The term study hall may bring back memories of passing notes and cramming for tests. However, Foster.ly's Study Hall, a daylong event taking place this Saturday, promises to provide a different experience focused on collaboration and the entrepreneurial spirit. Study Hall, hosted by Foster.ly, DC Entrepreneurship Week and Microsoft BizSpark, is a free, co-working environment for DC, Maryland and Virginia entrepreneurs.
This isn't your typical networking event either. It's a chance to brainstorm and hear from local entrepreneurs dedicated to fostering relationships in the community. Attendees don't have to be technology focused and the event is open to a wide range of industries, from legal to real estate to retail.
WHAT: Foster.ly’s Study Hall
WHEN: February 25, 2012, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
WHERE: 5404 Wisconsin Ave NW, #700, Chevy Chase, MD 20815. Nearest Metro: Friendship Heights (Red Line).
Act fast and register here to join the more than 200 entrepreneurs and techies who have already signed up to participate (Trapper Keepers optional).
-Pheniece
What are you doing on March 7th at 1:00 EST?
If your business goals include a capital raise, future acquisitions, or a successful exit, you should join SBX’s Elizabeth Shea and Clearsight Advisors’ Gretchen Guandolo for a webinar on PR and marketing activities that can enhance value for future capital raises or M&A activities.
Elizabeth and Gretchen will cover:
- How to land on the radar screen of the future investors and buyers of your business
- How to leverage communications to gain the most traction and exposure around a transaction
- What buyers seek in considering technologies and how your public persona can help put your best foot forward
- How PR is critical for capital raises, and when and when not to engage in PR
- What buyers look for when starting the due diligence process and how a company's presence affects that process.
- Strategic identification of select targets (investors and/or strategic buyers) and strategies for “creating buzz” within those segments
To learn more about the webinar and sign up please follow the link below.
Not to be outdone, Henry Ford unveils his own offensive logo in 1939
When you think about it, it's amazing that certain brands survive while others perish.
Take, for instance, the Hummer. That was a cool car! At least I used to think so, before society decided that gas-guzzling Sports Utility Vehicles were worse than nazism.
Speaking of which, here's Volkswagen – going strong. Volkswagen. A brand that Hitler personally helped create, launch, and shepherd. A brand that – until 1940 – had a corporate logo that was, essentially, a swastika.
Volkswagen logo, 1939 (Seriously)
Didn't know that, did ya? Well, it's all here (as well as some hilarious logo prognostication) from StockLogo.com's Ivan Raszl.
Raszl's main point, I gather, is that these logos are moving – inexorably – towards maximal simplicity (or in the case of Gap, Sisyphean stagnation).
So check out the full info-graphic. It's a hoot.
Raszl's prediction for Apple's logo in 2040
10,000 Nerd Bucks if you get the title reference.
Sifting through my reader this week, I came across what I consider to be one of the most maddening yet incredible start-up stories, courtesy of Mashable. A start-up called Wander has launched a mind-numbingly simple game – you click the image of a cow and you get a point. If you like or tweet the game, you get 100 points. The points serve no purpose at all, but the leader has one billion points on the aptly named “Utterly Pointless Leaderboard.”
Let that sink in for a minute: one billion points in a time suck of a game that serves absolutely no purpose other than to earn points. Go ahead and curse the human condition, punch a wall, whatever – I know you want to.
Mashable points out that Wander’s game is the homage to Cow Clicker, a Facebook game designed to illustrate the pointlessness of, you guessed it, Facebook games. Sort of like “You Have to Burn the Rope” for the social generation, I guess.
But the stark simplicity of the game combined with its massive popularity is telling – no one has any idea what Wander does (even Mashable), but their name is going to be everywhere. This is a solid lesson for PR pros, and not just one in gamification (although that’s a pretty key point here).
Attaching client names to something, anything, which promises engagement, will have some kind of benefit. It may not be the booming success reaped by clicking a stock photo of a cow, but the exposure gained will surely be greater than standing quietly in the corner of the social world.
So tweet, create Facebook pages, have YouTube videos, create social contests…the list goes on for quite a while. But just think – if clicking a cow can have such booming effects for a mystery company like Wander, just think what a similarly well-conceived endeavor can do for your organization.
--John Terrill
On the heels of Facebook announcing their small business program, today, Twitter announced the expansion of their own.
While previously available to only a few advertisers, Twitter will be expanding its self-service ad platform to all small businesses starting in late March. The platform went live this past November to a select few, and was tagged as a way for small and medium-sized businesses to build their audience on Twitter and better engage with the people they want to reach. The advertising options will include both Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts, among other options that have yet to be announced.
Twitter has been slowly dipping a toe into advertising since 2010, and has refined their offerings over the past year. They have now introduced geotargeting and a dashboard that gives marketers a deeper dive into the company’s data.
Have an American Express card for your small business? For the initiative, Twitter is partnering with the credit card company, offering preferential treatment for their card-holders. AmEx card-holders will be invited to try the platform first and the company will give $100 in free advertising to the first 10,000 businesses that sign up. Interested? Register quickly to take advantage of the giveaway!
- Kathryn
"The tastiest meat is under the horn."
Savvy marketers understand the key to their success has been -- and always will be -- making people feel bad.
When consumers feel bad, they buy things to make themselves feel better.
When they feel good, they go running barefoot in the rain or make watercolor paintings or some such non-capitalist nonsense.
So we have to keep people feeling bad, all the time -- and that means constantly coming up with new ways to shame and humiliate our targets. After all, there's only so many times we can watch Subway commercials of overweight people breaking their favorite hammocks.
Enter Ogilvy Cape Town with its new social media campaign for rhino preservationist nonprofit Forever Wild. As noted by Copyranter (one of my favorite ill-tempered advertising bloggers), it's a pretty clever bait and switch.
Essentially, the agency created a series of "YouTube Interventions," where they replaced pop culture videos with heavy-handed rhino moralizing. So people searching for "Facebook Dad Shoots Daughter's Laptop" only get about 6 seconds of the hilarity before the video switches over to graphic depictions of rhinos being raped, eaten, and murdered (in that order).
The pay off line is: "No time to help save rhinos? Well it looks like you've got time to watch Keyboard Cat you selfish hypocrite."
Did it make people feel bad? Check. Did it increase signatures on Forever Wild's Internet petition by 400%? Check. Did it cost basically nothing to produce since YouTube content isn't regulated by any rational form of intellectual property protection? Discount Double Check.
Bravo, Ogilvy. You saved some rhinos. And you might have even saved a few hammocks.
On Friday, I attended MarketingProfs Virtual Marketing World. The morning session, hosted by Jo Roberts a Product Marketing Manager at MarketingProfs, was entitled, “Five Traditional (Gasp!) Marcom Methods that (Still) Deliver Today.” As a long-time marketer, I was interested to hear what “old-school” techniques have new-found caché.
The program focused on three types of tactics: offline communications such as direct mail; paid media; and in-person encounters such as tradeshows, training and experiential/field marketing.
Direct Mail (DM):
Some marketers forgo direct mail as increasingly expensive, wasteful and hard to measure. However, direct mail has seen a resurgence, particularly with marketers trying to reach a local audience. How are these marketers using DM? Well, 35 percent of marketers use DM for direct sales, 29 percent to encourage Website visits and 14 percent to promote a specific offer or content resource (CMO Council, 2011). Need some additional tips to enhance your DM program and engage your prospects?
- Make them curious
- Give them content that matters, and don’t be generic
- Appeal to their emotions
- Make it personal
- Send fewer, better quality mailings
- Lastly, target them with multiple channels. Follow up on DM with email, events, even a personal call.
Paid Media:
Paid media expenditures are up, and B2B advertisers are allocating a greater percentage of their overall budget to paid media in 2012. While traditional advertising vehicles like television and outdoor are anticipating only modest growth this year, mobile advertising and online video are expected to grow by 44 percent and 22 percent respectively in 2012 (MagnaGlobal Advertising Forecast, 2012).
Tradeshows:
Contrary to popular thinking, tradeshows continue to be popular and represent about 20 percent of the typical B2B marketer’s budget (MarketingProfs, 2010). This makes tradeshows the top line-item for most marketers. The reason? Tradeshows work. Attendees at B2B tradeshows are 34 percent more likely to make a purchase than people who hear about the product through other channels. (Advertising Research Foundation, 2008). But, the devil is in the details for in-person events. The booth, staff and materials you bring all matter. Find ways to stand out, whether you opt for a sponsorship, a VIP reception or an exclusive QR code for event attendees that unlocks a special promotion or content resource.
Experiential and Field Marketing:
Experience is the single biggest factor impacting brand choice. Purchasers point to first-hand product experience (76 percent) and a unique customer experience (72 percent) as the major influences on purchasing decisions (Jack Morton Worldwide, 2009). And it’s not just about brand awareness, in-person experiences/events build better long-term relationships and are the most effective content marketing tactics (78 percent) followed by Webinars (70 percent) and case studies (70 percent) as noted in a 2012 MarketingProfs Content Marketing survey.
Training:
Though training is a bit different than the other tactics on this list, staff and reseller training is critical for a company’s go-to-market strategy and a marketer’s best friend. As Jo noted, especially for companies that sell through the channel, “training is a force multiplier that extends brand influence and product reach.”
I’d be interested to hear if anyone else is reinvigorating their marketing plan with a new infusion of traditional tactics. Please share your experiences!
Finally, I wanted to put in a plug for another virtual conference -- the 2012 SmartCMO Virtual Forum, hosted by VivaCreative on March 1. They’re hosting a unique event featuring marketing execs from the NFL and The Recording Academy, speaking about marketing the Super Bowl and Grammy Awards, respectively. In addition, two marketers from SAP will be discussing experiential and content marketing. Should be a great event.
- Katie Hanusik
(photo credit: The Foster-Jones Group)
Back in the fall of 2011, Japanese software developer Isseki Nagae wrote a blog post titled: "Why Japanese Manufacturers Keep Losing to Apple."
Technology companies like Sony (argued Nagae) kept basing their new product development on customer input, whereas Steve Jobs was using customer input to scrub the mildew off his diamond-studded toilet seat.
Jobs once famously said, “It's not the customer's job to know what they want."
Bold words, with a significant impact on technology creators. But an even greater significance -- potentially -- for marketers.
I'm calling this Jonathan's Second Law of Marketing: Stop asking people to think.
Okay, so how does this work, you ask.
Let's say I'm launching a marketing survey targeting C-level insurance executives. Here's a bad question to ask:
"Which social marketing channels do you consider most important for marketers targeting C-level insurance executives?"
The response you'll get is a mixture of what your survey targets think, what they think they think, and what they think they think should be the right answer.
Here's a better but still flawed question to ask:
"Which social media channels have you used in the past 48 hours for business purposes?"
You're close: keeping it strictly behavioral is the right play. But by adding “for business purposes,” you've inadvertently made the survey targets think -- what constitutes a business purpose? I was looking at Facebook at work... is that business?
See, as soon as people start thinking, they start misinterpreting, assuming, rationalizing behavior, and introducing a whole host of biases that kill your critical analysis.
This is why focus group testing doesn't work and A-B testing does:
We don't understand ourselves. Our minds are emotional, irrational, inconsistent little mysteries. It's cliche but true: We don't know what we want until we see it, and we don't know what we have until we lose it.
Anyone who says otherwise is selling something – and probably not very successfully.
Don’t look now, but there’s a new/old kid making some moves on the social media block.
MySpace – you remember it, right? – just added 1 million new members. What’s more, traffic to the granddaddy of social media sites increased 4 percent from December to January, the first increase of its kind in nearly a year. The gains have come since the site launched a new music player – and, perhaps more importantly, tight integration with Twitter and Facebook.
This last point is interesting. More and more networks and sites are playing nice with each other, something that seems to be benefitting all of them. Users signing up for a Spotify account, for example, simply need to sign in with their Facebook login, making it much easier to get access to Spotify and its features. Some people don’t like it, but many do, as it makes it easy for them to automatically post music preferences to their Facebook pages.
The same goes for MySpace. With its direct integration with Facebook and Twitter, MySpace users can show others what they’re doing within MySpace. This helps promote the site while making it easy for people to share status updates.
This type of cross-pollination among social networks is nothing new, of course, but it does raise an interesting thought: whereas once sites like MySpace and Facebook were considered competitive, that’s no longer necessarily the case. There’s a lot of co-opetition going on between these sites, particularly since pretty much everyone and their mother is on Facebook. Right now there’s really no point to trying to compete with that.
Things aren’t completely rosy for MySpace, however. It still lags as the fourth largest social media network (behind Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn). And with Google+ still growing, it continues to look like an uphill battle for Rupert Murdoch’s former company.
But the addition of a million users is a very positive sign. And while it might be too early to break out the champagne and call this a MySpace resurgence, it does signify that new features, in addition to integration with more popular social sites, is helping MySpace climb back into relevance.
- Pete Larmey
Pretty soon, the Silicon Valley will have nothing on us. DC/MD/VA are going above and beyond to create an entrepreneurial community all our own, initiating programs like Foster.ly, DC Tech Meet-up, and most recently, Startup America.
Last Tuesday, January 31st, Startup Virginia kicked-off their new membership into the Startup America clan by hosting an (awesome) early-morning, entrepreneurial get together at Founders Hall Auditorium at Geroge Mason University’s Arlington Campus. The celebration began with a quick note from Jonathan Aberman, Startup Virginia co-chair, president of FounderCorps and managing partner of Amplifier Venture Partners. This was followed by a few words from GMU President Dr. Alan Mertens, professing his dedication and support to the area’s startup and tech communities,. “Here at George Mason we have a responsibility to foster the entrepreneurial community…Be innovative and entrepreneurial,” said Mertens. “Take advantage of your location. Build on your strengths.”
Held in conjunction with Startup America’s first birthday party, Startup Virginia featured a 1-year anniversary video followed by an Aberman-led panel discussion with Startup DC, MD and VA co-chairs Evan Burfield, Mark Walsh and Dendy Young and Donna Harris, Startup America’s managing director of startup regions. The group provided positive insight into the future of entrepreneurialism in the region but also gave straight-forward advice on what we’ll need to do to reach our potential, specifically citing the need to “embrace failure the way the Silicon Valley has.”
Next up was the life of the party and White House CTO Aneesh Chopra, addressing the importance of entrepreneurship and Startup Virginia. He spoke of the need for government to remove barriers for entrepreneurs and announced President Obama’s unveiling of legislation to support entrepreneurship with bipartisan support later that same day. He also hit on the importance of students and others taking action to pitch policy changes that will help the community grow.
The moment everyone was waiting for, however, came when headliner Steve Case, chairman of Startup America (he may have also held some other important roles), made his way to the podium. He started out by making the audience feel important (cough - lying to everyone in the room) by stating he skipped the Startup Hawaii launch for the VA launch. His motivational speech encouraged everyone to go back to what worked, reminding us that we didn’t become the greatest economy in the world on accident. Case also pointed out his priorities for national policy change, noting immigration reform, easing crowd-sourced funding and lowering the cost of an IPO.
All-in-all, the event was a great way to kick things off for the entrepreneurial community here in the tri-state area. And, although I wasn’t able to attend, I heard another great event took place later that night for the Startup DC launch.
On an ending note – here were some of my favorite tweets from the event. Check them all out at #startupva!
@jmbadlam: #StartupVA event tomorrow expecting 450 attendees. Wowza. Great news for the alma mater!
@wfuentes3: @SpeakerBox: thanks for the invite to @startup_va event. Great panel right now #startupVA (what, I’m allowed to like a shout out?)
@TracyTran: Frankly, #startupva started because Virginia is the most business-friendly state in the country. Suck it other 49.
@ChrisF: "Marketing its not a dirty word." -- Alan Merten, George Mason President #startupva
-Kate N.