Jeff Clavier's Software Only

A couple of things to do before getting into your demo or presentation

My buddy Ed Sim has posted a piece that I recommend anyone doing a company, financing or product pitch to read: Don't forget that vision thing. This paragraph sums it well:

As one of our marketing consultants, Richard Currier, has always told our portfolio companies, "you market the vision, and sell the product." If you get too locked into talking about a product, then your partner or customer gets stuck into thinking about who else does this and why are you different.  Getting into a feature/function battle in the first meeting is not a great way to start.  Sure enough, our prospective partner started naming several companies asking us how we differed from them.  If you start with a vision first and clearly talk about your view of the market in the future and how your product evolves from where it is today to a roadmap of the future, then it is easier to differentiate your company and bring the discussion to a higher level. 

Too often do I sit in presentations or pitches with a company, and we end up diving in a deck or a demo without even getting two critical pieces of context: background & objectives.

• Background: introduce the company in a few sentences, and simple terms, covering history, vision and team.
• Objectives: establish what your motives are for this meeting, and how you are suggesting to conduct it.

Spending 2 to 3 minutes on setting up the context sort of brings everyone on the same page, and focuses attendees on fact gathering. I made a similar comment after Demo 2006 when I liveblogged about 68 companies (!!!): companies that did not give attendees a context really represented a challenge when trying to write about them.

A collateral benefit on setting up the context of such a presentation is that it can be more or less scripted, which allows people who have a bit of a challenge kicking off a speech to practice.

SimplyFired: the contest returns

The first SimplyFired contest had seen about 1,000 entries, and a winner who was fired for eating a piece of pizza without being invited to do so.

A new contest is up – with some great prizes, and this time the challenge is to submit short videos about… being fired.

My friends of SimplyHired, the organizers of the contest, have been kind enough to invite me as a judge, so I look forward to viewing these entries.

Here are the contest rules, and do watch this video when you have a minute to spare.

Brands need to keep a handle on their advertising: the New Orleans example

As I was using Evite today, I kept on getting these two banner ads for Southern Comfort (a peach flavored bourbon liqueur, produced in St. Louis, Missouri ).

One of the tag lines of the ad is "Born in New Orleans, where anything can happen". Very out of line IMHO.

Southern Comfort might already be about to pull out this ad from the inventory of advertising networks (at least one can hope so), but this shows that companies have to be on top of their ads/messages all the time.

Update: Zoli points me to similar stories of "bad taste" ad placements, either produced by content matching algorithms or the insertion of a commercial message during a key news segment (as described by Stephen Baker on Blogspotting a few days ago).

Update: Situation just got upgraded to mini-crisis - there is now a call to boycott of Southern Comfort's products until they remove their ad (and that job listing). I'm the first to link to it, we'll see how long it takes the brand to react.

A pizza can get you fired... and get you on a cruise

Just ask James Garrisson, who was fired for eating a slice of pizza he should not have. James' story was selected by the august judges of the SimplyFired contest. He will now head out for a nice cruise. Per SimplyFired's slogan: if you don't laugh, you will cry.
Here is his original post:

Fired for eating pizza?

Seriously, let me explain. I had been working for a mortgage company as a developer for 18 months and things were going well. Then, one day I saw that a different group in my company had just finished up a pot-luck and had some pizza left over. I thought they would probably end up throwing it away and I was kind of hungry so I went for it ... I took a slice of pizza.

Apparently the employees who threw this pot luck were planning to take it home and were offended by my action. Now I thought we were all basically on the same team and if someone didn't like what I did they would tell me so and I would apologize and maybe offer to pay for the pizza. These employees ended up telling their manager, who told her vice president about what I did.

The worst part about this is that I wasn't told about any of this until a month after the incident. No warning, no second chance.

I know that I left an impression because to this day my former coworkers refer to unattended pizza as "programmer bait".

Here is the list of winners of the contest, and if you have a few minutes, do read some of these stories (over a thousand were received).`

The results were announced during a very nice dinner on Thursday night with the SimplyHired/SimplyFired team, where each judge mentioned his favorite story. It was great fun (thanks again for inviting me!).

   

Steve Rubel, who pointed me to the AP story, was right: it was a clever PR stunt.

Tags: SimplyHired, SimplyFired

Search Marketing: growing and growing

Charlene Li just published a piece regarding a Forrester sizing report re U.S. online marketing forecast: $26 billion by 2010. She summarized her top 3 conclusions:

• This is not the return of “The Bubble”. The growth is coming from marketers having to make tough decisions about allocating scarce advertising dollars – in many cases, funding online channels from traditional channels. Back in 1999/2000, spending often came from exuberant spending, fueled by venture money.
• It’s more than just about search. Search is great, it’s growing, but it’s not the whole story. In fact, I anticipate that search will become much more integrated into traditional brand advertising – witness what Google and Yahoo! are doing in terms of tying CPM- and CPC-based products into the same ad ordering system.
• Marketers will shift channels away from traditional channels to fund online marketing. The key is perceived effectiveness -- most marketers saw traditional channels like TV and print becoming less effective over the next three years.

The press release provides additional data points regarding the survey of 99 leading US marketers:

• Search engine marketing will grow by 33 percent in 2005 (to $5.7B), reaching $11.6 billion by 2010. Display advertising, which includes traditional banners and sponsorships, will grow at the average rate of 11 percent over the next five years to $8 billion by 2010.
• The only nondigital advertising channel to reach the same level of confidence as online channels with marketers is product placement -- only 8 percent of respondents believe that product placement will become less effective over the next three years.
• Marketers are quickly losing confidence in the effectiveness of traditional advertising channels and feel that online channels will become more effective over the next three years. Seventy-eight percent of survey respondents said they think search engine marketing will be more effective, compared with 53 percent of respondents who said TV advertising would become less effective.
• New advertising channels will draw interest and spending from marketers. Sixty-four percent of respondents are interested in advertising on blogs, 57 percent through RSS and 52 percent on mobile devices, including phones and PDAs.

It is interesting to correlate this information (search marketing growing and growing) to the fact that Second tier networks are failing (via John Battelle), which can only bode well for Yahoo and especially Google.

The second remark is related to the ever growing list of vertical search engines that were popping up all over the place - many on seemingly large markets (jobs, travel, media, shopping,...), but others focusing on creating value around a very focused vertical (e.g. Edcomp.com for free computer online training material, gambling.com for gambling sites, etc.). These companies are all hoping to develop usage and eyeballs on the basis of providing increased value/accuracy compared to "generic search". However monetization through advertising is not always clear or straightforward (e.g. AdSense on a job search result page provides ads with very limited relevance).

On horizontal search, only a couple of players are trying to penetrate the fortress held by the big 3 technology providers (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). One of them is Snap.com (which was unveiled at the Web 2.0 Conference last October, and recently got into the News search fray). It is interesting for two reasons: 1) it allows advertisers to flexibly choose their payment model/strategy (CPM, CPC, CPA) and is totally transparent on statistics, referral information and how much it actually makes. In a world where click fraud might represent up to 20% of ad generated traffic, and advertisers are p...d off at Google for their lack of transparency - even filing suit against the company, that might be a strategy worth a shot at.
But first they have to raise more money, by convincing VCs of the reality of that potential.

As a final note, it is worth noting that over 50% marketers are interested in advertising on blogs, through RSS feeds and mobile phones/PDAs. We'll see in whose pocket that money ends up going.