When you start a business, you also start a timer that is counting down the days until your cash flow runs dry and your business fails.  Regardless of how well you are financed, who sits on your board or how good you are at keeping your costs under control, there is heightened significance to every moment, dollar or action when you are starting a business.

Every dollar or hour you commit has to have a discernible return.  The duration over when that return plays out may vary from company-to-company, but the return has to be there in a time that makes sense given your balance sheet and cash flow.

PR has traditionally been somewhat amorphous in terms of analyzing its return so it presents a challenge to start-ups.  Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that it’s important to get people talking about or with you but it’s not always easy to justify the costs (mostly time-based) involved with generating and participating in the conversation.

The evolution of PR has accelerated over the past decade and some would say it’s become more impactful and measurable.  Mid and large-market companies can now take a more quantitative approach to understanding the impact of their activities but the metrics are generally still one step away from the metric that start-ups should care about, which is dollars.

As a start-up on the clock, PR should be tied on some level to dollars generated because if PR isn’t helping to generate sales, then it’s not worth doing.

Starting from this premise, here are some additional thoughts on the how start-ups should think about PR:

1. Even if you’re not spending dollars on PR, you’re spending time on it  and time is the most valuable commodity you have when starting a business.  Your time could be spent building an awesome product, selling it to customers or supporting customers after the transaction to make sure they come back for more and tell their friends about your business.  Every hour you spend on PR is an hour you lose on actions that you know have a discernible ROI.

2. Derive multi-faceted value from singular activities – If you are going to spend an hour on PR, then make sure you get some benefit out of it.  If you spend that hour digging up a journalist to pitch, constructing a pitch, sending the pitch, not hearing back and then summarily forgetting that the hour just happened, then you have just failed.  If you use that pitch as the basis for a story that you share on your blog, then you have derived some value from the effort.

Every day, you are doing things outside of PR that can be repurposed to support PR and vice versa.  Keep that in mind.

If you just spent an hour writing an e-mail to a customer, explaining your perspective on something, then you have just created a story for your blog, which brings us to our next point.

3. PR can be mediated or disintermediated – It used to be that PR meant relying on someone to tell your story on your behalf to their audience.  Not any more.  You can tell your story to your audience yourself these days.  In fact, when you’re getting started, disintermediated PR is often times better because A. You aren’t relying on anyone else to communicate on your behalf so you can be sure that your content gets out there into the public sphere, B. You can get feedback that will help you tweak your product and your marketing/sales mix and C. you can target people that will actually care about your business or product and this is important because…

4. You aren’t that special – As Palahniuk wrote in Fight Club, “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all a part of the same compost pile.”  Most journalists don’t want to write about you because they know that it’s likely you won’t even be around in a couple years and they have heard the same pitch ten times today already.

Journalists don’t want to hear you telling them why your business or product is unique and special.  In fact, I don’t really want to hear that either.  What both the journalists and I want to hear, is something interesting that I haven’t heard before.  Don’t write 300 words about why you’re awesome and send that to a journalist, write 300 words about the research you did to determine that “awesome” is actually “not awesome” (and how this sparked your interest in starting a new brand called “not awesome”) and why that research is relevant in the context of a story I wrote last month.  Now we’re having a conversation and the conversation is important because. . .

5. A hit isn’t the result of a pitch, it’s a manifestation of the relationship that you build with your network - When you’re engaging in mediated PR, don’t go looking for one-night stands, look for buddies.  I’ve heard from my friends that one-night stands can be quite exciting.  You meet someone out, flirt, hook-up then never see them again.  You really don’t want to treat journalists or bloggers like this.

Journalists or bloggers are as tuned-in to your market as anyone.  Building a great relationship with one can be incredibly beneficial for a lot of reasons.  They can be an incredible source of information, they can point you in directions you never considered and can even lean on you for future stories and this is valuable because…

6. Even if you get a hit, it may not be a hit – I’ve talked to many entrepreneurs and small business owners who have spent too much time pitching, who have finally received a hit.  The ensuing conversation often times goes like this:

Entrepreneur: “Hey, I finally got a hit in [Insert prestigious publication of your choice].”

Me: That’s awesome, did you get a lot of new customers?

Entrepreneur: I got a couple.

On a side note, I really think the value of hits is in how the hit becomes a promotional tool by reinforcing your credibility (so pimp the brand where you got the hit all over your site) and in the organic search value the link from the hit brings to your site.  This is important because even after you have gotten a hit, you want to think about whether the benefit justified the cost and if it didn’t, then

7. If the experiment fails then stop and try something different – The most successful entrepreneurs who do their own PR are good because they try a bunch of things, stop doing things that don’t return and focus on things that do.  It seems like a simple equation but there are complexities, mostly in the execution of the tactic, the length of time that the tactic is executed and in the framework through which return is analyzed.

In general, PR can be an extremely valuable exercise if it is performed with the right mindset.  This is just a list of observations I’ve made, based on my own experience as well as from watching others.  What do you think?

My initial impression of their platform was that it had a contemporary look-and-feel and I’ve also found their general approach to packaging (monthly recurring) to be inline with today’s expectations for hosted services.   From a strict product perspective, I never fully understood the difference between their offering and what someone would get from WordPress, Tumblr or a host of other general content management systems.

As the concept of an entirely differentiated “social media” release has lost steam and possibly to better target SMBs, PitchEngine seemed to shift direction and begin focusing more on search and positioning themselves as a more general content sharing tool.  In principal, this was a good decision however a few intrinsic attributes of their platform have created a dissonance between their messaging and product, which has been exacerbated by the algorithmic changes we’ve seen Google make through 2011.

First and foremost, the lack of consistent editorial oversight has created a mass of content on the domain that may be seen as “low quality” by Google and a quick glance at their traffic according to Compete.com, does seem to indicate a general decline in traffic over the past year.

PitchEngine recently announced a new release, which claims to focus on providing customers with the tools to create “better content.”  My initial reaction based on the messaging was that PitchEngine had engineered their content management system to better help users generate high quality content however my initial impression after poking around seems to be that most of the changes are design-focused.  The core feature-set seems comparable with the legacy platform.

Generally speaking, I am not convinced that PitchEngine has fully defined who their core user is and what fundamental problem they solve.  If the problem they are attempting to solve is creation and sharing of multimedia content, then the challenge becomes how to differentiate themselves from the existing platforms who are either better financed (e.g. Tumblr) or being collaboratively engineered by a community of developers (e.g. WordPress).

My two cents is that when it comes to content creation in today’s environment, focusing exclusively on the tool is simply an insurmountable task given the competitors in the market.  Focusing on helping users understand how they fit into the broader media ecosystem, what content to create and how to best create content for a specific target are the problems that remain unsolved and represent the best opportunity to deliver value.

One area that Facebook does tend to drop the ball is with features oriented around privacy as they tend to err on the side of keeping things open as opposed to closed.  When it comes to social networking platforms, this is a mistake.

In their recent release, Facebook made some rather fundamental changes to the entity type, “lists.”  On the legacy platform, you were able to define privacy settings for the various profile components and attribute certain privacy settings to specific lists you had built.

Cropped from Alison Driscoll’s excellent Mashable article on Facebook privacy settings (2009)

The feature made it simple to categorize your network into buckets and set preferences that would be applicable to these various buckets.

When Facebook released their most recent product update, I didn’t give it much thought (beyond thinking it was cool that they had increased the size of photos in the feed) until I decided to help a friend configure her privacy settings.  I was a bit surprised to find that the UX behind security had changed and also disturbed that my legacy privacy settings had simply disappeared.

After a bit of poking around, I finally stumbled upon the new privacy control and it confirmed that everyone within my network now had open access to my full profile content.

 The magical, disappearing privacy settings

Amusingly, it would also appear that adding a value to the “Hide this from” field  doesn’t actually save (on Chrome).  Currently, not only are my former privacy settings gone but I am ostensibly not able to re-configure them.

So, where does this leave us?

I truly believe that the new entity type, “Lists,” was rushed to market to respond to the launch of Google +.  To me, it reeks of reactionary product development, which I fundamentally disagree with.  Reactionary product development moves companies further away from the core tenants that made them successful in the first place and long-term, is a negative practice.

On a very fundamental level, the trust that I had been building over the past five years with Facebook has been compromised.  I would also note that trust is the single most powerful point of differentiation, which allowed Facebook to grow into the empire it is today.

From my perspective, Facebook simply is no longer a viable platform for managing both my professional and social life.  Moving forward, I’ll start curating my network on Facebook to simply host my social relationships because quite frankly, I don’t want to go through all the trouble of configuring settings when the next Facebook release may just wipe them out again – particularly, when there is a better option available (LinkedIn).

Furthermore, I plan to filter out all the network connections that are not strong, primary connections because I simply don’t want people who are not part of my everyday life to have access to my everyday life.

I’d love to know what other people’s experiences have been and how they plan to respond.

]]> http://www.newinfluencer.com/facebook-privacy-product-releases/feed/ 0 http://www.newinfluencer.com/comcast-continuing-to-fail-at-customer-support-and-communication/ http://www.newinfluencer.com/comcast-continuing-to-fail-at-customer-support-and-communication/#comments Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:30:19 +0000 Jiyan http://www.newinfluencer.com/?p=515 Let me begin by saying that I’m writing from a Starbucks near my house because once again, Comcast (CMCSA) has failed to deliver and I’ve finally made a decision I should have made a long time ago, to cancel my Comcast subscription and use an alternative.

That being said, I feel obliged to share some details from this last debacle…

Things got kicked-off at around 1PM (ET) yesterday when the cable went out, which I had been expecting for the past twelve hours (we did have a Hurricaine come through town).  I did notice that Comcast had somehow managed to make it through the actual storm itself, failing once the weather had normalized, but gave them the benefit of the doubt given the circumstances and decided to enjoy the beautiful Sunday afternoon.

I returned at about 4PM to find that the connection was still dead, so used my phone to check their site to see if anything had been posted.

Buried underneath a bunch of ads XFINITY was the following:

It must have been hard for them to part with this space that could have been dedicated to selling XFinity

The informational page itself was a pretty good example of a company not taking the Internet very seriously.

It contained some tips for what to do before and after the hurricane including this gem for what not to do after the storm: Be careful to not cut cable lines as you trim trees and clear debris.  Thanks Comcast, I didn’t know you should avoid cutting cable lines as you trim hedges after a storm.

I did find it slightly ironic that one of the tips was, “Be prepared and have an emergency plan in place. If you don’t have a plan, or don’t know how to make one, click here to learn more.”  

What was Comcast’s emergency plan?  Where was all the information showing me what you are doing to ensure minimal downtime in the wake of the storm.  Why are you telling me not to cut cable lines?

Continuing down the page, I couldn’t help but laugh to find this diagram that apparently explained how the cable system worked:

Missing the part where Comcast executives poop on customer’s heads

Their joke of a page was missing any actual useful information such as A. the scope of the issue, B. estimated downtime and C. What Comcast was actually doing to help restore connectivity.

Compare this to the Pepco Web site, which dedicated their entire homepage to keeping customers updated on their efforts and even offered customers a dynamic outage map, which detailed the scope of the issue, actual numbers of affected customers and outages and an estimate for when power would be restored.

Not bad for a company with a monopoly

Realizing that the Comcast Web site was a complete waste of my time, I headed to Twitter, where I knew Comcast had been making an effort over the past few years to better connect with customers.   I was sort of amused to see that @comcastcares had decided to split town.

I’d also leave town during storms if I worked for Comcast support

As a last resort, I picked up the phone and called Comcast and must admit that I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to speak with a customer rep. after only a few minutes.  ”Maybe my luck with Comcast is changing,” I thought to myself.

The rep was offshore but very pleasant, well-spoken and seemed to actually care about me (I am susceptible to faking).

The downside to the interaction was that she answered every one of my questions by saying, “Sir, all I can tell you is that we are doing everything possible to resolve the situation.”  I really would have loved to know what areas they were working on, what their restoration plan involved and a general estimate of how long I could expect my power to be down but I guess that’s a fantasy.  Interestingly enough, she did reveal that only about 17% of households in the DC area had access, which was something.  She also did assure me that all customers who lost service during the outage would be reimbursed (provided they called back in once service had been restored).  I thanked her and got off the phone after a few minutes of not getting anywhere.

Back on Twitter, I was amused to find that XFinity had begun talking about the cable lineup for the evening.  I decided to respond, which resulted in this little exchange:

I wasn’t the only upset customer on Twitter.  In fact, the combination of the service outage and mobile access to Twitter culminated in a pretty hostile online environment for Comcast:

So, just to avoid making this a completely negative post, here are some things I think that Comcast could have done differently:

1. Next time, have an actual plan and tell customers what it is - I’d like to believe that Comcast did actually did have a plan that included collaborating with local utilities and staffing up to minimize downtime.  Educating customers on some key points of the actual plan would have demonstrated that there was substance behind Comcast’s general messaging.

2. Give customers actual information – What is worse than a pissed off customer?  A pissed off customer in the dark.  It is inevitable that outages are going to happen but next time, provide customers with actual information.  Repeatedly telling customers, “We are working on it,” and showcasing a diagram from the 80′s that explains how the cable system works doesn’t help much.

3. Proactively credit customers for the outage – This may sound insane to anyone at Comcast who is tied to revenue, but I truly believe that proactively compensating customers for outages will ultimately be counterbalanced by reduced matriculation to competitive service providers.  It’s at least worth testing.  When you are in the midst of an outage you are already pissed off, the last thing you want is to be told that you should call in once service is restored to request a reimbursement for lost service.

4. Think about freezing advertising during outage periods – I shouldn’t have to hear radio ads telling me about the awesome new packages you are offering customers when your service doesn’t work.  I know you can’t really control all communications channels but you should be able to exert some control over the radio ads.   Use the ad inventory to tell customers what you are doing to get them back online.  That’s going to be better advertising that telling a city of people about Xfinity when nothing is working.

5. Maybe get someone who isn’t on vacation to be your first POC online – I find it laughable that a guy with the twitter handle “comcastcares” was on vacation during the outage.  Consider creating an ongoing channel that isn’t tied to one individual and have several people manning the channel and providing meaningful updates.  On a side note, it’s a little sad that another one of your social media folks (@xfinity_tv) referred me to a guy on vacation.  Take social media more seriously.

Here is a thread you never want to see if you care about customer experience.

The purpose of these early conversations was to vet the concept with a group of sharp entrepreneurs who wouldn’t hesitate to draw blood when necessary, identify product ideas or points of differentiation from a group of extremely creative people and ultimately tighten up our concept and our pitch.

There were several thematic undercurrents throughout these conversations that began to manifest relatively quickly: first, general consensus that there was potential, especially in an unsaturated market large enough to bear newcomers.  Second, that the vertical focus on the home improvement industry would help and finally, that a key point of differentiation (and perhaps the most pivotal variable of success) would be the quality of experience we were able to create for the consumer – even if they weren’t necessarily the entity that would ultimately be directly providing us with revenue.

Long-term, we decided that prioritizing the consumer experience would result in a business that had the potential to be an order of magnitude higher than if we were to prioritize the business owner’s experience and this epiphany actually served to make many early decisions – from feature prioritization to our early business development strategy – quite simple, for when faced with any ambiguity, we simply asked the question, “Will this help the consumer in the long run?”

With a vetted conceptual framework and some key points of differentiation, we began to dive into the product.

After asking friends and looking online, it became quickly obvious to me that there wasn’t a great resource to find local home improvement services and that’s when the market problem first entered my head as a viable opportunity.  At the time, I was fiddling around with DC City Blog and learning how content could serve as a conduit between local consumers and local businesses.  The problem with the project however was that it contained too many limits – content production was limited to a tight group of users who had access to the platform (and the trust of the editor) and the scope of topics (and related traffic-driving content) was limited to a particular region (the DC metropolitan area) and vertical (nightlife).

Towards the beginning of 2010, I started discussing the concept of a community-driven platform within the home improvement vertical with David Petersen, one of the co-founders of ImportGenius, Wasauna and several other successful start-ups.  He had a strategic concept for data that helped the idea evolve from being an interesting product concept into a viable business proposition.

We came out of those early discussions with consensus on a short-list of tenants that became the conceptual framework for BuildZoom:

1. There was significant market demand for a solution that would help consumers find reliable local home improvement businesses – yet no killer application.
2. There were many applications aimed at solving a similar market problem but few that truly prioritized the consumer experience.
3. There was an opportunity to create a community-driven platform that aggregated feedback from consumers and leveraged that feedback to make sense of the local home improvement service market.
4. If the platform relied on consumer input then the platform should be freely accessible and open for consumers.
5. Staying vertically focused was the right way to go – it would provide us with an opportunity to build vertical-specific features, a stronger brand, execute a tighter data acquisition strategy and ultimately better serve the user.
6. There was an opportunity to sell the consumers visibility to businesses provided that the commodification of the visbility did not compromise the overall consumer experience.
7. If we kept our costs manageable and relied largely on crowdsourcing to aggregate data, we could prioritize the user experience and maintain a set of ethical standards that would be key to ensuring true community buy-in (and product differentiation).

I’m also looking forward to being able to devote more time and energy into collaborating with my partners on BuildZoom, which I’ll be talking more about on this blog in the near future.

The framework I’m going to propose is based on the assumption that the goal of international expansion is acquisition.  ”Acquisition” can be defined in a variety of terms (e.g. revenue, customers) however the point here is that the main goal is quantifiable acquisition and subsequently, all considerations should be oriented around the achievement of that goal.

1. How does your existing domain perform in the target market?

One of the first places to look is at the performance of your existing domain in the target market.  For example, if your conversion rates from the international target market on your domain are consistent with your conversion rates in your intended, native market, then that is worth knowing.  If your current domain is performing well in organic search for your international target market, then that is also good to know.  It’s unlikely that either of these things will happen but it’s always possible.

2. Will your brand translate well to the target market?

Some brands have more global potential than others.  For example, a brand like Lyris is likely more globally adaptable than a brand like Constant Contact.  Lyris, which doesn’t really mean anything in English, is short, language-agnostic, relatively easy to remember, and relatively type-able.  Those attributes are likely to translate to global markets fairly well.  Constant Contact on the other hand, has a very explicit connotation in English that is likely to create issues if used abroad.  The recall and type-ability of Constant Contact are tied to the semantic connotation of the words used.  In the absence of its semantic inference, it is really just a long domain name that scores below average on type-ability and recall.

3. How important is organic search to your success?

Google looks for signals such as the top-level-domain (TLD), country where your site is hosted and the geographic target (you can configure this in Google webmaster tools) as signals that will help in determining the performance of your domain in country-specific search.  In general, the optimal configuration would be to have a domain that is hosted in your target country with a TLD for that country.

Take for example, the country-neutral query, “preparing for a job interview” and its performance in both Google.com and Google.co.uk.  In Google.com, each of the top 10 results is from a .com that is hosted in the United States.  In Google.co.uk however, the picture changes dramatically.

Google.co.uk search results for “preparing for a job interview” with .co.uk results highlighted

The first result came from a .co.uk TLD, as did results six, seven and eight.  Results three, four, nine and ten came from .com domains hosted in the UK.  In fact, only one out of the top ten results in Google.co.uk for “preparing for a job interview” comes from a .com hosted in the US.

It should be noted that there is something to be gained from hanging a sub-domain or sub-folder off a domain that already has search authority.  This approach will give you a bit of a head start but in the long run, having a country-specific TLD and hosting your content in your target country is likely to perform better.

4. Are you expanding East?

Whether it be due to language differences, nationalism or government imposed restrictions is up for debate.  What is not up for debate is the simple fact that in China, the best performing sites have Chinese domains.  No major American brand has been able to achieve market dominance in China and only Google has been able to achieve significant traction.

Top Online Properties in the UK, France and China (according to Alexa)

For whatever reason, Chinese consumers seem to prefer Chinese brands and from a domain perspective, its worth considering whether a Chinese-friendly domain is the way to go.

5. Are you able to procure the domains you want in your target market?

There is always the question of procurement.  Domain squatting has been around for ages but as the market is becoming increasingly global, so follows the practice of cross-national domain squatting.  This (very irritating) practice has become a reality for even smaller, emerging brands.  Figuring out the logistics behind domain acquisition is an important variable.

6. What is your global brand strategy?

For some, a domain strategy should be considered in the context of a broader brand strategy.  Does your long-term corporate vision involve tje development of a globally recognized brand, or is your corporate strategy to simply build individual brands that speak more directly to target audiences in different countries?  If you’re successful at the latter, you may soon find yourself juggling a handful of brands.  On the other hand, a the approach does allow you greater flexibility in domain & brand targeting.

7. Avoid dogma

Ultimately, it’s all about approaching the game with an open mind.  Being prepared for failure, recalibration and iteration is normally going to be more successful over the years than zeroing in on one specific approach.  No one ever said that launching multiple domains is a bad idea – it just requires more resources.  Ultimately, it’s useful to acknowledge that the Internet is a dynamic landscape and the home run iteration is rarely the first.

I figured I would take a spin through their new application and share some general thoughts – but first, a bit of insight into who they are.

Who is Sprout Social?

Sprout Social is lead by CEO Justyn Howard, who earned his stripes in sales at New Horizons (1999-2005) and Learn.com (2006-2010).  He started Sprout Social in 2009, ostensibly bootstrapping, until he received a Series A around mid-2010 from Lightbank, the investment firm started by Groupon founders Eric Lelkofsky and Brad Keywell.  Howard’s technical counterpart is Co-Founder and CTO Aaron Rankin, whose past experiences include Endeca Technologies and IBM.  Of note is also Designer & Partner, Gilbert Lara, whose impact on the company is immediately clear once you enter the application.   It’s a lean team that seems to have some talented guys focused on R&D and UX.

How is Sprout Social packaged?

Sprout Social offers two packages: a professional package for $9/month that seems primarily aimed at helping “independent, small and online businesses” manage and grow their social networks, and a business package for $49/month that offers features oriented towards businesses with a “local audience.”

First Impressions

My first impression of Sprout is that they follow the Web 2.0 online marketing playbook pretty carefully – they have a clean design aesthetic that pushes people to a free trial.  Once registered, they push users to connect with their social accounts.  Everything is done cleanly and precisely through the point of registration to the dashboard.  Kudos to Nate Turner, their online marketing director.

The Dashboard

My first impression of the dashboard was extremely positive.  They provide you with a good set of information however there is an extremely well construed visual balance of icons, panels, actions and data.  It’s personalized out of the box and there are some intriguing data points (i.e. engagement and influence scores) that draw you in.  Scrolling down, you are presented with some real information drawn from your social accounts.

The Dashboard

Sprout Social includes the following modules:

Inbox - A stream of posts aggregated from your various social accounts.  The application offers various filtering options (types of communications as well as by social account) as well as the ability to tag different posts  (i.e. needs response).

Discovery - A tool set that allows you to run and save various queries (which they refer to as agents) that can be run on either Twitter or “The Web,” which they define as “websites, blogs, and news sites.”  The “Web” query seems to run across a variety of public engines including Bing News, Yahoo! News and Google News.  I like the branding of the module (Discovery) however I found this to be the most deficient of all the modules.  My assumption is that the purpose of the module is to help users identify new potential followers, friends, etc. however the UX doesn’t do a great job facilitating the completion of this goal.  I think there is a great opportunity for Sprout to A. help users better understand which queries to run and B. figure out how to make the data that streams in more actionable.

The Discovery Module

Reports - The reports module contains a variety of graphs that visually represent the user’s behavior across Twitter and Facebook.  I wasn’t immediately clear on how the data would be immediately helpful.  It does present the user behavior in a manner that is more intuitive, which brings a user one step closer to extrapolation however I have a feeling that most SMB’s are going to need more than this.

Schedule - This module is something I really like because it alleviates the known hassle associated with posting across multiple platforms.  Additionally, the calendaring feature allows for scheduling of a post and users can even create recurring posts.

The submission tool

My Locations – This is another interesting module.  It allows you to synchronize your account with your Foursquare and Gowalla pages and receive mobile or e-mail alerts when customers check into your venue.

Contacts -  Finally, the contact module allows you to view your Twitter followers and add them into a separate list “to keep your most important contacts organized in one place.”  I’m not entirely sure what the benefit of a separate Sprout Social list is unless they are planning to broaden the feature set in the module to include additional methods of interaction with users, which is somehow facilitated through the Social Address Book.

Concluding Thoughts

Based off a pretty brief interaction with the application, my general thoughts are that it is incredibly well designed and the overall modular framework seems to be the correct one.  The fundamental question is whether or not SMBs are going to find utility in the application.  The UI alone seems to be worth the relatively low cost of the $9/month package and the local features are a nice incentive to upgrade.  I’m looking forward to seeing how they develop the various modules – particularly the “discovery module” – to make them more useful to SMBs but I would say in general, they are off to a great start.

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