Stage Two's blog

I ran into an old friend not long ago, and as she palmed her 1G iPhone I asked her how she liked it. “I love it! she replied, “It’s like I’m in a relationship and it just gets better because Apple is always giving me updates!” It got me thinking. Too many companies (Apple included, with Leopard and MobileMe) are patching/fixing software instead of updating it to be more valuable to consumers.

The above Microsoft Update is an example of something most of us have grown so accustomed to that we hardly take the time read them anymore–I can’t remember the last time I read through one. One could also read this update as, “Everything you hold dear may be in jeopardy.” The point is Microsoft is a leviathan, they can get away with this stuff.  The little guys, the start-ups out there, cannot. Imagine you’re a financial monitoring site such as Mint.com and you issue a similar sounding alert asking users to update their passwords because of a flaw that (gulp) allows anyone to access their banking information. Users would flee faster than audiences did from Gigli.

Think of it like this: you take your car into the dealership for a routine tune-up and find out there’s been a recall. There are two ways for the manufacturer to position this recall; one makes you think your car is more road-ready than when you brought it in. The other implies a flaw in your car making you question its road-worthiness. Both are forms of maintenance, but the impression left with the customer is much different.

What impression are you giving your customers when you communicate product enhancements, patches, and updates? Believe it or not, something as simple as a product update or a bug fix is something that should be thought about from the marketing side, not just the technical side of the organization.  At Stage Two we believe that everything you do to your product has impact on your customers’ perception, and you never want to let that slip.

Exciting news for 12seconds today, they’re announcing their new public alpha. 12seconds is a video status platform for sharing moments from your life. Use a webcam or video-capable cell phone to record and share videos up to twelve seconds long. If you want an invitation to join the alpha, inquire here.

This was an instance where we felt a press release was unnecessary. As many people have discussed, the traditional press release is not the only way to communicate company news. I certainly agree with Brian Solis that “the press release is far from dead,” there are many uses for a well written and carefully thought-out press release. We use them often here at Stage Two Consulting. But some times (and some people) call for non-traditional means of communicating the news. Robert Scoble likes getting pitched on Facebook for instance. For 12seconds, we felt that a company blog post was an ideal medium for a company launch that fit well with the style and flavor of the company (which is totally bootstrapped).

There are several reasons behind this announcement:

1. The team wanted to formally announce themselves to the world
2. A number of new features were added to the site and service
3. They want to increase the size of the user community and test the scalability of their servers and infrastructure
4. They want to increase their visibility and work on fund raising
5. Using 12seconds is fun, and they want more people to experience the joy

It’s only 8:16 on the West Coast, but coverage has started:

• TechCrunch
• Webware
  
• CenterNetworks
• VentureBeat
• Mashable
• bub.blicio.us
• ReadWriteWeb
• LA Times

Lastly, how could we pitch the company if we weren’t users ourselves? Check out the Stage Two team on 12seconds:

• Adam
• Andrew
• David (who blogged about it on 1to10 and LIVEdigitally too)
  
• Ishmael
• Jeremy
• Jim
• Shaan

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.

Today I tried a new medium for pitching a story – a twelve second long video pitch. There’s continuous discussion about PR spam, and what’s the right way to pitch stories to bloggers and to press. Stowe Boyd explained his clear and unequivocal preference for being pitched via Twitter. This lead to a follow up post, and Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb also wrote a piece on twit-pitching.

I have pitched a few stories via Twitter, and in fact I was one of the 1st people to follow and post to the Twitter account called micropr, which I heard about from Brian Solis. I’ve pitched there numerous times, though I’ve never actually gotten a response (nor have we had success from #twitpitch or #pitch140). That said, I remain undaunted, and I truly do believe in the potential of new communication/social tools.

I have a story going out on the wire tomorrow morning at 9AM for Spleak Media Network (announcing some big new content partners – to give some perspective, their last content partnership announcement was with Hearst Digital Media).  If you want the news prior to embargo, please email/twitter me.  This morning, the first thing I did was login to my 12seconds.tv account (by the way, 12seconds.tv is nearing launch – stay tuned!), and record a couple of twelve second pitches. My first was terrible, so I canceled it. The second was a little better, take a look:

Spleak on 12seconds – take 1 on 12seconds.tv
Spleak on 12seconds – take 1 on 12seconds.tv

But still, it seems like there’s a dearth of information. How will someone make any kind of judgment call about whether it’s worth following up? So I tried a third take; my favorite so far:

Spleak, take: better on 12seconds.tv
Spleak, take: better on 12seconds.tv

I think this is an interesting tool for pitching stories. Considering the ongoing changes in communications and the media landscape, It’s important to explore various media and pitch avenues. While I agree with the folks at RWW that not everyone wants the standard email pitch, for many people it is still the best way to share news. But it’s part of my job to experiment with and try different mechanisms and tools for communicating both with clients and with press. If you have thoughts on video pitching in twelve seconds or less, I’d like to hear them. How were my attempts? What would you do differently?