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For Executives, Entrepreneurs, and other Digerati who need to know about SaaS and Web 2.0.

Archive for July 28th, 2008

Visualize Success. Better: Get Your Customers to Visualize Success

Posted by Bob Warfield on July 28, 2008

Guy Kawasaki (world’s most famous tech evangelist) posts this morning about some fascinating studies involving perception.  Seems that softball players and golfers who imagine softballs and golf holes to be larger than they really are have better days than those who don’t.  Sounds like they visualized their success.

Kawasaki goes on to suggest that perhaps if entrepreneurs imagine their market sector is larger than what it is, they’ll do better.  But while softball is a team sport, batting is pretty solitary–you’re alone up there facing the entire opposing team.  You just need to hit that ball and hit it well and they respond.  Markets are the other way around. 

I’ve often said that startups don’t create demand, they discover it.  But, perhaps they can help it along.  At least a little.  The secret I’m suggesting is to convince as much of you audience as you can reach to think that you market is very large.  That starts from investors, but customers are equally important.  Who doesn’t want to be a part of something new that will grow to something very large and successful?

Isn’t that the entrepreneurial equivalent of visualizing a hole so large you can’t help but hole in one?

Posted in Marketing, strategy | 3 Comments »

Fred: Comments Aren’t As Important as Blog Posts on Techmeme

Posted by Bob Warfield on July 28, 2008

VC Fred Wilson frets that Techmeme is a conversation that’s one sided because it doesn’t treat comments as highly as blog posts.  He is unhappy that Scoble’s post decrying Silicon Valley VC disease got onto to Techmeme but David Hornik’s reply did not.

Even if Hornik’s reply was as good or better than Scoble’s post (it wasn’t), I have a couple of problems with this.  First, its a reply.  Whatever interest or excitement it has fundamentally comes from responding to the blog post in the first place.  Techmeme and others are justified in focusing on the start of the conversation.  The blog post stands without the comments, but 90% of the comments cannot stand on their own without the blog post. 

Second, the purpose of Techmeme et al is to identify interesting conversations, not to microanalyze them down to which comment was the best.  What possible basis can they have for determining which comment is best at present anyway?  Are we going to measure impressions?  Do we care that the comments at top will automatically get more impressions than the ones at the bottom?  Are we going to vote?  At Helpstream, we let people indicate which response to a community question is the “best answer”, but no such facility exists in the blog comments I’m familiar with.

Fred’s been at this business of comments being more important or as important as the blog post for a while.  I read the comments.  There are often good ones.  Most of the time they are not as good as the blog post itself though, and this is not unexpected.

Posted in Marketing, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »

 
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