Four One to One's with The Travelling Geeks

So following a rather rushed morning Q&A session - in which you'll be please do know I DID ask the Geeks a question (number 7 on my list, below. Arguably the least sarcastic) the dinner was marginaly more luxurious. I managed to speak with four of our vistiors, at least partially.

Howard Rheingold is, in fact, a sparkling gem of a man. Not only did he agree with me wholeheartedly that entrepreneurs are created, not born (against the preposterous beliefs of one of our hosts), but he then revealed to me the the future of everything: interactive paper. Though it took me several attempts to understand it (and I believe I may yet be in denial) I now believe wholeheartedly in interactive surfaces and I plan to preach them continuously.

Tom Foremsky (#28 on the list of the most influential people in Silicon valley) turns out to be the softest spoken genius this side of Michael Jackson (RIP). He's one of those rare people who listens and then explains, in a whisper, what you had been trying to say all along. Therapeutic.

I only met Renee Blodgett, the startup PR impresario, for a few minutes, but she implored me to check out www.weblogtheworld.com - which I'm doing in the other tab as I write this post.

Lastly I saw Robert Scoble and reminded him of our last meeting at Les Blogs in 2005. There was no particular reason for him to remember me (other than I hosted a huge party) - but bless him if he didn't feign recollection. Now that's what I call dedication.

8 Questions To Ask The Travelling Geeks

So I'm off to see the Travelling Geeks in Cambridge tomorrow - with a geeky dinner in the evening. I'm trying to think of questions they won't already have been asked on their travels, apart from the obvious ones (who's got the new iphone? Can I lick it? etc.). So far I've got:

1. Is social media the new Google? Discuss.
2. How long will it take Facebook to become "Twitter with apps"?
3. How long will it take Twitter to become the "open" Facebook?
   
4. Q: List the number of viable business models for Twitter. Divide them by one. Double it. Add one. Halve that number. Then minus one. What do you get? [A: the number of viable business models for Twitter]
   
5. Why did Rackspace loose their fanatacism? (That one's for Robert Scoble)
6. Is Google the new social media. Discuss.
7. When will social media overtake natural search as the primary source of referrals to websites and blogs?
8. Will you invest in my social, mobile, feed-aggregating, location-aware, OpenID-enabled, semantic iphone app? It's called Tweet fluckr?
   

Does anyone have any better questions? I promise I'll ask the best one.

Social Media Overtakes Google in Providing Referrals

In an interesting post, Thomas Baekdal describes how, in just 4 years, the source of the majority of referrals to his site (www.baekdal.com) has shifted from Google to social media sites, like Delicious, Twitter, Facebook and Stumbledupon. In 2005 only 2% of his referrals came from social media sites and 60% came from Google. Now he has 65% coming from social media sites and just 15% from Google.

He goes on to discuss the importance of the 'influence' of visitors, how much they interact (i.e how much value they generate) over the pure quantity of visitors to his site - which is something we're all starting to wake up to.

Cash Flow Is More Important Than Your Mother

I attended a talk by celebrated MIT Professor Ken Morse on Tueday. For anyone who's not familiar with Prof. Morse, he's an Indiana Jones-style lecturer who prowls menacingly among his audience, tapping unwary individuals on the back and asking them searching questions about business, entrepreneurialism, life and the universe. He's also rather wise and eminently likeable.

He was speaking about what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. First off he stressed the importance of being able to sell. Something we don't do well in the UK. He bemoaned the fact that business universities don't teach sales, blaming a perception of it being 'dirty' and 'beneath MBA students'. He had a point - although inbound marketing (as I endlessly repeat) is likely to diminished our reliance on sales.

The next nugget of advice to catch my attention was that, before you start a business in a particular market (or did he mean industry), you must know the market, know people in the market and be known in the market. Ken called these the three "K's". It sounds obvious, but so many entrepreneurs launch into completely new markets, unaware of the unknown unknowns that are lurking, ready to unseat them.

On the subject of technical people who start businesses, Ken Morse was unequivocal: they must be supported by non-technical people. Apparently 80% of companies managed entirely by technical staff fail and 80% of companies with a mixed management team succeed. Now that's something I'll mention around Cambridge :)

Finally, Ken slammed the desk next to me and demanded that the woman sitting there explain what CFIMITYM - written on the board - stood for. It was a heartstopping moment. Gamely she ventured a sensible possibility. "Not quite". Ken turned to face the room "It stands for Cash Flow Is More Important Than Your Mother!" He smiled and tapped his temple and muttered "just remember that".

There endeth the lesson.

Zero Budget Marketing for Startups

I was in Edinburgh on 3rd June, teaching part of a new School for Startups seminar entitled "Entrepreneurial Marketing: Zero-budget Marketing for Startups" to a room full of eager businessfolk and students. As it turns out, there's a lot more to marketing than you can digest in one day, so we had to leave out lots of material, but we still managed 8-hours of intensive, no-nonsense lessons, rules, tips and examples.

We started by explaining what marketing isn't (it's not sales and it's not product). Then we loitered for a while on brands ("the bit that's left in your brain when the product's gone") and mused on the futility of trying to build a brand on a shoestring (ain't gonna happen), before summing up marketing in one rule: MAKE IT REMARKABLE. Why? Because startups need free marketing and the best free marketing is when people talk about your products (aka word of mouth).

Then came my cameo... There's this little medium called the Internet which has greased the wheels of WOM to a hitherto unimaginable degree. Email, social networks and Twitter have levelled the playing field between big brands (them) and nobodies (that's us), so that good ideas, can now travel faster than Swine Flu in a water slide, regardless of your marketing spend. I advised our room full of startups to publish whatever they have (ideas, news, presentations, photos, videos, articles and tweets) wherever they can - and to optimise their content for SEO.

I also explained how there's no hiding in today's one-to-one connected world. Knowledge is power and the more you share it, the more powerful you become. Entrepreneurs who fail to participate in knowledge exchange - be it through a blog, groups, networks, forums or Twitter - are missing the biggest advantage the little guys have over the big guys. We all need to heed the words of Pulp's Jarvis Cocker when he advised his coterie of 'mis-shapes' (a perfect term for entrepreneurs) to "use the one thing we've got more of / and that's our minds!"

How Twitter Ranks in Google Search

SocialmediaBiz noticed something I've started seeing - which is that Twitter tweets are starting to appear at the top of Google's search results. The question is: how can a 140 character mini-post outrank a 1000 word blog post with links, subscribers, images and comments in terms of value? Perhaps Google has made a conscious decision to rank recency over substance - or perhaps (as I suspect) it's working on something more useful.

There's a growing area of social media monitoring concerned with tracking the trends of real-time media (such as Twitter), where value is ascribed not only to the substance or recency of the content, but to the number of followers/subscribers, the influence of these people and the number of times the content is linked to or re-tweeted (see my previous posts on Radian6 and Scoutlabs).

Google is doubtless amending it's algorythm to take these factors into consideration - so in a few months, "mitra bootstrapping" (the search SocialMediaBiz did) won't produce a tweet as the #1 result. Note: the post they referred to is now second on Google, with a blog post above it. Perhaps the future arrived while I was writing this post).

Inbound Marketing Techniques for Startups

Following on from my last post - I did a presentation for the National Consortium of University Entrepreneurs (NACUE) last weekend using the presntation below. It's all about inbound marketing - i.e. blogging, SEO and social media. Half of it's swiped shamelessly from HubSpot, the rest is (c) LBJ. There's no sound - but you'll get the idea ;)

Inbound Marketing for Startups

View more presentations from Luke Brynley-jones.