Don Thorson - Marketing 2.0

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.

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.

iPhones + iChat

"The iPhone will soon have iChat integration which will  link all iPhone users to each other as well as to Mac desktop users, to create a first of a kind, mobile global linked community". Well, that's my guess anyway. It's not rocket science. Here is the evidence I'm looking at:

Adobe is said to be adding VoIP capabilities to the next version of Flash, as had been reported by Om , as well as Tom Keating  It's also generally believed  that Apple will announce support of  Flash on the iPhone, as suggested by Walt Mossberg and widely reported by everyone else. This would be a nice little relationship between the companies. Apple brings added differentiation to the iPhone (as if it needs it), while reinforcing the  advantages of being a computer company first and a phone provider second. Adobe extends the usefulness of Flash while reinforcing it's platform characteristics.

So who cares?

End Users - End users are going to be able to carry on conversations over wi-fi networks to any other iPhone user and probably any other Mac user seamlessly and hopefully for free. (Apple could charge for the connection, but hopefully will instead see the benefit of increasing the size of their user base). The solution will have built in presence across all Mac OS devices, (and conceivably all "opted in" flash players?). If you're on Mac or iPhone and you are on the network, the system will indicate your availability.  I would watch for a video camera and video iChat to be built in before Christmas,

Telcos / Carriers - Telcos will certainly be taking notice because this play hits right at a ridiculously profitable category for them and could signal the end of their walled gardened "playground". Long distance charges and roaming revenue will rapidly decay as users simply make sure they are in a wi-fi before they make international calls. When this happens, by the way, watch for  Apple to start using telco terms like "network size" and  social media terms like "community members". Apple will be disrupting an estimated 250 billion dollar slice of the 2.5 trillion annual communication  pie.  The telcos will need to be very concerned that they don't find themselves in the position of the music industry,  trying to  negotiate with Steve Jobs on how much they can charge their customers.

Skype - Skype, and all the current VoIP players will care. Skype, being a 1.0 downloaded client, will be made technically obsolete as soon as the Flash voice component hits the streets. The Apple integration of Flash VoIP  will certainly run right through the iPhone microphone and speaker so there won't be any special equipment and there won't be a download, in the traditional sense - it will simply be supplied in an iPhone software upgrade.

Apple - Apple cares because for the last 10 years they've been trying to position themselves at the confluence of computers, entertainment and communication and this is the last leg of this three legged stool. Demonstrating massive innovation in the communication sector is positioning them for ten years of industry leadership. What comes out of the merger of the Internet and telephony is yet to be defined but it will be significant and landscape changing.

The Catch - There are two catches actually. The first issue will be VoIP call quality. The quality of a VoIP call is usually defined by a combination of the speed of the connection (size of the pipe) and the power of the processor translating the analog voice signal to digital. If the wi-fi connection is weak, the call quality will be unacceptable, leaving room for non-bandwidth dependent solutions like Jajah. The other catch is, it might not be free. I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple require a .mac like account to use this service, possibly adding Voice 2.o features on the back-end to justify the cost.

PSTN Gateway - I doubt we'll see this in an early rev. but you can be sure they are also working on a wi-fi to PSTN bridge of some kind, possibly not unlike T-Mobiles recently announced Hotspot at Home service that reportedly lets you walk out of the wi-fi coverage area and get picked up by the T-Mobile cell service without dropping the call.

Any way you look at it, the telephony industry as we know it, is in for a roller-coaster of change. The good news is, the end user is about to win as a result.

 

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.