The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Public Relations in the Age of Blogging: Good Pitch, Bad Pitch

Just so happens that in my mailbox I have two lovely examples of how public relations professionals in different agencies are trying to work with bloggers, one that I believe is a poor example of how to pitch, and one that's spot-on good. I have scrubbed the names clean because it's not about the specific agency as much as the concepts here. As usual, I also have my editorial commentary like this as we go along.

Ready? Here we gooooooo....

First off, here's the initial pitch I, a daddy blogger based in Colorado, received, about a children's book signing event:

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I am following up on a previous email and my voicemail today regarding the below (and attached) event at Bloomingdales which will be taking place tomorrow.

Do you think this is something you would be interested in covering for your blog?

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Huh? Why would I care about something going on 1700 miles away, something with a 24 hour deadline? She didn't have information "below" within the text of the email she sent me either, making me have to open an attachment to even remember what we're talking about. I asked just that question...

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Nice contact, but what makes you think I’d be interested? Did you go and read my parenting blog, or am I in a contact database you have?

With regards,

Dave Taylor

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to which she responded

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Hi Dave,

Thank you for getting back to me.

We read your parenting blog and thought you may be interested in covering as it is an event geared towards children.

Do you think this is something you would be interested in?

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I will give her points for consistency, but if she read my parenting blog she'd know that I wouldn't give a hoot about a promotional event in Manhattan on my weblog. In fact, I almost never write about anything that I'd get from a publicist or PR person. I do, however, occasionally review things, which could have been her angle (e.g. mailing me a copy of the book in question), but wasn't.

Now, contrast that with this other pitch, made to someone else, not me, by Lisa at Metzger Associates:

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Subject: CSG Systems CEO would like to talk to you

Dear Jeff,

I'm the Lisa Everitt perhaps best known in the Rocky business department as the person for whom Joe Nacchio autographed a can of paint in 1999. That was a bizarre era. Now I work for Metzger Associates. Did the paint make its way to the new building?

Peter Kalan, the new CEO of CSG Systems, would like to sit down with you, on the phone or in person at their office, to talk about CSG's broader outlook beyond billing, statements and customer service support for cable and DBS companies. He's available the week of Oct. 13, specifically Tuesday 10/14 and Friday 10/17. If those days don't
work for you, we will wrangle calendars until something does.

As you know, CSG has been an influential company in the national and local cable scene, with customers that include Comcast, Time-Warner, Charter Communications and a raft of smaller players.

What's new with CSG Systems...

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[Dave again] What Lisa's done here is explain who she is, remind Jeff of a previous interact they've had, then succinctly detail exactly what the pitch is and why it should be of interest. It takes a total of, what, 15 seconds to skim this and identify the who, what, where, when and why. That's respectful and always appreciated.

Contrast that with the email I received from the other PR person, who had none of that useful information readily accessible in her email. The only thing she included was a rather naggy reminder that she'd already emailed me and left me voicemail (which I don't actually appreciate, as it happens). How much better for her to have said "To remind you, I'm talking about person X from company Y doing event Z and inviting you to ..."

But even there, the pitch never included "would you like to interview my client?" or "would you like a copy of the book for review?" or anything that suggested that I, as a blogger presumably sufficiently interesting to be on her short list, was anyone more than an additional one-way publicity channel.

This is, as I said in the beginning, a bad way to pitch bloggers or anyone else. A journalist wouldn't be impressed either.

Meanwhile, you'll note that even with this posting I still haven't offered up much information about the event at Bloomingdale's. Because... I just don't have a clue about what's going on. Still.

So you tell me. Good pitch? Bad pitch?

First things first: Sign up for the Blogsmart News so you can stay up to date on the latest insider tips and ideas for your Internet business and marketing efforts. Better yet, sign up right now and you'll get a free copy of my "Insider's Guide to Blogging" ebook too!

Disney, Sloppy PR and "do you have a degree?"

A while back I wrote a piece about sloppy PR from Disney Corporation and it's sat there for a while, garnering comment and thoughts.

Today I got one that I thought was particularly interesting, from Kate Runyan:

"I am curious about your comments about Disney's sloppy PR. I am interning there and trying to learn as much about it as I can... from every point of view. Do you hold any degrees and if so, what field? I hope to hear from you via e-mail as soon as you get a chance out of your busy day. Thank you so much! Cheers!"

Let me tell you a bit about the original article, then answer Kate's question and make some observations about how she's structured her query...

Basically, I got a clumsy pitch from Disney's Family.com travel team that started out "Dear Apparanting, I'm contacting you to let you know about a new travel site Disney Family.com needs your help promoting!"

Even pasting it here, you can see how clumsy and lame this is. 30 seconds of work (scroll to bottom, see © notice) would have revealed my name as the author of the parenting blog, but they didn't do that. That's a cardinal sin in blogger/PR relations.

The pitch was also ridiculously long and clueless about what motivates people to want to help you join a publicity effort without pay. For example, how different it would have been if they said "We know you travel with kids: can we send you a book that highlights how to travel more easily next time?" or "We'd like to invite you to be a Disney.com VIP by helping us spread the word" or "we're focused on making travel more green. If you help us, we'll donate $20 to Plant A Tree" or, well, you get the idea.

However loved the brand, people don't generally help a commercial business out of a sense of philanthropy or noblesse oblige. Like anything else, you need to give them an incentive and of all professionals, Public Relations pros should know this. And a big corporation like Disney can afford to hire the best. That's why I wrote about that in the first place.

So, Kate, I'm glad you asked me how and why I thought the pitch was clumsy. I hope I've addressed that here. What I also want to ask you is why do you care if I have any degrees?

As it happens, I do. A BA in Computer Science, Masters in Education and an MBA. But I think it's dangerous to suggest that one person's feedback is more or less important than another's simply on the basis of how much they've spent for their education. Uh, how much they studied. Um, well, you know what I mean. :-)

Then again, PR is a profession where I think you have to create heirarchies to survive. If there's no "A List" and no "key media outlets" then it's all a quantitative game and sending out a $200 prweb release might just be more valuable with its 300 links from press release archive sites than $10,000 on pro PR to get a small mention in the Washington Post. Hmmmm.....

Anyway, dear reader, what do you think? Was Disney sloppy in its original email to me and was Kate demonstrating a perhaps dangerously hierarchical mind in her query?

YOU can help out with the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge

First things first: I ask that you forego your next latté or bagel and instead donate a few dollars to this very worthy cause, helping out teachers and kids throughout the United States. Easily done, just click on the "Colorado Bloggers Challenge" text in the ad graphic below:

Now, let me tell you how this ended up here and in my sidebar too: My good friend Micah Baldwin of Lijit asked me to add it. Well, he asked a couple of us Colorado bloggers and we've all added the widget with the hopes we can raise some serious cash for a worthy cause.

I asked Micah for the back story on his relationship with DonorsChoose, and here's what he explained...

About a year ago, I was beginning to read VC and tech blogs. During that time, I came across Fred Wilson's blog. I had no idea who Fred Wilson was, other than a lot of people seem to read his blog. He was linked to Brad Feld, and Brad was someone I trusted, so I assumed Fred's content was equally trustworthy.

For a period of time, as I read Fred's blog, I began to find most of the content pretty interesting and on topics that I found interesting.

Then one day he had a post about joining a "blogger's challenge" by DonorsChoose. I was a new blogger, and was just learning what a widget was, etc., plus the power of blogging.

Having been an educational fundraiser for years early in my career (mostly colleges and universities), I always have held any philanthropic effort to help education in high regard, so I took a closer look at DonorsChoose.

It's a really interesting charity. It allows teachers to self-identify things that are important to them. So music teachers will choose things like new guitar stands, a history teacher might select a trip to a local museum, an English teacher might select a series of books. Then individuals can contribute to whichever cause they find particularly interesting. The amount doesn't matter, and the contributor can designate the entire donation to go directly to the cause (with DonorsChoose getting zero).

I decided to participate and help Fred out. It didn't hurt that the winning blogger would get a lunch date with Jerry Yang, which Fred had decided to give to the participant who provided the best reason for giving. My dad, having recently retired from Stanford University, would love to have lunch with Jerry, so I jumped in.

DonorsChoose allows you to pick a school by geography, and I was very excited to see that my middle school, Morrill Middle School in San Jose, CA had a fundable project. So I sent in a small amount ($500 I think), to fund that project.

Fred did win the lunch with Jerry, and selected someone extremely worthy to get the lunch, but I had found a site that I felt had all the pieces of a biz that could make a real difference. And over the next year, I made several donations, usually in the name of a family member. (In fact, for Christmas, I gave everyone a donation in their name rather than gifts.)

A couple of weeks back, I got an email from Kris Murray, DonorsChoose's Deputy Director, Northwest Region. She happened to be from Colorado and was out visiting family. She asked if we could connect, and, like a good Boulderite, we met over coffee.

She told me that DonorsChoose was going to have another Bloggers Challenge this year. She asked me to join Fred, Robert Scoble, Mike Arrington, Kara Swisher and others in the challenge. I knew that I would never be very effective on my own, so I offered to help in any way I can, which I knew was getting more people involved than just me.

In truth, its one of the best parts of the technology scene in Colorado. We are all more than happy to help one another. Unlike the coasts, where often the individual is the center, in Colorado its is usually a collective effort. TechStars is a great example of that. Lijit is a great example of that.

So, I asked the premier bloggers in the state: you, Brad Feld, Seth Levine, Ryan McIntire, Jason Mendelson, Andrew Hyde, Alex King and David Cohen; created a giving page called the Colorado Bloggers Challenge, and asked everyone to join in.

I am glad to see that everyone has decided to be part of the effort.

Thanks for the kind words, Micah, and thank you, dear reader, for your efforts to help us raise some serious money for DonorsChoose. Spread the word!

The latest tech companies emerging from CU Boulder

I just returned from the Fall ESPRIT Innovation Alliance Breakfast, hosted by the non-profit Boulder Innovation Center and it was, as usual, a fascinating morning.

In cooperation with the University of Colorado Technology Transfer Office, the Boulder Innovation Center helps take great ideas and inventions out of the university and into the business world. They wrestle with a fundamental challenge for any university that has a strong research base: how do you spin out companies while still retaining at least some of the IP for the benefit of the University and its students, faculty and staff?

This isn't much different from the tensions, challenges, and harsh reality I encountered at HP Labs when I worked there. Like many other corporate R&D facilities (Xerox PARC, DEC's Western Research Labs, Interval Research), it's hard to take blue sky and turn it into pragmatic for-profit businesses for both the benefit of the inventors and institution.

In a format similar to DEMO and other startup events, the BIC breakfast format gave each company approximately 8 minutes to present and 2-3 minutes for questions. Fast and furious.

Here are my notes, with my commentary and thoughts in [italics]...

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Intro: The CU Innovation Alliance

David Allen: You're going to see some wicked cool technology. This is the stuff that's right on the edge. We get about 100 invention disclosures from the Boulder campus each year, so we have 100 opportunities to figure out what it's all about. Our faculty are some of the very best people in the world in what they do, and here we are trying to figure out what they're doing.

We (The CU Tech Transfer Office) pay $50k year for the Boulder Innovation Center, which lets our investigators -- the inventors of these technologies -- have access to the BIC and its expert management and professional services teams.

Our first goal is to get a grip on the technology so we can protect it (patents), then we have a definable asset and then look to the tech platform to find business drivers.

[ I read this somewhat as "we get solutions, then have to identify a problem" which is accurate, and classic research. "Here's something cool. Now what?" ]

[The CU Tech Transfer Office also offers these Proof Of Concept Grants (they refer to these as "POCg" internally), so inventors have two shots at proving their ideas to the marketplace before seeking funding]

Allen posited that CU is the most active university in the US with its self-funded Tech Transfer Office, a university that's putting 3.5 million into proof of concept programs. [it's very interesting, this concept of University as angel capital investor and incubator!]

Tim Bour: Often the advisors that we (BIC) find become the principles of the newly formed company. We wrap a community around this young company with the goal of making it successful.

[In that sense, then, it's not like a traditional incubator, but it's one heck of a way for smart execs to get plugged in to hot new companies just coming out of a strong research institution]

Suvica

[Presented by Tin Tin Su, Association Prof Molecular, Cellular, and developmental biology, Suvica uses drosophila to create a tissue micro-environment that significantly improves the discovery of new anti-cancer compounds]

We're working on discovering novel combination therapeutics against cancer [Amusing to see that the title slide had "confidential" written on it] We're trying to find combination therapies, because combining radiation with chemo works better than either does individually. Their success is based on synergy between agents: result exceeds sum of individual therapies, but the challenge is: how do you find combinations that work?

They're trying to avoid clinical trials because they're costly and time-consuming. Suvica offers screening technologies for drugs that work well with radiation.

We're accomplishing this by radiating common fruit fly (drosophila) larvae to see what happens: the fruit fly is similar to cancer tumors. Through extensive research, we've identified that you can use drosophila to find agents that are effective against human cancer. Dros is 100x better predictive model than any screening system in existence, and there's potential to find drugs that act on mutants but not normal tissue

The presentation addressed scalability, competition and barriers to entry. They've filed patents, done a pilot screen, secured $381K grant to test on mouse model, screening commercial library (20k compounds), seek: equity finance, management, commence screening service, partner with biotech/pharma to screen their libraries.

[I found this exciting research, the idea that specifically trying to screen combination therapies for efficacy can produce better cancer treatments that have less side effects and work faster and more effectively. It also seems like a solid business idea, mostly likely a small biz that'll find revenue through licensing and testing with big pharma]

Ion Engineering: Colorado Carbon Capture

[Presented by Jason Bara, Colorado Carbon Capture develops technology that improves the efficiency of carbon capture from power plants and natural gas wells through the use of "green" solvents. CCC promises to bring dramatic improvements to the energy efficiency of current processes, as well as provide innovative, new and cost-efficient approaches to carbon capture.]

The market for CO₂ capture already exists:
- natural gas "sweetening" (removal of H₂S and CO₂). billion dollar market in US alone
- carbon capture from point sources: billions of tons of CO₂ emitted from burning coal, potential multi-billion market

We replace the water in the process with an ionic solvent
- improves energy requirements - reduces energy to process CO₂ 1/3 to 1/2
- faster reaction rates
- cleaner process (less corrosive, reduced loss and waste
- can open previously unviable gas fields

initial focus on natural gas application: $5 *billion* spent on new natgas equip each year, with an immediate market in Colo and Wyoming

24 month scale up: lab -> pilot -> wellhead

income sources: royalties on gas volumes, direct solvent sales, equip design

Have management and engineering team in place: CEO, scientific staff [Tip: a CEO is not a management team]

Q: What is your ionic solvent and what does it cost? It costs anywhere from $100-$500 gallon to create ionic liquids. room temperature ionic liquid - a family of organic solvents

Q: Is the solvent consumed or recycled? It is not consumed. The chemical process occurs to consume the co2, and since its not volatile, it doesn't evaporate.

Q: How is the carbon captured? When it''s captured from nat gas you vent it back out into the atmosphere. The h2s you have to turn it back into sulfur or some other product because it's toxic.

[I admit that I didn't fully understand this solution, but it's clearly a very big market and though we like to sweep industrial waste and pollution under the proverbial rug, it's a growing problem and there's a lot of money therein]

TissueFusion LLC

[Presented by Michael Larson, Tissue Fusion develops laser devices to "weld" biological tissues together for wound closures. This device is an improvement on existing technologies using sutures in an array of standard surgical procedures]

Laser tissue fusion is an alternative to sutures -- it's a medical device that's based on using laser energies to fuse tissues together and close wounds. Their product is called LaSept, and it's a device for helping with septoplasty and rhinoplasty surgeries: over 500,000 of these procedures are done annually in US. $100mil worldwide market

They also have a vision about follow on products: minimally invasive surgeries (laparoscopic procedures), their product will also prove a boon for procedures needing immediate, water-tight closure.

"The first FDA approved laser device for wound closure will create excitement and will transform the market"

[This company is definitely savvy: they picked septoplasty & rhinoplasty surgery because it's a fast FDA approval since the inside of the nose is considered the outside of the body. Yeah, that's a weird idea, but that's the FDA for you]

They have successfully fused horse mucosal tissue in a manner similar to the human nose. Have completed pre-clinical phases. As he explained, the science is proven, engineering is done, FDA approval process is straightforward.

Company has Larson as founder, two product designers, two academic otolaryngologists, but no management, no marketing, etc, The identified need for growing to the next step: a CEO to do fund raising.

[Again, my expertise is not in medical products, but this seemed like a neat, handheld product with a specific use and defined market. Not exciting, but a solid business opportunity.]

LineRate Systems

[This was the token geeky software presentation, made by John Giacomoni. LineRate Systems has a software network appliance platform that delivers 10 gb/s application layer processing capabilities on commodity servers and blades]

"Rethinking Network Appliances" - the plumbing that connects your machine to the Internet. When the equipment that they have to put in front of the machine costs more than the machine itself, that's a serious problem. Our focus is on low-cost no hassle sales model.

In 2009 we are going to bring our products to market. The idea came up in 2003, 2006 initial proof of concept, 2006-2008 they filed patents, 2007 got first gigabit appliance functioning, 2008 got 4gb/s.

These speeds mean each frame has to be processed in a few hundred nanoseconds max. In 2009 we've been talking with Intel and we should be able to hit 10gb/s system and enter the market

process: built upon open source building blocks: xorp, nginx, snort, RIsense (?), leveraging hw Intel, amd, dell, sun, hp. Missing piece: the glue: Line Rate acceleration software

There are 40 appliance manufacturers in the marketplace already. Total market $30 bil by 2013, $16bil today.

[This is where it got a bit confusing because John's answer to how they compete is "there's a great apathy in the market for new competitor entries because of the high cost of goods", yet his slide showed that the cost of goods was about 23% of total sales, nothing out of line for a hardware-based product line.]

They believe they can deliver the end product for the basic cost of goods of competitors, forcing the competitors to license their system.

Need: rest of business team and funds.

[I was intrigued by LineRate Systems and its idea of rethinking network backend appliances but I get a sense that the company needs to rethink its business vision. The cliché error of "we have no competition" wasn't quite visible, but having identified 40 big competitors (including Cisco and Juniper Systems) then claiming none of them can innovate at the software level, well, that's hubris at best and naive at worst.]

3QMatrix

[Presented by Johan Baeck, 3QMatrix focuses on the development and commercialization of novel wound healing and drug delivery products using a proprietary product platform. This was the most interesting company I saw this morning and I believe there's a tremendous opportunity here]

"A novel wound healing company: advanced biomaterials for enhanced quality of life"

Their market: 5-7 million US patients with chronic wounds -- wound care is $1 billion market.

Today's solutions don't meet clinical need, which is for a solution that:
- provides high performance at a lower cost
- minimizes the pain
- reduces hospital stay

Traditional solutions are low cost, but low performance (think special ointments or salves applied to wounds). Interactive solutions are high performance but have a high cost ($2000-4000 per application). 3QMatrix offers a low cost, high performance solution.

Their solution is an advanced synthetic biomaterial which creates a 3-dimensional mesh that lets the neighboring cells begin to rebuild the skin and tissue. It biodegrades and is bio-absorbable. They can also "functionalize" it by adding antibacterial, growth hormones and other medications to the material itself.

3QMatrix has a management team, scientific advisory board, and has received proof of concept grant from the CU Boulder Tech Transfer Office to solidify patents. Submitted two grants to NIH and one to DoD.

Seeking $2mil in seed money to further product development and clinical studies.

[To me, 3QMatrix is a perfect example of how ingenious technologies can be invented in a university research setting with high applicability to the real world and then can evolve into a commercial business. I have high expectations for this company]

XenoPur Systems

[Presented by Mark Hernandez, XenoPur Systems provides metals decontamination in water treatment processes. The combination of low-cost ingredients, low energy requirements and lower waste disposal costs will allow XenoPur to lower total process costs to industry]

Radionuclide and metal removal technologies - removal of heavy, precious and radioactive metals. Water and nuclear pollution is increasing worldwide. Over $1bil spent on treating industrial wastewater in US alone.

Their product is called the XenoPur "Liquid Magnet" and it's essentially impregnating carbon with corrosion inhibitors. Mark liken its primary industrial use to an "industrial wastewater Britta filter", and noted that the other primary configuration is as a "tea bag", cleaning passive water (from, for example, the contamination of acid rain).

It's a cost effective way to purify acidic metal-laden waters, including high efficiency removal of all EPA priority pollutants: copper, lead, silver, uranium and other semi-precious (silver) and toxics.

Displaces conventional sludge generating technology through solidification of dissolved metals [In other words, the end product pollutants are far easier to deal with and process]

The solution has to be cheap: water purification applications must deal with billions of gallons of water effectively. One patent has been issued, one tech continuation patent submitted.

Tested / field optimization in SAE Circuits, Boulder (industrial wastewater), Rockford Mine, Idaho Springs (mining reclamation) Los Alamos National Lab (radionuclide sequestration)

Incorporated in 2006 has received the following funding: $400k from NSF and US Air Force, $100k from State of Colorado

[The technology here is very cool. Imagine a device that could be lowered into a polluted mountain lake and actually filter out all the contaminants. Then it's pulled out and those contaminants can be easily processed and broken down into non-toxic elements. A solid business, I'm thankful smart people are working on cleaning up our environment after 100+ years of the waste from the industrial revolution]

Kapteyn-Murnane Labs (aka KMLabs)

[Presented by Dirk Muller, KMLabs was founded by Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn. This presentation was more of a TTO success story as KMLabs has been around since 1994]

KMLabs is a manufacturer of femtosecond lasers. They've built a very successful business, founded in 1994 and profitable every year since. Now has 20 people and a 21,000sf research and manufacturing facility in Boulder, Colorado.

[Tip: a femtosecond is one millionth of a nanosecond. As Dirk said, a femtosecond is to a second as a minute is to the age of the universe. Amazing, really]

The great advantage of femtosecond lasers is that they generate zero heat which gives them many interesting capabilities.

The company vision: bringing highest performance ultrafast laser systems to the research community. KMLabs was the first company to develop a reliable 10 femtosecond laser, and are a cornerstone in the NSF Engineering Research Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Science and Technology.

Global customer base, applications: ultrafast spectroscopy, nonlinear coherent light sources, coherent x-ray generation, attosecond pulse generation, optical coherence tomography. future apps: micromachining, sensors, lithographic mask inspection, biomedical, soft x-ray microscopy and metrology

[Femtoseconds weren't fast enough for you? An attosecond is 1/1000th of a femtosecond]

KMLabs are global leaders in high average power ultrafast lasers, cryogenic cooling for 10-100W (military applications), carrier envelope offset phase stabilization of high average power ultrafast lasers and coherent short wavelength light.

[I don't much know about femtosecond laser system and what they're used for in the research setting (my own research has been with people and computers, not cool laser gizmos) but, damn, pretty cool stuff, and KMlabs is a splendid example of tech transfer done right]

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Those were the companies that presented. Fascinating stuff and it makes me glad to live in a college town with a thriving research community and the desire and passion for those research findings to make it out into the world and help make everything faster, safer, cleaner and healthier.

If you have questions about these companies or want to get in touch with either the Boulder Innovation Center or CU Technology Transfer Office, please visit their Web sites: BoulderInnovationCenter.com and CU.edu/techtransfer.

How I Created The Aloha Social Media Summit

If you follow me on Twitter (@DaveTaylor), have attended any of the conferences at which I've spoken in the last few months (most notably Blogworld Expo), or generally keep track of my activities and exploits, you'll know about the Aloha Social Media Summit. It's a unique event with top-notch experts and a limit of 25 attendees. Why? Because the emphasis isn't going to be on the experts -- though I have an amazing lineup of speakers -- but on the needs and interests of the participants.

I view it as an unconference, but it's really sort of the anti-conference more than anything. No Powerpoint, no podium, no "audience" and "speaker" but instead a mastermind event where we'll all be sharing as peers and talking about how to market and promote your business through modern social media.

To be fair, I am involved in planning many events, including having co-hosted Blogworld Expo and being on the program and planning committee for the upcoming Thin Air Summit, but the more I attend large events, the more I see the appeal and great value of smaller, intimate, private events like the Aloha Summit. It's like my preference for parties: I'd rather hang out with a half dozen good friends than 250 of my peers or colleagues. Just don't tell anyone I said that, okay? :-)

How I Came Up With the Aloha Summit

At the beginning of 2008 I was planning a three week holiday in Hawaii with my children and thought "wouldn't it be cool to have a small mastermind event on the Big Island of Hawaii while I'm there?" And so, the Aloha Summit was born.

I threw out a few queries and my friend, colleague and fellow industry and marketing expert Andy Beal popped up and said he'd like to get involved as he was already planning a trip to Hawaii. He did, we co-hosted the event and it was a small, but inspirational success. Our speakers were Roxanne Darling's partner Shane Robinson, Andy Beal, Debra Micek, and, via video conference, Pete Cashmore of Mashable, Andy Sernovitz, founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and Roxanne Darling, who was in Florida at the time on a family emergency.

This time Andy and I decided to try holding it in my backyard, Boulder, Colorado, and seeing if we could up the ante even higher, having the very top people in the industry all in the room at the same time, not for their benefit (though I know they'll all have a great experience) but for the benefit of participants. As I said, it's the anti-conference.

Who'll be Joining Me in Colorado

Who did we get to join us in the room? Om Malik, one of my favorite experts in the entire blogosphere and social media spaces and founder of the powerhouse GigaOM, Biz Stone, super-smart serial entrepreneur and founder of a bunch of slick Web 2.0 startups notably including co-founding Twitter, Susan Bratton of Personal Life Media, where she's focused on building a network to target the "cultural creatives market segment" (I'm sure Susan and I will have a chance to talk about Richard Florida's Cultural Creatives book while she's in town!), Peter Shankman, PR guru and outspoken founder of the invaluable Help a Reporter Online service, and -- a special guest just added -- Shama Hyder of After The Launch, someone who knows more about how to market your business and service on Facebook than anyone I know.

Not enough? We also have two special guest stars via video lined up: Charlene Li, industry expert, former star analyst for Forrester Research and author of the terrific book Groundswell, and Roxanne Darling, who has done a masterful job of turning a hobby video blog into a thriving video production business and, this time at least, is in Hawaii.

That's who Andy and I have managed to line up to join us. Just as importantly, or perhaps even more so, are the participants, who will have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to spend two days comparing notes, sharing their frustrations and challenges, and getting expert advice and tips from the best and the brightest.

Here's the best news of all: we still have a few seats available.

It's not too late to join us and attend, no, help shape the very best social media event in 2008 and learn how to take your own business to the next level with online social media visibility and marketing expertise.

I know I'm excited to have us get started already!

Interview with Tom Taulli, Founder of BizEquity.com

When Tom Taulli of BizEquity.com approached me to talk about his business, I was intrigued, but I also thought that it'd be fun to mix things up and ask my friend and colleague Klaus Holzapfel of Concept Bakery to conduct the interview. Klaus did, and here's the result. I hope you find it informative as we travel through these difficult financial times...

Klaus: We know that the Credit Rating agencies are in the line of fire right now for apparently not understanding what they were rating. Many of the underlying financial instruments take at least three highly trained scientists to decipher them.

You might ask: How about some common sense in evaluating risks and businesses?

BizEquity focuses on evaluating business on criteria that we can understand, and, as founder Tom Taulli explains, the focus is on smaller businesses. If you are a small business owner, investor or simply would like to learn about small business valuations, you might find BizEquity.com a valuable addition to your toolkit.

Here is our Q&A:

Q: Tom, what's your "elevator pitch"?

If you check out the web, many of the resources on valuation can be tough to understand (you almost need an MBA to understand the finance details). Yet, valuing a company is very important, such as for estate planning, raising capital, the death of an owner, partnership disputes, selling a business and so on.

So, with BizEquity, you can get a rough valuation of your business – with a few clicks. At the same time, you get some valuable trend information about the industry. And, if you want a more refined valuation, there is a form you can fill out.

Q: Why do you focus on small business?

There are anywhere from 25 million to 30 million small businesses in America. For the most part, this is the driving force of job growth and innovation (just look at Google, which started just ten years ago).

However, it can be tough to run a small business nowadays, in light of the regulations, slow growth and credit squeeze. In other words, we believe there's a big need for small business tools.

Q: How do you get the data for all your evaluations?


It comes from well-known sources like D&B, Experian and so on. Although, we are finding that this data can be spotty. So, we are going to add a feature that allows users to rate the data. Moreover, if your valuation is wrong, you might want to check with the credit bureaus. It might be a reason why you are not getting credit or having difficulties with vendors/suppliers.

Q: Do you have any adjusting mechanisms? Evaluations in our volatile days could change rather quickly…

As mentioned above, we will have a rating system. We also plan to have a way for a small business owner to claim his or her business. We think these user interaction features will make the site much, much better.

Q: What is your revenue model?


At this stage, we have no revenue model. Our goal is to build a useful site. Then, as we learn along the way, we'll be adding services and relevant ads.

Q: Who benefits form your services besides investors and companies gearing up for an IPO?

Our focus is not on the large companies. They have CFOs and investment bankers to handle the complexities of valuations.
Instead, we are looking to the small business owner, who wants some knowledge and help. For example, on our blog, we have a feature where you can ask questions to a valuation pro.

Keep in mind that a professional valuation can cost $2,000 to $20,000 or more.

Q: Do you have any strategic alliances or partnerships?


We have recently launched, so we don't have any right now. But, now we are aggressively pursuing partnerships. We think we can be a big help to a variety of organizations, such as business brokers.

Q: What are your next steps?


We want to make the data better and valuations more accurate. This will be a short-term and long-term goal. If not, we will have failed.

We also want to provide more useful content for business owners. For example: what are the ways to improve the valuation of your business?

Q: What do you tell investors in a time when investment banking seems to drop off the planet?

Yea, amazing times, huh? Things have happened so quickly there really hasn't been enough time to let things sink in.

Unfortunately, the fall of the major investment banks and the credit squeeze are going to be big problems for the economy. I can see things protracting for a while.

Thus, for small business owners, it's more important than ever to focus on the key drivers of your business.

At the same time, when there is lots of upheaval, there is usually lots of opportunity.

Tom, thanks very much for taking the time to answer these questions, and Klaus, thanks for helping out with this interview!

iPhone App Developer Spotlight: Mark Moseley and Voyeur

Another entry in my series on iPhone app developer interviews. Haven't had a chance to read the others? You can do so through this link: The iPhone App Developer Interview Series. This time I'm talking with Mark Moseley about his slick new Voyeur application to let you watch the public Flickr photo stream...

Q: You wrote Voyeur. How long did it take you? How many lines of code is the program?

Voyeur was my first foray into anything Mac related for development. I've done .NET and Java in the past, but Objective-C was something new. It probably took me a week or so to get up to speed on the language and another week to get a rough version up and running. It took another week or so to really work out all the bugs in the app. It seems like a lot of apps in the store are "almost" bug-free, but I wanted to make sure that Voyeur was as stable as possible. The app itself is around 1500 lines of code.

Q: Tell us a bit about the application, including your target market and what problem or problems your application solves?

Voyeur is strictly for entertainment. It presents a slideshow of recently posted images from Flickr. The intent is for the user to simply start it up and let it go. I "use" it a lot at work - start some music, switch to Voyeur and start working. It's a nice distraction every now and then to look up and see something strange, funny or interesting. You can also save the image to the device, visit the image's page on Flickr or e-mail a link to anyone in your contact list.

Q: The iPhone Software Development Kit has been written about quite a bit, but I'd like to know your opinion: was it easy to get up to speed with this SDK? Is it sufficiently complete that you weren't stumped as you developed your application?

I'd say about 90% of the SDK is extremely intuitive, well documented and easy to understand. the other 10% of the SDK was a little mysterious to me, but I think that was more of a result of my newness to Mac programming in general. There were very few times during development that I was stuck for more than a few hours on something specific to the SDK. That said, Objective-C took me longer than I thought it would to get used to.

Q: Tell us about the experience of submitting your program to the iPhone Application Store and how long it took to gain approval. Did you have to demonstrate that you weren't accessing external data like the Address Book? What else was required for your app to show up in the public store?

The process of getting the application in the store was an exercise in patience for sure. I had previously registered with Apple as an individual developer into the program. When I signed up as an individual, I got accepted almost immediately. My business partner and I wanted to launch Voyeur under our LLC, so we had to apply with Apple again for the development program, this time as a company. That approval took around 2 weeks. After that, we had to submit a contract to be able to sell applications - that was another 2ish week wait. During that time we submitted Voyeur as an application. It was bounced back once for a bug (a newbie mistake for sure) after 7 days in review. I fixed the bug and resubmitted and was live about a week later. I really didn't have to demonstrate anything to Apple - I just submitted the binaries and they ran with it.

Q: Did you develop all the graphics in the app yourself or contract with a designer to create the look-and-feel of your application?

This app really relies on the images pulled from Flickr - there isn't much of a UI at all. All the menus are default iPhone SDK menus. The one image we have (the splash screen) and the icons were done by my wife, who's a graphic and web designer in her day job.

Q: How much is your application, and how did you decide on a price-point?

The app is $0.99. To some extent, I wanted to see what people felt was fair for a small app like this. $0.99 is the least you can charge for an application, so that's the price point I chose.

Q: Are you inspired to write more iPhone applications? What's in the pipeline?

My partner and I are absolutely interested in writing more iPhone applications. In fact, we have so many ideas for things to write that it's hard to concentrate on a single project. We're both gamers at heart, so we're probably going to concentrate on a game next. Now that I'm more comfortable with the SDK we hope to move it along quickly.

Q: If you're not a full-time iPhone application developer, what's your day job?

By day I'm an application architect/programmer for a large corporation. I work exclusively in Microsoft .NET there. It's a challenging job, but no where near as fun as iPhone development :)

Great stuff, Mark. Thanks for sharing this! Are you an iPhone app developer? Then I'd love to hear about your experiences with the development and publication of your application in the iPhone Application Store!

Should the Fed bailout failing corporations like AIG?

As an investor and citizen, I have been following with increasing concern the shenanigans in the financial market. First it was the huge problem with greedy banks and an overextended Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) that had underwritten loans to more and more risky borrowers, gambling that the upside of high-interest-rate loans would offset the tremendous risk of default.

In retrospect, that was a sucker's bet and no surprise that we're seeing financial institutions failing because of their inability to conservatively balance and manage their portfolio.

The demise of Lehman Brothers (NYSE: LEH), fire sale of Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) and probable demise of American International Group (NYSE: AIG), sidestepped by a massive government bailout, show another facet of the same greed and poor business strategy.

There are a number of problems that got us here, but one big issue is the lack of regulation: strong Federal regulation would have tempered the unbounded greed of these institutions and helped avoid the troubles we now face. But a part of me says that the trouble is really because we're afraid to have a truly free-market economy based on pure capitalism.

I know, you're probably saying "we've never had pure, free-market capitalism in the United States" and I concur. Between tariffs, export controls, market regulation, business practice laws and the RICO laws, there have always been a lot of ropes fettering business practices in this country.

That's a good thing, even though I recall reading books in business school that argued quite vociferously that unfettered capitalism was the only path to world economic stability and, ultimately, world peace. I never bought it, however, because it's predicated on all countries allowing free access to their markets (though some economists have projections of how a free market trumps constrained markets in a global economy. It's just never been borne out).

We all do better and have a better standard of living and more "contentment points" in a strong, healthy, growing economy, so controls and regulations that help us move in that direction are obviously and de facto a good thing. Let's face it, as much as the late 90's might have been the "dot com bubble", it was also a very good time to be in business and I know I enjoyed the largess of the marketplace.

Which is why I find it so interesting that when I read the WSJ headline that Feds Plan $85 Billion Rescue Deal for AIG [sub required] or the Bloomberg report that the government is considering an AIG conservatorship plan, I dislike the notion and feel that if we really were a free market capitalist economy, we'd let the companies fail, knowing that new ones will spring up to replace them, stronger, smarter companies that will avoid these poor management decisions.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were bailed out by the government. So was Chrysler, years ago, in a quite hotly debated rescue from mismanagement, Lee Iacocca's hubris, and poor strategic planning. But Enron wasn't bailed out and the Enron investors were left to their own personal financial nightmares.

The rule seems to be that if it's a big enough company or enough people are adversely impacted then the never-empty wallet of the Federal government opens up and billions of taxpayer dollars are allocated to alleviate the impending crisis.

One place we can perhaps assign blame is with President Ronald Reagan, actually. He was the first to have such a deep faith in the free market and a general mistrust of government and federal controls that he restructured the market. We've been in that financially conservative place ever since. Heck, it was President Bill Clinton who signed the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act), which removed the walls separating banks, securities firms and insurers. Not good.

Since then both Clinton and Bush aggressively promoted home ownership, even for homeowners who couldn't afford it. The magic solution? adjustable rate mortgages that had a low interest rate when the prime rate was low, but could rapidly grow to create unmanageable mortgage payments as the rate went up. Now those high risk subprime loans back almost 40% of private-sector mortgage bonds and that's the root of the financial problem we now face.

Back to the central dilemma, though: should we bail out AIG or not? Should our hard earned dollars paid to the government as taxes be used to prevent these massive corporations from facing the dire consequences of their stupid, myopic actions?

I have to say that, yes, I think that we should. Or at least, we should have some sort of program that helps out those most affected by the demise of these companies. When mortgage holders find that their adjustable rate mortgages prove a nightmare because the rates have gone up, that's one issue, but when a large corporation actively and aggressively markets to these subprime borrowers without fear of consequence, that's very, very bad for the market.

The consequences are what we're feeling today, with a dramatic drop in the financial market, the bankruptcy of Lehman, Federal bailout of AIG, and more to come as the ripples affect other markets and industries. Bailout because too many regular Joes are affected by these failures, but for goodness sake, tighten regulations and fix things so that we can prevent this happening again in the future!

To follow or not to follow, that is the essential Twitter question

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?

A few days ago I sent out a message on Twitter (I'm @DaveTaylor on the service) commenting that I was just a few people shy of 2000 followers, a big milestone as it has occasionally been the top limit of standard Twitter accounts. Someone I didn't know responded thusly:

"@DaveTaylor You are probably not following them. Many of us clean out the non-followers now and again"

Well, that was a bit of a surprise, the implication that the best practice use for Twitter is to automatically follow everyone who follows you? I don't agree, which is clear when you notice that I currently follow 130 people, while I have 2028 followers now. If you're calculating, that means I only follow 6.4% of the people who follow me.

I responded to Jill (kiwichamp) with a question of my own: "That's interesting. I follow less than 10% of the people who follow me. Why do you expect reciprocity?"

Jill's response surprised me:

"cause social media is a two way street -- otherwise it is not social"

As you can imagine, the conversation blossomed from there...

Me: To me it's about stemming the tide of information. I interact with everyone, I follow my friends.

Jill: I would give priority to those who do treat me as a friend -- that's what this latest move towards social mktg is all about

Me: So you wouldn't do business with me because I don't follow you on Twitter? (raises eyebrows) Um, okay.

Jill: How can you trust as a friend when there is not much two way communication?

Me: Ah, but isn't it important to differentiate between "treating you as a friend" and *being friends*? Not geeky, just ethics?

and on and on it went. In fact, Jill has a good point: if your philosophy is to engage with everyone you encounter, to connect to every person you bump into in the digital world, then yes, you should probably follow everyone who follows you. This, of course, is the quantity over quality approach to social media and it's certainly one way to approach things.

As someone with high visibility in the marketplace and industry, however, I have learned to use the opposite approach, of quality over quantity. In fact, I know every single person I follow on Twitter, and would invite all of them to my home for dinner without thinking twice. They are, truly, friends and I know them all personally outside of the digital world too.

I don't think that either approach is better or worse than the other, just different.

But, then again, maybe I'm wrong. To find out, I canvassed my Twitter followers and got some very interesting answers, in no particular order (and some are slightly edited for brevity, mea culpa):

@sizzler_chetan:

You don't follow me as you don't know me well and so there is no necessity for you to follow me. But am following you because I like to be updated with all your tweets.

Reciprocating the follow in Twitter is not necessary.

And it is not helpful, as you would be following a person who is following you but you are not sure who he/she is. So better follow those who you know and like to follow and let others do their job of following.

@SteveOuting

I think everyone can have a slightly different experience with Twitter, so there's no one rule that works for all, such as you have to follow everyone who follows you. If you're a college student and your Twitterverse is strictly friends and family, then you probably will have Follower-Following reciprocity. If you're a journalist with a lot of readers, it's impractical to follow everyone who follows you; you'll probably limit who you follow to your contact network (friends, colleagues, people you've interviewed, met at conferences, etc.).

@freelock

I'm relatively new to this twitter thing, but see no reason to follow all of my followers. Do you follow every blogger who reads your feed? Why is Twitter any different? Tweet what you want, follow tweeters you find interesting. It's so easy to start or stop following, and there are so many different reasons you might want to follow somebody--but nobody should take it personally if they're not followed back.

@RobertFowler

When I first started, I did and wanted to. Several reasons. One is I don't like to be rude or disrespectful, offline or online. Also, just because someone is "new" or does not have a website, does NOT mean they are not worthy etc.

That being said, I have found it is not possible to follow everyone, because I can not realistically keep up with all the tweets. I have ADD like everyone else, lol... Now, I look at the person's profile and website(s) and see if interests me, ie do we have anything in common, do they seem to be into something I have wanted to learn about etc. Obviously, you have to review to make sure it is not a spammer or bot, that is why I do not use the Tweetlater autoresponse function and Manually thank all my followers.

@NextInstinct

You follow people because enough of their tweets really inform or entertain you (and hopefully both), not because they'll follow you back.

@IreneKoehler

I tend to follow more often than not. I’ve been both pleasantly surprised and sorely disappointed once I’ve had the chance to be a part of others’ ongoing twitter streams. People I’ve never met have turned out to be fabulous resources of information and useful nuggets of advice. I had high expectations of the benefits of following others, but found myself drowning in endless tweets of what they’re eating for dinner, how many frappa-whatevers they’re getting at Starbucks every morning and so on. I really don’t need to know this.

@ClayFranklin

I would say it is not important to follow everyone that follows you. I would say it would be nice if you follow everyone that follows you. Unless tweets are not what you want to see on your feed then I always follow.

@GutzyWoman

My answer is NO. When I get follows from a tweeple that doesn't bother to put up a picture or avatar, is obviously promoting a business or opportunity, follows 2,000 people but only 10 follow them back and their tweets are nothing but spam, it only wastes my time and pisses me off.

If the person seems legit, I check out their tweets and who else they follow and check out their website or blog to try to determine if we have anything in common. If so, the decision is easy. If I determine them to be borderline, I'll usually give them the benefit of the doubt. One can always unfollow if necessary.

@bbspress

No -- you shouldn't try to follow everyone who follows you. Your goal should be FOLLOWERS. When you follow someone, their tweets show up in your panel. Follow too many people and you get slammed with tweets. Important ones scroll off too fast. Follow those you WANT to hear from or send and receive direct messages.

@JohnJaworski

I follow people that have something to say that interests me. Follow everyone and you really follow no one. Too much noise!

@Jonathan_Gunson

I always try to reciprocate and follow ... unless they're clearly a badass. Why? Because then folks feel truly part of my 'tribe'. My own Twitter tribe is very tiny right now, but it will grow. This is an increasingly social environment because the personal connection or referral is ever more appreciated in an ocean of deception.

There is no universal answer, but at least with the people who answered my query I think the strategy is clear: follow poeple who you find interesting or want to know better, don't just blindly follow everyone who follows you in Twitter.

But then again, you, dear reader, haven't chimed in yet. What's your opinion?

iPhone App Developer Spotlight: Boris Zhukov and SlovoEd

Another in my continuing series of interviews with iPhone application developers. Boris talks about "SlovoEd", but it's really a series of different dictionaries, as you'll learn. I highlight the terrific English/Spanish in the graphic below, but encourage you to search through their offerings for many different choices. To read the full set of interviews, please click on: The iPhone App Developer Interviews. If you're a developer and would like to participate, please drop me a note via the contact form on this site!

Q: You wrote SlovoEd dictionary. How long did it take you? How many lines of code is the program?

Development takes about 2 month and SlovoEd consist of about 30,000 lines of code.

Q: Tell us a bit about the application, including your target market and what problem or problems your application solves?

SlovoEd dictionary line for iPhone/iPod Touch contains 110+ dictionaries for 30 languages The most reliable linguistic dictionary content from world leading linguistic companies: Merriam-Webster, Oxford, DUDEN, PONS – to name a few and Paragon’s advanced SlovoEd dictionary engine have been combined to bring premium traditional dictionary content to iPhone users directly on the mobile device screen. Paragon's dictionaries under the SlovoEd engine allow iPhone users to take advantage of the iPhone's superb user interface, easy-to-use on-screen keyboard and many other device features, which work together to increase look-up speed even more over paper
dictionaries.

No Internet connection is required – simply download the dictionary once and use it on the iPhone/iPod Touch without any additional expenses. Audio modules contain nearly 40,000 live voice pronunciations prerecorded by native speakers, and having them directly on the iPhone helps to improve pronunciation and ease the mastery of a new language. The “History” feature shows the last 15 translated words, and the “Cross-Lookup” feature is an easy check of language comprehension.

Q: The iPhone Software Development Kit has been written about quite a bit, but I'd like to know your opinion: was it easy to get up to speed with this SDK? Is it sufficiently complete that you weren't stumped as you developed your application?

For our purposes SDK mostly is OK, but few things works different against our expectations, in one case native(Cocoa) functions were dramatically slowly compared to ANSI.

Q: Tell us about the experience of submitting your program to the iPhone Application Store and how long it took to gain approval. Did you have to demonstrate that you weren't accessing external data like the Address Book? What else was required for your app to show up in the public store?

Apple approval has taken some time, something about 1-2 weeks. We still have some difficulties with Apple & iTunes team approval of our applications (it takes too much time), but hope, that these will be solved soon. We are sure, our applications were tested to comply with Apple requirements, but we have not done any demonstrations - we only had to upload our titles to iTunes Connect backend.

Q: Did you develop all the graphics in the app yourself or contract with a designer to create the look-and-feel of your application?

All our graphics develop our in-house designer.

Q: How much is your application, and how did you decide on a price-point?

We have different prices for our dictionaries - $9.99, $14,99 and $24,99 depending on dictionary edition (Compact, Classic, Deluxe). Price point has been chosen according our understanding of mobile dictionaries market and iPhone apps average price. August sales show, that we have made right decision

Q: Are you inspired to write more iPhone applications? What's in the pipeline?

We are more than inspired to write more applications – we have made a good start and now planning to keep on our development for iPhone/iPod Touch devices. First, we would like to finish all our activities concerning dictionary development and its submission to App Store.

Q: If you're not a full-time iPhone application developer, what's your day job?

We are full-time iPhone application developer.

Great stuff, as always. Thanks for your informative answers, Boris. Need help with your iPhone? I got ya covered with that too, I have lots of free iPhone help online.

Jason Cormier of Room214 on the basics of social networking

The following are my notes from tonight's presentation. I apologize that they're a bit rough and I didn't include all the links I should, but I hope you'll find this interesting and helpful reading.

Jason Cormier, co-founder of Room 214 gave a presentation on the basics of social networking and social media for The Rocky Mountain Internet Users Group. It was, as you might expect, a bit basic, but Jason did a nice job of giving attendees an overview of this new space, which was - rather surprisingly - new to at least 20% of the approximately 40 people in the room.

Before we started, however, RMIUG exec Josh Zapin asked the audience a few warm-up questions: how many people use social networking for marketing? (answer, less than 30%) How many people think that it's just a buzz and not anything real? (2-3 people raised their hands)

Then we jumped into Jason's presentation.

The premises of social media and social networking are that

• Markets are Conversations (from, of course, The Cluetrain Manifesto) (markets are dynamic, ongoing conversations where fluctuations in credibility and visibility are common)
• Word of Mouth Spreads (monologue has become dialog)
• Search Engines are Media (keep them updated and attracted to what's relevant)
• Content is Still King (but the kingdom only grows if the king is relevant, dedicated and available) -- the point: just creating an account doesn't do much for you: you have to update the content!

The return on investment and measurement of how social media programs can be successful tends to weed out "the clowns" and leave the professionals. There must be some accountability for corporations. Jason relates clients saying "I know because we spent our money, I see metrics and a return, or I don't want to pay for it at all."

At this point there was an interesting question from the audience: What metrics are established in the industry?

The short answer from Jason: they're not very well established. The Association for Downloadable Media is trying to get standards in place for things such as the value of a podcast. An ROI that everyone can agree to. If we all abide by those standards then it'll help the industry grow.

Next, he explained how social media is mainstream, and that there are 80 million blogs "and we do know that most are garbage", as Jason mused, and that 69% of all social media users have participated in user generated content (leaving comment on blog, etc). Live prime time TV viewing is also down 10% year over year.

There are four main pieces of social media:

• The Aggregators - examples: friendfeed, flock, plaxo
• The Connectors: LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace
• The Feeders; YouTube, Flickr, Google Maps
• The Publishers: Twitter, Jaiku, YouTube, Flickr, Digg

As an aside, we talked about the importance of RSS as part of your strategy, with a focus on how Google has evolved to not just use Googlebot's Web scraper as input, but also scan millions of RSS feeds too. As Jason says, Google's latest strategy (e.g., input from Googlebot + RSS) confirms that you should be looking to RSS as the future of your own marketing and communications efforts.

Another question from the audience was: Can you explain RSS more?

Answer: It's "extensible markup language", a structure that provides a news feed. An example: the difference between a blog and a web page on which someone is keeping a journal is really the RSS feed. It's the idea that you can "subscribe" to receive an update to content. It's a one-way update and completely anonymous, unlike an email newsletter.

Stepping back, social media objects are:

• Listening: build sentiment measures and listen to the larger web - tools include Google Reader, Collective Intellect, Filtrbox, BuzzLogic, Google Alerts. He used the example of how Anthony Bourdain of The Travel Channel said "bitches" on a recent show, and now TTC is monitoring the online buzz, which has much discussion about his profanity.
• Talking: Build a content plan to speak about the overall space, leverage blogging, podcasting, twitter, etc, learn how NOT to pitch bloggers. You need to "give a little" first. Room214 has the 80/20 rule: 80% of Digg'd articles should NOT be about the client or vendor.
• Energizing: add social bookmark links to your most important pages, offer embeddable players, spread good ideas with reblogging, bookmarking, vote them up at social sites but be a good citizen

The reality is, you need to meet people where they are. If there's a facebook group, you need to be on facebook. Anthony Bordain has 30,000+ fans on Facebook, even though he doesn't DO anything about it. It'd be a mistake for The Travel Channel to say "no, all content needs to be on our site"

Next up were some thoughts on planning your social media campaign:

• Identifying Options and Requirements
• Identifying and Establishing your Baseline
• ID/Prioritization of Distribution Channels
• Audience and Influencer Identification
• Assets (content, people, web properties)
• Tactics (blogger outreach, video widgets)
• Programming / Integration Measurement
• Response Protocols

Speaking of measurement, we saw both qualitative and quantitative measures that can be applied to social networking and social media:

Qualitative metrics relevance rankings sentiment sentiment vs. competitors performance vs influencers share of voice influencer rankings % of influencer's engaged theme impact

Quantitative metrics Total conversations activity levels (# of postings/reach) total inbound blog links search visibility virality authority installs and views friends and registrations

Jason then showed some examples of the great work that they do at Room 214:

• Blog, produced by Room 214: "Bernina Blog" -- he highlighted the "Subscribe via Email" in addition to RSS button.
• Sample podcast: alltel racing -- used to highlight that you can subscribe with an "rss" feed OR click on the "iTunes" button. Explained that on the page that the "iTunes" button is clicked on more frequently than the "rss" button and that, unsurprisingly, more people are also clicking on the "play" button than the "download" link.
• Sample widget: a mockup of a very slick widget for the Denver Broncos -- can reside on MySpace, Orkut, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, iGoogle, etc. As he said, wouldn't it be neat if you could have the Broncos schedule, headlines from bloggers, etc, in centralized widget?
• A very cool demonstration of keyword-based RSS feeds that they built for MTV (they called it "roll/mash your own feed"), but to date, MTV hasn't actually implemented it yet. That's dumb on their part, this is a very slick idea.
• The Facebook page they created for The Travel Channel
• Sample Twitter profile for Anthony Bourdain, who, in the screen shot, has 392 following and 444 followers [today he has 525 following him and 740 followers, FYI] Worth noting is that the Twitter account is "NoReservations, not "Anthony Bourdain", and it's second person, about Tony. Sample Tweets: "Saudi Arabia episode on at 10pm EST." and "Tony heads to Saudi Arabia tonight in the FAN-atic casting call winner. You don't want to miss it: http://tinyurl.com/2lmlra"

During this same period, we also talked about the example of local Colorado business EventVUE and how he tracks occurrences of the phrase "conference registration" on Twitter, then personally connects with people and says that he offers those services. He's seeing a 90% response rate (albeit not always a positive response)

A question from the audience: From a marketing psychology viewpoint, what needs are being met with these social media services?

Answer: at a very basic level, people want to be a part of something. They want to feel like they are contributing, or connected. Feeling connected inspires them to contribute. There are a lot of public relations firms, etc., who have been busted for adding cheesy marketing messages on blogs. Then they're caught by the rest of the community who polices their own community. Used example of a client company who had an employee from an ad agency who astroturfed (masqueraded as someone else to plant fake comments). It was like "blood and sharks". Blogger did research, found the real name, and posted an entry "I hate deceptive marketers" and the employee was fired the same day.

There were some additional questions, but I'd run out of battery by that point. Jason did a great job and the audience very much appreciated his knowledge and candor.

Live Tech Support: An easy business to launch, or a tough one?

With great enthusiasm, a young man named Bill Egert contacted me asking about reciprocal linking between his LiveTechs.com site and my own Ask Dave Taylor.com. I rarely reciprocally link (among the reasons is that it doesn't help either site with SEO in most cases) but I was intrigued by his idea of a live tech support business and arranged to interview him to learn more about his business...

Q: Tell us about your day job, to start off. What do you do, where do you work, and what's that experience like?

My day job. I'm an IT consultant for a private firm in Central New Jersey. Our demographic is mostly Catholic churches and schools or the "ecclesiastical" demographic. I've been there for about one year now and despise it. Don't get me wrong, I've formed some pretty awesome relationships with the parish workers and even a few deacons and priests. It's my boss who gets to me...

Q: What's your background in tech? What credentials or certifications do you have?

I went to the Chubb Institute in 2005 , and have more or less worked tech intern positions (my church, a skincare company) until I landed my job in 2007. I have my CCNA, my MCP, my Network+, and my A+.

Q: What motivated you to create LiveTechs.com and how is the business structured?

LiveTechs.com was largely motivated when I read the book "The Four Hour Work Week" by Timothy Ferris. I realized the untapped potential to make money on the internet. A little brain storming is all it took, and it wasn't long before I hired a web designer create the website.

I should actually mention now that after some research, we are going to be making the switch from LiveTechs.com to ITHelpDesk.net. ItHelpDesk.net is a keyword rich domain that is very relevent to what we do: provide business' with outsourced IT support. I have a 301 redirect from LiveTechs.com to keep my link popularity =)

Also, LiveTechs or ITHelpDesk.net is now targeting the business sector. Let's face it, businesses are just ready to spend more.

I privately contract a call center in Dallas Texas and am in a long term agreement with them currently. We provide the client:

- An American, 24/7 call center
- Their own 800 number
- Access to a database of client/customer information
- A unique "brand name" experience where our service simply runs silently in the background.

We are in talks with a large online university and a website for Independent films. SLA's have already been sent and we are close to sealing the deal on these.

Q: How many other people are involved in your business?

My two close friends, Jon Macapodi and Scott Basgaard.

Scott is innovative and constantly comes up with great ideas in terms of what would make our site more appealing. He's also quite saavy in HTML/PHP.

Jon is excellent with the clients. He was the one who single-handedly landed this deal with the online college. He's ultra-professional, great on the phones, and an excellent communicator.

Q: Walk us through a typical transaction. How do customers find you? How do you connect with them and manage their computer to diagnose and fix it?

Customers have typically found us on Adwords thus far. (90% of our calls are people that think we are Dell tech support, Linksys tech support, AOL tech support, you name it. The content network hasn't been doing us much good. I'm just getting my feet wet with Google Adwords, and I believe what's really been causing my problem has been "broad" phrase matching.)

When we connect with a legit customer - we provide them an initial quote. If accepted, we draw up an SLA and send to the client. An initial training period takes place where reps from my call center in Dallas and myself get familiar with the client's systems and proprietary software. We then implement a base/per incident price structure: A base price is offered which includes X amount of incidents, followed by a per incident premium.

Q: How are you marketing and promoting your business, and how's it going?

Adwords and pay-per-call. It sucks. However, IT Help Desk is a targeted phrase that gets about 2000 hits a month so it shouldn't be hard to get rankings there. Also there's less competition for the SEO phrase "help desk" then there is for the term "tech support".

Thanks for your candor, Bill. Dear reader, if you have a problem and need live tech support, why not give their biz a shot and see how it works out? Then come back here and report to us!

iPhone App Developer Spotlight: Brandon Bogle, Bill Trost and Koi Pond

There are a lot of very cool applications in the iPhone application store, but few offer such a delightful reaction from people than the simple, but beautiful Koi Pond app. You kind of have to see it to appreciate what they've done, but I'm really glad to have Brandon Bogle (the programmer) and Bill Trost (the designer) share their experience writing this slick little application....

Q: You wrote Koi Pond, How long did it take you?

[Brandon Bogle] We started some early shared development when the iPhone SDK was initially released, so we were somewhat familiar with the development process, which ultimately saved us some time.

Unfortunately, we soon realized we weren't going to be one of the luck few accepted into the beta developer program (which meant we couldn't develop using the actual hardware), so we put iPhone app development on hold. Development on Koi Pond was started just after the app store went live.

Q: The iPhone Software Development Kit has been written about quite a bit, but I'd like to know your opinion: was it easy to get up to speed with this SDK? Is it sufficiently complete that you weren't stumped as you developed your application?

[Brandon Bogle] It was pretty straightforward, even having no prior experience with the Cocoa framework or the Objective-C language. The Cocoa framework itself is very complete with good documentation, and Apple provides enough sample applications and instructional material that we really didn't have any problems at all.

Q: Tell us about the experience of submitting your program to the iPhone Application Store and how long it took to gain approval. Did you have to demonstrate that you weren't accessing external data like the Address Book? What else was required for your app to show up in the public store?

[Brandon Bogle] Once again, we had no problems submitting our app. We were a little surprised there was not a definitive submission checklist detailing what you can and can't do, best practices, etc...

We did some basic profiling, checking for memory leaks, things like that. The approval process itself is still a complete mystery. Koi Pond was in the queue for about a week until it was approved for sale.

We didn't receive any feedback during or after the submission process other than the email notification that it had been approved.

Q: Did you develop all the graphics in the app yourself or contract with a designer to create the look-and-feel of your application?

[Bill Trost] Kurt Klockau created all the graphics for Koi Pond. Kurt is a very talented, experienced, illustrator/digital artist and is a core member of The Blimp Pilots team.

Q: How much is your application, and how did you decide on a price-point?

[Bill Trost] Koi Pond sells for $.99. We just thought that was a fair price for a quality mobile application. We really didn't want price to be a barrier to purchase. We hoped that Koi Pond was going to be an application that iPhone owners would want to show off to their friends.

Q: Are you inspired to write more iPhone applications? What's in the pipeline?

[Bill Trost] Most definitely. We have several in the pipeline, some more ambitious than others, but we are taking our time with them and can't really talk about them quite yet.

Q: If you're not a full-time iPhone application developer, what's your day job?

[Bill Trost] We are professional PC/Console game developers by day, working for Trion World Network Inc. in San Diego. We love what we do there, working on the cutting edge of server-based gaming. We all just totally dig our iPhones and thought it would be a fun hobby to make applications that really show off its unique capabilitiies.

We are totally stoked that Koi Pond seems to have struck a chord with so many people.

Thanks a bunch, guys, for this interview. Even at $0.99, I have a sense that your hobby of writing iPhone applications is starting to pay off too as you deliver popular, high quality applications.

iPhone App Developer Spotlight: Michael Alvarez and Showtimes

Another entry in the iPhone application developer interview series, this one's a favorite of mine because it's about a movie-related iPhone app that I use regularly and because both Michael and I are such movie buffs. As always, please feel free to spread the word about this interview series...

Q: You wrote Showtimes. How long did it take you?

Showtimes is one of Avantar's most popular app, and the #1 downloaded free application, which finds your local theaters and movie showtimes with a single tap of your finger. My developers wrote it and it took a team of one designer and three developers to design the interface, setup the servers, find a good host, manage the data, and write the application. It took one month just to write the application, not including everything else stated above. After launch there was still a lot of development needed optimize the app and to add new functionality.

How many lines of code is the program?

Showtimes consists of 8,000 lines of Objective-C.

Q: The iPhone Software Development Kit has been written about quite a bit, but I'd like to know your opinion: was it easy to get up to speed with this SDK?

It was hard to learn it, especially because the it was difficult to search the documentation for desired topics. Once learned, it's easy to use. The interface builder also is not very intuitive, but once you learn the tricks it's a easy to use.

We were able to solve every problem we encountered, but for the most part some there was a lot of frustration with the documentation. We are sure the documentation will get better now that there are so many developers providing feedback on the matter.

Q: Tell us about the experience of submitting your program to the iPhone Application Store and how long it took to gain approval.

There are two approval processes you have to go through before submitting an app.

1) Applying to become an iPhone Developer. All you have to do is fill out a simple form to apply. What was hard was not knowing what criteria we were being judged by for the approval process. We assume that having had a Mac account for years helped, and also having a website that explained clearly what we do.

We were one of the few to get approved before the launch of the App Store so we consider ourselves very fortunate because it gave us an immediate leg up on our competition.

2) Once we were approved as iPhone Developers, submitting a new program is fairly simple. It took us a week to get our apps approved.

Did you have to demonstrate that you weren't accessing external data like the Address Book?

Not really. I don't think it's possible to have two programs running at the same time. Some of our apps like Yellow Pages, AirYell, and Munch don't access the Address Book information, but they do allow you to add a new contact to the Address Book and we had no problem with the approval of that feature.

What else was required for your app to show up in the public store?

I believe that what they really look for is that your app is as bug free as possible. If the person reviewing the app finds a bug or that it does something out of the ordinary it will be rejected.

Q: Did you develop all the graphics in the app yourself or contract with a designer to create the look-and-feel of your application?

All were created in house by our creative team. We have years of experience in web usability and optimization, so this helped to get the look-and-feel and usability just how we wanted it.

Q: How much is your application, and how did you decide on a price-point?

Showtimes a free application. Our intent is to ask for donations for that app, but haven't set that up yet. Our paid applications are OneTap Movies ($1.99 USD), Yellow Pages ($.99 USD), and Munch ($.99 USD). Since we submitted these before the App Store went live, we had no competitors to analyze so we picked a number that we though would be supported by iPhone and iPod touch users.

For future applications we now have a lot of applications, and their popularity rankings, we can study before setting a price.

Q: Are you inspired to write more iPhone applications? What's in the pipeline?

Definitely! We don't disclose future launches, but what I can tell you is that soon you will see a very useful application for college students launching shortly and hopefully a few new games. Not only that, we are committed in making each one of our applications the very best, so we constantly improve them (based on user feedback) and launch new releases as soon as they are ready.

Q: If you're not a full-time iPhone application developer, what's your day job?

Avantar, the company, concentrates solely on developing iPhone apps, but we are also looking into developing for other mobile platforms like Google's Android.

Very interesting and candid responses, thanks! If you would like to learn more about iPhone application development, please read the entire iPhone App Developer Interview series. Need help with your iPhone? I got ya covered with that too, I have lots of free iPhone help online and, finally, if you're into movies like Michael and I, you'll want to be following @FilmBuzz, my film alter ego, on Twitter.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) training via DVD. For free.

I've been working with the Stompernet team for years now and have grown to both like and respect the group involved. From Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon to Dan Thies, David Bullock, Jerry West, Ed Dale, Don Crowther and Sherman Hu, I am happy to count these folks as good friends.

Further, when I started getting involved in the world of Internet-based marketing and sales I thought "isn't optimizing your site for search engines kind of like playing games and tricking the search systems?"

That's when I learned about the amusingly named black hat and white hat efforts you can use to help your site, your content, your product and your services be more visible, more findable in the search engines. "White hat", of course, is 'good guy' stuff, and it's basically just applying best practices as suggested by Google and other major search engines (search for "google webmaster seo guidelines" to see what I'm talking about, if you'd like.

"Black hat" SEO techniques are where I - and many other people - draw the line. It's when you play various tricks and use stealth techniques to artificially boost your relevance for a certain keyword of set of keywords. I know that there are people in the Stomper team who know this stuff, but it's definitely not how we collectively teach people to gain the benefit of being more easily found by potential customers.

The Deal: Stomping the Search Engines 2

It's exactly because I know the people behind Stompernet that I am so flabbergasted about the offer we're introducing today at noon Pacific: The entire DVD training course for the brand new Stomping the Search Engines 2 along with a copy of the premier issue of The Net Effect, our new print magazine on SEO and online business best practices, are both available for free.

No kidding. No tricks. No "request a refund" stuff. Go to the Stomping the Search Engines 2 page, watch the amusing video of Brad and Andy sharing their vision, read the deal, and sign up to receive this pretty darn sweet offer on the spot.

The real story? The real story is The Net Effect, and I'll speak as a contributing author that it's chock full of very interesting and useful articles on how to grow and expand your business, with action items and pragmatic help. Heck, have a very close look at the cover when you get it and you'll burst out laughing when you realize how I figure in that image too. :-)

All you have to do is try the magazine, and the first issue of the publication (with a highly amusing cover too!) is free too. You don't like it? Cancel it. No sweat, no problem.

But I suspect you won't. I suspect that you'll find it an extraordinary value, especially when you think about how much even the mediocre newbie SEO "consultants" charge to share even a fraction of the knowledge we'll send out each month.

'Nuf said, I hope. Really, there's no reason not to sign up and get the terrific DVD training materials and the premier issue of The Net Effect free.

Learn more and take action: Sign up for Stomping the Search Engines 2 today!