Takeaways from TiE Social Media Marketing Panel

We had an awesome panel yesterday at the TiE office in silicon valley. If you missed the event, here are some key takeaways from this panel.
Panelists

'Social' is old but happens a lot faster and at a larger scale now.

'Social' is where people shared their likes and dislikes with friends they met. Word-of-mouth marketing has existed since ancient days. The new twist on 'social' is that it happens faster and reaches a larger audience.

'Social Media' is about building relationships.

The best thing that social media marketing has brought about is the two way communication in real time. A great example of a well done social media marketing is the Old Spice commercial. It is important to engage and get your audience to participate to increase the effectiveness of your campaign.

Content  calendar is helpful

Having a Blog, Facebook fan page or a Twitter a/c is simply meaningless unless you can constantly refresh them with new content. The worst thing you could do is to have presence on one or more of these channels and not update  for a long time. So, having a content calendar forces you to think and be disciplined about your social media activities.

Goal should not be virality; instead try to touch your audience

When you make a video or blog about something, your goal should be to try and touch your audience. Your article will go viral only if it touches your audience.

'Like' is social proof

If you are on a table with 10 other people who use iPhone, then you fall into the social proof trap and think that you should get one too. 'Like' is a tool to display social proof. If a website has 800 likes then the 801th visitor will feel more inclined to like the website.

'Like' is light weight sharing

Like is also a very powerful and simple tool that could be used to share. Before socialmedia, people shared links via emails and this was not public. But, now when you click on the 'Like' button, you are sharing with your social graph in public and this carries more weight.

Who's winning ? Google or Facebook?

The answer to this was very clever and interesting. It is both because your use of these tools depends on where you are in the purchase cycle. If you are still discovering, then you would go to Google but if you have identified a product then you would go to FB for social proof.

What is one idea that entrepreneurs can work on?

Priority Inbox for all social media channels.

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TiE is the largest network of entrepreneurs and organizes many such events through out the year. TiECon is the largest conference of entrepreneurs and is happening in May. If you are an entrepreneur, this is one event you don't want to miss.

 

Bootstrapping? How you can keep your cost low.

If you are an entrepreneur and are bootstrapping, then you are probably going to watch every penny you spend. Here's how I kept my costs low when I founded StoryTruck . At the very early stage I only cared about these two.

1. Infrastructure Costs

• I used my home as a office space and avoided renting an office space. This alone saved hundreds of dollars.
• If you are building a web based product, look for hosting services. Although Amazon's EC2 is the default choice of entrepreneurs, if you look around, you'll notice that there are cheaper and equally reliable services. I chose to go with My Hosting's VPS solution for a fixed monthly cost. 
• You'll  need a good reliable source repository and bug tracking system. I chose SourceRepo because it was the cheapest. After a year, I can say it was the cheapest and it is reliable!

2. Development Costs

The next biggest cost is your development cost. If you are a developer yourself, then you can probably get away with this. But I found that I needed some help so that I could spend my time on other things. I addressed it as follows.

• Choose your programming language and platform wisely: I chose Php over .Net because I could find more Php programmers and at cheaper rates.
• I also found that hosting a Php site was far cheaper than hosting a .Net solution in terms of the hosting cost.

What do you think? Are there other ways of shrinking costs?

Three tips for publishers from Disney

Disney publishes a number of children's books online at Disney Digital Books. This is an interactive story reader which brings some great books back to life in a fun interactive way.

Disney's Underkoffler talked about what sells in the children's apps category and mentioned the following.

• Keep it simple. Add fewer bells and whistles.
• Fine tune your marketing message. Remember that there is a buyer (parent) and then there is a user (child).
• Old is gold. Old content turned into apps and digital content is in demand.

Most importantly he noted that "Disney hasn’t seen any cannibalization in the digital channel, in fact, digital has only helped increase overall sales." You can read the original article in MediaBistro.

What are your thoughts? Has your digital content done better than you imagined? Has it cannibalized your other channels? Tell me in your comments below.

How Cisco uses Facebook for building its support community

Facebook is not only for sharing those awkward pictures that you took in a bar with your drunken friends or telling how much you liked or hated the local restaurant you ate at. It can be used as an effective medium for many more purposes. Facebook provides an eco-system where a community can engage, participate and share common interests. You can find a community on Facebook for almost any topic. Search for a topic and you are sure to come up with something. Given the size and the active nature of the Facebook community, does it make sense to create a technical support community on Facebook?

Cisco has taken a bold initiative to experiment with this idea and although it’s too early to measure the outcome, it definitely seems to be headed in the right direction. CiscoSupportCommunity , a fanpage on Facebook has nearly 50K fans and is growing fast. In contrast to the common perception about Facebook, you will find a great deal of technical conversation on the fan page . You’ll notice fans posting questions and answers in near real time. Cisco has gone a step further in experimenting a concept called ‘Facebook Forums’. This is a real time conversation between the community and a technical expert at Cisco. The event takes place on the Facebook fan page and fans get to ask questions and receive instant responses from the expert. This event has grown in popularity and a sample of this can be seen on this Facebook Forum .

So, for those of you, who thought Facebook was not for geeks, think again. The world is becoming more connected and there is nothing wrong in joining a Facebook community. For the skeptics, I say, Facebook is a tool and it is up to you how you want to use it.

How do I take my idea to the market?

Many budding entrepreneurs have great ideas but don't know how to take the next step, or the anxiety and fear forbids them to make the next move. If you are one of those, don't despair. Here are a few things I recommend.

Step 1.

Talk about your idea to your closed ones like a friend or a spouse. See if they are excited about it? Talk to a few more of your close friends and see what they think. It's ok to tell them you are considering of getting into this seriously and ask them their honest feedback.

Step 2.

Do a search on the web to find if someone else is already doing it. Don't be heartbroken if someone else is because chances are 99 times out of 100 you'll see that your idea has already been implemented in some fashion or another.

Step 3.

Now, don't give up if your idea was already implemented by someone else. Try and see how many other people are doing it? Is there room for improvement? Could you do it at a lower cost etc.

If no one has implemented it yet, try to answer the question, "Why?" . Chances are that the business model didn't scale or there was no real need for it in the market place. Spend some more time doing your research and talking to your friends and exploring the idea. If possible talk to someone who has some start-up experience and see what they think about your idea.

Step 4.

Once you have a gut feeling that your idea is viable, you should check if there's a need to prototype your idea. I would recommend a prototype only when there is no real product out there similar to your idea. If there's one, then you can point people and tell them that you are trying something similar yet with these differences.

If you are building a prototype, make sure it has enough feature so that you could show it to people, let them use it and get their feedback.

In my next post, I'll share with you how to find the right people to help you build your prototype.

In the meantime if you would like to share your experiences, please add a comment.