

How many social networking strategists does it take to change a light bulb? ...I had promised earlier to post an updated list of answers...what's yours - let me know!

Original question had been posted on http://www.scottmonty.com/ ...

Søren Sprogø

None.

They'll post a question on LinkedIn asking "How do I change a light bulp?", and then wait for some helpful, naive soul to come around and do the work for them :-)

Scott Clark

I think around 5.

Person 1: I'm thinking the light bulb isle at Home Depot or Lowes might be a good start for finding true fans. Make a poster that has your photo, your favorite light bulb brands, a photo gallery of your current lighting fixtures and a scan of your electric bill. Stand to the side and hold your poster. Do not force yourself onto those discussing lighting, but chime in if someone asks a question. Post reviews of light bulbs online. Do a "unboxing" video about opening the bulb and how easy it is to use.

Person Two: The early engagements. You should 'fan' your electrician and the electric company. Also post comments on the "green-living" communities where bulbs are discussed. Learn who the authorities are and who is blogging in the A-list for this group. Do not ask for a link - just participate.

Person 3: Link to the wikipedia entry for Thomas Edison and Compact Florescents. Post tagged flickr images of the light needing changed, and connect to others who've posted photos of light bulbs of fixtures.

Person 4 - go over to NING and Fire up a community forum discussing things like voltage, green-lighting, compact fluorescents, and safety on ladders. Start some original posts about how you found the light bulb to be out, what you expect the challenges are, and what it feels like to be in the dark so much. Link to authority bloggers on off-the-grid living, home safety, and perhaps the story of Walden so that you get trackbacks from those blogs.

Person 5: Do a viral video showing hyper creative ways to change lightbulbs. Link to other creative lightbulb videos and set up groups on Flickr, Youtube and Viddler. Stumble your videos and start a viral spread.

Daniel Eizans

Who needs lightbulbs when you have the light of a laptop with a a browser window opened to Facebook, or a cell phone set to Tweet your need for a lightbulb.

Toby Marie Walker

Do they use lightbulbs?

Stephen Weinstein

Actually, the bulb never gets changed. The strategists spend all of their time devising ways in which to add more people to their network.

Robert Saric (robertsaric.com)

Nobody will really be able to change the lightbulb until somebody actually buys the ebook.

Joseph Shavit

none, a good social network strategist will find a way to mobilize his/her community to screw the bulb in themselves.

Ande Weinstein

Are you talking about a virtual light bulb?

Luisa Elena Mondora

two.

the first one actually changes the light bulb, while the second one takes a pic and use it for a presentation about changing light bulbs as a metaphore of the bottom-up movement.

Gideon Roberts

One to submit it and another 250 to vote it up.

Eric Rauschenberg

Twitter - "I can't find the light bulb" -> Digg this twitter (click) -> vote on this digg rss this post to my blog -> sms this post -> User posts question -> What bulb?

Raquel Hirsch

Ask an expert.

Nancy Masse

ROTFLMAO! Most of these answers are priceless but the first one takes the cake!

The answer is (IMO) none;

Oh, they'll talk about changing that light bulb... and evangelize about it .... maybe hold a BulbCAMP or a tweetup or start a facebook page ... and somewhere along that line, someone somewhere will change that light bulb... and then tout themselves as the "bulb changing expert"

... and so on.

Stephen Gaither

None

They'll just wait for it to burn out and follow it on Twitter for the rest of their lives.

Beatriz AvitiaVargas, MBA

Nine

First to define the context of the light bulb

Second, find an expert in the field

Third, ask the question

Four, identify the labor

Five, negotiate the contract

Six, arrange for the light bulb and laborer meeting

Seven, to ensure proper procedure

Eight to monitor progress

Ninth to report in the findings in a blog.

Mary Lascelles

I sort of think they'll just work off the glow of their computer and never notice the lightbulb is out. Candle power is "just fine."

Matt Wasserman

Just one. But when the light still doesn't work after he's done he'll blame the darkness.

Brad Shorr

Zero. They are never in one place long enough to need a light bulb.

Michel Lefebvre

As many as can try. We have a dead light bulb here since months, stuck in the cieling as King Arthur's sword. First who succeeds will be hired as Chief Strategist for 1B$/year.

Greg Evans

Hopefully just one and the new bulb will be energy efficient!

Ahmed Mallah

Search for only those strategists that are capable to bring to Social Networkers' attention that:

1- There is a Light Bulb.

2- The bulb has to be changed for their sake.

3- Its important to tell others to watch their bulbs enlightened too.

Walter Reade (walter.reade@gmail.com)

"99% of the People Changing Light Bulbs are Doing it All Wrong! Learn How to Produce Fast Cash by Quickly Generating a Massive Crowd of Followers Who Give You Money When You Change Light Bulbs!"

Bill Green

And the art director went: “Does it have to be a light bulb?“

Wade Rockett

The nature of social media is such that we can no longer confidently apply traditional metrics such as 'changed' or 'not changed' to determine the success or failure of the bulb to provide light. We need to stop thinking of the bulb as a physical object altogether, and start thinking of it as a conversation.

Nedra Kline Weinreich

Just one, but then they have to tell all their friends about it and get them to install a light bulb too.

Igor Bissikalo

It depends on how many of them share an apartment.

Jose Castillo

Two

One to change the light bulb.

One to talk about how cool light bulb 3.0 will be.

Michael Durwin

It's not a matter of how many, it's that none will give you a way to measure the success of said light bulb changing, they'll all disagree about how to do it, and several will refer to a ScottMonty case study why it should be changed.

Gary Unger

The one that has the Janitor in his network.

Montaha Hidefi

None. The social strategists are in the northern hemisphere, the light bulb in the suthern. They will mobilize some troups to engage in light bulb anihilation and replacement.

Web 2.0 New York - the "GoTo" guys

on an aside, at Web 2.0 New York yesterday every speaker payed homage to Jeff Pulver (Pulver.com) as if he is the God of Social Media. Congratulations to Jeff (he must have done an exceptional metamorphosis while I wasn't looking), when I last followed him he was the God of Telecom. I will have to start reading his blog and Pulver.com to see what all the buzz is about.

When they weren't praising Pulver...the buzz (overhead his name mentioned throughout multiple conversations in the audience) was all about Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Web 2.0 analyst), whom I only recently discovered. Apparently I am the only one in the space who did NOT know about Jeremiah. If you want to know Web 2.0, I can not recommend Jeremiah strongly enough. His blog is here.

Web 2.0 New York - Greg Verdino

Greg Verdino of Crayon was the other speaker on my panel. The PR campaign he structured for Oovoo (this was the case study he used), was spot on. You can (and should) REALLY learn from this one. In summary, his case study was the way he pitched the blogosphere for Oovoo (Oovoo is video conferencing software). Instead of just pitching the blogosphere to try Oovoo out. He encouraged the blogosphere to instead, use Oovoo - myoovooday.com The result was a much more viral campaign (and likely one more received by those being pitched as well). Instead of the bloggers simply trying out Oovoo, and then blogging about it, the bloggers engaged their readers to join in an Oovoo 'chat' with them.

The result? Instead of pitching 50 bloggers, having your software downloaded those 50 times, and blogged about. Each blogger became a sort of an eco-system for Oovoo, each generating hundreds (thousands?) of downloads of Oovoo. In the end (Greg showed a graph comparing blog traffic comparing mentions of Oovoo and Skype), during the outcome of the campaign, more people were buzzing about Oovoo then Skype.

Web 2.0 New York - Dr. Augustine Foo

Yesterday was my speaking engagement at Web 2.0 New York.

On my panel were Dr. Augistine Foo, SVP Digital Strategy at MRM Worldwide and Greg Verdino, Chief Strategy Office at Crayon. I liked being on a panel, where the other speakers both "got it", and were there to teach (and not just speak for the sake of speaking).

Augustine did a case study on what they had done with one of their clients (Intel). If you watched and listened, there was a lot to learn. The one interesting point (something I had not given thought to)that he made concerned the 'permanency of a Web 2.0 campaign). He was discussing their Intel campaign which involved interactive banners, where consumers could chat directly with Intel engineers. Now this by itself is something you should note. You should make your brand teams directly available to your customers whenever you can. What I had not thought about previously though that I found interesting... After the campaign ended, all the interaction remains live somewhere on the web. So among other benefits, the interactive chats can become some sort of a knowledge base, and reside on a landing page somewhere as part of future campaigns.

So what can you take away from this? In a Web 2.0 world, your content need not die, and can live eternally (on a social network, in the twittersphere,on a Wiki, etc). This I believe is an important point that you should consider at the stage of architecting your campaign how this will effect what you do (not after the fact).

Every Business Can use Social Media

I am going to start (as I am able) blogging about specific social media strategies for specific verticals. Someone asked how you would implement social media strategy for a credit card, and so this will be the first business I will discuss.

When trying to apply a social media strategy for your business, the first thing you need to do is look at it from the eyes of your customer. As the holder of a credit card, what would I want to be able to do, that I can not using one of my other cards?

The first "Social Credit Card":

SocialCard can be used just like any other credit card in my wallet, however the SocialCard is much more unique. SocialCard send information about all of my purchases into a database that is the hub of the SocialCard's social network. Now because there are many users of the SocialCard, all of this data is aggregated and known within the social network.

This information can be what is purchased,product or service category, specific product,price,where purchased, when purchased,purchased with what,etc. Why is that information unique and helpful? Just as one example, wouldn't it be nice to know in real time, what gas station in my area has the cheapest gas? What e/retailers have the lowest price on an item I wish to purchase? What is the "in" restaurant lately?

The amount of studies and value one could receive from such a network is endless. Lets not stop there. How about applying the *power of crowds* to a reverse auction within the SocialCard network. In this example, one might be able to post their wish list. With the power of many who also want the same item, there is a value for retailers to then 'bid" for the business. So if I sell 42" Sanyo plasma TV's, I would be much more likely to give the best price when quoting 5000 units, and not just one. I would make my money up on volume, not margin. (I will add more to this post as time permits, but this should at least give you something to think about). What would you want your SocialCard to include? Send me an email...let me know.

How many social networking strategists does it take to change a light bulb?

I should probably start preparing something to say for my upcoming speaking engagement at Web 2.0 in New York next week. I saw someone had posted on their blog the question;

"How many social networking strategists does it take to change a light bulb?"

I thought, perfect this will be a great introduction to the topic of my speech which will focus on MY answer which is ...."1". I know, 1 is the antithesis of everything social but bare with me. If you are thinking about adding social networking (web 2.0) elements to your enterprise, you WILL need ONE person(Chief Social Media Officer) to manage it, one that reports directly to the CEO.

This is because social media can not, and does not encompass any one area of your business.
Your advertising lead will use it to advertise WITH your customers, and not at them.
Your HR department will use it to locate the best hires.
Your product development will discover new products not thought up on their own
Your logistics will use it to track & communicate with your fleet
etc.

The point being, that social networking best practices do not belong to any one area of your business, they will be integrated into every aspect of your business,your products,your customers,your employees....EVERYWHERE! So while your CMO might have their own ideas on how to incorporate aspects of Web 2.0, his focus is likely not on product development (as it should be in a corporate structure) it is more likely on marketing.

*truth be told, there is a social aspect to this post... I used LinkedIn answers to see what other answers might be out there (and as with most "power of the crowds" answers, I expect the best answer will emanate from there, not from me :-)

Google's *real* competition

OK, if I were to ask you who Google's competition will be one year from now you would likely bring up the usual suspects ... Yahoo&Microsoft. I want to go on the record today as stating that one year from now Google's real competition will be (drum roll)...


FACEBOOK

You may think of Facebook today as a Social Network that competes with the likes of Myspace, but that is in todays model. Try to be open minded here, and realize what Facebook is, and what it can do with what they own. Facebook, is simply a large database of people, including their demographics, their interests, their friendbase, etc. Do these elements sound important to a different business, perhaps ADVERTISING? bingo! I know, Advertising on Social Networks has been a big bomb to date, but you need to be looking at Facebook a year from now, remember? Facebook will launch their own version of Adsense. By this time social awareness will reside in the browser (amongst other places). In other words, your network will follow you around the net. Sites you visit (and will locate) will be shown to you with higher rankings, should others in your network visit them just as one example. What comes with you when you surf besides your social network? All that juicy (advertisers love this stuff!) information that Facebook knows about you, and can associate with you.

So when you think of the Facebook of the future, and where they will find their advertising $$ success... Do not think of it in terms of advertisements on the Facebook.com website...think bigger, think adsense....

What's a Tweet?

OK, this post is for people who are already aware of what Twitter is. IF you do not know what Twitter is, you will soon. For those who don't, Twitter is a service that allows you to broadcast short bits of text (140 characters or less). Some examples of how I use this...

1) I have a family tweet, and this is monitored by my wife and kids. At a public event, and want to meet by "That tree on the corner"...just tweet it to them. Time for dinner? Tweet!

2) I use it on my blog...If you want to know what/when I post something new on my blog, just sign up to follow my tweets.


What will Twitter evolve to be?

Twitter will look more like an operating system in 2 years. The Majority of its users will not even have to go to twitter.com to use the service. Twitter will instead be the platform whereby others embed twitter functionality directly into their own applications. As a result, Twitter will be different things, to different people.

For some, the twitter OS will allow them to join a social network on the fly. This might be based on the location of a tweet, the content of the tweet, the profile of the tweeter. Some Tweeters will not even be human, they will be anyone or anyTHING.

A Tweet will be whatever one wants it to be (not constrained by 140 characters of text)..A Tweet might be multimedia,voice,video,etc.

The truest value of Twitter will be how it allows one to broadcast whatever (voice,video,data), to whoever (followers,family,friends,readers (a better RSS), however (via browser,sms,email,etc)

Twitter will be one of the most valuable net properties (along with Firefox)…why? Because they are OPEN. They ARE the ecosystem.

The Verticalazation of social Networks

Ya, OK I know Verticalization is not a real word. And when I coined the term "Vortals" (Vertical Portals 10 years ago, that wasn't a word either. Never the less, this is what has been happening, and will continue to happen on the web.


The "next" thing in Social Networking will be going Vertical. You and I are already members of these new social networks, we just do not know it yet. As an example, LinkedIn is quietly building a knowledge base (their database profiles,groups and even this Q&A). It is not a difficult process for LinkedIn (Facebook will do this as well) to "spin-off" vertically specific networks. Facebook knows most of their user's birth dates. As soon as they reached a critical mass (let's say 1M) of users that were 60 years old +, they could start a new network just for that demographic. Being a vertically specific network has financial benefits. The ability to target very specific groups allows them to charge more for their advertising - because it is more targeted... Unlike getting yet another offer to join yet another social network it will be as easy as a user simply "opting in" to join. Their info, friends,links,likes,etc will all be there waiting.”

NPR wants to be relevant again

I remember National Public Radio (NPR) from when I was a kid. I used to listen to one segment I enjoyed called "And so it Goes". And about the time I stopped listening to radio, was about the time I forgot all about NPR. NPR.org... who knew?

So what to do if you are NPR and want to be relevant once again? Let the masses Mash it UP!! . By releasing ALL of their content via open standards (API/XML,etc), and encouraging people to do whatever they want with NPR content they know have a path to survival in this web age...

They get it! Now what are YOU waiting for? Go out there and open (source) your content and watch just how easily you too can survive.

Music? Let em mash it up! Images (take note Getty,AP )? Let em photoshop themselves in! Hollywood? Let em write the endings!

Congratulations to NPR who joins other notable content kings such as New York Times in opening up!! Welcome to a web 2.0 world

Mobile, psst *YOU NEED TO BE THERE NOW!!!

One would think that people learn from their past mistakes. History however always seems to repeat itself. Many companies who dominated their markets, saw new, nimble competitors clean their clocks again, and again.

IBM who dominated the computer space lost out to Microsoft... Microsoft subsequently missed the boat, and lost out to Yahoo, who then lost out to Google...so on and so on.

In the *connected (Internet) space, no one took a hit more then old media - Music,TV,Print,etc. Some of these guys have limped back in finally having an Internet strategy YEARS after other nobodies entered their space online, becoming THE property within a given space. Hollywood (TV,Movies,etc) should have been the YouTube. Newspapers should have been the social networks. Music... erghh well lets just say the RIAA needs to wake up and smell the coffee...they will not make money selling MP3's, they need to use that as their loss leader - Making the money up on ancillary services.

So why are all these old media types (and NEW MEDIA TOO!) going to get hit in the head all over again??

If you didn't see it last week, your blind.
1) Location based services (LBS) change everything
2) Over a Billion cell phones changes everything
3) Apple's Iphone changes everything

OK, I realize that up till now, the Internet on a mobile (even smartphones) was a horrible experience. But if you have ever browsed or interacted with the web using Apple's excellent *game changing Mobile browser, you will know now that the time is now!

One can actually read a newspaper or book, one can view multimedia, and one can even interact. Now get in there and protect your brand, if you do not own your Mobile space now - someone else will.

So just to be clear...

Apple alone gives you critical mass... They will bring over 40M people into the mobile space with a device they can actually use.

Apple WILL be a social network...with that many users, Jesus isn't going to give up that opportunity without a fight (*wake up call to Facebook,LinkedIn,Myspace,etc).

WAP is dead ... you need not spend millions of dollars on a special infrastructure any more to interact with users on a Mobile platform...just a Mobile strategy

LBS - opens up all sorts of BRAND NEW opportunities for your brand many of which haven't even been thought up yet.

Lastly...you need to move NOW

Newspapers are dead... Long live Newspapers

OK, at least once every few months, I here another pundit calling for the death and demise of the conventional newspaper. Now I am not blind, I understand their ramblings, it is just that I do not agree.

Web 2.0 will save Newspapers, and publishers (print), are finally getting it. The first thing I do every morning (besides my coffee addiction) is grab the morning newspaper from my driveway, and read it end to end. Throughout the rest of my day, as time permits I refresh the homepage on my blackberry (set to Google News), and read as many articles of interest as I can. Once I get settled in front of my PC, it is all about my favorite blogs.

The main reason for me reading blogs is first and foremost the "freshness" of the content. I also like the ability to be able to scroll (dig down) through for additional information when a blog post does not satisfy my need for knowledge. The net allows me to dig as deep as I need. I also like the "social" aspect of getting my news online, reading others comments, adding my own,etc.

The New York Times (a sleeping giant awakes) is at the forefront of this with their TimesPeople initiative. With TimesPeople, you are able to annotate,share,comment, and be part of a community. This community can be like minded readers, can revolve around a restaurant, hotel, location, article or anything digital.

Now that I have a "Mash-up" of my favorite two things (NYTimes newspaper & Web 2.0), I can attest first hand that Newspapers are not dead, they were just sleeping.

What is still missing on the Internet?

The web needs to be more "world wide" I do not personally know anyone in the US that interacts with any foreign based sites (unless they are searching or researching a specific geography)...seems so "US" based from my perspective

The web needs to have protocols like what SMTP did for email (allowed disparate email systems to all interconnect seamlessly)...NO MORE WALLED GARDENS

Lastly, I can not wait for the web to finish its convergence with broadcast TV/cable (still in its infancy)... I want to be able to do EVERYTHING on one screen even if that screen is viewed via my TV,CellPhone,Wii,Car,etc

What is Web 2.0?

Definition of Web 2.0:

People are always asking for a definition of Web 2.0. Wikipedia defines it as “Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.”

I will simply state that Web 2.0 is about <---1Xto1X---> way communication, this is not limited to people, but also to software and websites.

I will break down some Web 2.0 tools into four different trends:

Social Networks (in its simplest form think of a blog VS a Wiki. A blog tends to be more “1”, a Wicki is “Many”)

Some of the more prominent examples are Facebook,MySpace, and LinkedIn –“Social Networks” (SN). These SN’s allow users to communicate and collaborate amongst peers, based on a shared passion, or vertical. There are family SN’s Cozi (Cozi allows families to share items like pictures,calenders, “to do” lists,etc ). There are Professional SN’s such as LinkedIn and Xing. There are even services that allow you to build your own SN such as Ning. How might you use a social network? On a personal level, perhaps you might use one for your child's little league team. It could play host to the teams little league stats, pics and videos of games, discussions about that “great catch the other night”, team schedules and much more. For your brand, you might use it to allow your customers to be treated more like employees. Customers could use your brands SN to share there opinions (good and BAD) about your product, share ideas about your product, hold contests related to your product, help you name your product, and more. The results for you? More *buzz* for your brand, perhaps a better name for your product (why not use the Power of Crowds to name your next product), customers that feel a connection to your brand, a captive audience with which you can more easily get your message across, and more.

Openness - Convergence

For software and websites/services and *coming soon* CONTENT Web 2.0 is about convergence, collaboration, co-opertition,Mashups, APIs and most importantly Openness . This new convergence of technologies allows you to build brand new businesses (or revenue streams) that would not have been possible otherwise. A great example is IMnearby.com, it can only exist because a confluence of technology being used together … GPS (location aware), Smart Phones, Internet, and an SN. Another working example that has had tremendous success is Mozilla’s Firefox browser… by being “open”, Firefox has attracted thousands of developers who write code for free, increase productivity of the browser, introduce new features that even Mozilla might not have thought of, get features to market more quickly, for less cost,etc. This “ecosystem” lends itself to being viral, as each developer in turn markets their products (plugins & toolbars), they drive further promotion and adoption of the Firefox browser.

Power of Crowds

If the expression “Two heads are better than one” makes sense, then imagine what 1,000,000 heads could accomplish when brought together. 1M people could predict outcomes more accurately, design a better car, come up with the best name for your product or business, and much more. Expect to see CrowdSourcing as a major player in “nextgen” website/web service winners.

User Generated Content

Want to scale fast? Get lots and lots of content online for search engines and your users? Why not let others do the work for you? Yelp gets it, almost 100% of their content (reviews/local/restaurant/etc) is generated by their users. This has allowed them to blow right by 'content controlled' services like citysearch . LinkedIn has a TON of user generated content in their LinkedIn Answers ... One day, this will (could) be large enough to be a stand alone business for them. NYTIMES (see my recent post) gets it, as they now allow users to mashup,share,participate and add content on their new interactive service. What are YOU waiting for? Let your users work for you!

putting your URL in print

I recently answered a question that someone had posed on LinkedIn. The question was whether or not to include your brand's URL within your print media. I would have thought this is a no-brainer, however since apparently it is not...here is the answer:

Not only does adding a URL in print lead to enhanced traffic, but it is a MUST! I would ask the question to you, why WOULDN'T you put a URL in your print media (and everywhere else).

Your brand should be your website, unlike traditional media, web based media is an excellent way to get concrete tracking of whether or not your marketing message is working - and from their allows you to sell your product or service.

You should also be taking advantage of the fact that URL's are dirt cheap. Any campaigns that I have managed get their own unique URL's as well. So for example, if your company name is widgets , you might also want to purchase the url "getwidgets.com" for print ...and additionally, you should be using sub directs (getwidgets.com/NYTIMES) to even further track. This also allows an easier method of leaning on the reputation of the print partner .... So for example, in your print ad, at the end perhaps offer the link along with the message "Special offer *exclusively* for NYTimes readers.

Can Firefox save face?

OK, I was all into helping make Firefox take home a world record for most software downloads in one day. You have to respect what they have done with their brilliantly executed SpreadFirefox campaign to date. I do not know why, but I just assumed, they had to know what to expect regarding server loads in doing this latest campaign. In fact, I was thinking that their big brother Google would make this in to a marketing campaign for their cloud initiative and would help in hosting the download burden. For that matter, shame on CNET who could have donated their front page for the initiative as well as their hosting services ... no reason why others could not make an excellent PR event out of Firefox's.

So here it is 2PM (est), and after FINALLY getting a response other then *timedout* from their server, it brings up a download page pointing to their older 2.0 release WTF????

So now, instead of having this potential PR event chime on throughout the next month, it is looking like more of a PR disaster. Now I am certain that the smart people over at Firefox will make this into a really positive PR spin "WOW! We had the bandwidth and were prepared for 10 Million downloads, but by 1:30 we already had 15 million requests!! ....

So other then the ultimate outcome of what they need to do to repair the PR spin what can we learn here?

PR is not the sole function of marketing, and in fact - The more of your team(s) that become involved directly, the better chance of success. For anything bandwidth intensive, DO have a scalable backbone, and provider - Lest your servers get "Twittered"

Website Suicide

File this under what you should NEVER do on your website (WARNING/Hint turn off the volume on your speakers before you navigate to their site):

Go there Now

Its ashame, because other then the sound, I would have given their website design a decent grade.

Most Returned Products Work Fine, Study Says

Accenture, the global consulting firm just completed a study.... Over 95% of all returned products work fine... The take away from the article should be a wake up call to anyone - Whether you're a product manager , marketing pro , regardless of what type of product your selling.

So why are a whopping 95% of products being returned? USABILITY ... or as I referred in an earlier post using the known term KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid). Companies should have an executive on board, their CGO (Chief Grandma Officer), because if Grandma can't use it you flunked on UI 101.

It never ceases to amaze me that this continues on day after day. From my toaster whose designer does not understand that toast needs to eject at least enough for one to grasp it. To Bluetooth's implementation which makes it virtually impossible to connect a Bluetooth enabled device without having a degree. Have you tried setting up a home network?!!

Now I am cognizant of he fact that this study refers to consumer electronics, but if you're marketing a Web 2.0 or consumer software product like I do KISS needs to be your rule number #1 as well.

Want an easy example of this in the software space? Look at recently deadpooled Meetro; Meetro had a cool product, but the software needed to be downloaded and installed (I believe to a cell phone). According to a postmortem comment by one of its founders

"In the end, though, the drop off that happened once people had to download and install Meetro was HUGE and didn’t help us at all. If I recall, it was something in the 80 to 90% range. It crushed adoption rates."

Now granted there could be other factors why Meetro had a 95% drop off rate (One important one I will reference in a latter post is Trust) the point is that software is no different then hardware (95% return rate = 95% "Walk away from your shopping cart" = 95% "abandon their download", etc. etc.

1) Keep It Simple !!! Can not stress this enough

2) Functionality over Features ...(just because you think it would make a cool feature, do not cram it down the throats of your existing users) if a feature is arcane, consider putting access to it via an "Options" panel.

3) Tell them (your users) what you are going to tell them, tell them what you just told them (Introduction, Lesson, Summary) - This can be via UI, user manual, FAQ, Blog, etc (NOTE - People do not read - so this is a fallback)

4) Make sure they know your reputation (Trust) - Truste,Verisign, Better Business Burue, Webbuzz...

Why SPAM when you can PAM?

OK, this started back when I headed up Marketing for RoboForm (RF). Here we had a large database of emails (when user's downloaded RF's software, we asked that they register (provide their email) from loyal users. Working for a one (at the time) product company, one of my tasks was how to bring in additional revenue sources.


One of the simplest ideas, and IMO a no brainer is to "second sell" our users (see my earlier post "Time to make the Donuts" ) . Even though we did not have a second product yet, affiliates and partner's products made it easy to at least sell the user something else besides RF. We had, after all their email address's ...no brainer, right? Wrong! When I first pitched the CEO on letting me send out an email, he was adamantly against it... Being a Password manager, we were after all in the trust business. What if users thought we were spamming them? What if our ISP blacklists our IP address?


I tried hard to make the business case - after all there are protocols that protect one against being a spammer, and a lot of third party tools exist to manage mailings. The good ones start by scrubbing the list (making certain that only people who truly Opted in will be sent future mailings), and also email using their own servers. So what I devised was a method to reach out, and to second sell our users in a manner that satisfied my conservative boss. In hindsight, this new method Personalized Associated Marketing -(PAM) not only solved all issues related to emailing (spam,open rates,interest,conversions) but allowed for a much much more targeted message as well.



Figure one:
RF notifies the user that there is a new version of RF available for download, and prompts the user to download





We send the user to a trusted third party site (download.com) to retrieve the update (This is important for other reasons that I will address in a separate post):








After the user's download is installed, we took them to a post download webpage where we congratulated them on completing the download process and offered them a link where they could view newly added features. Most importantly, note the rest (majority) of the post download page:








Here we have the users complete attention, with an offer to try another piece of software they might like...no worries about an email getting caught in someones spam filter...the user knows exactly why they are viewing this offer...it is unobtrusive... it works!! During my tenure with RF, these PAM's converted as high as $1000 eCPM!! more importantly we did not receive ANY complaints from ANY users .



So where is the Personalized Associated Marketing, after all this is just an offer right? Wrong!, though a user would not see the sophistication designed into this behind the seen, we made it very powerful from the get go. If I was a user of RF FREE version, my PAM message would prompt me to upgrade to RF PRO. Had I seen that message on a previous upgrade, perhaps it would prompt me to purchase RF PRO but with a discount associated with it. If I already own RF PRO, it would show me a different offer. I designed the PAM so that I could filter offers (and messages) based on a number of factors. Some of these additional factors included affiliate ID (who originally referred them to RF), Language or geography, and much more... But proper product design (requirements/needs analysis) will have to be a post for another day.

Span of (out of) Control

There is a potential flaw in your Span of Control (SOC). Now this does not usually effect start-ups, but at some point in time companies are no longer lean and mean. Their span of control has grown both vertically and horizontally (as expected) to manage their growth in products/offerings, sales,user base and the staff needed to manage same. At some point this span of control breaks down, and the fast turning cogs slow to a crawl. This might be due to economic factors, competitive factors or other outside factors. We hear it loud and clear when in recession, calls of across the board job cuts of 5%,10% or even 15%. Other times, the cogs slow due to factors within the corporation, and specifically as it relates to your SOC, and how you manage it.

So as a hypothetical example, Cogswell's Cogs has a staff of Marketing,Sales, Business Development and Channel executives. Each dept. has their own SOC and all of these departments are part of yet an even larger corporate SOC. In marketing as example, you have your Executive Vice President of Marketing, Vice President of Marketing, Managing Director of Marketing, Marketing manager, assistant marketing manager, etc. For the corporate SOC you have your EVP of marketing, EVP sales, EVP Global sales, EVP GLobal Marketing, EVP Business Development, EVP of Channel sales, etc. ... already seeing the mess, right (and we're only talking about the upper layers right now!).

Lets now examine a SOC from the bottom up. Inside Sales, reports to Sales manager, Who in turn reports to the East Coast Sales Manager, Who reports to the National Sales manager, who reports to the VP of sales, who then reports to the EVP of sales, eventually reporting to the CEO. So what's wrong here, after all a CEO needs to be insulated from all these layers don't they? WRONG! and this is where your SOC is broken. SOCS need to be multi-directional.

Johny is somewhere in the middle of a SOC. He is the Director of Strategic sales at Cogswell Cogs. He reports directly in his SOC to Henry, the Managing Director of Marketing. Johny is not making his numbers because even though he has successfully lined up, and signed up partners there is a breakdown with one of the Sales Engineers (SE), yet part of another SOC! In order to get the partner up and running, they need to be trained on how to use Cogswell's cog. The problem? David, the Director of SE's is a golfing (drinking?) buddy of Henry...remember now Henry and David are best buds... and so in a functional SOC Johny should be able to reach out to the SE, and when unresponsive reach out to the SE's boss who should remedy the breakdown. But what happens when Henry, the SE's boss is also incompetent, or just unresponsive? Johny can only go so far up his SOC before he is though of as a troublemaker, or a complainer. More often then not, the Johny's of this world (usually the MOST competent of your employees) become disenfranchised, and move on to a different Cog manufacturer, where their SOC team is more functional.

So how can you protect your SOC's? Management needs to have a venue available whereby anyone in a SOC can communicate with anyone else, from a Cold Caller, to the CEO. It is one thing to tell a guy doing inside sales, that he can feel free to use this "open structure" to offer his suggestions, and gripes. It is another for it to actually take place (are you going to go over your bosses head and risk being out of a job??). Make your open structure anonymous, monitor it directly (EVERYONE in the org.), and encourage its use.

the Net going forward

in answer to a question someone asked about the future of the Internet;


The future will be more of the same as well as what's old is new again. Recall, when "dumb terminals" were all the rage... That's where we are heading back to (think Cloud computing).

More of the same refers to more collaborative activities (Crowd Sourcing,etc). Lastly think more Convergence... Just a year or two back the buzzword du jour was "Mash-ups", and referred to adding data to a google map... Now, and more and more often a Mashup might be combining three or more applications to create a new solution (ie- Google Maps, Geo Tagging, Flickr, and a social network gives you a virtual tourist solution that tells you about where you are, and what you are looking at. Add GPS, and it is a real time tour guide).

Convergence is also only constrained by "faster,cheaper,smaller" type factors. As example, we would not be able to have had GPS enabled phones only a few years ago. This is because the GPS chip was to big, and battery drain to much. Nowadays almost every new smart phone contains a GPS chip, and battery life is no longer an issue.

Open source (and api's) is only in its infancy, and as that trend progresses, ultimately everything will talk / integrate with everything... Then it will get really fun.

The "pipe" also continues to get bigger, and as we are able to move thicker streams of data through the net (i.e. HDTV), this will open up a newer convergence where we finally will have no differentiation between our living room TV and our office PC.

I believe that we will not stop in our innovation, and what the Internet platform can achieve till I can actually hit the send button on my oven, and send my mother a Turkey that I just cooked via the net to her oven.

Viral Marketing Case study (OboPay)

ok, I stumbled upon a company called Obopay today. They are essentially a "paypal for your mobile phone" start-up. Upon completion of signing up, they CORRECTLY ask/offer for me to invite any of my friends to sign-up. The entire process is so far smooth... And the product seems good enough (and harmless enough) that I decided I will use it as an experiment in marketing.

Now I have thousands of contacts in Outlook, but close to 500 in my LinkedIn network. Since Obopay has a limit of 500 friends in their invite system, I sent the first batch of invites to my LinkedIn friends.

I do not know if OboPay will want to be involved in this study on a formal basis, however if they do I will be able to get much better info. to explore their Viral campaign and further a/b test different suggestions for this funnel.

If you want to participate, and / or see the results when done please send me an email to andy (at) afpr.com with "obopay study" in the subject line ... I will follow up with a few brief questions .


*******FIRST UPDATE ************

1) Obopay problem #1... I just received this automated email from Obopay after I sent their offer to LinkedIn friends using their system:


"Hi Andrew,
Thank you for your referrals. We have sent invitations for your friends to sign up for Obopay.
When the following people accept your invitation to join and successfully sign up within the next 30 days, you will receive $5 in your Obopay account for each referral:"

So what's wrong with this? ...I use Outlook, and have ZERO spam filters that I run. Regardless, I just happened to have received their email to me in my JUNKMAIL folder (Outlook does this by default). Lesson here for fellow marketers .... Your very first communication via email to your customers should strongly suggest that they white list your @domain name ...this way they will be certain to receive your future communications.

Campaign comment #1:

I sent an invite to myself, so that I could see what my LinkedIn list was receiving. My initial thoughts are *kudos* to the Obopay marketing team. Note in the following screen shot of the email invite, how simple, and straight to the point the offer is ...





Who sent it (should it include my last name, or just "Andrew" as it is?).
What is Obopay
List of benefits (not features)
Text link to join
Call to action button to join

Note to fellow marketers. KEEP IT SIMPLE (KISS)


** Final Update **

OK, I have received zero help from Obopay on this, zero input from my LinkedIn network (thanks guys) and so regretfully will not be able to follow up... To bad, would have made a few thousand for charity, Obopay would have gained ten's of thousands of dollars worth of free market research, and marketers would have had a solid case study to learn from.

My only take is that by not putting the referrers FULL name in the offer email, the offer becomes spam. Note to Obopay - you really need to disclose a referrers full name, not just "john sent this...".

Learning from LinkedIns' (Mistakes)

OK, first off disclaimer (in the event my advice comes across the wrong way);

I love LinkedIn, I believe them to be one of the most successful web 2.0 services, They are the REAL pioneers of Social Networks and they obviously know what they are doing.

Now my rant... I have often felt (still do) that LinkedIn (maybe YOUR company also?) was missing something in their pricing structure. Ok, free is nice (what I currently use), but IMO they are missing a crucial price point. The Price Point can be the difference between a $200M company, or a $2B company - Make no mistake about it, it is that important. A link to LinkedIn's Premium accounts sign-up page, shows the following options:



Should you not be able to read it in the image above, they jump from free to an immediate $20 per month (or offered for $199 per year). Now as much as I love their service, I simply can not justify $200 for the amount/type of networking I do. I am also certain that I am not alone here, and more then likely I am in the *sweet-spot* of what an average user would pay (besides free). My personal choice would be for some sort of a limited (small biz?) price point that I would bet would work best at $49.99 [ As an aside, and I will post about this in more detail latter, but this is an EXCELLENT example of how/when and why to do A/B testing - (yes, even on pricing!!), but who knows...maybe the magic number will end up being $39, or $29....

The second mistake LinkedIn makes regarding PRo Vs. Free users ? Their sales funnel!!! Without driving down into sub page, after sub page let's simply look at the top half of their front page first:








Where the heck is any offer to upgrade, any mention of a PRO account??? OK, let's now look at the bottom half of their homepage:




Careful, you might miss it!! There is is, buried underneath the Google Adwords!!! To, the right of the word "Premium", where it states "Upgrade Your Account". Now this is only the very first stage of their sales funnel, however it is usually the most important, and also the number one rule in Sales; ASK FOR THE ORDER ... and for Gods sake, ask for it where a user can find/see it!!!

My refrigerators social network

OK, so maybe my fridge will not invite my oven to join it's social network, but really the larger point is that EVERYTHING, not (only) everyone will have a social network. Huh?

Think about it, in a conventional social network there is a common element whether it is Business,Geography,School,etc. So why shouldn't all my physical possessions have there own? I own a Sears fridge, and was recently 'pissed' that Sears now charges $55 for their water purification cartridge for this model. When I first purchased the fridge, the cartridge was less then $30. This now adds over $600 per year to the cost a a refrigerator that only cost around $1000 to begin with. I would LOVE to speak with, and share stories, ideas,rants with other owners of my refrigerator, and so it goes.

Brands will want to have some level of control over this, to be preemptive in any PR 'damage control' they might need to do. This is a time where they can be pro-active, and not reactive. The Kenmores,Sonys, and other 'brands' should recognize the social trend first, and get their products their own social networks - One where they have an opportunity to steer and moderate the conversation to a greater extent then if their consumers started it for them.

Time to make the Donuts (and Coffee)!

What you need to learn from Dunkin Donuts

One need only go as far as their local Dunkin Donuts to learn how to better monetize their own software. Give it a try... Go into D.D. and order just a Coffee - at the P.O.S. you WILL be asked "Would you like a muffin with that, or perhaps a Donut?".

Now Dunkin Donuts does not have a monopoly on "second selling" the customer, far from it. When I was just out of school, one of my first jobs was working in a retail clothing store. Every sale was the same... Customer comes in looking for a pair of pants. They would bring the pants to the cash register, and the first thing I would say is "I have an excellent shirt that matches those pants perfectly, let me show you...".

So what this means to you, is that at the point of your customer's shopping cart experience where they are about to hit the Buy button, show them an additional offer - preferably a product bundle where they can save even more money should they purchase more then one item. Only have one product that you have made for sale...No problem, there are ALWAYS other peoples products that you can offer. If you are a low volume vendor, you can easily use affiliate systems to locate others products that have synergies with yours. Should you be doing higher volumes of sales, consider reaching out directly to other companies, where you should be able to make yourself a better deal then what they are paying their average affiliates. Do NOT be afraid to ask if you can white label their product, this is even better as you get to brand your products, and not someone elses.


The Digital space is no different then brick and mortar sales, second sell them!

Buy or Build - Penny Wise?

When deciding whether to Buy or Build - The most obvious reason to lean one way or the other is cost. Other considerations include Time to Market, First mover advantage, and the "polish" of having something designed specifically to your needs, and not bolted up. Affiliate Management Systems, Shopping Carts, Social Features pretty much anything you need can now days be found from third party vendors, and even better some that are open source. But be careful not to fall into the "Penny wise Pound foolish" trap.

I once worked for a company whose founder believed he and his developers code were superior to any others solutions, and that more importantly he could build the functionality cheaper then any off the shelf solution. While he might have been correct about any initial costs, I simply could not convince him that he was dead wrong.

We ended up developing our product in house (this was a consumer software program that we had been white labeling for just a few dollars per copy) and were able to launch the product into beta 9 months latter.

Ultimate cost was not the money (a few thousand a month) he paid his off shore developers for those 9 months...the real cost? Looking back, when the product did finally launch, it started at a 20k per month run rate, and quickly ramped from there to 500k a year. So even if you just factor the first 9 months of missed sales - You're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost sales.

At this same company, it was not just products, it was our infrastructure where he made that same WRONG decision... We built our own affiliate system internally at a cost of one year to get to market. It was just out right wrong to not have used a third party affiliate system even just temporarily ... That was one whole year of affiliate sales opportunities down the drain.

Product Management 101

Good product managers do NOT need to have any technical knowledge. They DO however need to be able to communicate with the entire team though, techies included. More importantly, the key to designing great software is once again, "Walking that fine line". Though time to market is often critical, rushing bad and buggy software out the door is equally critical. Many users will only give you one chance, they do not understand (nor should they) the product/production lifecycle and how that works.

While off-shoring much of a products development makes a lot of sense (especially for a money tight start-up), proper development and budgeting for same is much more then going to India/China/Russia and paying $10-$15 per hour to hero programmers. At the critical early stage of a products lifecycle, a product manager (or CEO) needs to have their core team in house, this is a must.

An earlier Carnegie Mellon study "Quality Software development @ Internet speed" dictates a framework that works well at walking the fine line between Hero and Level 5 development. Hero being that scrappy buggy code not well thought out in advance, and Level 5 being the "Best Practices" of development environments:

The model uses the 3-phase approach: requirement analysis, design and implementation. It is in the requirement analysis stage that I am a big believer that someone with a Product management/ Marketing background need be involved, even more then the technical lead. Though I am certain there are MANY competent programmers able to lead here, my experience has shown that often a programmer looks at software differently then the mainstream. They often get hung up on arcane features, and niche detail that only they would use, or even understand. Remember "KISS" Keep it Simple Stupid, this could not apply more to the software development process. Software more then ever needs to be "Grandma Proof". Bury the details at this stage of the development process and focus on the UI...this is the foundation on which you will latter build great software.

At the other extreme we have "Analysis Paralysis". Analysis Paralysis is when your project leads refuse to get the software out the door until it is bug free and perfect. Note to team - YOUR SOFTWARE WILL NEVER BE BUG FREE, NOR PERFECT - It will always be a work in progress. Remember, walk the line and you'll be fine

*stay tuned*

Thanks for your patience! I know I have not blogged recently, this is because I am a semi-finalist in a Business Plan competition...Bizplan was due by today! Next I will be helping the $12 Billion per year Music Biz make lots of money Web 2.0 style, in the 21st century.

Soon I will get back to helping; VC's screen web 2.0/Net start ups, locate their competition,fix broken business models,sell off assets headed for the dead pool; Start-ups write their business plans,develop new business models and revenue streams,fix broken strategies,do their bizdev,structure their marketing,strike their deals; Internet & Web 2.0 Companies teach them what a white paper is,proper pr,marketing subsets such as marketing collateral,trade shows & exhibitions,contests,talking to sales team,high level business development, website design, GUI design and usability, and lots lots more ... Stay tuned!

Andy

buying Print Media

No one should ever pay rate card and I assume most do not. I was always very proud that I was able to get excellent placement in tier one publications at MY price and not theirs. It would be inappropriate for me to "name names" here, but what I will state is for a $69k rate card price I was paying less then $20k. For another with a 25k rate card I was paying in the four figures.

Be careful with your media buys though - price is not everything. I always stipulated, and was granted "front of mag" placements. Most of the time, I was even able to receive a right hand page, and sometimes got the fold page as well!!! Make certain you take care of your ad. rep. :-)

Yahoo OneConnect

Day late and a dollar short!! Just one day (maybe even hours) after I highlighted a $15Billion opportunity to own mobile - Yahoo introduces Yahoo One Connect at the Barcelona Mobile show:

Congratulations to Marco Boerries, and his team!!

http://mobile.yahoo.com/oneconnect

In my earlier post, I referenced why others already in that space would fail. Kudos to Yahoo's OneConnect product managers - It's like they read my mind. Yahoo will succeed - here's why;

1) Support multiple (and most) of the popular social networks, not just Yahoo properties.

2) Work "Off Deck", so I do not have to use a particular wireless carrier that they chose to partner with.

3) Work with OTHER Instant messaging products, not just Yahoo's.

Image is Everything!

Website when I was first hired

I was with this company from 2000-2007. Possibly the most painful employment I ever had. Don't get me wrong, I like the product, liked what I did (headed up all marketing / bizdev and sales). I LOVED all my success. Unfortunately, I worked for a micro-managing CEO who had the mentality of a software developer, but the business acumen of a peanut. So after BEGGING for years, to let me take over the message/ look & feel of our website - It was like pulling teeth and took years. Here is a look at the website when I first started, with a new *look* approximately once a year. NOTE to web designers and marketing people; WHITE (empty) SPACE is GOOD - LESS is MORE!!!:

Front Page 2007

Enterprise Page 2007 (I lobied for this look for the main site as well but was denied)

Main Page 2002

Main Page 2003

I called it an ICMS - Now at its simplest form You call it Blogging Software

Was just thinking back to 1995, my first Internet Start-Up. Raised angel money at a $10M Valuation, and got as far as a proof of concept site, based on our ICMS technology. Funny to note that sites based on our ICMS still exist (and are totally self maintained) today;

Go to The Website


DDBC has created an Internet technology called the Image Content Management System (ICMS). The ICMS is designed to allow any company operating in vertical or specialty markets a robust and quick "time to market" solution for adding and implementing a buyer - seller model on the Internet. Below is a brief overview of the Image Content Management System Technology. You can then visit an example of the system at www.art-smart.com or visit www.ddbc.com for a more detailed description of the ICMS technology. The ICMS is considered to be beyond an end-to-end solution. Simply putting up an online catalog of your products just will not do. Ask yourself, will it cover both my retail and wholesale (extranet) needs? Is it simple and yet robust enough for my customers to navigate? Can anyone within my organization administer the site, without the need for special computer skills? Can I update and change my content 24 hours a day? Will my site be able to grow as our customers and inventory grows? Will it run on any platform? Is it search engine friendly? Buyers and Sellers Speaking the Same Language - Our unique categorizing matrix gives the ICMS engine unparalleled search capabilities. A Platform That Grows As Your Needs Grow - Because the ICMS is an application server, and not CGI based, it scales as your site traffic grows. Your Own Look And Feel - The ICMS is driven by standards based HTML templates allowing for complete reconfiguration of the "look and feel" of the target site without touching any of the code. End User 'Point and Click' Maintenance - Whether being used in a multi - vendor environment, or a multi department environment, every exhibitor has 'end user' control over their own home page. Your Products Found by NEW Customers - Specialized technology allows the ICMS database to be posted on to search engines. Users Search THEIR Way - There are a multitude of browsing techniques for your customers to use.

1 + 1 + 1 = $15Billion - IMNEARBY.com

IMNEARBY.COM The Killer App.


It is important to note that, IM technology, Contact Management and LBS components can easily be licensed, not just built internally. This is important, because this is a market that needs to be hit prior to other larger players entering the space. So the concept is to be able to suck everyone of your business and/or personal contacts into a neutral IM client (should work ideally not just with AIM, but with all the messaging clients). Marry the IM client to Navigon’s SDK … And you have an immediate mobile social network unrivaled… Users would be able to determine who sees them and who does not, as well as “friends of friends “ (linked in).

So one day I happen to be at the airport, and my IM client would alert me that someone in my social network is nearby me…I would have the opportunity to “meet” / cloak / “reject” … Paid user business model for PRO features, as well as huge local advertising opportunity.

There are already many different companies in this space ie;

Appear
Ask Mobile GPS
Carmenta
Dodgeball (service)
Garmin
Ipoki
Loopt
Meetro
Mologogo
Navxs
Navizon
Skyhook Wireless
Smarter Agent
Socialight
Sprint Family Locator
Super Local
Swirl
Trackme
Trimble Outdoors
Trisent
WaveMarket
whereaboutz

Problem is as with most start-ups, they lack correct product management,business model and marketing. Carriers will always try and protect this via their "Walled Gardens", charging a monthly fee. Why this ultimately fails to become the gorilla is because - Apps/Content just want to be free * Note how the multi-billion dollor MVNO/Ringtone business is constantly moving off-deck; www.tonethis.com Carriers loose because their models lock out all other carriers other then themselves (think the multi-year ongoing communication issue between Yahoo Messenger,MSN Messenger, AIM Messenger,etc) . Free + Cross Platform = Scale / Category Killer most quickly.

Initial GEO locating can be done via Cell Tower triangulation, IP addressing as well as GPS. It is expected however that the majority of cell phones shipped going forward will have GPS - Thus, ultimately the service would prefer to support GPS.


So who will be in this market?

Wireless carriers (Verizon,AT&T,Sprint,T-Mobile)... They will all leverage their existing users...they will not be the victors for the earlier aforementioned reasons.

Operating System guys (Microsoft via their windows mobile,Google via their android, Apple via Iphone)

Portal guys (Yahoo via their large userbase combined with their Yahoo IM userbase)

IM Clients (AOL IM,YahooIM,Microsoft Messenger,Meebo,Trillian)

Phone Guys (Nokia,Motorola,Apple,Sony/Ericson,RIMM)

GPS & Sat guys (TomTom,Mapquest (aol),Garmen)

Note to RIAA and record labels

Now you want anti malware software to scan desktops for illegal music downloads??? Huh??? You need to loose all the DRM, and EMBRACE the digital economy.

1) Make ALL your music 100% free - There's nothing like free advertising, and this is what that is FREE ADVERTISING

2) Make your money on new ancillary revenue streams ie; RingTones,CallerTones, Higher quality (loseloss) digital recordings then the MP3's you offer for free,licensing fees for comercial uses,concerts,etc ...
3) Think outside the box for even newer yet to be discovered revenue streams. How much do you get everytime a Guitar Hero player downloads a new song??? How about making your music available for download on a "track" by "track" basis. Then, I, as a casual (or even professional) musicion could "Jam" with Aerosmith ... Do you know what every Tom, Dick and Harry would pay to be able to do that???

Marketing / PR for Web 2.0

It's not your father's PR anymore. Start up & Web 2.0 launches:

1) Interactive press kit - Beside hard copy needs online elements . ie ; Corporate Blog/s

2)YouTube videos both product demo & viral / fun campaigns (*think Superbowl ads on a start up budget).

3) PR Blitz to industry/product specific bloggers (*must be done prior to general press)

4) Podcast from both a corporate & product perspective

5) Website SEM/SEO

6) Launch via high visibility events ie- Demo / Showstoppers / etc

7) Gotta have a widget and ties to social networks when possible

8) Share functionality for viral effect

9) Beta launch invites need be limited at first ala google email launch


**Updated in response to a question someone asked on whether PR should be run in or outside:

I have dealt with, and there are many agencies that will work with you on a "per hit" pricing scheme. I do not recommend this however and I am a big believer that you get what you pay for. PR is NOT and should not be practiced how it was even ten years ago (though it is not that far off).

You can get a very competent PR (outside) team for as little as $5-$6k per month. To be done properly however, I would strongly suggest that they be managed by someone in house. This is for a few different reasons. No one will know your product as well as you do, nor will they be able to pitch your product with the passion you will have. An outside agency should be used for their contacts and introductions... Most of the time saying only what they need to walk you in.

Another reason it is important to manage this resource internally is that if you let them simply run loose, they do not necessarily know your needs/what's available outside of basic media contacts. For example, when I managed PR for a consumer software company, not only were media hits (newspaper,wire,Tv,radio,blog) important - but equally important was getting the company in front of, and entered into different "award" offerings (download.com Best Software of the Year, Crunchies, SIA awards,etc). Regarding an outside agency working 100% on a per hit basis only, I would turn the question back on you... As a sales person do you work for 100% commission only, or do you (as most) have a salary, benefits as well as a *bonus* kicker commission?

Stupid Factoid of the day

If you bought stock in the 1920's, it took you till 1954 to break even!!!!!

Stupid Factoid of the day

As we move from an agricultural economy, to an industrial economy and now to a service economy ... Services as a percentage of GDPis now more then 2 to 1 over durables/non-durables

Yelp! I Stumbleupon my Blogcatalog! Can you Xobni that?

(The following story means nothing, other then it contains over 200 random names of various Web 2.0 companies... What should you learn from this? ...Perhaps the *Cutsie name* stage is too cluttered lately...time to name your product/website something that aligns it with what it does)

NOTE: Try to keep it a verb ...pass me a *Kleenex*, *Google* me ,etc ...


So I was Bebop-ing to my Clickcaster when these Musicmobs with Musicstrands come up to me and say use your Streampad to listen to Radiotime its Purevolume. It has Upto11 channels. I heard that old Bitty down the block used her Blogburst and Allyourwords. There’s only 9rules to Blogmarks.

1. Your page must have a Butterfly.
2. You can Blurb about anything.
3. You must mention how those Clipmarks are Delicious.
4. Onlywire is Listible but you’ll be able to Looklater.
5. Anyone you befriend you must Meetwithapproval.
6. Any Upcoming events must be approved by the site.
7.No Lifetype, also known as writing about everything!
8. Use a Blogladder to climb up in the world of blogging. And finally number
9. Before you right do some Structureblogging.

The net day I was sitting at a Campfire and I see 3bubbles. It was odd but I ignored it. Then I Chatsum up with these people. They told me they lived in Favorville. They used some Hubpages to get directions and stored it in the Ifolder. We hit this juice place called the Jotspot, the workers were on strike at Rallypoint. They needed People2pray that the strike would be over soon. If I may Say-So my StudyBuddy knew a lot about strikes and maybe could help them. I was done with standing in the Socialight so I was at Standpoint thinking Whatshouldireadnext. I decided to read a book called Lime, I found it at this Librarything. It had Comics and some Quicktoons, which I really found funny. Later that day I was playing some Dodgeball and I really Stickam good. Iglanced at my watch and realized it was time to write in my LiveJournal and do some MapMix research.

On my MySpace and Facebook I wrote about Twocrowds in my school. I was Linkedin to the more popular crowd. The weird kids had funky styles one had Plum hair, but for some reason her nickname was TinFinger. The most popular girl in my school’s nickname was Theblackstripe, she was awesome. Then it hit me, I had to go get some school supplies. So I walked over to the 24sevenoffice supply store. I saw a book there called “Helpspot the dog cross the road” It was the book that guaranteed me a Simpleticket to an A in English. I went home to do some research on the book and decided to download some music on my Genielab

Ok-Cancel, two buttons that I always saw when I downloaded music. I downloaded a hilarious song. The song is made up of one word throughout 2 minutes. It just goes “Wufoo Wufoo , I’m in the club hollerin Wufoo Wufoo.” After 43deals with my parents they let me get the song. It was by Closo the crumping clown. The album coverpopped up and it was a picture of a Redtoucan. I payed my parents Tenbills for the song. I must of impatiently Yelped so many times during the duration of the download. I was Castingwords in every direction. It took forever! I tried to Givemeaning to the song and Listsomething good about it, but it was to plain. I Trustmymail but when I get stupid spam it pisses me off. If Yousendit you will here words from me. The Secondsite I went to was yomama.com. I played Millionsofgames on that one site. It was Bliss but it used a lot of Memory.

In this one game there were a Bunchballs flying at me. Ugh, my computer only had 30gigs left. What was I to do? I deleted Allmydata and put it in a Box with a Bolt. I needed to store my photos somewhere. So I put them on my Photobucket account. I had so many pictures it was like a Picturecloud. I had formally been Simplyhired by an art company so I had experience to be a photo Colorblender. My Brainreactions to the job was extremely happy, I finally got a job. There were 43things I needed for the job and I had all 43. I was a sketch artist for the Chicagocrime lab. After work everyday I go to the Cafespot and use my friend Alexscoupons to Dropcash on the waiter Edgeio. I go some coffee and did a Jigsaw puzzle.

My-brand of choice is Starbucks but Dunkin Donuts is okay too. I knowmore coffee brands but those are the two best. I Root on Starbucks because since I was little they were Thisplaceiknow. And the Titlez of that café is off da chain! After I had my coffee I walked around the corner to the opera theatre. The Castpost was up…and I got the lead role. Everybit of my happiness was conceived by this joyful role. I Glided down the road. I jumped over my neighbor’s Backfence and did a crisscross jump down the road until I got to my house.

Later I went to work and did my dailyrotation and was bored out of my mind. I was informed that the knownow newradio had finally been up and ready to listen to. The advice of the day on the radio was to go to the Strategicboard and rethink my life. There are a lot of Topix going on in my life, for example how I almost got mugged going down 2nd Avvenu the other day. I was totally Thinkfree that day. All I remember was looking in a weird mirror and seeing me with 24eyes and then all of sudden a man came up from behind me. He had like 1000tags on, it was so scary.

His name was Alexa. He must have been a Blogdigger. He must have just finished eating because he had Gravee on his beard. My Golden Retrievr attacked him. It was montastic, I was so proud. I was still processing what was happening when these Scriptacilious birds flew onto me. It was a very cloudalicious day so I was just beat. My sproutliner was all smeared but it was computer time again.

Ilovetravelstories so I decided to blog about my horrid day. I was at sharingpoint so I needed to vent. It was time for exercise with my husband. So we went to the Adultswim class. Many men Blinkx at me so it was very akward. I just ignored them and did my Dailymotion. The other couples never stopped talking, I referred to them as the Yackpack. Wow that was a long long day. Goodbye for now.


.

Fixing Yahoo

Note to Jerry Yang;

1) Recognize that you are not the one to lead / reposition YHOO. Stick to your knitting, you're making a fool out of yourself.

2) Spin off all non-strategic assets IE Alibaba,Y Japan,etc (approximate value of $15 billion of its current $27 Billion market cap).

3) 15%-20% reduction in headcount.

4) Dutch auction/buyback of stock .

5) Stake and spin/off new stand alone initiatives.

6) Go Open Source, and let others build in an ecosystem.

Kudos for Molly... Someone gets it!!

An article from CNET's Molly Wood entitled"Good-bye computer, Hello World" is a MUST READ for anyone looking out over the horizon.

http://www.cnet.com/4520-6033_1-5759958-1.html

She articulates and predicts CORRECTLY (IMO) where Google and other's will be taking the next "evolution" to...

Why? Because the pieces are all in place... Wired & Wireless broadband (Wimax,3G,etc),XUML or Ajax,every phone/cell phone/pda/device can connect to the net,Voice to text and Text to speech,etc.

True definition of convergence =What we want,when we want it,where we want it,how we want it.