From social media to mobile commerce: My new gig
February 1, 2011
In October of 2008, I moved to Austin and starting working at Powered. Powered had been around for a long time, since 1999, but was just then embarking on its journey as a social media marketing company. Over three amazing and tumultuous years we succeeded in building one of the largest and most successful social-media-focused agencies in the world.
It was a fantastic learning experience as we worked through forging new client relationships, built great partnerships, and acquired three accomplished and like-minded companies to flesh out our vision for the capabilities the next-generation agency would possess. I worked alongside some amazing people, both inside and outside of our little company.
This past December, that world got even bigger as The Dachis Group acquired Powered as part of a vision that encompasses not only social media marketing (how companies talk with their customers) but also the use of social media to advance workforce collaboration and partner optimization. “Social Business” is truly a guidepost for how the companies of the future will function, and there are massive challenges that large companies must overcome to get there. The Dachis Group will no doubt be one of the companies that will lead the way.
For me, having helped to build something of which I am truly proud and seen it successfully off, it is time to move on to the next challenge. That’s why I’ve chosen to move from social media to mobile, and to a great start-up company here in Austin named Digby.
Advances in mobile platforms and mobile devices are some of the most exciting things happening in our technology culture today, and we are really just scratching the surface. Digby is a company that works with retailers specifically to create not only the mobile buying experience (“mobile commerce”) but is also pioneering the mobile in-store experience. I will be helping them with Product Marketing, shaping the future of that experience and working with them to be successful in bringing it to market.
I will miss my colleagues, clients, and partners from Powered, but I am enthusiastic about the great team at Digby and what I will get to build with them.
Apple unleashed
June 8, 2010
I don’t make any bones about admitting that I’m a big Apple fan. I’d be hard-pressed to name another company that I think has their approach to the marketplace and how to innovate for consumers so well thought out. I think this is particularly true in the portable device space (iPods, iPhones, iPads). I don’t own a Mac computer and still can’t make the economic argument for it, but in my opinion their portable devices rule the roost. And let’s be honest, for consumers at home, the future is devices. We are likely to find in the near future that the iPhone was never about the phone, it was about getting in your pocket.
As I followed the unveiling of their latest – the iPhone 4 – yesterday, I had to feel excited for users (despite the clear disadvantage of a remaining lock-in to AT&T) and sorry for handset competitors. I wonder what it would be like to have to compete against them in device space.
A likely comparison would be to how I feel when my dog Rio is able to escape the leash, which she has done a Houdini-like 7 or 8 times during her life (which breaks down to about once a year). Once free, she retreats to about 40 yards away and lingers, paying no apparent attention to me. This is just far enough away that if I break suddenly into a dead sprint I will get within 5 feet of catching her before she is able to escape again to another 40 yard cushion.
Over the past year or two, I feel like other manufacturers have been catching up, slowly but surely, to the iPhone. Apple, seemingly unaware, has been sniffing a few trees and loitering non-chalantly. Then the sudden leap forward comes. Competitors must again find themselves 40 yards away, out of breath, dreading the next phase of the chase.
Lines in the sand
June 7, 2010
One of my favorite excerpts from Rework, the 37Signals‘ folks latest (and potentially best) book:
Draw a line in the sand
As you get going, keep in mind why you’re doing what you’re doing. Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or service. You have to believe in something. You need to have a backbone. You need to know what you’re willing to fight for. And then you need to show the world.
A strong stand is how you attract superfans. They point to you and defend you. And they spread the word further, wider, and more passionately than any advertising could.
Strong opinions aren’t free. You’ll turn some people off. They’ll accuse you of being arrogant and aloof. That’s life. For everyone that loves you, there will be others who hate you. If no one’s upset by what you’re saying, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. (And you’re probably boring, too)
It’s a great passage on many levels, but the thing that resonated with me is that what you believe in as a business will lose you customers, and you have to be willing to accept that . . . and maybe even embrace it.
It’s what Apple does with it’s devotion to artistry and unwillingness to have anything other than complete control over the systems it designs.
It’s what Southwest Airlines does with it’s devotion to cheap, friendly travel and unwillingness to diversify its fleet, assign seats, or charge to check bags.
When you think about it, the companies with the most passionate fans also tend to have a healthy amount of critics. Are enough people complaining about what your company won’t do?
By the way, a thanks to Jane, who bought me a copy of this book before I had to buy one.
Putting It On Goal
November 3, 2009
A good friend of mine and co-founder of CaptainU sent a video along this morning that reminded me of a concept I learned from playing certain sports – most notably soccer and (during a few years in Tulsa) roller hockey.
In those sports, where both sides are shooting at a goal and much of your success is governed by the positioning of players and the angles of the field/rink, you’ll often hear team members encouraging each other to put the ball or the puck “on goal.” Putting it on goal is basically taking a shot at the goal where, if it was unblocked, it would go in, even if there are visible obstructions (like the goalie).
The reason you want to put it on goal a lot is that you really don’t know what will happen. The puck might ricochet, the ball might take a weird bounce, and the goalie might just miss it. The goalie might go to the ground to block your shot and a teammate might get an open look on the rebound. The more attempts you make, the more chances you have that something will break in your favor. But if you dribble the ball or control the puck around the perimeter and never take a shot (because you’re waiting for the perfect look), you have no chance.
As the video shows below, even the most ridiculous attempts lead to success sometimes. But you’ll only know one way or another if you try. And try again. And try again.
Open practices
April 2, 2009
I’m not a huge fan of the University of Southern California, mostly for the sole reason that I personally flew to Miami to watch them pummel my Oklahoma Sooners 55-19 in the 2005 Orange Bowl game. But you can’t deny their success as a football program under coach Pete Carroll, who has led their program since 2000.
One of the things I’ve always found interesting about Carroll is that nearly all of his team’s practices are open to the public. Most college coaches guard practices closely, not only because they find that an audience distracts the players – but also because they don’t want competitors sending scouts to study their team.
Carroll finds that an audience helps players get accustomed to the distractions of a real game-time scenario, makes them practice harder, and is fairly dismissive of the potential danger that competitive spies pose. While many attribute this to arrogance (notably those who have watched his team pummel theirs, of which I am certainly not the only one), I believe that Carroll understands the role of execution vs. methodology.
Sure, Carroll isn’t handing anyone his playbook, and he doesn’t allow photography or video at practices, but he is ok with more openness than most because he understands that just because he is revealing how he does it doesn’t mean you can go do the same. You won’t have his experience, you won’t have his athletes, and even if you did you would be starting late. You may learn a lot about his methods, but you won’t be able to outdo him at his own game.
This is a good lesson in business as well. Someone stealing your ideas or you way of doing things is often far less of a threat than you think it is. Because ultimately it’s not about the ideas, it’s about the doing. And ultimately no one can really execute your idea the way you see it better than you.
Being guarded with your ideas can be dangerous, because the more you convince yourself of their value, the less focused you will be on executing on them. You will not benefit from the discussion that sharing ideas brings, and your ideas will not evolve.
Try holding a few open practices, and see what it brings.
The three big questions in sales
March 3, 2009
There are three questions I think a salesperson has to answer for a potential buyer:
- What is it that I’m buying? (Understanding)
- How is it relevant or valuable to me specifically? (Relevancy)
- How risky is it to buy? (Risk)
The difficulty of answering these questions can vary widely depending on what you are selling and to whom you are talking. But they all have to be addressed before someone will buy.
For a salesperson, understanding which question seems to be the most challenging to answer most of the time can be key to focusing your message. Also, experience in answering these questions in order, while choosing just the right words to answer each question quickly and effectively is key.
For a marketer, by choosing potential buyer segments that easily understand what you are selling, find what you are selling very relevant, and feel that it is less risky than others do, you will likely make things much easier on yourself. With each successive sale, understanding and relevancy will be better understood by tougher targets – while risk will be perceived as lower.
For a businessperson, you can rate the worthiness of a business on these three dimensions. If one out of the three is a real barrier, you can probably find a way around it and capitalize on doing so. But if what you are thinking of providing to buyers is confusing, lacks wide relevancy, and is a risky thing to buy, it’s clearly not a wise investment.
A final point: most salespeople, and most websites, ignore the first question. Then they wonder why they just can’t get past the second or third one.
Music should look like professional sports
February 13, 2009
I was understandably rankled when I read about the recent merger between Ticketmaster and Live Nation. Just when we were getting some competition going in the live ticket sales industry, we’re going back to the monopoly. In the article, the writer tried to put a positive spin on it by saying that perhaps now they’ll go to an auction-based ticket sales format so that artists can get paid the true value of their performance (much of which is now captured by Stubhub and ticket agencies on the secondary market).
The thought of an auction is a bit scary. Demand for hot show tickets in most cities is out of control, with individual tickets to most desirable shows going for 2 to 3 times their base sales price – typically hundreds of dollars each. It seems like you’d be able to see a lot fewer shows than you do in the current system.
But for the sake of comparison, let’s look at another public-venue entertainment industry: professional sports. One of the reasons professional athletes get paid as much as they do is because of the economic concept of “rivalry.” Simply put, rivalry identifies whether a good or service can be enjoyed at the same time by more than one person. For instance, only one person can eat my box of junior mints. Therefore that box is only worth the three dollars the movie theater overcharged me. However, the movie we sit down to watch can be enjoyed simultaneously by everyone in the theater. That is why one movie can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars (if it’s any good).
Professional sports teams and the athletes that play for them know this. They do as much as possible to get their on-field activities in front of as many people as they can. People pay top dollar to attend events, with ticket prices set close to market price, and then the leagues have massive TV contracts that bring the events to people all over the world. Merchandising and celebrity-athlete spokesperson contracts are for huge amounts of money, fueled by TV availability and awareness (the Dallas Cowboys, Chicago Cubs, and Notre Dame Fighting Irish all excel at grabbing national attention, which is why they are more valuable than other teams in their leagues).
So why aren’t rock concerts like that? Why can’t you watch them all live on TV (I know some of them are on pay-per-view, but that doesn’t count)? Well, I’ll point an accusatory finger (again) at the packaged media business. By putting musical content on to a tape, a CD, a DVD – by slapping DRM technology on digital downloads - media distributors are trying to introduce rivalry into a medium that is characteristically non-rivalrous. Follow me? Music is intangible, abstract – not at all like my junior mints. When people say that “music wants to be free,” they don’t mean without cost. They just mean that it, by its very nature, is supposed to be enjoyed by more than one person at the same time.
The economic reality of music and the musicians that produce it is that they are like professional athletes, and that economic reality is now causing a collapse in packaged media sales. Because you just can’t fight the nature of something.
What do record companies do? Is the music industry going shrink or even <gulp> collapse? No, not at all.
A big part of the solution is to follow the lead of professional sports. Raise tickets prices so your “athletes” get paid what they’re worth. Don’t fire everyone who works in your packaged media business. Move them over into a new type of distribution job for “ConcertTV” channels 1-20 that air live concerts of all types from all over the world on cable, 24/7. I’d pay $15 a month for those channels. With this increased personal exposure for artists, ramp up the merchandising and sponsorship dollars (there is so much that could be done here that isn’t being done). More distribution and marketing jobs there, too.
The side effects of this approach? Prices for albums lower further to a price that lets more people enjoy more of the good stuff (25 cents a song, anyone?) – music becomes more accessible and demand is further stimulated. Supply follows: Bands tour more, more venues are built, more musicians can actually make a living doing it on the low end – music becomes bigger and more diverse. Bands that can’t actually play their instruments, are supported only by good production and marketing, or write albums full of filler can’t put on a decent show and fail – music becomes more about talent and quality.
I for one think the above realities will come to pass regardless of what the record companies do, and I’m pretty excited about it. But I’d like to see the record companies continue to employ the good people they have, I’d like to see the transition happen faster and with less heartbreak. So here’s hoping that sometime soon, during a Sunday afternoon football game, a few record executives have epiphanies.
Photo Credit: Originally uploaded by Mark Sevigny
Web 3.0 is what you make it
August 5, 2008
I recently got sent this very well-written article by Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com and a this video of Eric Schmidt from Google both answering the question “What is Web 3.0?”
Well, not surprisingly both definitions are highly biased toward the bets that their respective companies are making. Marc thinks it’s cloud computing, or SaaS, or a world without deployed software. Hmm, Salesforce.com is not beating a new drum there. Eric also think it’s cloud computing, but a huge number of point solutions launched and tied to together with open architectures. That sounds awfully like Google’s product strategy.
Of course, I don’t think either of these guys is trying to requisition the term “Web 3.0″ in a greedy or underhanded way. Their corporate directions are only a logical result of where they genuinely think things are going – not vice versa.
But I think they’re both wrong about Web 3.0. To see why, you just have to climb into Marc’s article a bit. In it he defines Web 1.0 as “anyone can transact,” Web 2.0 as “anyone can participate,” and Web 3.0 as “anyone can innovate.” The problem is he switched what he meant by “anyone” in the Web 3.0 instance. The first two were sea changes for everyday users, and I like and agree with his definitions there. The third one is a sea change for developers, which will arguably go unnoticed by users. And sadly, there are still a lot more users than developers. So his definition is more like Web 2.5.
That said, I don’t know exactly what Web 3.0 will be. But I do think the following things:
1. There will be one. A 3.0, that is. The Internet is not reaching maturity, more like just headed into adolescence.
2. 3.0 will come about as a result of another sea change in the user experience, not just the developer experience.
3. It will have something to do with the reversal of informational flow. Instead of you searching to find it, it will find you.
In the meantime, Web 3.0 could be whatever you want it to be. Which means your web company is headed in exactly the right direction.
My related post over at The Engaged Consumer: Marketing 2015: Where Everybody Knows Your Name
