Even with SEO best practices “Marketing a crappy product doesn’t do well” says Neil Patel, Pronet Advertising

Posted by James Lim on 07/16/07 at 03:52 PM

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Failure in Silicon Valley

Posted by Glenn Gow on 06/05/07 at 12:37 AM

John Caddel writes about failure on the Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog. He talks about how in many companies, failure means you’ll be packing your bags soon.

We see this issue in spades in Silicon Valley. The big companies have a harder time failing, as their culture doesn’t enable it. For example, Wall Street will kill you if you have a single down quarter.

However, Venture Capitalists live in a failure culture. A very large percentage of their portfolio companies fail. Furthermore, an executive who fails attempting to start a company is viewed as an excellent choice to run a new venture. Granted, that executive isn’t as esteemed as the one who took a company public, but the exec who failed is more like the baseball player who struck out. They get to get up to bat again and again.

Now, the bigger companies use that culture of “acceptable failure” to their advantage by letting the VCs take the risk, and then, if the company succeeds, the big companies buy them.

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Social Media: Opportunity and Risk

Posted by Glenn Gow on 05/19/07 at 05:52 AM

Denise Shiffman writes about a report on the Inc. 500 by the Center for Marketing Research that speaks to smaller companies moving to social media faster than large companies.

The reason smaller companies are earlier adopters is that they perceive they have a lot less to lose. The larger companies are worried about their proprietary information getting out. They’re worried about losing control of their messaging. Their worried they won’t look good. They’re worried (by the attorneys) about legal issues.

This is not dissimilar to IBM’s early attempts to embrace Apache as a web server platform. “Oh no, we’ll get sued! We can’t control that code”, is what the attorneys said. And yet, IBM adopted it with a vengeance and rode a wave that really helped them grow their services business, because they saw the market opportunity and managed their risks.

THAT is what bigger companies need to do. SEE the market opportunity and if they’re concerned about risk, manage it, but don’t run away from this revolution because of it. In many ways, this is like cannibalization. Either you step in and be part of the revolution, or it will happen to you without you gaining from it in any way.

Big companies no longer have the control over messages that flow to decision-influencers, that they used to. Full control is gone. Big companies need to step in now to “participate in conversations”. Yes, this is a paradigm shift. That’s why they need to do it now and learn how to do it really well.

The world has already changed.

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Dell's Web 2.0 Effort Can Do Better

Posted by Glenn Gow on 05/07/07 at 08:51 AM

Companies are fundamentally changing their connection to their target markets, by connecting to those customers and prospects via Web 2.0 technologies. One example, highlighted further in John Cass’s blog, is Dell’s Ideastorm website. What you see here is an example of a company very wisely reaching out to its user community to ask for their ideas about what products to build.

They enable any person to contribute product ideas and offer a way to break it down by product category. In addition, you can promote ideas that already exist, discuss these with other users and see what Dell is thinking about the ideas created.

While this is a great start, and is an excellent way of reaching out to the user community for ideas, Dell is missing one critical component. Dell currently has no way of determining what ideas to invest in! They don’t have enough information to make an ROI decision.

A better solution is to ask for information regarding the target market the idea is to serve and/or information about who is presenting the idea and why that idea meets a particular customer need.

For example, is Dell more focused on business users or consumers? Within business users, are they more focused on large enterprise or small (and we can get a lot more granular than that). Within consumer, are they focused on the technology-savvy or the technology training-wheels consumer? Are they focused on the U.S. market or China ? Etc., etc.

If Dell knows what target markets they are focused upon as a company (or even within product lines), and they can map these new ideas to those target markets, then they can force-rank ideas so that a great idea is defined as one that helps them serve the needs of their most important target markets.

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Happy Birthday Ma.gnolia!

Posted by Karen O'Brien on 02/16/07 at 03:15 PM

I had fun last week at Ma.gnolia's 1st Birthday party, held at Citizen Space in San Francisco. There, I met Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff who brought out some awesome bottles of wine from his personal collection for the occasion, thank-you Larry! We chatted a bit about Ma.gnolia and where it's going. For those who don't know about Ma.gnolia.com - its a fabulous social bookmarking site that allows you to bookmark and tag your favorite sites online AND it allows you to see what your friends are others are bookmarking. In a random browse though the site I saw the bookmarks of one of my favorite TV chefs Alton Brown. It got me thinking that having visibility into one's bookmarks can really tell you a lot about a person..kind of like peeking into someone's purse or wallet.

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