Tag: web 2.0

When seeking investors

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Here’s some simple advice when seeking investors for your startup.

Never use the words ‘The Next’…

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Regardless of the uber successful business which follows these two words it just isn’t going to happen. For two reasons. The first is our probability of being this successful is almost non existent. Secondly if we are this successful, we wont be the next, but something new.

The main point is when people use the words the next, they lose credibility. And when someone says it to me regarding their new business venture, I find it hard to believe anything they say after that.

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Digital Footprints – the power of

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Recently I took a photo in New York of something I thought to be particularly interesting. I uploaded it to twitpic and posted it on my twitter page. The net result was approx 100 views of the image. Here it is below:

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Fast forward 2 months and the image is ‘re-tweeted’ back to me from someone else after it has made the rounds and it now has more than 38,000 views. Holy Wow. (You can click the image to see the current view count)

How did it get 38,000+ views after only 100 people cared when I first posted it? Well the answer is simple, it’s digital, which means its footprint stays forever – the digital footprint. And when someone more influential on the web than me share’s it, it spreads in a compound fashion. Sure it got shared, call it viral, call it what you please. But the thing of true power here is the digital footprint. It wasn’t an instant in market reaction. The spreading happened 2 months after the launch. Not the day it went to air, like a TV advertisement.

The lesson for startups and marketers is simple. The real power of digital media is the footprint it leaves, the permanency, and the ability for people to catch up. This is something traditional media (newspapers, radio, billboards, Tv) just don’t have.

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The Feedback Trap

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

I recently heard an interview with the Drummer from band Midnight Oil, Rob Hurst. He was asked how he felt about a particular record which made it to number 1 on the US charts. His response was this:

‘We were too busy touring, putting on shows to follow the bands progress.”


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It sounded as though serving the fans they already had was more important than gaining new ones. And guess what happens when we do that? Our reputation grows and more fans arrive, they find us because we are delivering something special to those who already appreciate what we are doing.

The formula for success is to continue to focus on delivering good stuff to those who already believe in you. To improve our delivery to them. Just like Midnight Oil was continuing to perfect the live performance of it’s songs. They weren’t worrying if their songs were good enough, they weren’t focused on external feedback from sources like sales revenue or chart positions. They ignored all feedback, except that from existing fans (customers). They didn’t get caught in the feedback trap.

So what are the feedback traps of the modern entrepreneur?
–    Website traffic
–    Google analytics
–    Facebook friends
–    Twitter follows
–    AC Nielsen data
–    Market share statistics
–    (Insert feedback mechanism here)

These tools can be useful, but they also tempt us to change tack.  They tempt us into believing we are strategically wrong, because the feedback is so instant. Where as the benefits of our strategy is never so instant. Strategy takes time to work, it takes belief and patience, more over it takes ‘the real feedback’ cycle to spread before we can truly know if we have something. And the real feedback cycle is what our current customers have to say, and if they spread the word.

Startups out there – don’t fall into the feedback trap.

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1 versus millions

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

It’s easy for us to be taken by the one in a billion websites like Facebook, Youtube and the like and think we need millions to make what we do work. The reality for most of our businesses is that we don’t need huge crowds, just a handful of good loyal people who dig what we do.
Sure some of us do need the zillions, like my business rentoid.com does… but the large majority of us don’t. We don’t need global awareness and brand recognition. What we need is a small group of dedicated fans, much like what Kevin Kelly has espoused in 1000 true fans.

But it’s often hard to get our heads around this, to believe this could really be all we need in the social media millions focus. So here’s what we ought do. This about how long it takes to have a decent conversation with 1, 10 or even 100 people. To imagine lining up 100 people, all of which are interested in what you do. To imagine them all in your living room or backyard at a BBQ. Your house would be very full, very busy, and chatting to all 100 people individually would take a week or so. In the real world it’s a lot of people.

And the internet is ‘the real world’….

The real world we are doing business in, not a virtual one. The real world where each customer matters and is always the start of our journey towards potentially millions.

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Zero Cost Advertising & Social Media

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

I’ve blogged before many times about how to generate brand awareness with limited or zero budget. The list of tools available is pretty long actually. No need to list them here – you know what they are. But to use them effectively takes two important ingredients:

Ingredient No 1: Frequency
If we think are are going to start a brand blog, a youtube channel, twitter account and all our communication problems will be solved over night, then we have really not understood what has happened with social media. If I was to summarize it it succinctly. I’d say – we’ve gone from a ‘produced’ world to an ‘organic’ world. The produced world took large capital investments. The organic world is free, but not everything grows, and those that do take time. It’s a lot like nature, free but time & frequency of events is the asset.

The more often we return to our crop and nurture it, the healthier the return we’ll get. Occasionally something will just click. We only have to do something ‘once’ and it will grow astoundingly with little input other than the raw ingredients. The market will take get hold of the communication and we’ll crack it – it’ll go viral. This is the anomaly – it happens so rarely, that we know about it every time. Best advice is to assume it wont happen to us.

Ingredient No 2: Patience
We don’t have to buy the communication asset. They’re here, we have been given them, but we have to work them. We need to allow time for our compound effort to accumulate. Be patient and trust that our continual effort and focus on frequency, will work in the long run.

Patience has something on its side that the old media world didn’t – digital foot prints. Our stuff stays on line forever. So when a passionate web surfer finds one of our things they like – they can do a back catalog on our stuff. This is when things can work, even months after launch date. A TV ad on the other hand has one shot at the eyeballs. If it’s missed by the target market, it’s all too late.

No doubt, we need to build great stuff for people to care, but in the new world of zero cost communications, Startups can can get it wrong and learn as we go.

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Great work from Craig

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Here’s an example of why creativity beats a big  budget every time. A very well executed ‘idea’ – I wont say campaign, or viral marketing ‘yet’. Sure, it’s gone viral, but I’m not yet convinced it is marketing…..which we’ll have a little chat about after you read the attached visuals:

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Clearly, this is some very clever and funny work. Engaging, entertaining and creates strong curiosity.

Yep, it’s gone viral, but is it marketing? I’d say not yet. Simply because effective marketing has to create a change in behavior, a call to some form of action, which this hasn’t done yet.

I can’t help but think that any added brand addendum in part 2 of the campaign will make it lose credibility almost instantaneously. To me it could work if it was Craig’s list – which would make sense, or maybe ‘Craig’ the local comedian doing some nice street level brand awareness bootstrapping. It will be interesting to see what this thing ends up being. It comes from this webpage: http://users.tpg.com.au/morepats/Craig/ – If any one knows be sure to share it with us.

So what’s in it for startups?

This campaign, proves that we can do really cool, engaging stuff for less than $1. in printing costs. It proves that media is ‘free’ for cool stuff. We just need to unlock our imagination.

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