Early and often -- focus on new features or customers?

For any startup looking to gain a strong foothold in the market, customer traction is the name of the game.  All too often though, many Web 2.0 startups focus instead on pushing a product or service to market that they built without involving beta customers beforehand.

Innovative ideas need to incorporate early user feedback and testing and that shouldn’t mean just before the product or service is “baked.” Working with beta customers should start at the onset in order to really understand what customers’ needs are and reiterating the product or service to win their nod of approval. Since early stage, tech startups have such limited resources, the startups early version of their product/service should focus on solving the most critical customer pain points: the product/service has to be “a must have” and not — “a nice to have.”  This can be best achieved by focusing on beta customers — early and often.  Happy customers will become referenceable customers and your biggest champions.  In their words, they can best articulate why the product/service solved their problems and why it was of value.  Other prospective customers will self-select by identifiying with the same problem/pain points and move to seek out the solution.

Being on the PR side of things, we still see far too many Web 2.0 companies, as well as established companies, not involving their customers soon enough or often enough before they roll out some “beta” offering (or even worse launch a new product).  From the PR side, the best advice we can offer is not to push out new whiz bang features early and often but instead to work closely with customers, early and often, in order to build that better mousetrap.

The rebirth of PR

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I attended the Girls in Tech / Horn Group event that examined the notion of whether social media tools are killing PR.The event was in part to address the ongoing backchannel blogger chatter, which is essentially asserting that PR is dying on the vine.Kudos to the Horn Group and Girls in Tech for taking the opportunity to move beyond the negative bickering and look forward to the role that social media tools are having and how PR must harness them.I agree with the stand that Sabrina Horn took in noting that, no, PR is far from dying and the industry is, in fact, on the cusp of being reborn. In other words, there is opportunity on the horizon for those agencies that choose to transform for the future.The panelists were fantastic, each bringing a different and highly relevant perspective: Sam Whitmore of Media Survey served as the moderator and did an excellent job of prodding the audience for feedback while trying to cover a number of areas and keep all participants on track.Susan Etlinger, from the agency-side, Jeremiah Owyang, provided the analyst and blogger perspective, and BoomTown’s Kara Swisher lent perspective from her traditional media experience.Unfortunately, the 90 minutes didn’t afford the time to really dig down into how different social tools are enhancing PR or could be integrated more successfully.Nevertheless, the exchange was positive and fruitful, providing some good take-aways.Kara Swisher was vastly entertaining and provided a dose of reality related to the drama and antics some bloggers are exhibiting.

A few folks from the crowd provided a client perspective, noting that they want their agencies to be more expert at product marketing and SEO and web analytics.Jeremiah was spot on in his assessment that today the PR industry has to build out core competencies in SEO, web analytics, product marketing, viral marketing and beyond in order to be able to offer a new brand of PR services and expertise to clients; This new brand of PR is one that will blend core practices of traditional PR with online marketing -- while harnessing existing and future tools that disseminate information faster and farther. There are indeed new revenue streams to be realized here for PR firms.PR is at a crossroads in its need to evolve and become savvy in online advertising and other marketing competencies so that we can help clients navigate how they can most effectively apply their marketing efforts and dollars to drive company revenues.

Like the auto industry’s need to retool their manufacturing plants, now is the time for the PR industry to also retool.Future core services that we begin to offer clients need to be creative and closely align with how to leverage the expanding communication channels and the different avenues in which content and services and conversations are being disseminated, shared, and consumed.

Clean tech: how straw, diapers & broken bottles offer great promise

Wow, we had the opportunity to attend last week’s California Clean Tech Open Annual Competition. It was a fantastic event that was flawlessly produced by a group of dedicated volunteers who have a passion for clean tech and entrepreneurship. Next year, we hope to get involved with such an exciting group and sector. The event showcased a broad range of the most promising clean tech startups. The level of innovation taking place was amazing and holds so much promise for “what’s around the corner” in terms of job creation and better, more efficient ways to improve resource availability, transportation, renewables, power delivery, eco-friendly building and energy consumption. Each of the clean tech startups were winners in their own right.

One of our favorites in the Air, Water & Waste category was, hands down, a startup called, Over the Moon Diapers. Any parent knows and often struggles with the decision of whether to use cloth diapers or disposables. Cloth diapers raise concerns regarding air and water pollution required to clean and reuse the diaper. On the other hand, there is the matter of the disposable diaper that takes 500 years to decompose; each year, 450 billion diapers are tossed in landfills (yes, that 450 billion with a “b”). These staggering numbers indeed paint a real problem, so we applaud any company that can improve this smelly situation! Bottlestone was another clean tech startup winner that makes ceramic stone material made out of 80% recycled waste glass. With an improved ability to reduce heating and cooling costs— while maintaining all of the aesthetically pleasing aspects of natural stone, quartz and granite, Bottlestone is bringing a highly appealing product to market. In the renewables category, Renewable Fuel Technologies caught our eye. Have you ever gotten excited about straw? Well what this company does with straw is amazing. There is currently more than 200 million tons of straw and other crop waste being produced. Renewable Fuel Technologies is harnessing this by-product for its energy value and converting it into BioCoal™. This is a win-win for farmers all across America that have literally tons of straw and other crop waste that they ordinarily would PAY others to come haul away. Even better, innovative startups like Renewable Fuel Technologies can begin to replace the environmentally scarring effects caused by the traditional processes used by the aging coal industry. Converting 200 million tons of agri-waste into BioCoal, could replace 150 million tons of fossil coal and, more importantly, reduce CO2 emissions by over 500 million tons each year. BioCoal is a new, much more promising clean tech alternative that cement kilns, power plants and other users of fossil coal can adopt, without any capital cost, while reducing their CO2 emissions footprint. There’s another win-win!

Great tech startups will get gunding despite tougher market conditions

We worked with San Francisco-based Syncplicity recently on their funding announcement.  The timing for the startup was fortuitous because they managed to get their post-seed funding just before the market conditions and environment for tech startups became much more challenging.  Syncplicity and their VC firm, True Ventures, have been sharing their perspective related to the funding environment and tech start-ups.  Here are a few postings that we wanted to highlight that touch up some of the notable points of Syncplicity’s funding.

http://profy.com/2008/10/31/simplicity-still-viable-investment-syncplicity-gets-2-35-million/

http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2008/10/cloud_computing.html

VentureWire’s Scott Denne’s piece captured that Synplicity found one of the biggest challenges in closing the round was that most venture capital firms wanted to put in more money than the company was willing to take. Since Syncplicity runs largely on hosted infrastructure, like many Web 2.0 start-ups, its capital needs were out of sync with the amounts that larger venture firms look to put to work over the life of a company.

VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall just did a post related to the current VC model and startup environment that elicited insightful, provocative comments from readers as well.
http://venturebeat.com/2008/11/12/the-vc-model-is-broken/

American Airline's PR faux pas

I thought about American Airline's recent PR blunder the other day. The airline company took a pre-emptive strike and boldly announced they will now be charging customers a $15 surcharge for transporting each piece of luggage for their trip. Well that piece of news made the headlines on tv, radio, print and online, and needless to say, it was not well received. Travelers are already being hit with airport fees, additional security fees and rising ticket prices, the $15 per bag charge is hardly trivial, especially if you're taking your family on vacation. Yet the reality is that prices everywhere are rising due to runaway gas prices. It's typical for manufacturers and suppliers to pass the costs on to consumers; and lately, rising costs across the board are the norm these days. Clearly, the amount of fuel airlines require to operate their planes is skyrocketing and consumers are well aware of this fact. As consumers, we would have expected to see and pay for higher ticket prices. Are other airlines likely to follow American's move? I doubt it. What they will do and what American should have done is build the additional fee into the price of the ticket. That move would have been far more palatable with the public. I'm unsure what type of PR advise American was given or whether they decided to decline it; now, their efforts to find new ways to boost revenues may have backfired. It will be interesting to see if they reverse their decision and how it takes them.

Being a great moderator

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Over the weekend the blogsphere was on fire with the unfortunate story about a disaster of an interview between Sarah Lacy and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Train wreck seems to be how many have described it. We do feel for the interviewer and the public lambasting that she's received. In case you missed it, Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine and Dave McClure of 500hats blog weigh in with good summaries. One of the team at Ignite was the event chair at the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab's (VLAB) February panel on Multi-Platform Social networks that featured a fantastic panel including representatives from RockYou, Social Media, Google's OpenSocial, Bebo & Mogenthaler Venture Partners. The moderator of this panel was Jeremiah Owyang, Managing Director, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, and blogger of Web Strategist, who did an absolutely stellar job. The moderator came well prepared, was extremely knowledgeable about the space and very adeptly engaged the panel and audience of about 350 people with solid questions, interjecting humor from time to time. Jeremiah did a great thing that we haven't seen too many moderators do; he took the extra step of surveying his readers in advance of the event on what they wanted to hear from these panelists. What a great move! In fact, Jeff Jarvis' piece echoes the very recommendation that is part of Jeremiah's standard practice.

For those of you out there planning to moderate a panel or do a one-on-one interview with an industry heavyweight, say Steve Jobs :-), take heart in Jeremiah's best practices on how to be a great moderator. Earlier this year, Jeremiah wrote a comprehensive piece on this which should be a helpful best practices guide for moderating. www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/01/30/how-to-successfully-moderate-a-conference-panel-a-comprehensive-guide/

I 'm sure by closely following his guidelines, one can avert the unfortunate situation that might have been prevented if the focus was more on the attendees and keeping their interests first and foremost at hand.

Off the record..means on the tecord

We always counsel our clients to be careful and conscientious about what they say to the press and when they say it. We believe it is never a good idea to share sensitive information with media and then hastily use "off the record" lingo--as if that is going to somehow keep the information from being shared. What we do counsel our clients about here is the following: always assume that with a reporter "off the record" means "ON the record." Juicy tidbits of information are exactly what press seek in order to break a news story. Today, Samantha Power, a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and a now-former scenior advisor to the Obama campaign, made deriding comments during an interview in London with The Scotsman, a Scottish newspaper. Prior to the press interview she had actually agreed that everything said during the interview could be printed.

In our opinion, it is unwise to divulge sensitive, confidential or questionable information and then quickly interject "oh that was off the record" during any interview. The use of this popular phrase hardly means that the reporter is under any obligation to agree to your unexpected request. In the case with Samantha Powers, the reporter did his job and ran with his piece and this started off a chain reaction leading to a big political bruhaha.

We recommend a simple rule of thumb to follow: if you do not want to see it in writing, then don't share "off the record" comments with the press.

Computer clouds are rolling in (again)

What’s old is new again; Cloud computing (a.k.a. grid computing, utility computing, computing on-demand) which was talked about nearly ten years ago, is once again the horizon (pun intentional).One of the December cover stories of BusinessWeek did an in-depth series of cloud computing and spelled out several lofty initiatives that IBM and Google have underway. It appears Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon are quickly following suit to tap into a potential goldmine for data storage and access services.

Google is betting that cloud computing will support a 300-year plan to make everything – and possibly everyone – online and searchable.Recently, Google teamed with IBM to bring cloud computing into academia with a six university pilot program.An increasing number of businesses are looking at cloud computing as a foundation for their business processes.Gartner Group picked cloud computing as one of its Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008, noting that companies must evaluate the positive impact of SaaS and web platforms that provide “access to infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes through ‘cloud computing’ environments.”We’d like to respectfully add online databases to this list as well.

Last week our client, LongJump, made an announcement that put them at the forefront of startups offering online databases on-demand.LongJump announced its powerful new “cloud database service” that presents several potential advantages for a web startup. LongJump’s DaaS is a fully managed infrastructure and administered relational database architecture that includes: SAS 70 Type II data protection compliance, enterprise-level security, flexible access and control, real-time mirrored database replication, and 99.999% application uptime.

In spite of announcing in the throes of CES, LongJump’s DaaS announcement was able to rise above the noise and land in some prominent publications, news venues and blogs. Here’s a brief snapshot of some of those news stories:

TechCrunch

eWeek

ZDNet

Web Worker Daily

VentureBeat

Network World

DMNews

TMCNet

ComputerWorld UK

Is email really cool again?

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New York Times Saul Hansel posted a provocative piece around the concept of Inbox 2.0, which has since set off quite a buzz happening online and in social media channels.  We’re delighted to see a renewed interest in email. Most recently, the Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Delaney and Vauhini Vara wrote an excellent article titled, “Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again?”

Several startups are also emerging that are each taking different approaches aimed at bringing relief to the ongoing email overload madness. The evolving landscape includes a wide array of options, ranging from spot solutions to content-based email solutions to comprehensive email management solutions.

Our client, Deva Hazarika, the founder & CEO of ClearContext, has a great blog focused around the subject of email. He posted an insightful piece titled, “Inbox 2.0: Email as a Social Networking Platform,” that highlights some interesting bloggers’ viewpoints that were part of this firestorm.

Summarizing some of Deva’s key points:
1) The real value of using the information within email lies not in the prioritization itself, but in doing interesting things with that information. Combining all of that data within the context of email, and paying attention to what people are actually DOING in the client, provides the ability do things with email that are a lot more intelligent than simply displaying a message or finding out who your most important contacts are.
2) Intelligently using that information to make the entire email experience more powerful and productive for people. And done right, it will also make people's experience with any email/contact based site or application more powerful, because it will be driven from a set of rich profiles full of deep context, not just a list of names.

ClearContext aims to bring help to the endless deluge of inbound messages and interruptions consuming in-boxes is taxing employees’ resources and reducing time they can devote to priority work. Studies show that email overload causes people to work anywhere from one to two extra hours a day. Email overload coupled with multi-tasking, constant interruptions and ad-hoc projects are drastically impacting workers’ effectiveness and productivity loss to the tune of up to $1 billion (yes, with a ‘b”) dollars annually for knowledge-focused companies having 50,000 or more workers. ClearContext’s IMS 4.0 helps users save an hour or more a day (260 hours annually) with smart, automated features to gain a much better handle on their daily email management. For fans of GTD, IMS does everything that the “Getting Things Done (GTD) Outlook Add-on” can do and then a lot more.

Quality over quantity

Valleywag, one of our favorite reads here at Ignite, had an interesting post today titled, “Wired editor in Snit over unsolicited emails.” The post points to Chris Anderson’s “outing” of 329 PR people who took aim at the Editor-in-chief, pitching him on their clients’ products or services. Boy, did his own blog post set off a firestorm of great debate, as evidenced by the comments too numerous for yours truly to finish reading. (I feel bad for any non-PR person who got accidentally ensnared in this public flogging.) Whenever I see the title ‘editor-in-chief’ or ‘publisher’ on ANY of our lists that we are building, I immediately cross them out and remind our staff that those titles should not be there. (period)!! (Actually, there are a few exceptions here but these are typically with smaller publications or newsletters that are usually focused in vertical market sectors.  In these cases, the editor-in-chief is indeed the go-to-guy or go-to-gal. ;-)  I, for one, would welcome PR folk applying the basics here. Among the two camps, I fall on the side of supporting Chris for getting fed up with the hundreds of PR people and PR firms that do not bother to do the basic quality control when it comes to promoting or trying to interest reporters. Herein, lays the key --- the operative word being “reporter” not editor-in-chief. There is a big difference and if a PR person doesn’t know this, doesn’t get it, or doesn’t care, well then I guess they continue to face public lambasting.

Is it, as Chris is suggesting, laziness by lots of PR folks? I know that, like reporters, PR people are also typically under the gun but, quite frankly, it takes a minimal amount of time to prune out any odd titles (copy editor, publisher, and editor-in-chief). I can understand why, in this age of email overload, there is an even bigger backlash at this type of spamming practice. I guess this quality (and perhaps basic training) or lack thereof is essentially up to each agency to either put in place or disregard.

The NYT’s weighs in on this today as well.