Power Pal

I just read a great article in McKinsey Quarterly called " Four ways to get more value from digital marketing " by David Edelman, a partner in their Marketing and Sales Practice in Boston. Here is a summary of the four lessons with a couple comments of my own thrown in: 1. Orchestrate an integrated consumer experience. Coordinate activities to engage the consumer throughout an increasingly digital purchase journey. Some examples: TV commercials should offer keywords that can be used later for online searches, links should go to specific places to learn about and buy products, retailers should use the same images and rich descriptions as the manufacturer, shifting of budgets from mass media spending to areas that influence a consumer's evaluation process (presence in stores and online, search engine positioning, content for retailer's web sites, and cultivating recommendations online influencers like bloggers). 2. Inspire customers to help you stretch your market...

Read an interesting blog post titled " The Future of Music Business Models (and Those Who Are Already There) " by Mike Masnick. I don't know much about the music industry, so thought it was interesting. The main take-away of the new way to approach music business models is: Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = The Business Model The business models he used as examples ranged from giving away music for free online (but charging for "packages"), to getting your fan-base to fund your next record, to Here were the examples: Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails - They give away their music for free online, but ask that you sign-up for their email list. You then get emails about their upcoming tour dates, can find ways to connect with other fans (like forums, mobile apps, and user submitted videos), to purchasing higher-end packages. He's made a lot of money this way ... despite giving the music away for free. Drummer Josh Freese - He priced his album s...

I've been trying to get up-to-speed on the mobile industry these days and had a thought on search and implications for marketers. All this may be obvious, but I figure I'd jot it down while I'm thinking about it. I was looking into all the new location based gaming companies starting up these days. In looking over what companies like Foursquare , Gowalla , and Booyah are doing, it seems like it introduces new opportunities for how search and targeted advertising will work. Each of these games is producing a rich amount of content regarding where, when, and how consumers behave in the real world. This is incredibly valuable if you're a retailer or service provider. Apply some analytics to this data set and you could form completely new segmentation strategies based on behaviors rather than demographics. For example, make offers to those people that may actually respond to them based on their previous behaviors (e.g. they don't always frequent the same locat...

Read a good article in Business Week titled " Apple vs. Google " about how the two companies are on a collision course for each other. The recent acquisitions of AdMob (by Google for $750M) and Quattro Wireless (by Apple for $275M) and the uncanny similarities between the iPhone and the Nexus One highlight how similar the two firms strategies may be. They both want to dominate the mobile industry. According to the analysts, mobile is the next key battleground for digital riches: The key battleground in the near term is mobile computing. Analysts who once tingled when talking about the Internet are getting that same old feeling over mobile's potential. Morgan Stanley's ( MS ) Mary Meeker predicts that within five years more users will tap into the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs. Desktop Internet use led to the rise of Google, eBay ( EBAY ), and Yahoo, but the mobile winners are still emerging. "Now is the time to get going," says Doug Clinton...

This is a continuation of my post about The VC Due Diligence Process and builds on The 3 Laws of Venture Capital . Both are commentaries of David Silver's book Venture Capital: The Complete Guide for Investors . Continuing with the audits that VC's should perform when reviewing investments, the second of the five audits is the review of the entrepreneurial team. The two team members that VC's should focus on are the entrepreneur and the manager partner . Entrepreneurs are responsible for the launch of the company while the manager is responsible for building the company into something that has value. Think of entrpreneurs as the technologist or visionaries and the manager partners as the "gray hairs" they bring on to make their dream a reality. Entrepreneurs generally don't select managers well and have trouble delegating. This is because entrepreneurs believe others can't do things as well as they can (and this is, in fact, usually true). A great ...

This is a continuation on my post about David Silver's The VC Due Diligence Process and builds on The 3 Laws of Venture Capital . Both are commentaries of A. David Silver's book Venture Capital: The Complete Guide for Investors . The first of five audits that VC's should do when reviewing investment opportunities is the audit of the problem and solution. Estimating the Problem Size The first step in evaluating the problem is to estimate the total size of the problem and then the expected market share once the market has been saturated with competitors. According to Silver, the maximum plausible market share is on the order of 10 - 15%. If the goal is to have $100M+ revenues after 5 to 10 years once the market has developed, the total market size must be at least $1B. There are many methods of estimating market size, so I'll defer on the best method. But an important step in this process is to actually talk to potential customers to gauge whether they perceive the...

As has become my yearly tradition on July 4th, I read through the Declaration of Independence today just to remind myself of the significance of the occasion. Here's the text of the document off Wikisource for those interested. It's amazing that Thomas Jefferson was only 33 when he wrote this in 1776. He wrote the first draft in a day or two in parallel to several other projects he was working on; quite astonishing, but he was apparently a gifted writer of public documents so they put the task in the right hands. I learned today, though, that much of the text of the document was in fact borrowed. Many of the famous lines were Jefferson's own creation, including the concluding line "we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." But much of it was adapted from state level declarations of independence, most notably the Virginia Declaration of Rights . For instance, the pre-amble which included the famous "all men are cr...