Startup Revolution

When we read about content marketing successes, we so often hear stories from glamorous industries with substantial budgets, but YNAB is not one of these stories. In fact, it couldn’t be farther from that reality. It is however, a success story of David vs Goliath proportions, building a thriving community of users in a highly

Please Note: Waitlist Thanks to our friends at FedEx Curagami’s agency business, our incubation lab where we invest in customers and they invest in us, is currently CLOSED. With 4 active clients we have no room at the Inn. This doesn’t mean we can’t help. We have friends in every aspect of online marketing. Friends …

Added Zillow-ification of Content to Asking Key Ecommerce Questions Haiku Deck: http://shar.es/1gcmvT

The slide shares a common problem. Regional industries from banking to real estate have feedback loops that reinforce their regional-ness. They are big fish in small ponds.

Along comes startup entrepreneurs who understand the "socket layers" of information architecture in a platform world. They create a platform, roll up the regional content, tag, filter and package information that WAS free but held in a thousand places and SELL the package back to the proprietary and once powerful big fish in their small pond.

Google's only "boundary" is the web their only VOTE inbound links and the social and search clout earned. Google thinks and acts differently. Google fishes the world's oceans and will think about fishing on Mars should such a possibility present itself.

Information is free doesn't mean what you think. Information is free means information is boundless and so able to be formed and reformed in an infinite variety of ways. The power distribution of everything is something Google and their roll up students know and regional once powerful big fish learn the hard way.

How do I know so much about this? Some of my best friends are roll-up artists capable of hiding the pea or the red queen in ways so clever and adroit those paying for their information don't even seem to realize or know how badly they've just been zillow-ized :).

@Kelly Hungerfordand @Ally Greermay be the best community managers on the planet. We included our favorite storyteller / teacher ( @Dr. Karen Dietz since online communities will become more and more about stories (yours and THEIRS where theirs = customers and brand advocates).

Wiki-ization of Marketing: Moving From Brands To Communities
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As digital marketing becomes more about communities and less about control Wiki-like meritocracy is taking over.
http://shar.es/1nMGyS

Invisible Giant: Why the new SEO Is So Hard To See
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The new SEO is being obscured by the social / mobile web, Google changes and the rapidly changing nature of content marketing & curation.
http://shar.es/1nM6nl

Tomorrow's Ecommerce Today
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Is it possible to design tomorrow's ecommerce website today? Yes
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Never Ending Battle Truth, Justice & American Way
Tough "Dog Days" of summer for "Super Hero" marketing tactics. Here is a list of the dead and dying tactics:

SMB Marketing Tactics Costing More, Getting Less:

* Yellow Pages (near death). 
* Print ads (near death).

* Val-u-pak coupons (near death).

* Coupons of any kind (losing relevance with smartphone users)..

* Groupons (blows brands up almost beyond repair).
* Email marketing (sick due to social / mobile web). 
* Social Media Marketing (sick and getting sicker fast). 
* Content Marketing.(content shock sick).

* Ecommerce (too many stores, same offerings).
* PPC (paying more to get less). 
* Retargeting (cat out of bag, so sick efficacy declining).
* Video Marketing (steep learning curve, expensive). 
* Viral Marketing (everyone has that cold now & hit or miss). 
* Cause Marketing (not as unique as once was & live or die with partner).

* Celebrity Marketing (expensive and live or die with branded celeb).

* SEO (don't even get us started, all but gone, baby, gone). 

Many of these "SMB" tactics are in a startup's launch plan too. Good luck with that. Startups have to double down on asynchronous tactics since their money is tight and they have little or no brand awareness yet.

Favorite startup asynchronous tactics of ours include:

* OPN (tap Other People's Networks).
* OPM (tap Other People's Money via crowdfunding).
* Crowdfunding.
* Friends-of-Friends marketing.
* Community (start handing of the keys to your content early).
* Partnerships.
* OPC (Other People's Content via content curation with attribution(.
* Video Marketing (learning curve and expense scares most away).
* Events.
* Training.
* Contests & Games.

That last bullet can be especially powerful for startups. Remember to create tools needed to empower advocates, contributors and Sherpas. Make it easy to help you by providing graphical tools, listening and curating content into a social space (curation is a form of social reward).  

Our Startrup Factory funded startup Curagami, a content marketing tool for merchants and content marketers who "get it", lauched into "Friends Beta" yesterday & we need your help.

We need help teasing out the good stuff and toss the trash. As any startup learns problems multiple. Easy to solve the problem for all the right reasons. Together we can create tools needed by merchants and publishers to KNOW what content matters to who and why.

LESS STRESSFUL is our goal after spending years gambling with millions we want to provide a MAP merchants and content marketers can use to enjoy the journey. Hope you will join our journey and visit our landing page at:
http://www.curagami.com/friends-beta/

We are emotional people on a spiritual journey. Why is logic the most common approach to online selling? 5 Tips so your digital marketing makes less sense.

Startups BELIEVE in the widget. Talk to any Venture Capitalists and they will tell you they invest in teams not ideas. Ideas change. Teams capable of making the many pivots any new idea needs are worth their weight in gold.

Go to 100 startup websites and teams, if they are there, are pushed to the background as the WIDGET takes center stage. This is because we believe the way to "make a sale:" is to use logic.

Logic is tyranny when what we seek is emotional connection . This post shares 5 tips to avoid logic's tyranny:

* Listen More.

* Control Less, Collaborate More.

* As community forms listen and curate.

* Empower your advocates and Sherpas.

* MOVEMENTS not campaigns.

Startups need to forget the widget and remember we are spiritual beings having a human experience not the other way around.

Lunch With Smart Dogs at Triangle Startup Factory
Kip Frey (www.linkedin.com/pub/kip-frey/36/b09/384 pictured in middle above) is a smart entrepreneur who one might say has "gone to the dogs". Kip spoke at Free Lunch Friday at +Triangle StartUp Factory today about Dognition (https://www.dognition.com/ ).

Dognition is a Myers/Briggs personality test for dogs. During an hour long fascinating conversation Kip made several points we've heard consistently from Chris and Dave at TSF such as:

* Ideas that "seem true" create their own momentum.
* Look for ideas that "create a new category".
* Ideas with great partnership hooks work best since partners help create scale with OPL (Other Poeple's Lists) and OPC (Other People's Content).

Dognition is a cool idea since we humans are always anthropomorphizing our animals. Now you can do a test AT HOME with your dog to figure out which one of 9 classifications your dog's personality falls within. You can compare your dog to dogs in your area, across the country or possibly the world (soon Kip mentioned they are already speaking to interested parties in China).

I found Kip and Dognition's #brandingstrategy fascinating. Kip and the team at Dognition spent a year working on the #DIY version of their test. They needed enough data shared by "citizen scientists" after taking their test that the hard work created in the lab held up even in the DIY home version.

"I think people are more interested in their dogs than in their DNA," Kip said at one point and I agree. There are 70M dog owning families in America (so one in three roughly) and each year brings 7M new dogs to market.

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Branding            vs                   Scale

The tension between creating a brand with meaning and the scale necessary to support that meaning was interesting. Kip decided to do a deal with Purina One to gain scale. Sounds like he had to defend the sizable deal with his board because they were worried about "brand purity".

#branding is tricky. Too much scale too fast could marginalize the brand. The science at the core of the test is something that could be seen as goofy in the wrong context. By doing an exclusive with Purina One for 2014 Dognition gets millions in partner ad dollars - the test is a freebie if dog owners complete a 28 day "Purina One 28 Day Challenge" (http://www.purinaone.com/dogs/28-Day-Challenge/main-page ).

Cool promo and great legitimacy for Dognition and possibly just the right amount of scale. Partnerships bring interesting challenges. Dognition can get swallowed whole by Purina, and can anyone spot the BIG #socialmarketing error on the Purina One challenge page? http://www.purinaone.com/dogs/28-Day-Challenge/main-page

ERROR - Love that Purina is using Tweets, but seeing 46 day old Tweets HURTS the social legitimacy of their campaign. A 46 day old tweet from a customer is fine IN ROTATION, but what if the only representation I see has old content?

When curating old and new social content from Purina and users always have something in the roll that is current, only several hours hold max. Using customer Tweets is brave, but stale in its current implementation. Even if the Purina staff creates Tweets today that related to something that happened 46 days ago have something current on social.

Building  a #story off of #UGC is what +CrowdFunde is all about. Conversations require different #contentcuration and #contentcreation than promotional push. Purina One's misuse of #SMM is a perfect validation for a tool like CrowdFunde that helps create, curate and converse with the most valuable content on earth - User Generated Content (UGC).

By isolating old tweets without a clear understanding about why they are there, other than being self congratulatory, Purina destroys what they hope to build - active, alive conversations.

We think Dognition will have great conversations since learning your dog's personality feels like something MADE for social shares, but HOW you share social conversations is tricky as a big brand like Purina proves. Turning conversations into #engagemn and #loyalty is trickier still.

Cool talk today with many lessons for #startups and #Internetmarketers . Dognition is going to be on 60 Minutes in April and they will have a reality TV show on Nat Geo Wild so conversations will happen. Team at CrowdFunde wishes our fellow Durham #startup   luck and a free CrowdFunde installation if they want to discover how to build community on a scale hard to knock down or duplicate...because building ongoing engagement after initial novelty is based on the quality, frequency and value of Dognition's (and any brand's) CONVERSATIONS!

Thanks to Kip for speaking with TSF startups today! Marty

PS. Kip asked for feedback on the Dognition site and since I know there are a lot of ecommerce conversion experts that follow me send me your thoughts and I will pull together 5 to 10 "would be better if" kinds of feedback for https://www.dognition.com/ .

People Marketing shares hard won tips, ideas and stories about loving, curating, listening to your people to create winning online marketing.

We included this link in our Startups Revoluiton Scoop.it because startups are so WIDGET focused they forget PEOPLE provide the context and emotional connection needed to SELL. It is understandable that YOU love your widget, but your customers love THEMSELVES much more.

Creating "like me" moments mean your "product" becomes a movement your customers want to join. This journey from YOU and THEM (customers) to WE is the most important journey every website and all marketing is on whether the creators know it or not.  

I'm discussing Ask For Help: the New Collaborative, Curated and Community based Ecommerce at the FedEx Ecom Summit in Atlantic on 4.16.

Content curation is key for Small To Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs) online success & Scoop.it's new Content Director makes curation a marketing reality.

Warren Buffet's tips for startups as Bill Gates says, "Stick 'em up
Finishing our Haiku Deck Analysis (Scooped here http://sco.lt/80QYs5 and on Curagami here http://www.curagami.com/featured/buffet-tools-conversations-top-haiku-decks/ ) we were surprised how much our #1 views deck: Startup Tips From Warren Buffett is in front of #2 (Content Marketing Tools).

Fuffett is 35% ahead in views, but Warren is NOT the most shared. That honor goes to our fastest scaling deck ever - The Invisible Giant: Why The New SEO Is So Hard To See (http://shar.es/11X9fa ).

If you are a startup the Oracle of Omaha has tips for you and our tip is to use Haiku Deck. .

Every Startup Is An Elephant High Jumper
Every startup entrepreneur reading this knows what I'm talking about. Everyday team Curagami (http://www.curagami.com) tries to make the graceful dancing and jumping elephants we see so well in our mind, dreams and brainstorms.

We rub the bottle hoping for I Dream of Jeanie.

We know ODDS and OBSTRUCTION are against us. In the boring world of limited possibilities elephants don't dance. In our world elephants sit at the table and worry about their hair before a night of Disco Inferno.

It is not that our dreams are unrealistic. All dreams are unrealistic. No, the real challenge is in turning the crank ONE MORE TIME. When we rode bicycles from Durham to Santa Monica there were days when that single thought was all we (really me since the rest of the team was 20 years younger lol) could think about.

Turn the crank one more time.

Don't give up. Never give up because you can ONLY discover what it looks like to see NO MORE ROAD by continuing to turn the crank. And on that day, the day when you see nothing but ocean, you will have achieved something NO ONE can take from you ever - the knowledge that YES Elephants can jump of the moon as every startup knows.

Here's hoping YOUR startup elephant is a jumper :).

Marty & Team Curagami,
American Tobacco Campus, Durham, NC

Help A Startup Over The 4th of July Holiday
If you have 15 minutes you can help a startup over the 4th. We are trying to keep this, our first, ASK to 15 minutes or less. Click 3 links and answer 3 questions and your feedback will help a startup!

Will post our landing page link as soon as we finish making it (lol). In the meantime checkout our Evolution of Web Design & Marketing infographic: http://www.Curagami.com .

Great Daniel Ek +Spotify Founder Interview On Utilities As Experiences
Great conversation with Spotify's Swedish founder on +The Charlie Rose Show… - Martin W. Smith - Google+

CrowdFunde team is attending startup school. This Triangle Startup Factory Dairy shares our journey. Day 2 = creation of "unrealized networks", UGC & SEO.

Day 2: Tapping Unrealized Networks
Wow, what a day. Started with a Scrum-like standup and then worked the Business Model Canvas with TSF Founder Chris Heivly and Whitney. Discussing CrowdFunde's SEO benefit we realized that many businesses have "unrealized networks".

Unrealized networks are your customers. One undeniable New SEO truth is commons or platforms like HuffPost and Facebook out perform all other models. Problem is how does a small business easily add a "commons" that won't cost them a million bucks in cash or time?

CrowdFunde to the rescue.

CrowdFunde's goal is to help our partners TAP the gold they carry in their unrealized network. When I was a Director of Ecommerce our mailing list was around 50,000. We communicated with our customers regularly because email marketing was the most profitable Internet marketing channel (by far).

What we DID NOT do was for a community. We didn't realize benefits from our network. This Video Diary includes a 2 minute video that walks you through our first cut at tapping "unrealized networks". Please share any thoughts, reactions or ideas.

We are in "startup school" at the Triangle Startup Factory in Durham, NC for 12 weeks and everything is up for grabs. Together we create a cool tool, a "get more with less" tool to help conquer the "New SEO".

Thanks, CrowdFunde team and Marty