I recently outlined why I’m sick of the ‘ROI in web 2.0′ discussion. To be specific, the debate as to whether there is one at all.

In that post, I gave examples of how naysayers reacted to social media tools in the past - and how they were left in the dust of those who experimented with these web 2.0 tools. So, where do these naysayers come from? Why is there a resistance to web 2.0? In this post I’ll explain how to sell social media to those people and/or your boss!

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This is a guest post by DJ Francis, founder and author of OnlineMarketerBlog.com

Your Responsibility

Seth Godin says it’s not because your boss is stupid. It’s not that your boss is ignorant of Facebook, but that they know the 30-second spot. Seth says that the best way of changing the world is to open the close-minded and you do that by presenting more data in a palatable way. It’s your job to teach your boss about web 2.0 tools.

Here are some suggestions for ways other companies have used social media tools. Consider how these could apply to your business. Be creative and don’t think about what you could do - think about what your customers want. Then determine which social media tools can help you deliver what they want.

Ways To Sell Social Media Tools To Your Boss

1. Keeping Up With The Joneses

Your boss doesn’t want to get left behind and it’s getting more likely that s/he’s seen some of this fancy social media stuff at work. Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson report that familiarity with and usage of social media within the business world (the Inc. 500 in this particular study) has nearly doubled in the past 12 months.

This means that your boss is likely primed for a conversation about using social media in your business. You just need to fit a web 2.0 tactics to your current business objectives. Your boss might just be looking for someone to lead the charge.

Barnes and Mattson report that “When queried on the importance of social media, 26% of the respondents [Inc. 500 members] in 2007 felt social media is ‘very important’ to their business and marketing strategy. That figure rose to 44% in approximately one year.”

2. Listening (Customer/Market Research)

Social media offers infinite market research, branding, and listening opportunities. I dare you to search for “[Your brand] sucks” and see what you find. Listening - a simple yet often over-looked aspect of human life - may be the Web 2.0 killer app and smart companies are catching on.

TNS/Cymfony found that “Revolutionaries” - companies that focused on listening rather than selling - “have a more sophisticated approach to creating strong relationships with consumers and as a result are gaining a competitive edge,” said Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer Jim Nail. (Bill Green at MakeTheLogoBigger concurs that social media leads to listening that eventually leads to monetization.)

When I heard AOL had bought Bebo earlier this year I cringed just thinking about the energetic startup in the clutches of a Web 1.0 holdover. From The Economist: “The non sequitur is to assume that the new service will be a revenue-generating business in its own right.” But the service could be amazingly valuable if marketers used it as a listening mechanism.

3. Responding

Social media gives marketers the chance to give quick feedback and break down unnecessary walls. Businesses are using Twitter to personalize a brand (@Zappos), quickly solve customer’s problems (@ComcastCares), and create more immersive interactive media experiences (@_S_A_R_A_H_ from the Sci Fi Channel’s Eureka).

And these comprise only one social media tool. Response ideas are endless considering the vast array of tools at your disposal.

And speaking of response, the best way to get that is…

4. Talking To Actual Customers

Some bosses - maybe yours - are so removed from their customers that they get a kick out of hearing from them. After all, if you spent 20 years getting your customer feedback from memos, you can imagine how disconcerting but exciting it would be to hear from, you know, a real human.

I recommend starting with positive feedback. Grab a sampling of social media feedback from your customers (just Google your company name or check Yelp.com, if nothing else). MarketingVox reports that reviews are usually positive - 87% of them, in fact. Print out a few and put them in front of your boss. Seeing glowing customer feedback will only get your boss more interested in hearing from customers.

In the up-coming book Secrets of Social Media Marketing, author Paul Gillan describes it this way: “Once they start taking direct feedback from customers, they tend to get addicted. Direct customer relations is like a drug.”

5. Set The Boss’ Sights Long-Term

When discussions of ROI come up, a time frame almost always comes up. “What will we get in the next quarter for this investment of time or resources?” “I want monthly reports on this expenditure.”

This discussion is worthwhile and statistics should be kept to track progress. However, you will have more success in social media if you set your boss’ expectations to cover a longer period of time. Engagement is a long-term project.

Valeria claims that engagement and impact on retention can take two years to measure. That’s not to say you won’t see results before then. Lewis Green talks over at MarketingProfs about the ROI his company received from their blog. But manage your boss’ expectations and keep them looking at the long-term goal.

BL Ochman put it succinctly in this interview:

“You need to have realistic expectations, and know that conversational marketing produces results over time. It is not a quick fix or a magic bullet. Instead, social media must be integrated into the overall marketing plan for the long haul. And over time, you can build traffic, sales and your customer/donor base with these new tools.”

So What?

In most instances, when marketers talk about measurement or ROI of social media, they are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. You can’t apply a Web 1.0 gestalt in a world where the audience cannot only respond, but can also generate more content than any single company.

Instead of measuring how well we are pushing our message onto potential customers, we should instead gauge our success on the number of conversations listened to, problems resolved, and useful suggestions received from the community of customers we already have.

Your challenge is bringing your boss around to this worldview. And it is a worldview, not just some notion. It changes the way you interact with the world, so it’s no small task. Likewise, it’s a big job, so you’d better get cracking right now.

Social Media Linked To Trust

Don’t forget that the reason to sell social media to your boss is so that you can begin to build a cache of trust with your customers. In truth, that trust is the real return on investment. The more they trust you, the more they will buy from you and respect your opinions.

Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, said in AdWeek that “The other risk is that in the zeal to track, marketers and agencies will lose sight of the need to trust that getting closer to customers is a worthy goal in and of itself.”

Marketers seem obsessed with assigning value to interactions on social media sites. But real success comes when you value the interaction itself.

Have you sold your boss on social media tools already? How did you accomplish that? Please leave suggestions in the comments section below. And if you haven’t already, subscribe, where I regularly blog on these topics.

DJ Francis is the founder and author of OnlineMarketerBlog.com - a business blog at the intersection of marketing, copywriting, and social media.

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OpenID adoption has been lopsided. Getting sites to offer OpenIDs has been relatively popular. Google, Yahoo!, MySpace, and countless others provide OpenID addresses for their users. Even AOL users have an OpenID. Far less popular? Allowing users to access their accounts on those services with an OpenID.

But JanRain is hoping to change that with the release of RPX, a new subscription-based service that simplifies implementing OpenID. RPX promises to result in more OpenID login opportunities on the Web - and a revenue stream for JanRain.

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JanRain has been involved in OpenID development since 2005. During that time, it has received a wealth feedback on OpenID implementations.

Earlier this year, that feedback motivated JanRain to simplify the usability of OpenID logins for users. Now, they’re turning that same “ease of use” attention to the sites that want to implement OpenID. The result of that effort? RPX, which provides plug-and-play OpenID logins for any site, delivered via a software as a service (SaaS) model.

“We’ve heard loud and clear that companies want to simplify the registration and sign-in process,” said Tore Steen, VP of Business Development at JanRain. “They definitely see the value of accepting OpenIDs, but there hasn’t been a clear path for adopting OpenID and other open authentication standards. With RPX, JanRain is providing that path with a simple SaaS implementation.”

According to JanRain, RPX makes accepting OpenID logins (and OAuth requests) as simple as subscribing and making a few code changes:

If your website can make HTTPS calls and can parse either XML or JSON, then it can use RPX. You can get RPX up and running in under a day.

For JanRain’s customers, RPX carries the benefits of lowering implementation and maintenance costs. Companies gain access to the technology they want while the onus of staying up-to-date on the latest code changes and dealing with other maintenance issues resides with JanRain.

For JanRain, however, the product solves a completely different issue: producing revenue. Offering OpenID services as SaaS, JanRain gains the ability to charge customers a subscription fee based on the number of OpenID logins in play. If the service takes off, so could JanRain.

To date, lack of use cases and general confusion about OpenID implementation techniques have been effective deterrents to more widespread OpenID adoption. It will be interesting to see if the introduction of JanRain’s solution - combining ease-of-use with a subscription model that companies understand - breaks that logjam.

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Admit it. You don’t always read the EULAs when you install software on your computer. You just click “I Agree.” The same goes for the web. Most of us don’t read the privacy policies that accompany our favorite web sites and services (myself included, apparently). But our failure to do so has some researchers suggesting that it’s time the Federal Government got involved. According to these researchers, today’s privacy policies are long and hard to read. Instead, they think it may be time for the FTC to step in and read the privacy policies for us.

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Might Be Time For The FTC, Says Researchers

A new report by Carnegie Mellon University, authored by Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor, states that online privacy policies take an average of 10 minutes to read. If every U.S. web user read the privacy policy at every site they went to, the time spent reading privacy policies would total 44.3 billion hours per year. Their recommendation? Regulation. They concluded that regulation might be necessary to “provide basic privacy protections.”

Of course, you can imagine a lot of companies are not happy over this proposal, specifically those that take advantage of long privacy policies which they know no one reads. Online advertisers are the worst for abusing the average user’s ignorance over how the internet works. They deploy behavioral targeting platforms that track users and their behavior across the net. Instructions for opting out of these programs may be found in the privacy policies, but few people take the time to read them and discover how to do so.

Cranor, who’s also a member of the EFF, thinks that people shouldn’t have to read these extensive privacy policies in order to protect themselves - the FTC should get involved and regulate if companies aren’t willing to improve the readability of these online documents.

Should Privacy Policies Be Regulated?

If a privacy policy is long, does that mean it fails? We’ve seen the privacy policies now sent in the mail to us from our credit card companies. They aren’t the most readable documents either, but they’re legal.

Privacy policies today only seem to be there for the hyper-aware online citizen for whom privacy is a major concern. The rest of us just hear about the breaches of trust when one of those folks takes the time to read the long and boring legalize and then warns the rest of us of their findings.

The problem with privacy policies isn’t just their length, though. Alissa Cooper, chief computer scientist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, argues that "It’s not only that they’re long, but they’re also complicated. They’re not really written for your average Internet user to understand them.”

The average internet user? You mean those people who access the internet for twice a day for a total of 20 hours per month? The ones that spend less than one minute per page? Something tells us they’re not going to read privacy policies no matter how clear and easy-to-understand they become.

Image Credits: Computer Eye, Mikey G. Ottowa; Cameras, Urbankudos

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YouTube is not exactly known for the depth of discourse in its comments. A few days ago, Randall Munroes’s popular web comic XKCD suggested that Google should add an audio preview for all comments, so that commenters might realize how inane some of their comments really are. Now, Google has implemented exactly this feature: audio previews for YouTube comments. While the XKCD comic recommended that commenters would have to listen to a comment before posting, however, these audio previews are entirely optional.

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The audio previews are actually quite impressive and can handle even relatively complex words well (think ‘autohagiography’ or ’schadenfreude’). You can try it out for yourself on any YouTube video.

This is clearly a project that Google had been working on before it released this fun, but relatively useless feature on YouTube. Right now, audio previews are restricted to the first 150 characters of a comment, but we envision that Google was working on this text-to-speech project to provide screen reader functionality for tools like Google Reader or Blogger.

It’s also noteworthy that Google can move this fast when it wants to add a feature just to be funny, while tools like GrandCentral and other acquisitions often lingering somewhere on a server in Mountain View for years.

Here is the comic that inspired this new ‘feature.’

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Mixx, the social news site that competes directly with Digg, just celebrated its first birthday by announcing that traffic to its site has grown rapidly over the last few months and that it now attracts more than 4 million unique visitors a month.

These numbers are even more impressive if you consider that Mixx only had about 1 million unique in May.

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This June, we criticized Mixx for apparently not being able to convert its partnerships with large sites like CNN, the New York Times, NPR, Slate, Reuters, and USAToday into real usage numbers.

Since then, Mixx has added a number of new features, including Mixx Communities, but most importantly, it seems the size of the Mixx community itself has reached a tipping point. In its anniversary blog post, Mixx diplomatically attributes its growth to all the “fabulous, intelligent and wonderful Mixxers,” but it is also clear that Mixx’s strategy of partnering with large content providers is finally starting to pay dividends for the company.

Our initial impression of Mixx was very positive and the new features the company has added since then have only solidified our opinion of Mixx as a very useful social news site for mainstream users.

At the same time, though, it is also worth pointing out that Digg now gets about 30 million unique visitors a month. Digg’s Kevin Rose has admitted, however, that the site needs to become more relevant to mainstream users if it wants to keep growing. As Mixx is already geared towards mainstream users, we think that is should be able to continue its rapid growth for the foreseeable future.

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Trapster is a new mobile application that lets you see and share the location of speed traps right on your mobile phone or GPS device. Once installed, the app uses a combination of your device’s internal GPS capabilities, geocoding techniques, and voice transcription to alert you in real-time to any reported speed traps in your area.

Of course we know we’re not supposed to be speeding in the first place, but a little heads up never hurt anyone. Besides, who can afford a ticket these days?

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I actually got to see Trapster in action at this year’s DEMO conference when I met with CEO Pete Tenereillo, a conference attendee. He had the app running on his iPhone at the time before it was made publicly available in the App Store. There was a genuine air of excitement as people crowded around him to get a better look at Trapster in action.

The app doesn’t just run on iPhones, though. It also runs on navigation devices like Garmin, TomTom, and Dash Express as well as on all sorts of mobile devices including Blackberry, Nokia s60 and n95, Windows Mobile, and other Java/J2ME devices. Although you may have heard about Trapster before, the iPhone application was only approved for inclusion in the iTunes App Store this week. It is now available for download to the iPhone.

How It Works

Using Trapster is easy. Speed traps are reported by the app’s community of users either by pressing a button on the phone or device to add a marker or by calling a toll-free number. When reporting a speed trap, you specify whether they are live police traps (where police are hiding with radar or laser guns), red light cameras, speed cameras, or just typical police hiding spots.

As you approach the reported traps, the app will alert you to upcoming hotspots by way of audio alerts or, optionally, via text messages. To see the exact location of the trap, just click on the trap icon on the screen.

You can also set up and join Trusted Groups via the Trapster web site. These groups are private speed trap sharing communities where traps can be shared either publicly or privately. In an area where there are a lot of Trapster users submitting numerous alerts, using a Trusted Group could cut down on the noise as you can configure the app to only alert you of traps that the other members in your group have reported. They could also be used by a small group of friends, co-workers, or family members to just share traps that are relevant to them and their daily commutes.

How Accurate Are The Traps?

The beauty of Trapster is that is goes beyond being a simple reporting system. Measuring the accuracy of the speed traps is a function that has also been crowd-sourced to the user community. When you report a trap, others can rate that trap which makes your “karma score” go up. Based on the accuracy of the user ratings, traps are color-coded as green, yellow, or red, with red being the most certain.

Live Police Speed Traps Never Get Stale

The live speed traps on the service never get stale, either. The live traps will only live in the system for one hour after the last corroboration unless someone rates it or the user who reported it chooses to delete it. So, for example, if you reported a particular trap and no one else reported it after you, the trap would disappear after an hour. If 10 minutes later a second person reported it, the trap would continue to live in the system for another hour past the time of the second report. The confidence of the trap would also increase to “2.” If, instead, a second user comes in behind you and puts in “I do not agree,” the trap disappears. 

Is This…Legal?

According to Trapster’s lawyers, the app is legal to use. Apparently, Apple must think so too since they’ve decided to allow it into their App Store. Some police even like the idea because it will get people to slow down. But really, for anyone who drives, it’s hard to not like an app like Trapster. No tickets, no insurance increases, no worries. 

See a demo of Trapster or download the app here.

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The media world is changing and its jobs are changing too. The rise of the blogger is an often-told story, but are the lucky few bloggers who do it for a living well paid? We did a survey to find out.

We asked 20 top-tier tech bloggers and social media consultants to tell us how much they get paid, by the post, by the hour or by the month - however their rates are set. Half of them told us, on the condition that we wouldn’t disclose who they were or where they worked.

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The end result is an anecdotal overview of what some of the top tech bloggers and social media consultants are making. These aren’t the founders of big blogs, these are their employees and people who get work writing, doing trainings or consulting for tech companies.

There are a handful of people in tech blogging that make even more than this but the vast majority of people who get paid to blog get paid far less. To be honest we have no idea what it’s like outside the Web 2.0 world. (Honestly, is it raining?) We hope that no one will be too angry with us if these numbers lead their employees to feel newly shortchanged and protest. These folks are at the top of their field.

Our methodology was to email people we trust to be honest and who trust us to keep their identities secret, and ask them to post anonymously their rates and the rates they can confirm of co-workers or employees they’ve overseen within the last year. We realized after performing the survey that we should have asked our respondents whether the current US economic downturn was impacting their rates but to be honest, it didn’t occur to us to ask. Maybe that tells you something, too.

We were told pay rates for per-post blogging jobs, full-time blog and social media jobs and for hourly consulting.

Payment Per Blog Post

Most people who are paid to blog are paid per post. What kinds of rates are our respondents seeing? The low end of the scale was per post for very short posts. Almost everyone else said they were paid per post. One person said they were paid per post! One respondent said they were paid 0 per item of long-form writing; bloggers often do other kinds of writing as well.

How does this work out long term? Based on our experience working for many different blogs, we believe that most per-post blogging gigs assume you’ll write an average of 3 blog posts in 4 hours. It often takes longer than that to write 3 posts but ambitious bloggers, like the ones we surveyed, know that at this stage you put in extra unpaid hours just to get ahead.

Let’s say these people are half-time pro-bloggers making per post, writing 3 posts per day. That’s per half-day, a little less than per hour, about 00 to 50 per month for half time work. Take two of those jobs at once, do it for a year, and you’ll make about k. Everyone’s got different arrangements, though, so it’s hard to take these kinds of annual projections too seriously.

The world is full of people who would be insanely jealous of people who make k a year blogging, if it was widely known that you could do that for a living. The biggest rewards aren’t the money, though, but the thrill of writing and the ability to dedicate time to the subject you love.

The truth is, very few people are able to get jobs like this. A small number of those who are so lucky take the next step, financially, and move into a full time position with a blog or go in-house doing social media work at a marketing agency or software company.

The Wages of the In-house/Full-Time Blogger

Career minded bloggers coming up through the ranks of the per-post writers sometimes land full time jobs writing, managing other part time bloggers and performing other social media activities like events planning, promotion, etc. Sometimes this work is done as an employee, sometimes as an extended “consulting” relationship. Some of them get work at blogs, others do similar work for marketing firms and software companies. The founders of the big tech blogs now spend most of their time running the businesses they started. These second-in-command type social media positions have a wide range of pay rates.

Our respondents reported annual pay rates ranging from k and k with benefits (!) up to k, k and k with bonuses. We’re tempted to say, based on the anonymously submitted but descriptive replies we got, that the closer to pure journalism our respondents were doing the lower their wages were. That’s not always the case, but social media management and working for marketing firms were clear indicators of higher end pay rates. That makes sense.

Based on our experience and conversations in the industry, we can say that all of the people doing this work full time are putting in at least 50 to 60 hour work weeks, often longer. That means most are making the equivalent of to dollars per hour. One factor not taken into consideration here is equity, the full time bloggers and in-house social media pros who are working for startups are hoping to get a nice payday in the unlikely event that their company is acquired.

There are certainly a handful of full time bloggers making six figures, as well. Robert Scoble famously noted that even after everything he did to humanize Microsoft, they never paid him 0k annually, so we presume he’s making more than that at Fast Company. He’s barely a blogger, but Walt Mossberg is rumored to be paid million per year. It’s safe to assume that some in the upper echelon of traditional media reporters now blogging for mainstream press are making more than anyone we surveyed as well.

Consulting - The Big Money

Social media consultants, expert practitioners with multiple years of success in the kinds of positions discussed above and in some cases in traditional marketing jobs, are the ones making the most money.

No one we surveyed named an hourly consulting rate below 0 per hour. 0 per hour was the most common rate named. Some listed monthly rates of k to k per engagement, which we assume probably means 20 to 40 hours per month.

Social media (or in many cases Search Engine Optimization) consulting is probably making a fair number of people six figures. What are these people doing? They are advising companies on how to set up and run blogs, how to reach out to and relate to bloggers, how to use Twitter (seriously) and how to make advanced use of RSS. The SEO work is probably the most technical, but degrees of technical challenge are all relative. A lot of this work is about communication skills.

It’s a new world online and people with experience succeeding in it are widely sought-after by businesses wanting to catch up fast. There’s a nearly bottomless need for and a strong demand for high-quality social media consulting - the big challenge is bridging the gap between living a Web 2.0 life and reaching out effectively to people.

We believe there are a fair number of snake-oil salespeople in the social media consulting field as well, but we didn’t survey any of those people.

Conclusion - This Part of the Economy Has Been Strong, if Small, So Far

We don’t want to claim that there are a lot of people making the kind of money discussed above for blogging or consulting. It’s still a very small sector. Between advertising and venture capital, revenues in this sector can’t be considered secure during a time of economic down turn.

There are far more people working in social media industries making less money than the people discussed above and the vast majority of participants don’t make any money at all in this economy. Making money isn’t really the point for most people, but there is an economy around social media and so some people are making money. We believe that this informal survey shows how much money some of the top people in the sector are making. Does this sound crazy to you? Compared to other professions does it seem like too little money? Far too much? Let us know what you think in comments below.

Illustration titled “Blogging Au Plein Air, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot” by Flickr user Mike Licht

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Shortcuts for commonly performed functions are beautiful things and we just found a great Firefox extension that’s going to save us a lot of time. It’s called UrlbarExt and it puts six little gray icons on the right side of your address bar. What do those buttons do? They perform in one click some common functions that would otherwise take several keystrokes.

Adam Pash over at Lifehacker unearthed this extension for a post about three as-yet unapproved (”experimental”) Firefox plug-ins. We didn’t find the other two Pash highlighted especially inspiring, but UrlbarExt rocks. Here’s what it does.

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• Copy the URL you’re on to the clip board. A whole lot faster than click, drag to highlight, right click, select “copy link to clipboard.” A lot faster.
• Create an instant TinyURL link in the address bar. Super fast and smooth. We do wish this button used our favorite URL shortening service, the semantic-web lovin’ Bit.ly. We also wish we didn’t have to click on the copy link to keyboard button after creating the TinyURL - what else are we going to do with that shortcut if not paste it somewhere?
• Perform a Google site: search inside the domain you’re on. Awesome, we do this all day long and this is a big time saver.
• Go up one level in a page’s URL, or double click to go to the root URL. How often do you find a page on a site through search or a link and want to visit the home page? You can usually click on the logo or a home link, but why mess around looking when you can just double click? We’re not sure how much we’ll use this one, but we’ll see.
• Add a tag. Ads tags to the local bookmarking in your browser. Seems kinda silly.
• Anonymous surfing. Reloads a page you’re on and subsequent pages, through a proxy server. Pretty cool idea. We’d like to know more details about which service this is using before we trust it too much.

We’re not able to access any settings options for this browser extension but the plug-in page indicates that future iterations will include more user control. It’s a simple tool, but simple is good and this will make many of the things we do every day on the web faster and easier - meaning that we can focus on something else.

You’ll have to create a Mozilla account in order to access UrlbarExt, because it’s still in the “experimental” section of the plug-in site - but we think it’s well worth it to do so.

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]]> http://www.4utoday.com/shave-keystrokes-off-your-day-with-urlbarext.html/feed http://www.4utoday.com/blurb-doesn%e2%80%99t-need-vc-lectures.html http://www.4utoday.com/blurb-doesn%e2%80%99t-need-vc-lectures.html#comments Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:16:46 +0000 admin http://www.4utoday.com/blurb-doesn%e2%80%99t-need-vc-lectures.html In our search for that rare beast - the profitable VC backed venture - I interviewed Eileen Gittins, the CEO of Blurb. Blurb does Print On Demand publishing for both consumer and professional markets. They compete with Lulu, which announced today that it is “laying off 24 workers at its North Carolina plant because of [...]]]>

In our search for that rare beast - the profitable VC backed venture - I interviewed Eileen Gittins, the CEO of Blurb. Blurb does Print On Demand publishing for both consumer and professional markets. They compete with Lulu, which announced today that it is “laying off 24 workers at its North Carolina plant because of the slowing economy”. That is 25% of their workforce and includes their President. Eileen and I both had the same reaction: “you mean you only just learned that hard times are coming?!”.

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Where Were The Alarm Bells When We Needed Them?

Seeing the Blogosphere afire with tales of crisis in start-up land, with emails going from the wise investors to their portfolio companies, makes me think: no duh! Driving with your eye only on the rear view mirror is not smart. I hate to say “I told you so” but some times I cannot help myself. We have been banging this drum for a year. Not that it took a genius to see that a downturn was coming, it was bleeding obvious! We followed up with perspective here and here. When the sky started to fall a few weeks ago we started to look on the positive side.

Of course companies should keep their costs as low as possible. That has been the obvious for centuries. So last week the advice was “spend like drunken sailors?”. Seriously, this kind of boom one day, gloom the next reminds me of the crazy behavior that got us into this mess and which, if you want a good laugh, you can watch here or embedded below. By the way, that video was from a year ago!

Blurb Is Just An Old Fashioned Story

The key points that came from Eileen Gittins don’t sound terribly interesting, except that in today’s world they are so unusual:

1. A “seasoned” management team. Like somebody at the helm who has sailed through a storm before.

2. Aligned with their VC. Some VCs push the “shoot for the moon at all costs” approach. Blurb’s backer, Canaan Partners, was aligned with the push to profitability before that was fashionable.

3. Willingness to make trade offs. Sure we all want profits asap. But in the real world there are decisions and trade-offs. These may involve deferring features, leaving a market until later, being more niche than generalist. It is almost always a growth vs profit trade-off (”revenues are vanity, profits are sanity”). The Blurb story is full of those. Now Blurb are in a position to do the things they delayed earlier, while their competition is retrenching.

4. Being contrarian to some degree. Blurb got funded in 2005. They had nothing to do with advertising and you would have to be a spinmeister to call Blurb “Web 2.0″. Blurb uses Internet technology (er, who doesn’t) to deliver a different value proposition to satisfy a demand that has not changed since Gutenberg. Canaan was clearly ready to be Real VC and back an unfashionable concept.

And, What About The Impact Of The Financial Crisis?

We ask that question to everybody. Eileen Gittins said “we watch the economy like a hawk, because that is what we have always done, it is in our DNA”. But so far, so good, they grew in September and the last quarter looks very strong. At least they don’t need to go to (more) VCs, who are spending all their time with their problem companies, to ask for more capital. With all the talk of revenue vs profits trade-offs, Blurb grew revenues this year around 3x - not shabby.

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]]> http://www.4utoday.com/blurb-doesn%e2%80%99t-need-vc-lectures.html/feed http://www.4utoday.com/hostonnet.html http://www.4utoday.com/hostonnet.html#comments Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:16:44 +0000 admin http://www.4utoday.com/hostonnet.html Has anyone here used or is using hostonnet? are there any problems with their Getting Support. Link to the original site ]]>

Has anyone here used or is using hostonnet? are there any problems with their Getting Support.

Link to the original site

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