State of the Media

Taking a leap at another challenge: 12 Entrepreneurs

Now that things are calming down to a dull roar I should be able to get back to my series on location-based web apps next week.  But today I just wanted to give you aheads up on an overall new direction for me and what I write about.  

I'm working on several fronts with people that want to change the world.  I wish I could say that  that some of those people are in the semiconductor and EDA worlds but that is just wishful thinking.  I recently helped launch a new organization that is aiming at being a movement to change how start ups are launched and nurtured called the 12 Entreprenuers (here's the NTP report).  These are people from a handful of countries in Europe as well as US businessment, government representatives, angel investors and people who are thinking about things in new ways.  Here's a couple of snapshots.

The first signers...

 

Me as the MC at the kickoff meeting...

These vibrant people are working in online video content, medical applications, gaming, mobile apps, location-based technology, green tech, publishing... everything but electronics.  They are brilliant, innovative and driven.  It feels good to be around them and is giving me hope for the future.  You'll be hearing a lot more about it, but I write this today to say, if you really want to do something about unemployment, the economy, and the general state of the world, I'm all ears.  There is a movement afoot and everyone is welcome to join.  But we're not going to try to revive a dead horse.

Just saying...

Social media for your neighborhood.

Last week I started a series on the importance and future of geolocal (also called geosocial) apps and outlined a few of the roadblocks to success including the lack of widespread adoption of the underlying technology (smart phones), holding the interest of the audience, and the lack of community building inherent in the current options.  Today I want to look more into that last problem and how some players are overcoming it.

As I said last week, the big benefit of social media is its ability to build communities through the web.  But those communities are, for the most part, virtual.  If you are in Facebook or any other platform, you have a large group of people in your network that you have never actually met face to face.  Yet, you are in contact with them regularly no matter where they are in the world.  you know a lot about them and you have several common interests.  However, try to do that on a local level with social media and you run into a problem: you can’t without a lot of effort.

I discovered this over the past two years on some pro bono work I’ve been doing for Sustainable Redwood City.  I wanted to use social media to grow the organization but discovered that if I didn’t already have a personal relationship with people in my community, I couldn’t actually get them to connect with me or the organization on any SM platform.  I had to meet them first before they would accept the connection.

I also could not use social media to discover people in my community or neighborhood because the platforms did not get that granular.  In Facebook, for example, I can choose the Silicon Valley network or the San Francisco network, but not the SF Peninsula, San Mateo County, Redwood City or my own neighborhood, Friendly Acres.  I was forced to accept a position in a large geographical context.  This isn’t as much of a problem if you live in New York City or San Francisco, but it doesn’t help the 2 million+ people in the Bay Area.

What social media lacks is a local approach and even the entry of Twitter and Facebook into this realm is not helping.

Geolocal/social apps are supposed to help solve that problem by making it possible for local business to reach their local community and expand their business.  If you are an ice cream shop or a coffee bar, it’s a great idea because you will succeed if you get a lot of regular customers.  If you are a dentist of an auto shop, not so much.  If you go back to those guys more than once in six months you have a problem.  But the real benefit lies with the vendor, not the customer.  You need a way for those customers to come together in a community, without violating personal space or privacy.

And that’s the good news because I have discovered some startups that are doing exactly that.

The one with the biggest name is Yelp.  They’ve recently added a geolocal aspect to their reviewing service where you can check in to favorite establishments, but again, they are focused only on commercial outreach and only to whole cities, not neighborhoods, so it is a step in the right direction but not exactly what I think people need.  

Next up is a tiny little company called Gogoverde, which is hyper focused on neighborhoods and is currently only available in Palo Alto and Redwood City.  But they lack the geolocal tech at present.  Mostly what they do is get people who already know each other to join a local network and share information and materials.  

But the app  I’m really excited about is a company called DeHood.  I’ve been using the app for a while, sending some of my activity on it to my Twitter and Facebook pages and even went in to talk to the company leadership, Babak Hedayati and Mike Mertz, to find out more, which lead to a consulting contract with them that started a couple of days ago (so there’s your full disclosure)

But I’ve been using the tech for several weeks now simply because it accomplished what I’ve been looking for: a social media application that can build local and REAL community.

And what DeHood does will be the subject of the next post.

Selling in the Cloud with Xuropa

At the Design Automation Conference a couple of weeks ago, one of the big topics of discussion was the use of "Cloud Computing" and one the up-and-coming player in that field is Xuropa.  I did one of my live video interviews with James Colgan, Xuropa's founder an CEO, regarding how that is affecting the bottom line for the industry.  The real kicker came at the end of the interview where James talked about the hard evidence of benefit for the concept... and that got truncated when the bandwidth gods shut down the broadcast.  So here's what I got and after you watch it, I'll tell you tomorrow what the bottom line was.

Watch video live on Vpype Live Broadcaster

My first seminar outside of the tech world

Last week I did a seminar on social media for people that are about as far from the technology world as you might be able to get... evangelical pastors.  It was the most receptive audience for I've ever had for my schpiel.  Just amazing.

Why you don't (or do) like social media, Part Three

When you boil down attitudes toward and execution of social media practices, it's all about leadership.  Real leadership, not the popular definition that rises from the horrific misinterpretation of Geoffrey Moore's book, Crossing the Chasm.  Let me explain that reference a bit more in depth first.

Moore stated fairly simply that for a technology company to be successful, it must attain the perception of leadership in a market niche.  The misinterpretation of that concept is what screws up the marketing for so many companies.  Moore's statement was an indicator of success and a strategy, not a tactic.  If you are the perceived market niche leader, Moore explains, THEN you know you successfully crossed the chasm.  Therefore your marketing strategy must revolve around developing the perception of leadership.  However, most companies believe that saying you are a leader in your marketing documents, even when you are clearly not the or even a leader, is a strategic leap forward.  And that is when the horror begins. Why is that? Well, as Margaret Thatcher said, being a leader is like being a lady.  If you have to tell someone you are, then you aren't.

Marketing is all about knowing where you stand in your market, but most start-up companies ... well, most companies ... don't really have a clue.  There entire focus is on their product or service and how they can get someone to buy it.  They started out solving a specific problem in a specific sub-niche arena and now they have to recoup that invested time.  So they start jamming their answer into customer engagements without even knowing the questions being asked.  That brings me next to a new axiom (new to me) that I heard a couple of weeks ago attributed to a social media guru names Clay Cotton.

Fall in love with your market, not your product

Are you old enough to remember when fax machines were technological marvels?  Are you old enough to still consider fax machines important pieces of office equipment?  There are companies out there still trying to make a living of of selling and servicing fax machines.  That's my definition of being in love with your product: They are willing to enable their dwindling customer base in ignoring the advance of technology, just so they don't have to really pay attention to what is going on in the world.

Those kind of companies don't like the social media paradigm.

To be successful in this world, you have to really understand that Geoffrey Moore wasn't saying you have to create the illusion of leadership, you have to demonstrate it in order to be perceived as a leader.  It's kind of the difference between being a cattleman and a sheepherder.  Cattle are driven to slaughter, never to be seen again.  Cattle don't trust cowboys, they fear them and cowboys curse their herds.  Sheep are lead to be sheared on a regular basis and they find comfort and protection in the shepherd.  They follow shepherds and shepherds care for the flock.

Social media is a shepherding process.  It provides valuable feed back from your customers that you can use to adjust not only your messages, but your technology and services.  It's interactive. It creates the perception of leadership, if done right.  And it changes your perception of your business as well.

Which is why you don't (or do) like it.

Not in the whirlwind, but in the still small voice

So I spent a great deal of my morning trying to get into the EE Times Virtual Conference on SoCs.  I was able to get into the exhibit hall to see really bad demos and webinars,  I could get into the resource center and download a lot of badly written marketing material and a few good articles.  But the meat of the conference... the panels and keynotes ... was unavailable to me.  Even Tech support couldn't figure it out.

So I wandered into the chat room and found a half dozen people with the same problem.  And since they were all engineers I figured they weren't using a Mac like me, so my tech couldn't be the problem.  We all had a lovely chat about the conference as it was shaping up and learned something very interesting:

Engineers don't like marketing materials (who does?), they don't like presentations, and they don't like webinars.  

Webinars?  I thought webinars were the be-all and end-all of marketing.  That's where engineers talk to engineers, virtually. 

The knock on webinars were that they were too long and too filled with marketing BS, which is really interesting since most webinars are written up and produced by engineers, not marketers.  Marketers get to make suggestions in content, but it's the engineer that is the editor in chief.  So if the engineers are in charge of the vehicle that is supposed to be the most popular way of reaching engineers, can engineers really talk to each other?

Well, yes, but not in a controlled environment.  What the engineers in the chat room said was the most valuable part of the exhibit hall was the chat room with other engineers, not all the controlled messaging of the virtual booth.

Hence the title of this post.  There is a great deal of time and money spent on trade shows, virtual and otherwise, that all goes for naught.  The only thing that matters is the personal interaction.  That's what makes the sale.  The most valuable tool in a company's marketing arsenal is anything that creates a conversation, not a blind blasting out of information and noise.

Think about it.

Hookin' up with IdaRose

Had coffee yesterday with my favorite tech analyst, IdaRose Sylvester.  I did a podcast with her back in July after she got caught up in the latest round of layoffs at IDC (she was a senior semiconductor analyst with them).

This time we weren't just shooting the breeze, catching up or discussing the world economic situation.  We had business to do. 

I've been alluding, tweeting, and "status-ing" about a little project I've been working on for a while … about two years, actually.  The project has been bringing Silicon Valley VC expertise together with European tech entrepreneurs.  I needed just one little piece to put it all together: third-party analysis.

So I'm happy to say that IdaRose Sylvester will be providing objective market analysis for presenting companies at the VComm Venture Faire, January 20, 2009 in Redwood City, California.

You'll be hearing more.