Read the full article at VentureBeat.com:
Are We In a Startup Bubble?

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Socializing Data:
When I attended a recent Digital Analytics Association symposium, there were a couple presentations on the importance of good visualization of data. They discussed how the data was better understood and more easily socialized within the organization, simply by making it more accessible. Then there are those infographics taking the Internet by storm, which provide a fun and easy way to demonstrate interesting statics and figures.

Clearly people love consuming charts and graphs more than reams of data.  But its more than simple enjoyment; by graphically modeling the data, you’ll often uncover important patterns that might have otherwise been missed.

Observing Patterns:
A great example is the new flow visualization tool in Google Analytics (version 5).  It is now possible to observe how users and macro groups of users are flowing between pages. you can even apply flow visualization to a segments and compare how that one subset of users flows differently from others.

Imagine taking a segment and observing how they might flow through your site differently.  For example, try comparing the flow of visitors from Canada compared to the US.  Or more interestingly, consider segmenting around traffic you’ve tagged for different campaigns or marketing channels.  As you begin to observe the differences of flow between paid search (SEM), organic search (SEO),and social channels, you’ll really appreciate the power of this new resource.

Diagnosing Bottlenecks:
Another significant benefit of flow visualization is the ability to see non-symmetrical dropdown from one step to the next, along your flow, which may implicate a bottleneck that is negatively impacting conversions.

For example, imagine your you have 500 users enter your eCommerce catalog, 50 of them engage with the shopping cart, but only 1 of them continues on to the checkout form.  You might already know that industry standard would be for 2% of those 500 users (10 users) to complete a transaction and by contrast your number is very low.

By using flow visualization, you have relatively painlessly identified a bottleneck in your funnel that may have gone unrealized for years otherwise.  You’ll need to begin looking at usability and conversion optimization to correct the issue, but you’re well on your way to increasing return on ad spend and revenue generation by a considerable margin. If you’re able to increase your conversion rates and flow to industry standard, you may in fact increase your revenues by 10x!

Conclusion
Data visualization is a powerful tool for socializing and communicating data, observing patterns and diagnosing abnormalities.  Inforgraphics and executive dashboards are popular examples of how data can be better socialized through visualization and Google Analytics provides an excellent example of the power of visualization, to drive pattern recognition, diagnostics, and action.

Consider what else might be possible with data visualization of your data.  How might you be able to instigate action within an organization, uncover important patterns, or drive more sales, simply by presenting the data differently?

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It is often difficult to convince business stakeholders to allocate budget to uncover and fix an undefined problem, rather than investing in customer-facing features and enhancements. And so the front line attack on the problem is often to simply apply caching; a particularly easy solution with most modern application frameworks providing either integrated caching or easily applied solutions via 3rd party plugins or modules.

So let’s just assume that the first line of defense is going to applying a cache bandaid. Fortunately many of the caching frameworks provide multiple layers of caching and by applying caching at the lowest levels and gradually stepping up through the application, this can give a relatively easy opportunity to understand at least what level the issue is occurring at.  And this information can be useful in convincing stakeholders of the need to dig deeper.

i. DB Objects
One of the most common problems with slow applications, are slow database queries.  Either because of complex queries or poor database architecture, there is the potential to exhaust the database connection pool because each connection needs to hold open and isn’t returned back to the pool quickly enough to manage the current traffic load.  That doesn’t mean you need more hardware necessarily. But it does mean you need to look more closely at the database queries, the structure and the indexing of the database.

ii. Code Objects
The next level is to cache programmatic objects. This might be helpful if you’re holding objects open while either waiting to populate them or structure them.  Structuring complex objects can sometimes be an issue when dealing with large complex XML objects for example. More often though, it is about delays in fetching data from external services buses or web services, where the routine is waiting for this data so that it can popular the object.  By caching these objects, you avoid ever having to instantiate, structure, or populate these objects.

iii. Page Caching
Moving another level up, you can cache the entire page requested by the user.  In this case, a copy of the output stream data (HTML) is kept either on the local file server, or in RAM with more aggressive caching.  Inbound page requests are intercepted, existence of a copy of the output stream in cache is first evaluated and the user is provided this completed object if its available.  if not, it proceeds to construct the response to the query, save a copy into cache and return that to the user. By doing this, you’ve cached and avoided all of the underlying processing for that page request.

If this works to resolve latency whereas DB and object caching did not, this likely indicates  inefficient code somewhere in the logic of that processing. For example, I once worked on a project in which a junior developer had written a database query that generated over 100 results, and subsequent database queries were being run for each of those results. So rather than running a single complex database query, the code ran 101 queries, and possibly more, for a single page. Clearly this was a problem.

iv. Content Delivery Network
If you’re working on a larger application and have access to a CDN to offload serving your assets, that’s a huge advantage.  If your site is media intensive, you could be serving a lot of heaving images and/or video.  If could be that perceived slowness of your application actually has nothing to do with your application, but rather has to do with network latency in returning these assets, if your server is far away from the user. CDNs solve this problem by mirroring these heavier assets on a network of servers throughout your targeted geography, and this can significantly improve the speed of these assets, not to mention freeing up HTTP server threads that may be hanging open too long and causing a bottleneck and queuing user responses.

Conclusion
If you’ve walked through each of these steps sequentially, you should now have a pretty good sense of whether you’re dealing with issues related to the database, inefficient database queries, latency in web services or other external system integrations, inefficient code in your business logic, or network latency related to delivery of your media assets.  Since you likely know the application fairly well, this should hopefully be enough to trigger a few thoughts and theories of what might be the problem and what to look at next.

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Online marketing however is a big topic and requires an understanding of the online landscape to position one’s small business appropriately.  Perhaps adding to the confusion, is the deluge of phone calls SMBs have been receiving from advertising agencies (reports of 4-5 calls per week on average) offering to help with their own brand of online marketing, some even claiming to be acting on the behalf of Google; an exaggeration at best. While these agencies do represent a conduit for local merchants to quickly get online, how does one know if they are offering the right services for your business or that they will receive a positive return on ad spend?

I took a little time to review the more prominent SMB agencies and I found that by and large they fit into one of three categories:

Local SEO (Presence Focus)

These are companies that focus on getting a company listed in Google and Bing’s maps and local search results.  You may have noticed recently that if you type in “Pasadena plumbers”, you now see a map and a list of local merchants next to the map.  If you search simply for “plumbers”, you will see a similarly local-biased result set on your phone.  This is not to be confused with traditional SEO in which optimizers acquire links to establish relevancy for specific keywords. Rather, they are acquiring citations and reviews on behalf of the local merchant, in the authoritative local directories and registering the business as a local entity directly with Google and Bing.

Search Engine Optimization companies are notorious for selling their services over that of paid advertising by saying their listings are permanent and the listings are free, saving a lot of money in the long run.  Sometimes it is true that you can save a lot of money by going the SEO route instead of paid advertising, but it is rarely free.  There is a lot of time and effort that can go into getting your business listed properly and staying on top of the search results takes continued effort.

These companies also typically provide website development, design and social presence services, since these efforts are largely related to the effort of better online visibility and reviews.

Paid Advertising (Sales Focus)

Paid advertising companies essentially buy ads and search placements (pay per click) on behalf of the local merchant; a practice sometimes referred to as lead generation.  Most often paid advertising companies are purchasing text ads from the search engines, and mostly from Google.  In fact, it would not be uncommon for 80% of a local merchants ad spend to go directly to Google.  There is also value to be found from Bing and Facebook, and perhaps some specialty niche sites and increasingly from ad banner retargeting, if there is enough volume and budget.

For the local merchant, it is worth understanding the eco-system a little bit, if considering working with a lead generation company.  Google AdWords can be rather complicated and some spend years perfecting the art and nuance of managing keywords and maximizing ROI for campaigns.  Google however does offer the Local platform for SMBs, a simplified and watered-down version of their standard AdWords interface.  Local merchants can in fact run their own campaigns and save the premium that is being paid to agencies to work on their behalf (sometimes as high as 40%!), but its not as rosy as it first appears.  First, many of these larger agencies get reseller discounts allowing them to source for a lower cost right off the bat.  Second, if you don’t have the skills, you will likely pay more and get less qualified traffic than you’d pay the agency, and third, if can take more of your time that you’d think it should, even using the simplified Google Local platform.

These agencies often do offer a website but it is typically a very simple 1-5 page site, focusing on a sales landing page and a prominently displayed 800 phone number for ad-to-call tracking purposes.  Some companies such as ReachLocal may even insist to mirror or overtake your site in order to be effective at running their ads.

Lead Incubation (Relationship Focus)

Finally there is a third type of marketing agency which works with longer-term relationships that may not convert into a sale immediately.  For example, Realtors, B2B sales, and other high-cost transactions may first be introduced to a prospect months before they buy.  Compare that to the nearly instant transaction of someone looking for a plumber.  In these cases, lead incubation experts may use a blend of SEO, paid search, and perhaps even social channels to generate the leads, but take an extra step of staying in contact and following up with the leads periodically, to ensure that business prospect is not lost through the course of the longer sales funnel.

Lead Incubation is typically achieved using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that tracks relationships and stays in touch via email, following up at strategic opportunities to check in with the prospect and potentially provide more value.  In the case of real estate, the CRM may be integrated with the IDX data feed which provides a listing of houses for sale and email alerts can be sent to prospects, when a new listing is added that matches the search criteria of that prospect. This is typically referred to as a Drip campaign.  Some companies such as TopProducer for Realtors and Eloqua for B2B sales, provide the tools for sales professionals to orchestrate and manage their own “auto responder” follow up emails, while others may automate and manage the effort as a service for their clients.

These companies typically provide a backend CRM and/or DRIP campaign system.  There is often a front-end website option or website integration form, to facilitate lead and email capture. Frequently additional information is provided in the form of whitepapers or deeper search query reports to incentivize completion of the form, which enables later follow up by the CRM/Drip system.

Comparison

As you can see from the above descriptions, these companies and their strategies may very significantly.  How does a local business know which is right for them?  Fortunately, a lot of this translates to the real world and may be self-evident with a little analysis. For local merchants considering working with an online marketing agency, be sure to understand their focus and if it is a correct fit for your business:

Companies for whom their product or service is generally not differentiated by quality (aka a commodity), will tend to be more sales-oriented. For example, if I am the local seller of bicycles or the local locksmith, people need not qualify me, and so its more of a sales game to get the business.  For these companies, a paid averting specialist (lead generation) may be the right fit.

For companies that are a lot more discernible by quality and reputation, paid search may not be effective, since customers are interested to see ratings and reviews first.  Examples might include restaurants or doctors.  And finally, for real estate agents and B2B sales professionals selling expensive product that typically would not be a cash transaction for a consumer, lead incubation is a must.

Advice

At the end of the day what you are really looking for is the best Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).  Your ROAS will vary by (a) having the right strategy to match your business, (b) how much you paid for the advertising, and (c) how effectively it was executed.  Fortunately most small businesses should already have a sense for the right strategy based on what’s already working for them in the offline world.  It may be tempting to reduce cost of ad spend by doing it yourself but remember there is not only opportunity cost in having to learn this stuff yourself, but you likely will not execute as well as experts of the field, if you are new to online marketing. That’s not to say you shouldn’t learn about or dabble in it yourself but those are two counter-weights to consider.

No matter how you choose to proceed, just get started!  And plan to set aside 10-20% of your marketing budget for testing and exploring new online opportunities such as social or mobile marketing.  There are always new opportunities popping up online and invariably, the largest bounties go to those who are early to the party.

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Waterfall Methodology

Stage-gated processes such as Waterfall emphasize completion of one task before proceeding to the next.  For example, a business stakeholder must perform due diligence and complete requirements documentation before passing the project on to the technology leads to perform technical analysis and the designers to implement a graphic design.  Upon completion of the technical analysis and graphic design artifacts, the project is ready to be implemented by programmers.

This approach has some benefits. The business team is forced to gather all of their requirements before production begins and that can be a fantastic incentive to get the business stakeholders to prioritize the effort and complete the document.  Otherwise, business stakeholders might be inclined to do a half effort, pass along a requirements document lacking a lot of details and expect technologists to begin designing and building the product. Everyone will be frustrated in the end, when the product is late, and doesn’t look or act as was desired.  Waterfall is very good at solving this type of problem.

Waterfall can also be a significant advantage from the perspective of budgeting.  When working with external vendors or even service units within a larger enterprise which are driven by strict annual budgeting, there can be little tolerance for wasting money. By practicing a Waterfall methodology, business stakeholders get everything in place to be maximally efficient with the use of technology and design resources before engaging them, thereby reducing capital waste.   And, the vendor can also deliver on a fixed-cost or fixed-timeline, which helps overcome trust issues that can be a problem otherwise working with external vendors who bill by the hour.

Iterative Methodology (Agile & Lean)

Iterative methods such as Scrum, Extreme Programming and the Rational Unified Process (RUP) rose to prominence in the 1990s, in direct response to the perceived short-comings of Waterfall and other Stage-Gated approaches.  In 2001, the Agile Manifesto was written to unify these efforts and as a result the Agile Method was born. The key issue they collectively seek to address, is the waste of building the wrong product or features.  Whereas Waterfall in particular is great for reducing the cost of production, it is slow to produce results (since planning must be 100% complete before implementation begins) and outright terrible at discovery and responding to user feedback.  Proponents of iterative methods would argue that while stage gating methods such as Waterfall make efficient user of capital and resources to develop a product, it is only efficient in creating something that nobody wants!  This is a real problem for startups and new products, in particular.

The Agile method focuses on software development and includes several sub-processes such as Scrum, Extreme Programming, and Adaptive.  Collectively, they provide tactical guidance and frameworks for implementing iterative development process within an organization.  The Scrum sub-process for example emphasizes face-to-face communication and requires a daily meeting between team members to provide updates and social accountability, as well as align everyone around the common goals and challenges.  It also recommends that all members of the team work together in a single office without walls (called a “bull pen”) to facilitate open and organic communication.  The idea is that the team can be more reactive and ultimately agile and responsive to changing business requirements this way.

Agile also mandates that delegates from each business unit be an active part of the process, every step of the way.   Each iteration is typically 1-4 week time-boxes and while developers are implementing the design for the current iteration, designers and business stakeholders are creating the requirements for the next iteration, to be completed at the same time as implementation of the current.  When the current implementation is completed, it goes to QA to test, while development codes the next iteration, and so forth.

In this way, design and functional requirements are being created just shortly before they are implemented.  This allows for a tight feedback loop in which product designers quickly realize flaws in implementation and business stakeholders can quickly perform user testing and correct any flawed assumptions as for what is actually being built.

The Lean method is similar to the Agile method as it is iterative in nature, though the focus is product-market fit and less upon product implementation.  Whereas Agile provides a feedback loop for internal discovery among business units, Lean focuses more upon customer feedback, discovering product-market fit and optimization details such as conversion rate and landing page optimization.

Comparison

So which is a better option for your organization? It depends.  Waterfall has been beat up a lot by those who reject it in favor of iteration, but it is actually a better fit when working with external vendors, since cost-control is often a key issue. Agile can be a great choice internally within organizations that are product focused and which foster an open enough environment to allow for communication and inter-departmental cooperation.  A lot of organizations realistically do not have the culture to succeed with Agile however.  I use to work at one organization in particular which had a known policy that business stakeholders were not even allowed to enter the Engineering wing!

The nature of the project is also important.  If you are working on creative or discovery-driven projects such as analytics-driven optimization or are simply charged with increasing revenue by whatever means, iteration is the only option, since you need to make changes, test, and respond systematically.  Conversely, if you are performing a systems integration project with very specific requirements that are not going to change and require no discovery, Waterfall will likely bring more success.

Another consideration is the composition of your team.  Agile is often preferred among the more big-picture and senior members of a team, who have the competence and visibility of overall business objectives to be effective.  And in fact, it is good to engage such people and allow them the opportunity to work with Agile and Lean methods, since they will likely get bored and not be challenged by having every detail spelled out to them in a Waterfall style requirements document.  Conversely though, junior team members often need the structure and oversight of a more structured environment and might not perform well on an Agile team.  Agile has also been implicated as non-effective on larger teams.  If you have more than 20 people on your project team, the overhead of managing rapid-succession iterations might overwhelm your effort.

Finally, consider stepping back from all of the details of what Stage Gate and Iterative methodologies are, and simply ask this question:  does your business benefit more from a large-batch or small-batch approach? Stage Gating is much like an assembly line and assumes you have all of the answers and are not making any strategy mistakes.  If the answers are known already or discovery of the answers within your organization is not going to be tolerated,  then large-batch is the way to go.  If you are an early-stage company or are intro ducting new products or trying to optimize user engagement or monetization of those products however, small batch is the right choice, since you need to build a little bit, test, get feedback, and take the next steps based upon feedback.  If retaining top intellectual talent is core to your business, Agile provides more latitude and will allow you to keep your best minds engaged.

The following lists provide a quick comparison of waterfall and iterative pros and cons.

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Take Starbucks for example – how did they blow up into an International sensation in 2 short decades?  What they did flies in the face of the collective wisdom of Silicon Valley in fact.  They didn’t chase the latest TechCrunch craze; they went after coffee!  Coffee, seriously … a commodity that hasn’t been hot for hundreds of years.   But therein is the wisdom I’m trying to describe.

Starbucks took a product that that had only marginal capitalizable value if they were merely to resell it, but they created value around it, in a way that was completely new an innovative, particularly in the US where cafes rarely existed prior.  They took a commodity and created a value chain around it.  And by focusing on a commodity rather than the hottest latest thing, they were virtually uncontested in their market and under the radar until they established enough critical mass than no one could take the market from them.  Brilliant!

So what exactly did they do, you ask?  Instead of just being a coffee bar, they created gourmet drinks .. that just happen to be based on coffee.  They created inviting spaces with nice comfortable chairs and ambient music that are enjoyable to hang out in.  They created a place for people to congregate and socialize.  They created a lifestyle brand that people could identify with, thus engaging an entirely new generation of coffee drinkers.  By creating all of this, the coffee was of secondary significance.  What people are paying for when they purchase the $4 cup of coffee is the value that has been created around the cup on coffee; no the coffee itself. And yet by anchoring the entire concept around a known commodity with established demand, they were easily able to to establish a brand that resonated.  Again, much easier than trying to create an entirely new market and convince users of its value.

Zappos arguably accomplished the same thing in the retail space.  They sell shoes.  Not even unique shoes; they’re merely a reseller of shoes. And sure, they were able to accomplish enough scale to negotiate preferential sourcing and pricing, but that’s barely enough to stay above the fray of commoditization.  But what really separated them and allowed them to soar, was the amazing customer service they provide to their customers.  Zappos is legendary in fact for being incredibly helpful for anyone who calls them seeking shoes.  By doing so, they’ve created value around the shoes by reducing risk of online purchase and enhancing the overall shopping experience for their customers.  Now they’re not just selling a commodity any more, and the customer gets more value in that experience, than a mere pair of commodity shoes.  They’re now able to compete without reducing prices to compete with every other store.

What both Zappos and Starbucks did was simple really.  They took a commodity and built a value chain around it.  They took something with a history of demand (which is why its a commodity in the first place) and looked at how to increase value around it and launch a new tangential category of it.  Given that these things are a commodity, any high-end competition was squeezed out a long time ago and its mostly just very large competitors selling the commodities as cheaply as possible.  So the opportunity to innovate by building a value chain around existing commodities should be fairly easy.  And I’m beginning to wonder if that’s the really entrepreneurial opportunity of our generation, not creating yet another iPhone app.

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HTML5 is very powerful and a significant milestone in the evolution of web application interface architecture.  Its not just about animation and native support of audio and video.  In truth, HTML5 in conjunction with JavaScript can do just about everything that Flash could do. The name HTML5 in fact is perhaps a misnomer in this regard as it should be noted that HTML5 embodies the standards for a collection of technologies that facilitate audio, video, real-time rendering and animations, local persistence, and so much more.  But because it is all inherently a part of the HTML5 document model (not compiled binary code), accessibility and SEO are no longer the issues they have been in the past.  Finally, the design and technology prerogatives need not be in contradiction to one another!

So what exactly is Adobe Edge? The basic concept for developers is quite similar to Flash.  The differences  are minor, for example the timeline is based on elapsed time now rather than key frames, similar to Adobe’s After Effects video editing software.  Also notable is the use of non-destructive editing. Rather than over-writing the original HTML and JavaScript files you start with, it will create its own parallel file set to augment what you started with. Available binding events are also a little bit different and better reflect their HTML5 underpinnings. Overall though, you’d be surprised just how similar the tools are.

With Adobe making this change to embrace HTML5, it seems that just about everyone is on board now with HTML5 and JavaScript as the way forward for development of rich internet applications; Microsoft even announced recently that they are depreciating Silverlight.  That’s on the desktop anyway. Mobile is a more complex issue with so much momentum still with development of native applications (iOS, Android, etc). The cost of maintaining separate applications for various devices certainly isn’t ideal however and truthfully, 80% of those apps could be replicated using HTML5 and JavaScript without much negative impact on user experience, but at a substantially lower cost.  Its primarily the sophisticated game and media applications that might not port as well.

Adobe Edge seems well positioned to take become the default product for interactive and animation authoring for the web 3.0 applications of the future. The product has done a good job of playing off of the strengths and knowledge of the existing Flash platform and hopefully will not alienate the developer base.  They’ve satisfied UI architecture prerogatives by keeping the output artifacts aligned with HTML5 and the document object model, and they’re going to be the first significant tool to provide an easy authoring solution for what will inevitably be a major new wave of web application innovation.  I’m sure it was a painful decision for Adobe to kill their golden goose, but this move should be a positive for everyone and may actually help them in the long run.

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You’ll typically find a Product Manager within organizations that have consumer focused products.  For services businesses, the Program Manager is the analog and they manage a set of services and procedures in a similar way.  In organizations that practice Scrum, this person is typically referred to as the “Product Owner”. They are the delegate for the team who is ultimately responsible for representing the product to the client or stakeholders.

In the past, many organizations have used Project Managers instead of Product and Program managers but this isn’t always ideal, since the Project Management is transactional based, focusing only on definition and delivery of a given project and then they move on.  There is no ownership over product strategy and no long-term accountability for the success of the Product itself.  Product Managers own these additional responsibilities and in fact often have profit and loss (P&L) accountability as a key metric for evaluating their performance.

To date, there are few educational programs that prepare professionals to become a Product or Program Manager and indeed, everyone in the field seems to come from a different background; typically from one of the roles that would interface directly with the PM, such as Design, Engineering, User Experience, Business Analysis, and Marketing.  Depending on the size biases of the organization some of these responsibilities may even roll up to the PM.  For example, you’ll often see Technical Product Managers, who take an active role in system architecture, Agile sprint definitions, product deployment, and user acceptance testing (UAT).  I’ve argued in a previous blog post that the Product Manager is the role that should own the responsibilities of User Experience (UX), Analytics, and Conversion Optimization, unless the organization is large enough to have dedicated resources for these tasks.  It is a mistake however to align User Experience for example, with the design team, not the Product Manager.

Within a digital agency, a Product Manager is the person who works with the client to define a product’s vision and success criteria and shepards that project through development, deployment, and QA testing.  Ideally if the client allows for an open-ended engagement with the agency, rather than fixed-scope, the Product Manager is able to work with the product on an iterative basis to test, discover, and optimize user engagement and conversions.  In this way, the Product Manager is able to able to assist the client in finding real value and ROI from the engagement, rather than simply delivering a product on specification.

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Scott Brinker is the CTO of Ion Interactive and a self-described marketing technologist.  In his blog, Scott calls out the the pain point for organizations and proposes that many organizations should consider instituting a new department of marketing technology, complete with its own C-level delegate, the Chief Marketing Technology Officer.  When you consider the political struggles within large organizations, its not a bad idea.

Meanwhile, a recurring theme at the online marketing conferences, are solutions for marketing teams to work around IT.  Tealium and Enisghten for example, provide a tagging management system, whereby IT only needs to be requested to drop a single JavaScript tag into the footer of a site, and marketers can then login to a management system and add the tags for whatever else they want such as 3rd party analytics packages.  And while the solutions provide obvious appeal for marketers, many people on the IT team rightfully resist these solutions as ‘trojan horses’, citing poor and excessive choices by marketers as to what all to include once they have the ability to do so, not realizing the effect on site performance.

Then there is the reality of the evolving online medium itself.  Only a couple years ago we were talking specifically about websites and search engine rankings.  Now, brand management has moved outside of organization’s website and to the social sphere (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn); even the physical media by which we consume online media is changing with the ever increasing prevalence of mobile and alternative devices such as iPads.  All of these things require technical facilitation.  To build a simple Facebook app isn’t so simple any more with Facebook now requiring even the most trivial customizations to be run through an ‘app’ and registered in its developer’s center.  Mobile meanwhile requires sophisticated device-specific applications.  Meanwhile the changes are just beginning and the past of change areas such as eCommerce looks poised to explode with innovations such as eBay’s X.commerce platform and where.com’s Geo IP fencing technologies.

The more I’ve pondered this dilemma, the more I’m inclined to agree with mr Brinker’s thesis that organizations now require a dedicated department for marketing technology.  All of these challenges are entirely outside of the scope of support and fields of expertise for both traditional marketers and IT.  When you look at what’s happening with technology, its no longer an entity separate from the marketing message; the technology is becoming the expressive media itself! Imagine a songwriter who cannot play an instrument, or a skilled pianist who doesn’t understand music theory – neither one is going to be effective at composing good music. What’s really needed is a group of people who are both analytical and technical; they sit somewhere in the middle, and right now, there is no room for these individuals in the normal corporate structure, so they typically go to work for advertising and digital agencies instead!

So, instituting an online marketing department seems a natural direction that corporations will evolve, particularly those doing a lot with online marketing.  In the meantime, the optimal solution for many organizations may simply be to partner with an agency capable of bridging this gap.  These agencies can take ownership over marketing technology and operate at a more organic level, creating the types of solutions not capable within organizations who require solutions such as tag management to succeed.

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His speech chronicled his life as a serial entrepreneur and provided a 12 pieces of advice that he learned along the way.  I thought it might be an interesting blog post to capture his advice.

1. Up Markets – try to align yourself with a market that is rising.  If you are running with the trend, it is like running a marathon with the wind at your back.  Yes there may be a lot of competition, but your opportunities to succeed are also greater. This is the most important piece of strategic advice.

2. Selling – Learning how to sell, pitch, and explain your product, is the single most important skill as an entrepreneur.

3. Passion – You have to pursue your passion!  A young company will go through many tough times and often the fate of the business will not be known.  Apple and many others experienced these dark times and persevered, only because their founder(s) had so much passion for what they were doing that they did not give up, when things looked bad.

4. Focus – Even if you think you are going to starve yourself of opportunity by limiting yourself to just one thing, in fact the opposite is usually true.  He told the example of how he was building educational software products for kids and decided to build one specifically for Kindergarteners. That became, by far, their biggest seller!

5. Strengths – It is important to recognize your own strengths (and weaknesses).  Build your infrastructure around your strengths, and find others  to compliment and fill in around you.

6. Grow Slow – Do not get ahead of yourself; it is better to grow slowly.  He told the story of how eToys was growing as quickly as possibly, trying to grab marketshare before Amazon did.  When the .com crash happened however, they were over-extended and it killed the business.  In retrospect, growing slower and not causing such vulnerabilities would have been a better strategy.

7. Survive – If you have a great idea but are early to the market, you need to stay lean so that you can stay alive until the market is ready for you.  Mr Gross told the story of how Z.com could have been a leading entertainment business online but they spent their capital and folded that business before the market was there.  In retrospect, they should have grown slower and maintained so they could stay alive until the opportunity manifested.

8. Testing – Test your core value proposition early and often – test, test, test!  He told the example of how CarsDirect initially was just intended to be a simple test.  They put up the site to see if they could attract buyers for a single night and received 4 purchases.  Based upon this response, they went forward with the business.  Testing as process is an idea I’ve written about before and also a major tenant now of the Lean method.

9. Perservence – If you believe strongly enough in an idea, stick with it. When Bill Gross founded GoTo, no one saw his vision for the Pay per Click advertising model.  GoTo later became Overture.com, which of course eventually became Yahoo, and is the model that Google Adwords now uses. Had he not stuck with it at the time, none of that may have happened.

10. Funding – If you have a big idea, you will need big money to pull it off. Its that simple.  No when you are going to need partners and seek them out if necessary.  For smaller ideas, its often better to build the initial iterations yourself and seek funding later, but for big ideas, funding is a critical element of the venture.

11. Automation – Find automated ways for customers to bring new customers to you.   Virality in other words.  Its the single most efficient way to scale a business, though it can be difficult to crack. He is currently working on social media tools (UberMedia) and social networking (Chime.in) and exploring how to make this happen.

12. Opposites – Work with people opposite from you.  This has previously been described as the hacker and the hustler team.  Mr Gross talked about how early on, he made the mistake of always working with people like himself but soon realized he wasn’t getting the objectivity or rounding out his own skills this way.  He recommended that entrepreneurs seek out their opposites instead.

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