Tag Archive | "marketing"

Marketing, SEO, and Social Media: Week in Review

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I started linkrolling my bookmarks during during this weekend’s U.S. Open but soon became obsessed by Rocco and Tiger. So here’s my marketing, SEO, and social media links for last week.

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Viral Loops

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Virtuous Circles -- Ning -- Internet Viral Loops | Fast CompanyThis month’s Fast Company cover story is Ning’s Infinite Ambition. Ning is a social networking company founded by Marc Andreessen. The article discusses the concept of viral loops (The image on the right is a graphical representation of a compound viral loop).

Viral loops have emerged as perhaps the most significant business accelerant to hit Silicon Valley since the search engine. They power many of the icons of Web 2.0, including Google, PayPal, YouTube, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flickr. But don’t confuse a viral loop with viral advertising or videos such as Saturday Night Live’s “Lazy Sunday” or the Mentos-Diet Coke Bellagio fountain. Viral advertising can’t be replicated; by definition, a viral loop must be.

Andrew Chen further riffs on the viral loop:

“most advanced direct-marketing strategy being developed in the world right now.” And make no mistake: Viral expansion loops are about marketing, just not in the traditional sense. “Nothing can be truly viral unless it is good,” Wilson allows. “You can create a crappy application, build viral hooks in it, but if it’s bad, then nobody will follow the viral channel, and the company will go out of business.” But if you create something people really want, need, or merely enjoy, then your customers will grow your business for you. Users, just by using a product, are, in essence, offering a testimonial. “When your currency is ideas, people become emotionally attached,” Ning’s Bianchini says. “Then you become a public utility like Blogger, YouTube, or Facebook.”

Alex has some great information on his blog.

Now here’s what really got my attention:

The company calculates that each person signed up for a Ning group is worth, on average, 2 people, compounded daily: On day two, that individual brings in 4 group members and on day three, 8; within a week, she has brought in 128 people. Which is how Ning has been able to grow at a daily average of more than .4% and add 500 new groups a day, doubling roughly every 137 days. “It’s the power of compounding, predictable growth rates,” Bianchini says.

That’s a beautiful thing acquire a customer that recruits other users at a compound rate. Given the description of open source software as viral in nature it makes me wonder how we might get the I don’t know how to incorporate a viral loop into open source software . I am not sure exactly what method would work for systems management software like Zenoss but maybe the guys at OSS start-ups Ringside Networks and Appcelerator might have a clue…

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Socialized Links for April Fools Day, No Jokes

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Fear and Loathing in Open Source Marketing

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If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

Hunter S. Thompson

Drupal recently made a deal with the devils (venture capitalists) by virtue of the a $7 million investment in Acquia. Acquia owns the Drupal brand (or at least legally they do). Drupal lead (and Acquia co-founder) Dries Buytaert and the fine people at Acquia along with their backers are now at the crossroads faced by every vendor who sells free software… How do they supply a return on their investment without recommitting the sins of their proprietary software brethren or alienatingDrupal - Open Source CMS the community that so far has driven their success.  

Despite being the owner of the Drupal brand and employing the project lead Dries Buytaert, Acquia has to figure out how to balance their commercial concerns as well as the care and feeding of the vibrant Drupal community.  Luckily on the announcement of their funding Dries is saying all the right things:

However, a good number of Acquia people will be working 100% on Drupal, alongside the rest of the community. This is an important investment,because Acquia succeeds only if Drupal succeeds, and we’re going to do our part. We’ll contribute code, QA testing and other important things like user experience design, marketing, documentation, etc.

 

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Marketing Links 2.15.2007

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Some good stuff for the marketeer… 

How To Move CMOs Out Of Harm’s Way 

Since I typically don’t like traditional marketing types, they tend to believe their own hype. Apparently after 26 months their CEOs tend to stop believing it though.  

In a study of 100 leading consumer companies in June 2007, executive search firm Spencer Stuart reported that the average tenure of CEOs is 44 months but CMOs last only 26 months. In fact, 40 of 100 CMOs turned over in 2006 and 31 of 100 lost their jobs in 2007, noted Greg Welch, a practice leader in consumer goods at the Chicago-based search firm. 

I like this take on hiring them. If you are hiring a marketing professional especially one who will market a product is sold or distributed over the internet and they don’t have a blog, don’t hire them.

Even the hiring of CMOs needs to be overhauled. To select a CMO, most companies review traditional resumes and the person’s prior marketing experience. "I would refuse to accept a resume. Send me to their blog. point 13e to what they’ve accomplished on the Web. When you Google their name, what appears," Scott said.

Today the hard part is  

(Via David)

A Quick Introduction to Twitter for Bloggers

I was slow to take to "twittering" but I think it’s very useful now. Nice post from Chris Garret on how to use Twitter as a marketing tool. 

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About

Mark R. HinkleHello, my name is Mark Hinkle and I am technology enthusiast and executive for Zenoss Inc. the maker of the open source monitoring software, Zenoss Core. This is my personal blog and does not reflect the opinions of my employer. I am also on the advisory boards for open source collaboration software maker, MindTouch and SourceForge, the world's largest repository of open source software.  If you want to find out more you can read my bio

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