Stage Two Consulting

Spleak Media Network, based here in San Francisco, announced some big news this morning - the press release went out on PRWeb this morning at 9AM.  Three new content hubs have doubled the size of the Spleak network; GameSpleak (gaming), StyleSpleak (fashion) and TVSpleak (television) have joined the list, each with their own network hub.  Previously CelebSpleak (celebrity gossip), VoteSpleak (politics), and SportSpleak (sports) were the topics of conversation across the Spleak network.  All of the them are accessible at www.spleak.com, though of course most users create and consume content via IM (AIM, MSN Messenger, Google talk), on social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Piczo) via SMS or on destination sites via interactive widgets.

In addition to distributing content in all kinds of interesting locations online, Spleak uses a unique hybrid publishing model combining UGC with mainstream media content.  Spleak partnered with Hearst Digital Media a few months back, and now more big content partners are participating as well including Fox Sports, CBS Sports, Declare Yourself and many others.

Several people have posted about the news this morning, including:

• Webware
• Venture Beat
• Mashable
• Journalism.co.UK.
• BNET

Very exciting news, and congratulations to Spleak on lots of hard work and success.  Also, if you have a preferred topic and medium for Spleak (IM, social networks, widget, etc) please comment and tell us your favorite.  I like TVSpleak, and my favorite is to play with it on MSN Windows Live Messenger, or on Spleak.com.

We’re talking out of the ball park folks - over 200,000 unique visitors in the first month! To put this in perspective, it took 1 year and a $100M purchase by Microsoft for Powerset, a fellow semantic web startup, to reach 200K unique visitors. Lowell Goss, founder and CEO,  understanding the challenge of growing an individual website organically, built LOUD3R as a network of sites, each dedicated to a specific niche topic. LOUD3R is preparing to add 9 new properties in the near future, which will continue to increase traffic, and take the total number of sites in the network from 25 to 34, with plenty of room to grow - they own over 500 3R branded URLs.

For those of you in the audience unfamiliar with LOUD3R, it’s a semantic publishing platform that controls a newtork of websites, each dedicated to a different topic (motorcycles, mixed martial arts, gadgets, etc.) The LOUD3R content discovery engine searches the web to find and rank the best news, editorial, photo, video and other content related to a particular topic, while filtering out spam, splogs, repeats, and dead links. LOUD3R’s publishing platform requires minimal configuration and maintenance, making it possible to rapidly launch sites at low cost. The platform is capable of unsupervised learning, and automatically improves over time through user feedback across the LOUD3R sites.

Check out the LOUD3R Network to find news about topics important to you.

The music lovers at TuneUp Media, a client based here in San Francisco, launched their iTunes Companion software today. Here’s an overview of what they are doing:

What’s the one problem most people have with their digital music collections? They’re msesy, err… messy. They’re missing albums, artists, or track names (Track01 ring a bell?). For most of us, this is something we tolerate because we don’t have the time to fix songs one by one, and previous tools are too complicated or ineffective to bother with.

Introducing the new TuneUp Companion for iTunes. TuneUp plugs into your music collection and automatically fixes your mislabeled song information. It takes the audio “fingerprint” of a song, compares it to over 90 million songs in the Gracenote database, and fills in the missing info. No more “Track 01’s”. No more Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stones, and TheStones. No more headaches looking for music on your iPod or iPhone. We like to say, “It’s your music’s new best friend.”

TuneUp also automatically finds missing cover art for your albums and lets you pick from up to 4 options so if you really want that import cover, you got it. You can even save all of the album covers at once with a handy “Save All” button.

So you’ve cleaned your music, found your cover art, what’s next? TuneUp integrates seamlessly beside iTunes to present the web’s best content in the “Now Playing” tab. Every time you hit play, TuneUp searches the web to provide music videos from YouTube, merchandise from eBay, song/album recommendations from Amazon, and news from Google for the artist and song you’re playing.

Additionally TuneUp lets you know when artists in your collection are coming to town with a “Concerts” tab. Even better, they pull information from both national and local sources so you won’t miss the next Justice concert, or the next show from local artist Sean Hayes.

TuneUp has something for everyone, and you can try cleaning your first 500 songs for free at www.tuneupmedia.com.

Useful links:

• TuneUp home page
• TuneUp blog
• TuneUp news feed
• Launch press release
• Online media kit (includes demo video, pix, etc)
• Joint press release with Gracenote

Coverage so far (will be updated throughout the day):

• Geek.com’s detailed review
• Lifehacker
• TechCrunch
• Venture Beat
• ZatzNotFunny
• UberGizmo
• KillerStartups
• Addicted to Digital Media detailed review
• Download Squad
• CNET Download.com detailed review
• Boing Boing
• GeekBrief.Tv

Another new Stage Two client has taken the wrapper off their product. Involver has announced the pilot program for their Video Marketing Platform with campaigns for Serena Software and Kiva.org. Involver’s platform is an end-to-end solution for marketers who want to manage video campaigns on Facebook and other social networks. Involver lets you build, publish, manage, change, update, and track video campaigns with a turnkey offering specifically designed to increase engagement, promote sharing, and speed viral distribution.

Involver’s unique vision is to provide more than just “video with a buy button”, creating a tool for marketers that does more than deliver millions of impressions with no way to capture the audience. The platform uses a rich set of video plug-ins to allow the campaign owner to capture email, offer quizes or surveys, even take orders or donations - all within the framework of the video, never forcing the viewer to browse to a new Web page.

Serena Software has garnered a lot of attention with their “Just Bleep It” video campaign, which saw nearly 1.2M views on YouTube. They moved to Involver to publish the second phase of the campaign on Facebook, using the Involver platform to provide a rich social experience and the means to convert viewers into leads. Kiva.org launched their campaign to tap into Facebook, and other social networks to attract a new audience to their person-to-person micro-lending website.

The launch of Involver’s pilot program is already receiving a good deal of attention, with articles from Kristen Nicole at Mashable, Eric Eldon at VentureBeat and Michelle Lentz at Bub.blicio.us (we’ll update this list throughout the day) - already pushing the news to Techmeme.

New Involver Articles:
Crowdsourcing.com
Ad Lab
ReadWriteWeb

Involver is off and running!

In a word: no.

An old adage says that “all press is good press,” meaning that if you are getting noticed at all, even with a negative portrayal, that still increases your visibility and recognition amongst the masses, which is a net benefit. I think if you are either really big (like Nike), or really small (like an unknown startup no one’s heard of), there might be some truth to the idea. But for the VAST majority of people in the middle, I simply don’t agree.

Nike doesn’t want to be known as a sweat shop that abuses Malaysian children with unsafe work conditions at slave wages, but they are. Does it matter very much? For Nike, probably not. They have the athletic endorsements and the marketing budget to overcome negative press (and yes, it shouldn’t be ignored). However, Nike is such a large, recognized, long standing and wealthy brand that bad press isn’t that difficult to deal with. It keeps their name in the press, most people forget the bad stories, and just remember Nike when they think of shoes and sports.

Tiny startups can usually survive bad press, and possibly even benefit from getting on someone’s radar. They might get some new user signups simply by getting trashed on Techcrunch. This could increase their user base, and perhaps give them an opportunity to improve their site / collect feedback. But it can also lead to a negative long-term impression in the public eye, which requires careful and intelligent efforts to fix (of which PR is a component, but it better not be the only one!). Ultimately you still need to deal with bad press on some level, or it will work against you in the long run.

Small to medium businesses definitely do not want bad press (also, we’re not talking about ‘one single negative blog post’, we’re talking about a series of notable posts/articles). It is not somehow “good” even though it’s bad. Small to medium companies don’t have the anonymity of tiny startups, nor do they have the budget and inertia of massive, long standing brands.

Take Twitter for instance. Twitter is a cool service, and I use it a lot. I enjoy it. But it fails… constantly a lot. The folks at Twitter have worked hard to improve, and have a very admirable, self-mocking attitude about the whole thing. They use a critter called the “Fail Whale” when their site is down, as a tongue-in-cheek means of acknowledging that they’re having technical difficulties. But their failure rate is so high that it strains the utility of their service, and some of its big early adopters and users are either moving or considering moving to new services. This leads to a lot of bad press, in spite of their self-deprecations. Initially, that press was jocular and supportive. Now it’s way past that. The Fail Whale is now ironic, and not in the good way.

The Twitter example demonstrates that a lot of negative press attention can, and will, hurt your image. As we’ve said before, it’s not just about the marketing to fix the problem - the problems themselves must be fixed before any PR can even begin (you don’t mend a broken leg with a bandaid). All press is not good press.