San Francisco Music Technology Conference

At the show, and have to say it’s great.

Flickr stream here. Active Twitter stream here.

Getting Social Media

I was on a panel at the Cornell Entrepreneur Network event yesterday, asked to speak on the marketing potential of social media to a (smart) group of “Web 2.0” neophytes. The assignment led to some reflection on my part, and the following (hopefully) insights:

1. People under 30 – the typical target for marketers interested in social media – don’t want online dialog for it’s own sake. Dialog is a means to multiple ends which they care about a great deal: Authenticity, Understanding, and Validation.
2. Because of this, you have to understand social networking as a user before you have a prayer of using it effectively as a marketer. Rather than spending your lunchtime listening to paper gurus, go create a blog yourself and see what happens.
3. After you’ve done that, don’t expect the world to beat a path to your door. Check where the people interested in what your interested in hang out today. Lurk quietly for a while, like you would wandering into a conversation at a cocktail party. Then try and make a worthwhile contribution.
4. If you really have something great to add, post it on your own blog with references to appropriate posts in more established blogs. This will create traffic, and begin to build your social networking equity.
5. Whenever possible, move the conversation to the real world. Blog away, but throw on some lipgloss once in a while and go shake some hands, will ya?

Did you attend the forum? Feel free to comment and post a link to your blog.

It’s Down to Two: Microsoft and Google

Great insight on implications of Microhoo! here from Jeff Rayport. Highlight:

The new online reality is that scale and features attract online users and the advertisers who want to reach them, and analytics—the tools that help sites target ads to users more effectively—build ad-pricing power and therefore margin. Scale is simply the traffic or number of unique visitors a site attracts. Features are the applications and services a particular Web site can deliver. In both cases, more is usually better. But analytics is an area that looks like art but is rapidly becoming science. It’s the way sites parse users’ profiles and click streams using behavioral targeting, predictive intelligence, and other database manipulations to boost ROI metrics for marketers spending advertising dollars online.

It’s Down to Two: Microsoft and Google

Target Marketing Changed Politics

My monthly column in Adotas is up, teaser:

No matter what your politics, these are interesting times in the realm of political marketing. After a decade-long footrace between the parties to out-execute each other in the realm of “microtargeting,” the technique is being painted as the root of all evil by progressives bent on putting the “United” back into the good ‘ol USA.

Tabling for a moment whether this shift is motivated by aspiration or resignation on the part of the Democrats, the strategy itself merits some reflection by commercial marketers.

Pretty pleased with it, actually, your comments welcome here or there.

Our Higher Moral Purpose

Between my first and second year of business school I was a strategic consultant at The Monitor Company in Cambridge. During that time Mark Fuller, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, was obsessed with an exercise to help the company define what he called its “higher moral purpose.”

“All truly great businesses serve a higher moral purpose than the need to create value for the shareholders,” he said, “and we need to find ours.”

This seemed a little pretentious to me at the time, but it stuck in my head for some reason, and as I’ve been a part of building subsequent businesses I’ve always taken the time to reflect on what thier higher moral purpose might be.

There’s an Italian saying that the only thing more true than truth is a story. The story in this video, Malcolm Gladwell’s TED speech, captures what I believe to be matchmine’s higher moral purpose:

A Cautionary Tale

Sometime a group of smart people come together, have a neat idea, work hard toward a common vision… and it doesn’t work. Such was the case with Convoq/Zingdom, shutting down after a five year adventure.

Chris Herot has a great post reflecting on lessons learned, invaluable for any current or aspiring entrepreneur. Highlight:

• Iterate in the marketplace, not the conference room. Agile is the only way to go.
• Just because you are using agile methods doesn’t mean you don’t have to plan. Write your stories before you begin an iteration, but don’t waste a lot of time on the details that aren’t needed until later.
• Don’t spend a lot of time and money naming the company until you have the product and positioning figured out.
• If you are depending on paid search to generate traffic then your marketing is broken.
• Raising too much money is almost as dangerous as raising too little – it sets high expectations which then drive high expenditures to deliver the results on time.
• If you want to do a consumer-facing product on the East Coast, stay engaged with the community in Silicon Valley. By the time you read about something in TechCrunch it’s too late.
• Remember the three stages of building a web property: 1. Attract, 2. Engage, 3. Monetize. Don’t skip a step.

Sage advice, IMHO. Think we’re delivering on these fronts, if you don’t, please let me know.

matchmine headlines GigaOm!

To be honest, I never imagined I’d be so excited for us to appear in somebody’s blog. If you’re going to be in one, though, this is the one.

My favorite bit:

What I like about matchmine is that it lines up my multidimensional taste profile (my MatchKey) with the multidimensional profile of a piece of content. For example, I like “The Princess Bride” because it combines comedy with romance and a bit of fantasy; matchmine can find other movies that have similarly specific profiles.

matchmine reminds me a bit of Pandora, which doesn’t use collaborative filtering but rather searches for music based on the characteristics of music you say you like. Pandora, however, doesn’t construct a personal profile of you to match to the music; it starts with music you specify.

matchmine can also match you to other people, by computing the similarity of your respective MatchKeys. That would be another path to find content you might like.

matchmine works across content types and services, effectively bypassing the compartmentalization of personalized recommendations. But it does so in a way that doesn’t compromise privacy, because you retain control of your MatchKey. Plus, when used to make recommendations, it’s not associated with any identifying data.

Wow. Totally get’s it. Get the whole post here:
matchmine: Made for the Multidimensional You – GigaOM

It’s a movement, baby. Resistance is futile…

Verizon Wireless Opens Up

Boy, as a long time mobile guy it’s hard to overstate the significance of the highest quality and most closed US wireless carrier deciding to open up access to their network in this way:

There is a lot of fine print, but the essence appears to be that Verizon will offer two flavors of service: its traditional bundle, which typically includes a subsidy for phone purchase and various other features, and “bring your own” device service, which will be open to any device that meets “minimum technical standards.”

Wow.

This is yet another giant leap in the direction of what we see as the “one network, many devices” inevitability. T-Mobile Wi-Fi, iPhone, Playstation 3 Web Browser, Android… all these and more point to a time in the not too distant future when users will plug into The Network by whatever means is convenient to them at the time, and expect to be able to acquire content of interest to them without needing to start from zero.

I’m more sure than ever that this will happen, and equally confident matchmine will play in important role in making it so.

Cult of the Amateur?

I was supposed to meet with Andrew Keen last week, and before we spoke Mr. Keen asked that I read his book. No problem, it’s hardly Shogun, and the subject matter is pretty interesting.

The essential idea: The democratization of creativity is harmful to our culture, our society, and our economy. In essence, Web 2.0 is evil. It’s elevating opinion at the expense of verified fact in our news, crippling the ability of real artists to survive economically, and seducing already self-obsessed westerners with the idea that their stories / pictures / video is extraordinary even when it’s crap.

Mr. Keen is a smart man, and nobody loves a contrarian like me. While I resisted much of what he had so say for a few chapters, in the end I must admit he makes some important points about the nature of news, art and self indulgence.

Then I saw Larry Lessig’s TED speech on copyright law, which is characteristically brilliant, and understood what bothered my about Mr. Keen’s point of view.

Lessig himself was mixed on the book, his thoughts are here.

Full disclosure: Mr. Keen blew me off, I have neither met Mr. Lessig, nor been assigned homework by him.

Privacy & matchmine

Lots going on right now at the intersection of facebook targeting capabilities and “do not track” initiative from Tacoda. Marta Kagan does a nice job expressing how many people feel about all this, including me.

The pressing question is what do do about it.

I see 3 strategies:

1. Do nothing. Accept that privacy is an illusion, or at least make the implicit decision that the risk isn’t really worth the hassle of something else to deal with in your life. It seems like most people under 30 are here, though it’s not clear whether that’s a generational or life-stage phenomenon.
2. Maintain your anonymity online. Don’t give out your e-mail address, turn on cookies, or download anything, which pretty much cripples your ability to get the stuff you want on the Internet. Might as well go off the grid, buy a Che t-shirt and make baskets.
3. Take control of your own online privacy. Take the active measures you can take today to manage your online identity (the private browsing feature on Safari and Sxipper are two of my faves.) And get behind emerging initiatives like ours that further empower individual people to take control of their own privacy and preference data.

This last one is the most attractive, but as is so often the case it also requires the most work.

The privacy case to do that work with respect to matchmine is pretty simple:

• Your MatchKey knows a lot about what you like but nothing about who you are. Yes, the download is a pain-in-the-ass (and it will be optional soon,) but as we get more and more partners on board it will enable you to get what you want in lots of places online without compromising your anonymity with so much as a user name.
• You decide – explicitly – who you want to share your key with and who you don’t.
• It gives advertisers – who when they’re not twisting their mustaches and tying maidens to train tracks are paying for all the free stuff online – just the information they really need to make sure their advertising is effective for them and relevant to you.

Wouldn’t that be cool? It’s a movement, baby. Get on board.