Net

Advice to Start-ups : Do Not Sponsor Big Conferences

I am surprised to see how many new web start-ups that are sponsoring big conferences like Web2.0 Exp, Web 2.0 Summit, Digital Hollywood etc you name it.

I have only one advice to these companies:

If your target audience is not conference attendants (and they very seldom are) Do not waste your marketing budget on these events! It's a total waste of money. Your potential users/customers are most likely not early adopters, partially half-converted Internet savvy media people and developers. If I would be an investor I would be very upset to see resources wasted like this.

Believe me, if you as a start-up would instead pay anybody on the street $50 to become a user - I bet that it would be a better return of investment that paying outrageous sponsorship fees for web conferences.

Go where your users are. And they are everywhere. The big challenge is to aquire real users - Go and get them!

Technorati Tags: Web2expo, Web2.0expo, Marketing, Advertising, Start-ups, Web2expo

"All Marketers are Liars" - Seth Godin speaks at Google

                 

Here is a very good and entertaining video wih Seth Godin, the author of six bestsellers, most recently, All Marketers are Liars. The video is a part of the Authors@Google series. The bottomline: Be personal & relevant and most of all: Tell a story - don't sell blue boxes! It's amazing how  many companies and advertisers that still don't understand that.

Tony's Lessons Learned during the First Bubble

Tony Perkins has put this confession about what he learned from the fist Internet Bubble Online. I can certainly agree with many of his points. Especially

the only way to create a real company is to have lots of real (that is, paying) customers. More often than not, Internet entrepreneurs design products they like, but forget that the rest of the world isn’t made up of geeks like them. Just because your web-based service is popular on Slashdot doesn’t mean it’s going to hit it big with regular folks.

Although the blogosphere is a great place to evangelize your product and your company - it is not where most of your potential costumers hang out. The fact that your company has received a positive or event great review in Techcrunch does not necessary equal new customers and success. Unless your target audience typically consists of Techcrunch readers.. Moreover, many well know or even less known companies occasionally receive (or constantly) bad reviews throughout the Blogosphere, but they still have millions of customers and are doing very well anyway.

I would add another advice to some start-ups. Don't waste your marketing budget on sponsoring on sponsoring web 2.0 events and conferences, unless (again) that is where the majority of your potential users/consumers hang out. To sponsor these type of event often comes with a very heavy price tag ,a budget that could be better used for actually acquiring and attracting new users - where they actually hang out...

Technorati Tags: AlwaysOn Media, AO, Consumers, Start-ups

Singer Makes Music Video on Nokia N93

Last year. when I worked on the Anyfilms.net campaign together with Hyper Happen for Samsung Mobile, I covered how the new vide enabled cellphones is changing or is going to change the way movies & videos are produced and consumed. Now PSFK, is reporting about how singer Robert Dickinson, has made a music video of his song "Oceans" on a Nokia N93 phone.

The video is very good actually. This will certainly not be the last one produced by a mobile. Check out the Anyfilms Blog I ran (no longer active though) for more on coverage on the cross-over between movie making and cellphones..

Do you know of other music videos or movie shot on cellphones?

Technorati Tags: Anyfilms, Hyper Happen, Mobile, Movies, N93, Nokia, Rob Dickinson, Spreadsheets

Web2.0 Summit - The Bubble That Burst?

I am so happy I didn't waste my time and money on the overhyped Web2.0 Summit wrapping up its last day today.

1. First of all, I know many of the companies and people there already.
2. Second I just came back from the Valley the week before,
3. Third there seems to be nothing new and

4. Fourth and the most important part: this is not the place where you find your users.

5. I actually have to work...(too)

Sponsoring these type of events is just a real waste of VC money (even if many of them are happy to sign the check). Some of the companies sponsoring these event should feel a shame of themselves for throwing up so much money on worthless exposure. If any of them reads this post - spend it on your users instead, or to get new users!

Manley has a good summary of what he learned.

True Web2.0 in my eyes is so disruptive that it does not need a conference.. .since it's all on the web anyway. Drinks and fun you can have anyway for less than $3000...

Technorati Tags: VC, Venture Capital, Web 2.0, web2.0conference, Web2.0summit

Windows Vista Viral Marketing Campaign

Windows Vista is just about to launch their official a viral campaign called Clarification.The focus of the website is the cartoon personification of Demetri Martin (best known from Trendspotting reports in the Comedy Central Show) appearing as a young man with psychological problems who has been send to an institution. It's really funny.

The question is just where Windows Vista comes into the picture...I started something, thinks that the connection is that Windows Vista is going to make the man the you man less crazy.  Regardless of Microsoft's intentions with the site, it looks like it can become very popular with teenagers.

One point that they did miss (unless I missed something) is the possibility do copy & paste the video episodes and spread them through blogs etc. Anyway, very entertaining and very non-typical Microsoft marketing message.

I am more concerned that Windows Vista will drive me crazy when I need to install it....but I guess there might be a fitting institution for guys like me too...


Technorati Tags: windows vista, vista, viral, viral marketing, clearification, microsoft, psychology, demetri martin, daily show, trendspotting, windows vista campagin, advertising, marketing

Podcast: PR in China

China Businesscast has an interesting interview with PR Expert Vanessa Seow of Beijing based Weber Shandwick. Vanessa shares here opinion on what makes the Chinese PR industry different from PR elsewhere.

Listen here or subcsribe here.

Via Dan Wei.

Spreading Zecco

Last week I broke the news about Zecco - the finanical community that is going head-to-head with brokerage industry giants like E*trade and Charles Schwab by offering zero commission trading.

It created quite a buzz and according to my tools I could see that the financial guys really did pay attention and it sparked quite a debate. It' got picked up by Om , Techcrunch (see what some thought about Techcrunch first not covering the story , to finally cover it with quite a dry/negative review)  Market Watch and many others.

Stay tuned for some more interesting coverage ahead (and not only from Zecco ;).

David Winer, Maxthon & Gnomedex06!

This is awesome! Chris Pirillo a.k.a known as "Lockergnome" probably our biggest, pro-active and most passionate evangelists out there, and organiser of the the famous Gnomedex, was using Maxthon as the default browser for all the presentations at Gnomedex06!

Now some of them are available at Podtech.net. Watch them here at PodTech.net . Or what do you say about seeing David Winer talking about " How to make money on the Internet" with a huge projection of Maxthon in the background.

I especially like the one with Farecast, where they guys got a bit confused at the set up and Chris comes in and says " BTW, I use Maxthon as my browser so it opens up as a background Tab.."

This is marketing at it’s best:

1. A real usage in the right context
2. A natural part of the presentations
3. In front of a highly demanding tech, nerd and geek audience (where the majority is probably Firefox users)

We love you forever Chris! There is nothing more passionate than this...

Hacking Hezballah

An IDF Intelligence Unit, managed to hack al-Manars live station broadcasts planting Israeli PR messages in the transmissions. Messages like: “ Nasrallah, your time is up” and “Your days are numbered” etc appeared on the TV screen. Who said hacking cannot be good?

WangYou Media Launches Red Town

Bill Tai and Buddy Ling having fun at WangYou Media’s launch party of “Red Town” in Beijing. Buddy Ling is the co-founder and CEO WangYou Media, a Chinese media company focused on promoting user generated content. Bill sits on WangYou’s board for CRV as well as Maxthon.

Red Town is aimed to explore and promote super star amateur artists emerging out of its online platform. At the launch party, New Perfume band, consisting of four 21–year old-s that met 6 months ago through WangYou and was voted by the WangYou users for the bests act. The band apparently was offered a contract with one of the big US-based record labels, but turned it down and signed up with Red Town instead - since this is how music is best spread and promoted today.

This is a proof that the speaker from Sony at AlwaysOn in Stanford last week was wrong when he said that user generated music will never take off…Guess what, it is already happening in China…

Breakfast with Chinese Entrepreneurs

Yesterday I was speaking at the Chinese Entrepreneurs in Beijing for a group of 30 entrepreneurs (mostly non-Chinese) about the Maxthon story. It was really a very nice gathering of both Chinese and foreign entrepreneurs active in China. It seems that everybody is so fascinated by the Maxthon success story and I really enjoyed sharing it with them.  At the breakfast I finally got to meet some longtime virtual friends, like Richard Robinson in person as well as chat with Manec & David from newly launched Recruit.net, a tri-lingual (English, Chinese and Japanese) job site focused on jobs in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Singapore and India. I also met with George Kellerman (frmr. Yahoo executive responsible for Japan) now CEO and founder of ValueLogix, relocating to China and Jason Ma, CEO of JiSharp.  Jim James and Ben Han, from EastWest Public relations, Ted Teo, from the Citigroup, Michael Zhu from 3Com people from Norway and Sweden as well and man others interesting people. What a mixture!

A great thanks to Ori Elraviv for inviting me.

Now I’m off to a Maxthon board meeting followed by a party thrown by the guys at WangYou.  

 

Maxthon In BusinessWeek

And the story just goes on...Now it reached BusinessWeek

Tags: Maxthon Tags: BusinessWeek Tags: China Tags: Browsers Tags: PR Tags: Media Tags: Marketing

Maxthon Is Hotter Than a Finnish Sauna

Two weeks ago I gave an interview to Cnet's Stefanie Olsen at the Global Internet Summit about Maxthon. A few days ago her article was published, with a very different pitch that I expected. The article took off like crazy and was soon published, re-published, cited, Digged and blogged all over.

A few corrections:

• What got Maxthon so popular in China (and start gaining popularity world wide) is it's speed, rich feature set  high level of customization and user interface optimized for Chinese users - nothing else.
• Web proxy's can be used by most browsers and a number of well known software's - but you need to know how to do it and where to get the addresses from (sorry to disappoint you on that).

Sometimes journalists tend to spice up the material in order to create an interesting storyline. Maxthon has a very interesting story, but it has nothing to do with web proxy's.

Tags: Maxthon Tags: Browsers Tags: China Tags: Search Tags: web proxy Tags: IE Tags: Web browser Tags: Web 2.0

HBO's Interview With Ari

Rob Krause from Deep Focus, a Brooklyn-based online marketing agency that works with HBO, tells me that Interview With Ari, is the first viral, immensive interactive streaming video application not only designed to promote a TV series but tied into the plot of the upcoming season. The New York times have more on this third season of HBS’s popular “Entourage”.

Interview with Ari, is offering Internet users the chance to undergo a nerv-racking job internview with the cutthroat Hollywood agent Ari Gold, played by Jeremy Piven.

Media Chaos

NPR’s On the Media, recently aired an interesting piece on the current chaos in the world of media networks.  A year ago Bob Garfield predicted that 

Mainstream media, especially network TV, lose so much audience, they can no longer attract the advertising revenue they need to sustain their content, leading to still more audience defection, then more advertiser defection, and so on into the toilet, all before the online brave new world is ready to take over. In this past year, plenty has happened to add to the chaos. TiVo and DVR usage is rising, with Forrester Research estimating that by 2008, one in four households will be DVR'ing their favorite shows and skipping past commercials. ITunes has started selling hit TV shows for $1.99, and now all the networks are offering free streaming content on their websites. More options for us, and more jeopardy for the old model.

Talking to Jeff Jarvis, of Buzzmachine.com , it looks like things are getting even worse for mainstream media;

• Al Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, imagines a world without presses
• Tom Glocer, the head of Reuters, talks about a world where his consumers are now his editors
• The head of Gruner + Jahr says the role of the journalist in the future is to be a moderator

Click here for a full transcript of the show. BTW I love NPR, many of their shows are available as Podcasts and they also provide full transcripts for many of the show as well which is a great service.

Social Media Press Release

Neville Hobson asks himself if journalists are ready for the social media press release, as suggested by Todd Defren. Todd has posted his debut of how a “Social Media Press Release” shall look like here (PDF).  I must say that this template is a great first step in the right direction. It definitely puts the P (Publish) into PR. One can always ask oneself it all the elements are needed, but as a general guideline I think its great. Todd also points out that PRNewswire (that I have been using several times for Maxthon – and it’s free), have started to integrate some of these elements as a standard in their press releases (e-mail, link, RSS and del.icio.us). See an example. I still run press releases for Maxthon through Business Wire and PRNews wire – but they are not even nearly as effective as my own targeted efforts. Just take the latest press release from Maxthon as an example – Charles River Ventures invest in Maxthon – my own efforts reaching out to fellow bloggers and journalist – created far more publicity than the costly (not worth the money) press release through Business Wire.

But back to Todd’s Social Media Press Release, Neville’s question as to whether journalists are ready for them, I agree with Neville saying that unless the journalists wants it this way, it is going to be difficult to get them to use it. Remember the one of the golden rules of psychology, people will do what they are used to do (or read: use what they are used to use) – a new format is likely to present additional cognitive overload – and journalists (as well as the rest of us) are already drowning in information overflow. However, do I think that should stop us from adopting the social media press release format? No, on the contrary – we should start using our own modified versions of this format, and educate the journalist – but by gradual exposure. Eventually the social media elements and interactive part will become a de facto standard, since the advantages by far out numbers the dead press release format. Business Wire – wake up! Justify your charges by integrating some of these elements into your standard format.

Nice Piece About Maxthon in Ynet

Ynet wrote a nice piece about Maxthon (sorry in Hebrew).

Maxton Investment Creates Buzz

The recent press release from Maxthon managed to create quite some buzz:

• Red Herring
• Techcrunch
• Om Malik
• Zdnet
• Paid Content
• Techrepublic
• Silicon Beat
• Internet News
• Digg
• BizJournals
• China Venture News
• Ouriel Ohayon
• Paul Kedrowsky
• Mark Evans
• China Tech News

and many more: Google Blog Search and Gada.be , it also lead to lots of new downloads and many new users, and we haven’t really got started yet…

Digging Maxthon

I stole this image from Ouriel's blog. It shows how many who Digged the Maxthon announcement yesterday. Pretty impressive I must say. I just can't stopped being surprised by the level of emotions attached to what browser you use. Com'on guy's, it's not a religion, it's just a browser - but of course not your plain vanilla browser. . And Ouriel, I am happy - very ;). For those of you that think that this investment was "stupid on bordering on insane" digg a little deeper and it will all be become clear to you...This is no bubble deal, it's a very sane deal with a cash positive company, driving a very substantial amount of search traffic in China...

Technorati Tags: browser, Digg, maxthon, Mesh06, Techcrunch

Charles River Ventures Invests In Maxthon

I am very proud to announce that one of the leading US venture capital firms, Charles River Ventures, has invested in Maxthon. Ever since we received the Red Herring Asia 100 award, we have been in the quite unusual situation of being pitched by VC’s (and not the other way around) from all over. But not until I met Bill Tai, general partner at CRV, I felt the real “click”. CRV are not only one of the oldest and best performing US VCs’, they also have a very deep network and share our passion and vision for where the future of the web is going. I feel very fortunate of being able to work with Bill and the rest of the team at CRV, together with our early investors Morten Lund  (first Skype seed investor) and San Francisco & Beijing based WI Harper to take Maxthon to the next level.

The full PR can be found here. The Red Herring has a nice article about it here. Techcrunch has a great post here and Om Malik here.

Digg it!

Itunes + PDF Subscriptions

The disruptive revolution keeps on rocking. Now you can subscribe to PDF's via Itunes. Perhaps it does not sounds like music to your ears but it can be quite useful. Wikinews is already available this way and we can expect many more to come. I find this PDF-casting interesting in many ways:

• Authors and Journalist can distribute their materials directly via RSS - cutting off, or being less dependent on the middle-man
• Anybody can become a publisher (just as with Blogging and Podcasting) no barrier for entry
• Services like NPR can offer transcripts of their programs together with the Podcast
• Artists can bundle their music with lyrics & transcriptions etc

Tags: Itunes Tags: PDF's Tags: Wikinews Tags: Publishing Tags: iPods Tags: Apple Tags: NPR Tags: Disruptive Media

Branding 2.0 & Ninjas

Mashable has a good write up about what he calls Branding 2.0 using Ask a Ninja as an example. By utilizing YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Frappr and Friendster ,  Ask A Ninja creators Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, is reaching out to users with at a very low, if any, cost at all. Really smart usage of social tools! Just another great example of how easy and chep it is today to build a brand (i.e. if it is engaging and fun). While we are already on the subject of Ninjas, allow me as a long time practiciner of Bujinkan Ninpo Taijutu share a great Ninjutsu video with the Soke (Grandmaster) himself, Dr. Maasaki Hatsumi – watch and learn from the real master..

My Old Songs On Podsafe Music Network!

I can't believe it...I uploaded one of my old Reggae songs I recorded way back in 1990 on the Podsafe Music Network, and guess what. Somebody actually played it. The brave show is called Puffcast - very cool, thank you guys!Inspired by this, I just added two more songs for anybody to play on their show (if they dare) and listen to.

• You can listen to my old reggae songs on here.

What do you say should I pick up songwriting again, or should I just forget about it?

Tags: Podcast Tags: Podsafe Tags: Podshow Tags: Podsafe Music Tags: Puffcast Tags: Reggae Tags: Music Tags: Mp3 Tags: Malachi Tags: Reggae

Me in New Media Age

New Media Age (19.01.06) published a piece on Samsung Anyfilms project, mentiones me and my role in this exciting project. The article is for subcribers only, but here is what it said:

Samsung promotes short-film initiative via blogs and Yahoo!

Samsung has launched an online campaign to promote its multi-million-pound AnyFilms short films for mobile and Internet initiative, using blogging, messageboard marketing and search marketing. The company has also secured Yahoo! as its global media partner to promote the AnyFilms project. The online campaign has been developed by Hyper Happen, a joint venture between creative agency Fallon and strategic planning consultancy Naked Communications, to seed interest in AnyFilms ahead of any future above-the-line marketing activity.

AnyFilms, launched in December, is designed to position Samsung as a leading brand in mobile entertainment. The site features short films that can be viewed on mobiles or online, by Hollywood directors Joel Murray, Alex Merkin and Mark Dippe. A separate interactive film enables users to tailor the way they understand the content by providing 11,000 different ways to view the film.

The initiative has been developed by Hyper Happen alongside New York agencies MFP, First Look and Burger King Subservient Chicken creator Barbican Group, plus Tokyo agency Drill.

Hyper Happen has tied up with Israeli A-list blogger Netanel Jacobssen to kick-start the online campaign. The agency views such bloggers as key to effective blog marketing, enabling trusted links to spread.

"Blog marketing can go horribly wrong, so it's crucial to work with bloggers who are linked in and trusted by all the A-list bloggers," said Hyper Happen partner Brad Fairhead.

Messageboard marketing has been used to stimulate conversation and debate of the AnyFilms initiative. The Yahoo! media deal goes beyond straightforward banner promotion to include editorial coverage of AnyFilms throughout the site.

Finally, a search marketing campaign covers keywords such as 'cool content' and 'mobile movies'.

"Samsung has taken a big leap with this campaign," said Fairhead. "It could have just gone with a normal banner campaign. What we're doing is risky as it could have fallen flat."

Well, I don't know about the " A-list blogger" part, however, it is alway nice to get recognition for what you do.

Ads on Blogs Does Not Create Buzz

Nick Denton from Gawker Media revealed yesterday at a Adtech panel in New York yesterday that Ads on Blogs does not really create buzz. He could not really think of any posts generated by Ads on throughout his 14 blogs. Nick thinks though that Ads on blogs are a good way of reaching a certain demographics. Steve Rubel, where more positive, saying that advertising on blogs would help marketers finding the customer evangelist out there and empowering them with tools. I tend to agree with Nick. Ads on blogs is just another way of extending the media mix and reach certain demographics - it has nothing to do with creating buzz - unless the ads themselves are so compelling that people feel an urge to comment on them. I believe that buzz is better created by seeding out stories and content through the blogosphere and if the stories have legs they will take off.

Technorati Tags: ads, blogs, word of mouth, buzz, adtech