This week I attended an event in Palo Alto in the old Facebook headquarters building. It wasn’t your typical event, but it was definitely a good one. Organized by the fbFund, this event featured several great thought leaders in the realm of social media and startups, including renowned author of The Facebook Era Clara Shih, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang, Stage 2 Consulting head Jeremy Toeman and Microsoft BizSpark “marketing dude” Jacob Mullins.
What is the fbFund? According to the Facebook website, it is a group of developers selected by Facebook to help innovate and create unique social experiences relating to Facebook Connect and they offer seed funding ranging from $25k to $100k investments along with mentorship to help accomplish this goal.
So what’s so important about this meeting, you might be asking? Well it’s because since it was organized by a group dedicated to helping developers, that means also startups (aka small businesses), right? The goal of this particular meeting was to answer some really fundamental questions:
- When’s the right time to launch?
- Hire a PR person in-house, outsource, or do it themselves?
- How much should you invest in marketing vs product development?
- Right mix of social media marketing vs more “traditional” channels?
Here are some of those answers.
With over 250 million users and 1 million developers in over 180 countries, Facebook marketing is becoming a really big part of garnering new business. According to The Facebook Era author Clara Shih, sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have changed the paradigm from the world wide web to the world wide web of people and even user expectations have changed. No longer are you simply banking on a “spray and pray” policy to work. Instead, the way to do business with your customers is to understand who they are. It’s all about having targeted marketing – they expect you to know about their problems, issues and to show them what you can do to help them. Let’s be customer-centric, not product-centric.
Shih brought up an interesting phenomenon during her presentation – that being of transitive trust. What is this? With social media, it means that the probability of you trusting someone would increase based on the marketer having the trust of a common person you trust. So if a guy from Salesforce.com is interested in reaching out to your demographics, they might seek out a trusted source you follow and then you might be more inclined to at least listen to what they have to say (whether there is a transaction is entirely up to you).
Moreover, Shih also believes that with this paradigm shift in promotion, so to has there been a change in how we communicate to our customers. With the advent of the telephone, it was a 1:1 ratio where businessmen talks to customer. Then with web 1.0 (static websites, email marketing, etc.), the world changed to be 1:many. Now with web 2.0, you’re now looking at many:many. Ultimately, Shih believes we’re in a new age where Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn has forced it to be a ratio of everybody-to-everybody.
In a tie-in back to Facebook, Shih’s accomplishments include creating the first Facebook application integrated with her previous stint at Salesforce.com. Just how integrated was it with social media? It had a Facebook portion that allowed you to link up with other people you know on the platform and employs transitive trust. Also, it allows you to better target any sales through LinkedIn’s friend-to-friend network and lastly works on customer service through Twitter…all in Salesforce’s system.
A key point made throughout the afternoon was that you don’t have to work with big agencies to promote your brand. Instead, it’s all about networking, going to events, showing the benefits of your product in the ecosystem through partnering with influencers and others. According to Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang, there are three rules that he would like to see for startups to do in order to try and succeed:
- Be specific in what problem you’re solving.
- Crowdsource your support.
- Be a part of the dialogue happening online.
Owyang says that with Twitter, it’s alright to have a non-engaging profile for your brand/company BUT you need to have at least one person listed on that profile so that customers can engage with someone from your company.The company Twitter page can simply be a news feed of press releases and other blog posts – and state that the Twitter page is not an active account.
For startups eager to engage in blogger outreach, Stage 2 consultant & blogger Jeremy Toeman suggests that you need to know who you are talking to. Actually reading what they write and building a trust with the blogger over time through comments, conversation and engagement is a necessity in order to have them even care about what product you’re creating. Toeman also suggests that if you’re reaching out to big blogs such as Mashable, TechCrunch, etc that you should probably try and influence those people that the editors listen to – the concept of transitive trust.
It should be noted that the panel of Toeman, Owyang and Microsoft Bizspark “marketing guy” Jacob Mullins all believe that positioning is more important than exclusivity when dealing with bloggers. You need to tell the bloggers and even your stakeholders and customers “this is the problem and here’s how & why we solved it”. Frankly put, Toeman says that if you haven’t built a good user experience in the first 30 seconds of your customer or stakeholder trying out your product, you don’t have a good product. It’s your best selling point and you need to make sure that it has all the potential to succeed.
This session at the Facebook headquarters highlights an good philosophy that Jeremiah Owyang harped upon – be specific in what problem you’re solving. Without actually addressing this problem, your startup and product may not last very long.
You can watch the entire recording of this presentation by clicking here.
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