Category Archives: Internet

Do You Want to Think Like Zuck?

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Despite the bad press that Mark Zuckerberg has received over the Winklevoss twins, Facebook privacy issues, and the disastrous IPO, Facebook is nevertheless an overwhelming success story. Zuckerberg has overcome the odds of moving from entrepreneur to CEO, and has broken the 1 billion user mark in the process.

Just consider some Facebook numbers: 1 billion users is one-seventh of the world’s population, the site houses 140.3 billion friendships, 600 million access the site on a mobile device, 52% of job seekers use Facebook to look for jobs and one in five have been sent a job lead via the site.

But there are also many touching stories of people who have been helped in meaningful ways through Facebook. Ekaterina Walter, in her book Think Like Zuck, tells some of those stories as she makes the case for what we can learn from Mark Zuckerberg.

Walter draws out the five “P’s” that are essential to Facebook’s success:

  • Passion
  • Purpose
  • Product
  • People
  • Partnerships

If you would like to hear more about the 5 P’s, and how these principles might bring your company added success, then please join us for our next Soundview Live webinar, The Five Business Secrets of Mark Zuckerberg with Ekaterina Walter. Bring your questions and fill your conference room for this intriguing look into Facebook’s success.

Are You Making Things Happen or Just Making Noise?

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THE IMPACT EQUATION

AN EQUATION FOR SOCIAL MEDIA SUCCESS

Bloggers Chris Brogan and Julien Smith burst onto the publishing scene in 2009 with their social media marketing best-seller Trust Agents. They return with a new book, The Impact Equation, which delves deeper into how to be heard and noticed in an age when everyone is connected.

Brogan and Smith know their subject. As the authors explain: “Anyone can write a blog post, but not everyone can get it liked 40,000 times on Facebook and not everyone can get 75,000 blog subscribers. We’ve done these things, but it isn’t because we’re special. It’s because we tried and failed… We tried again and again, and now we have an idea how to get from point A to point B faster because of it.”

How to CREATE

The authors’ secret to getting from Point A to Point B is encapsulated in the equation:

Impact = C x (R + E + A + T + E)

The “C” stands for Contrast, which is another way of saying positioning or differentiation. A successful contrast, according to the authors, offers both similarity and a noticeable difference.

The “R” stands for Reach, that is, how many people you connect with in as many channels as possible. At the heart of reach is your platform, which is basically, the authors write, “a combination of all the tools you use to reach others.”

The “E” stands for Exposure. This is a tricky area: Too much exposure and you just become more spam. The authors offer several strategies for building your exposure, including: start with like-minded people before trying to raise awareness; tell stories that make the buyer a hero; and help others first.

The “A” stands for Articulation. For the authors, the key with this attribute is to use small words and connect the dots.

The “T” stands for Trust. A prerequisite to successful impact is understanding why we trust others. Credibility, reliability and self-interest are the key elements that generate trust.

Finally, the “E” stands for Echo, which, the authors write, is the “feeling of connection you give your reader, visitor, or participant.” The best way to create this feeling of connection is to find common experiences and use these experiences to show people that you understand them.

Guiding Principles

The Impact Equation is divided into four sections that give a guiding set of principles for moving forward with your high-impact initiatives. First, begin with your goals, exactly what you are trying to accomplish. The next set of principles is built around the concept of ideas, and covers the Contrast and Articulation attributes. As mentioned above, platform, the next category of principles, is a key component of successful social media Reach and Exposure, while the attributes of Trust and Echo are grouped under network.

Every hour of every day around the world, people are striving to connect with each other. Most of them are no more than grains of sand on the beach, unnoticed by others. The Impact Equation offers solid advice from two veterans of the social media arena on how to break through.

How the Gilt Groupe Got Its Shine

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BY INVITATION ONLY

There is an old maxim that friends should not do business together since it invariably ruins the friendship. The Information Age has disproven this notion as best friends and college roommates have launched enterprises that eventually become billion-dollar companies (Microsoft and Google are two notorious examples). Perhaps one of the most engaging stories of friendship turned into entrepreneurial success is told in By Invitation Only by Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson. The relationship between Harvard Business School graduates Maybank and Wilson is so tight that the pair is known as A&A. However, By Invitation Only is more than a story of friendship, it is a story of how two smart young women leveraged their experience, intelligence, contacts, complementary personalities, careers, skills, and a passion for fashion into an innovative online enterprise called Gilt Groupe.

The Core Idea

The Gilt Groupe — co-founded by Maybank, Wilson, engineers Mike Bryzek and Phong Nguyen, and chairman and veteran online entrepreneur Kevin Ryan — is based on the idea of the “sample sale,” in which a very select group of customers is invited to buy (during a very small window of time) luxury brands at discount prices. “To savvy, fashion-conscious New Yorkers, a Louis Vuitton or Hermès sample sale was a drop-everything-and-run proposition,” the authors write. “Once there, you basked not only in the bargains, but in being part of (and often trampled by) an elite, stylish, in-the-know crowd.”

Gilt essentially brought sample sales to the Internet. The idea began with Ryan, whose French wife discovered a French “luxury private sale” Web site. Through a recruiter, Ryan was put in contact with Wilson, who had followed Harvard Business School with stints at Louis Vuitton and Bulgari. Uneasy with the idea of an Internet business, Wilson suggested her best friend Maybank instead.

Maybank joined Ryan but eventually realized that Gilt needed a high fashion insider with the right contacts and personality to lure the right high-end brands to the site — a job description perfect for her best friend, Wilson.

How to Network and Other Lessons

By Invitation Only describes the successful entrepreneurial journey of Gilt, revealing to readers the exhilaration and terror that launching, growing and managing a start-up inevitably brings. More than just telling a story, however, Maybank and Wilson want to help readers succeed in the way that they have succeeded, and therefore offer specific advice, often in the form of boxed checklists, on moving from an idea to a profitable enterprise. Extensive networking, for example, was a key factor in the successful launch of the site. In a chapter entitled “Networking to a Launch,” the authors offer a checklist that explains the rules for growing and maintaining your network. Another chapter describes how the co-founders laid the foundation for their viral business model. This chapter includes a checklist that enables readers, through a series of questions, to evaluate whether their business has the potential to be viral.

At the heart of the book, however, is the continuing friendship and collaboration (in that order) of Maybank and Wilson. The ultra-organized and cautious Wilson and the spontaneous, risk-taking Maybank complement each other perfectly. In an era in which company founders can end up on opposite sides of a courtroom, the story of the partnership described in By Invitation Only should be a primer for any friends considering going into business together.

Master the Revenue Cycle

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Once upon a time, writes consultant Phil Fernandez in his book Revenue Disruption, companies were in control of the buying process. Customers needed the company marketers to grab their interest and the company salespeople to give them the information they needed to make their final decisions. Many companies still operate under that old-fashioned paradigm, Fernandez writes. Marketers try through their webpages, Google AdWords and other marketing tools to “hook” a prospect; as soon as the prospect is hooked — because he or she has sent an email asking for information, for example, thus becoming a live lead — the prospect is immediately handed to sales, which is supposed to close the deal. Often, Fernandez notes, the prospect will simply say, “I’m not really interested,” and sales will angrily denounce “another poor lead from marketing.” Eventually, the sales function will ignore the marketing leads, which angers the marketers, and the two functions are quickly engaged in pitched battle.

The Buyer in Control

What both marketing and sales fail to appreciate is that today, buyers are prospects long before the company even knows they exist, Fernandez writes. They wander anonymously throughout the website, they ask friends through LinkedIn for their opinions on the company, they read articles and reviews online — all before showing up on the company’s radar. According to Fernandez, traditional sales strategies and methodologies are based on the salesperson’s timeline: develop leads, make contact and so forth. Fernandez has developed a radical new approach to sales and marketing, called Revenue Performance Management (RPM), that is built around the buyer’s cycle, which he captures in a Revenue Cycle Model.

The Revenue Cycle Model

The first step of the cycle is simply “Aware,” and refers to the entire pool of people who are aware of the existence of your company or its products — nothing more. A buyer moves to the next step, “Friend,” when he or she starts to have positive associations and preferences for the company’s brands or products. If still interested, the buyer becomes a “Name” by giving contact information to the company. The buyer is then qualified by marketing, becoming a “Prospect” and eventually a “Lead” when he or she is ready to engage with the company’s sales organization. In the last two stages of the Revenue Cycle Model, the buyer is an “Opportunity” for as long as he or she is actively engaged with a customer service representative, and a “Customer” when the deal is closed.

The steps of the cycle can be grouped in three stages: Seed Nurturing (Aware, Friend); Lead Nurturing (Name, Prospect, Lead); and Qualification to Close (Opportunity, Customer).

Why Marketing Counts

This Revenue Cycle Model is a more accurate depiction of the prospect’s journey than traditional sales cycle models. In traditional sales cycles, the sale begins with the prospect’s first contact with a sales representative. In reality, this step is in the middle of the buyer’s journey, Fernandez writes. The Revenue Cycle begins at the start of the journey, when the buyer is first encountering information produced by marketing.

Thus, according to Fernandez, marketing is considered part-and-parcel of the sales process. This is a departure from the traditional approach of most companies, which consider the sales function as a profit center and the marketing function as a cost center. Marketing itself might be to blame somewhat since it is reluctant to use the revenue language of salespeople. It is clear that marketing, according to Fernandez, is a growth investment.

Fernandez compares RPM to Six Sigma — a series of new business processes that leads to continuous improvement of revenue performance. Lead scoring, for example, is a process that identifies promising leads versus leads that are premature. RPM also includes careful tracking of Key Performance Indicators, the metrics that monitor the effectiveness of the company’s revenue functions.

Calling for new business processes, new metrics, new relationships between the formerly antagonistic functions of sales and marketing, and even new executive positions (Chief Revenue Officer), Revenue Disruption is a detailed and insightful blueprint for revolution.

Tablet Mania

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There has been a surge of new tablet announcements lately. Kobo rushed out four new versions (Glo, Mini, Touch and Arc) to beat Amazon to the punch with their announcement of the Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Fire HD. And both of these companies are in a race to grab market share from the recently introduced iPad with Retina Display, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, the Barnes&Noble Nook Color and Nook Touch with Glowlight and the Google Nexus 7.

How a person decides which one of these tablets to buy is becoming a daunting task, especially since many of the tablets also have various screen sizes, screen types, functionality and wireless access options. CNET posted a great article last month taking consumers through the choices and options, but unfortunately it didn’t include the latest models from Kobo and Amazon.

What it really comes down to is how and where you’re going to use your tablet. If you just want to read books and newspapers, then you’re best off going with the Amazon Kindle or B&N Nook e-readers. If you want to browse the internet, watch movies, play games and more, then you want the iPad, Galaxy Tab 10.1 or Google Nexus 7, and if you want a device with some of the benefits of both, then you have the Kindle Fire and Nook Color in the middle.

Having all of these choices has also become a challenge for content publishers like Soundview. Our solution has been to develop and adjust our available formats to work with most devices, while launching apps specifically for iOS and Android devices.

What does the future hold? Most likely, over time some manufacturers are going to lose market share to the point that they drop out of the mix (BlackBerry?). And when the dust settles let’s hope we have a few clear options with standards for content formats. Consumers deserve to be able to purchase content from any source, and have access to it no matter what device they’re using. We’ll see if this is just a pie-in-the-sky wish or not.