NathanWBurke.com

You know the battle: AT&T vs. Verizon. The two popular mobile phone providers are in a very public war with each other, each pointing out the shortcomings of their rival while boasting about their own unique selling points. This post is about AT&T and their use of a time-honored tactic: competing by solving a non-existent problem.

There’s A Map For That

The AT&T vs. Verizon war really started to heat up when Verizon took a shot at AT&T and the iPhone. Since AT&T/Apple had been doing so much promo for the 100,000+ applications available for the iPhone, Verizon decided to take them down a peg. Turning around the "There’s an App for that" slogan to "There’s a map for that", Verizon took a swipe at AT&T’s flaky coverage. The idea: you can have all the apps in the world, but since AT&T’s coverage stinks, who cares?

It was an awesome campaign. It actually pointed out a problem that all cell phone users can identify with.

I remember wondering what AT&T was going to do to counter the campaign. I couldn’t believe what the response was:

The above video is just one example, but AT&T’s big idea was: Sure, our coverage might stink, but you can talk on the phone and surf the web at the same time.

Now think about that. Forget about the commercials or your loyalty to a particular brand or phone, and just ask yourself which is more important to you:

1. Coverage- being able to place calls and use you phone’s data plan wherever you are.
2. The ability to talk on the phone while being on the web.

While I admit I don’t have any statistics on hand, I’d have to guess that most people would go with coverage. And to extend the example even more, if Verizon’s claims are correct, it really doesn’t matter if you can talk and browse at the same time on AT&T, since you won’t have coverage anyway!

Solving Problems That Don’t Exist

Now, it might sound like I’m picking on AT&T here, and that’s absolutely true. But it’s not the first time a company has tried to promote a product/service by hyping a feature that solves a non-existent problem. Think of ANY infomercial you’ve ever watched.

The snuggie is a pretty good example. The problem they apparently solve: the need for a blanket with sleeves (as opposited to a sweatshirt). Watch the beginning of that video to see just how annoyed the actors were at life before the snuggie came to town.

So is this tecnique a good thing? A bad thing? A thing at all?

Personally, I don’t like it, as it seems sleazy to me. But hey, maybe it actually works. And in that case, who am I to judge?

Twitter is down, presumably due to a DDOS attack, and facebook is really sketchy today. While checking out blogs like TechCrunch and Mashable, I noticed a pattern….the people that have just "launched" the "new social network" called Knoyce are trying to capitalize on it.

On the Mashable post entitled "Facebook Down. Twitter Down. Social Media Meltdown,"a comment from someone named Tim:

press release about twitter and facebook going down http://bit.ly/14GNm4

Which leads to a press release:

Twitter & Facebook are Down….Knoyce.com is thriving!

Twitter and Facebook down….people joining Knoyce.com, the newest social media network that works!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PRLog (Press Release) – Aug 06, 2009 – With the recent issues of Twitter and Facebook, many people worldwide have been acquiring about the new social media network Knoyce. Knoyce recently launched on Tuesday August 4, 2009 and has already reached many people everywhere. From the United States to Canada, South America, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Berlin, London, Serbia, the United Kingdom and many more, people are loving what Knoyce has to offer.

For those who are tired of the continual problems that Twitter and Facebook have every other month, go to http://www.knoyce.com and become a part of something "better than just nice…" but KNOYCE!!!

Read more about what Knoyce has to offer @ http://bit.ly/uwHHA

They’re spamming other posts as well, like on the updated Mashable post:

apparently the new network Knoyce.com is the only site thats working right now http://bit.ly/14GNm4

Which again links to the same garbage press release listed above.

Why is this getting me so worked up? Because Knoyce isn’t real. It isn’t a "new social media network". It’s just a NING NETWORK. Anyone can create a network on NING for free, and there are some really good ones out there. I really enjoy SocialCigar.com and Sysadmin-Network, both NING sites. But they’re not claiming to be new social networks.

If you check out the link from the press release that tells you "more about what Knoyce has to offer", it brings you to a wordpress.com blog that says:

After much anticipation, Knoyce has released it’s new social network site to the public for all to join. There have been many registered users that have taken well to the site and are already running with it. Some of the new members on Knoyce have already began tweeting about Knoyce and one member in particular, has already invited over 300 of his friends and family.

Right. Much anticipation, and someone invited his friends. Whoa.

I honestly believe that this is a massive prank by someone saying "I bet I can get a bunch of fools to join my fake social network, and I can do it without spending a penny. I’ll build a free NING network, and I’ll put up a wordpress.com blog, then I’ll put out free press releases. I’ll get publicity by spamming a bunch of blogs. It’ll be hilarious."

To that, my friend, I tip my hat to you. I think the Knoyce concept is pretty funny. Very nice.

You know you may have a problem when you see something when driving and think "Wow. That’s a good example of search engine optimization." You are certain that you have a problem when you then take a photo of said location and blog about it.

The photo:

I apologize for the quality of the image. It was rainy, I was using my iPhone and I was in a moving car. Not the optimal conditions.

I saw the location as a web site, and the entrance you see here is their home page. The other entrance is right by the white car you can see underneath the sign. That’s a landing page.

Here’s what we see on the home page:

1. Vegetables Flowers and Plants- This is their page headline, and they’re using an <H1> tag around it.
2. Northshore Flower Exchange- This is their page title and the name of the site
3. Plants and Flowers- This is their subheadline. They believe that the majority of people searching for what they offer use the words "Vegetables flowers & plants", but know that some people search for just "plants and flowers", leaving out vegetables all together.

On the landing page they have the same sign as #1. It feels like a landing page, as you can’t actually get into the parking lot there. You have to follow the call to action and drive around to get in. I’m reasonably certain that if they had a third road-facing side, they would have another large sign that says "Plants and Flowers". You know, for A/B testing purposes.

Way back in January while I had some free time and was contemplating my next job, I decided to start a meetup group. And in contrast to my usual style I decided to give it a name that actually makes sense: The Boston-Area Startup Marketing Group. At the time, I was consulting out of betahouse in Cambridge and I was inspired by all the entrepreneurial energy surrounding me. I was watching insanely talented people building amazing things, and I asked “what’s your number one challenge in turning ____ into the next big thing?”

The answer I heard most: “Nobody knows about it.”

It’s true. Most solo or small team tech entrepreneurs don’t have the time or resources they’d like to devote to marketing and promotion. There just aren’t enough hours in the day or people to do it. Startups with dedicated marketing people are in a better spot, but still face the same problems of time and resource allocation. With thousands of sites to promote a startup online, the following questions arise:

• Which sites are worth the time?
• Where’s my audience?
• What kind of content are they looking for?
• After taking the time to blog, podcast, etc., how do I put it where my prospective users will see it?

With those questions in mind, I decided to present “Getting Your Startup Found Online” as our first meetup. Since the presentation is very tactical and focused on content promotion and light on strategy, I took a step backwards:

Though blogging, podcasting and promotion are fun, they need to take place in the larger context of a marketing plan. Otherwise you’ll drive yourself nuts by just throwing content out there to see what sticks. In our case we started with a list of our main objectives. In short: what is the goal? For example, if you’re a B-to-C startup focused on user acquisition, give yourself a target user number.

After we had solid, actionable objectives, we moved on to the buyer personas. At this point we wanted to really get to know our prospective buyers. We looked into things like:

• Age
• Industry
• Title
• Online behavior
• Goals
• Day-to-day tasks
• Decision-making abilities

Of course, this is different for all startups, but the goal is the same. You want a deep understanding of who your targets are, where they go online and how they make the decision to buy (or join/subscribe/download) what you have to offer.

We then focused on our Company Persona, giving us a clear picture of:

• How we want to be perceived by our customers
• What tone we’ll use
• What colors we’ll use
• How we’ll set ourselves apart from everyone else

The persona exercises then led into our keyword research, which fed into our content plan. And with the majority of our content planned, we moved onto my favorite part: SEO + Promotion or Getting Noticed Online.

Well, you need to start somewhere, and I can’t think of a better place than google, yahoo, crunchbase, killerstartups, vator.tv and the like. These are directories that usually take some time to index your site, but are important sources of residual traffic.

Next, you’ll want to grab some land. We’re talking about twitter accounts, flickr accounts, friendfeed, vimeo, youtube, stumbleupon, delicious….the works. These will be important when it comes to promotion.

Now it’s time to find your audience. Where do they go online? Do they participate in LinkedIn groups? Ning networks? Facebook? Reddit? Forums? Go out there and find out where your target users are hanging out, and find out what they’re talking about. This is NOT an open invitation to spam people. Instead, find out what problems they have. Find out what they’re looking for. Find out how you can help with what you’re going to offer.

Now get out there and create some compelling content! Shoot some video. Get blogging. Fire up a podcast. Start producing content and you’ll start to see what works.

Now that you have a great blog post, video, podcast, etc. it’s time to promote it. Go get a bit.ly URL so you can promote the link on twitter. Bookmark it in delicious and diigo. Add it on stumbleupon. Submit it to reddit and digg….but only in relevant categories.

I must admit, this is the oversimplification of the decade, but you’ll find more information in the video below. The goal of this presentation was to give a quick overview of my workflow when it comes to content creation and promotion. It’s definitely not one-size-fits-all, but it’s close.

If you’re interested in joining our meetup group, you can find out more here.

Here’s the presentation:

So, here’s the situation. I was plowing through emails this morning and had an email from FastPitch Networking. Here’s what it said:

All right. No big deal, right? You get stuff like this all the time, no? But then…….

My phone rings. I answer it.

“Hi this is Bob Poole from FastPitch Networking…..”

Wait, does Bob somehow know that I’m looking at the email at that moment? That was kinda weird.

Rather than Bob actually calling me, it was a prerecorded robocall from FastPitch Networking. The call basically reiterated the same information from the email, then let me know that if I had any questions, I could find the answers on the web site.

I looked back at their site, and noticed that a phone number is required to sign up for the service, but I didn’t see anything in the privacy policy about them calling you (though it didn’t say they wouldn’t either!).

So, I was just wondering:

• Is this a successful strategy? I mean, I understand how effective a phone call to a prospect can be, but is a robocall effective?
• Has anyone else tried this technique?
• How would you feel if a service you use (twitter, facebook, etc) robocalled you to encourage you to check out new features?

I’m not annoyed or mad, nor do I necessarily think this was a bad thing. Instead, it’s just something I’ve never heard of before and I’m curious to see what others have experienced.

I never thought I’d type the following sentence: I’m excited about a webapp that manages tasks and projects.

Yep. I just wrote that.

I’ve seen a million web apps that do slick, fancy things, and have dismissed them with a jaded “meh.” But today I was introduced to something that manages day to day tasks and lists. And I loved it. It’s called springpad, and here’s why.

What’s a springpad?

So, here’s the short description:

“Springpads are free online notebooks that help you manage your life. Use your springpad to keep track of notes, photos, maps, to-do’s, contacts, appointments & more.”

As someone that makes lists of everything (seriously, I have a list on my refrigerator right now with the first item “Find Full Time Gig” followed by “Get Oil Change”) a web based application that can manage all the lists I make for completing tasks and can tie-in to other web APIs makes all the sense in the world. So let’s take a look:

That’s the springpad homepage. You’ll notice that they’re focused on holiday and seasonally themed notebooks right now like:

• Weekly Meal Planner
• Thanksgiving Menu Planner
• Gift Planner
• Trip Planner
• Job Planner

There are dozens of possible springpads:

Here’s a video that explains how to use springpad:

What’s Different

On the surface, an online notebook isn’t all that sexy, but springpad has several underlying features that sets it apart from competitors that simply stop at creating a list-based application.

1. Bloggers as experts- To help users get started and to help them make lists, springpad is looking to bloggers as experts. For instance, let’s pretend for a second that I’m an expert chef (I said let’s pretend, ok??). If I have a blog with a great recipe, people might want to be able to import my recipe into a springpad. Right now, this is a manual process, but down the line, there will be automatic springpad integration in blogs. With one click, a springpad user can “spring it”, which will copy the recipe using standard microformats into a springpad.

Here’s what that will look like (currently available on thesimpleme):

Clicking “Spring The Task List” will copy the list and will redirect me to:

Then:

2. Traffic to Blogs- Again, if I were a subject matter expert, I’d love to get new traffic from springpad instead of just sending my traffic there. Well, they’ve got that. In its current incarnation, spring pad’s SpringAdvice is a site that scours the internet for smes (subject matter experts), and links to their content:

Of course, this is a win-win. Bloggers are able to get new traffic and are seen as experts in a topic, and springpad users are able to easily import lists. And springpartners (the company behind springpad) is able to increase their visibility by having multiple links to the service from blogs across the web.

One of the other things I like about the springpartners strategy is their focus on end users. While most web notebooks are focused on the technology and turn to early adopters for user acquisition, springpartners has made the decision to go after specific user groups. Because there are so many uses for springpads, the company is able to target usergroups based on the problems they’re solving. For instance, there’s a springpad for Pregnancy Health Notes and Nursery Planning. This allows springpartners to approach bloggers writing about pregnancy, helping them reach out to expectant moms looking to organize information in one place. In addition, springpartners can approach mainstream media sources on a topic-level basis. It’s a great strategy.

The best part of springpartners in my opinion is that they’re actually solving a problem that people have, and their solution is based on an approach everyone is familiar with: making lists.

Keep an eye on this one, as there’s a lot still to come. They just opened their beta, but in the coming months, you’ll really start to see how the list-making component can play with existing APIs. Sure, it integrates with Yelp and Google Maps now, but with the APIs now available, you’ll see topic-level integration with relevant web services. Write a shopping list? Maybe it can integrate with an API that will look at the items on your list and give discounts or price comparisons. The opportunities here are massive.

Okay, so I’m still trying to figure out this whole video thing and I’m not entirely comfortable with it. But I think this format is at least a step in the right direction. This is just a quick video talking about exactly two things:

1. Gmail Video Chat

2. Twitterank and Twitter Grader

So, here goes:

Related Links:

Twitterank Creator Speaks

Twitterank.com

Twitter Grader

Last night I got an email from a old co-worker inviting me to check out SocialMinder, which said:

SocialMinder is an online assistant that helps you maintain relationships with your LinkedIn network.

I thought that you might appreciate a free invitation to the “closed” alpha test of SocialMinder.

SociaMinder:
* Scans your email headers and maps them to your LinkedIn network
* Identifies relationships that need strengthening
* Helps identify recent business news to discuss with each contact, no matter how out of touch you are
* You get weekly updates identifying top opportunities to build a better network

I have arranged for you to get a priority account;
1) Go to http://www.SocialMinder.com , and
2) Click on the green button (‘sign me up’)

You are on the priority list, but your space is only held for 3 days.

And the price is FREE…

Hope that it works for you!

Since this came from someone I knew (and someone that has sent me beta invites in the past), I decided to go check it out. You enter your gmail username and password, and SocialMinder tells you how long it’s been since you’ve contacted everyone in your gmail address book. 

I then was brought to this screen:

If you can’t read what’s in the yellow box, it says:

Click here to upgrade to full version for free – just answer a few questions in our Alpha phase questionnaire. The full version helps you manage all of your contacts, and checks for contact updates regularly.

Oh, cool. I can get an upgrade to the full version just by answering a few questions in the Alpha phase questionnaire, right? I can answer a few questions. No biggie.

So I click. And here’s what I see:

No problem. This one’s easy. For some reason I see the following at the top:

Free Trial Upgrade- Step One of Two

But that’s okay. 

So I answer the questions and click OK. Here’s what I get:

Yup, you read that right. Here’s the line:

To get your free full trial upgrade, you must select 15 friends to be sent a pre-approved invitation to try SocialMinder.

So the third step- which wasn’t mentioned at the beginning- is spamming 15 of your friends. 

My Point:

I have no problem with services trying to get users to spread the word. It not only makes sense, it’s essential. But in user acquisition as with everything else, you have to manage expectations. And as someone who just ran through this process, I’m left feeling cheated. I feel like I wasted my time, and I’ll never go back to the service again. 

Harsh? Probably. But I’m just pointing out how easy it is to make someone feel cheated and angry when promising one thing and giving them another. 

Since the beginning of his campaign, Barack Obama has understood one simple, yet essential principle that seemed to elude all other candidates. He was a master at crafting the exact right message for exactly the right audience, and he was always able to do so without ever being manipulative. Right before his acceptance speech, he sent the following email to his supporter list:

Nathan – 

I’m about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first. 
We just made history. 
And I don’t want you to forget how we did it. 
You made history every single day during this campaign — every day you knocked on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and neighbors about why you believe it’s time for change. 
I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign. 
We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next. 
But I want to be very clear about one thing… 

All of this happened because of you. 

The guy just won the election, and was about to give his acceptance speech, but he made sure to send a quick note to those that were responsible for his win. (And yes, I realize the note was likely ready to go well in advance, and could have been written by anyone) The lesson here is this: the little things mean everything. Treat your members, users, customers like they’re insiders, and always let them know how important they are to you. 

The last line of his email says it all.