I’m Tired of One Night Stands
February 21, 2011 by admin · 6 Comments
At the risk of mixing metaphors, Luke Hohmann recently described Groupon, Living Social and other daily deal sites as enticing businesses into one night stands. At first I laughed but as I thought about my direct experiences with a plethora of group buying sites, I think he may be right. There is no doubt that these daily deal sites can deliver a deluge of coupon-grubbing customers to a small, local business’s door step. But at what cost? Negative margin, stretching service delivery to breaking point, alienation of regular loyal customers, attracting customers who don’t spend more than the deal amount and won’t ever come back are some of the well documented potential pitfalls. (And hopefully not STD’s!)
I often describe Groupon, Living Social and other daily deal sites as providing small businesses a large, fishing drift net to cast broadly into the ocean; the result is you will no doubt collect a lot of sea life, but only some of which will be the targeted species you are actually fishing for. Luke’s metaphor is certainly more colorful and may, in fact, be truer than mine.
Fanminder | 5 Questions for Paul Rosenfeld & Tracy Grover
February 10, 2011 by admin · 2 Comments
I met Paul Rosenfeld last year when he came to pitch Savvy Cellar Wine Bar & Wine Shop before it opened in Mountain View, CA on the merits of his new mobile marketing service called Fanminder. Always being one to extend and try new things and wanting to dip our toe into the mobile world, I said yes (plus Paul is very passionate and convincing). He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fanminder. He spent about 15 years working for two of the best companies catering to small businesses — American Express and Intuit. At American Express Paul helped lead its first gift card program for merchants and worked in the Small Business Services division. At Intuit, he was General Manager QuickBooks Merchant Account Service; QuickBooks Online Edition; and led development of the FinanceWorks online banking suite.
Tracy Grover is Co-Founder and COO of Fanminder. Most recently, Tracy was Vice President of Product Management for AccountNow. Previously she served as Director of Marketing for LoopNet, which automates online marketing tools for small real estate businesses to help them compete with the big guys. Before that Tracy built, launched, and marketed online banking solutions for small businesses (for Bank of America & Silicon Valley Bank), a secure mobile application used by doctors & public officials (Certicom) and the first mass market online credit card, NextCard.
I recently sat down with Paul and Tracy and fired off 5 questions for them . . . .
1) What was the genesis of Fanminder?
Paul: Tracy and I started Fanminder literally in the teeth of the recession, in October 2008. We had very good paying jobs – I was the Chief Marketing Officer and Tracy was the VP Product Management for a local start-up. We saw how all the larger, Fortune-sized retailers were rushing into mobile and social marketing but when we “walked down main street” we didn’t see any local businesses doing anything.
Innovation Games | 5 Questions For Luke Hohmann
I’ve been blessed over the course of my 12 years in Silicon Valley working for Netscape, AOL and Apple and consulting for countless software and Internet companies to have met many bright, creative and high-impact people. Today I kick off a new blog series highlighting some of those people. As Jim Barksdale, CEO of Netscape, would explain: “every great list has either 3 or 5 things on it. If you got 4 on your list, you either got 1 too many or need to add 1 more.” I’ve opted for 5 questions on my “list” and blog series!
Luke Hohmann is software product expert, author, coach, entrepreneur, innovator, teacher and friend. He is the author of “Journey of the Software Professional: A Sociology of Software Development”, “Beyond Software Architecture: Creating and Sustaining Winning Solutions”, and “Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play”. He is a former faculty member of the UC Berkeley and Santa Cruz (Extensions). Luke is on the board of the Agile Alliance and is a member of the ACM, IEEE, and PDMA. Luke is the Founder & CEO of Enthiosys, an Agile Product Management Consultancy. I caught up with him recently to talk about his latest venture, Innovation Games Online.
1. What are Innovation Games Online?
Innovation Games® online are web-based versions of some of our most popular games. They provide the same kind rich interaction and collaboration of our in-person versions of the games at a web-scale.
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What I Learned at 140 | The Twitter Conference (round-up)
June 16, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
Well its been a couple of weeks since the 140 | The Twitter Conference ended. The Twitter Conference (#twrcon) has come and gone. A NYC Twitter conference – 140 Character Conference – is now on (#140conf). And I completed my 8-part round-up of my learnings from my experience at #140tc.
- The Power of Presence. Insights from Alex Payne, Twitter API Lead.
- I am a Twitter God(ess) and So Can You! The View From Twitter Stardom with @ijustine, @missrogue and @davepeck.
What I Learned at 140 | The Twitter Conference (part 6 of 8)
June 7, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
“Even with a simple hash tag, there is a learning curve.”
Soren Macbeth
Co-Founder / CEO
Stocktwits
Soren (@sorenmacbeth) joined a panel with Brian Solis (@briansolis) of PR 2.0 fame. Brian unveiled a new tool, Twitterverse, that attempts to map the Twitter Universe. (Interesting when searching for Brian’s Twitterverse image, I found 17 Ways to Visualize Twitter.) Unfortunately I missed most of Brian’s talk – he has written a good recap of The Twitter Conference and TWTRCON, complete with his broader perspective on Twitter on his blog post: Is Twitter Evolving from the Facebook to the Myspace of Microblogs? Analyzing Twitter trends and demographics.
Soren shared his experience in founding and building StockTwits. His original idea was to develop detailed and complex algorithms, reputation indicators and stock pricing information. That idea evolved into something dramatically simpler with the use of the “$” tag. I missed whether this was something Soren pushed on Twitter or Read more