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.

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.