Stage Two's blog

While wandering the Web 2.0 Expo show floor yesterday I couldn’t help but notice a chunk of startups trying to pitch ideas and business that seemed awfully familiar.  In some cases they were rehashing older ideas trying to pump them back to life with a new fresh look.  In others, the companies were tackling areas that are overly saturated with competition today.  As I talked to the various booth reps, I was surprised by many of the pitches, as many of them seemed to base their entire “differentiator” story by aspects of their business which are simply insufficient to truly differentiate.

It’s one thing to have a massive amount of differentiation against your competition, and to heavily play up that feature/tech/etc.  For example Google grew out of literally nowhere thanks to serving significantly better search results than other offerings at the time.  Notice I said “significantly better,” not just “better”.  Further, timing was important – Google came to market against products whose offerings were quite poor, so the “significantly better” results were highly noticeable.

Launching a “better than Google” company today, on the other hand, is a much larger challenge (despite numerous attempts).  Not only are people NOT dissatisfied with Google’s results, their products now span well beyond just search, and are tightly integrated with a huge amount of Internet users’ lives and services.  I’d say Google is more intertwined with the Internet today than Microsoft ever was with integrated Internet Explorer and other products which prompted all the lawsuits. Competing with the big G is going to take a lot more work than even “significantly better” search results would provide.

Another topic that seems to cause confusion in regards to differentiating companies is user interface (UI).  I’ve heard countless companies show demos and talk about how they are great because their UI is so amazing and easy to use.  One company’s rep even stated that the thing that will make them “stand out from the rest” is their signup process.  Baloney. This is a very dangerous ground to play in, because it’s lacking the important tactical element of understanding when UI actually matters.

First, it’s my position that to use UI in this manner requires existing products to have bad UIs (not just average or mediocre, but bad).  Second, existing UIs must be bad enough that the consumers who use these products are vocally unhappy and can identify statements such as “it’s too hard to use”.  Third, the “better” UI must be easy to absorb instantly – in other words a new potential customer should see your screenshot/web site/gadget interface and instantly see how easy it is to use.  Fourth, and of no lesser importance, better UI doesn’t mean “prettier” UI.  Fifth, it’s hard to use UI to compete against massively entrenched players, though if its a bunch of startups fighting for attention, having a better UI is good.

TiVo beat ReplayTV with a stick when the two launched, outselling them at over 10:1 ratio from the getgo (although much of this was also due to pricing models, with the ReplayTV units coming in almost double the price of a TiVo, albeit with no monthly service fee).  My precious Slingbox sent Sony’s LocationFreeTV packing time and time again.  In both cases the products at hand were in new categories with no existing comparative products.  Today, however, competing with either is much much harder, and good UI alone isn’t enough to cut it.  While my examples here are both physical products, it’s fairly easy to see how they apply to Web services and sites as well.

Whether it’s UI or features, pricing or compatibility, it’s extremely important to understand how you stack up against the crowd.  The key challenge startups and even large companies with new products face is to figure out the how and what of demonstrating competitive advantage.  Building great products is only the starting point.  Understanding how your potential customers will perceive your products is at least as important, and proper timing and positioning is just plain essential.

In a pseudo-related note – please come check out the unconference today!

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a semi-controversial blog post today on the “wrong ways” to pitch news (to ReadWriteWeb specifically, but it probably applies to many other publications as well. BlogHerald chimes in here too.) and Mashable has a similar post. One of Marshall’s key insights was regarding how Voce Communications shares their updates with an OPML file. We thought it was a good idea, huddled up, did a little Yahoo! Pipes magic, and here we are: presenting Stage Two Consulting’s client news.

Here’s how we approached it, on a client-by-client basis, in no particular order (note that this only includes currently active clients and only those for whom we are doing outreach):

Bug Labs – the company has both a blog and a twitter feed. All blog posts end up in the twitter feed, and other miscellaneous news does as well. We chose to include the twitter feed only (although also considered doing both, and filtering out the duplicates).

DeviceVM – has a blog and issues press releases through PRWeb. We’ve included the blog feed, and also created a filter from PRWeb’s feed to find DeviceVM content.

TuneUp Media and Spleak – have no blog at present, so all news will come via PRWeb filters.

In addition to the PRWeb filters, we created Google News filters for each client. For each given filter, we added a prefix with the company name OR “Press Release”/”News item”, here’s a sample output:

Also, we’re including the Stage Two blog, but leaving out our personal blogs and Twitter feeds for now.

The process was fairly simple to accomplish using Yahoo! Pipes. We’ve never used it before, yet from start to finish took less than 45 minutes. It was pretty darn easy, well done Yahoo!

For most of next week you should expect a deluge of events, panels, conferences, unconferences, camps, meetups, mashups, foos, crunches, gigas, and memes all surrounding the Web 2.0 expo.  I’ll be taking part in a few activities, including a panel (hosted by Softech) on how to leverage social media for business (professionals, b2b, etc).  The panel is being moderated by my colleague William Gaultier (from e-Storm), and I’ll be joined by Karl Long (Nokia), Adam Metz (theMIX Agency), and Pankaj Parekh (Zmingo Inc).

The details:

Date:
Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Location:
San Rafael Corporate Center
750 Lindaro Street
San Rafael, CA

Agenda
6:30-7:15 Registration and Networking
7:15-7:20 Welcome and Upcoming Meetings
7:20-8:15 Panel Discussion
8:15-8:45 Audience Q&A

Registration Cost
This meeting is free to SofTECH members
Non-members pay $15 to pre-register, or $20 at the door. Register in Advance for Business Social Media- 4/23/2008

Should be an interesting discussion, as we have a variety of experts in the room, and we’ll probably each come at the various topics from different angles.  It’ll likely be my last opportunity to talk about how I don’t use Twitter, since it’s seeming rather inevitable that I’ll end up having to use it for something sooner or later.  Now now, the sky hasn’t fallen, dogs and cats are still not living together.  But twitter is no longer just a neat tool for telling strangers how cool you are while waiting in line to get a sandwich, and I can’t keep my head in the sand forever.

But at least I’ll have tonight, and probably this weekend…  Hope to see you next Wednesday!

While the primary goal of our blog is to talk about marketing, social media, public relations, strategies, outreach, etc, we’ve decided it’s also a good way to give updates when our clients have interesting news to share. This is one of those times.

Spleak is one of our new and interesting clients. They’ve created a new kind of content delivery platform that enables highly interactive and engaging communication and publishing, combining user generated content (UGC) with mainstream media content across instant messaging, social networking, texting, and web-based widgets. Their first product is called CelebSpleak, you can check it out here. Today they announced a strategic partnership with Hearst Digital Media, owners of Seventeen, CosmoGirl, Teen Magazine, and the eSpin network (you can see the press release here).

What’s interesting here is that Spleak has created this cool network that reaches into places that content publishers have a hard time accessing. Hearst has great publications and high quality content, and this partnership with Spleak makes it easy for them to feed that content into AIM, Facebook, MySpace, MSN Messenger, and via SMS. This partnership represents a cool merging of old school publishing with new school technology. And it further serves to prove Spleak’s model of hybrid publishing, where they combine the best of UGC with high quality, professional content.

For some insight about our outreach strategy, we decided rather than to blast out a release to hundreds/thousands of writers, we instead chose to approach a select list of press, bloggers, and technology/media influencers who we felt would be most interested in the story. Some were technology blogs, others were personal “influencer” blogs. We also contacted folks in the media and magazine publishing space – many of them were interested in what this hybrid publishing model means for the future of web and print publishing. Finally, we contacted several newspapers, including some owned by Hearst itself.

Coverage so far this morning includes Kristen Nicole at Mashable, Joanna Pettas from FOLIO, and Ellen Lee at the San Francisco Chronicle wrote on SF Gate. We’ll add to the list as more articles appear over the course of the day.

Throughout the day more stories have continued to pop up across the blogosphere.  Anastasia Goodstein at Ypulse mentioned the Spleak / Hearst partnership in her Tuesday April 15th Essentials.  Dave Cohn wrote a great post on his blog DigiDave about Shifts in Journalism, and highlighted Spleak’s partnership as a great example of that shifting.  And Kira Bindrim at Crain’s New York featured Spleak’s announcement in a summary piece about several new items of social media news.  Keep ‘em coming!

Big discussion today about the social media press release. Again. There’s some good reading over at MediaShift which you should check out (warning – it’s long) prior to going too far here. You should also see counterpoints from Duncan Riley and Mathew Ingram. The highlights of the MediaShift article, as a convenience for the lazier readers:

• Press releases are bad.
• Social Media Press Releases are good.
• Rationale is that all the extra info in a SMPR is more likely to get readers what they want.
• Journalists face a deluge of press releases.

Here’s how we look at it. The above summary is basically wrong (although I don’t have any real problem with the concept or use of SMPR, I just don’t believe they are inherently better than a traditional release). There’s nothing wrong with a press release, just like there’s nothing wrong with having a pile of bullets on your living room floor. The problem really comes when you give lots of people loaded weapons, and then don’t teach them well how to aim them. As a result, bullets fly everywhere and rarely hit their targets. It’s kinda like watching an old episode of the A-Team.

At Stage Two we aim to act extremely deliberately when it comes to press and outreach. For example, Bug Labs has issued exactly one release since inception. Releases are issued for purposeful, strategic reasons, not just because “it’s been two weeks, we need to issue a release!”. I’ve written about this before, but let’s reuse the bullets analogy.

If you are a PR rep (internal or external), instead about thinking of things like release rhythm and remaining in the journalists eyes all the time, pretend you have a single gun with a single clip. You can certainly choose to flip off the safety and pull the trigger at everything that moves, but odds are you aren’t going to hit much, and you’ll probably scare off your target (not to mention annoy the heck out of your neighbors) right around when you run out of ammo. Who’s going to give you a fresh clip with those kinds of results?

I should probably mention I’ve never even held a real gun, I just really think the marketing/ammunition analogy works so well. If press releases were treated as valuable communications tools by those who wielded them, I think we’d see a lot fewer complaints about the format and industry in general. It ain’t the release folks, it’s how they are used.