Not too long ago Rob Kischuk issued a challenge. Essentially he threw down the gauntlet to Atlanta Startup Weekend participants. If you are going to play, play with the intent to launch. Paul Stamatiou took up the rally cry. And Paul had a pretty consistent question during the opening pitches. "Can you build it in a weekend?"
Atlanta has a strong Startup Weekend history. Both Skribit and Twitpay were companies that made it out of the gate before the end of the weekend. Both have received seed funding. There is a bit of a legacy to uphold. The big plan was select and form on Friday, get to prototype before going home on Saturday, and get out the door by Sunday presentation time.
And did the people that participated in Atlanta Startup Weekend 3 answer the challenge and hold up the legacy. Six products were launched this past weekend. Yes six. And two others made it to rather impressive demos.
1.0
Beta
Alpha
Demo
Remarkable. Eight teams had something to show on Sunday night. Rumor is that two of them have revenue. XpenseTrack went to Startup Gauntlet on Tuesday night and won the pitch competition.
It will be interesting to watch these projects develop. There are one or two in the bunch that could evolve into interesting companies.
Yesterday afternoon a friend of mine checked in to The Commerce Club on foursquare. I had never heard of the place so I two tapped down to learn more.
Note the green special nearby call out. It led to this loyalty/promotional offer from the Red Moon Cafe.
Interesting.
ChubbyBrain, whose name is perhaps only surpassed by BackPackBuddy, is issuing a series of reports on the state of incubators around the nation. They recently covered Georgia. Not surprisingly, ATDC dominates the market with over a 50% share when you combine the Atlanta and Savannah results.
ATDC is really not just an incubator any more. It is more of a venture accelerator with an incubation space for companies that need it. If you do the math on the old ATDC data that CubbyBrain used of 39 companies it would put the total market at about 75 companies incubating in Georgia, or 36 non ATDC companies. ATDC now has 218 member companies. The ATDC share under the new model is more like 86%. It also makes ATDC the largest program in the country.
Pretty impressive.
This morning I woke up to find Ev's avatar in my personal tweet stream.
I was a bit taken aback. I don't follow @ev. Did not understand why he showed up. So I followed the link and sure enough he does a fine job explaining this.
Seems like Twitter has a bit of an retweet attribution problem. Here is how they decided to solve it.
"In order to get rid of the attribution confusion, in your timeline we show the avatar and username of the original author of the tweet—with the person who retweeted it (whom you actually follow) in the metadata underneath."
So Fred Wilson, whom I follow, is merely mentioned in small text at the base of the retweet. Ev, who I do not follow, is noted prominently with his avatar and user name.
End result is increased exposure, reach, and influence for users that get retweeted. It will be interesting to see how this effects user behavior.
Atlanta Startup Weekend is less than a week away from starting. Over 75 people have signed up. The total registrants may reach 100 (registration closes on Wednesday). And we have some great local sponsors in MailChimp, JungleDisk, and A Small Orange that are going to be offering some resources to Startup Weekend participants.
With that said, there is a dirty little secret about Startup Weekend. Actually it's not confined to Startup Weekend. It applies to lots of well known startup related programs. Startup Weekend, TechStars, YC, the GRA/TAG Business Launch competition. The further along you are when the programming actually starts, the better your chance of success when the program ends. So what does that mean for Atlanta Startup Weekend?
If you have an idea start developing the idea into something that you can easily share on opening night.
Below is a nice tutorial. Exceptions for Atlanta is we are limiting the first round pitches to 60 seconds and not allowing slides.
If you have an idea it also would not be too bad an idea to start
recruiting your team before the event starts. As an example, the
idea for Twitpay was well socialized last year before the weekend began
and several key team members knew that was what they were going to work
on before they walked in the door on Friday night. So recruit people
that you know and want to work with to sign up for the weekend so they
can work on your project.
If you don't have an idea go to the idea wiki and chime on the ideas that others are submitting.
It's time to get started. If you have any other insights or questions bring them on.
In a nice opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, by Schramm et al. They essentially say that the age of the business not the size is the more precise characteristic of companies creating jobs.
The authors go on to cite economic and regulatory barriers that are in the way of young companies and propose a four pronged solution.The more precise factor is not the size of businesses, but rather their age. According to the Census Bureau, nearly all net job creation in the U.S. since 1980 occurred in firms less than five years old. A Kauffman Foundation report released yesterday shows that as recently as 2007, two-thirds of the jobs created were in such firms. Put more starkly, without new businesses, job creation in the American economy would have been negative for many years.
There is this big debate about if you should or should not try and determine ROI on social media efforts. I am clearly in the former camp.
Evan LaPointe, whom I had the pleasure to interact with a bit recently is not really a social media guy. He is a web analytics guy. Dare I say an expert. He was a nice article on Search Engine Land pondering the question if Web analytics is easy or difficult to do. The answer is both.
Money quote:
"But the most important—and hardest—thing to do is tie it all back to the two very simple metrics that drive all business value: revenue and profitability."
Yep. And I think that is why some people don't want to measure social media ROI. It's hard.
It's also important. To quote someone a bit more famous than Evan, "what's measured gets managed." If you want to improve how social media drives business value you have to measure it's impact on revenue and profitability.
Christina Warren has an excellent article over on Mashable entitled "HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI." It's a great roundup of the tools available today and chock full of content. Including Oliver Blanchard's Social Media ROI presentation.
It's simply astounding how many social media marketing practitioners take the stance that you can not measure the ROI of social media. It's even more astounding that 84% of social media programs are not measured. I honestly do not think that I have ever undertaken a marketing program that did not have ROI metrics attached. Never, ever. It's appalling.
Why are so many social media consultants/companies/experts so averse to measuring the impact that social media has on business results? Perhaps they don't know how. Perhaps they don't like the results. I really don't know. A notable exception is Chris Brogan. He says something to the effect of "sure I measure ROI, that's why they give me money." Good for him.
The position of most social media types reminds of the time when I did an agency review and the astonishment displayed upon learning that customer revenue generated was the end game measurement of any marketing effort. The agency folks were aghast. Measure sales. As a results of marketing efforts. Good god man what is wrong with you!
Folks if it is marketing, and that's the general classification of many social media programs, you can measure it. Measure it all the way to ROI.
Being employed by Georgia Tech means that I don’t travel that much for business these days. In all the time I have been at ATDC I think I have gotten on a plane for business exactly once (make that twice, it was a round trip ticket). The first week of November I am going to do it again. I am going to TechJournal South’s Internet Summit 09 in Raleigh. Not only am I going, I am paying for the trip out of my own pocket. For me to start writing personal checks I need to be a little excited. And I am super excited about Internet Summit.
First of all Eric Gregg the publisher of TechJournal South and director of TechJournal South always puts on a heck of a show. They have what looks to be a great networking event on the opening night followed by a day of top notch panels/presentations with executives from comScore, Blogger, Digg, ESPN, Meebo, Pandora, Tapulous, Technorati, Twitter, and Salesforce to name a few. And Don Brown from Twitpay is on the agenda as well. They are also having a demo pit where a dozen or so of the local Internet hotties are going to be showing off their goods.
Looking forward to what I expect to be more than a full day of connecting and learning with these folks that are a bit outside of my normal circle. Registration is still open. They are expecting a record crowd. I hope to see you there.