SocialStartups.com

Innovation, Culture, and Social Media

Steve Rubel writes about how the financial success of some companies might be tied to their innovative culture, and he sees social media adoption as an example of that. Specifically, he cites Amazon’s use of Twitter to broadcast it’s Goldbox deals. Now if I remember right, it was my friend and Amazonian Jason Weill (@j2xl) who put together that Twitter bot. I don’t know for sure, but I think he did it because he wanted to and thought it would be valuable, not as the result of a series of deliberate and tedious corporate meetings where strategy and ROI was discussed and debated. And that’s fantastic. Reasonable risk-taking is a great part of any culture, and Amazon definitely supports that. 

Mark Hughes, the chief marketing guy for Half.com before it got bought by eBay and the author of Buzzmarketing, came to speak at DreamIt on Tuesday. His talk was surprisingly great, as I have a somewhat large distaste for marketing, and here’s why: he said no amount of marketing can make up for a bad product. In fact, he says he will refuse consulting contracts from companies who admit their product is not as good or better than the competitions. Sales will go down.

Jim Young, co-founder and former CEO of HotOrNot.com, came in to DreamIt to speak yesterday, and someone asked him, “How can you improve your viral coefficient?”. His response was perfect: Who cares? If you have a great product, people will talk about you. If not, all the people your “viral” product draws in will never come back.

We saw this at Etsy as well. Etsy had fantastic content (Ooooh, pretty pictures!) and a good Product. And people talked and blogged and linked to Etsy. Then came news media (like the NY Times) and eventually TV media (Martha Stewart, Good Morning America). We didn’t pay a PR firm or buy Google AdWords or even do SEO*. And you know what? 50% of Etsy’s traffic is referral traffic, 25% is from search engines, and 25% is direct. 

A lot of companies get distracted by marketing strategies, business development, advertising campaigns, or search engine optimization. If your CEO is by nature a marketer or biz dev or MBA, be careful. They will naturally want to do what they like, what they are good at, and what they have a fine tuned understanding of. Someone needs to remember: lipstick on a pig doesn’t change the pig.

*Now that Maria has taken over as CEO, she has gone and paid for those things.

 One of the guys in DreamIt has a Wave account. My thoughts:

• This is an incredible collaboration platform for teams.
• No way will this replace email or other existing forms of communication.
• The federated platform nature of it will make companies much more comfortable. You can store your sensitive documents on your own servers, not Google’s.
• The robots concept is neat, but not much more intuitive than IRC bots.
• It’s buggy as hell.

The people who should be worried the most is the 37Signals team. This has the potential to be a fantastic improvement over Basecamp, Campfire, Backpack, Highrise. It’s real-time collaboration, version controlled like a wiki, great support for multimedia with smooth drag and drop.

If you don’t use IRC or 37Signals-style group productivity software, move on, there’s nothing to see here.

 My friend Nick responded to my tweet about using Twitterific, Twitterfon, Tweetie, Tweetdeck, and now Birdfeed by asking which I liked the best. I responded:

Hard to say. I’ve used Twitterfon the most, as it has local caching and shows me # of mentions and DMs in the tabs (so I don’t needlessly check). But it’s slow to boot up and now has an annoying ad. Also only supports one account.

Tweetie has a great UI feel to it, supports multiple accounts, is fast, but no local caching, no notifications

Birdfeed is like Tweetie, but with local caching.

Tweetdeck supports groups, which is awesome, but I surprised myself by not really needing groups. I think how I use twitter on my phone – “snacking” – means I’d rather scan the whole stream than deal with groups. Also, it’s buggy and crashes (at least, v1.0 did).

I tried Twitterific once last year, hated the UI, and abandoned it.

My ideal app would:

• Support local caching, so I could read stored tweets while on the subway or plane.
• Have a little notification count that tells me when I have new mentions or DMs.
• Support multiple accounts
• Allow me to publish a status update to multiple accounts at once.

On a related note, I’m dying for a Postling iPhone app, but we gotta launch v1.0 first. Prioritize! Really, it’s probably #3 or #4 on my list (as of right now. By next week, who knows.)

 My friend Nick responded to my tweet about using Twitterific, Twitterfon, Tweetie, Tweetdeck, and now Birdfeed by asking which I liked the best. I responded:

Hard to say. I’ve used Twitterfon the most, as it has local caching and shows me # of mentions and DMs in the tabs (so I don’t needlessly check). But it’s slow to boot up and now has an annoying ad. Also only supports one account.

Tweetie has a great UI feel to it, supports multiple accounts, is fast, but no local caching, no notifications

Birdfeed is like Tweetie, but with local caching.

Tweetdeck supports groups, which is awesome, but I surprised myself by not really needing groups. I think how I use twitter on my phone – “snacking” – means I’d rather scan the whole stream than deal with groups. Also, it’s buggy and crashes (at least, v1.0 did).

I tried Twitterific once last year, hated the UI, and abandoned it.

My ideal app would:

• Support local caching, so I could read stored tweets while on the subway or plane.
• Have a little notification count that tells me when I have new mentions or DMs.
• Support multiple accounts
• Allow me to publish a status update to multiple accounts at once.

On a related note, I’m dying for a Postling iPhone app, but we gotta launch v1.0 first. Prioritize! Really, it’s probably #3 or #4 on my list (as of right now. By next week, who knows.)