Startup Revolution

Healthcare Is About To Explode
I have a friend, Mary Kay O'Connor founder of Starting Point (http://www.startingpnt.com/site/ ), who is about to jump off the roof. She's been selling, or attempting to sell, into healthcare for several years.

Healthcare is bureaucratic, infected with "Father Knows Best" syndrome, changing rapidly thanks to The Social Patient and ripe for the startup pickings. If your fabric is as TOUGH as my old boss Mary Kay's you may want to look HARD at healthcare since it is about to explode (whether it wants to or not). 

Wow, this post is TAKING OFF fast. Its about something I keep talking about and no one seems to HEAR. GPlus is the place to create your Internet marketing and I use numbers from @Crowdfundeanalysis.@CrowdfundeFind An Amazing G+ Analysis here:
https://plus.google.com/102639884404823294558/posts/F5fXyrkTPCr @Crowdfunde

Startups & Paper.li
This is a great interview with a knowledgeable curator - Judy Gombita. Startups are in a constant state of frenzy. They must create content, but they are creating other things too like a product or a company.

Most startups abandon content marketing until after they launch. That is a mistake. Start sharing content NOW and Paper.li is a great way to share because it uses your Twitter feed to create one of the most powerful, "Get more done with less effort," content curation tools around.

Your Paper.li helps build community, inform your content marketing and create feedback loops and it can be as "plug and play" as you want. Highly recommend all startups have a Paper.li since this great tool is like putting your Twitter on steroids. .

"Startups face tremendous pressure while competing with their bigger counterparts. They neither have large manpower nor big infrastructure. Social media can become an effective solution in helping them grow. This infographic shows how startups should utilize the power of social media."

Getting your tech startup covered in press isn't easy. Nonetheless, it's one of the most valuable activities which provides your endeavor with links and

Must Follower Startup Experts & Resourcs
Are you an active user of Twitter? Great! If not - get there as fast as you can and follow these 15 startup influencers. Recommended by an online market...

Never Ending Battle Truth, Justice & American Way
Tough "Dog Days" of summer for "Super Hero" marketing tactics. Here is a list of the dead and dying tactics:

SMB Marketing Tactics Costing More, Getting Less:

* Yellow Pages (near death). 
* Print ads (near death).

* Val-u-pak coupons (near death).

* Coupons of any kind (losing relevance with smartphone users)..

* Groupons (blows brands up almost beyond repair).
* Email marketing (sick due to social / mobile web). 
* Social Media Marketing (sick and getting sicker fast). 
* Content Marketing.(content shock sick).

* Ecommerce (too many stores, same offerings).
* PPC (paying more to get less). 
* Retargeting (cat out of bag, so sick efficacy declining).
* Video Marketing (steep learning curve, expensive). 
* Viral Marketing (everyone has that cold now & hit or miss). 
* Cause Marketing (not as unique as once was & live or die with partner).

* Celebrity Marketing (expensive and live or die with branded celeb).

* SEO (don't even get us started, all but gone, baby, gone). 

Many of these "SMB" tactics are in a startup's launch plan too. Good luck with that. Startups have to double down on asynchronous tactics since their money is tight and they have little or no brand awareness yet.

Favorite startup asynchronous tactics of ours include:

* OPN (tap Other People's Networks).
* OPM (tap Other People's Money via crowdfunding).
* Crowdfunding.
* Friends-of-Friends marketing.
* Community (start handing of the keys to your content early).
* Partnerships.
* OPC (Other People's Content via content curation with attribution(.
* Video Marketing (learning curve and expense scares most away).
* Events.
* Training.
* Contests & Games.

That last bullet can be especially powerful for startups. Remember to create tools needed to empower advocates, contributors and Sherpas. Make it easy to help you by providing graphical tools, listening and curating content into a social space (curation is a form of social reward).  

GPlus Is For Startups
GPlus is a much misunderstood social network. That misunderstanding may stem from the fact it is not a social net. GPlus is really a tool suite with a social net sitting on top of it. There are several reasons G+ is great for startups including:

* Not As Crowded as other Social Nets.

* Better for long form content.

* Great for conversations.
* Hangouts on Air = create YouTube Videos automatically.

* There's a learning curve.

That last bullet is why we love G+. Since there is a bit of a learning curve, many aspects of the tool are not intuitive, the uncommitted are turned away. What is left is a group of power users ready, willing and able to contribute meaningful content, inspiration and awareness for your startup.

Try creating a committed tribe of power users on Facebook (hint: you can't). Share pictures of your new baby on Facebook, use GPlus to build your business.

Lunch With Smart Dogs at Triangle Startup Factory
Kip Frey (www.linkedin.com/pub/kip-frey/36/b09/384 pictured in middle above) is a smart entrepreneur who one might say has "gone to the dogs". Kip spoke at Free Lunch Friday at +Triangle StartUp Factory today about Dognition (https://www.dognition.com/ ).

Dognition is a Myers/Briggs personality test for dogs. During an hour long fascinating conversation Kip made several points we've heard consistently from Chris and Dave at TSF such as:

* Ideas that "seem true" create their own momentum.
* Look for ideas that "create a new category".
* Ideas with great partnership hooks work best since partners help create scale with OPL (Other Poeple's Lists) and OPC (Other People's Content).

Dognition is a cool idea since we humans are always anthropomorphizing our animals. Now you can do a test AT HOME with your dog to figure out which one of 9 classifications your dog's personality falls within. You can compare your dog to dogs in your area, across the country or possibly the world (soon Kip mentioned they are already speaking to interested parties in China).

I found Kip and Dognition's #brandingstrategy fascinating. Kip and the team at Dognition spent a year working on the #DIY version of their test. They needed enough data shared by "citizen scientists" after taking their test that the hard work created in the lab held up even in the DIY home version.

"I think people are more interested in their dogs than in their DNA," Kip said at one point and I agree. There are 70M dog owning families in America (so one in three roughly) and each year brings 7M new dogs to market.

_____________________________________
Branding            vs                   Scale

The tension between creating a brand with meaning and the scale necessary to support that meaning was interesting. Kip decided to do a deal with Purina One to gain scale. Sounds like he had to defend the sizable deal with his board because they were worried about "brand purity".

#branding is tricky. Too much scale too fast could marginalize the brand. The science at the core of the test is something that could be seen as goofy in the wrong context. By doing an exclusive with Purina One for 2014 Dognition gets millions in partner ad dollars - the test is a freebie if dog owners complete a 28 day "Purina One 28 Day Challenge" (http://www.purinaone.com/dogs/28-Day-Challenge/main-page ).

Cool promo and great legitimacy for Dognition and possibly just the right amount of scale. Partnerships bring interesting challenges. Dognition can get swallowed whole by Purina, and can anyone spot the BIG #socialmarketing error on the Purina One challenge page? http://www.purinaone.com/dogs/28-Day-Challenge/main-page

ERROR - Love that Purina is using Tweets, but seeing 46 day old Tweets HURTS the social legitimacy of their campaign. A 46 day old tweet from a customer is fine IN ROTATION, but what if the only representation I see has old content?

When curating old and new social content from Purina and users always have something in the roll that is current, only several hours hold max. Using customer Tweets is brave, but stale in its current implementation. Even if the Purina staff creates Tweets today that related to something that happened 46 days ago have something current on social.

Building  a #story off of #UGC is what +CrowdFunde is all about. Conversations require different #contentcuration and #contentcreation than promotional push. Purina One's misuse of #SMM is a perfect validation for a tool like CrowdFunde that helps create, curate and converse with the most valuable content on earth - User Generated Content (UGC).

By isolating old tweets without a clear understanding about why they are there, other than being self congratulatory, Purina destroys what they hope to build - active, alive conversations.

We think Dognition will have great conversations since learning your dog's personality feels like something MADE for social shares, but HOW you share social conversations is tricky as a big brand like Purina proves. Turning conversations into #engagemn and #loyalty is trickier still.

Cool talk today with many lessons for #startups and #Internetmarketers . Dognition is going to be on 60 Minutes in April and they will have a reality TV show on Nat Geo Wild so conversations will happen. Team at CrowdFunde wishes our fellow Durham #startup   luck and a free CrowdFunde installation if they want to discover how to build community on a scale hard to knock down or duplicate...because building ongoing engagement after initial novelty is based on the quality, frequency and value of Dognition's (and any brand's) CONVERSATIONS!

Thanks to Kip for speaking with TSF startups today! Marty

PS. Kip asked for feedback on the Dognition site and since I know there are a lot of ecommerce conversion experts that follow me send me your thoughts and I will pull together 5 to 10 "would be better if" kinds of feedback for https://www.dognition.com/ .

Don't Ask The Wrong Questions
Statup Investors Often Ask The WRONG Questions in the WRONG ways. Here are examples of GOOD questions to ask startup entrepreneurs:

* How many unique visitors will your site get daily in the first year?

* How many downloads (or sales) will your site make daily?

* What is projected cost of customer acquisition first through third years?

* Where will your website’s traffic come from? Top 3 – 5 sources?

* Who are you disrupting and what is the PageRank PageSpread and number of inbound Links.

Complete list is included in the linked post on CrowdFunde
http://crowdfunde.com/new-money-startup-investment-criteria/