Yesterday Business Insider published AOL’s leaked “master plan.” I haven’t yet figured out how to navigate BI’s slide show labyrinth (patent pending, I’m sure) to find the actual document(s), but the gist seems to be that AOL is going to produce a couple thousand pieces of content per day, at a rate of 5-10 per creator, with a focus on SEO and a hard reliance on pageviews as its metric of success. Say what you will about how creative or ethical you might think this is, that doesn’t really interest me. What does interest me is how this knowledge can be exploited.

In any competition, having more information about other players’ motives strictly dominates having less. That is to say, it’s always beneficial to know more about what other people or companies in your market are doing since it gives you the opportunity to ignore that information or act on it. Now we know more about AOL’s strategy and there are a couple key things that people trying to get coverage from AOL publications can exploit.

I think this is really valuable to people who work in PR in two ways.

1. Any organization that relies on a large number of people doing a large number of things is inevitably going to struggle with internal communication. Ordinarily it’s very tough to get repeated attention from a single media outlet; in other words, it’s really hard to get TechCrunch to write about you 10 times in a month, which you’d like to do because it decreases the unit cost of learning how they work, what they like and how to pitch them. With hundreds of reporters writing hundreds of stories per month, AOL’s staff is hardly going to have time to chew their lunch, let alone cross check who has covered whom. It’s going to be much easier to double (or triple or quadruple) dip in multiple press hits on AOL properties, all of which are motivated by the same high level goals of SEO and pageviews. Let’s say the upfront cost of researching how to pitch a new outlet takes 5 pieces of coverage to recoup — on TechCrunch that might take 2 years, on AOL you might be able to do that in 3 weeks.
2. PR is a historically difficult idea to get companies to rally around when they’re early-stage, resource-limited and engineering-driven. PR is notoriously difficult to measure and relies on a lot of soft value props like “branding” that make anyone who knows how to use Vim want to shoot anyone who likes writing emails. With AOL producing content and making decisions based on pageviews and SEO — hard metrics and measurable tactics that any news.ycombinator reader can appreciate — the internal pitch to invest in PR is a little easier. If AOL is measuring their success by things that you like, you get a bit of associative property help in justifying its existence (PR, not AOL).

If I were doing PR right now, I’d be turning a lot of attention to understanding AOL as it grows into Tim Armstrong’s army of bloggers.

This blog post mentions a small app I wrote to do some testing. If you want to download it, it’s available on Github here.

Messaging and positioning

Three weeks ago I took a look at our messaging and positioning for my new company, Insidr. In other words, I had to figure out how to optimally present our company and product: the words to use, the example to cite, the feelings to emote, etc. I wanted to be very analytical about it and arm myself (and my team) with as much data as possible to inform decisions (and let us call bullshit when needed). What follows is the process I used, from start to finish, to make an analytical decision about an emotional question.

Continue reading →

In general history views exposures of information quite favorably. From Upton Sinclair to Mark Felt, there are many examples of surfaced information that was certainly damaging to some–the in case of The Jungle, relatively few, and in the case of Watergate, a great many–that was ultimately judged as a heroic act.

Wikileaks could be called the first organization to scale muckraking, but it seems like newspapers did that decades or really centuries ago. So I think it’s interesting that Wikileaks has created such a ruckus.

It seems that one of the big differences is the extent to which Wikileaks injects itself, the organization, into the story when it releases information. For me, it makes it nearly impossible not to question their motives. At a high level, I think it’s hard to make a case that more transparency (in anything) isn’t generally good in the long run. And yet, Wikileaks has never managed to be seen, at least in the US, in the way that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are, who basically did the same thing.

I’m very curious to see what people will think of Wikileaks in 20+ and 100+ years. My guess is that they will ultimately be praised, but they might have to walk through hell to get there.

Say hello to the new baby, Insidr.

I am working with the fine folks of Social Venture Partners on a new startup that we’re calling Insidr, at least for now. After getting some feedback on my initial pitch, I’ve settled on this: we’re trying to make it easier for customers of big companies, like AT&T, to cut through the red tape when they’re dealing with customer support. We want to connect customers with people inside the company, hence the name, to answer questions that standard customer support channels suck at answering.

The idea is that big companies have very little incentive to provide good support because the cost of churn is incredibly low relative to the cost of adding more customer support reps or giving them more time to help customers. So we think there’s an opportunity to do something better, and we think customers will pay for it. At least that’s what our research so far suggests.

I’m working on all things marketing, most notably how to accelerate our growth. This is super early stage, about 2 months in the making and a lot of part time help from friends and consultants. Should be fun, we’ll see where it goes.

It’s pretty common to hear that Google, Facebook or another big company is going to launch a product to compete with an existing startup, thus killing the startup. Sometimes this takes the form of a reason not to start a new company in the first place.

Empirically, this seems to be false.

There are a few assumptions made in these startup-killer stories. The logical argument usually goes something like the following. For whatever it’s worth, the illogical argument is usually “That’s a feature, not a product” or something equally silly that no one has been able to explain to me yet. Anyway, the logical one…

1. First, motivation. Startup competes, or could soon be competing, with BigCo. BigCo wants to own all the value that Startup is targeting.
2. Second, actions. BigCo will launch a competing product. Advantaged by size and capital, BigCo will use its reach, money and staff to attack Startup.
3. Third, results. BigCo, still advantaged by size and capital, will quickly gain more users and copy or eclipse Startup’s product. Startup will die or wish it had.

Replace “BigCo” with “Facebook” and “Startup” with “Foursquare,” and that’s the last few months of tech news. Feelings about quality and insightfulness of journalists aside, the story above appears to almost never actually happen.

1. Motivation. I think this one is actually pretty accurate. Big companies (and small companies) do and probably should worry about competitors stealing either current or future market share. I don’t have any issues with the logical argument on this point, though a case could be made that big companies usually don’t figure out that a startup’s market is valuable until it’s too late; there are plenty of examples to support that.
2. Actions. I haven’t gathered any data because I’m not really sure how to measure this. Counting every startup that “could” compete with a bigger company, then counting the big companies that have launched a startup-killer, seems too prone to errors. Even if data existed, it would be near impossible to interpret since I have no idea what any result–let’s say it was 10%–would actually imply. Lack of data notwithstanding, I bet this one is false. To make an even bigger unsubstantiated claim, I bet that acquisition is more common than competition. If I can make the leap of faith that any company that’s acquired is seen by the acquirer as competing with something they are either doing or would like to do, that’s pretty important.
3. Results. This is where the logical argument really comes off the rails, in my mind. I see three problems with the “logical” results. First, size and capital are not always an advantage, maybe not even usually. Second, big companies’ paths to quickly doing a good job on something new are strewn with skeletons of fallen comrades. Third, even if everything so far is true, it doesn’t mean the startup dies or even does worse.

Full disclosure, I already have a counterexample. Microsoft killed Netscape. It used its size and capital to do it. At the end, Netscape died. However, that’s the most recent counterexample I can think of and it happened 15 years ago.

Facebook vs Flickr/Photobucket. Facebook Photos is the biggest photo sharing product in the world, with 50+ billion pictures. Flickr and Photobucket launched before Facebook Photos. Facebook did compete and they clearly won, but both Flickr and Photobucket are still kicking and have been acquired (Photobucket for $300m). I’m not sure exactly when Facebook Photos launched, but I’m pretty sure that it was before Flickr’s acquisition and I’m positive it was before Photobucket’s. Summary: Facebook attacked photo startups, photo startups didn’t die.

Google vs YouTube. According to Wikipedia, Google Videos and YouTube launched just a couple weeks apart. Google wanted Videos to be exactly what YouTube is, according to everything I’ve ever heard about it. So it’s basically a given that Google did compete. As the hottest public company at the time, they had massively more people and money than YouTube. Of course Google Videos sucked and they quickly acquired YouTube. Summary: Google competed with YouTube, failed, and bought the company for $1.6b.

There are other good examples that I could have used instead, like Google vs Admob or Yahoo! 360 vs WordPress. The point is that I really can’t think of a counterexample to the idea that startup-killers are bullshit since Microsoft and Netscape. There’s probably something out there that I’m missing, but the fact that zero come to my mind or the minds of a few friends I’ve asked doesn’t justify the amount of time that gets spent talking about the idea.

Jeff Jarvis recently wrote, “I’m not [a conspiracy theorist], because I’ve found the world is rarely organized enough to conspire.” Accurate, in my opinion, and relevant here. If big companies whacking startups was a successful strategy, it would mean that the big company would have to move quickly, acquire new skills and devote significant resources to something that is tiny in relation to their main business. They typically don’t do those things, and that’s why the startup exists in the first place.

One of the most common reactions to a TechCrunch* post in too many circles these days is instant attack mode. Tales of their unfair practices, shortsightedness and fanboy-ism. “All they do is write about the great new Twitter app,” the masses shout from rooftops, “and they slam my startup!” Hey, I should know, my startup has been on the business end of that slamming more than once and it sure as hell isn’t fun. It’s not uncommon to hear theory upon theory detailing the ways in which TechCrunch is at best immoral–everything from favoritism to paid coverage–and at worst downright malicious.

I think few people who pay attention to startups could argue that Foursquare is one of the most beloved web services today, and MG Siegler of TechCrunch is probably responsible for that in no small part. It’s in that light that I hope people remember this quote from today’s Paul Carr missive.

Last year those same people were so desperate to find the new Twitter that they mistakenly handed that crown to Foursquare on the basis that a relatively small number of Web 2.0 scenesters used it to find out where their friends were partying. And yet, despite that auspicious start, and a shit-ton of publicity since, Foursquare has failed to capture the imagination of even most early adopters, particularly those outside of San Francisco and New York. Foursquare was resolutely not last year’s Twitter. Last year’s Twitter was Twitter.

The point being that it’s very easy to see all that is vindictive and ignore mountains of evidence to the contrary if you’re even the least bit motivated to do so. About 6 months ago MG wrote a post asking whether TechCrunch was a kingmaker, to which I replied saying that they indeed were biased. But that is, as they say, a feature and not a bug. It seems to me that the ideas behind that post have really escalated since then, and I’m not really sure why.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that part of my job is to get the people at TechCrunch to write about my company, so mine is not an unbiased opinion in the least. Nevertheless, I don’t think any of this is unreasonable, unfair or inaccurate.

* TechCrunch here is really a wildcard for any tech blog, as fewer each day are immune from or deserving of this treatment.

Pretty simple idea I was thinking about on the bus today stemming from the broader idea that I’m really tired of unqualified opinions getting too much attention.

Anyone who’s anyone in the startup world can tell you to “launch early and often.” “Iterate!” they’ll say, and “your first version should suck!” These things may very well be spot on, although I’d guess like most free, generalized advice, they’re to be taken with a grain of salt. On the other hand, Apple, the shining star of the tech world, is praised (and this is putting it gently) for “never putting its logo on anything that isn’t perfect.” Many people will say that’s why it is the company it is–let’s ignore, for now, whether or not you think that’s a good thing. Obviously any startup would kill to turn out like Apple, but it’s interesting that these ideas so fundamentally clash.

Now, there are obviously structural differences in the markets and customer bases of seed stage startups and global supercompanies, I get that. But still, when do you stop fearlessly launching brave new ideas that may (should?) suck and start only releasing perfection whose names attain the status of proper nouns? More importantly, when does making a mistake on one side become more costly than the other?

People get freaked the hell out. They become defensive really quick.

It’s sort of become a game of chicken. It’s cool to say you want people to ask questions whenever they don’t understand something–the people that legitimately feel this way are exempt from this post–but way more often than anyone admits the asker doesn’t understand because the askee doesn’t either. Far too many conversations lately have gone like this…

Me: I don’t understand that, can you explain?
Someone: Ya know, something like xyz.
Me: I still don’t know what you mean. Can you give me an example?
Someone: [completely ignores request for example and uses the term "ya know" again]
Me: [slaps self in head]

The real frustrating thing here is that this only happens because people are lazy and try to give instructions without understanding the task themselves. This, of course, is a waste of time. Most often, you will get back a shitty (or maybe mediocre) product that isn’t really what you wanted. If you’re lucky, you’ll get asked enough questions to make it clear that whatever you were hoping would happen is a waste of time–if you’re really lucky, this will take less time than would have otherwise been wasted. Some of the time you’ll get back the same shitty product as in the first case, but you’ll still have through so little about what you actually wanted that you don’t realize it sucks. In this case you’re blissfully ignorant. Many would consider this the best possible outcome.

I can’t stand the phrase “do(ing) email.” It drives me borderline nuts (for admittedly no good reason).

It occurred to me tonight, while waiting impatiently at Fedex, that lots of communications tools use awful verbiage–actually, awful verbage, if only that was a word, since the offending terms are nearly always verbs.

“Do email.” “Make calls.” Ick!

One that seems to avoid the train wreck is IM’s, where we “chat.” Oh, maybe if we get the noun out of the sentence we can make some headway.

When we search we “Google.” Everyone likes that!

Of course we can “email,” or “call,” but I think those have already been spoiled (1) because of tradition (2) because they’re somewhat uniquely communications mediums that people try to pass off as real time commitments. “Can’t talk right now. I’m doing email.” Oh, sounds official.

I want someone to come along and introduce the “Google” (v.) of email. I don’t care so much about phone calls–I’m already brainwashed to not really mind when people “make” calls–but if you want to fix that one too, be my guest.