New Venture Marketing

The Souk & the Supermarket

A favorite client threatened to come to my site today and post a comment to the effect I haven't blogged in too long and isn't that a bit hypocritical for someone who is so enthusiastic about new Internet media.  So with the hope of doing a pre-emptive strike, I am posting today.  Okay, John, the ball is in your court.  How about that new web site?

I will be teaching a course at Stanford Continuing Studies this spring on the Internet and new digital media and I am delighted.

The course will be entitled:  The Souk & the Supermarket:  Demystifying New Internet Media.  The Souk in this instance will be a "new" model for community, chaotic, messy and ever changing, and the Supermarket, my metaphor for a conventional business, highly structured and controlled.  I've wanted a chance to explore the changes I have seen resulting from the impact of the Internet. This is a great opportunity.  So stay tuned.

Lunch at Hitachi Data Systems

It's so easy not to blog when you have gotten out of the habit, but there have been so many things, I have wanted to write about, I thought I better just begin. 

I have become increasingly interested  in this thing we are calling "social networking", the "aha" for me when I began to blog. The social part of blogging is one of those things that you don't get until you blog and then, the realization is amazing.  When I first began to blog some years back, I truly had no idea what it was or what it might mean for my clients or myself. 

Fast forward a few years later this September, I went to an event spawned by Jeremiah Owyang, one of my favorite bloggers. Jeremiah began by writing about web strategy and has since branched of in many new Internet arenas.  His is one of the few blogs I consistently read and I highly recommend it.

Any way, in his role as social networking evangelist at Hitachi, Jeremiah organized a lunch sponsored by Hitachi Data Systems whose purpose was to promote Hitachi Data Systems with web sites that wanted to scale.  Jeremiah extended his invitation over his blog site, and I decided to stop by and check it out.  It was an impressive event with a great many people and start ups .  The company provided lunch and attendees could grab a bite, stroll through the exhibits and catch up with friends. It was a very innovative and low key way to promote the company and its products AND it didn't cost the company a dime to promote the event and draw in attendees.  Jeremiah simply used his blog.

Among others, I ran into Shel Israel, whom, while I haven't seen him in years, have been following both his blog site and excellent book, Naked Conversations.  The book, co-authored with Robert Scoble, perhaps the best known of the a-list bloggers, is my hands down number one pick for books on business blogging. So I had the chance to tell him so and we caught up a bit.  I've known Shel in what seems like an earlier life when he was first at Regis McKenna and then on his own, and I was running my own firm, both of us doing what I would call traditional PR. 

It was great to catch up and compare notes and laugh about how dramatically things have changed.  I learned that Shel was working on another book, this time on social networking, and I was able to discuss my idea for a class on the new media and how to apply them. It was well worth the time spent.  Thank you, Jeremiah.

 

Larry Weber Web 3.0

Larry Weber, Chairman of the W2Group, was one of the keynotes at Red Herring's CMO 2006 Conference.  I was so excited by his ideas -- and in violent agreement.  Weber built the world's largest high tech PR firm, Weber Shandwick, then sold it off to begin again with a new effort focused next generation marketing services.

Weber began by saying that he thinks the Web is not in its 2.0 phase but in 3.0.  The first phase was site building, the 2nd, eCommerce and search and the 3rd and current phase, the Social Web, the world of communities.   

In the traditional PR model, Weber remarked, a company tries to influence the media, analysts, investors, customers and partners via the mass media. The role of marketing is to influence opinion.  In Web 3.0 companies, and marketing people, will be in turn influenced by their digital constituencies. 

"What characterizes a community?" Wikipedia defines community "as the sharing of ideas, intent, belief, resources, preferences or a multitude of other conditions that that the members share in common...."

3 Great New Books for the Entrepreneur (and anyone else)

I'd have been remiss in not recommending three terrific books.

The first, Growing Your Business with Google, by Dave Taylor, I've just finished reading and it is excellent.  Taylor, who writes a highly regarded technology blog, column and many other things has spent the last decade developing the experience and insight for this book. And it shows. The book, whose title doesn't do justice to the content, is really about how companies can -- and will -- use search engines to maximize their business in the future.  It provides a great deal of insight into how Google operates, how search engines find you and "promoting and growing your business online."

Taylor says, it's about visibility or how easily a company can be found or what he calls "findability".  "On the Internet," says Taylor, "visibility revolves around the question of when people search for your product or service, do they find you or your competitors?  How you achieve and use that findability is the essence of his new book.

 

Toward a New Communications Model (2)

This week under the leadership of blogging thought leader Elizabeth Albrycht, we will be discussing a new model for communications.   Elizabeth kicked off the week with a reflective exploration of "social practices within the framework of 'cooperation.'"  From her first piece:

... I open our discussion today with this statement, because I believe that "social practices" is what has historically been given short shrift in the world of technology -- and technology-based communications. We professional communicators adopt the latest-greatest tech tools (often rather slowly!) but we don't generally give much deep thought to what these tools mean to those we apply

New Free Database for Silicon Valley Startups

I just read on John Battelle's blog that Topix, a company, called the "Craigslist.org of news" by the SJ Mercury News has just begun a new service for start ups based on a former client's (LinkSV) database.  The combination should be an great reference for entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, accountants and others on some 2,500 Silicon Valley start-ups.

From the Merc, Link SV "is worth a deeper look itself.  The profiles include information like name and bio details of key executives, a business focus summary, a listing of board members, venture capital backing, company contact info and names of customers."

" Alternative database services like VentureOne and Venture Economics charge users a lot of money, largely because they deliver exclusive data about financing rounds, based on laborious work sending out questionnaires to start-ups and then subsequent fact-checking. While LinkSV says it too will charge for premium services, its free version is offers quite a bit. One cool feature allows you to search your LinkedIn contacts by clicking on highlighted executive names or companies listed on LinkSV."

I've been using LinkSV for sometime now and think the new service will provide a great benefit.