Internet Tech Boston

As I sit here and watch the breaking news of Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed light up the Twitter-verse, a thought occurs to me. Facebook is the epitome of the Web 2.0 world – having grown from the brainchild of a college dropout to one of the largest online communities on the internet. You know you’re not just a cool web startup when you’re interviewed for 60 Minutes. FriendFeed has not had nearly as much media focus as Facebook or other social media darlings like Twitter and LinkedIn, but with the all-knowing, yet hard to define super-powers of the “ex-Google” founders, it’s had more than its fair share of media attention. Robert Scoble, I’m looking in your direction.

Here’s a news flash – these companies don’t really make any money. While the terms of the deal have not yet fully been disclosed (or even made official), I wonder if this is worth it. When two companies making no profit merge, they must be doing it for the hope of a future realization of revenue and profit. In other words, there are “synergies” here. Sounds a lot like the fateful merger of the Web 1.0 media giants – AOL and Time Warner. We all know how that ended up.

I don’t have enough knowledge or experience to be able to effectively (or even professionally) compare these 2 blockbuster deals. But, what I know about the first one is this. The merger of AOL/Time Warner marked the end of the Dot Com / Web 1.0 hype. It was all down hill after that. Many people have been discussing and speculating that Web 2.0 is already jumped the shark, and that we’re now in Web 2.5 or even approaching Web 3.0 – The Semantic Web. There’s a big part of me that thinks all this talk about Web 2.5 is just a fancy way of hitting the snooze alarm and prolonging the inevitable. Maybe we’ll look back at this latest big time merger and see it also marked the end of an era.

Then again, maybe not. What do you think? Please leave a comment below.

The Power and Peril of Online Communities

This past Friday, August 7th, I went down to the main office of Communispace in Watertown, MA for another cool and exciting Social Media Breakfast (SMB). This was the 15th SMB in Boston organized by Bob Collins, and they just keep getting better. SMB15 was all about “The Power and Peril of Online Communities,” and presenters included:

• Bryan Person, Social media evangelist at LiveWorld and Founder of the Social Media Breakfast series that now features 28 chapters across the world.
• Rachel Happe, Principal at The Community Roundtable. Rachel’s talk on the “Community Maturity Model” was far and away the best presentation of the day, in my opinion.
• Diane Hessan, CEO of Communispace Corporation told a great story of the history of Communispace which was fun and engaging. She is clearly a tremendously capable leader, speaker, and expert in Online Communities. At the end of her presentation, you felt you knew her and her company like old friends.

I was armed with my trusty FlipCam and was able to record most of the event. Enjoy!

The founder of Hubspot, Dharmesh Shah, recently wrote a blog post about hiring a startup sales team. Dharmesh is a really smart guy, and Hubspot’s success is well chronicled. His contributions to the local internet technology and startup culture through activities like his blog are invaluable.

But, as I read his top tips for building startup sales teams, I saw descriptions of marketing folks, project managers, consultants, and tech-type folks – but no sales people in there.  At least, not the type of sales people that you and I know. You remember those guys – they have big titles and big smiles. They don’t work very well as a team. They don’t really understand your product very well. All they care about is . . themselves. Up until recently, a company’s sales team was comprised almost exclusively with these alpha-male-hunters. The bad ones used pressure tactics and fast talking to trick customers in buying stuff they didn’t want, and promised them things your product couldn’t do. The good ones were characterized by such descriptors as “Well, he’s an arrogant jerk that couldn’t care less about anyone but himself, but he at least he’s selling a lot of the right product.”

Let’s face it – selling is something you do to someone else. You sell a person in the same way you invade a country or drive to the hoop. Your success in these endeavors is almost 100% predicated on how bad you want it. And what do the recipients of all these actions do in return? They put up their best defenses to keep you out. Only the fastest, strongest, and smartest are successful.

But these days, buyers are in control. They weren’t found by the sales team in a phone list. They found your company through a web search. They didn’t listen to your sales team’s pitch about how great your product is. They watched your webinars and read your whitepapers and educated themselves. Your sales team didn’t sell them. They purchased you. These are all hallmarks of what is now being referred to as Sales 2.0.

Still out playing the Sales 1.0 game with a core cadre of sales heroes? You’ll probably find that it’s getting harder and harder to be successful, even if you have an All-Star lineup. It just may be that you’re playing the wrong game now.

Here’s another great post that came out of an email conversation. This one was between myself and Mike Lewis, VP Marketing at Awareness, social media guru, and all around great guy.

We were discussing the creation of a hashtag. For those of you who may not be familiar, a hashtag is a simple way to classify information posted on the internet. The reason why this is done, according to Wikipedia, is that “Labeling and tagging are carried out to perform functions such as aiding in classification, marking ownership, noting boundaries, and indicating identity.” They’re most commonly used on Twitter, because there’s no other way to group tweets from different people together. As with anything that involves Twitter, it’s pretty simple. You simply put a pound sign (#) in front of a word, and you have  searchable hashtag. No brainer, right?

Well, at the risk of overcomplicating it, I think there might actually be a real formula for making a good hashtag. Your hashtag should be:

1. Unique. The purpose of a hashtag is so that people can search for, and find additionally content, related to your topic or event. When people search for your hash tag, you don’t want to get mixed up in other people’s content. Good: #dowant – Simply, stuff that people would want. Has taken off as a little meme of it’s own. Bad: #ims. All due respect to Chris Brogan and the team leading the Inbound Marketing Summit, but #ims content is usually about Indy Motor Sports.
2. Short. Hashtags are used all over the internet – from blogs like WordPress, to picture sharing sites like Flickr, to video sharing sites like YouTube, to file sharing sites like Slideshare. But, they are used most heavily on Twitter. We’ve only got 140 characters to play with on Twitter, so we don’t want a huge hashtag. It will prevent people from being able to effectively Retweet your content. Or, they’ll Retweet your content and just drop out your hashtag to save room. Good: #nyt – everyone knows the New York Times.  Bad: #p2/liberal/progressive – It’s a hashtag, not a map to a directory on your computer, folks.
3. Descriptive. It’s gotta make some sense that the hashtag describes the type of content or event or location that you’re writing/tweeting/shooting video of. That way, you can actually work it into the content of your post, rather than just appending it to the end of your tweet like a footnote. Good: #followfriday – On Friday, people share the names of people worth following. Bad: #073109 – huh?

In conclusion, before you settle on a hashtag that may have to live with for awhile, do some simple searches on Google or on Twitter’s Search page, to see what other content is out there, and do some tests in a Twitter client to see much your tweets will have to be shortened, in order to include the hashtag. You’ll be glad you did. You may also want to check out hashtags.org – the definitive directory of hashtags.

What about you? Share your Good and Bad examples of hashtags in the comments!

For those who follow the local, Boston Interent Technology scene, there is no better place to network, learn about upcoming pre-funded ventures, and meet really smart people than the Web Innovator’s Group. If you haven’t been to one of the quarterly gatherings yet, you definitely should put it on your list. Unfortunately for me, the summer event fell smack dab in the middle of my vacation week. As much as I like Web Inno (and I really do), I was hard pressed to leave the sun, sand, and surf of Cape Cod and venture up to Cambridge. Luckily, my colleagues at PermissionTV were there recorded the entire night’s events. Enjoy!

Last night I ventured out to the Boston-area Startup Marketing Meetup organized by Nathan Burke and hosted by the folks at Aprigo in Waltham. I gave a 15 minute talk on the subject of using video to strengthen your online marketing efforts. There were about 15 or so people from the local startup community – some folks looking for work, some looking for marketing ideas (like me), and some brave souls starting their company of 1 and needing some moral support. In other words – it was a great crowd with people who could really share their unique perspectives and help each other out.

Phillip Zannini

I particularly enjoyed listening to Phillip Zannini talk about his experiences and “lessons learned” from his time working at 2 startups that he either founded or co-founded. Phillip gave some good, honest, and actionable advice that may seem simple, but if not followed can lead to really disastrous results. For example, he advised that co-founders should form a team of complementary but different skill sets. By nature, entrepenuers and co-founders are hands-on. If the members of your startup team have similar skills, it will result in everyone trying to do everyone else’s job – not good in the already-hectic culture of a startup.

If you’re interested in learning more about my talk, I’ve posted my presentation slides below. Also, be on the lookout for Nathan’s video recording of both presentations on his blog.

As one of two marketing professionals in a startup video marketing company I am responsible for producing a lot of video, and for helping other digital marketing professionals understand and see why video is the preferred way to educate, engage, and drive conversions on your site. There’s no doubt about it – video marketing is becoming a very hot topic. New tools arrive almost every day that make it easier and easier for non-video professionals (like me) to do it.

As with any new trend or marketing tactic, there is some trepidation to getting started. When I’m talking to someone who is interested in starting a video marketing strategy for the first time, the conversation invariably turns to the question, “Yeah, but how do I get a video to go viral on YouTube?” Every profession has that one or two questions that just keep coming up over and over and you have to understand the impetus behind it, and address it with care and respect. This is just one of the common misconceptions that is specific to my industry – online video marketing is all about creating whacky videos for mass distribution on YouTube. After explaining that there is no set formula for viral videos, and that as a B2B Marketer you probably don’t even need one anyway, for a few hundred times, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I asked the supremely creative team at PermissionTV to answer this question once and for all – How do we do YouTube? Here is their reply. Sometimes, it’s just best to give people what they think they want – or is it?

I saw this great website today that wasn’t even a website. Instead of creating the standard company website that we’ve all grown to know and love, the agency BooneOakley created their entire website out of a series of connected YouTube videos. Check it out:

This is a pretty ingenious idea that’s more than just an agency gimmick. With over 78 million unique visitors in June of 09, YouTube gets a ton of traffic. There’s plenty of eyeballs there. The content stands on it’s own, but being video you also get the added benefit of not just sight, but sound and motion too.

I’ve seen other approaches like this. Boston area agency Modernista once redesigned their entire website to be a series of Delicious links. Now’s it a collection of links to content sites like Flickr, Wikipedia, and social media sites like Facebook. A small frame-like overlay instructs you:

Do not be alarmed.
You are viewing Modernista! through the eyes of the Web.
The menu on the left is our homepage. The blog is ours. Everything else is beyond our control.

At the end of the day, people are visiting your company or product website to get information – pure and simple. Who says your company or product website needs to be hand-crafted, self-hosted, unique combination of art, utility, and technology? As digital marketers, we should be focused, instead, on creating the content that visitors find useful and create conversion paths that engage visitors and get them to raise their hand in interest.

Tell me what YOU think. Leave a comment below – will the traditional online home evolve into a situation where there are no more websites – just content?

Software engineers hate maintaining someone else’s code – they don’t know for sure what will happen when they change it. Sales people can’t  give presentations created by other people effectively – their styles rarely match. Don’t get me started on designers – ask them to make a minor edit to another designer’s work and you’ll have a complete brand new design overnight.

Digital marketers, however, love to copy. They emulate best practices. If a tactic has proven to work for someone else, then it will be scooped up and replicated in short order. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at how Twitter has grown.

Perhaps there is something to learn from our fellow technology professionals. Just because a something works for a marketer in Company A, does it really mean it work for yours? Maybe – if you’re talking to the same people, and addressing a similar business need. If so, you’re probably competitors and have just lost differentiation.

Don’t get me wrong, marketing is a tough job and it’s getting tougher and tougher to reach and hold people’s attention and get them to take the action you want. You’ll need new methods of engagement and conversion tactics constantly. Don’t let that need to “feed the beast” drive you to move in herds. Keep your eyes open and measure what’s happening with these new programs. Don’t be afraid to stop them if you’re not seeing what you want.

This past January, I started producing a weekly live video webcast at work called PTV Live. Even though it’s only a half hour once a week, my co-workers were pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to keep it going for more than a couple of months. Even though I had never done anything like this before, I was confident I’d be able to get it done. After all, all I really had to do was give our opinions on blog posts and news about online video marketing. As my father-in-law says, opinions are like . . . well, let’s just say- everyone has one.

In the past few months, I’ve also been spending a lot of time on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and FriendFeed. I’ve been able to meet a ton of new people and learn a lot because of my interactions on these social sites.  But, creating lots of short form content is a great deal different than the long form blog content I’d been used to. I have not been able to switch gears to keep all these content creation engines humming.

Well, it’s 5 months later. I”ve successfully produced 20 shows, and been followed by and have followed several hundred interesting people. Not bad! But, looking back on my efforts,  I can see it’s had a dramatic affect on this blog. My twitter digest, once just a single post in a week of other content, has taken over as primary content, like a virus that has eaten up every other decent idea for a conversation I’ve had in the past few months.

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned about myself and blogging. I’m not sure if these are universal rules. I think they might be.

1. Short form content is not long form content. Don’t install a Twitter Digest widget on your blog platform. Having your Twitter stream in a sidebar is one thing, but having an automated bot post daily or weekly entries gives you yet another reason not to post to your blog. You’ll end up with 33 consecutive posts titled “Tweet Tweet, My Week.”
2. Cut your losses with old, half-dead posts. One of my ideas was to do a running column titled “Heads-Up Tech” – pitting 2 similar web technologies against in each other. I had been dragging my feet on finishing up a decent column about Last.fm vs. Pandora. But then Mashable released it’s Pandora vs. Last.fm post. Yeah, it’s professionally written, but I still couldn’t get over how much more better and more complete it was. I stared at my draft post, off and on, for the next 6 months until I finally just deleted it.
3. Share less, explain more. Last week, I tried Sessmic Desktop after being a happy TweetDeck user for 9 months or so. There were some key features missing, and it didn’t make sense to me to learn a whole new UI that offered basically the same feature set as the one I was used to. My 140 character mindset fired off a quick missive and moved on. Yeah, it was great to share my thought, but it would have made a better “Heads-Up Tech” post.
4. A blog is about content, not widgets. In the 6 months that I haven’t been writing content, I’ve installed dozens of themes and played around with bunches of widgets. I had fun playing with the technology when I should have been writing.
5. It’s just a blog. I’m not writing for Time or Newsweek. It’s ok to write a post that’s . . . Ok. No need to win the Pulitzer each and every week. When I have a thought, I’ll write about it quickly and get it out there.

One last thing – an apology. I’m sorry to those who had subscribed via email and to my RSS feed. You thought you were signing up for one thing, and got something else instead. Here’s looking forward to a different approach for the rest of ’09.