People tell me that I’m an optimist which I suppose (luckily) cannot be easily changed.  Or maybe to say that I’m an entrepreneur and see the opportunity in every challenge.  But that, as they say, is another story.

I was thinking about how to comment on the turn of the year and embarking on a fresh start to this great opportunity that presents itself to all of us here in 2009.  The fact is that now is a great time to start a company.  Resources are plentiful, space is cheap, and the competition is languishing.

I read a post from someone that sums this up really well so I’m presenting it here with full credit.

Snowball Effect: It’s Not that Bad by Stewart Alsop at Alsop Louie Partners.  His full blog can be found here.

During the whole stock market crash and credit crisis during the past two months, I’ve been reading Alice Schroeder’s biography of Warren Buffett. (It’s a big book and he’s still alive!) I highly recommend reading this book if you’re feeling lousy about the financial and economic crisis; you get an incredible perspective on the highs and lows in the U.S. economy over the past 60 years. I particularly enjoyed reading the following paragraph and remembering what it felt like to me, as a newly minted business editor trying to maintain some perspective in a rough time:

“By mid-1979, the stock market was sunk in gloom, and orders for stocks, Buffett said were placed “with an eyedropper.” The Dow had languished for a decade, bucking and stalling in snorts and gasps, like a beat-up car with a faulty carburetor. Its latest stall-out took back down to the familiar territory of the mid-800s. Gerald Ford’s replacement in Washington, Jimmy Carter, wore Mister Rogers sweaters to promote energy conservation; it backfired and he seemed to embody the United States’ impotence in dealing with Iran, where the Ayatollah Khomeini had deposed the Shah. The empress would no longer waltz around the dance floor at the Iranian Embassy. A partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant released radioactive material into the atmosphere; inflation galloped at double digits; and lines formed at the gas pumps. Business Week declared “The Death of Equities,” as if no one would ever buy stocks again. A mood of deep pessimism settled on the country.”

I remember the  Misery Index, which Jimmy Carter referred to often. It rose from 13% when he was elected to 22% by the time he lost to Ronald Reagan. Right now, it’s at around 11% depending on exactly when you take the measure of inflation and unemployment.

The way to do this is to comment back on people’s tweets (their expressions on Twitter).  You can do this privately or publicly.  For purposes of getting visibility – i.e. for your company - it’s best to do this publicly.

Here is how it works for the public aspect which uses the @username command.  Pasted below is the excerpt from the Twitter user guide.  You see a tweet (comment) from one of the people that you are following, and make an informed comment back to them using the @username function.

Fun Stuff: friends, favorites, and stats!

There’s more to Twitter than OFF and ON! Use the commands below to send private messages, mark updates as favorites, or even remind someone to update their Twitter if you’re wondering what they’re doing!

• @username + message
  directs a twitter at another person, and causes your twitter to save in their “replies” tab.
  Example: @meangrape I love that song too!

This creates a two way conversation!

 I believe there are only a few key decisions to make about virtual goods. These decisions cause problems that will challenge you for years, if you are lucky enough to be successful with your product. If you know what you’re getting into, you really don’t need to solve those problems in advance. As the size of your community and economy grows, you’ll be able to solve them as they arise, as long as you know what to look for…full post

IMVU is very succesful at leveraging virtual goods as a source of revenue.  They announced publicly that their revenue for virtual goods exceeds $1 million per MONTH.  This is a startup, folks!

I wonder why enterprises don’t make more use of virtual goods to engage their communities and even generate revenue?

Jeff Clavier, one of the best silicon valley early stage investors, had an observation that really put things in perspective.  He noted that the printing press marked a state change in communications and took 100 years for the benefits to play out.  The internet, another state change, is still in the early stages especially with regards to the openness and connectivity aspects.

Social media marketing is most effective when it is an integrated part of your overall marketing efforts.  But how do you jump into social media when you already some really effective classic marketing programs in play?  Here are a few ways you can babystep into the world of social media by leveraging the good stuff you already have.

1) Maintain a single consistent marketing strategy through classic and social media marketing.

Your goals, objectives and messages should be consistent across all of your marketing.  Sounds simple, but unless you define and enforce this it won’t happen. 

The good news here is that you don’t have to re-figure this all out just for social media.  It is really just taking your existing marketing platform and extending it.

2) Extend your reach – Reach out to your influencers in ways that they like to communicate. 

Use your existing marketing knowledge about who influences your product’s purchasing decisions, and use social media tools to create a discussion with them where they hang out. 

Some specific examples: Are your influencers kids?  Get on the social networks catering to the younger set.  IT buyers? Figure out which bloggers are influencing this community.  Mobile sales professionals?  Deliver content in a mobile enabled way, such as Twitter.

3) Invite your customers into the process.

While you are planning your next product, refining your messaging, or even launching a marketing campaign, figure out a way to get your customers involved whenever possible as early as possible.  When you do this they feel that they have been heard, feel more engaged and valued, which results in a tighter connection with your company and product. It also gives you the benefit of upfront input.  A product that people actually want? Described in a manner that speaks to them? Wonderful!  

A good way to on-ramp this customer involvement include online communities (public or private, even a public group on an existing social network).  You can even ask them to deliver their thoughts in video form by way of a contest  - “describe what our product means to you”.

4) Turn an online forum into a social media hub.

Make people feel more at home by adding profile information and allowing the posting of pictures (or pointers to a picture posting service like Flickr).

Recognize that you have to give to get.  Start a genuine conversation with your audience by having company employees contribute to the forums in their own words.  For example, instead of just asking for feature enhancements suggestions, tell them what direction you are headed and, if possible, the timing for these enhancements (without giving away too much info).  Then ask them their opinion. 

Try these few tips to help ease into a social media program that leverages your existing marketing – and you will soon be on your way!   

I attended Oracle Open World and have to say…good show!  I was pleased to see how Oracle has embraced the digital social landscape with everything from their approach at the conference to their applications development.  It was certainly cool at the conference to see comments from the community flying around on digital message boards throughout the venue.  And I have to say that I’m loving the new Oracle Social CRM applications!  They are a web 2.0 suite that empowers salespeople to be more effective and productive by leveraging the knowledge and experience of their broader community.  Sales Prospector, available now, gives insight into what to sell and who to sell it to based on the buying patterns of your customers with similar attributes.  Nice!  And of course the 3D graphics are great too (you can see a small image in the upper left here and a click takes you to their data sheet).   I can’t wait to see where Oracle goes with this.  It’s a natural fit on top of their semantic web strategy and could pull in some of the best aspects of social networks without the chore of having to develop directly on those platforms.

from ReadWriteWeb

I was talking to an experienced silicon valley CEO yesterday about the climate for startups in the enterprise 2.0 arena.  That got me to wondering what the latest blogophere sentiment was on this topic.  I’m repeating here a good post I found from Bernard Lunn on the ReadWriteWeb which was written last month.  And besides everyone loves a list.  Note I’m condensing this for space reasons and don’t at all mean to take any of it out of context.  You can see the full post here.

This post looks at Enterprise 2.0 from the point of view of the vendor, specifically startups.

1. Know how to deal with secrecy, structure and control needs. Social Media is about being open, loose, unstructured, informal and fun; no ties allowed. Enterprises are about secrecy, structure and control… If you threaten those, many forces within the enterprise will shut you out. It will be like the red blood cells attacking the foreign virus… So “make the trend your friend”, but beware of the very strong forces of opposition and deal positively with their legitimate needs.
2. Subscriptions are the best revenue you can get. Subscription revenue is more recession proof than advertising and more predictable than traditional enterprise software licensing. As long as you don’t mess up, you will have a low churn rate. Then your new subscriptions drive your revenue growth. 
3. It is much easier to get subscriptions from a business than from consumers. Sure we all love the idea of consumer subscriptions, the potential is enormous. But do this reality check. How many subscriptions do you pay for? …  
4. The other 80/20 rule. 80% of enterprise IT budgets just “keep the lights on”. Only 20% goes to new stuff… You have to attack the 80% to make it big.  
5. “Parallel replacement” is new. The old enterprise replacement market was based on capital expenditure write offs. If the client bought a $1m license fee over 5 years ago, you had a shot at selling another license fee for something “better, faster, cheaper”… So you need to show that you can run in parallel with the existing solution for a period until you are established enough to be a viable, safe replacement…To play this new parallel replacement game you need to a) offer a free entry point (the Freemium strategy) so you get traction with a low cost of sale and b) you need to show one very clear new value proposition that will tap into that 20% budget for new stuff.  
6. Have one simple new “blue ocean” value proposition that any business user can understand. You need this to access the 20% of budget going to new stuff…  
7. SaaS ++ means that Open Source is no longer a problem. Open Source has been great for buyers but it has also taken the entry level market away in most segments and that trend shows no sign of letting up. That is bad news for a startup looking to sell traditional software with a “better, faster, cheaper plus we try harder” replacement pitch… You need the “++” bit as well. That is likely to be something to do with viral, communications and network effects that create a growing user base and proprietary data coming from that base. That is the “magic sauce”.  
8. You need to become a very good financial and data modeler. You will need some old-fashioned face to face relationship selling to get large enterprises to understand your solution, so that the “powers that be” encourage adoption and do not seek to block it… Modeling the cost of subscriber acquisition using SEO, SEM, social networking, conversion from free to paid and inside telephone sales in a highly efficient funnel process that delivers the right $ per subscriber… Modeling the revenue growth with multiple what if variable assumptions. Modeling the ROI for your clients at various levels of adoption.  
9. Most external market size projections do not help your business plan. Forrester Research reports that Enterprise 2.0 will be a $4.6 billion market by 2013. That is not nearly granular enough for a real business plan…
10.  You need VC, they need you but there is a disconnect. Since 2000, most VC have sent any business plan with the word “enterprise” straight to the trash.
11. Vertical is not the same as Horizontal. Classic Web 2.0 services such as Delicious, YouTube and Skype are geared at mass markets. Anything that is more niche has tended to be called “vertical”. That is confusing. Vertical means a specific industry such as banking, healthcare or manufacturing and sub-sets of those industries…

If you have ever felt that too many technology sales pitches seem to be delivered by plastic people, you should watch this video from TIBCO – because they actually are Ken dolls!  TIBCO, which provides business integration and process management software, is generating awareness about their SOA solution with this You Tube video.   I’ve been tracking this one and they now have close to 80,000 views.  I love the video because they clearly didn’t blow the budget (helped by Ken dolls doing the talking instead of live actors) and still get their message across.  It is an increasing trend to have real businesses raising their visibility using new media techniques. 

Anyone seen other good videos that serve this purpose?