Original post by Tim Berry via timberry.bplans
Suggestion: don’t just call it all social media marketing. Call at least part of it community management.
Why? Because words and phrases get worn out. Or they get clogged like a motor boat’s propeller in a swamp. And social media marketing has been worn out by too many people with too many fake names talking up too many products with too many fake offers.
But community management is a better way to describe the business role of developing personality, relationships with people, and conversation. Marketing is getting people to know, like, and trust. Social media belongs there. Social media should be part of the marketing mix, especially for smaller businesses, individual businesses, and expert businesses.
But there is a part of social media that differs from most of the rest of the marketing mix because it’s inherently conversational. Conversation means as much listening as talking, and no shouting.
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October 26, 2011 | Techmeetups
Original post by Mark MacLeod via startupCFO
I’m guessing that most everyone who reads this blog usesDropbox. The four year old company has over 50M users and adds a new user every second! It can be dangerous to use such run away successes as lessons when building your own startup. After all, most startups never achieve this level of success. Still, a recent article in Forbes Magazine shed some light on their numbers and their success. If nothing else, these should serve as high level targets showing what is possible with a freemium SaaS company.
The highlights:
50M users, adding 1 per second
2M paying customers (4% conversion rate)
$ 240M revenue ($10/ user/ month)
70 staff members
The Takeaways:
From these little nuggets, I take away the following lessons:
Engineering-led cultures can be the most dangerous (in a good way). Most of the 70 people at Dropbox are engineers. This team is delivering $ 3.4M in revenue per team member. Let’s assume each staffer makes $100K (likely less on average). That still translates into a very profitable company (depending on acquisition costs). $ 3.4M per employee is way above benchmark and shows what is possible when you use technology to drive in market results.
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October 25, 2011 | Techmeetups
Original post by Caleb Garling via WIRED
“I’ve played heads-up poker against Phil Hellmuth,” says David Sacks, name dropping the 1989 World Series of Poker champion who occasionally stops by his exclusive Silicon Valley card game.
Sacks is no stranger to fierce competition, and that will come in handy. He’s now the CEO of Yammer, a three-year-old startup that seeks to bring social networking to the enterprise — just like so many other outfits across the industry. “The market for enterprise social software has probably tripled in the last 18 to 24 months,” Gartner analyst Anthony Bradley tells Wired.com.
Startups like Socialtext and Jive are racing alongside Yammer. Salesforce.com offers its Tweetbookian Chatter service to businesses. And now, the big name IT outfits are getting into the game, with IBM pumping money into its Connections application, and Cisco acquiring collaboration outfit Versly. Even Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook — if an IT manager so dared — are available for workplace collaboration, and new startups keep sprouting up.
“I do wish VCs would stop funding Yammer knockoffs,” says Sacks, half-joking from behind a desk at Yammer’s San Francisco offices. Outside his door, his engineering teams banter over the cubicle walls about how to “optimize flows.” Laptops in hand, they file in and out of conference rooms named after playing cards. One meeting just broke up in the Ace of Spades.
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October 25, 2011 | Techmeetups
Original post by ANN HANDLEY via Entrepreneur
To me, LinkedIn has always seemed like more of a place to hunt for a new gig than anything else. And since I haven’t been in the job market for a while, I’ve paid it little mind.
Plus, I’ve always thought LinkedIn was kind of … well, boring. If Facebook is a rave at a hip downtown hot spot, LinkedIn is a stuffy reception with piped-in music at one of those soulless function facilities conveniently located at the end of an exit ramp.
Does that sound harsh? For sure. But now I’ve realized that I couldn’t have been more wrong.
While the early adopters flock to Google+ and our kids and moms become power-users on Facebook, LinkedIn is where business gets done. Execs from all Fortune 500 companies are there, and 59 percent of those active on social networking sites say LinkedIn is their platform of choice over Facebook or Twitter, up from 41 percent who called LinkedIn their most important social account a year earlier, according to a June report by Performics and ROI Research.
LinkedIn, it turns out, is a happening place. As of this spring, it has more than 100 million members in more than 200 countries, on all seven continents. In June–following a splashy and successful May initial public offering–LinkedIn counted 33.9 million unique visitors, up 63 percent from a year earlier, according to internet analytics firm comScore. That traffic meant it eclipsed Myspace as the second most popular social network on the web (after Facebook). (Of course, suggesting that LinkedIn eclipsed Myspace is a little like noting that the Rolling Stones are more popular than The Wiggles. The former remains relevant and continues to increase its audience, whereas the latter has limited and specific appeal–albeit to a passionate and loyal following.)
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October 12, 2011 | Techmeetups
Original post by Duncan Kinney via AV
A Twitter list featuring a who’s who in the startup tech world
The tech founders featured in Beer Money: The Story of Startup Drinks aren’t your typical small business people. The start-up entrepreneur world is a small, exciting insular little world where the threat of failure looms over every positive press release.
It’s no wonder then that they’ve banded together and formed groups like Startup Drinks in order to swap war stories and commiserate about the difficulties they face. Start-up founders have more than one choice for an informal network to engage with. Raymond Luk (@rayluk), Kory Arsenault (@karsenault) and Christian Maclean (@fourslice) are all avid Twitter users. We canvassed them for their top 5 must-follow accounts for budding or interested entrepreneurs.
Raymond Luk – @rayluk
@byosko – Ben writes the excellent Instigator Blog and he’s Canadian too
@msuster – Mark writes Both Sides of the Table, the best entrepreneur/VC blog out there
@cdixon – Always insightful and not afraid of controversy, Chris’ blog is must-read
@ericries – Lean Startup thinker and ambassador
@fredwilson – Union Square Ventures partner and VC master of the universe
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October 3, 2011 | Techmeetups
Original post by KELLY FORD via kellynford
Here’s a newsflash which most startup marketers learn pretty quickly: nobody really cares that you just released feature set or design tweak #372 (unless you’re Facebook, in which case every tiny change you make will be over-analyzed with angry skepticism.)
If you want to generate some continuous buzz about your startup and its message, eschew incessant feature news and chest-thumping. In their place, try what I’ll call the ‘data flank’ approach: find a way to use your company’s proprietary, anonymized data to create a steady drumbeat of interesting insights.
Getting buzz from data flanks isn’t just about gaining immediate site traffic, sign-ups, conversions, or even revenue. All those things are nice and tend to happen to various degrees, but the real benefits are often longer-term and longer lasting. Your site/brand begins to be perceived as an authority with credible data. Consumers/end-users are willing to trust you. Potential partners learn about you and become amenable to business development discussions.
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September 28, 2011 | Techmeetups
Original post by Wade Roush via xconomy
Regular visitors to the Xconomy website may have noticed that we recently killed off the “News Xpress” box at the top of each city’s home page. The news that formerly appeared there—mostly notices of venture investments, mergers & acquisitions, and the like—will now show up in the main news stream, alongside our regular features. But here in San Francisco, my plan isn’t to pepper the main story flow with lots of small news items. Rather, I’ll be gathering them up as warranted into short roundups—starting with this one.
—Lanyrd, a UK-based event-finder startup that emerged from the Winter 2011 term at the Y Combinator seed accelerator, announced in an e-mail to users today that it has closed a $1.4 million round of seed funding. Index Seed and PROfounders Capital led the round, which also included individual investors Joi Ito, Esther Dyson, Joshua Schachter, Matt Biddulph, Blaine Cook, Matt Haughey, Tim Cederman-Haysom, and William Burks Spencer. The startup previously raised money from Y Combinator and Start Fund. Lanyrd said that the closing is “really great news” that means the startup can now “focus on creating a team and building new features for Lanyrd.”
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September 11, 2011 | Techmeetups
Original post by Stacey Rudolph via B2C
There’s no better way to build your startup’s reputation than by promoting your startup online. These days, your online Internet reputation is your reputation. Every startup should start building its own reputation before being forced to build one in defensive mode. Competition is heavy these days; a savvy startup is one that uses every possible advantage, especially the internet advantage, to build a sterling reputation.
1. Claim Your Online Identity
- Put out every possible effort to obtain your preferred domain name
- Establish business accounts in various common blogging platforms and social media networks.
2. Prevent Reputation Damage
- Generate positive content to keep negative content off your Google search results page. You can upload your achievements in the business arena, tie-ups, future plans, social accomplishments, positive customer feedback and so on.
- Link to positive or neutral content on blogs and accounts of online friends, contacts and supportive business networks. This will help mitigate possible online reputation damage.
3. Build a Strong Online Brand
- Communicate your guarantee of quality products, service and performance via social media networks, blogging networks, Ads, promotions and so on.
- Post video interviews with management people on YouTube so that people can put a face to the name.
- Invite your consumer base to connect with company representatives via your blog.
August 30, 2011 | Techmeetups
August 26, 2011 | Techmeetups
