Its 1030 AM. I want to buy the Macbook Air. Can’t do it.

Tagged by Paul Dunay. My top 3 influences in my life:

1. My parents work ethic. I remember my dad would go into work even on days when he was down with fever (during those days that was considered “being a trooper”. Not sure now if others in the organization would accept). My mom’s known to work even in her sleep. Long hours were the norm for both of them. Since my dad would travel nearly 3-4 months of the year, Mom would help us with homework, schoolwork, etc.

2. John McCracken and Yuval Scarlat at Mercury. Probably the two best executives I have worked for / with in my career. Yuval’s the person I picked up the “top 3” items to focus on daily. John’s known as the person that just plain wont give up. Keep throwing obstacles his way and he will keep jumping through hoops to get where he needs to be.

3. Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford. I dont particularly know him or liked him all that much, but his speech was very inspiring. I try and read it every week.

Tagging Erik, Aaron and Jake.

Good interview with John Ridding of Financial Times at Portfolio.com. Excerpts:

“We’re seeing strong numbers both on the print side and online. On the
print side, I think we are certainly the only quality newspaper in the
U.K. and possibly the world that’s increasing circulation despite the
fact that we’ve put up prices in the U.K. and in many markets.”

“So I think that underscores three things: one, the loyalty of our
audience; two, the incredible news that’s going on around the world in
business and finance; and three, if it’s must-have information, people
will pay for it.”


“The thinking was there are these huge waves of audience and traffic
driven by what we think of as the wave machines of the internet —
aggregators, blogs, the Drudge Report, all of which drive huge amounts
of traffic. The problem is, when you put subscription walls around
content sites, these waves of traffic can just bounce back off them.”

“Quite often for traditional publishers, new technologies are seen as
a bit threat or challenge, and there are challenges resulting from it,
but I think the opportunities way outweigh the challenges. Video’s a
really good example. We’re now producing about 100 videos a month. Our
video downloads have doubled to about 30,000 per week. Editorially,
it’s fantastic because it gives you that immediacy.

From a commercial standpoint, meanwhile, it’s fantastic because you
can charge very premium rates, and it also gives us access to ad
budgets that we never had access to. People talk about the threat to
print advertising, and how it’s a shrinking pie and we’re all fighting
like wildcats for our share of it, which is true, but people forget
that new budgets are being opened to us because of new technology, so
we can go after TV budgets and video budgets that we couldn’t before.
So it’s important of itself, video, but it’s symbolically also very
important as an illustration of the kind of opportunities we wouldn’t
have had five years ago.”

This article is prompted by a good piece at SEMPO on SEM Salary levels.

If you are a community professional (Community Manager, Evangelist, etc.) there are several skills you need to be good at. Some (but not a comprehensive list) of related disciplines you need to be aware (In my experience you dont have to be an expert at these things) of include (not in any particular order, but bold indicates more important):

1. Technology: Web Design, Usability, etc.
2. Librarian: Content Architecture, Taxonomy, etc.
3. Social Media: Digg, Blogs, etc.
4. Social Networking: Facebook, Bebo, etc.
5. Customer service: Support, Issue resolution, etc.
6. Marketing: Web Marketing, SEO, etc.
7. Business: Your company, its products, its customers, competition etc.

So how much do Community Managers make? My (not formal or comprehensive, but good sample size) analysis of talking to about 33 individuals with those titles, indicates, your range is from $90,000 to $150,000. Why the wide range and what gets someone more than less?

1. How critical is the your community to the business? If you
are a ‘community driven” provider such as many Web2.0 companies, you
get paid better.
2. Experience on the job: How long have you been at it? Longer, means more money is what I gathered.
3. How big (# of participants) your community is: Not an obvious one, but larger is has not always been paying more.
4. Location: Its pretty clear that the coasts (SF, NY, specifically) pay MUCH better than middle America
5. Justification: How well are you and the team able to justify your position / value the community is providing back in real ROI terms to the company.

Please let me know if I am in the ball park. I got my research based on email discussions alone so I cannot attribute names.

Hat tip.

Shara Karasic has a good and extensive list of online community resources. Took me some time to find her – wonder why?

For the last few days and before my vacation I ended up spending 2-3 hours daily (which is a lot I agree) on research (on the web). Some might call it “wasting time”.

There are 3 different topics I am researching currently:
1. Healthcare communities
2. All things viral – viral adoption, viral marketing etc.
3. Online Retail communities, retail adoption.

Here are somethings I am looking to get answers for:
1. Overview of the space
2. Which are the key communities
3. What are their strategies
4. Who are the key players (Names, contacts, etc.)
5. How to put these items in a context that is easy to understand
6. Relationships (or lack of) between the players
etc.

The output of this research is a series of blog posts / articles and I intended to make them available in multiple formats – presentations, images etc.

Here are the tools of the trade I am using:
1. Delicious for bookmarking
2. Google Notebook (Firefox plugin) for taking notes
3. FreeMind for mindmap (I have tried mindmeister, but for some reason dont like it)
4. Zoho for documents and spreadsheets. I also tried Google docs (We have Google apps for the enterprise), but the lack of offline support pretty much makes it difficult to use
5. Twitter for quick questions, polling etc.
6. Google Reader (since some items are blog posts that I have starred or shared) over the last year.

Here is what I am using even after trying out all these items.
1. Google Notebook: Collecting, marking and collating is a breeze with Google notebook. If you dont need to share your links with everyone else as part of the research, there’s nothing to beat this. Why? Markup is easy, the note book is a small extension on the bottom right corner of my web browser. This beats delicious any day (again, I assume you dont have to share with anyone else).

What’s missing: 1. Offline access (I sound like a broken record), but I move around a lot and in many places there’s no Internet access (or I am too cheap to pay $14.95 a day for it). 2. Easy way to export this into Mindmap software so I can create maps out of it. If each notebook entry could be an object that I can then easily move it into FreeMind and manipulate it right there. If Google docs and spreadsheet did have offline access AND were easily integrated with Notepad, I think this would be the ideal scenario and I’d switch to Google apps.

2. Zoho for documenting and collating. By far the best online productivity suite by a mile. As I mentioned we have Google Apps for our domain but most of our folks are using Zoho. Since some of my team is in India, where DSL speeds are still 500Kbps, offline access is key. Zoho is absolutely awesome for that. Its also very simple to use.

What’s missing: 1. Documenting contacts is a pain. I want a contact object in Writer so I can collect Name, Email, blog / website and Phone number. Just putting it as a text makes it difficult to put it into my address book. 2. Some small features that are what I think most people call the 80% (least used) are ones that I use a lot. E.g. Delete cells (not all items in a row, or all items in a column) within a sheet. I am torn on this since I value the 20% functionality which is the most important, but not being able to do certain things and having to find other ways to do them is a pain.

3. FreeMind. If you have not tried MindMapping, (while doing research) you absolutely need to give it a whirl. It helps you put a lot of things in a simple context. FreeMind as the name indicates is opensource and very easy to use.

What’s missing: 1. Easy way to create the maps you create into spreadsheets, documents etc. The export capability is absolutely needed since most people dont have mindmapping software and PDF export does not allow you to edit. 2. Importing objects from other documents, notepads, etc.

Be sure to check out Spatially Relevant’s Lazy Blogger’s way to efficiently manage content for an alternative set of ways.

Back from Hawaii and Carribean after a long trip, I noticed I have several more FTCLTL on this blog. Why?

1. Topic variation: Most topics unrelated to Communities are getting the comments.

2. New year’s resolution: Four (4) people mentioned to me that ONE of their new year’s resolutions was to comment more on other blogs. That something I have never heard before.

3. Topics are worth commenting. This is a new one

Anyway I notice that if you want to get more comments on your blog, then make more friends (personal connections). That is unless you are a A-lister.

Off for vacation, 10 days of beach fun.

 

The WSJ has a good article on the “ new VC” model. In a nutshell, since it takes a lot less to get a startup to traction now versus late 90’s it has spawned a new age of VC’. Since I started and sold 2 companies during the “bubble of 90’s era” I can give you some perspective as to what’s cheaper and why is it a lot less expensive. The number 1 cost in any software / Internet startup is people (initially until you get traction). Another big area of cost is infrastructure and G&A etc.

1. Lower technology operations costs: This is by far the biggest cost that’s been removed. At Interfinity, (which built order management systems for large companies), we had to hire 5 people to do system administration, database administration, monitoring and SLA management. Today with Amazon web services most companies have 1 (if at all). Besides you dont need to spend a few hundred thousand on hardware (Sun, Cisco, DELL, Compaq) any more. The cloud makes it a lot less expensive and since its not an upfront investment (pay-as-you-go) you can try stuff out cheaply.

2. Lower G&A costs: Today’s business has the same number of people but 80% less costs of telecom (all employees at my previous startup had Skype), free email (Google Applications) and an extremely cheap laptop ($1099) minus Windows Office (saving $700 almost per employee). Overhead costs the way I calculated it were close to $2100 LESS per employee per year.

3. Lower Marketing & business development costs: I had 2 people doing marketing and building relationships (yes I admit my company had a few Barney relationships myself). If I were doing it again I would rather be a consumer startup and have a facebook application to get the word out virally. The marketing costs for an enterprise startup (those that build software and solutions for large companies) have not significantly reduced but consumer startups costs have dramatically gone down.

4. Lower development costs*: I have heard of several of my peers outsourcing development to Romania, Prague, India and other places. In the valley its still very difficult to hire good, talented engineers and they still cost a lot. I am not sure I would do the outsourcing for version 1 or 2, but to scale the company beyond the initial few developers the costs of adding developers has reduced on average by 2/3rds.

On average if you add all these up, you are looking at building a startup to momentum costs lower by 60-80%

No wonder there are so many startups being started daily.

Lois Kelly talks about 10 ways to overcome the boss’ objections to social marketing. Most of the items are a good starting point if one of your 2008 goals is to engage with your customers by leveraging social media. There’s one point that I disagree with though:

“Hint: a company blog is usually a bad first foray into social marketing.”

As part of my previous role I was VP of Marketing for Inovis, where the blog was our first foray into social marketing. Why?

1. Easiest way to share relevant and useful industry information in a single place without flooding them with email daily. Since we could get many people within the company engaged with the blog you have multiple perspectives and opinions, which adds to the mix and makes the conversation diverse, yet relevant.

2. Customers appreciated the ability to comment and add to the conversation on specific topics that were of interest to them. Nothing drives more customers away than seeing a discussion board or forum without many people there already. Couple of customers mentioned they felt more connected to the company after we started blogging.

3. Quickest way to join the discussion. There are several other bloggers already talking about topics that are of interest to your company, customers and partners – the blog is usually the easiest way to be heard and the starting point of least friction.

Are there downsides? Yes. We did get some feedback from customers when the “blog agenda” was starting to border on self promotion than (industry) information dissemination and that was the best lesson we learned.