Sales Sushi

Twitter has exploded!  Unique users have more than quadrupled from 4.4M in December2008 to 19.7M in May of this year according to Compete.com.  This growth was thanks in large part to the sudden  popularity of Twitter amongst the national news media and of course celebs like Ashton Kutcher and Oprah. But what goes (way) up must come down or at least take a break along the way for a while right? Indeed, May was the month that traffic to Twitter started to go sideways.

Clearly this is a sign that new user growth in the U.S. may be decelerating. But this may be the least of Twitter’s worries. Perhaps they should be more worried that more than 80% of Twitter users have less than 10 followers, which is a more series sign of lack of engagement and commitment to keep Twit, Twit, Twittering of most users that have joined the bandwagon.

Is this the beginning of the end for Twitter? Will it go down in history as another Friendster like ball of flames? Only time will tell!

My notes from the iMedia Brand Summit below. You can find the official coverage here at iMediaConnections:

Random leanings:

• Mattel - “Barbie has a FB page. She has an opinion. She likes Ken.”
• Travel bans keep large agencies like Starcom Mediavest, CIA, Digitas and OMD from attending iMedia. We publishers should sponsor their flights! Let’s do it!
• Agencies can come to Brand Summits if they bring two brand clients! Very smart!
  
• It costs $600,000 to buy a lifetime membership to the Broadmoor Golf Club
• We need to put the “i” back in iMedia with high speed Wifi in every room and outlets at every seat!

On bashing agencies: “Has the agency lost its “Special Strategic Place” at the Client’s Table: They are now just one of many players?”

• The reason digital only gets 8% of overall media spend is that agencies can’t make money in digital.
• Digital media is far too data intensive for agencies or humans to handle. It will be automated by tech.
• Agencies will make themselves obsolete if they don’t innovate to compete.
• No one is an expert in social media today, so the brands, agencies & publishers are all trying to figure it out.
• Brands having multiple agencies represent them causes natural competition and everyone has to step up their game constantly.
• Agencies will always have a role in the creative, but technology is moving too fast for low paid, 20 somethings to keep up.
• We have real time automated tracking now! Brands don’t need to sign long-term contracts with agencies anymore!

Question is “Clickthrough is a Junk Metric?: The future depends on Finding Scalable Audience Metrics to Redirect TV Dollars.”

• Google had 18 trillion clickthroughs in 2008. The click war is over and Google has one!
• If brand marketers are going to scale their business we need an audience based measurement and buying platform.
• Intuit: “we assign brand campaigns points per actions. Sites that score high in brand points often don’t score well in transactions and vice-versa.”
• New term - CPW, cost per whateveryouaretryingtomeasure.
• “ClickThrough is like the Centime (French penny) toward the end. Its just not used anymore”

Question: “In the Social Digital Age, the Idea of “Advertising” is a joke” “Your Message [marketers] has No Place in a Conversational World?”

• Not many people are going to engage with your brand online, but those that do are passionate about your brand! They are Viral!
• Some brands are so scared of social media that they are overthinking and will be left behind.
• Click is the first step. What happens next interests us.  We want to be a part of the conversation.
• Lots of companies think of social media as buzz and monitor what people are saying about their brand. There’s so much more!
• Rarely are companies thinking of social media as what people are saying about your brand in a deep way. Who are they really?
• Things happen so fast on the web that you can’t keep up with a reactionary strategy to social media as a company.
• Brand monitoring cant stop PR bombs - they happen too fast to stop.
• Companies think they can identify key influentials and get them to create positive buzz for the company.
• Do the influentials speak for the masses…and are they really that influential?
• JD Power says even with real time monitoring, brands can’t expect to prevent dominos disaster or even dramatically mitigate.
• Journalists in blogger costumes are very dangerous to follow as “influentials.” They want readers. Consumers want solutions. The two interests are NOT alligned!
• So if you count on journalist online comments/opinions/reviews thinking they represent the masses you are missing what your customers are really saying about your brand.
• Social media monitoring should help identify brand strengths and weaknesses to address proactively and serve as support.
• Value of social media to companies is consumer insight, product innovation, but U have to ask the right questions 2get answers!
• Tribe analysis don’t start with what [people are saying] it starts with who [is saying it and what they care about].
• Conclusion: social media is exploding and provides a whole new way of listening to consumers. Look deeper at who is really behind the conversation!

The BostonGlobe.com reports today that “After 44 years in the Boston area, Greylock Partners has chosen Silicon Valley for its new headquarters.“

Frankly, I’m surprised this didn’t happen years ago! When I raised money for my first Internet start-up in 1999 there was a bustling ecosystem in Boston for Internet start-ups complete with plenty of Angel and venture capital investors.  When the bubble burst in 2001-2002 Internet investment left Boston and never came back!  Instead what I found when I started raising money for my real estate search engine BigDiggs (now Trulia.com) in 2005 is that VC’s turned their back on Internet companies completely. Either they just got so burnt they couldn’t face the space again or they  chalked the whole Internet thing up to a fad or both.   The investors were all still very much in Boston, but they had moved on to bio-tech and hardware based start-ups!  Bio-tech makes sense, but the hardware thing shocked me!   I vividly remember Common Angel Managing Director  James Geshwiler telling a room full of hopeful entrepreneurs like me back in 1999 that hardware start-ups were a thing of the past now that you could start a good software or internet company for less that $1M.  When I started raising money just six years later that same group led by the same guy was investing in hardware again.  I actually presented to another group of  Boston angel investors in late 2005 and a few of them pulled me aside to suggest I not take the group’s money and instead go to Palo Alto where I would get smart money that was passionate about the Internet and believed there would be a Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and beyond!

But wasn’t Facebook founded on Harvard’s campus by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004?  Yes, but he also immediately took a sublet in Palo Alto that very summer to open FB up beyond colleges, not only leaving Boston but also quitting Harvard in the process.  This is pretty sad considering that at any given time Boston is home to over 400,000 college students and between Harvard and MIT  some of the world’s smartest, most powerful business people are produced in Boston.  These two institutions should produce as many if not more Internet success stories for Boston as Stanford does for  Silicon Valley!  But alas Boston turned their back on the web and the Valley has had the last laugh ever since.   The only real claim to Internet start-up fame in Boston that remains is Lycos (ouch!), Monster and a few other forgettable names.

For my part, I turned to my good friend Janet Kraus for advise in 2005.  By then Janet and her partner Kathy Sherbrooke had raised almost $30M for their Boston based start-up Circles.   But what I found was that their investors hailed not from Boston but from  Silicon Valley and New York!  That was it! Given the complete lack of appetite for Internet companies in Boston I too was beginning to doubt the future of the Internet.  I mean, all these “wicked smart” people must know something I didn’t right?

Wrong! I think if we learned nothing else from the whole Bernie Madoff scam its that smart people are stupid too!  What other conclusion can you come to when Boston VC’s have largely missed the boat over the past 10 years on mega successes like Google, Yahoo, Paypal, Ebay, Twitter (there was at least one Boston based VC smart enough be an early investor in Twitter) and Facebook? Fortunately for me Janet’s fellow Stanford classmates were deep in the throngs of Silicon Valley venture capital and through them and her I hooked up with Trulia co-founders Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen in late 2005.  We combined forced and since they we have raised over $33M from top tier VC’s Accel and Sequoia Capital and a few other Silicon Valley VC’s.

So have Boston VC’s learned their lesson yet you ask? Apparently not given that the best and brightest Internet entrepreneurs still escape Boston for Silicon Valley.  Even the ones who stay raise money outside.  By 2008 Janet had sold Circles to Sadexho and started an online community for the affluent named Spire.   Did she finally find investors in Boston? Maybe, but she ultimately took smart money in New York and Silicon Valley, not Boston! Greylock Capital’s announcement today shows that the VC’s themselves are now fleeing Boston for the Valley.

So will Boston’s other VC’s like General Catalyst and Highland Partners move to the Valley?  GC is hunkered down in Cambridge decidedly feeding off the other types of tech entrepreneurs and companies coming out of Harvard and MIT and Highland does have a Valley office already, but both are still only getting the leftovers when it comes to smart Internet deals.  Personally I would love to see Boston become a hub for Internet entrepreneurs, but the likelihood is that my hometown of New York will continue to become the new East Coast hub for Internet start-ups as most Internet advertising dollars come out of NYC ad agencies and smart venture capitalists like Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures lead the pack investing early in companies like Twitter, FeedBurner and Delicious!

I feel very fortunately to split my time between New York and San Francisco, right smack in the middle of where its all happening for the Internet now, but I sure do miss Boston.

I strive to become more productive everyday and I use a variety of techniques to do it. My entire system is based on Getting Things Done (GTD).  But whatever system you use the goal should never be to become a better multitasker! Why? Because studies have proved it doesn’t work and you lose far more time switching from one task to another than you gain by trying to do multiple tasks at once.  I finally found a book that does a great job proving that theory in The Myth of Multitasking by David Crenshaw.

This except from an email interview on Black Belt Productivity with the author pretty much says it all”

“I like to use an economics and finance term to describe the waste of time; the term is switching cost. Switching cost usually refers to the cost and time and money of switching from one provider to another. In the case of multitasking, people feel that they are doing multiple things at the same time, but they are not. The brain is incapable of focusing on multiple tasks at the same time. When people attempt to multitask, what they are really doing is switching rapidly back and forth between tasks. Because of this, I prefer to refer to multitasking as switchtasking. It is because of these switches that people lose time in the switching cost. In this way, switchtasking causes us to be exponentially less productive.”

So the next time you think you are doing your company or yourself a service by doing more than one thing at a time, think again!

On the heels of yesterday’s post about Google’s own sales team turmoil, The Silicon Alley Insider reports that 17-45 people are being axed in sales and marketing at AOL. 17 ad sales reps were fired today alone and rumors have it that Googlers will replace the AOLers.

Given that Google has replaced Tim Armstrong’s team with robots chances are Googlers who would not have considered working at AOL a year ago are jumping at the chance to flee Google now!  Details from the article below:

“From what I’m hearing the state over there is panic shock and chaos. It was a bloodbath,” says a source.

Remaining sales reps have already been told the laid off reps will be replaced with nine new ones — “most likely from Google.”

New AOL sales boss Jeff Levick and new AOL CEO Tim Armstrong come from Google (GOOG) and it’s no surprise they’d want some of their own people.

Layoff meetings began at  9 a.m. ET and will go till 11 a.m. Management plans to hold a meeting with remaining reps at 2 p.m

I had the opportunity to sit down with a few Google sales team insiders recently and got a very surprising view of Google’s direct sales post Tim Armstrong leaving to become CEO and Chairman of AOL.

What I learned was surprising to say the least. My notes are in bullet format for easy reading:

• When Tim left Google he took several senior sales managers with him to AOL.
• Google replaced the sales management with a bunch of “McKinsey types” who have never sold a day in their life.
• They are big on face time, so if they are at the office until 10pm they expect their team to be right along side them!
• They love building Power Point decks, have the team spend whole days in meetings presenting those decks and especially love writing “processes about processes about processes”.
• Google’s sales team in North America is now 600+ large! 400 are based in New York City and the rest are spread throughout offices across the country. The AdSense inside sales team in California is completely separate from the direct sales team.
• Until last year (2008) AdSense “self-serve” represented 60% of revenue and direct sales the other 40%. Now its closer to 50/50.
• 75% of direct sales clients spend $1M per quarter/ $4M per year. The other 25% are typically large brands that have just not embraced online and/or search advertising just yet, but are expected to be large paying clients some day.
• Any account paying less than $1M/quarter is handed off to the self-serve AdSense inside sales team to manage more efficiently.
• The self-serve AdSense sales team is not so self-serve after all. There are hundreds of inside sales reps and hundreds more customer service personnel to support them.
• Google has totally failed at getting its sales people to enter data into a CRM and/or adopt any one CRM system internally. Only a fraction of Google’s sales team is using a CRM at all. Half of them are using Salesforce.com and the other half are using GRM (Google Relationship Manager) which is relatively new, not very useful and chock full of bugs, which only gives sales people valid reason not to embrace it. Most are using a variety of homegrown systems including spreadsheets and even notebooks to track customers and manage their pipeline.
• Sales data quality is so bad and forecasting so unreliable Google finally added a completely new layer of management called “Industry Leads” who’s job it is to constantly gather sales pipeline data manually from their assigned industry/vertical sales team. They actually sit with each of their team members each month to manualy collect sales information to update the pipeline.

I don’t know about you, but I was shocked at the disorganization and lack of data quality and control! I guess we can’t be too surprised that Google brought in a bunch of consultants to run sales after reading the recent NYTimes article about how Google top visual designer quit very publicly over frustration that every tiny design decision is preceeded with painful data analysis. But you have to be shocked when a company whose mission is to organize the world’s information and make it useful cannot even get its own sales team to enter data into a CRM and instead has resorted to manualy data entry! Hello 1989!

It would seem Google has been able to grow direct sales despite its woes. It will be interesting to see how thing shake out now that the sales team culture has been turned on its head.

I sat down with Jott.com VP, Business Development Doug Aley in New York last week to talk about all the cool new features Jott has added in the past few months.  I was amazed to see how far Jott has come since I used the service a year ago and how relevant it all was now to individual sales people and entire sales organizations.

I was also very impressed that 1) like Twitter these guys have taken a simple but valuable technology, in this case voice-to-text, and built far reaching applications on top and 2) they figured out a revenue stream that makes sense, is affordable and was not advertising supported for once!  A few months ago they had the guts to stop giving the service away for free to six hundred thousand users and start charging a monthly subscription fee.  God knows, we need more online success stories out there with non-advertising based monetization models!

There are actually three main features on the new and improved Jott well suited to the busy sales professional:

1. Jott for Salesforce uses voice-to-text and a simple phone call to allow sales peeps to input their account and opportunity updates, take quick notes, and set reminders and appointments, all on the go, and all hands-free without risk of driving off the road in between appointments. Sales professionals are not only safer drivers, but they spend more time selling vs. in the office typing, and senior management (like me:-) get timelier, more accurate forecast data. Wahoo!

2. Jott for (Social) Networking allows you to use the same voice-to-text and simple phone call to post to over 50 sites including your online networks from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn. We all know how important networking is to a sales person’s top and bottom line and Jott just made it easier to update your personal networks inbetween appointments, in traffic, or even at the airport! You know what Jeffrey Gitomer says “make a sale make a commission, make a friend and make a living”.   Cha-ching!

3. Jott Voicemail - This is Jott’s PhoneTag like service that automatically converts your voicemail to text message and/or emails. This is brilliant if, like me, you check your voicemail once a month, live in email and like to follow GTD like systems where you process all your “stuff” in one place like Outlook.

By the way, the one very cool difference between Jott voice recognition and others like PhoneTag is that with Jott while most voice-to-text is automated, there are dozens of real live people on the back-end (way back in the Philippines where they speak perfect English) as well to transcribe voice data that is flagged by their system. So don’t worry if a Mack truck or an ambulance drives by when you are updating Salesforce with Jott, as a real person will figure out what you were trying to say before its added to Salesforce. Now that’s service!

So in one simple, relatively inexpensive monthly service Jott has managed to make sales people more productive, better networkers, safer drives and keep them out in front of customers and prospects instead of stuck behind their computers. They have also made forecasting in Salesforce more reliable, which is a relief to sales execs like me.

So is that all worth $9-$25/month per user? I think the answer really depends on how good you and your own sales team are at adopting the tools and making full use of Jott’s potential.  The more users engage the better the economies.   What remains to be seen is if Jott needs to fundamentally recondition people to use their services or if there will be a smooth transition from text to voice-to-text.  That will largely determine adoption rates and therefore success.  Only time will tell. Let me know what you think.

So it seems I unknowingly committed the ultimate Twitter crime last night and within hours was duly tried and sentenced to Twitter pergatory!  I admit I am fairly new to Twitter and really wanted to accelerate my adoption curve to catch up to the Tony Robbins’ of the world. How? By following a few hundred Twitterers to see the spectrum of good and bad Tweets and of course in the hopes that they would follow me in return. The results? After just one hour my Twitter account was suspended!

How did I manage to get suspended so quickly? I used a mass follow tool called FlashTweet.  With my user name or “handle” being my real name (SeanBlack) I clearly was not looking to spam anyone! I just figured not only would mass following lots of people give me a guide to what to Tweet and what not to Tweet, but also everything I read online suggested that the best way to get followers was to follow other Twitterers. After hitting follow on a few dozen people I quickly tired of following one person at a time.  I am also an executive at four year old internet company Trulia.com, so of course absolutely everything I do more than once I ask myself “Is there a way to automate this process or to make it more scalable?”.  So I went to Google and simply typed “Twitter mass follow tool” and voila! I got FlashTweet.com.

FlashTweet seemed like the answer to my prayers!  It basically let’s you follow 100 people at a time, which is Twitter’s max limit for one time follows.  Even better, it let’s you follow friends of friends, which is great as I want to make sure my follows and followers and I have lots in common.  I simply went to one of the friends I follow, who just so happens to be one of the most successful Twitterers out there in terms of number of follows and followers - Guy Kawasaki. Is Guy really a friend you ask? Well, I attended his four day Garage.com Entrepreneurship Bootcamp back in 1999, then he gave the commencement speech when I graduated with my MBA at Babson College in 2000 and I have read his books and followed his blog ever since, so yes I think so!

Anyway, once I logged into FlashTweet all I had to do was find Guy’s profile and it showed me all his friends. I could then select people one by one (that would have defeated the purpose obviously) or a hundred at a time.  After seven clicks and about 20 minutes I went from following 40+ people and having 40+ followers to following 753 people and 83 followers. I went to bed thinking I had hit the Twitter jackpot! I shut my computer with a plan to return tomorrow and follow a few more folks only to find that I had been suspended!

So now what? Well, I wrote to the Twitter Gods (aka Twitter customer service) in the hopes that they will take mercy on me and put me back on Twitter Earth to live another day on Twitter. Wish me luck!

I konw Tony Robbins is the king of self-help, but really - how the heck did he get 342k followers with only 242 posts?  Are newbies more likely to type Tony’s name in their first time on Twitter than say their high school friends?  Did he make the top 100 people to follow list that Twitter supplies a newbie to help them get started?

The most concerning thing (for him really) is that Tony only follows 94 people in return! Guy Kawasaki’s opinion is that it is arrogant not to follow the people who follow you.  In fact, Guy has  over 100k followers but follows 110k people in return! Is Tony arrogant or is he just not quite up to speed on Twitter ethics?

And here’s my last, somewhat unrelated question - why would anyone with as much personal brand equity as “Tony Robbins” name his company the Anthony Robbins Companies?  I saw Tony speak for the first time two years ago.  He did a clever marketing ploy during his presentation that got everyone to subscribe to his email newsletter as they were sitting there in exchange for some free limited time Tony wisdom. The first time I got his newsletter a few weeks later from the “Anthony Robbins Companies” I wondered who the heck was Anthony Robbins? When I realized it was Tony I had to ask myself if maybe he really is a great self helper that just got lucky marketing himself along the way.  I haven’t given up on him yet, so maybe he will respond to me in his own defense?