The Very First Thing a Founding Team Needs to Do: Achieve Content-Audience Fit
A lot of entrepreneurs, when faced with the question, “What’s the most important thing to do first?”, would answer, “Build a product.” Big mistake. The most important thing to do first is to find an audience. It may be that building a product is an integral part of growing your audience, but you’re not ready to [...]
Why Marketers Will Rule the World
I’ve recently delivered the keynote at Marketing Magazine’s 2012 Social Media Conference, and spoke about something I had been thinking about a lot lately: that the explosion of customer data provided by social and digital have put extreme power in the hands of marketers, if only you’ll learn how to wield it. We’re entering a [...]
The False Dichotomy of B2C and B2B
The segmentation of business (B2B) and consumer (B2C) behaviors is a false dichotomy to begin from, what really matters is the customer lifecycle and renew-ability of the relationship. Is a purchase cycle highly deliberative in nature, does the post transaction phase focus on repetition of purchase or a shift to services and add-ons, how does the retail experience inform purchases, and much more
Is Freemium Compatible with Enterprise Software?
Is the freemium model compatible with traditional enterprise software? Yes but it requires a significant shift in the way you go to business as well as design and build the customer experience.
Marketing Isn’t Dead – It’s Everywhere
Last week Bill Lee wrote a controversial article in which he claimed that “marketing was dead” (yet another clever use of a traffic-grabbing title.). It was later (correctly, IMHO) pointed out that what Lee probably should have said was that “advertising was dead”. Regardless of where you come down on this debate, it’s nice to [...]
Trends: The Battle For CMO Mind Share
Marketing and Advertising Budgets Are The New Land Grab Constellation Research, Inc. predicts that the global advertising market (paid search, display, and classified) will hit $125B by 2015. While IT budgets continue to stay flat, marketing budgets are up. Warc’s recent Global Marketing Index (GMI) entered positive territory in March 2012. Consequently, the heat [...]
Steve Ballmer and Marissa Mayer Face the Same Problems at Microsoft and Yahoo
I know this will come as a shock to many Microsofties who will hate seeing their company compared to Yahoo, but I firmly believe that Steve Ballmer and Marissa Mayer face exactly the same problems at their respective companies. The only differences are matters of scale and position on the lifecycle to extinction. Both are [...]
Twitter’s Biggest Problem: Brevity
There are many rumblings these days about Twitter’s recent changes blocking LinkedIn from putting Tweet’s into their streams. Lots of different reactions from various folks: – From Twitter’s perspective, they’re trying to deliver “a more consistent user experience.” We can paraphrase that one as, “We can’t run ads if you don’t come to our site, [...]
Facebook’s Next Business Model
VC Chris Dixon muses in a recent post that Facebook has yet to uncover a business model that will support its IPO valuation and drive future growth in that valuation. As he puts it: Facebook relies on an old internet business model: display ads. Display ads generally hurt the user experience, and are also not [...]
Why I’m Dropping InstantSlideup Like a Hot Potato
This is one of those minor personal rants that come up from time to time. What good is having a blog if you have to be all serious and to the point all the time? I recently had tried a little piece of software called “InstantSlideup” (not gonna link to them as I don’t want [...]
