Offering an unconditional guarantee is a great mechanism for engaging clients. I first read about this strategy in a book by David Maister. Cogmap has never offered these in site licenses before and frankly, it is because I never thought of it.
Now that problem is fixed!
If you aren’t unconditionally guaranteeing your work, do you have so little faith in the quality of your work?
Read/Write Web had a great post the other day by Josh Catone where he discusses the uneven coverage of Internet start-ups. Josh essentially indicates that if you don’t know someone (join the 250!) then you basically don’t get a lot of press coverage. Josh observes that many start-ups get left out of publications because they don’t have the right investors or know the right people or generate the appropriate buzz out of the gate.
This is certainly something Cogmap has struggled with. When we launched free private maps, VentureBeat wrote an article. Other than that, despite personal emails to many prominent Web 2.0 news blogs, there was basically zero coverage. TechCrunch covered OrgPlus when they launched a similar service with a hefty per month price tag and never even mentioned other players in the market. Is that indicative of the better PR firm they hired?
I actually assume that it was more a product of completely random outcomes. They get a million press releases, they are in such a rush to get the news out due to pressure of the blogosphere, and they are under-resourced, so they don’t have time to be comprehensive, or make sure things are “fair”. As Josh indicates, he has to make a call every time he is asked to cover something and it turns into his whim. Essentially, if you catch him on a good day or a slow day or he likes you, the odds of coverage go up. How do you get on the list of similar services if he doesn’t know you? Luck. Well-known investors?
Everyone agrees investors play a key role in coverage. You can actually have media invest in you these days! Arrington invests. Calcanis has the ability to generate media coverage and invests. Even Fred Wilson has his own popular media vehicle and his association is an imprimatur of start-up savvy-ness. Ironically, after millions of blog posts discussing how cheap it is to build a start-up using today’s technology, the challenge of getting media coverage even if you build the better mousetrap continues to exist - although there is no doubt that the cost has come down in some ways, an email to TechCrunch can get you hundreds of thousands of visitors. Now the challenge is having a relationship that allows you entry. You no longer have to be a rich kid to be in the cool clique, but you still have to be cool!
As my friends would say, that basically dooms me.
Unfortunately, Josh does not offer a prescription for this challenge. Now that he has recognized this shortcoming in his coverage of start-ups, what will he do? What should he do? What should the industry do? Maybe the answer is to be Scoble: Cover everything all the time, writing millions of posts per day.
Would love to see how more people think about addressing this problem, particularly as bias in media outlets becomes a bigger problem (see Techcrunch).
Couple of thoughts I wanted to get out there:
This is an email we circulated recently that I wanted to share on the blog:
Are you familiar with OpenCoffee? OpenCoffee is an activity that connects entrepreneurs, angels, and other Web 2.0 people in an informal setting.
We are starting up just such an event. It will be held every other week at 9:00 am starting April 21st at the Cosi in beautiful Columbia, MD:
Cosi
6181 Old Dobbin Lane Suite 200
Columbia, MD 21045
Phone: 410-953-6311
(The Cosi opens at 9am, so don’t come early)
Cosi was selected because it has free wireless, so bring your laptop and be ready to demo your stuff!
Please circulate to the appropriate audience. The goal is to keep it smaller rather than bigger, so forward with consideration. Shoot me back an email if I should add you to an email reminder list. Also, given that we are just getting started, a quick email to tell me if inviting you hit the right audience would be inordinately valuable.
Our initial invite list is hopefully a nice combination of coders, business people, and investors, so theoretically we should have a diverse and interesting audience.
Thank you, we look forward to seeing you!
I bought a Dell laptop in December and ever since then I get email from them every week about new laptops I could buy.
When I click the unsubscribe link and then fill out the 2 pages of forms to remove me from the mailing list, what do I see:
Suffice it to say that I have been trying to unsubscribe for weeks. Clearly, this is an error that they monitor closely and care a lot about.
According to Valleywag, I violate basically all the rules to writing a good blog.
I can only hope that when they say, “don’t be a pundit”, they are talking to the less interesting pundits.
Hopefully, I can learn from what they say to say something new and interesting. Unfortunately, I already know what my next post will be and, in classic form, I will simply complain about another blog post.
Much like this post.
My blog is the new chain email of 2008.
http://www.viddler.com/explore/rooreynolds/videos/17/
It makes me cry that I didn’t get to see this at SxSW, but frankly, I don’t think this panel was on my original list anyway….
Post on Silicon Alley Insider that made me actually click through for the comments: Ad Sales Reps, supposedly scarce, are a dime a dozen.
My immediate reaction to this was a) Great, you can hire the worst sales people from Yahoo and AOL, no problem. That’s encouraging. b) Is the guy that was having success (or struggling, assuming he is not the top guy) selling Yahoo’s home page going to be the guy that monetizing neverheardofit.com? The brand difference is pretty big.
The first sales guy I ever hired worked at Netscape and went from selling Netscape to selling our neverheardofit product. He failed miserably. He was used to people taking his calls because he was from Netscape. He was used to having good lead flow because he was from Netscape. People called him. It was a different kind of sale.
You have to have sales people that are appropriate to the life-cycle of your business.
I know it is kind of cliche, but I had to spend 60 seconds mocking up my mockery of a potential AOL redesign of Bebo.
Am I close? Post links to better ones in the comments!
Agree completely with Junior Hines (I wish I knew where he worked/what he does). He points to PaidContent’s discovery that IAC is capitalizing customer acquisition costs.
Frankly, I don’t even like to capitalize IT costs. The whole process of making future numbers harder to hit makes me nervous.
Capitalizing marketing expenses basically ensures that the company is doomed at an indeterminate point in the future.
Is there a fiduciary responsibility to manage numbers and connive to prop up the stock price? I would argue that this action has done the company a disservice strategically.
What’s worse is there is never a way to undo this. Any restatement would crush the stock.
I was trying to think of an analogy that would shed more light for someone on how ridiculous this is. I started by thinking, “Can a company capitalize its sales people over the life of the customer? Like if a company had a sales person who sold a long-term deal, can they capitalize the salary of that sales person over a ten year period? So only recognize 1/10th of the salary of the sales person as an expense this year?” But that sounded so patently ludicrous, I thought it was a bad example. But then I thought, “Wait, that actually is what they are doing!”
Here is a funny question: Did Match.com increase its CPA payout after the accounting change?
