Who is the ideal social media audience for a startup?

I've been privileged to meet a lot of exciting startup people in my social media travels. One thing they - we - all seem to have in common is an excitement about the potential of social media, to create awareness quickly and inexpensively among a core community.

As part of this process, you start to interact with others in your community, and spend a lot of time and energy interacting. This can create some great search-friendly content, which is useful for marketing, but can it also be distracting?

Like any really useful question, the answer is "it depends". It depends if your core target audience, your community, are other entrepreneurs like yourself. In many cases, like PlanHQ or Pocketsmith, this is the case.

Of course it doesn't have to be an exact match. Entrepreneurs can be a subset or overlap with your larger audience, and they can help spread your message.

But a startup like BizChat has shown remarkable restraint, focusing on making the user experience easy, and avoiding the temptation to cram the site with as many widgets as possible. (Ahem)

It's a lesson Rowan Simpson points out very clearly, and the approach we tried to take with our current iteration of the iJump site, showing that we use the tools (as you can see from our Twitter updates) but not overwhelming or distracting people who visit.

What do you think? Where's the line between networking with like-minded individuals, and getting lost in the fishbowl?

Could these financial hard times give birth to the next Google?

So the bailout plan has been rejected. Listening to the news in the past weeks, I've heard the word "unprecedented" an unprecedented number of times. These are possibly very frightening times, the more frightening the more tied in you are to the financial status quo.

In The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Batelle, it tells of how Google stumbled upon the business model that would eventually make its fortune.

In late 1999/early 2000, Google was spending $500,000 a month on its smart staff, and had $20 million left in the bank. Income streams were ... well, hazy.

Ideologically opposed to tacky banner advertising, the founders sought a way to make money without compromising the user experience. We all know what they came up with, but at the time it was an experiment.

Plan B was to sign a banner advertising deal with DoubleClick - a sure thing in January 2000, but not four short months later, when the tech bubble burst. (Ironically, Google now owns Doubleclick!)

All of sudden, they had to make this new thing work. And if it hadn't been for the bubble bursting, Google may have ended up as just another traditional media company.

What innovative ideas are facing the do-or-die challenge of their lives this week? What plan B's just went under?

Need a reminder of those heady times? To celebrate their 10th birthday, Google has dragged their oldest index of the web out of storage ... see what you can find, and what you can't!

Well done Ponoko!

Umamiblog » Blog Archive » Hola from TechCrunch

Woohoo! Well done Ponoko for being part of TechCrunch. This is better than the Rugby World Cup!

Diversity drives innovation - notes from this week's diversity symposium

I had such a great time at Thursday's Diversity Symposium, where I was the guest (thanks very much) of the EEO Trust, who put the event on.

Keynote speaker was Frans Johansson, who's well-qualified to speak about diversity, being part Afro-American, part Cherokee and part Swedish. He's the author of the book The Medici Effect.

Without further ado, my notes from Frans' presentation:

• All new ideas are combinations of old ideas.
• Some combinations aren't that exciting; eg spider + web. Big deal.
• But what about spider + goat's milk? Strange, huh? Explore connections between the two and you actually get some of the material they make bulletproof vests out of.
• Far apart ideas and cultures look at the same things differently -> creativity -> innovation

Then he looked at the characteristics of organisations and teams who create great ideas:

• Corning Glass - the world's biggest glass provider - develops 4000 products a year; about 2% go to market.
• Prince has about 1000 unreleased songs in his vault - they're not good enough for him to release.
  
• You have to have lots of ideas to get the good ideas.
  
• The most innovative teams fail the most. (Interestingly, I was hearing much the same thing in ResearchTalk's interview on excellence while waiting for the train Thurs. morning!)
• Diverse teams generate more ideas.

Then he had a really cool example from the world of music: Tubular Bells.

• If you were a rock musician in the 70s and you wanted to do something different, how many variables do you have? There are about 2400 combinations with traditional rock band equipment, chords and vocal styles.
• And if you're a classical musician, you've got about 2400 different combinations to create a new piece of classical music.
• Or you could mash them together like Mike Oldfield, who made an album that stayed at number one for something like 15 weeks!

And now some facts and figures from the world of business:

• hp's quantum lab has 32 scientists from 13 different countries, and 13 disciplines. And no rules!
• Took them 2 years to get established and working together as a team - but once they'd figured out which language to speak (!) they got to be one of the most productive research labs in the USA.

Then a few pieces of advice, supported by examples:

• Find inspiration from fields and cultures other than your own - and dare to explore the connections.
  
• Redefine what you do.
• How to be number one: make a new category.
  
• Combine curiosity, no fear and ideas.
  
• Deliberately staff for innovation - different:
• experiences
• approaches
• concepts
• traditions
• Diversity by design.
• Example: L'Oreal - a French company with a British CEO - launched a hair product for African-American women (why didn't an American company do that?). They accidentally discovered a market of 1 billion people worldwide - all those women with African-origin hair, found in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe!
• Example: Frit-o-lay had an affinity group (self-formed group of people with something in common) of Hispanics who recommended a guacamole-flavoured chip. In its first year it earned $100 million. Ees nice!
• Ignite an explosion of ideas by selecting specific groups.
• Eg Volvo had a concept car designed by all-female engineers. It had - among other things - a side hatch to fill up your washer fluid, instead of having to open the bonnet (or hood). Good only for women? Nah, great for everyone. Diversity drives innovation.
• Intesect ideas from your global offices.
  
• Example Cummins makes generators but makes profit from service. Good in Europe and US but in China there's no infrastructure, so they had to make their generators better so they won't need servicing so much. Ended up thrashing the competition and changing the business model!

Then Frans showed us a graph which showed that homogenous teams get productive straight away, but plateau after a while. Meanwhile, diverse teams take a while to get going but go on to outperform homogenous teams.

"The single most important leadership quality is to move the [time to get productive] to the left (of the graph - in other words to get productive , faster)"

Man there's so much great stuff here, I'm going to have to do another post shortly. Time for tea now!

Oodlies - another great accidental business

Some of the best businesses just grow like penicillin, born out of passion and very little planning.

Oodlies is just such a business. They started as a form of relaxation for overworked designer Joi Murugavell, and found an audience of people captured by their ... oodliness!

Oodlies are accidental no more - there's an e-store, blog and even a buyer's FAQ.

Full disclosure: we know Joi and have worked with her in the past. This post (until now, anyway) was a sort of experiment in how important someone sounds if they're written about 'objectively' ... how impressive would it sound if we said "our friend Joi has this business"?

What's the future of music retail?

This is what happens when it rains in Auckland.

How to get attention for a spec script in Hollywood (or anywhere)

Before a movie is made, you have to create a movie in the heads of the studio people: script readers, producers, directors.

Until now, you could only do that through phone calls, meetings and the screenplay.

But now...

How's your competitiveness?

"the most important competition is between you and your own imagination"

Thomas Friedman, quoted in Idealog

A CEO asks, "What would you do in my shoes?"

If you're a member of Facebook (and if not, it's free and easy to sign up) you can sit in the CEO's chair of startup company Mahalo.com for a few minutes.

Jason Calacanis, former journalist and now serial entrepreneur, has started a discussion on Facebook to set the future direction of this nascent company.

A very smart move, and with social networking now ubiquitous it's fairly easy to get quality feedback from people all around the world. This is one of the things that the intarweb is really, really good at.