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We provide marketing consulting to new ventures, turning great ideas into successful companies.
We provide marketing consulting to new ventures, turning great ideas into successful companies.
Sunday, July 4th, 2010
in: Communicate, Standing out
Public relations is a tricky game. For a long time, PR has been about shaping a message — getting the words just so, tugging on an audience’s heartstrings. But shaping a message is changing dramatically in today’s more connected, more transparent world, and I can think of no better demonstration of this than the Vuvuzela button in Youtube. In the unlikely event that you haven’t yet heard of this nefarious noisemaker, here are the facts: it’s loud; it’s indigenous to African sporting events; and it’s droned so loudly at every World Cup match this year that programmers have built custom filters that remove its sound from games, and many fans have called for its abolishment. So Google put a Vuvuzela button in Youtube. Not, as you might expect, to filter it out. Instead, the button adds the unmistakeable droning to any video clip for which it’s enabled. Changing Youtube isn’t something that’s done lightly. For one thing, every time Google changes the Youtube interface, millions of visitors’ browsers need to re-download its components, generating a flood of new traffic that would otherwise be cached in browsers if the interface hadn’t changed. That Flash plug-in is 132.61 KBytes, and Quantcast estimates Youtube receives around 100M unique visitors a month. Bandwidth consumption aside, as every good web operator knows, changes are bad simply because they break things. There’s also testing to consider. Google probably has clever ways to minimize the impact of new components, but however you slice it, changes to a popular part of the UI cost the company money. What’s more, this is a feature with no real utility. It’s an annoyance, a trick, a novelty. It doesn’t add anything to the viewing experience — in fact, it outright ruins it. Read more…As a marketer, would you have allowed this?
Friday, April 9th, 2010
in: Communicate
When I was in university, I was convinced that advertising was all about clever turns of phrase. It’s an idea that’s reinforced on Mad Men: the perfect slogan can sell a billion cigarettes. But advertising — indeed, any kind of communication — is really about empathy: get the right message to the right person at the right stage in the buying process, and you’ll win. The best way to ensure that your messages are clear and targeted is what we call a message map. It’s essentially a flowchart that shows the stages a prospect goes through until they become a buyer, along with the objections they have at each stage of the process and the content needed to overcome those objections. It borrows from the concept of a sales funnel, which should be familiar to anyone in sales or web analytics. It works best for bigger-ticket purchases that involve several decision makers, rather than for small, impulsive buying decisions. This is some of Rednod’s secret sauce, but in the interest of openness and conversation, we figured we’d show it here. It’s a process we’ve developed over the years, and we use it in most of our client engagements. If I could do only one thing with a startup, this would be it. In some cases, the message map exercise sends companies or investors back to the drawing board to reconsider their entire offering. I’m going to show you how it works using the example of someone buying a new car. You can use this approach for nearly anything; the point isn’t to learn how to sell cars, it’s to think about the messages and collateral you’re creating in the context of your target customer. Read more…
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
in: Communicate, Funding, Standing out
Investors and partners have short attention spans. If you have something to communicate, Guy Kawasaki suggests you keep it to one idea and five sentences. I followed those suggestions when I asked him to write a sidebar for Complete Web Monitoring, and it worked. But what if you have something more complex to say — a business plan, for example? What if you’re giving a colleague a competitive analysis? Or proposing a new product? How long should that document be? In my experience, you should follow the seatback rule. This is the time between when a pilot asks passengers to put their seatbacks up and tray tables away, and the time when it’s safe to use portable electronic devices. Read more…
Friday, October 9th, 2009
in: Communicate, Funding, Startups
Next week, the ever-energetic Phil Telio is organizing the fifth Startupcamp in Montreal. He’s assembled five excellent new ventures from a long list of submissions, and both Tara Hunt and Chris Shipley will be attending the event. I’m helping to judge and counsel the participants, and in doing so I’m remembering just how hard it can be to explain what you do from within your own company. In a pinch, here’s what I usually advise people to do if they have no idea how it’ll go. You can break a presentation up into five chunks of a minute each, and use 2-4 slides for each minute, to get your point across.
Read more…
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
in: Case studies, Communicate, Standing out
[Update: Beth Kanter has re-posted this piece over on her blog; she's had some great guest posters keeping things moving over there while she makes the move from Boston to San Francisco. If you're looking for other resources on social networking and nonprofits, there's no place better than Beth's.] Last week, we helped out our friends at Visible Government with their Beers for Canada campaign. In the end, the campaign raised just over $1,000 in two days; donations will help open government data to citizens and promote transparency in public offices. We learned a lot about what did and didn’t work, and in the interests of transparency, we thought we’d share some of the lessons we learned along the way (and see if we can collect some ideas for next time.) A week before Canada Day (July 1) we built and tested a simple site that encouraged donors to “buy their country a beer” — basically making a donation. We told a few key bloggers and Twitter personalities about it beforehand; then, on June 30, we started talking about it online. We continued to mention it, and amplified what others were saying, until midday on July 2. From the outset, this was a short-term campaign built around a single day. We did this to give it urgency and purpose. We chose to start talking on June 30 because so many people were out the office (and away from their computers) on the holiday itself. But it’s important to realize the differences between a short-term campaign (minimal upfront work, strong word of mouth, modest goals, and real-time virality through Twitter) and a longer one. The timeframe also meant that most blog coverage only hit on July 1st (and thanks to all the bloggers who covered us!) What worked? What didn’t? What would we have changed? Here’s a quick list. Read more…How it worked
Friday, March 27th, 2009
in: Standing out, Startups
We call Rednod a startup accelerator. That means we get our hands dirty helping to design product features, business models, positioning, look and feel, business processes — whatever it takes to get the job done. It’s a lot of fun, particularly when the team is smart and they’re trying to solve an important problem. One of Rednod’s clients, FarmsReach, fits that bill especially well. They launched on Tuesday at the Green:Net conference. After ten months of hard work on a web platform that could actually transform the local, sustainable food industry, the company’s finally taking the covers off. Best of all, the company won the inaugural People’s Choice award at the Launchpad event with CEO Lana Holmes’ great presentation. The buzz has been huge, and while FarmsReach is taking it slow, focusing on San Francisco farms and restaurants, it’s a model that can work across North America in short order. Congratulations to the FarmsReach team. Also worth checking out is Saul Griffith’s awesome presentation on the energy we use, which takes a decidedly engineering-centric view at the daunting challenge humans face in trying to slake our thirst for energy. Green:Net was an excellent — and thought-provoking — event.