No, not the heavenly kind. I was recently invited to attend a local angel investment group meeting. It was an opportunity to meet local investors, listen to a few pitches from other entrepreneurs, and learn how the group operates. I gained some good insight and would suggest that anyone planning to seek angel investment for their endeavor find a way to attend a meeting informally before pitching your opportunity officially.
While I didn’t present, I did get to talk to several investors about Mediassembly and social media. You might think that social media, being a very hot topic these days, would naturally be of interest to investors hoping to ride the next big wave. But many waves crash into rocks. The investors I’ve met tend to be conservative and skeptical of anything that is overly hyped. They’re interested in finding companies that provide innovative, yet practical solutions to tangible problems. The clearer the problem, the easier it is for them to understand the opportunity.
Social media is indeed a phenomenal wave that is changing the way people interact with each other and the way businesses interact with customers. And it is tempting to lead into discussions with how social media is changing the world and citing amazing Facebook and Twitter statistics. But doing so will likely trigger the skeptic’s spidey sense and disengage your audience. Statistics are important, but only after you demonstrate that you’re offering a valuable solution to a clear and significant problem. Sell your solution, without incorporating the hype. The good news is there are plenty of problems to be solved with social media. You don’t need the hype.
While the context of this post is speaking to angel investors, I believe the advise is broadly applicable. It seems there are many agencies and social media champions inside organizations who encounter skepticism while proposing a social media strategy to senior management. I have found that a healthy skepticism is a trait common to both executives and angels. Angels are often retired executives, after all.
There have been several great posts and presentations recently that address the ROI of Social Media. Whether you’re talking to investors or executives, you should be well versed on the bottom-line impact of your solution and how ROI will be measured. This is a good place to start:
It’s been a busy week of announcements from cloud platform vendors. Amazon announced RDS, their MySQL-based relational data service, lower pricing on their EC2 compute service, new new higher memory and capacity EC2 instances. I see RDS as a welcome addition and very complimentary to Amazon’s SimpleDB service.
SimpleDB provides simplicity and infinite scalability (relatively), but that comes with some big compromises – the biggest being eventual consistency and no transactional integrity. Eventual consistency means data updates are not reflected immediately – they propagate over time (usually under 5 mins), which can create some unique challenges for transactional applications. Without transactional integrity, you can’t be guaranteed that a set of related updates are applied together, which creates the risk of data corruption.
RDS, on the other hand, provides all the advantages of a traditional relational database (MySQL, specifically), but comes with the cost of complexity and scalability. Amazon does reduce a significant amount of the complexity and scalability issues with RDS. They provide all the generic database administration services, including backups. And they provide the ability to scale both CPU and storage capacity with simple API calls. But there is a limit to how high an RDS instance can scale, at which point you have to manually resort to horizontal scaling techniques like clustering and partitioning – which are not automatically supported by RDS. While both RDS and SimpleDB have limitations, used together they offer a very powerful and flexible solution.
Meanwhile, in an email to Windows Azure CTP (Community Technology Preview) participants, Microsoft announced plans to transition Windows Azure from a CTP to a commercial offering by February 1st, 2010.
- At PDC 2009, on November 17th, 2009, a number of new features in Windows Azure will be made available for the first time. The CTP will remain open through December 31st, allowing you to experiment with the full feature platform and to give us any final feedback.
- Beginning January, 2010, new customers will have to sign up for an offer to access services on the Windows Azure platform. You’ll receive your first bill with a $0 balance, so you can see your exact usage while still enjoying free service.
- On February 1, 2010, we will begin charging customers for using the Windows Azure platform.
I’ve been surprised how long Microsoft held off the official release of the commercial Azure platform, meanwhile loosing market share to Amazon and others. I’ll be interested to see what is released in November and how their pricing compares to Amazon.
While I am involved heavily in business and marketing activity, I am a tech guy at heart. I often have to stop myself from being overly influenced by technical concerns and perspective. However, sometimes that perspective is broadly relevant. One example that has been on my mind recently is the issue of scale – how to design and extend a solution to support (sometimes massive) growth.
Social media marketing is about dialog, not monolog. Conversing, not broadcasting. It is about engaging at a personal level. That is probably the most common message shared and passionately propagated by social media marketing experts and practitioners. And I certainly believe it to be true. But the implications of this message make the software architect in me uneasy.
In software development, supporting multiple concurrent dialogs (user sessions, transactions, etc.) is the number one factor inhibiting scale. Content publishing sites (msn, cnn, nytimes) are relatively easy to scale because they don’t have to sustain ongoing dialogs with each reader. But transactional and dialog-centric sites (ecommerce, gaming, social media) are very difficult to scale. This is because each dialog requires memory, CPU cycles, and other finite resources. Twitter is the poster child for the scalability challenges that come with dialog-centric systems. They have had tremendous growth and success, but not without a lot of pain and frustration for both the company and the users.
I see a clear parallel between the scalability challenges faced in software and the challenges that will be faced by agencies and marketing organizations as they attempt to scale their social media marketing programs. Brand engagement, at a personal level, is critical to success. But brand representatives are finite and expensive resources. As social media usage continues to grow, along with consumer expectations of brand engagement, consumer demand for attention will exceed brands’ ability to connect at a personal level. Brands can’t add marketers as readily as they add servers. But without those personal connections, the social media marketing benefits are lost. If brands can’t scale their social media engagement and maintain personal connections, they will be perceived as using social media as a broadcasting medium – and end up fostering resentment, rather than affinity.
Fortunately, the consumers themselves are the solution. Marketing agencies and organizations should include brand ambassador programs as central components of their long-term social media strategies. The brand ambassador term seems to have many definitions and interpretations. So, in this context, I’ll define a brand ambassador as a customer/consumer who is an active advocate and has been given some kind of official recognition or endorsement from the brand – usually for their product knowledge and/or passion. They are part of an exclusive community that have a privileged relationship with the brand, and are recognized by other consumers for that relationship.
Again, I’m really a tech guy, so I’m sure a marketer could provide a much better definition. But, hopefully, I’m in the ballpark – at least in this context.
One of the best examples that I’ve personally experienced is the Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) program. Microsoft describes the program as follows:
Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real world expertise in offline and online technical communities. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community’s best and brightest, and they share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others.
The program is run by Microsoft’s Community Support Services group – not by marketing. While it was not conceived as an ambassador program, it very affectively solves the same problem of scaling customer engagement through social media. Through this program, Microsoft has extended its reach into hundreds of communities and discussion forums where customers are interacting with and supporting each other. MVP participants in these communities and forums are recognized and respected because of their relationship with Microsoft and are often sought out by other members. Some MVPs have more respect and credibility with customers than many Microsoft employees.
While the MVP program is not a marketing program, it is a fantastic case study for the power and effectiveness of using customers to represent a brand and scale social media engagement. I believe the fact that it is not simply a marketing initiative elevates the credibility of the program and the MVPs.
Sean O’Driscoll was the primary architect of this program. Since it pre-dates the social media term and social media marketing era, you could say he was doing social media before social media was cool. I had the pleasure of meeting him while working on Microsoft’s social media marketing platform for Windows & Windows Live. He has since left Microsoft and is now President of Ant’s Eye View, a community and social media marketing firm. Definitely a company worth following.
