Posts filed under 'Blogging'
August 9th, 2008
One of the strategies we cover in our Getting More Customers workshops is blogging.
Below is a 90-plan developed by a workshop attendee last year, anonymized and presented with permission. Actual implementation took more than 90 days but he has been blogging for a little less than a year and has 60 blog posts that have been gathering readers. He also uses the blog to answer questions that keep coming up, treating it like a FAQ in progress.
Any good action plan builds on your existing strengths and successes. If you are comfortable with writing, a blog is a good way to gently remind your prospects that you are out there and are available to help them when they have a problem.
Here is the blank worksheet he filled out, answers in italic
One Page Customer Development Plan
Chose the techniques you are going to implement and have a plan! Figure out how you are going to measure it and track the outcome.
Objectives:
- Who are the NEW customers you want to attract?
want to target customers in financial space
- How will you develop NEW business?
use blog as a way to reach and influence prospects
- How will you grow EXISTING business?
same
90-day Plan
2 weeks: Identify blogs where I can guest blog or comment on4 weeks:
- Select blog software and domain name
- Check out at typepad, wordpress, blogger
- Does my hosting service have one?
- Comment on other blogs - 3 times/week (Can I keep this up?)
8 weeks:
- Develop a plan for one/week blogging topics
- Start writing one blog per week
13 weeks:
- Start my blog
- Write one blog a week on my blog
- once a week comment on someone else blog (linking to my)
We checked in with him briefly at each of the milestone dates (basic follow-up is included in the workshop fee) and recently spoke with him now that he has been blogging for about 10 months to get his assessment of the results achieved.
I got busy so it took about 5 or 6 months to do. It takes a lot more planning, reading and thought than I anticipated that it would and readership is smaller than I would like (at least compared to our newsletter). I need to get better at commenting on other blogs. When I am busy this is the first thing to fall off, yet it is critical to building my readers. I have seen it boost my website traffic but I have not seen it generate sales leads directly yet. It was been useful to answer inquiries we get by writing a blog post, and doing this has made them easier to re-use. It’s also been helpful when we wanted to respond quickly to an event (e.g. an acquisition) that our customers and prospects are looking for a quick take on. But it’s a different writing style from a forum post or a newsletter article that requires practice to master.
July 22nd, 2008
I just added Cadence to the list of companies with blogs on my May 28 post “Bloggers Covering Design Automation.” I didn’t see any announcement but they appear to have re-designed their website in the last three or four weeks and now highlight a community of bloggers on their home page.
My simple projection is that within three years every EDA company, large or small, will have at least one blog, and EDA consulting firms of all sizes will add a blog to their website. So that says we are on track to grow from 70 to over 500. I base this in part on the speed on adoption of the web by EDA firms and what’s already happened for web startups and many other emerging technology spaces: entrepreneurs consider a blog a core component of their corporate identity.
Making sense of 500 feeds will be no easier than surfing across 500 television channels to find something new and worth reading. I mentioned David Lin’s experimental Netvibes page in my “Primer on Blogs for EDA Start-Ups” and it certainly represents a good start. But I think an opportunity exists for community lens approach similar to what Hacker News provides web entrepreneurs (which is different in some important but subtle ways from digg and reddit that allow it to avoid the death of the lowest common denominator topics migrating to the home page). Other models are certainly viable as well, based on forums, wikis, and new forms both emerging and yet to be invented.
Paul Saffo’s 1994 Wired article “It’s the Context Stupid” (also available on www.saffo.com/essays/contextstupid.php) makes the point that the value is as much in providing context as the raw content.
“It’s the content, stupid.” This catchy apothegm [is] now the mantra of an infant new media industry. […] As compelling as this phrase may be, it is also dead wrong. It is not content but context that will matter most a decade or so from now. The scarce resource will not be stuff, but point of view.
[…]
The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching, and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the expanses of cyberspace.
One example of a hybrid model of journalism is what John Byler is doing at Chip Design magazine in adding 8 blogs to complement his print publication. I was particularly impressed by a recent post by Grant Martin on “Leibson’s Law in Action? Cadence returns to ESL with new synthesis tool” because he did something that is natural for a blogger and highly unusual for an article in an on-line paper or magazine: he links to whoever has the best information on the topic, even it’s a competitor to Chip Design. It’s not only a very useful summary that places several recent ESL announcements in context, but Martin links to the source material on-line, regardless of where it came from: EE Times, SCDSource, EDN, and Chip Design Mag. And he has comments from a number of key players ESL.
I was talking to a well respected EDA PR professional recently who was waiting for the EDA blogging ecosystem to sort itself out and pick a dozen “A” blogs so that it would resemble the good old days of print (and EDA PR could “return to normal”). I said I didn’t think that would happen because blogging uses links for context in a way that print didn’t (and can’t). On any given topic there may only be a dozen well respected bloggers, but there would be a lot of topics with different sets for each. It’s different when you have knowledgeable practitioners writing directly on the web.
I believe Grant Martin’s post is a harbinger for a very different kind of “sense-making mechanism” than both traditional EDA print journalism and the press release aggregation model that’s practiced on a number of websites. Not necessarily better (or worse) but different.
We have time to get ready, and since we are all steering we may end up somewhere else. But I think 500 blogs (plus or minus 250) is likely by 2011 because it they don’t depend upon a business model transition: blogs are like weeds, they don’t require cultivation to thrive. I think they create a substrate that complements and potentially displaces the press release with the RSS/Atom feed as the quantum unit of information distribution for (social) media.
June 30th, 2008
After I offered “7 Tips for Encouraging Bloggers to Write About a Conference,” Gabe Moretti, the editor of the DACeZine, asked me to contribute an article on blogging (I guess that could have been my eighth tip). It appeared in the June 26 DACeZine. What follows is a version of the article appropriate for a blog post: same content, more links. I think these tips are actually useful for any software start-up.
History & Definitions
Blogs are a “new” social software technology that have been in use for more than a decade. The name “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997 and shortened to “blog” in 1999 by Peter Merholz. Both describe a website with one or more of the following characteristics:
- Permalink: each page or article has a permanent URL called a permalink that allows other sites to reference it uniquely for the life of the website. This inhibits link rot and allows useful references and backlinks to accumulate over time.
- Reverse Chron: there is normally an index that presents the articles in reverse chronological order (newest first) which answers the question “What’s New?”
- Comments: each article has a footer that allows readers to add comments. Registration can be required to inhibit spam, but in effect, each article can have a forum thread associated with it.
- Trackbacks: notifications to other blogs (and content management systems that accept them) that they have been referenced in a published article. These trackbacks may be appended as comments after the referenced article on the remote site to let readers know who else is referring to it.
- Categories: may be defined in an ad hoc way for a site and appended as tags (metadata) for each article. Sometimes, these tags may be shared between blogs to facilitate easy reference about common events or issues.
- Syndication Feeds: typically based on one or more versions of RSS and Atom, allow readers to aggregate content from many blogs. They are essentially a machine readable format of “What’s New” that tracks and displays a summary or the full text of the last few articles published.
- BlogRoll: a list of other blogs that are suggested reading by the blog author(s).
There are many blogging systems and not all of them support all of these features. Not every blog has all of these features enabled, but a minimum feature set would normally include permalinks, a reverse chronological index, and syndication feeds.
EDA Blogs
There are more than 70 blogs relevant to Electronic Design Automation, and the first “EDA Bloggers Birds of a Feather” meeting was held at this year’s DAC. As a part of the preparation for that event, I developed a list of “Bloggers Covering Electronic Design Automation” that David Lin of Denali published on Netvibes.
Starting the Conversation
Tim O’Reilly has observed that a blog acts as a dial tone for a website: it signals a commitment for interaction and participation on the part of the authors. Current blogging activity substantiates that a start-up is open for business. This can be an issue when the website has not been updated for six months!
EDA software and consulting services both require an ongoing relationship for a customer to get full value out of the initial decision to engage. This means that a purchase decision, especially for start-ups, can look a lot like a hiring decision. By exposing your thinking and demonstrating your expertise on your blog, you allow your prospects to get to know you better even before they write that first email or pick up the phone. Whether they see you listed at a tradeshow, see an article you’ve written, or hear about you from a colleague, they will almost always check your website before contacting you. If you let them get to know you and proactively answer their likely questions, you allow them to make more productive use of their time and make your first conversation that much more useful for both of you.
Key Benefits From a Blog
- Using permalinks for your content means that the highly linked articles accumulate a higher preference in search engines (e.g. Google) which means you are more likely to be found, especially if you are blogging about something of interest to your prospects.
- Using feeds means that new articles will get into the search engine caches, where they can be found by prospects; in a matter of hours rather than waiting for an indexing spider to visit your site every two or three weeks.
- A blog allows you to respond frequently and in real time to events, issues, and new information that are relevant to your prospects and your business. News releases still have a role but are better reserved for key communications.
- A blog also replaces the “What’s New” page for your website with a much more powerful structure that’s better connected with other websites.
Tips for Better Blogging
- Plan ahead. Map out a calendar of subjects to cover one or two a week for the next month or two; this will help you focus on these topics in other media and help you avoid writer’s block.
- Offer Perspective. Don’t just rehash other articles, blog posts, and news stories. Add your own insights and expertise—and keep the content clear, focused and professional.
- Report. Tie your subject matter to topical events such as talks, conferences, seminars, or trade shows you’ve attended, adding your own insights from those events.
- Focus for effect. Pick a set of topics that are relevant to your business and your (prospective) customers. (For non-business-related topics, create a second personal blog.)
- Do it often. Shorter, more frequent posts are best (around 200 to 400 words and at least once a week). Try making just three points per issue relevant to your intended audience.
- Choose clear titles. Keep titles short and use words that are familiar and relevant to your readers.
- Cite references. Include links for your citations to increase your credibility and make your blog more useful, reliable and better integrated into the blogosphere.
- Write with Integrity. Disclose all relevant information about your financial interests in the topic and only write what you know to be true.
June 9th, 2008
Since I am at DAC this week I will use the DAC website as a representative example.
- Add a blog that allows (moderated) comments and (moderated) trackbacks.
DAC: Not yet.
- Give every session and every event a permalink.
DAC: This is actually true for the last seven and a half conferences (back to 37th post conference site). The URLs are a little funky but here is a pointer to session 1 of the 39th DAC
- Give every session and every event trackbacks so that you can see who has blogged about them.
DAC: Not Yet
- Add RSS/Atom feeds for both events and announcements.
DAC: Not Yet
- Link every presenter’s name to their home page (blog, personal site, IEEE personal page, or other they supply) so that it’s easy to learn more about them. Add a link to their affiliated organization (college, university, firm, government entity, non-profit). I actually did this for the 1995 HDLCon (admittedly a smaller show than DAC) and it added a lot to your ability to do some quick background research.
DAC: Not Yet
- Realize that you are writing a website first, with content that may re-purposed into e-mail newsletters and print. This means using hyperlinks to provide pointers to relevant information.
DAC: Not yet; while the DACeZine is a great addition it’s an on-line magazine that obeys all of the strictures of print.
- Make Wifi available ubiquitously at the conference.
DAC: Yes! (at least for the 45th at Anaheim Convention Center)
May 28th, 2008
Ever since EE Times laid off Richard Goering (and seemed like it was no longer committed to covering EDA) I have been meaning to map the EDA Blogosphere. When JL Gray suggested a Blogging Birds of a Feather at DAC (scheduled for Wednesday June 11 6pm in Room 201B in the Anaheim Convention Center) I volunteered to help him and Harry Gries organize it, along with David Lin and John Ford. Final details are being worked out but it looks like Steve Leibson, Grant Martin, and George Harper will also be giving 3 minute lightning talks on different aspects of blogging.
There is also an edabloggers Yahoo Group you can sign up for if you want to be notified of updates, if this one goes well we may facilitate others at appropriate EDA-related conferences.
So this event was the spur I needed to uncover about sixty bloggers covering some aspect of electronic design automation:
What was surprising to me was how few companies had blogs, but I suspect that will change in EDA as it already has for Software as a Service and Internet/Web companies. If your blog is not on this list (or it’s on the list and you would like it taken off) please contact me. Bloggers and those interested in learning more about blogging are welcome at the DAC Blogging Birds of a Feather Wed June 11 6pm in Room 201B. Other posts about the event:
Update June 16: I continue to add to the list almost daily as overlooked bloggers E-mail me or leave comments. My plan is to keep this list updated here for at least another two or three months.
Update July 22: I added the Cadence blogging community to the list and blogged about “What Happens When 70 EDA Blogs Become 500 in 2011.“
May 5th, 2008
Back in February i had an exchange with Sam Huleatt on his Leveraging Ideas blog (tagline: “Ideation on social media, venture capital and startups”) in response to his “Why I can’t Read Novels Anymore Post” that I thought I would rescue from the obscurity of the comments and post here for the half dozen regular readers of this blog (and it’s part of my natural economy of effort to rework an existing bit of writing into a blog post than finish one of the dozens languishing 90% finished in my drafts folder). I have reworked it lightly to add some hyperlinks for context and to make it a little easier to read.
First some excerpts from Sam Huleatt’s original post for context (the whole post is definitely worth reading):
I have optimized my ability to consume niche information rapidly: reading blog posts via Google Reader and applying tags (340 subscriptions to blogs on social media, venture capital and tech/economics). Daily I consume and tag 30+ websites and articles found by the 94 people whose bookmarks I subscribe to via Del.icio.us. In addition, I make use of various alerts and aggregators like Techmeme.
However, recently two things have happened:
- Information has become ‘commoditized’ and to “me too-y”
- My ability to read for pleasure has disintegrated
Information has become ‘commoditized’ in the sense that websites like Techmeme now have powerful algorithms to find niche content and expose it. This strips away any competitive advantage I felt in dutifully ‘hunting’ for information. […] It also means that all readers have access to the same information: it’s no longer a competitive advantage to be the most well read-guy in the room. Plus, because of the ‘me too’ effect, it’s less likely that really great innovative insights will emerge. How many takes can people possibly have on Facebook’s latest announcement? I now get more information out of reading a post’s comments than I do the actual article.
Also, and perhaps tragically, my ability to read for the sake of pleasure has greatly faltered. I am now trained like clockwork to scan for keywords and main points; reading detailed monologues such as those found in novels has become too boring to maintain my interest. In my new world, rather than read a book, I’m more likely to read the book’s Wikipedia page and then individually research the conclusions/topics. A book’s prose is just filler. When I do read lengthy pieces, I find myself skipping ahead in chapters to reach conclusions. For someone who write often and used to love literature, I know I’m this is not a good thing.
In re-reading this now I get a real sense of “not enough time” (perhaps an occupational hazard of a technology oriented career, and a sensation I am personally haunted by) and I am reminded of a quote by Eric Hoffer “The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else—we are the busiest people in the world.” A life without time for reading novels would be much less enjoyable. My response went in a different direction:
There is a category of information that hasn’t been written down (yet). You might try more reflection and focus on serious conversation to regain your balance. Ultimately gathering all of this information has to be used for a purpose beyond maintaining situational awareness. What kind of know-how do you want to develop? What is the problem you are trying to solve.
Neither Google, nor the Blogosphere, nor the World Wide Web are the world. As Korzybski observed:
“The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing it describes. Whenever the map is confused with the territory, a ’semantic disturbance’ is set up in the organism. The disturbance continues until the limitation of the map is recognized.”
Mr. Huleatt responded
I want to develop expertise in the social media and venture capital industries. In our current era, information and knowing where to access information (quickly) is a major asset, especially in the technology space.
I agree that none of those are the ‘world’ but the way things are going, I have lots of multiple worlds and each has varying priorities.
Sam Huleatt is also part of the team that’s behind Workstreamr (tag line “Work Made Social”) which was deeply in stealth when the original exchange took place but now has a blog and manifesto. I’ve signed up for their beta. Anyway, I replied back as follows:
I am not a venture capitalist but have some experience working with them and I would think much of the key or differentiating information they rely on is not on the web. It seems to me it’s more about being able to judge people rather than encyclopedic knowledge of technology and financial trends. As an analogy: it’s the difference between knowing the probability distributions of poker hands–necessary but not sufficient–and knowing how to assess people.
The deep trends are visible in the “long nose of innovation.”
What society will do with them is harder to predict.
The latest data on developing expertise is that it takes approximately 10,000 hours (or 10-12 years) of practice, and actually requires “deliberate practice” so that you don’t experience the same year over and over. See for example http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.html
I don’t fault your goals, but I do question your methods.
His reply
The law of 10,000 hours is one I have studied. While it’s interesting, it’s not the law.
Knowing how to assess people is definitely very important, but without blogs and the internet you are not exposed to nearly as many people.
I use blogs as a ‘foot-in-the-door” to learn about new people, companies and ideas. If I find something truly scintillating, I always follow-up in person.
And there we left it. I do think entrepreneurs should engage in serious conversation in preference to reading blogs. Serious conversation with prospects and people who are knowledgeable about the technologies and markets that are relevant to their startup. And I think the deliberate practice model that Ericsson outlines is based on a reasonable amount of data.
May 1st, 2008
- What have you learned?
- How have you changed since you started?
- What key skill or experience did you lack when you started that has caused you the most problem?
- What has been the biggest surprise: what was one key assumption you made, perhaps even unconsciously, that has caused the most grief?
- What development, event, or new understanding since you started has had the most impact on your original plan? How has your plan changed in response?
Take 30 minutes and write down the answers to these questions for your current business (you can take another 30 and write them down for you last one as well if you like). Share the questions with your co-founders and ask them to do the same. Compare notes. Put the answers away in a safe place, answer the questions again in six months, and compare your first and second set of answers. Repeat as necessary.
I came up with these in response to “Need good interview questions for startup founders” on Hacker News, deriving them from questions we have been asking in our Founder Story series.
Inspired as well by “Forget your Blog: 5 Reasons to Keep a Personal Log”
There is a scene in the movie Weird Science where the main character looks up something in his so-called “log.”
“You keep a diary!?”, the other geek asks.
“No, of course not! Teenage girls keep a diary, I keep a log”.
- Full Freedom of Thought
- Spot the Connections
- Sum it Up
- Backtrack Feelings
- Make Growth or Decline Visible
April 23rd, 2008
I caught this tweet on the VentureHacks Twitter feed but in checking with Mr. Google I discovered it was part of the Balanced Scorecard methodology. An excerpt from Dr. David Norton’s “Measuring Value Creation with the Balanced Scorecard” a summary is available here.
“Strategy is a hypothesis. Strategy implies the movement of an organization from it’s present position to a desirable but uncertain future position. Since the organization has never been to this future position, the pathway of how it intends to get there involves a series of linked hypotheses.”
And some excerpts from a presentation “Using Balanced Scorecard to Build a Project Focused IT Organization” by Glen Alleman:
Strategy is a hypothesis. Metrics are the data for testing the hypothesis.
Strategy is making a hypothesis about a desired outcome, constructing the measures to test the hypothesis, deploying the experiment to test the hypothesis, then making adjustments based on the metrics.
The concept of strategy as a hypothesis and the experiments to test the hypothesis may be new to many. But this approach puts strategy in a different light. Strategy is not something you do then go off to execute the plan. It is a continuous feedback process. Always testing the strategy with metrics derived from projects.
The take away for startups is to understand how you are going to keep score, measuring both progress and distance to goal. Whatever strategy or mix of strategies you adopt, for each you should define up front and in simple terms how you will track impact on the key outcomes you are trying to achieve (e.g. revenue, profit).
April 12th, 2008
As Silicon Valley’s economy slows down and expense controls transmute into layoff notices, it’s good to remember what real problems are.
Major Andrew Olmsted was killed in Iraq on Jan. 3, 2008. Olmsted was a blogger who left behind a post for posthumous publication. I am excerpting a couple of key paragraphs to help offer a sense of persepctive. Olmsted was a Babylon 5 fan who also blogged under the pseudonym G’Kar, he sprinkles his final post with a number of quotes from the series.
Final Post
“I am leaving this message for you because it appears I must leave sooner than I intended. I would have preferred to say this in person, but since I cannot, let me say it here.” G’Kar, Babylon 5
This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits. And so, like G’Kar, I must say here what I would much prefer to say in person. I want to thank hilzoy for putting it up for me. It’s not easy asking anyone to do something for you in the event of your death, and it is a testament to her quality that she didn’t hesitate to accept the charge. As with many bloggers, I have a disgustingly large ego, and so I just couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to have the last word if the need arose. Perhaps I take that further than most, I don’t know. I hope so. It’s frightening to think there are many people as neurotic as I am in the world. In any case, since I won’t get another chance to say what I think, I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity. Such as it is.
It’s incredibly jarring to start reading and realize that the author is dead and wrote this farewell essay with the intention of having it published posthumously.
On a similar note, while you’re free to think whatever you like about my life and death, if you think I wasted my life, I’ll tell you you’re wrong. We’re all going to die of something. I died doing a job I loved. When your time comes, I hope you are as fortunate as I was.
This is reminiscent of Marcus Aurelius “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
I wish I could say I’d at least started to get it right. Although, in my defense, I think I batted a solid .250 or so. Not a superstar, but at least able to play in the big leagues. I’m afraid I can’t really offer any deep secrets or wisdom. I lived my life better than some, worse than others, and I like to think that the world was a little better off for my having been here. Not very much, but then, few of us are destined to make more than a tiny dent in history’s Green Monster. I would be lying if I didn’t admit I would have liked to have done more, but it’s a bit too late for that now, eh? The bottom line, for me, is that I think I can look back at my life and at least see a few areas where I may have made a tiny difference, and massive ego aside, that’s probably not too bad.
Read the whole thing, and bookmark so you can go back and re-read when you are feeling sorry for yourself.
April 11th, 2008
Matt Maroon wrote a very thought provoking post on “Why Not to Do a Startup” a little over four weeks ago that I have been meaning to write about. I went back today with the Awesome Highlighter–an appropriately named product for once, unlike those damned “sea monkeys” and “X-Ray specs“(see Postscript)–and pulled out what I thought were some of his key passages. Here they are in context in the highlighted version and now in cross examination mode:
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about startups lately, and I’ve come to realize that they’re really not for most people, probably even most people who attempt them.
I am reminded of Sramana Mitra’s quote in the Real VCs of Silicon Valley that “The truth is, start-up-land is littered with mavericks, iconoclasts, drops-outs and misfits.” (As I read that quote again I think to myself, yes, that’s me, these are my kind of people).
There are a number of people floating around the Valley whose lives are a pretty sad story. Every startup they joined tanked, every one they passed on went public. They went without salary for years, and even when they had one, it was pretty low.
It’s always the one that got away that is successful (probably because so many can get away for every one you take part in).
Even sadder are the people whose startups succeeded but still aren’t happy, because they never learned that there is more to life than making money.
Perhaps we should introduce the first group to the second. But this affluenza isn’t limited to startup founders.
The biggest problem with startups..is the variance. Startups tend to be fairly binary, with you making either a very large amount off of them or nothing at all.
I think this is actually not true, and while many fail, there is a large spectrum of outcomes. Even among founding teams. Even among venture backed founding teams, which I think is the population Matt is describing. Matt’s entire post should probably be required reading for all YCombinator, TechStars, etc.. applicants, because it makes a lot of points that will make founders uncomfortable but that have to be acknowledged and managed.
Some folks win big, but many do well, especially when coupled with:
[B]enefits to startups other than the money..Working for yourself.
We see a lot of bootstrappers who run “small successful” software firms who are about as happy as they would have been in “a real job.” Some break out and some fail, but many fall into a fairly large middle ground: they achieve modest success but stay below the radar screen of most observers. It’s one of the reasons we facilitate the Bootstrapper Breakfasts as a service to the startup community.
Postscript April 12: After an e-mail alerted me to the fact that the final highlighting link drops some of the text I contacted the Awesome Highlighter team and exchanged a couple of E-mails. The app is very early stage and doesn’t work on many web pages, just like my X-ray specs after all.
Postscript April 14: The Awesome Highlighter team has fixed some of the problems.
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