Don Thorson - Marketing 2.0

Milestone Affiliation

This morning I am pleased, and honored, to announce an affiliation with the Milestone Group, a top-tier global business consultancy, with offices in Palo Alto, Sydney and Amsterdam.  This affiliation allows me to bring very senior talent, depth of knowledge and expanded services to Momentum customers, while at the same time contributing to the success of Milestone clients around the world.

“Milestone Group’s experts put new energy, new ideas and new possibilities into your company’s revenue model. We do it by getting you plugged in. Plugged into an entrepreneurial group of operational and process experts covering sales, business development, marketing and product strategy. Plugged into an approach that helps you see what needs to be done, and then helps you deliver on your vision”.

More to follow,  as the dust settles... (I am very pleased)

Listen To The Leonids

OK, this might not be for everyone, but one of the most amazing nights I ever had was watching the Leonid Meteor Shower. It was 2002, which was one of the peak years - They seemed to be everywhere. It was literally breath taking. The sky appeared to be "raining stars". It was something out of a Spielberg movie. I remember thinking at the time that I could hear them shoot across the sky. It was a very cold, very dark,  moonless night at 7,000 feet in the front yard of our cabin in the Sierras.

The Leonids happen every year around Nov. 17th. I'm not going to make it to the cabin this weekend to see them, but check this out. You can now  listen to the Leonids over the internet. Now you actually can hear them. I found this article this morning which gives some background.

"Meteors burn up in the atmosphere and leave an ionized trail which acts like a mirror to reflect transmitted signals from stations hundreds of miles away," explained Michael Boschat, a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. "Any meteor will be heard this way, but more are usually heard during meteor showers."

Invisible Engines

"The Power of Platforms "

Om Malik presents an interesting review of a new, well named  book; "Invisible Engines . How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries" by David S. Evans, Andrei Hagiu and Richard Schmalensee

I've been scanning it for about a week. In it, the authors liberally and appropriately, expand the definition of what a platform is in the 2.0 economy. Including the iPod and Google  for example. One of the hallmarks of a platform is the 2 sided nature of the platform relationship. Users develop, developer use. This is not far from what we are seeing  in emerging marketing, where having your customers deeply engaged, involved and "invested" in your product is central to viral growth.

Om : "Any executive looking to turn his company's product into an engine of growth will want to consult "Invisible Engines."

"Just as the internal combustion engine led to the formation of the modern automobile industry and ended up driving so much else in the economy (think only of steel and gasoline), invisible engines are now powering the vast postindustrial economies in which we live and work".

Recommended.

The Live Web

It was about 3 months ago that I met Doc Searls. He had come by Krugle at the invitation of  Steve Larsen, the CEO. We went to the local cafe for a cup of coffee. I filled three or four nakins with notes, listening to Doc talk about the live web.  He ratttled off lines like "nothing is ever finished". It was drinking from a fire hose. I had just joined this company to help get them launched - and the deal was, we would try and do it  using no traditional media - we would try to do it using the live web.Doc is still writting about it, as is Newsweek. This thing is big, communication is going through it's greatest change since the Internet.  I want everybody in my circle to "GET IT"  and hopefully, "get it FAST".  My company, Momentum , was there at the beginning, helping launch Netscape and we rode the 1.0 wave all the way through.This is bigger. The live web changes everything. One -way communication, (an artifact of the printed page), is finally leaving us. The promise of hypertext   is now real and as a new generation grabs the wheel,  it's morphing the social infrastructure and changing reality as we know it - And once again, "you're either on the bus, or off the bus" .

The Krugle Case Study

More Customers, In Less Time, For Less Money - That's the bottom line on the Krugle launch.

Many of you have asked me where I was the last couple of months, so here it is. I took a 3 month contract to launch a company named Krugle - (no, it's not a German pastry-and yes, I tried to change the name as soon as I got there). I was the VP of Marketing, but "VP of the Launch" might have been more accurate - since that was the task at hand.

The Launch Highlights:

- 7 weeks from near zero to live stage launch

- DEMOgod Award

- Coverage in all targeted major technology press

- 35,000 Beta sign-ups in 11 weeks, 45% from off-shore

 

Krugle is a search engine for source code. Getting them launched was arguably the most successful launch I've been involved with - and certainly the most cost effective. This story makes a tasty case study in marketing in this new flat world, but for now, here's a top level description of events,

The project started on Dec 13th and ended March 13th.

One of the first orders of business was to create the overall brand look and feel. With no time to do a formal study, we brought in Ashton Abeck of San Francisco to crank out a series of "web 2.0" looking designs. In the end the search engine window would become the brand, but the search engine was not scheduled to be ready for several months, so we needed to come up with a temporary brand image and marketing presence to instill customer and investor confidence until the search engine was ready. We built a site in two weeks with the help of Brian McNitt cranking out the code

A New Way

From the onset, one of the goals was to launch this company in a new way, leveraging new mediums and methods - not relying on traditional marketing tools such as advertising or even PR. So, we knew we needed a blog. After  some debate,we settled on a Wordpress blog template because we perceived using an open source solution would be important to our customers.  The Krugle blog was, and is, masterfully managed, built, added to and watched over by Chris Locke. (thank you Chris), after we got a  little top-level "how to" advice from blog masters Doc Searls and Shel Israel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We used DEMO as the launch platform, journalists on site to ignite the fire, and the blogosphere to spread the messages around the world.

DEMO, for those who don't know, is the one of the premiere venues for launching a new product. From the start-ups point of view, it's extremely efficient and cost effective, with a deep concentration of press and venture capitalists to make it worth your while.

Krugle CEO and Co-Founder, Steve Larsen, along with John Mitchell, Chief Architect, did an excellent job on stage of making a "search engine for code"  look engaging- not that easy to do as a stage performance (watch the show). DEMO gives you six minutes to tell your story - it has to be live and it has to be good.

Much of the value of DEMO comes from the press. In Krugle's case it was the press that ignited the blog community, who in turn, spread the messages around the world. In particular, one of the first articles, by Dan Farber seemed to be most quoted in future blogs.

The effect of the press was nearly instant, with site and blog visits gaining momentum from the first hour of the show and continuing for several days.

The next major jump in activity after DEMO happened about a week later when Wired On-Line covered the product with a well written story by Dylan Tweney. The Wired article turned out to be more important than the launch event in terms of site and blog visits. It triggered slashdot activity which made for an active day.

It was the combination of exposures that  launched  Krugle into a number one spot on Technorati for the better part of a week, meaning Krugle was the most talked about topic in all the blogosphere during that time.

And why is all this traffic important to a company just announcinng a product with nothing to sell or even give away? 
Beta sign-ups. The larger the list of signed-up, interested customers, the faster product propagtion upon availability.

The following slide shows the Beta program sign-ups from the web site. Notice the graph simularities to the blog visits.


So that's the short version of the Krugle launch, with the other interesting fact being how far and wide the messages were cast. Take a look at the clustrmap map which gives a reasonable estimation of where the blog activity and hence, Beta downloads were coming from:

I've been involved with hundreds of product and company launches, but this would be the first time I've seen a product reach so far with so little expense. The reach and velocity of the messages has to be attributed to the viral nature of blogs, "friends telling friends " about a product or service they might find interesting. 

 

 

 

Ribbit. The First Four Months

Well, I never was a prolific blogger - but with the onset of the microblog it's even worse. Anytime I spend doing my own social media these days seems to be in shorter and shorter bursts of Twitters and Facebook status updates. (I'm totally enjoying Twitter as new medium). I'm also spending time writing the Ribbit blog.

As I do every so often, I'm going to use this post to update everyone on my marketing activities over  the last couple of months - this time with Ribbit. Ribbit is an "open platform for telephony innovation" , which we decided to position as "Silicon Valley First Phone Company"- which didn't go unnoticed at launch.

The first strategic launch goal was to create basic company awareness among the press, influencer's, analysts - and what better way to do it than to come right out and claim you were a new kind / better kind of  telco. I'll write a lot more about this after the dust settles - but for now, it appears to have helped us accomplish our first strategic communication and positioning goal. (and as with all good positioning , it also accurately describes who and what we are).

Rather than write pages on every single marketing strategy and nuance, I'm going to simply list the milestones and activities around Ribbit and give an overview of what I've been doing. Getting the company "on the playing field" and gaining mind share were clear launch objectives. Which explains our double launch strategy: Phase one, launch the company pre- Christmas. Phase Two: launch the consumer application at DEMO in Jan.

Ribbit Marketing Activities (So Far) Dec 07 - April, 08)

Dec 17  - Company Introduction / Press Tour

Jan   7 - Consumer Electronic Show - "Bloghaus" involvement
Jan 15 - Wireless Roundtable - Influencer Event
Jan 17 - Salesforce "Tour de Force" Conference - Award Nominations
Jan 18 - TechCrunch "Crunchie Awards" -Double Nominations
Jan 28 - DEMO - Amphibian Product Announcement- Palm Springs
Feb 26 - Flex 360 Conference - Developer Event
Mar 13 - eComm Communication Conference
Mar 17 - Ribbit Spawn - Our First Official Developer Event
Mar 18 - Mash-Up Camp, Developer Event
Mar 20 - Under The Radar  Conference
April  9 - SD Forum, Speaking Engagement
April 21 - Wireless Innovations Conference
April 22 - Web 2.0. Blogtropol.us Involvement, San Francisco
April 22 - Flash In the Can ( FITC) Toronto

While this is a busy list of public appearances and marketing activities, it doesn't begin to describe  what's going on in the background. The bulk of Ribbit's efforts have been in business and product development.

Other Ribbit Milestones

New Hires  (25+)
First Platform" Revenue  - (customer deployed app on the Ribbit platform)
First Business Customer  - (first "Ribbit for Salesforce" revenue from satisfied Beta customers)
First Large Partner Technology Integration  - (test with global handset company)
+ 4000 Developers in Ribbit Developer ecosystem
Flash Toolkit  (Drag and Drop Voice Components ) announced and previewed
Business Development / Partner Meetings  (90+)

Stayed tuned for more news soon! If you're a start up, it just doesn't get anymore fun than this.

I Love Peets

For a first hand "customer satisfaction success story",  check this out . I dropped into Peets Palo Alto yesterday afternoon to take advantage of what I thought was a free coffee giveaway in celebration of their 40th anniversary. Turns out the coffee wasn't free. The story that follows is an impressive display of corporate values and customer service. Check it out. These guys are good.

Digital Lifestyle Aggregators (DLAs)

Dig into the world of DLAs and the road leads to Marc Canter. A DLA is one of those things you wouldn't want to try to explain to your mom but if your profession has you anywhere near creating specifications for next generation applications, you'd better get in this game. Here are some DLA characteristics as described by Marc (which I first found via Om's synopsis on the same topic):

- integrated environment - bringing together lots of things in one place

- aggregated information - from all over the place

- highly customizable - which modules, what look and feel and what UI

- all supporting open standards to create an inter-connected meshed web

You can see the obvious relationship between these attributes and how people like Joseph Smarr and Google are describing OpenSocial, (which is a related title wave that will also hit in 2008). The opening up of applications and communities is inevitable and it will quickly become standard practice. The notion of losing access to core information as I move from one community to another or one app to another is antiquated. There is core information and connections that I never want to be detached from. In fact, I want my applications to be "intelligently" linked from the activity I'm doing and the community I'm doing it with or for. I don't only want access to information across communities and activities, I want dynamic interaction that contributes in real time to my understanding of a topic and advances the quality of my interaction with the community I'm involved with. Plaxo Pulse is making a run at this, but it's still in it's infancy.Walls between applications and communities are simply artifacts, probably of a shrink-wrap software mentality or business models that need to "own eyeballs".

All this goes hand-in hand with Doc Searl's presentation at this years Le Web in Paris , where he says on Slide 16 " Herding people into walled gardens and guessing about what makes them social will seem as absurd as it actually is"

At Ribbit, being rooted in telephony, we are awake to the losing proposition of "walled-gardens" because we are convinced that this will be the demise of traditional phone companies. Ironically, it could also be the downfall of traditional software and web application companies if they don't quickly embrace the concept of the living web.

A Big Week At Ribbit

It's been an amazing week at Ribbit. We launched the company on Monday and we've enjoyed surprise after surprise all week long. The press coverage was exceptional. Depth, accuracy, intelligent reporting. People  (bloggers / reporters) dedicated time to their writing and painted an accurate and complete story.

This is contrasted with other launches I've done where the  journalists sometimes cut, paste and reassemble other writers articles and claim it as their own. The journalist on the Ribbit launch spent considerable time interviewing us and digging deep into the  details. For a more complete list of  news coverage you can go to the Ribbit Press Page. (We apologize to the people who covered us who are not listed on the press page. So much went on this week that we were just in a scramble. We simply ran out of time to gather the posts).

Much to our surprise, we also ended up getting television and radio coverage, again where the journalist worked hard to get the story right.

This launch was not "designed" to be a consumer oriented story - it was actually focused on creating industry and developer awareness for Ribbit and the Ribbit API.  We expect the Ribbit business model to behave as a platform , as such it needs both developers to create applications and users to create marketplace "pull". This leg of the marketing was more focused on increasing the number of developers - and it was successful in that we tripled the size of the development community in one week, from around 650 to over 2,000.

In short, we are very grateful for the coverage we're getting. It's critical for a start-up to get coverage and exposure. Being a start-up, we can't buy the awareness we need, so we hope for  the journalist and bloggers to carry the story - which they did, so Thank You everyone who wrote about us, It's very much appreciated.

Perception Is Reality

Brand is often considered to be a "soft science", because it's difficult to directly quantify the effect of brand on a particular business. We all know we make decisions based on brand preference, but even when we do it, it can be difficult to articulate why we do it. At the same time, we all understand that brand drives market behaviors and influences company revenues.

This study, originally published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine , demonstrates how brand perception directly influences customer opinion. It describes how you can take food items and simply by wrapping them in different packaging, you can dramatically change the perception of the taste of the food. This study was conducted by the Stanford University School of Medicine and involved testing 63 young children.

The researchers took identical food items and wrapped one in plain wrapping and one in a McDonald's packaging. Alarmingly, the food wrapped in the McDonalds packaging received consistently  higher scores for taste. When the food items were tested while both in plain wrapping, they were rated as tasting the same by the children.

Fries and Chicken Nuggets both rated as 6 times as tasty when wrapped in McDonald's packaging. In addition, the results were not limited to " junk food" items. Foods such as fruit juice and milk were also rated higher by the test subjects.

The study goes on to make a correlation between the degree of brand preference among the children and the numbers of  TV's in the home - suggesting that the brand preference is being driven by McDonald's  commercials. While almost certainly true, I would guess that the brand promise would also need  peer and parental validation to have this effect on the test results.