John McArthur’s New Venture Blog

I had a conversation with Megan at BzzAgent this week.  My interest was peaked, when a former IDC colleague, who now works at Iron Mountain Digital, mentioned BzzAgent. 

BzzAgent claims to have 400,000 “buzz agents,” who have agreed to review products and services and to share with their friends and colleagues their honest opinion.  BzzAgents get the products for free.  They test them.  And they create buzz.  The buzz could be good, or it could be bad, but it’s buzz.  I don’t know if Iron Mountain Digital uses BzzAgent, but I can see the fit, since, Iron Mountain offers desktop and server backup services to homes and businesses. 

At the $80,000 entry price that Megan mentioned, you’ll want to get a lot of buzz for the investment, and you’ll want to have enough confidence in your product to expect that most of the buzz will be good.   In the consumer products and services area, I see a great opportunity to leverage BzzAgent.  It’s hard to see the fit for the kinds of enterprise IT infrastructure providers with whom we are working. But, Megan suggested I check out their Frogpond offering, which I will do when I get a chance. 

In the meantime, after listening to the pitch from Megan, I decided to sign up myself.  I am now officially a BzzAgent.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  For now, I’ve just filled out a bunch of surveys about my drinking habits (softdrink and otherwise).  Fortunately, the fortunes of Coke and Pepsi don’t depend much on my soft-drink habits. If they did, the companies would be broke.

I did a couple of customer-satisfaction interviews today.  I won’t tell you the company or describe the product.  It’s not important to the discussion, but in case you are wondering, it’s not one of the companies or products I represent.  It is important to note that both individuals that I interviewed want the product and the company to succeed.

In the first survey, I got a lot of feedback.  Almost an hour’s worth.  There was some very positive feedback about certain components of the offering, but I heard many more negative comments, such as:

• They are barely keeping up with free alternatives.
• The leadership was great for a startup, but needs to step aside if they are to get to the next level.
• They are not listening to their customers.
• They treat everyone the same, and don’t listen to the different needs of different customers.
• No one thinks their product or their service is adequate.
• I have to go to a third party to fix the problems they aren’t addressing, and I know other customers who are doing the same thing.
• I shouldn’t have to pay someone else to do the job that they should be doing. (more…)
   

RyanAir is in a lot of businesses, but they are definitely not in the airline business.  The airplanes they fly are simply the delivery mechanism for a lot of other services.  And since the airplane is the method of delivery, RyanAir has done everything they can possible do to reduce their per-plane cost. For example, they have

• Maximized seat density, making it impossible for anyone with an inseam greater than 32″ to slouch in the seat.
• Eliminated the removable safety-instructions card and replaced them with laminated labels on each seatback.
• Eliminated the seat-back pockets so passengers won’t put trash in them, thus reducing the time to clean a plane.
• Boarded and deplaned from both the front and the rear of the plane, thus reducing the airport turnaround time to about 25 minutes.
• Standardized on a single style plane, the Boeing 737-800, to reduce pilot and crew costs.
• Arranged for landing rights and terminal gates in the lowest-cost locations in Europe.

You may be asking, “If RyanAir’s not in the airline business, then what business are they in?”  Well, here’s a hint… (more…)

Shortly after I started working with StorMagic, I suggested they create a Facebook group.  One of the initial target markets for StorMagic is the education market, and given the number of college students on Facebook, it seemed like a logical fit. We’re only a few weeks into this, but I’m pleased to see that the number of members is up to 46 and includes some pretty well-known, well-connected analysts, venture capitalists, and potential partners and customers.  Facebook groups are a great way to notify interested people about changes, enhancements, new materials and upcoming events. 

That brings me to the Web 2.0 double-dip comment.  Facebook is one tool that can be leveraged for marketing and community-building.  Another is YouTube.  StorMagic just completed their first video and uploaded it to YouTube.  You can see it here.  But they also notified the 46 members of the StorMagic Facebook group about the video, by posting a notice on the group’s posted-items board.  We’ll see what kind of traffic it generates, but having created the video, YouTube is a low-cost way of beginning to circulate it.  I just watched it, and it does a pretty good job of demonstrating the simplicity of implementing a StorMagic iSCSI storage area network.

I’d really like to hear your opinion on two things:

1. Using Facebook as a community building and marketing tool
2. Using YouTube to cost-effectively demonstrate key features of a solution

I’d also like your suggestions for other Web 2.0 tools that are effective in raising awareness and building communities for a supplier’s customers, partners, and prospects.

One last thing.  Can you give us some feedback on the video?

When I was growing up, my family would occasionally take what we called “Penny Walks.”  We lived in western Colorado, where the towns were mostly laid out on a North-South, East-West grid.  A penny walk involved taking a walk, penny in hand, and every time you got to a corner, you flipped the coin. Heads you go right. Tails you go left.  You never knew where you were going to go, but you knew you weren’t going to get caught in a familiar routine.  With penny walks, you ran into different people or different things. You had variety. Penny walks don’t work as well in Massachusetts, where I live now, because the streets are laid out in the rough equivalent of a meandering cow.

My random walks these days are as likely to occur on the World Wide Web, as they are to occur in my town.  Did I mention we have almost no sidewalks? So here on the internet, thanks to a link from Jason Rakowski, I was lead on a random walk through his blog, to another blog by someone named Dejra to a service called Pingomatic.  The service helps writers/bloggers raise the visibility of their sites by updating search engines.  I’m trying it out today.  I’ll let you know how it goes. 

Given Dejra’s focus on affiliate marketing, I’m wondering if she knows my brother, Ken?

Dejra? Ken?

I’ve never met Jason Rakowski, but he introduced himself through a comment on my previous post.  As I always do, I checked out his website to ensure that the comment wasn’t originating from yet another linking/spamming news-aggregation site selling pharmaceuticals or worthless paraphernalia. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Jason writes a very good blog on customer service.

As a service to my readers, I’m providing a link to his blog posting on When It’s Time to Fire the Customer.  He even provides a helpful case study. It looks like Jason works in or with the auto industry, so I suspect he knows more than a bit about customer service, both good and bad.  Jason?

A Google search on “Top 10″ will get you all kinds of interesting results.  When I did the search this afternoon, the first listing was “Top 10 Naked People on Google Earth.” Sorry, but I’m providing no hyperlink, and for the record, no, I did not go there.  Next is Time Magazine’s  50 Top 10 Lists for 2007, which shows a surprising lack of appreciation for symmetry.  Then comes The Late Show with David Letterman, which I thought should have come up higher on the list.  There’s also the Top 10 Dunks and Top 10 Women Drivers of the Year available courtesy of YouTube. I’m just going in order here.  No offense intended. 

For any startup or new technology, it’s difficult to get the door opened long enough to allow the first presentation of a product, company or concept to a potential customer or partner.  It’s not that customers don’t want to look at new stuff.  It’s just that there’s so much new stuff, and who’s got the time to look at everybody. So whether it’s analysts, or bloggers, or the press, it’s nice to have a little bit of focused attention on new companies and new technologies, and have them do some filtering.  Thus the creation of Top 10 lists that say, “Hey, pay attention to this.  It could be big.” (more…)

As a follow on to my earlier posts regarding GoldMail, Bruce over at Iron Mountain sent me this note through Plaxo.

This is one of the typical Brainshark presentations we use. You can also embed other objects like videos, etc. in the presentations.

www.brainshark.com/ironmtndigital/vu?pi=5687813

Another interesting marketing company that uses word of mouth/viral marketing is called bzzagent out of Boston.
Regards,
Bruce

Iron Mountain uses Brainshark for some email marketing campaigns, and I asked Bruce to send me a sample one that they use to market their desktop backup service.  So here it is, and none to soon, since my Outlook application keeps crashing and I’ll probably lose my data soon.  Tell me again, why I don’t just use Gmail?

Don’t ever challenge my mother to a game of Jeopardy.  She answers every question correctly almost before you can get the question out.  You’ll leave the game having lost all confidence in your ability to remember highly-specific details or the picayune.  She’s pretty good at ping-pong (sorry, table tennis), too.  At least for an 81 year old. The people that Myndnet has recruited to answer questions for clients are a bit like my mother.  At least that’s my recent experience.  They seem to be able to answer anything.

StorMagic recently used Myndnet to identify IT directors at K-12 schools, at colleges, and universities. The question went live on February 15th and by Tuesday, four days later, they had fulfilled the 200 or so budgeted responses.  If you go to Myndnet, you’ll notice that the question is still up and you can still respond.  StorMagic has the right to reject leads that don’t fit the criteria, and StorMagic might want to acquire additional names, if the first ones work out well.  So why not keep it open for a few days? (more…)

About 10 years ago, I did several video segments with Caspar Weinberger on the show World Business Review (WBR).  I was one of the “industry experts,” whose job it was to keep the conversation on topic, and not let the episode go too far afield or become too much of an infomercial. 

Cap (he wanted to be called “Cap”), who was eventually replaced by Al Haig, passed away in 2006, but he was amazingly active well into his 80s, when he was hosting this show.  He used to record between 4 and 6 episodes a day. At the time, distribution for the episodes included broadcast on the business channel on United’s overseas flights to Japan.  I only know this because I spent so much time flying to Japan in those days and saw myself on the overhead screen from time to time.  WBR also licensed the content to schools, which I always found interesting.

Every startup is looking for cost-efficient and effective ways to get the word out on their products and services.  StorMagic decided to leverage wsRadio with this webcast.  It’s well produced. I don’t know the cost, and I need to hear from wsRadio regarding how many listeners they get and how the content they produce is distributed.  I’d also like to hear from anyone who has used wsRadio or similar services to get the word out.  Was it effective in raising visibility?  Did it increase end-user or partner leads? Did it help close sales?