Interview Series with Shel Israel – Part 1
Shel Israel is a well-known social media author and public speaker who co-wrote the book “Naked Conversations” with Robert Scoble in 2006. Mr Israel has contributed editorially to Business Week, Dow Jones Co and FastCompany TV.
His new book: Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighbourhoods, will be released September 8, 2009, and talks about potential business uses of Twitter.
Walter Schwabe had a chance to chat with Mr Israel and have a few questions about his views on social media answered. This will be the first interview in a series of them with Shel Israel, so be sure to check back often for the next interview! Read more
Streaming live from nextMEDIA in Banff
Members of the fusedlogic team are heading to Banff, Alberta to take in the nextMEDIA conference. Probably even more fun for us will be the fact that we’ll be streaming live Saturday and Sunday from the event and looking to do interesting interviews with as many people as we can. So track us down and say hello, we’d love to hear about your business and all about your nextMEDIA experience in general.
Watch @fusedlogic @paulney and @eadnams on twitter as well for updates.
Guy Kawasaki: the interview
If you’ve been around computers, particularly the Mac, for any length of time, you probably know who Guy Kawasaki is.
When I sat down to write about Guy, I realized I just didn’t know that much about him; time to do a little research about Guy Kawasaki. The one thing I did know about him was that he was an “evangelist” at Apple; probably one of the first company evangelists out there.
I’m not going to bore you with typical “about” details you can find on his website. Guy, as you know, worked for Apple to evangelize the Macintosh computer. He was there for a few years and helped start up some software companies and ended up back at Apple.
Upon leaving Apple once more, he started up Garage which went through a few incarnations providing services to venture capitalists. He recently sold one venture, Truemors, and is doing quite well with his latest venture, Alltop.
Alltop.com is billed as an online magazine rack that pulls in RSS feeds from blogs and other websites on almost any topic you can think of.
He’s no stranger to controversy, and his latest involves his site Alltop.com, something Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch calls a “big pile of nothing.” For a big pile of nothing, Alltop is doing pretty well, with an Alexa ranking of 88,348. Not too bad for a site that’s been around for less than a year.
Of course not all the comments on Tech Crunch are negative. One commenter pointed readers to a quote from Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged, with the quote: “Do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It’s resentment of another man’s achievement.”
Guy Kawasaki: the interview
Click the above link for the MP3 of the interview.
Walter Schwabe, fusedlogic CEO, got on the phone with Guy Kawasaki for a long chat ranging from his latest ventures to social media and how he uses Twitter.
We’ll give you a synopsis of the interview in print and cover the highlights, but you’ll want to download the MP3s for the full conversation. You won’t be disappointed.
truemors.com, how long did you have it? And what was the inspiration for it originally?
Guy had truemors.com for a little more than a year.
“We truly wanted to democratize information.” Instead of wealthy people and religious leaders having had the power to publish in the past (through scribes, printing presses and then desktop publishing), it’s now in the hands of everyone to post anything, spread information, or disinformation.
Truemors is good for people who might like to set up a blog but don’t have the time or capability to do it, but would like to post information.
Sale of truemors
A few weeks before the interview, Guy sold truemors to NowPublic.com and had breakfast with Leonard Brody, owner of NowPublic, a site where people collect and broadcast news.
“Rather than having several hundred reporters, you have tens of thousands of reporters,” Kawasaki said about NowPublic.
I suppose you could call that crowdsourcing?
“Yes, Twitter might be an extreme example of that.”
“I think today, for most events, the first place you would hear about it is Twitter. Even if there are people who are tipsters, who are professional tipsters, and they listen on their scanners to police, and emergency and fire broadcasts right and then they call up the San Jose Mercury and they say I just heard there was an armed robbery at the Ikea [for example] in Palo Alto.”
Guy said newspapers are the next day, online might be a few hours, but someone could be in that Ikea and be on their cell phone immediately on Twitter talking about that armed robbery 30 seconds later.
Walter talked about a similar situation he went through when his wife and daughter were with family visiting Disneyland in the fall and there was a fairly major earthquake in California. He first heard about the earthquake on Twitter and combined listening to CNN with Twitter to try to find out how bad the damage was. The advantage was with Twitter in that he could talk to people who were actually going through it.
About Alltop.com: how is it different than truemors.com?
Guy said he got the idea for Alltop from Popurls.com that had been aggregating the RSS feed from Truemors.
“PopURLs takes about the top 15 or 20 news sites and puts all their feeds together on one page so that you could see the all the news happening from various feeds in one place rather than having to go to 15 individual websites.”
“We noticed that PopURLs was sending us as much traffic as Google. So I got in touch with PopURLs and I said just ‘what’s the story here? How does this work? How can you send us so much traffic?’”
“I got to be friends with him and I said well ‘you’re covering tech and business do you have any intention of covering things like celebrities, fashion, wine, food, cancer, ADHD, autism, sports,’ going down the line, and he said ‘no, I’m just going to stick with tech and business.’”
“So I said ‘alright, so if you’re not going to do it, I’m going to aggregate the news in all those topics’ and so that’s how we started Alltop.”
What’s happening on Alltop and how big will it get?
Guy said they’re adding three to five topics per week and will have a big software change coming up that will allow them to add three to five topics per day.
Initially the topics started out quite broad, like sports.alltop.com but they soon found they needed more specific topics like baseball, cricket, hockey, etc. This will progress to things like newyorkyankees.alltop.com because there are large number of blogs specifically about them.
“It is kind of endless. Someday we’ll be as big as Google maybe.”
Alltop relies on qualities feeds of information.
“I can’t think of a topic where you can’t find 15 or 20 feeds about it. You could take the most esoteric disease that only 5,000 people in the world have and you’ll find 20 feeds or 20 blogs about it.”
Guy hints at how Alltop might change in the future
“At that point we have a different issue. We have a user interface issue because right now you can come to our home page and it’s an alphabetic index. But what happens when we have a thousand topics. You don’t want to be scrolling through all that, so the next version of our homepage you’ll be able to look at things a la index, which is what it is now, or categorized. For example, sports versus arts.”
The third option he’s looking at is a search feature where you’d type in something like “baseball” and you’d see all the different baseball-related categories.
Criticism of Alltop and Guy Kawasaki
Walter recounted some of the criticism of Alltop and Kawasaki that the site is not breaking new technological ground and it’s the same as POPurls.
“In a sense they are correct. This isn’t revolutionary, patent-pending new technology. Anybody can do what we’ve done. All you need to do is set up a little program to aggregate feeds. So there is no proving them wrong in the sense that, you know, it is revolutionary, you are wrong by not calling it not revolutionary.”
“Where we can prove them wrong is they think that it’s not a big deal. I think it is a big deal.”
Guy Kawasaki gives it to Tech Crunch with both barrels
“Now, to be honest, whenever a story breaks in Tech Crunch or in some place like that. No matter what you do, let’s take a far-fetched example. Let’s say that somehow I invent a new kind of battery that will charge in five minutes and will run a Macintosh laptop for 25 hours with absolutely no impact on the environment that can be made for $5 each… and by the way it only ways two ounces.”
“Let’s just say I did that. The comments in Tech Crunch would be ‘I thought of this five years ago. How hard could this be? I could have done this but I didn’t think it was worth doing. The only reason why Guy is in Tech Crunch is because he’s Guy; it’s not because this is revolutionary.’ And so that’s the nature of Tech Crunch.”
“It’s a bunch of angry little people living at home with their mothers who have never even French-kissed. Nothing you could do would impress the Tech Crunch crowd because, according to them, everything is easy, they’ve already done it, they thought of it ten years ago and it’s no big deal.”
“So the bottom line with that is that you just have to ignore those comments.”
“If there were a Tech Crunch the day that Google was announced, people would have said ‘there’s already ten search engines, I thought of doing a search engine by counting the number of links to a site and prioritizing results that way, there is no business model for this and the only reason why it’s in Tech Crunch is because it’s coming out of Stanford.’ Right? That’s what they would have said about Google.’”
“The bottom line lesson is: we need to ignore the bozos in the world.”
Part 2 of Guy Kawasaki interview
In the next installment of our interview with Guy Kawasaki you’ll hear Guy talk about Twitter and how he leverages it, blogging CEOs, who should be Twittering at your company and how you can be successful on Twitter.
Alain Saffel – any questions? alain@fusedlogic.com
Marketing strategy during the economic downturn
Offline marketing cut during recession while online marketing increases
According to a survey done by Marketing Sherpa, it would seem that online marketing is going to jump during the economic downturn. Offline media such as print, direct mail, radio, television and events are going to be taking a big hit the study indicates.
Not surprisingly, online marketing such as social media marketing, email marketing are going to be seeing increases. For paid search on Google and Yahoo, the results are mixed, with some marketers cutting back and almost an equal percentage increasing that marketing tactic.
Online marketing vs. offline
But why would there be an increase in online marketing rather than offline forms of marketing? Well, one of the big advantages to online marketing is that through web analytics, it’s far easier to measure the results of your online efforts. It’s much tougher to measure the return on investment of a television, radio or other type of ad.
Online marketing is generally less expensive, although you could spend just as much if you really wanted to. One banner ad in an Edmonton daily newspaper could cost you thousands of dollars per day. Ouch! Take that same budget online, and you can do a lot with it.
That’s not to say that offline marketing methods don’t work. They do, but more and more, people are going online because it’s easy to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, get comparable (if not better) results and in the end, spend less. It does depend on your market though.
Social media strategy
It’s one thing to increase your social marketing efforts, but doing so without a social media strategy in place might not be the most effective thing to do. Like any marketing effort it really pays to set the groundwork and have a good plan.
As much as social media marketing is about conversations and engaging with your market, you need to know information about them. Do you know who your audiences are? Do you know what messages you’d like them to come away with? Do you know what forms of social media your market is most likely to use and what forms might be most effective for you?
This is the groundwork for your social media strategy. Once you’ve got this, then you can start looking at the most effective ways to engage with your market. Which would work for you? Twitter? Facebook? Blogging? A combination of these or maybe other social media?
The conversation
Knowing your audience and the messages you’d like them to take away doesn’t mean you can’t have a natural conversation. You just have those messages in the back of your mind about what you feel is important for your audience to know.
Even more important than that is to make sure you listen to your audience. The whole purpose of social media marketing is to engage with your audience. They have a lot of valuable things to tell you, so make sure you’re receptive to them.
Just using social media marketing with old-style push marketing won’t work. Push marketing is part of the reason traditional marketing is on the wane and online marketing is becoming more popular.
Your audience will begin to tune out if you’re only pushing out messages without listening. There’s still room for a certain amount of push marketing, but if that’s all you’re doing, you might be a good candidate to develop an effective social media strategy.
Marketing in a bad economy
Marketing is often the first expense to be cut when the economy turns sour. It is certainly an easy target, but that’s a risky strategy. Why not consider keeping your marketing budget at approximately the same level, but look for more effective marketing methods?
If your competitors are cutting their marketing budgets while you keep yours the same, it’s almost like water draining out of a lake. As the level decreases, islands become visible. Your company can be like that island: more visible.
Right now might be the perfect time for your company to take a serious look at its marketing plan and make sure those marketing dollars are being allocated to marketing methods that are most effective. There are many good ways to market online, and social media is one of them.
Is your company planning to change its marketing because of the economic downturn? If so, what kinds of changes are you making?
Alain Saffel
Canadians shopping online in record numbers
Can you really afford to chill when it comes to your online marketing & social media strategy?
I read yesterday that online shopping by Canadians hit $12.8 billion last year. That’s pretty impressive, but you have to look at the numbers that form part of the story to find the really interesting data.
One third of Canadians 16 and older made purchases online and even more interesting, Alberta led the country with 51 per cent of people making purchases online. Why that is, I’m not sure. Just over half the people from 25 to 34 in Canada made purchases online as well.
According to StatsCan more retailers are offering online shopping, which makes sense. What retailers should also know is that 43 per cent of Canadians have used the Internet to research their purchases, with 64 per cent saying they’ve gone to a “bricks and mortar” store to make their purchase.
How businesses can respond
What it means is that if you’re a business that doesn’t have a solid web presence, you may be missing out. The Internet is an incredible research tool, so make sure your company has the information people are looking for.
For retailers it’s important to have the basics down: solid website, good design, good search engine optimization and pay-per-click ads, but what else? That’s not going to guarantee online marketing success, whatever business you’re in.
A good social media strategy can help tie all your marketing together. Engaging with your market in other ways such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other social media can help your business in many ways.
By listening to your clients and potential clients, no matter what type of business you’re in, you can gain valuable information to help serve them better. A good social media strategy will help you do that, and is a win-win for you and your client: you’re doing more business and your client is getting what they need and want.
A good social media strategy is important for online retailers, but also to those companies that are being researched online and contacted off line.
Alberta social media strategy
It’s remarkable that Albertans are leading Canada in terms of shopping online. It should be a wakeup call for those Alberta companies who are ignoring their online marketing.
I would really like to know more about why Alberta leads the country in online shopping. Could it be the booming economy here? Not sure. According to what I’ve been reading though, Alberta’s economy is still strong, possibly the strongest in North America. It’s still a good place to do business.
Online marketing will continue to be a growth industry. It might be a good idea to examine your online marketing efforts and social media strategy to make sure you’re part of the growing online research and shopping trend.
