Top 5 tips for engaging with bloggers

Posted on January 21, 2008 by

Here are my top 5 tips for marketing professionals to productively engaging with bloggers in their industry:

1) Talk to them directly. It’s easy… even hobbyist bloggers like to be treated like real media professionals, which they often are, in fact. Forge an earnest relationship based on real interest and relevance. Stay engaged with the dialog; drive-by one-time glad-handers are often treated roughly later on.

2) Be honest. Sometime reporters get lazy and won’t dig enough to reveal a mistruth. Bloggers thrive on that. If you conceal something or tell anything less than the truth, they will find out. If you prove to be consistently honest, you’re credible. If not, you’re a target.

3) Do the homework for them. Whether it’s market research, margin calculations, or supply-chain/channel dynamics, don’t expect the blogger to do even basic background research, unless they are looking to disprove your claims or smack you down. Blogging is appealing in part because it’s fast. If writing about your company or topic requires even a few minutes of homework, it might not happen at all.

4) Know the neighborhood. It helps if you’re familiar with the blogger’s work and the work of peers in the same blog community. And who knows, you might learn something relevant to your business.

5) Nothing is off the record. Embargoes don’t exist. Deal with it.

6) Seed the discussion, don’t advocate. If you want to see posts that cover a certain topic or address a particular issue, initiate the conversation with a thought-provoking observation or two, and solicit comment. Don’t ramrod a new discussion with a dissertation, or cleverly worded questions cloaked in naivety. Act like a credible professional and you’ll likely be treated like one. Act like a pitchman, expect to get ignored and disliked.

Copyright Peak Nine Ventures LLC 2007
Posted in blogs tips | 1 Comment

Pre-launch build-up

Posted on August 7, 2007 by


Zoomin.com is the 5th new business I’ve been a part of (3 of my own smaller companies, and Half.com), and one dynamic has remained consistent throughout: the Roller Coaster.

The Roller Coaster, described very well here by Marc Andreesen, is the grind of emotional highs and lows that you experience on a day-to-day basis in a startup. Some days you feel as though your company is destined for greatness or riches or both, and other days the anxieties about cash flow, competitors, and timelines make you feel like you’re holding a 1st-Class ticket to nowhere. Zoomin.com is no different, to be honest, but when you have a solid team and a clear goal, the good days out-number the bad days.

Right now, we’re close to Launch, and we’re sweating the small stuff. My own mental ball of yarn is wound a little tighter, and finding a reasonable stopping point each day (work/life balance, of course) is getting more and more difficult. The stress and anxiety are finding me on the pillow, in the shower, and on my dinner plate. My wife is taking some R&R time right now, and I am not in the frame of mind to join her, even when I do step away from the laptop.

But it’s a thrill.

I can’t wait to see how we’re received by my knowledgeable colleagues, the blogosphere of influencers and early adopters, fellow execs of other startups, the media, and most importantly, our customers. I can anticipate many of our early challenges, but nothing is as momentous as your launch day, and I’m eager to get there. Hope the anxiety levels let me get there in one piece.

Like my friend Josh Kopelman says, “you only launch once.”.

Copyright Peak Nine Ventures LLC 2007
Posted in startup ZoomIn.com ZoomIn | Leave a comment

An insider’s case for an eBay-Yahoo merger

Posted on June 22, 2007 by

As of this post, eBay is worth $43.4 billion dollars. Yahoo is worth $36.9 billion dollars.

As a former eBay employee, I can say with certainty that ego flows deep and wide in the executive ranks at eBay. My sources tell me that eBay has had near-miss M&A conversations with AOL, Yahoo, and Google in years past. I was not involved in any of those discussions personally, but the walls talk, and eBay senior execs were often well-apprised of such discussions. Such intel is hard to contain amongst type-A execs for whom such inside knowledge constitutes validation of their organizational importance.

Valuation disagreements barred an AOL merger, and those talks instead yielded a multi-year “strategic” marketing partnership which turned out to be a burden on both parties. AOL sold ads on eBay for cheap, when they sold them at all. And eBay chased AOL around for years trying to extract the promised value from the vaunted AOL network with remnant banner ads and do-nothing placements while AOL focused on more lucrative CPM rates as they chased quarterly earnings targets.

A potential Yahoo merger was killed by ego. Meg would not report to former CEO Tim Koogle.

A potential Google merger was killed by ego and hubris. Meg and Rajiv did not want to be seen as having paid too high a premium for the #3 or #4 search site in 2001. Google, understanding their position of strength, would accept nothing unless than $5 billion.

So, after all of this, here we are in 2007, with Yahoo occupying what looks like a permanent post in Google’s rear view mirror, and eBay feeling the pubescent pains of decelerating growth rates in the US and Europe, slow-to-mature emerging markets, and outright failure in Japan and China. Both companies inched towards a merger with a deal that effectively replaced the AOL deal (albeit with some improvements): Yahoo selling ad space on eBay, eBay paying something closer to market value for a mix of premium and second-rate placements on Yahoo properties. Yahoo shuts down Yahoo Auctions, eBay commits massive long-term paid search advertising, and the proverbial drawing of lines in the sandbox is complete.

So, what’s holding up the consummation of the courtship? Ego.

Rumor has it that Semel’s ego is even bigger than Meg’s, and that Semel ‘s hand-picked lieutenants are full of “i’m smarter than you” syndrome, making them very hard to stomach in even casual conversation, let alone M&A discussions.

There’s also the issue of vulnerability: neither side wants to suggest that they want the deal badly, even if it makes sense. These two companies go together so seamlessly, it’s a layup, strategically speaking. But Meg will not go out as the subjugate, and will require the upper hand with regard to valuation, reporting structures, board seats, etc.

Yahoo Shopping + Shopping.com + del.icio.us = home run
eBay marketplace + Yahoo network = boost to global customer acquisition
Flickr + eBay sellers = home run
Skype + Yahoo Groups & Answers = home run
Paypal + almost anything Yahoo (IM, Flickr, Shopping, Groups, Answers, etc.) = home run
Rivals + StubHub & eBay Sports = home run (lame pun absolutely intended)

And with Terry Semel (and his ego) out of the picture, Yahoo can spin a merger as innovative, outside-the-box thinking instead of tail-between-the-legs acknowledgment that Google is kicking their ass.

This is one of those deals where the Gods of Smart Business need to strike down with great vengeance and furious anger those execs who refuse to discard their egos and do the right deal for customers and shareholders.

Copyright Peak Nine Ventures LLC 2007
Posted in ebay yahoo merger | Leave a comment

How to Make It in the Widget Business

Posted on April 11, 2007 by

There has been a lot of hand-wringing in the venture community about the future of web 2.0 startups that rely on a heavily-visited social networks to be welcoming (at best) or ambivalent (at worst) for the viability of their business.

I don’t find this matter difficult to sort out. It’s a question of leverage.

What do social networks need? Traffic, of course, but traffic comes and goes. Talk to AOL and Yahoo about how fickle traffic can be! It has become so easy to participate in a social network, requiring only a few minutes to create a page and link to a network of friends. Where the real time is spent, where the user really invests their effort, is to tweak out the page with ego and character. Pictures, videos, voice recorders, etc that tell your visitors something about you are what you really care about.

And that’s the value: user assets. When users rely on a site to store their assets and use them creatively, that site has a created a critical switching cost. If your assets don’t work in the MySpace eco-system, you will be much more likely to take your assets to a more hospitable eco-system, like Bebo or Virb.

Consider how painful it is to change to a new web mail provider, or bank account, or online bookstore. Your incumbent service will remain such so long as they don’t:
A) get out-innovated (like Hotmail, Yahoo search), or;
B) fail to offer broad interoperability (Lotus Notes, AOL)

The only way that networks retain some leverage is by closely regulating the kind of services and utilities that can participate in their eco-system. Utilities like Google’s search index, eBay’s marketplace, or Facebook’s austere network can keep things tidy because content is not their business.

If content is your business, as is the case with MySpace and the drift of Yahoo, you’ve got to own it or have exclusive deals to deliver it. MySpace has neither, Yahoo is working on the later.

Photobucket - you’re safe. Stop crying in your beer and start telling your users all of the other social networks where they can use their creative assets. You’ve got a switching cost in place. Now use it.

Copyright Peak Nine Ventures LLC 2007
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

New medium, new skills

Posted on February 23, 2007 by

In 1998, when I first dove into the new and rapidly evolving world of online marketing, the Internet was, from a marketing perspective, just another place to stick your ads and generate awareness. Banner ads were king, and CPM-based pricing prevailed.

In 1999, I started a unique (at the time) company to make branded adver-games that could be attached to email and distributed virally. The only way to make a sale was to find a progressive online ad agency willing to risk some of their credibility with their client and give it a shot.

Only 5 years later, so much has changed. Banners sold on CPM have joined by performance-based search and affiliate advertising, spyware, blogs, mobile, podcasts, and so on. But the direction this industry is moving has been driven by the same underlying motivations throughout: Advertisers want to use these new media to reach and motivate customers to buy, sell, call, download, test drive, or ask their doctor.

The availability of new media dictates that companies must engage customers in new ways or risk losing share or squandering growth opportunities. The conventional process of adjusting the marketing mix is not a new discipline. Experimentation with new concepts, messages, or media often follows a well-trod path: discovery, research, assessment, trial, measurement, optimization, repeat. But there are 3 critical factors that will challenge the prized conventional offline marketer:

1) Innovative developments are multiplying, and arrive much faster than ever before. Each week, there is a new marketing opportunity that your company probably ought to be aware of. It could be a new way to gather research, or a new avenue for reaching customers, or improved performance reporting. But there’s always something new, and keeping up with rapid developments is a big challenge. Rolling prioritization of what’s most relevant to your business is even tougher.

2) There is more performance data more readily available now than ever before. This is not headline news; it’s been a reality since the advent of online advertising. But the sheer quantity of data, from a variety of sources (web logs, web analytics software, ad tracking, page views, conversion rates, return on ad spend, cost per page view, and so on) is staggering. The ability to identify and analyze the most relevant performance metrics is at a premium. Analysis paralysis is the likely alternative.

3) Achieving success requires a previously unnecessary depth of understanding about how customers interact with the new marketing channels. The days of simply throwing some ads out there to “see how it works” are over. High opportunity costs preclude under-informed experimentation, and often leads to wasted money. And I don’t mean letting the CMO tinker with YouTube for a half-hour or showing her where to spot the dynamic ads on your racing game on Xbox. You need to understand these new media and the behaviors resident in those microcosyms. This truism holds for even the most basic marketing tactics. Did anyone see Tassimo‘s meaningless banner on the log-in page of Citysearch? Neither did any Citysearch users. Old-school marketers had to understand their product or service very well, and certainly they needed to understand their target customers, but never has there been such a strong imperative to know the media through which the marketing messages will be delivered.

I’ve gotta cut this post short… it’s turning into a novella.

The best marketers will possess the ability to identify, assess, test, measure and exploit or sometimes discard the bevy of innovative marketing opportunities presented by new media. Often this means bringing on an experienced online/new media marketing pro, but old dogs can learn these tricks, too. If your marketing squadron feels intimidated by the plethora of new marketing media or methods, they can check their fears at the door and call me for help with Internet marketing. Because 1998 ain’t coming back.

Copyright Peak Nine Ventures LLC 2007
Posted in media, talent | Leave a comment