Sorry, but no.

I remember when I was co-founder of a particular startup that was in a very ‘hot’ space — we knew this because there were six other startups in Australia doing something similar, we all appeared to be growing fast, and similar businesses in the US were getting press coverage every week about how quickly they were growing.

Yet none of these startups was making money. In fact, we were all losing money — some more rapidly than others. We were all betting on the market growing, betting that our cost of customer acquisition would come down as we learned more about the best marketing channels and tested different forms of conversion.

Some of us were backed by large corporations, some of us by venture capitalists and some of us by angel investors. You’d see our brands everywhere, in banner ads, newspapers, on the backs of buses and even in television commercials. You read about us in the technology press at least monthly. To the outsider, we all looked like successful businesses.

But we all had one thing in common: we had a certain amount of money and time in which to create a profitable business.

We were test pilots, given a plane loaded with debt and a runway from which to make it fly. We could throw out things and people to make it lighter, we could add more marketing or tech engines to make it accelerate faster, but the weight, speed and runway length were all connected variables. We knew some of our planes wouldn’t get into the air, but it wasn’t going to be us, so we and our competitors kept heading down the runway.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking a hot startup you see mentioned everywhere is evidence of a successful business, or that a crowded space in the tech startup sector is evidence of a successful business model.

Where are they today? The majority of our competitor’s planes crashed or exploded while still on the runway. We sold our passengers and their luggage to a competitor — our ejector seats worked, and we got to keep all our arms and legs and most of the airframe. In the US (which despite all the similarities, is a very different business environment) only one plane really got off the ground. None of the Australian startups in that space survive in their original form. Personally, I don’t regret pressing the ejector button.

I see evidence of similar market conditions today in smartphone app frameworks, social analytics, CMS and especially in daily deals.

It’s very possible to be working and not making any money, so don’t be fooled by a popular startup or business model. It’s not possible to keep making a loss indefinitely, because every runway has an end.

reporters notebook by sskennel

I’m so old that I had a whole career in journalism and PR before the visual web even existed. I know, I can hardly believe it myself, but maybe that’s a symptom of early-stage Alzheimer’s. So I’ve written and read a lot of press releases over the years. Press releases are much less important these days, for various reasons, but they can still add some momentum to your startup business. Here’s some tips for the first-time press release writer.

Most first-timers work really hard to make sure they’ve written a good story, but when you’re writing a press release, that’s actually not the goal. A time-poor journalist scans press releases very quickly looking for good news angles, things which, in a couple of keystrokes, can become a headline and first paragraph that will draw the eye of the reader.

A great news angle:

• Is stated simply, without jargon or overly formal language
• Is never more than 15 words
• Makes a surprising assertion
• Leaves a question unanswered

Usually it’s not possible to get that all in a single 15 word sentence. Instead, try to write your news angle as 2-3 (max 4) bullet points.

An example:

• New Aussie online store growing fast, even though it sells only one product
• For young professional men who don’t have time to shop for fashion
• Young, charismatic, founder with a surprising business story

The simplest way to improve your press release is to make the first bullet point your headline and put the second two news angles as bullet points between the headline and body copy.

With good news angles up the top of your press release a journalist may not even read the rest of your press release, just call you for an interview before they really understand what the story is. Or they may run the whole press release as their story.

No numbers

From this day forward until you’re required by ASX/NASDAQ to report the data publicly, never disclose how many customers and how much revenue you’ve had, currently have, or expect to have. Instead, you talk about growth in customers and revenue in terms of “doubled” or “tripled” or “grown by 150% since launch” or whatever. Never disclose a hard number as it can be used against you by competitors, media, analysts, investors and others in future.

Distribution

If you’re a startup and can’t afford a media relations agency to distribute your press release to the media, for heaven’s sake don’t try to research the email addresses of relevant media contacts and send them out yourself — there are more important things you should be doing (MVP, customer discovery, analysis, pivot, you know the drill). Traditional distribution services like AAP MediaNet in Australia will be too expensive so try PRWire, Get2Press, Getthewordout or google “australia press release distribution” — there’s heaps of ‘em. If you have an international story, PRWeb is good. Don’t tweet or Facebook press releases (very poor form) though you may be forgiven for tweeting a link to a blog post based on your press release.

Be prepared

Be prepared to take a phone interview about your business and the product as soon as the press release is out (though don’t be disappointed if you don’t get a single one first time around). It’s important to be well-prepared — practice with a journalist friend if you have one, with a media relations professional if you can afford one, or just a buddy who watches too much TV news and can do a convincing impression of a cantankerous journalist.

Take the interview on your mobile phone — that way if the interview’s not going the right way and you need to stop, recover and think about how to get things back on track, you can hang up on the journalist and call them back, blaming poor network coverage for the drop out.

If you don’t know the answer, if you can’t remember the industry statistic, if you can’t remember the caller’s name: be honest and admit it. Offer to call, text or email back with the missing info and make sure you do it before you take another journalist’s call, or really, do anything else at all. A frustrated journalist with only 90% of the story will be tempted to make up the missing 10% or punish you by writing a negative piece.

Good luck!

First, the background: as a mentor and investor in tech startups, there’s only so much time I need to spend face-to-face with people, and since clients are as likely to be in Lausanne, New York or San Jose as Sydney, I don’t really need to maintain a city office, or spend more than a day a week in the city if I plan ahead.

But working from home has drawbacks for such a distractable guy. My productivity plunges if I get distracted by hanging out the washing and finishing the newspaper, and I miss the chance to bounce off other creative, entrepreneurial people.

This is how I'm often distracted: by kayaking

I was keen to try and solve these two problems, and was investigating establishing my own co-working space in the neighbourhood if need be.

One phone call and an hour later, I was being given a guided tour of the creative co-working space…

The day after we moved house, I was at ZUBI Bar, one of the best locations in Newport, an extremely funky and fun coffee shop on the main strip. Big, charismatic South African Steve and his team of loud, cheerful, playful baristas and waitpeople are happy to share their Wi-Fi connection if you order a meal.

I told Steve about how I was considering starting a co-working space. Steve knew somebody I had to talk to: “Simon Bond, a guy up the street who’s got a space with really fast internet access and a few spare desks”. Sounded intriguing!

Got Simon’s contact details? No, but Steve thought the owner of the local Apple reseller, Mac&Me could help, so I went looking for Margot. She  had Simon’s number because she was also setting up a training room and Apple service centre in Simon’s space.

One phone call and an hour later, I was being given a guided tour of the creative co-working space, NewportNet.com.au from Simon and his wife, Karen. I’d gone from worrying about finding someplace to work to finding the perfect workplace in an afternoon.

ZUBI Bar, like the best of Surry Hills transported to the Northern Beaches

Thanks to St George Bank opening a branch downstairs, this brand-new building has high capacity optical fibre all the way from Newport back down to Sydney. When stockbroker Simon was looking for office space to relocate his busy broking business, he happened across the developer at [address] and discovered that much of this optical fibre cabling was sitting un-utilised.

Simon’s connections run far and wide, including senior management at Internode, the Adelaide-based internet service provider. Simon knew just the people to help him put in the hardware required to utilise all that unused high-speed bandwidth.

Simon needed some high-speed, reliable internet access for his broking firm: if Internode could install and configure the necessary internet plumbing, could he build the Northern Beaches’ first high-speed internet access point for small creative entrepeneurs? Would Simon Hackett of Internode back that idea with some technical people and hardware? The answer was a resounding yes.

He’s a bit of a visionary, is our Simon, and he and his wife Karen have an admirable vision for the Newport business community: “build it and they will come”. That is, create a bright, open, collaborative business environment for the creative entrepreneurs of the Northern Beaches, give them access to the services they needed, make it affordable and too good to refuse, and they will come.

That certainly appears to be the case so far at NewportNet, with video production company Stem Media and Mac training and retail business Mac&Me joining me as anchor tenants in the new space.

The entry to NewportNet

As well as high-speed internet access (currently 10Mbps up and 10Mbps down, with both Wi-Fi and Ethernet available throughout) the premises includes elevator access, secure car park, meeting room, kitchen, bathroom and several lockable offices about 4m x 4m. All the desks are IKEA and the chairs are Herman Miller.

One of the offices

Downstairs you’re a block or two from banks, chemist, post office, supermarket, organic produce market, several great restaurants and cafes, and the wonderful ZUBI Bar.

A typical desk (in this case, mine)

Space in NewportNet is available by the desk or by the office, by the day, week, month or longer commitment.

Meeting room

If you’re on Sydney’s Northern Beaches and you’d like to share a workspace with other professionals in a casual and collaborative environment, get more details at NewportNet.com.au  au, follow us on Twitter as @NewportNetAU or drop in at Office 1, 341 Barrenjoey Rd, Newport Beach 2106 (Google Map)

By the way, if you’re lower down the Northern Beaches, I’d recommend you check out Co-Worka in Dee Why.

The team from Mac&Me in their training space

Via a dedicated free live event app you’ll be able to watch the three nights of performances from 62 artists, live or on-demand, free. And we’re not talking B-list bands here either, there’s Paul Simon, Moby, Duran Duran and Coldplay (yes, I’m that old).

As in previous years, tickets will also be available to attend the festival if you’re in the UK, and they’ll be available only to contest winners.

Could this be bigger — and more profitable — than Glastonbury?

From today you can buy the latest album from each artist performing from iTunes Store or from the app and I’m guessing that’s part of the reason why artist management agree to the concept.

The other reason, and the reason why the festival is most interesting, is the email marketing opportunity. Here’s why:

How many people do you know these days who own an iPod, an iPad or an iPhone? Lots, right? It’s not a static number either, it’s still growing fast.

If they’ve ever used iTunes Store to buy music, TV, movies or apps, Apple has their email address, and unless they’ve opted out, their permission to send them weekly emails about content for sale in iTunes Store.

No big deal, right? Every online retailer and content publisher has an email database. But this is an email database unlike any other, since it now represents arguably the biggest and fastest-growing entertainment content marketing database the entertainment industry has ever seen. There’s an iPod Touch, iPad or iPhone in the bag of nearly every person on the train with you, in the pocket of nearly everyone jogging in the morning. There might be as many Android phones out there as iPhones, or Kindles as iPads, but add up iPhones, iPods and iPads? Big number.

The music industry created the commercial radio industry to market new content to consumers, but never knew who those consumers were, what they listened to, and where they were at. Then, MTV added a little granularity for marketers, was able to provide some logbook data on audience size, viewing habits and geo location.

Today, businesses as diverse as Amazon, CDBaby, MySpace and Facebook have a database of content customers they can market to via email, but with nothing like the detailed purchase and consumption data Apple has access to. And not only does Apple have the biggest database of entertainment content consumers, they also own the whole stack, from bringing major labels and artists together for an event, to reaching an enormous global market of music consumers via email, to actually selling and delivering and tracking the consumption of the end content.

Analysts studying Apple’s market performance look at profit per device shipped, app sales volume, and PC and handset market share. Does anybody know what the open rates are on emails from iTunes Store? What their click-thru rates are? Perhaps Apple’s biggest untapped and unvalued asset is the ability to reach more of the world’s music fans than any other media publisher?

iTunes: what a truly global retailer looks like (yes, even in Kazakhstan)

iTunes Festival is a big endeavour, and while Apple is the king of hardware, it doesn’t yet have enough entertainment content culture in its DNA, so along the way there have been mistakes made, goals reached for but unmet, and lessons learned.

But Apple is also the king of execution — it learns perhaps better than any other major brand. This year you can watch the whole event from your iDevice of choice instead of on YouTube, and for the first time, you can watch in HD on a TV equipped with an AppleTV using AirPlay.

The world’s number one retailer of music is on the cusp of becoming the next MTV and the next Glastonbury, all rolled into one. Like, wow.

Once the gold deposits are mapped, or if cheaper shovel-makers start eating into your margins, you better pivot quick and become the best gold miner in the business, or the best refinery, or the best goldsmith in town. If the gold market changes from being about discovering gold to locking up, distributing and selling it, the act of shovelling becomes a much smaller slice of a much bigger pie, and your shareholders will punish you for not adapting to the changing market.

This story isn’t about gold mining, it’s not even about shovels. But as with most of my writing, I need analogies to set the scene. This post is actually about the smartphone market, and it’s partly a response to a post by Jojo over on 37Signals, where Jojo asserts that the new Nokia N9 handset may still be successful, even though the app offering for the N9 looks sparse. This post started out as a comment at the end of Jojo’s post, then got way too long for anybody to read at the end of many pages of other comments, so here it is in full.

Here’s the thing: the N9 will find customers and will be profitable, but will it be a big enough success to do what Nokia shareholders *really* want from the company? To take back #1 place? No. And the answer lies in the way Nokia just keeps selling shovels. Or, if you prefer, keeps making TV sets…

Oh dear me. Billions of dollars, thousands of well-paid employees, and this is what you see when you first go to Nokia.com?

The handset market is changing

Being a handset maker is becoming a smaller slice of a much bigger pie, in the same way that making TV sets is now a small slice of a pie mostly made up of content production, distribution/licensing, and advertising.

By sticking to handsets and partnering with Microsoft for mobile operating systems, what Nokia has done is to commit to making TV sets, handing the content production to Microsoft (the networks, remember, are already owned by carriers).

That would be fine, if making the hardware was still a premium margin business, or if the market for content was still unproven. But a seething mass of Asian manufacturers making Android handsets are cutting all the margin out of making smartphones, and the market for content is very much proven. VERY much proven.

For Apple, meanwhile, is the fastest-growing content production, distribution, licensing and sales business that the media industry has ever known.

Shareholders expect Nokia to make the same leap and the reason it’s taking a hammering is that it’s failing to do so. In fact, it’s been failing to do so for a very long time.

Build a better marketplace

Enough of TVs and shovels, they’ve served their purpose. Nokia can be a successful and profitable handset manufacturer, but it is now clear that it won’t be the biggest brand in the mobile space unless it has the biggest content marketplace. Mobile content is now largely about music, TV, movies and, more than anything, mobile apps. How’s Nokia doing?

Not good. Nokia’s first opportunity to build an app marketplace was actually with the N-Gage platform, which it launched in 2003. Apple didn’t launch the first iPhone until mid-way thru 2007. Here we are in 2011 and Nokia’s had several attempts at building a thriving content marketplace, yet has been overtaken by every other competitor of note, most especially by Apple.

Nobody likes inertia, especially a shareholder

Nokia’s had an eternity in ‘market time’ to see the change coming, from a hardware market to a content market. It’s even had the luxury of being first to market with a content store. Yet with each strategic decision it makes, and with each product releases, it just confirms that making hardware is written so deep into its corporate DNA that there’s no room in there to become anything else.

That’s OK, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Nokia’s doomed, it just means that the market will adjust its valuation of Nokia, and we see that happening right now, with shareholders pricing in the adjustment, realising that Nokia’s probably only ever going to do one thing well, and that’s make shovels.

For instance, he keeps referring to “bands” these days, like the smallest unit of commercial music is still two guitarists, a vocalist and a drummer.

That was certainly the case in the past, but like the internet atomised the album into 12 discreet musical products and a video, it’s also in the process of atomising the “band” into something looser, stretchier, more of a ‘rubber band’.

A rubber band’s configuration changes more frequently than in the ’80s and ’90s, with little or no media and fan panic. Each of the members of the rubber band is an independent artist to a greater or lesser extent, and each collaborates with others outside the rubber band from time to time. Each will increasingly have separate management, publishing deals and content contracts.

Taking a broader view, the rubber band is an interim step between the industrial music industry’s smallest denominator (band) and the independent artist, both in creative direction and legal entity.

The internet’s atomising effects won’t stop at breaking up the rubber band, it will move on to atomise the artist themselves, creating discreet commercial entities for each track, coffee table book, short film, app, game and item of tour merch. The eddies and surges of ecommerce will sometimes recombine these elements in traditional ways, and sometimes in surprising ways, but only because the internet has first split them apart.

The legal and business friction still holding the artist together as the smallest unit of artistic commerce will soon be gone. Not only will the art remain, it is in the process of becoming vastly richer, more collaborative and complex.

Bugherd experienced a brief outage early Friday morning AEST which apparently was unrelated to the fact that they’d been mentioned in the morning’s US tech press including TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb and AllThingsD.

Some of the coverage on the investment announcement

It wasn’t news to me exactly, since there’s been talks with the 500Startups team since Alan and Matt pitched in the 500Startups Mountain View office with the Startmate crew back in April, but it was great to be able to talk about the deal finally, and especially gratifying to be mentioned alongside some other really promising startups.

Alan and Matt will be over in Mountain View in July and August, for demo days with the 500startups team and other meetings. But Bugherd’s not attending for the full incubator program because it’s further along in its journey towards hugeness.

500Startups’ decision to invest means they’re excited in the potential of the product and the company, particularly when it comes to delivering a service all early-stage web startups need: a great issue tracking tool. Interested enough that being on the other side of the Pacific isn’t too far away, even. Hope we can get Dave McClure and Christine Tsai out here soon to visit and meet some of the other great people in the startup community here.

I’ll keep track of any further coverage of the announcement at http://bit.ly/500startupsinvestsinbugherd

Try Bugherd now if you need the world’s simplest bug and issue tracker. I have it on good authority the free beta period is about to close, but beta users will get a big discount when pricing is announced in the near future.

Yolanda is a smart person (MBA candidate and chemical engineer — I’m impressed) and since I got to do the social media work for TEDxSydney on the weekend, I now consider myself a real social media expert (yes, I’m that vain and deluded). So I’m offering free social media advice (hey, at least I’m not charging for it, I’m not that deluded… though I’d like to be…)

Here’s Yolanda’s question:

Feeling like a gen x, needing some social media lessons…

I have been following LinkedIn for 6 months, just got a facebook page two weeks ago (yes, hard to believe…when did I become a luddite…). Phase 1 – my neighbours and I produced a short film entry to the Origin Sustainability Drive competition, so proved that we could take an idea into reality (check it out on link). Phase 2 – We need at least 2000 votes for the $10K people’s choice award, but sitting at just 65. We have formed an alliance with the community not-for-profit Moreland Energy Foundation (we would donate half if we win). We have interviewed for an article that will appear in The AGE next week. But how do we use social media? It is much harder than I imagined!! (I am studying an MBA, so super keen to develop these new world skills!) Will appreciate your help and advice.

So, Yolanda, your idea is to rename your street from Laura Street, Brunswick to Sustainability Drive, Brunswick?

Happy to teach you about social media but in my opinion you should be learning about online advertising and local newspaper media relations instead.

You’ve less than a month in which to achieve your goal of approx. 30 times more votes than you have now, in competition against more than 8,900 other entries? If you got 65 votes per day starting tomorrow, you might get there. Does that seem achievable?

Social media isn’t really the right marketing tool for your problem. Social media takes a sustained investment in time and energy over a long period to build a network of connections that will share your message with a broader community. To get 2,000 votes in a month might take six months of fostering an online network to vote and encourage others to vote.

What about this says, "Before you do anything else, vote for me"?

To build a network you either have to align a disparate community of people with diverse priorities for the first time around a common issue, or find a way to reach all the currently disconnected people who care passionately about a common issue.

It also takes a reward for each of the people in that network — “something in it for them” — which needn’t be of monetary value, but that’s lacking from your plan too.

Your campaign also needs a ‘Big Idea’ — something memorable, engaging and different.Yours isn’t a big idea, it’s not even a new one. Lots of streets, people, and even towns have been renamed to try (usually unsuccessfully) to permanently raise awareness about an issue. If they’re lucky it gets a few mentions but more likely as a joke at your expense, not in support of your cause.You need a bigger idea than the one you currently have.

You haven’t a hope in hell of achieving your goal with social media. But there are two other marketing tools that work much better in these situations: advertising and local media relations. Advertising is a big, blunt tool that can achieve the impossible given sufficient money and time. Assuming you can’t spend any money and don’t have a great advertising creative living on your street, that leaves local media relations.

Go call the editor of all your local papers, make appointments to go in and see them, take as many neighbours as you can, and try to get them to give you some editorial exposure. If you have community radio stations, do the same. Anybody idle enough to read their local community newspaper has enough time to go online and vote for you. Just don’t hang about, yeah? You’ll lose a week or more just getting the interview and then waiting for that issue to get printed and distributed.

Good luck!

Third, longest and most useful of a series of three posts from my social media team guidelines, written in my role as Social Media Director for TEDxSydney. You might find them helpful in planning your organisation’s social media policies and procedures. Here’s the first and second posts.

Twitter versus Facebook: news versus current affairs

At TEDxSydney we have a presence on Twitter and a presence on Facebook and the two presences lend themselves to related but different applications.

Material we post to Twitter usually has a shorter ‘shelf life’ — it is more likely to run off the news stream page sooner, and Twitter material is more likely to be forwarded on than Facebook material, so it lends itself to newsy items, controversial or sensational items.

Facebook has a more generous character limit, which allows for longer updates, so if our Twitter page is “the news”, Facebook is “current affairs”.

As time gets short and TEDxSydney approaches, the temptation will be to favour Twitter over Facebook but we should try not to neglect our Facebook community. (Note: we have a YouTube presence too but conversations there tend to be less synchronous, we have more time to consider and respond, and most comments don’t require response.)

Start conversations by asking questions

Too many brands make their social media feed a constant stream of announcements — special offers, new features, seasonal sales, press releases.

Good social media is a conversation and, as any good conversationalist will tell you, often the best way to start a conversation is to ask someone a question about themselves.

“What do you find interested you most in this morning’s talks?” “Do you agree with this statement from this speaker?” “Who have you most enjoyed meeting here today?” — all great questions to get conversations started.

Follow the people who tweet about us

Following someone on Twitter is a tiny compliment. Anybody who tweets about TEDxSydney deserves to be followed. Although they’ve tweeted about TEDxSydney they may not yet follow us, and they may do so if we follow them first — building our community and our marketing reach — to them, and their followers.

We don’t have to respond

Sometimes it’s easy to get carried away by all the positive feedback we’re getting from Twitter and Facebook, and respond with gratitude by thanking everyone who tweets something nice. Now, imagine reading a Twitter stream that’s entirely full of those thanks — boring as batshit; and we don’t ever want to be boring as batshit.

Of course they like us; we’re good. So reserve the thanks for the innovative, creative, stand-out mentions we get in social media. Personal blog post authors should be thanked, news editors and journalists shouldn’t (just doing their job and we make them uncomfortable when we thank them).

It’s also easy to over-react to criticism. It’s one thing for one person to tell a friend they think TEDxSydney sucks; it’s another thing entirely for them to do so in front of everybody on Twitter. The temptation is to react to every negative tweet or Facebook comment. Don’t.

Some people are negative on Twitter to attract the attention of others, and nothing is more likely to get them more attention than luring us into a discussion, that becomes a disagreement, that dissolves into a slanging match, only to burst into a flame war.

Please correct the incorrect, and defend the brand: these are the only two reasons to respond to negative material in social media. People are entitled to their opinions and we are unlikely to ever change those opinions in the course of one discussion in a social media platform.

If it’s absolutely necessary to take on a negative person on social media, try enlisting our most significant advantage: our large, loyal and communicative online community. Don’t say:

@example it’s a bit unfair to judge the TEDxSydney line-up before you’ve even seen these people speak.

Instead, try:

“What about it, TEDxSydney community? Is @example right when he says our speaker line-up is boring?

We don’t have to respond in this medium

Just because someone raises a problem, error or criticism on Twitter or Facebook, we shouldn’t necessarily respond in the same medium.

If the problem raised affects the whole event (e.g. “sound not working at back of auditorium”) then use Twitter to respond so everyone gets to hear we’re working on a fix.

If the problem is personal (e.g. “I’m going to ask for my money back, this food is shit” then either direct-message the person or respond via email or even mobile, if available. The best way:

1. Tweet them to direct-message you their email address or mobile number;
2. Follow-up by email or phone.

The one-to-one nature of email or phone makes the complainant feel like you’re going out of your way to address their problem. The less-than-instant nature of these mediums reduces the expecation that we’ll respond immediately. And taking the issue out of social media helps keep the issue from attracting further attention and blowing up into a larger incident.

If it gives you pause… pause.

If you’re not sure whether to send your tweet or Facebook message, don’t. Once it’s out there, it’s out there, and even if you delete it, someone can still find it if they want to badly enough. If you’re not sure, save it in a draft state, review it with someone else, or just give it a little time, come back later and see if it still makes sense to send it.

…and that’s our plan. It really swings into effect in 1 day, 8 hours and 31 minutes from now. But as they say, “no plan survives contact with the enemy/customer/marketplace/audience!” Wish us luck!

Has someone already tweeted this?

We share official TEDxSydney Twitter and Facebook access and it would look dumb if we tweeted, say, a housekeeping announcement more than once. So, when tweeting/FBing from the official TEDxSydney account, check the tweet/FB stream on the profile page first to make sure your information hasn’t already been tweeted, and if you think it’s necessary, also check with other frequent users of the account first to make sure they haven’t already tweeted/FB’d it.

Personal account versus official TEDxSydney account

It’s fine to tweet or FB about TEDxSydney from your personal account — please do. But please remember to do it from your own perspective, not from TEDxSydney’s perspective. Similarly, when communicating from the official TEDxSydney account, try to remember to do so from the perspective of TEDxSydney, not your personal perspective. For example:

@bigyahu Just bumped into the most interesting artist while in the queue for coffee at TEDxSydney (personal perspective)
@TEDxSydney morning tea is now served in the foyer. One brownie per person, please! (TEDxSydney perspective)

Use your initials on Twitter

It might make TEDxSydney less like the impersonal, elitist organisation we’re sometimes accused of being if we inject a little personality into our tweeting, but as we all have different personalities, it will help if we also indicate who’s tweeting from the @TEDxSydney account. Use your initials, prefaced with a carat (“^AJ”) to indicate your identity.

However, being exciting, engaging and informative is more important than clarifying your identity, so if you need more characters from your tweet to get your point across, please omit your initials.

Use an URL shortener with tracking

Later we can come back and measure how many people clicked on the links we’ve tweeted/FB’d to our followers, so we can learn how to do this even better over time. But we can only measure this if you use an URL shortener with tracking built-in. Bit.ly is a great service for this.

This Saturday 28 May I’ll be Social Media Director for TEDxSydney, which is developing into one of the best-known TEDx events in the world. (How big is the TEDx movement? There are 12 TEDx events happening all around the world on 28 May!) With a small volunteer we’ll be using social media tools — primarily Twitter, Facebook, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Instagram — to help the organisers, speakers, venue audience and online audience connect, enrich their experience, and share.

TEDx is about sharing, so here’s some excerpts from the guidelines we’re using, which I’ll chunk up into several blog posts for easier digestion. Hope you find them useful when planning your own social media strategy.

Why are we using social media?

• Extend and enrich our relationships with our community;
• Encourage interaction and exchange between community members;
• Feedback channel, customer satisfaction barometer;
• News and information distribution; and
• Brand reinforcement

When representing our organisation online, be:

• Informative
• Engaging
• Exciting
• Courteous
• Witty
• Humble
• Accurate
• Timely

Remember

• We have our brand (and those of our partners, sponsors, customers and suppliers) to protect
• Nothing is ever truly deleted from the web

Those blasted McHappy Meals usually go half-eaten so it’s not the few moments of fat, salt and sugar that makes them irresistable, it’s the movie tie-in, limited-time collectible nature of the bloody near-worthless-will-break-before-your-car-leaves-the-carpark toy included with the meal.

Believe it or not, what works for selling fast food also works for selling enterprise software products.

Mike Cannon-Brookes is a fellow mentor/investor in Startmate.com.au and also the co-founder of one of the most successful Australian software companies of this generation.

When Mike recently spoke at a Sydstart event in Sydney, he said he realised some time ago that Atlassian’s most effective marketing strategy was not to sell software, but to sell very witty, cool t-shirts that developers will kill to get their hands on. “We sell great t-shirts that you have to buy a software licence to get,” he said.

Most of the Sydstart audience thought he was joking, and he was funny, sure, but he was serious. By selling t-shirts individuals want and bundling them with software corporations need, Mike has been practicing the ‘good’ kind of bait-and-switch — the kind that creates a desire so powerful for one thing, you end up buying another just to get it.

Why bait-and-switch? Well, there’s nothing funny or exclusive about selling software that helps developers track bugs and publish internal wikis. So getting customers passionate about Atlassian and its products would be tough, if the company restricted itself to just marketing software.

But after trialling all sorts of give-aways and branded items, Mike and his team hit upon the ideal marketing medium for Atlassian: short runs of exclusive, clever and usually very funny t-shirts.

It’s impossible to underestimate the importance of clever t-shirts in developer culture, but if you are a developer, you likely have a problem expressing yourself in conversation, and a great t-shirt message makes a great warning signal, much like the yellow and black stripes on a poison dart frog, except, well, less cold and slimy. Usually.

A great developer t-shirt will include a message, graphic, or both that will leave passers-by in no doubt that they haven’t watched enough cult sci-fi movies, played enough cult XBOX games, listened to enough undiscovered bands, or compiled enough great code to really understand the person wearing this t-shirt. One of my favourites of all-time just had the message, “Of course you realise I could replace you with a shell script?”

You see, a shell script is… Oh, never mind.

T-shirts are also great because they make the fashion decision for you — wear a business shirt to work and you need to decide between stripes or plain, tie or no tie, etc. A t-shirt is a t-shirt and a developer can pull one out, tug it on and be one pair of jeans and one pair of shoes away from being ready for work. That’s how stereotypical developers roll.

Atlassian’s newest promotion, playing off the popularity of the iOS/Android game Angry Birds is wonderful marketing. See how it plays off a current meme, borrows from exactly the kind of landing page design that nearly every web business other than Atlassian uses these days, and most important of all, stacks on the developer in-jokes that only they will truly understand (or will believe that’s the case).

The key to good bait-and-switch marketing (and all subculture marketing) is to make your audience feel like you are peers in the same subculture, and this promotion achieves that beautifully. There’s even what I think is a clever stab at Mike and his fellow co-founder Scott under “The Founder” (at least, I think it is, after all I’m not truly a member of the Atlassian customer subculture). You can’t be peers with Mike and Scott unless they are brought down a couple of pegs.

Finally, this may look like a promotion for what might be the lowest-selling iPad game of the year, but it isn’t. It isn’t even an ad for Atlassian software (see their products, or any of their features, or benefits, mentioned anywhere on the page? No.)

Instead, it’s an opportunity to buy a witty/cool t-shirt or plush toy. A  t-shirt or plush toy that, had you not read this, you would not be cool enough to understand. Which would make developers wearing the t-shirt very happy, and more likely to feel that Atlassian was a brand that understands them.

If I were Mike, I’d make sure I had very limited stock of this merchandise, and I’d make it clear that if you’ve missed out, there will be no reprints. You’ll just have to pay closer attention to Atlassian, act faster next time, spend less time considering the purchase decision rationally and get used to making emotional decisions about Atlassian products.

Because Mike’s clever enough to know he’s not selling software, he’s selling emotional engagement, in XS, S, M, L, XL and XXL.

Posted via email from Trailwalker Tips Still time to Donate now!

The Air Mail design is made from almost-indestructible Tyvek paper, the same stuff they make courier bags from. Very light and flat, they expand to hold a lot of stuff, though the smooth interior means you have to be a little careful opening your wallet or a card may slide out. There’s a range of cool designs featuring all kinds of real-world and abstract art over at mightywallets.com. You can see that I’ve written my address on the front with a Sharpie to personalize it (and if I lose it, maybe someone will mail it back to me?)

Both vendors ship internationally.

This year I’ve decided to put in an extra effort on my personal physical challenges.

In 2010 I competed in a 50km trail relay walk called WildEndurance, the 18km Kayak4Kids kayak race, the 90km Sydney To Gong Ride and my personal favourite, the 100km Oxfam Trailwalker Sydney.

This year I’m going to add the 90km overnight Hawkesbury Classic kayak race!

Those paying attention will notice these events all have more than long distances in common – they are also charity fundraising events, where competitors are expected to raise a minimum fund-raising amount to qualify to compete. Last year in addition to the minimum charitable contribution I raised about $8,000 for these charities, thanks to the support of many friends, family members, colleagues and social media friends.

This year I’ve decided to take a break from raising more than the minimum amount, and I’m going to donate the minimum amount myself instead of asking others.

Why? Charitable fund-raising disguised as endurance competitions are clever marketing ploys, but they’re psychological marketing strategy too, exploiting common weaknesses in the male psyche as effectively as the sugar-laden energy bar manufacturer telling you their product is healthy and good for you. It works on two levels.

See, human males have evolved to be risk-takers. I can only assume that in cave man days it was the males of the tribal group who did most of the hunting, risked their lives driving off predators, and of course, competed with each other for dominance and access to breeding age females.

From an early age, young boys start taking physical risks, from climbing to the top of their first flight of stairs to swinging off a rope or throwing themselves off the roof of the carport hoping they’ll fly. Risk-taking is a big element in determining what a man thinks of himself and what other men think of them. As they age, the surges of testosterone moderate and the demands of relationships, families and careers tend to moderate the risk-taking urge, but it still lurks within, seeking expression.

In their fourties, men are commonly stricken with mid-life crises. With the ego and emotional maturity of a young man stuck in the suddenly aging body of a middle-aged man, we rebel against this sudden awareness of our own mortality. We take off with a younger woman or buy a convertible, make a surprise career move, take up electric guitar, start playing soccer or, in extreme cases, all of the above. It’s all risk-taking.

It’s this same instinctive rebellion against ageing that I think is the reason most of us have many friends, mostly male, competing in an endurance event with a charitable fundraising compenent. The typical endurance event speaks directly to the risk-taking centre of our brain; it says, “here’s a chance to pit yourself against nature, to prove you can still climb that mountain, conquer the wilderness, succeed at something that looks impossible”.

The fundraising element gives us a higher cause to hide behind, a reason other than fear of aging to take the time needed to train and compete, to spend the money needed for equipment, meals and transport. It’s handy justification for the wife, kids and workmates who’ll be seeing less of us during training.

Problem is, for many of us, endurance events are addictive. The endorphin high is as addictive as any drug and much more socially acceptable. We like how we can run up a flight of stairs without losing our breath, how we can eat what we like and still lose that little pot-belly the odd gym session could never quite shift.

But get addicted to endurance events and there’s a hidden toll – if you’re a friend of mine, last year I would have asked you for a charity donation at least four times. One time is fine, four times maybe, but if I do five events this year are you happy to support me with a cash donation nine times in a two year period? If our positions were reversed, I wouldn’t be, and I say that as one of your closest friends!

If it was really all about the charitable cause rather than the masculine cause, maybe, but not while at least a part of it is sustaining my endorphin addiction. So this year I’ll take the year off. I’ll pay my own endorphin tax. You’re welcome to donate if you wish (I’ll post the links here) but you won’t hear me asking. If you do, please do it for the sake of the charity, not for me.

Posted via email from Trailwalker Tips Still time to Donate now!

Coming soon to a zombie-ridden suburb near you!

Nevertheless, due to the needs of my clients I’ve enmaddened my skillz in SurveyMonkey, the tool of choice for startup online marketers (because you can design small, basic research surveys free). I’ve just upgraded from SurveyMonkey’s PRO subscription to their GOLD plan. I’m now allowed to build surveys including “unlimited questions and responses”! (Hah! Everybody knows the number of respondents is inversely proportional to the number of questions in the survey).

It also comes with:

• Custom Survey Design, URLs & Redirects Upon Survey Completion
• SPSS export
• A/B Testing
• Question & Answer Piping
• Text Analysis

…and more!

It’s going to cost me a fair chunk of change to be a gold subscriber and there’s nothing stopping me running multiple research projects for multiple clients, so if you’ve ever yearned for more than an eight question survey or longed for some piping (when the survey recalls your answer to a previous question and includes it in a subsequent question) let me know.