In this podcast, John Doerr, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital, talk openly about themselves and their lives in venture capital. The keynote session was recorded live at the National Venture Capital Association May 2008 annual meeting. Doerr and Moritz are among the most successful venture capitalists practicing today. They are also both so competitive and try to have fun with each other in this interview but there is an underlying drive by both to be the most clever and most memorable.
Worldwide mobile content revenues are expected to surpass $44 billion by 2011, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that mobile entertainment and campaigns are growing annually by leaps and bounds, with marketers beginning to investigate mobile opportunities seriously. Marketing Voices spoke with the head of Phluant Mobile, David Breckling, to find out what the trends and challenges are in executing innovative mobile marketing campaigns.
I spoke with Emmanuel Brown of Nike who knows how to engage his customers. As director for digital and content for Nike’s Jordan brand, he knows his customers inside-and-out and has been widely successful launching innovative, digitally-driven programs such as Jordan Breakfast Club. Talking to him at the Forrester Marketing Forum in Los Angeles, I hears how he implemented these programs.
Isolating conversations around products, brands and issues is now possible through BuzzLogic’s new ad targeting feature. In my Marketing Voices product demo video podcast that I did with BuzzLogic CEO Rob Crumpler, he explains how his company can help marketers better determine who is driving online opinions.
When the service launched earlier this month, news coverage highlighted the potential value to marketers who have been searching for effective ways to participate in discussions and debates online in communities where some of their most passionate potential consumers are already sharing ideas.
The bottom line for BuzzLogic customers, according to CMO Bob Schettino in an interview with ClickZ, is that the social media universe can now be managed as one single channel, with the new ability to cut through the noise to the 10 or 20 most influential bloggers — a slight tweak on competitors’ offerings in that the focus is not necessarily on the most popular blogs, but specifically the most “influential.”
In my interview, CEO Crumpler says this conversation targeting ad system delivers more than two times the performance than what could be done just a few months ago. More coverage on the offering, as well as in-depth coverage on related stories, can be found at marketing news site Marketingvox.com.
What do you do if you are in a crisis communication mode given a blogger or blogggers who are criticizing you? I spoke with Charles Pizzo, a communications strategist about just this issue recently on Marketing Voices. He gives tips about what to do, and how to handle problems in a timely fashion.
I have always been intrigued by the idea that team blogs can work. For my podcast, Marketing Voices, I recently interviewed a PR manager for Southwest Airlines on a team blog that they produce. The results are impressive. They have more than 30 people blogging for Southwest and all of them are not great writers but the blog really makes people want to come to Southwest and fly that airline. Operations people, pilots and stewardesses all contribute to the blog. Pretty impressive.
Recently I spoke with Sharon Wienbar, Managing Director of Scale Venture Partners about what is cool about investing in social media or Web 3.0 today. She shared her insights with me mainly focusing on Facebook. This interview was done before the Facebook investment by Microsoft so the interview is a bit old (amazing as it was done in late October 2007 but the news changes daily–an understatement!)Sharon is also on Marketing Voices (www.marketingvoices.com)
Hypertargeting has always been of interest to me as a marketer. I recently interviewed Rex Briggs, CEO and founder of Marketing Evolution, on Marketing Voices who tells me how marketers can find the true fans of their brand, which is what hypertargeting is all about. Briggs says to use natural language and technology to find the core group of people who matter.
I recently joined Facebook at the suggestion of Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah will soon be joining Forrester from PodTech, where he’ll be covering Facebook as an analyst. He has been a big believer in the power of Facebook as a social networking/community site for some time. I am becoming more of a believer in it as well.
I was especially intrigued recently when I asked my 18-year-old son what pictures and memorabilia he would be taking to college, and he replied, “None. I have Facebook, that is all I need.” He continued, “Everyone I know and care about is on Facebook. All of the most important pictures I want and information I need is there.
“All my friends feel this way about Facebook, Mom.”
Wow. What power. To have an 18-year-old boy and his community think that all he needs is this one tool/place to go for information and social connection. No wonder many people are comparing Facebook’s power to that of Google’s. Nothing else that I know has captured my son’s loyalty (and obviously many of his friend’s, as well).
Despite enjoying Facebook and all it offers in social connections, I am not to that level of commitment to Facebook yet. I find it interesting and intriguing to play with as a social community development tool, but I do not yet feel like I have to read it daily to get my news about my friends and their friends.
I know that many of my colleagues and their professional contacts are registering on Facebook, but it seems that they do it more to “be on the site” than to necessarily “live” on the site. It does seem to be gathering momentum and stealing people from Linked In as the professionals community.
As a marketing professional for more than two decades, I have seen the value that strategic marketing brings to a company. I have worked with or at many great companies over my career: Technology: Apple Computer, Genentech, and Intel, Professional service firms: Goldman Sachs, Mayfield Fund, and Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, and Consumer companies: Levi Strauss, Hunt Wesson, and Sharper Image. With all of these companies, I have been involved in their strategic marketing at some point in their business development—creating and defining products and marketing plans and implementing more tactical marketing and communications programs.
I believe that there are many value points to marketing practiced strategically. They are:
1) Building a Consistent Advantageous Identity in the Marketplace
2) Building Leadership/Ownership in Specific Market Areas
3) Translating Leadership into Leverage for More Quality Deal Flow
4) Expanding Visibility/Broadening Market Reach
5) Enhancing Credibility of the Firm
6) Building Key Relationships within the “Circle of Influence”/Return on Investment
In the linked PDF file: The Value of Marketing, I have delved more into detail about strategic points 1-6 and also have two case studies that describe in more specific detail how my firm implemented these strategies. The work I describe in the case studies involves Mayfield, a leading venture firm for whom I was a marketing partner/consultant for more than 15 years, and Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, a law firm for whom I worked as a consultant for more than 9 years.
In future blog posts, I will get into more discussion about strategic marketing points 1-6.
I hope that readers will also help me further discuss these points.
