Marketing Articles About Growth

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Results for: growth

45 items found:

Hops Farmers Find Growth Biz. The Wall Street Journal: Last fall, South Dakota businessman Steve Polley was scouting for ways to make some extra income when he saw a news headline: The price of hops was surging because of a global shortage. At the time, Polley knew little about hops, the flowering plants that give beers their distinct aromas and bitterness. Now, [...]
(09/03/08 09:00 PM)

Carat Revises Global Ad Spend Forecasts. Carat lowered its growth forecasts for global advertising expenditures in 2008 and 2009, predicting 4.9 percent growth in 2008 (vs. 6.0 percent it estimated in March) and a growth of 4.8 percent in...

(09/02/08 09:01 AM)

Why Social Media Optimization?. SMO or Social Media Optimization is the latest trend in the field of online marketing. From hindsight SMO seems like an inevitable consequence of the rapid growth of social sites on the net as well as... (08/31/08 09:00 AM)

In a Revolutionary Guesture of Cost Savings, Starbucks Refuses to Increase CEO’s Salary. From the Wall Street Journal: Starbucks Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Howard Schultz and other top managers will not get salary increases next fiscal year, according to an internal Starbucks memo sent this week. The move reflects the Seattle-based coffee chain’s continuing effort to rein in spending as it tries to revive its profit growth and stock [...] (08/28/08 09:00 AM)

Website Aids In The Online Bookselling Business. When you’re looking for a business to start, the book business probably isn’t the first business that comes to mind. With the growth in technology and the many attempts that have been made to wipe out the old fashioned book, nothing can seem to replace it. That is what makes the business so [...]
(08/27/08 09:00 PM)

Top Internet Portals to Weather Economic Storm. Google's strong financial results for 2Q08 - including 27 percent growth in net US advertising revenues - is an indication that Google, Yahoo and MSN would continue to show positive results for all...

(08/22/08 09:01 AM)

ASP = SaaS = Cloud = ?.

Matt McAdams has a clever blog up titled Up next: telesoftware! He discusses the rise of our favorite new buzzword (hint: it's "Cloud Computing") and spends some time harkening back to its origin (hint: it's the "Application Service Provider.") Timeline of cloud computing buzzwords

I was around at the birth of the ASP as the co-chairman of one of the early ASPs (Interliant) which started out life in 1996 as a "web hosting company" (how passe) and evolved in 1997 into an Application Service Provider. I clearly remember the tech media latching onto the ASP label at the end of the 1990's right alongside prefixing everything with a lowercase e and postfixing everything with ".com".

The cynics were simple minded - they simply referred to the ASPs as the return of mainframe - or even better - timesharing. Interliant enjoyed rapid growth and a brief period of what looked like success before being decimated during the collapse of the Internet bubble.

Platform-as-a-Service has emerged suddenly with a vengeance. IBM System/370 anyone? The S/370 had this nifty thing called "virtual memory", which evolved into VM, which lives on today as the great new "virtualization" trend.

Telesoftware? Nah - that sounds too much like Telemedicine (what ever happened to that one?) I think we are going to be talking about "planetary computing" once "cloud computing" runs its course since "Sun computing" has already come and mostly gone.

(08/19/08 09:00 PM)

Lower gas prices are bad for the global economy..

The stock market saw its biggest gain in four months on August 5 thanks to falling commodity prices, especially oil. However, commodities have fallen because of a global slowdown in economic growth, which is only going to get worse.

(08/08/08 09:01 AM)

Whole Foods Dismayed to Find It Can No Longer Excise All Funds From Your Paycheck. From the New York Times: Whole Foods Market is on a mission to revise its gold-plated image as consumers pull back on discretionary spending in a troubled economy. The company was once a Wall Street darling, but its sales growth was cooling even before the economy turned. Since peaking at the beginning of 2006, its stock [...] (08/04/08 09:01 AM)

Survey: Better Data, Measurement Abilities, and ROI Metrics Boost Marketing Performance. Want to take your performance to that ideal level of highly effective and efficient marketing? It takes better access to detailed data and ROI discipline, but it also comes along with greater growth and better levels of budgets, according to the recently released study. (07/15/08 09:01 AM)

Small business growth through investing.

Since launching MarketingSavant (my social media/digital marketing consulting company) earlier this year, I've been looking at a number of ways to grow the business, outside of hiring people. By growing the business I mean simply the cash base or revenues from the organization. I was caught off guard when another local consulting business owner asked me "so, what's your exit strategy?" Wow, I just kicked this thing off, what do you mean "exit strategy". Of course, I know exactly what he means, but I'd never really given it that much thought. When you're an entrepreneur or an intrepreneuer (someone with an entrepreneurial spirit inside the corporation), you need to have your own exit strategy. For me, I've chosen to pursue an 'education in investing' strategy to help grow my cash reserves while I grow the business. Yes, I know, the market isn't exactly doing well, but that's precisely the time to get in. I look at the stocks and funds that I'm investing in now and thinking back to when I graduated college in 1999... if I had invested even a modest sum then, I'd be doing quite well now. Which brings us to the one thing that I think investing and marketing have in common (I'm sure there are others...but this one is really important... Faith in the future. As marketers, we're always marketing to the future, with faith in that marketing campaign and it's ability to deliver future value. As investors, we're buying stocks and funds with faith in the company's ability to grow into the future. Marketers and investors unite! Doom and gloom does not serve you...it's the faith in the future that keeps both of us afloat and in business. [Inspired by Kevin's post on 'cracks in the retirement nest egg']
(07/08/08 09:00 AM)

I've Been Gnipped.

Earlier this year we made a seed investment in a new company called Gnip. Yesterday, Gnip launched their first service - a free centralized callback server that notifies data consumers (such as Plaxo) in real-time when there is new data about their users on various data producing sites (such as Flickr and Digg). I've written my version of the overview on the Foundry Group blog in my post titled Gnip is Ping Spelled Backwards, there are a couple of posts up already on the Gnip blog, and a number of people have already written about Gnip including TechCrunch, TechCrunchIT, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, Dave Winer, and Joe Smarr (Plaxo's Chief Platform Architect). Rather than repeat what Gnip is here, I'm going to tell you how this investment came about.

It started in 2004. I got an IM out of the blue from someone named bpm140 (my IM addresses are easy to find - AIM/Y!: bfeld; Skype: bradfeld; MSN: brad@feld.com.) bpm140 asked me if I'd be willing to take a quick look at a business plan he had. I IM'ed back that he should email it to me - I got it 30 seconds later.

I took a look and scheduled a call. It was a plan for an educational game thing that I didn't really get but I was intrigued by some of the stuff in it. I talked to bpm140 (Eric Marcoullier) and gave him some feedback. After talking for a little while I told him it wasn't my thing, but he should feel free to holler if he thought I could be helpful.

Over the next few months I periodically got IMs from Eric. We'd have quick interactions - usually around a specific question - and he shared with me a new idea he was working on. He and his partner Todd Sampson (who I only knew through Eric's references to him) had this idea for a thingy (this was before little lines of javascript that you put on a blog were called widgets). You put this thingy on your blog and it gave you statistics of how many times someone clicked on a link. I'm a stats junky so I loved it. Eric said it would cost $3 / month. I told him it was stupid to charge for it, but I'd prepay for a year for $25. He took my money.

Over the next few months I gave him plenty of feedback on this new thing he was calling MyBlogLog. The UI of the stats service was hideous, but the popup link data on my blog was awesome and the stats were killer. By this point I had invested in FeedBurner, so I introduced Eric to Dick Costolo - FeedBurner's CEO. More feedback ensued.

One day, I got a familiar bpm140 IM saying something like "we came up this amazing idea to turn your blog into a social network." All I needed to do was put a little different piece of javascript on my blog. I did and the old version of the MyBlogLog widget - with names only and a really yucky font appeared on my blog. For those of you that remember it, it was one of those amazing widgets that you suddenly couldn't ever remember living without. Names were great, but soon little images appeared and the idea of seeing who had recently been on my blog was incredibly satisfying. MyBlogLog took off like a rocket.

Up to this point, Eric and his partner Todd hadn't raised any money. I remember the first "are you interested in investing call" happening in May 2006. Amy and I had rented and apartment in Paris for the month and I can remember the conference call with Eric and this new guy Scott Rafer who Eric and Todd had brought in to be CEO. They were considering putting together an angel round with the idea of going for a venture round in three or four months. I committed $25k on the spot, although I remember Scott saying he really didn't want investments of less than $50k.

MyBlogLog continued its torrid growth over the summer, appearing on virtually every blog I read. Fred Wilson - one of my co-investors in FeedBurner and another fan of MyBlogLog - and I started talking about doing a VC round. We came close to do a deal (the documents were a few days away from being signed) when Yahoo! acquired MyBlogLog shortly after getting excited about them after seeing them at the Web 2.0 conference in 2006. I had one awkward conversation with Eric where I quickly told him that while I was disappointed that I wouldn't be investing in MyBlogLog, I was psyched for him, Todd, and Scott and wished him luck. I also told him that I'd love to stay in touch and have another chance to work with him in the future.

I didn't expect Eric to stay at Yahoo! very long (he lasted about six months, although Todd is still there trying hard to keep the MyBlogLog flame alive.) True to my invitation, Eric and I stayed in touch, he and Todd were a big help at TechStars in 2007, and Eric started making occasional trips out to Boulder to see me.

I spent most of 2007 raising our first Foundry Group fund. By the fall we had finished raising our fund and had turned our focus towards making investments. It was in this context that Eric and I sat down on one of his trips in the fall of 2007. Over a couple of hours, Eric ran me through a half dozen ideas he had for a new business. He was hedging a little - struggling with whether to go deep on one business or try to start a few. I strongly encouraged him to focus on one. I told him that four of the six ideas were stupid, one wasn't for me, but one was awesome. It was the seed of what turned into Gnip.

During that trip, I dragged my partners Ryan and Seth into a conference room to sit with Eric and sketch out Gnip more. Eric was originally calling the idea Pingery but somewhere along the way Gnip popped out and it stuck ("meta-ping server" was a little awkward). Gnip fit perfectly in a new theme that Ryan, Seth, and my other Foundry partners were calling Glue and we told Eric that if he wanted to do Gnip as the exclusive thing he worked on, we'd be game to go after it with him.

I got a call from Eric a few weeks later that he'd decided to go all in with Gnip. We'd recently made an investment in Zynga and Eric had spent some time with Mark Pincus, the founder/CEO of Zynga. I think Mark's single-minded obsession with the business he was creating made a deep impression on Eric, especially since Mark is a multi-time successful entrepreneur who also has plenty of angel investments and can basically spend his time wherever he wants.

Part of Eric's success in MyBlogLog was his partnership with his technical co-founder Todd. I told Eric he needed either Todd, or a technical co-founder like Todd, as part of Gnip. Todd wasn't available as he was committed to staying at Yahoo! so we introduced Eric to a few people, including Jud Valeski. We'd known Jud for several years as he was a Netscape/AOL refugee that had settled in Boulder. Jud had recently left Me.dium and was working out of our offices as he contemplated his next gig. Jud and Eric hit it off immediately and started working together remotely (Eric in the bay area; Jud in Boulder) to both flesh out the idea behind Gnip as well as see if they could work together.

A few weeks later Eric and Jud gave their formal pitch to us for Gnip. It was a 10 page PowerPoint presentation that outlined the idea, opportunity, and how they would go about it. We committed to leading a seed investment of $1m on the spot - either by ourselves or with another VC firm. A few weeks later we closed a $1.1m round with SoftTechVC (Jeff Clavier) and First Round Capital (Josh Kopelman) and were off to the races (BTW - Josh has written a really clever post about Gnip titled The Story of Francis Bates.)

Eric, Jud, and Gnip have surpassed all of our expectations from our seed investment at the beginning of the year. They've totally nailed the concept we were kicking around when we first started talking about Gnip, have built a superb initial service in a remarkably short period of time with the help of Pivotal Labs, and have added a handful of awesome technical people to their team. They've managed to do this while still being split between the bay area (Eric, Tiffany, and Pivotal) and Boulder (Jud and the rest of the team).

It took a three year courtship, but Eric and I are now working together as partners. As my grandmother used to say, "My Gnip Runneth Over."

(07/03/08 09:00 AM)

Top, Bottom, Middle, or Who Cares?.

Having been an entrepreneur and VC for over 20 years, I've now seen plenty of economic cycles - both at a macro level and specifically in the areas I invest in. As a result, I smiled when I received three conflicting pieces of information today from two people I know and like and one person that I don't know but know is respected.

Matt McCall at DFJ Portage calls the current VC cycle "dead" as of Q2 2008 in Rough Ride Ahead: Buckle Up & Get Your Money Now (if you can). He says it with conviction, although he does acknowledge that he hopes he is Peter the Wolf.

Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures asks (and answers) the question Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”? Fred is heading off to Europe for a month with his family "to see how the web is changing the world and I want to see how entrepreneurs who are operating with a different worldview are thinking about the power and potential of the web. I could do the same thing in Asia or some other part of the world, but Europe is particularly easy place to do this because of the range of cultures and countries within a couple hours plane ride from each other."

Merrill Lynch's chief strategist Richard Bernstein in "Some thoughts on alternative investments (6/23/08)" says "The growth in alternative investments seems linked to the growth of the credit crisis" but then goes on to say "There may be two areas of alternative investments that seem relatively attractive in the current financial environment. In both cases, these are areas that might benefit from the tightening of global credit. The first is early-stage venture capital. ... If return-on-investment does indeed tend to be higher when capital is scarce, the significant tightening of traditional credit funding to smaller companies seems to make early-stage venture capital strategies more attractive."

While Bernstein's definition of "early stage venture capital" is mostly likely different than mine (given my interpretation of his assertion), knowing how sound bites work, the three tag lines are "VC is dead", "I'm bored of Web 2.0 and need more meaning in my investments", and "early-stage VC is attractive again."

Like Fred, I also am about to embark on a month outside of my normal context. Amy and I are about to head to our house in Homer, Alaska for the month of July. I'm looking forward to going to a place where the Supreme Court rules Homer voter initiative invalid and thinking big (but not big box) thoughts.

(06/23/08 09:00 PM)

How to Avoid Six Common Pitfalls of the Launch Process. Launching new products, services, or segments is the lifeblood of growth for most organizations. Yet, despite its importance, the launch process is often mishandled or assigned inadequate resources. Many of the mistakes that companies make are basic?yet frighteningly frequent and consistent across various types of businesses and industries. Here are six common fault lines in the launch process that very company should look out for. (06/10/08 09:00 PM)

The Best Things In Life Are Free!. Have I got a deal for you! One of my strategic partners, InfusionSoft, has asked me to conduct a webinar Wednesday, June 18th at 3pm CDT called “Infusionsoft & Duct Tape Marketing Reveal The Must-Know Secrets of Small Business Growth” Infusionsoft makes marketing automation software that helps small businesses keep track of leads, lists, orders, opportunities and [...]
(06/04/08 09:00 PM)

Five Secrets to Email List Growth. Building a list of responsive subscribers via a Web site that has a bit of traffic and quality content is surprisingly easy. But sometimes, when working with users, we're surprised to see low conversion rates. So, we take a look into just why that might be. Here are five factors to consider when growing your list. (05/27/08 09:00 AM)

How to Unleash the Power of Brand Repositioning: A Four-Phase Process. Many brands and companies today are constantly reinvigorating their businesses and positioning them for growth. There is a constant need to innovate, reinvigorate, update, recalibrate, or just simply fend off the competition in an effort to better explain "why buy me." To move forward, companies and brands need to first take a look at their current brand positioning. But for a moment, it makes sense to go back to the brand drawing board to answer the question, "Just what is brand positioning, anyway?" (05/20/08 09:01 AM)

Announcing Jack Tyler Decker. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE MANAGEMENT SHAKEUP AT DECKER HOUSEHOLD Jack Tyler Decker Appointed New CEO AUSTIN, TX (MARCH 6, 2008) -- The Decker Household announced today the arrival of its new CEO, Jack Tyler Decker. A 9-month veteran of fast-growth environments, Jack took control of the family startup on Friday, March 6 at 5:42PM CT. In a management shakeup, the 21 inch, 8 lb. 11 oz tycoon appointed Shannon Decker to report directly to him as President of The Household. Shannon's promotion came after hard labor disputes for a few hours just prior to his appointment. Sam Decker, who had worked many years to gain peer status to the new President, has been demoted to special assistant to Shannon and her supporting staff, Kyle and Haley Decker. Jack had started his 9 month rise to control since June 7…or maybe June 8 or 9, 2007-- analysts cannot confirm the date. Jack had an inside track to the position ever since. The new CEO is expected to work around the clock. His duties will consist of sleeping, eating 8 meals a day, and making many daily deposits into plastic envelopes. Shannon and Sam, in their new roles, will act quickly on directions from their new boss to achieve his desired career growth. On the day of his arrival, the CEO wasted no time crying out instructions to her new staff, and was already making small deposits. Jack Decker, with a simple coo and finger suck, immediately got his team to swing into... (03/07/08 09:00 AM)

VP of Marketing Responsible for Shipping & Logistics?. Harry Joiner, a marketing recruiter and good friend, asked me to comment on his blog regarding what a VP of eCommerce or VP Marketing candidate should be asked or should answer regarding shipping & delivery logistics. Here's what I said... As you know, I believe word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing and sustainable growth. So, a VP of marketing candidate needs to have an appreciation for the overall customer experience. Shipping logistics are a huge part of that experience. You can weight the satisfaction and loyalty impact of each part of the customer experience – researching products, buying, receiving and using a product (support). The weight of impact is correlated to the the emotional residual for that part of the experience. Shopping and research is a relatively forgettable experience, unless there is severe frustration. The buying experience is overshadowed with the emotional weight of the receiving and the out of box experience, as well as resolving customer service and support issues (downstream activities). Amazon is consistent with shipping and logistics. Apple and Chumby have great out of the box experiences. So, word of mouth and branding (and thus, top line revenue over the long term) are driven from upstream decisions (great products, packaging) and downstream logistics (shipping, service, support). A great VP of marketing should realize they have to balance between immediate, short term tactics to drive revenue and the sustainable long-term activities that may even be out of his direct control. In this case, marketing... (01/31/08 09:00 PM)

Why, How and Who of Web 2.0. A couple weeks ago I moderated a panel and roundtable for Austin Venture portfolio companies on Web 2.0. As many of the companies were not in the "Web 2.0" bullseye, the discussion focused on the what, why, how and who of Web 2.0. I'll skip the "What" question...here are the some of the other notes: Why? * Analysts read blogs. Reporters read blogs * Empowers customers * Blogs are turning into a trusted media outlet * 78% of online customers trust brands more that have reviews on their site * Marketing (PR) is being Master of Reality (Edelman) * From conversation about your brand, to your brand’s values (ex: Saturn’s findyourdetour.com site) * From monologue to dialogue (how web 2.0 changes marketing’s voice) * Demonstrates your brand’s authenticity * Longer life vs printed articles * Get insight into audience and build relationship * 90 / 9 / 1 rule: 90% read, 9% participate, 1% narcissism (+1% paid participation) * Viral growth via networking and connectivity * Your brand = your Google content * 25% of Google search results is user generated content * C to C marketing (customer to customer) is much more effective * Word of mouth marketing works online because the content is archived while word of mouth marketing offline can be quickly forgotten How? * Keep messaging consistent through channels * Treat online media same as traditional media, but use a different pitch to target each media * Video metadata, and taking advantage of Google’s universal search... (10/30/07 09:00 AM)

Parallels: Investment Portfolios | Marketing Portfolios.

As many a marketing manager and media planner turns their focus to 2008 (in fact, I'm better that a fair number of you have already turned in some preliminary budget numbers for '08, if not your entire budget and marketing plan) we're all challenged with where we're going to allocate dollars for our anticipated returns and ROI.

An intriguing post over at Get Rich Slowly and a story on NPR about David Swensen, who, for the past 21 years been Yale Universityâ??s investment portfolio manager, garnering an average 16 percent annual return! This is astonishing in that most of us are fortunate to sneak by with an average 7 percent across our investment and retirement stockpiles.

What's more interesting is the connection that's made in the blog post between what David feels is a intuitively balanced portfolio and the types of index funds (ETF - Exchange Traded Funds) that the everyman (or woman) could safely invest in and secure a comfortable return.

The chart below represents Swensena's basic formula for creating an investment portfolio likely to give you good returns while still managing risk: (via Get Rich Slowly)

This got me to thinking, what's your marketing portfolio look like? When you look at how Swensen's investment percentages break down with 20% in Real Estate and another 5% in Emerging Markets, I can't help but think that there are parallels in our marketing portfolio to things like brand building and awareness (long-term, stability investments) and new media and social media (emerging markets, high risk, potential for high return) and the list goes on..

ACTION ITEM: What's your marketing portfolio look like? Do you have enough invested in stable, slow growth areas like branding and awareness building for the long term or have your been bit by the latest marketing trend bug and shifted your investments into higher-risk marketing vehicles? Are you investing enough in customer retention, referral and reactivation like we invest in government bonds to renew our country or have those areas fallen out of favor because of their seemingly modest returns?

Take another look at your marketing portfolio before the ink dries on next year's budget!

(10/04/07 09:01 PM)

Thought Leadership Marketing is Market Focused.

Steven Van Yoder posted an excellent summary of how Cisco embeds thought leadership marketing into its culture and plays off this philosophy as its marketing mainstay.

Most companies give lipservice to TLM the same way that few marketers understand the fundamentals of marketing in that the 'product focus' mentality of the twenties is dead and that we're still very much in the era of 'market focus'.

Therein lies the inherent power of Thought Leadership Marketing - It's market focused and puts the needs of the market first. More to the point, it puts the credibility, reputation and growth of the company truly in the hands of the customers. Thought Leadership is bestowed upon a company by its customers - it cannot be created in a vacuum without an intuitive revervence for the market or markets served.

Specific to Cisco, and others that use Thought Leadership Marketing, there are a few keys that make TLM what it is:

Leadership demands that every executive establish and nurture his or her own reputation for thought leadership
Pursue blogging, public speaking, and writing articles
Become an industry purveyor of executive thought leadership
Align your website with with links to research reports, papers, podcasts, interviews and other content from around the industry which supports and furthers your TLM position
Publish newseltters for customer segments and the industry in general
Host thought leadership events that bring together academia, industry, goverment and customers to address very specific topics related to your business and industry

That is not a be-all end all list to be sure, but it's a heck of a start on your Thought Leadership Marketing strategy.

(10/04/07 09:01 PM)

Mindblowing numbers on Internet Video.

I was speaking with some folks this morning at a local Green Bay college about the growth of video and their thoughts about YouTube, vlogs (video blogs) and the like. (they've even started to put St. Norbert College Videos on YouTube) It's not coincidence then that this report from ComScore shows that we're all but consumed with Internet Video!

Some of the more interesting data points:
> Fox Interactive (Fox News) ranked second for most video streams with 680 million, following the top ranked Google/YouTube with a combined 1.8 billion streams.
> 2.5 minutes is the average duration of an Internet Video Stream - keep this in mind when developing your videos
> Nearly three out of four (74.3 percent) U.S. Internet users streamed video online.
> The average online video viewer consumed more than two videos per day!

This online video space is far, far more pervasive than I once thought.

The whole Fox stat blows me a way too. I often watch videos from Fox after the fact, but I know that when I do catch the broadcasts, they're incessantly pimping the online follow through videos. Great strategy on their part! It's paying off.

[ref ComScore via Paul Kedrosky]

P.S. I didn't see St. Norbert listed, but for some time, YouTube has had a schools channel. Way cool!

(10/03/07 09:00 PM)

Parallels: Investment Portfolios | Marketing Portfolios.

The chart below represents Swensena's basic formula for creating an investment portfolio likely to give you good returns while still managing risk: (via Get Rich Slowly)

Take another look at your marketing portfolio before the ink dries on next year's budget!

(10/03/07 09:00 PM)

The Last Wall is About to Fall at the NYT. Donovan Building Demolition Originally uploaded by Allan M Some newspapers have tried stubbornly to resist giving away their content for free on the Web. But the New York Times is finally about to give up the ship, according to the New York Post. It already gives away most of its stories for free online—all except select Op-Ed pieces on TimesSelect. In an age of seemingly unchecked growth in online ads, subscription walls don't make a lot of sense. And with Rupert Murdoch thinking about taking down the subscription wall at WSJ.com, the Times would not be wise to become the last holdout. Scott Karp explains the disruption occurring in the media world:The new economics of media make charging for content nearly impossible because there is always someone else producing similar content for free — even if the free content isn’t “as good as” the paid content by some meaningful metric, it doesn’t matter because there’s so much content of at least proximate quality that the paid content provider has virtually no pricing power.News and commentary are no longer a scarce commodity.... (08/07/07 09:00 PM)

New York Times' Web Growth Doesn't Make Up For Print Decline. In what's becoming an all-too common theme among old-media companies, the New York Times reported a 5.7 percent drop in overall ad revenues and a 59 percent drop in operating profits. The one bright spot: it's Web properties, including NYTimes.com, Boston.com, and About.com, saw a 23.4 percent rise in revenues. But it's $81 million in revenues only makes up 10 percent of the company's overall sales, and is still not enough to counter the decline in print. Still, operating profits at About.com alone ($8.5 million) represent 38 percent of the company's total operating profits. Web revenues don't have to rise tenfold before Web profits can offset the decline in print profits. But with online ad growth expected to slow at the Times, it could still be a while.... (07/25/07 09:01 AM)

Andreessen Rakes in $92 Million on HP-Opsware Deal. Marc, originally uploaded by Gina Bianchini. Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) $1.6 billion acquisition of Opsware (OPSW) announced this morning strengthens its hand in the market for automated data center management software. Corporate data centers are getting bigger and more complex, so software to automate it all is a growth area for HP.The big winner in this deal, though, is Marc Andreessen. Yes, that Marc Andreessen. Opsware was his second startup after Netscape (originally dubbed Loudcloud). At HP's offer of $14.25 a share, he stands to make $92 million off the deal personally (according to Yahoo Finance, he owns 6.5 million shares.) Now, all he needs to do is sell Ning (which he also co-founded), and he'll have a hat trick.Opsware has had many ups and downs since it was formed during the dotcom bubble in September, 1999. As Andreessen notes on his blog:Loudcloud took off like a rocketship, raised $350 million in equity and debt financing, went public in March 2001, and was rapidly nearing $100 million in annual recurring managed services revenue when the entire market blew up and virtually all of our competitors and peers went bankrupt.In September 2002, we did a complete restart as a public company -- we sold our managed services business to EDS and turned Loudcloud into Opsware, a software company based on the core intellectual property developed at Loudcloud. Over the next five years, we executed on our original vision -- automation of large-scale modern datacenters and computer systems.We have become the clear market leader,... (07/23/07 09:01 AM)

Microsoft Plays With P2P TV. Video: LiveStation Demo Microsoft Research (MSFT) and a UK-based company called Skinkers are developing peer-to-peer software called LiveStation for streaming live television over PCs. Think of it as a Slingbox Without the Box. (See demo video above). Except that TV stations would have to sign up to stream their broadcasts over the service. Using P2P networks is the most bandwidth efficient (and least costly) way to deliver video over the Internet. Joost, Babelgum, and Veoh also all use P2P distribution techniques in one form or another. But they all deliver videos that are already stored somewhere (their servers or the computers of their members), as opposed to live streams. I'm not sure how difficult it would be for any of these services to offer live streams as well. It doesn't seem like that big a deal. Joost, for instance, is working on (or already has) the ability to synchronize the streaming of a particular show so that you and all of your friends can watch it at the same time while chatting over Joost. Making that a live stream should be easy enough. The bigger question is: On the Internet, does live TV even matter any more? The TV schedule is a product of the historical limitations of broadcast television, where you have to broadcast the same shows to everyone at the same time. But those limitations are falling away. Even in cable and satellite TV, the growth of pay-per-view and on-demand channels proves that if you give consumers more... (07/06/07 09:01 AM)

How to Harness Word of Mouth (Article from MyCustomer.com). When I got back from London I got a call from Neil Davey from MyCustomer.com, who interviewed me for this article... Quoted from http://www.mycustomer.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=133068: Everybody's talking: how to harness word of mouth marketing - 14 Jun 2007 By Neil Davey, editor Word of mouth marketing and customer advocacy have got a lot of people talking in recent years. Studies by the likes of the London School of Economics have found that word of mouth advocacy is a statistically significant predictor of annual sales growth. And this has generated no little excitement in marketing departments around the globe. Nurturing and harnessing this powerful medium has therefore become a growing imperative. As a board member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, and VP of word of mouth marketing firm Bazaarvoice.com, few are more aware of the surge in interest in this field than Sam Decker. Read More --... (06/18/07 09:03 PM)

Balancing The Three Jobs of Growing a Business: Lawn Mower, Plumber, and Contractor . Weeds are growing in the yard…so I’ve scheduled the lawn mower to trim the yard.My wife told me the toilet is leaking at its base. I called a plumber to keep things running.And we’re in the middle of working with a pool contractor to extend our patio to change the usefulness of our backyard. It takes a lawn mower, a plumber and a contractor to run and increase your house investment. It struck me these are also the ‘jobs’ – in essence --to run and grow a business. There are always opportunities to optimize, fix issues, and innovate in your business. This is the natural mix of requirements during growth. Sustained growth is achieved through the art and science of balancing between a portfolio of optimizing, fixing and launching breakthrough strategies. Or rather, being the lawn mower, plumber and/or contractor. In my experience, many people in startups spend their time as a contractor…architecting, engineering, and building new ideas. Inevitably, there are too few people interested in being plumbers to fix problems from new products. Execution to build new ideas is good, but execution to resolve issues is not as good (or not as interesting). And there are few systems and little patience to optimize (lawn mower).. At companies like Dell, employees are operational, executional, financial, superstar lawn mowers. Business Process improvements drove optimization to new levels. The goal is to squeeze every dime of cost out of or every dollar of margin out of existing products, functionality and programs. Occasional... (04/10/07 09:00 PM)

Telecall on Wednesday to Help Grow Business. One of my colleagues, Lisa Nirell of energizegrowth, has launched an exciting program for successful entrepreneurs. This Virtual Seminar series helps you build an 11 step, highly actionable growth plan to attract great customers and focus your teams on your... (04/06/07 09:01 AM)

3 Emotions to Drive Execs to Action. Yesterday I was on a panel for a Forrester bootcamp on Social Media. One of the common questions was how to convince senior management to agree to and resource these new emerging channels and marketing strategies. What moves consumers to action? Emotion. It’s not much different than with executives and managers…you just use data to create those emotions! In my experience, there are three emotions I’ve seen drive executive action: Fear – show the competition is having success with a strategy that you are not. I’m putting this first because fear is the biggest motivator in the human psyche. And the first reaction for executives when they see a competitor doing something successful is to react. I’m not suggesting this is always right, but it’s reality. It’s a call to action event. If a competitor is launching an emerging channel strategy, your executives have to decide to do something or nothing. Use this time to drive a recommended strategy. Excitement – show and prove the revenue impact from such a strategy. Changne resistance is typically due to prioritization and predictability. Corporations, and management in them, have a need to drive predictable growth and mitigate risk. Priorities are driven based on familiarity of strategies that drive confident results. Something that can be proved to drive better results and meet or beat forecast excites executives. Pride – most forward-thinking executives want to be first to market, forward thinking, innovative and cutting edge. Some want this because it is right for the company,... (03/22/07 09:01 AM)

How should Chipotle Invest $.26 per Burrito?. I was intrigued by an article in this week’s BusinessWeek regarding Chipotle’s incredible growth (27% YOY last quarter), despite a relatively small advertising budget. McDonald’s spends $820M+/yr in marketing on $21.5B revenue…4% of revenue. Chipotle spends $4.5M on $882M revenue…less than 1% of revenue. I did the math... if you assume the average meal is $8 (with drink, maybe chips), then Chipotle is serving over 110 million burritos (or burrito bowls, as I prefer) per year. If they decided to spend as much as their McDonald’s parent and competitors (4% of revenue), they could spend an additional $29M in marketing. That’s an extra $.26/burrito they could spend on advertising. Or perhaps they should spend it on something else? I’m not suggesting they spend this money. They are growing 26% YOY and pulling in $41M in net income. They are not ‘growth challenged’. More importantly is the positive business results growing on such a small marketing budget? How does Chipotle do it? They create a great atmosphere, built an eco-friendly company, and invest in great food that is served fast. I eat there once a week -- they give me more food than should fit in my stomach for a decent price, and it comes nowhere near the poor quality of first-frozen fast food. As growth slows Chipotle will face the pressures of a public company, typically to reduce costs. Bad idea…see my post on “Marginalizing Quality”. Or, ironically, analysts may ask for them to spend more on advertising. This is... (03/05/07 09:00 PM)

How Measurement Can Impede Long Term Growth. Measurement and accountability crystallizes movement towards a goal, individual performance, and helps identify employees worthy of merit. Measurement is the language of any organization. The more measures we can hold employees accountable for the better, right? Hold on. There’s a cautionary tale to running a company with an extreme and unbalanced reliance on internal measures. Most corporate measures and employee goals are internally focused, financially-oriented, and functionally silohed. There’s an unfortunate consequence for companies that ONLY focus on these measures. While it’s healthy to manage business with a pragmatic view of financial health, over the long term, a primary focus on these internal lagging measures is not what builds a great company. Can you agree that a great company is one which builds products based on customer needs, strives to delight customers, and generates positive word of mouth as a result? Great companies reinvent and innovate. Now, how many internal measures and key performance indicators directly tie to accomplishing these objectives? Can you identify the internal measures that measure the required cross-functional cooperation to ensure the entire customer delights customers? Sustained-growth companies create great experiences and benefit from positive word of mouth. The Ultimate Question / Net Promoter questions supports this, where Fred Reicheld studied companies with sustained growth and found when customers were willing to tell friends about that company. What companies are you willing to tell friends about? Here are some ideas: Toyota / Lexus, USAA, Costco, Southwest Airlines, Craigslist, Apple, JetBlue, and Amazon. What do these companies... (02/19/07 08:59 AM)

Decker's 15 Career Tips. This concludes my series of career tips, which was prompted by a few friends reaching out to me for advice. I'm sure I could think of more, but these are the first 15 that came to mind...and 15 is a good place to stop. Here's the list with links: Find and Follow Your Passion and Strengths Create Soundbytes for Your Personal Brand It's WHO You GET TO Know Choose Who Your Work For Take Initiative Outside Your Triangle Inform Others Connect to a Visible Brand Learn, Challenge, Fun Feed Others Go Where There's Margin Growth Always Can Do Take Bigger Risks Answer First Show and Know Metrics Never Eat Alone... (02/03/07 09:00 PM)

Career Tip #15: Never Eat Alone. Stealing the Keith Ferazzi's book title and principle by the same name, Never Eat Alone is a great principle for career growth (in addition to personal growth). Early in my career I took inter-office relationships for granted, eating lunch at my desk during those busy dot com days in South-of-Market San Francisco. However, one of my peers always ate lunch with others, and was inviting groups of people to lunch. I had two or three key relationships and she had 20. The relationships she built mattered made a difference in her ability to get things done with others. The better relationships you have inside your organization, the more you can get done…and the more people will talk about you (see Sound bytes tip) or defend you. In addition to inter-office relationships, consider eating with people outside your work. Get new perspectives. Network with people in your industry, and in your city. Your career, whether inside your company or out, is highly dependent on who you know and who you GET to know. Lunch, even if you pay, is worth the investment. I’ve had lunches with former colleagues who wanted to network outside their company. However, very few of them take action on this idea. They get stuck networking within their own company. Yet when they’re ready to move to the next game, they realize they don’t know anyone. Experts believe only 10-20% of jobs filled are ever publicized. Most jobs are placed from relationships. Over half the people hired into... (01/27/07 09:00 PM)

Career Tip #10: Go Where There's Margin Growth. The tabloid paparazzi attacks a story they know will sell magazines. Hence you see five tabloid covers at the supermarket all covering Brad and Jennifer’s break up, for example. Similarly, executives swarm around areas of the company that margin dollars. They will focus there, invest there, and grow that area as quickly as they can. And it is there where you can also find career growth. In any company with multiple product lines or divisions there are some parts of the company that have high margin % and/or high revenue growth (preferably both), and some that don’t. For Dell, for example, there’s high margin and high growth in servers, storage, and service. You find lower margin % and lower growth (yet an unfortunate large % of Dell’s revenue) in workstations, desktops, and consumer laptops. Which divisions do you think will hire more people and the best people? Managers in those high margin divisions are growing their career and learning things other companies want. Are you in a position to help your company grow a high margin category? Can you learn a new skill that helps grow a high-margin category? Remember, the ideal situation is high margin % and high revenue growth. If management is smart, they are trying to grow margin dollars (a.k.a. profits). If only 5% of your revenue has high margin % and is growing slower you’re your overall business that’s not the greatest place to be. But if a high margin % part of your company is... (01/17/07 09:00 AM)

Follow Through in Selling. We all know when a company is going through that growth phase - when disconnects start to happen more frequently between departments, or between customers and the company. The ball gets dropped one too many times - and we say,... (12/12/06 08:47 AM)

Ten Worst Internet Acquisitions Ever. "As the market for acquiring fledgling Internet companies heats up, it's worth taking a look at all those acquisitions that didn't quite work out. For every Internet acquisition that's successful there seems to be dozens that die on the vine. So what makes for a really bad Internet acquisition? First, it has to be expensive. No one's going to rake a company over the coals over a few blown $50 million acquisitions. That might sound like a lot of money to you and me, but that's a rounding error to Google. Second, for an acquisition to be lousy it has to contribute little or no long term growth to the acquiring company. An acquisition that doesn't fit with a company's long term strategy and that is quickly forgotten -- that's a bad buy. So, here is my highly subjective list of the 10 worst Internet acquisitions of all time..." (12/12/06 08:04 AM)

How to Buy Presents Strategically. When you have kids and have gone through a series of Christmas seasons, you realize that sustainment of happiness from a present is usually longer in the mind than it is in reality. Sometimes, especially with toys, the euphoria ends on December 26! This season I'm taking a different approach. I'm approaching present-giving like capital investment. In business good strategy requires allocation of resources towards areas of growth. Capital is invested towards something that has long term ROI, and aligns with the strategic goals of the business. Apply this concept (loosely) to presents. So, for your gift receivers (kids, spouse, family), what gift will help have sustainable enjoyment? And, what gift will help the person and/or your relationship with that person grow? I want our kids to learn experientially. So, I will buy gifts that will teach them new things they would not learn in books, but still enjoy. Example: I recently bought them SIMS City, Zoo Tycoon, and Rossetta Stone. I don't have as much time as I'd like to give to our family. So any gift I receive or give them should be accretive to quantity and quality of time with the family. Anything that builds family memories is good, like a camera for the kids so they can take pictures of the family and our life. A book for me on raising my kids (instead of my typical marketing / management books!). Family games that aren't boring would be a good thing. Gift certificates to dinner or... (12/06/06 09:00 AM)

Ten Reasons Why You Need a Strong Business Plan. A business plan is the cornerstone of starting a business as well as a significant tool for monitoring the progress and growth of your company. Below are ten key reasons why you should have a business ...

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Ch 8 of 'New Rules for the New Economy'. "Innovation is disruption; constant innovation is perpetual disruption. This seems to be the goal of a well-made network: to sustain a perpetual disequilibrium. A few economists studying the new economy (among them Paul Romer and Brian Arthur) have come to similar conclusions. Their work suggests that robust growth sustains itself by poising on the edge of constant chaos. 'If I have had a constant purpose it is to show that transformation, change, and messiness are natural in the economy,' writes Arthur." (Thanks Noise Between Stations!) (08/18/06 09:00 AM)

Banks Expand Services, Perks for Small Outfits. Banks Expand Services, Perks for Small Outfits

By GWENDOLYN BOUNDS

"After a Chicago newspaper featured her small pet-food company, Holly Sher was showered with flowers, congratulatory calls and candy. But the attention didn't come from friends or clients -- it came from banks that wanted her business.

'They promised everything,' says Ms. Sher, who had just purchased Evanger's Dog & Cat Food Co., a pet food manufacturer with $6 million in annual revenue. The ultimate winner was Harris Bank, a chain of Chicago banks owned by BMO Financial Group of Canada. Harris sent an account executive directly to Ms. Sher's office with all the paperwork she needed to transfer accounts. The executive gave her his direct phone number and promised to arrange for a substitute contact anytime he went on vacation; he's since brought her Chicago Cubs baseball tickets."

- I have noticed the huge increase in banks catering to small business. Now it makes more sense. Small Business is a growth area for banks and that can only mean good things for Small Business. I recently opened an account at Sovereign Bank that has no maintenance fees, no minimum balance, free online banking and a free ATM/Visa Checkcard. How can you beat that on a business account. Of course there are some limitations (like 100 basic transactions monthly) but in the startup phase it is the perfect way to get set up without incurring expenses. (07/29/06 02:29 PM)

New Series: How to Hit the Marketing Bullseye. I’ve felt guilty not posting for a while. But I have been thinking a lot about marketing topics as they relate to my past and current position in a new startup. These thoughts keep circling around the same theme for me… How to Hit the Marketing Bullseye You see, Marketing (and typically advertising) is an incredibly wasteful profession… Some marketers measure their effectiveness by the amount of money they spend. Some view success by the ‘names in light’ phenomenon – because they have a pretty ad somewhere visible, they’re doing a good job. Some do one marketing function well, and regardless of industry, company, product, or customer they deploy their marketing strategy they know best. Some marketers hire big agencies or big consultants, who’s business model revolves around hours spent and/or money spent. Marketing has historically been one of the most wasteful professions available to young college graduates! I can’t think this way. Maybe it’s because I’m on my fourth startup, and in each I’ve had little marketing budget and huge growth goals. From these experiences I wrote a book on word of mouth marketing and guerilla marketing. I spent 7 years of operational, metrics-driven, Six-sigma optimized marketing at Dell, Inc. (B2B and B2C). While budgets are bigger at Dell, they are tiny compared to the revenue and growth goals. Try a marketing marketing budget of 1-2% of revenue (and declining) with 20% revenue growth goal! So, I’ve decided to write a series of blog posts centered on principles of... (07/29/06 02:28 PM)

DirectIndustry, or Direct Access?. On the last page of July's Test & Measurement World, there is an interview with Corentin Thiercelin, CEO of DirectIndustry.com. I haven't talked much about DirectIndustry here, but it is a directory targeting world-wide B2B supply.

The interview is typical of what you would expect, with bits like this:

"Google is so exhaustive that it can sometimes lack the order and logic necessary for professionals to compare products and brands effectively. As a search engine specialized for industry, DirectIndustry returns this order to the search, saving professionals time and headaches."

Info-commerce geeks and directory clients who read this blog should find the article somewhat interesting, which is part of the reason why I've posted it. This article leaves me with three questions, however:
1. Is this good content?
I've praised T&MW's content here before, but why this piece? Are engineers interested in the business of directories? The page subject is "Viewpoint, An exclusive interview with a technical leader". The most interesting part may be that Corentin was once a test engineer, which is why his website is lopsided towards test.

2. Is this a play to an advertiser?
DirectIndustry has been running a series of ads in T&MW celebrating their growth and longevity--is this why this interview is here? It's lack of typical editorial relevance smacks of direct access for advertisers. And the interview is all about his company, not really the 'role of the Web in purchasing decisions', as the intro promises.

3. What about loyalty to KellySearch?
T&MW is a Reed publication, which also owns KellySearch.com, a DirectIndustry competitor. T&MW has KellySearch as a tool on its website. Are the editors passive-aggressive towards their forced association with Kelly? Or trying to look unbiased?

What do you think? (07/29/06 02:28 PM)

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