Cup of Joe: Changing Cu...

Last week I talked about how marketers should leverage culture to promote brands. Today I would like to talk about why we also can (and should) change culture. As I watched the video above I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Is marketing changing culture? Or is culture changing marketing?” Or in other words, are these ads changing our perception of beauty or is our perception of beauty changing the ads? I still don’t have the answer, but maybe it;s a little bit of both. In the end it doesn’t really matter, the bottom line is that the concept of “ideal beauty” has been around for a very long time. However, that doesn’t mean that it has to continue, and as marketers we have a unique ability to make a difference. Because as marketers we, in part, define culture. How To Change Culture With Marketing Develop Icons – Cultures love a good icon. For example take a look at Donald Duck in Germany, they love him. A strong icon can be a powerful force with in a culture. And who creates icons? Marketers do, that’s who! If we want to change our culture’s obsession with ideal body types we need to work to develop more icons that embody realistic and diverse forms of beauty. Change The Narrative – Maybe with the help of some of our new icons we can start telling some new stories. How about a story about a fully figured woman that men fight over. Or perhaps a movie about a funny young guy in a wheelchair that hordes of women lust after ( wink ). Stories shape our collective conscience and define the way we view the world. They also help define our own personal narrative, which gives us courage to be different and try new things. Make A Profit – Remember that marketing is still all about generating wealth. With out wealth we can’t elevate icons or tell new stories. So we need to use the power of marketing to create consumer demands that redefine cultural norms. We need to start building brands that target individuals that deviate from the prevailing cultural narrative. We need fashion brands that market directly to consumers with wrinkles and body weight. We need to grow these brand’s revenue streams and make wrinkles profitable. Quit Being Lazy – As I watched the video above I couldn’t help but think how unimaginative and uncreative the ads pictured were. Smart marketing is never easy. To redefine culture we have to be creative and try many different things and be willing to fail. Sometimes, it’s hard selling failure to our clients, which is why we need to demand and expect more courage from the companies and brands we work with. Most of you that work with large brands know that they are run by good people that want to do the right thing, they just often times lack the needed courage to do what needs to be done. In the 21st century marketers are one of the most influential elements on our culture. We have the power to redefine ideas and conscientiousness and it’s our job to wield that power responsibly. This does not mean simply abstaining from the types of ads in the video, it also means taking an active role in the development of new trends that shape our collective identity. If we can effectively do that, we can use marketing to make the world a better place while generating wealth. And, to me that sounds beautiful.

Wahooly Launches Its Cr...

There’s an interesting experiment afoot in the startup community, which poses the following questions to entrepreneurs: Would you be willing to trade equity in your startup in return for social media buzz, and customer feedback? How much, if any, would you fork over? Minneapolis-based startup called Wahooly is both asking those questions — and proffering a few answers. Soft-launching in late September, Wahooly set out to create a platform on which socially-connected and early adopter-types, who are not accredited investors, can grab a small stake in up-and-coming startups by sharing their influence in exchange for a piece of the action. The goal: To help address one of the biggest obstacles encountered by early-stage companies — traction. Partnering with Klout and Cmp.ly, Wahooly has ammassed over 28,000 users, which Founder Dana Severson (a former business writer/blogger) says are all online infleuncers within the 90th percentile, according to Klout. Wahooly provides startups that need social media boosts and helping feedback with access to these “influencers,” allowing them to create testing groups of 5,000 to 8,000 people. Once formed, these groups take a share of between 4 to 6 percent in the startup. As to how it works, at a more granular level: Severson says that once users (a collection of bloggers, developers, and “web-lebrities”) join a startup, their share of the equity pool fluctuates based on a number of criteria, including feedback, which is tracked/rewarded in a point system. Users gain points based on three variables: The value of feedback (voted by the community), user activity (how often and to what extent they are using the service), and by influence (how many conversions their activity creates). Obviously, it’s in the interest of the user to focus on increasing the value of their startups, and the campaign continues until Wahooly exits, at which point users are paid based on their point total. In terms of what Wahooly provides to its startups, the founder says that the platform’s value proposition lies in delivering acceleration via advocates. “It’s a quality not quantity equation,” Severson says, “We’ve built our system to get what start-ups need most out of influencers, which is what most companies struggle with. We’re really focused on the power of combined influence, which is how trends begin.” While many startups are able to attract a decent amount of tweets, posts, mentions, and so on, the tipping point truly comes when this activity occurs concurrently and repetitively. But finding sustainability in brand advocacy is a difficult challenge, as user attention is fleeting, and most are wary of phoniness when it comes to repeat advocacy. That’s why Severson, who has also spent tim in advertising, wants to deliver a level of activity that will consist of 1,000 mentions over a single day — rather than over the course of a year — and then repeating that. A tricky feat, no doubt. Due to its unusual business model, Wahooly has been met with skepticism from some media, as the company plans to have quity stakeholders who take no action have their stake diluted (like a stock splitting), could potentially run afoul of the FTC and other regulators. Severson explains that part of the reason for this skepticism was due to the fact that the team hasn’t been willing to discuss how Wahooly is structured, holding off for competitive reasons. At this point, however, the founder is willing to share a bit more. Wahooly will always be the single shareholder in its startups, paying users based on its point system, with points being calculated against the net result of Wahooly’s success with its investments. It’s the same result for everyone, he says, while staying within the guidelines and allowing for the structure to be applied to international markets. In terms of the FTC’s potential interest, Wahooly’s users will be required to provide full disclosure. In other words, the affiliation/disclosure will appear on pages in which Wahooly users share. Because its users are influencers, the founder explains, they want to maintain their credibility and online reputations, and thus Wahooly wants to make it simple for the proper disclosures to be made. As to Wahooly’s progress: The company plans to introduce 200 startups to its users this year, and they’ve received over 300 applications thus far, and will be continuing to accept applicants going forward. Right now, Severson says, the focus is on consumer-based web applications. Today, Wahooly is officially introducing its first three companies: TweetTV.com, Cull.TV and ValuValu.com. The first, tweetTV is an Austin-based startup, building a web-based social TV Guide and Twitter-powered social TV platform that helps its users discover what to watch on TV and facilitates real tweet-based conversations around TV programs as they air. The second, Cull TV is attempting to reboot music television by leveraging leading recommendation and web data mining technology to helps anyone discover relevant, emerging talent through music videos. Currently experiencing a renaissance, music videos are the most popular way to distribute and consume music online, so Cull TV wants to give users a new and better way to discover artists. The third is Seattle-based startup Valu Valu , which calls itself “the hedge fund for everybody,” and aims to beat the stock market by combining momentum strategies with social sentiment analysis, sending “precise and easy trading instructions to its subscribers.” I’ve also just learned that a fourth startup, RAVN, which we wrote about in October, will be launching on Wahooly later this week. Check out the post for more here . Wahooly, which is walking the line between an accelerator and a crowdfunding platform, is definitely offering an unusual model, and could very well be a successful tool for startups looking to push past the early-adopter phase. But it could also be another sign that we’re on the doorstep/in the midst of another bubble. Whether or not Wahooly is successful depends on how influential its community truly is and whether they can really help startups get off the ground. Startups have to attract enough users or they will be overlooked, another challenge. It’s still early in the process to waylay judgement, but, as it scales, we’ll be able to get a better sense of how much real value Wahooly is adding to the ecosystem. It’s very likely that Wahooly will get early adopters feeling very tingly, but will the value be there? If it can deliver real acceleration in the market, Wahooly will no doubt race past the tipping point. The company is currently in the midst of raising its series A. For more on the model, check out Wahooly at home here .

Congratulations Crunchi...

This year’s fifth annual Crunchies Awards has just finished up at the classy Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and it was a smashing success. We poked fun #humblebraggers, got cussed at by Siri, honored former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, and gave wild monkey trophies to tech’s greatest innovators. If you missed the event or our livestream , check out the full list of nominees and winners below. The world owes a thank you to Jack Dorsey, the “Founder Of The Year” and leader of Twitter, winner of “Biggest Social Impact”. His poise and dedication helped keep the microblogging service online so it could aid revolutions. And a big congrats to Dropbox on its win for “Best Overall Startup”. The company’s young founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi (seen below) demonstrated the power of the freemium model, and had the guts to turn down a 9 figure acquisition bid. Here are the nominees and winners: Best Technology Achievement Lytro  (Runner Up) NFC OnLive Siri   (Winner) Tesla Flat Pack Battery Best Social Application Facebook Timeline Instagram  (Runner Up) Google+   (Winner) The New New Twitter Path 2.0 Best Shopping Application Birchbox Fab    (Winner) Gilt Groupe Lot18 Warby Parker   (Runner Up) Best Mobile Application Evernote   (Winner) Flipboard   (Runner Up) Pandora Spotify Square TaskRabbit Best Location Application Airbnb Foursquare Grindr   (Winner) RunKeeper   (Runner Up) Uber Best Tablet Application djay Eventbrite At the Door Fotopedia   (Winner) GarageBand Netflix   (Runner Up) StumbleUpon Best Design Gojee Orchestra Path 2.0    (Winner) Pinterest   (Runner Up) Quora Best Bootstrapped Startup  (2010 winner: addmired) Github   (Runner Up) Imgur   (Winner) Instapaper Onesheet Tap Tap Tap (Camera+) Best Cloud Service Asana Box   (Runner Up) CloudFlare Dropbox   (Winner) Okta Twilio Best International Startup Badoo Klarna   (Runner Up) Peixe Urbano   (Winner) Rovio SoundCloud Wonga Best Clean Tech Startup Alta Energy Array Power   (Runner Up) EcoATM   (Winner) EcoMotors Hara Best New Device Galaxy Nexus iPad 2 iPhone 4S Kindle Fire   (Runner Up) Nest   (Winner) Best Time Sink Modern Warfare 3 Quora Skyrim   (Runner Up) Turntable.fm Words With Friends  (Winner) Biggest Social Impact Charity: Water   (Runner Up) Khan Academy Kickstarter Practice Fusion Twitter   (Winner) Angel of the Year Ron Conway Paul Graham Reid Hoffman   (Winner) Keith Rabois Naval Ravikant  and  Babak Nivi   (Runner Up) Kevin Rose VC of the Year Marc Andreessen  &  Ben Horowitz   (Winner) Matt Cohler   (Runner Up) Vinod Khosla Aileen Lee Yuri Milner David Sze Founder of the Year Leah Busque  (Task Rabbit) Brian Chesky  (Airbnb) Jack Dorsey  (Square, Twitter) (Winner) Susan Feldman  &  Ali Pincus  (One Kings Lane) Drew Houston  (Dropbox)  (Runner Up) CEO of the Year Dick Costolo  (Twitter) Daniel Ek  (Spotify)  (Runner Up) Phil Libin  (Evernote) Mark Pincus  (Zynga) Jeff Weiner  (LinkedIn) (Winner) Best New Startup of 2011 Codecademy   (Runner Up) Fab Nest Pinterest   (Winner) Turntable.fm Best Overall Startup of 2011 Dropbox   (Winner) Instagram Gilt Groupe Spotify Square   (Runner Up) Tumblr Thanks to everyone who watched, voted, or attended the Crunchies. This award show is about the tech community, and we’re honored to have you as our readers.

Years After Being Dropp...

Two weeks ago, the excellent Building Windows 8 blog posted an in-depth look at the upcoming operating system’s new file system, ReFS . It reminded me of the promise of so many years ago that OS X would be changing its file system from HFS+ to ZFS. Not a promise many remember or even cared about at the time, but it was, in fact, important. ZFS support was dropped amid development and legal problems, but Don Brady, who was heading up the file system transition team at Apple, left to pursue it independently. And now he’s releasing a piece of software, Zevo , which finally adds ZFS support to any Intel Mac running 10.6.6 or later. Most of you are probably wondering why you should even bother about something as invisible to the average user as the file system. It’s a fair question, and the short version is that HFS+ has its roots in very old computing practices (think PowerPC processors running OS 9) and is missing some features that are becoming more critical every year. The long version is here in John Siracusa’s 10.7 review on Ars Technica, where he breaks down feature by feature where HFS+ falls short. Zevo comes in four flavors : Silver ($20), Gold ($40), and Platinum (no price yet), plus a Developer edition that isn’t fully detailed yet. Each adds more features, but many basic benefits of ZFS are there to begin with, like bit-level error detection. Unfortunately, you can’t boot from a ZFS volume right now, so you’ll need to create a ZFS partition and keep your data there. This isn’t surprising, but it is a little disappointing. It’s not the full conversion people were hoping for, but only Apple can provide that, and they don’t seem to want to. Should you buy it? You should probably at least ask your IT guys. But it’s nice to see this little gem of geekery resurface after so many years in limbo. If I get a new MacBook Pro this year ( a high-res one, naturally ), I might just stick this on there for kicks. At this price, it’s really not much of a hit, and it’ll be great for my cred. [via MacRumors ]

Will 2012 Become the Ye...

This post comes from our SEO channel sponsor Link Assistant . The mobile Web has been gaining HUGE momentum in the past few years. Different statistics pertaining to the mobile Internet paint a vivid picture of the latter growing bigger each day:   76 percent of the world population (5.3 billion people) use mobile devices, of which over 1 billion are smartphones. The average iPhone user only spends 45% of his on-device time making voice calls Facebook pages drive 80% of newsletter sign-up’s through mobiles The number of mobile searches has grown 400% in the last year For many products, 1 in 7 searches comes from a mobile device 1/3 of flowers sold on Mother’s Day were through mobiles  The mobile Web is expected to grow bigger than the desktop Internet by the end of 2014, etc. This makes one wonder, “Oh my, isn’t it time I optimize my site for mobile users?” But thing is, while some Internet marketers are very excited about the Web going mobile and all that, a big portion of SEO’s are still rather skeptical about mobile taking over the “normal” search, which is well-illustrated by the fact that only 21% of online businesses have already optimized their sites for mobile users. I’m not trying to say that “hey, there is no need to optimize your site for mobile”. Actually, that will definitely NOT hurt. However, a little bit of critical approach towards the mobile Internet won’t hurt either. So, let’s take a closer look at what the mobile World Wide Web is like. People use different gadgets for different purposes According to Google , people do different things on mobile devices than they do on their desktops. Although it is quite self-evident, what does it mean for SEO’s? Can you expect to find your target audiences among the mobile crowd? Are the majority of your users going mobile in the nearest future? Let us see what mobile users mostly use their devices for: -1 out of 3 mobile searches is somehow related to local search This means, if you have a local business, it’s time to give the mobile version of your site some serious thought. Also, get listed on Google Places ( here are some tips on how to do it) and get your site indexed by corresponding vertical search engines, such as OpenTable.com or similar. -36% of mobile Web surfers use their mobile devices to check out the news So, if you are a news website (say, a blog that covers celebrity news), you stand a good chance with mobile users. -49% of mobile users use their phones for social networking This information would probably be of interest to those who invest heavily in social media marketing and expect users to “land” on their sites via particular social networking sites (for example, Facebook). -79% of smartphone consumers use their phones to help with shopping , from comparing prices, to finding more product info, to locating a retailer. Thus, if such users cannot find your site using the mobile search engine, or your site provides a poor mobile user experience, you are running the risk of losing quite a big portion of your potential customers Conversion rates on the mobile Web are way higher The good news is that those browsing from mobile devices convert times better than your average desktop user. For instance: 28% of people who see a mobile ad take action 33% of mobile users who access sites via their smartphones make purchases on them 59% of users visit an online store after looking it up online. Pretty cool, huh? So, consider this when weighing the pros and cons of optimizing for mobile users. Mobile apps perform better than mobile sites A normal website would NOT, in most instances, look that good on a mobile device. A way out would be to either (1) serve a special mobile style sheet to mobile users, (2) create a special mobile version (usually a subdomain) of your site or (3) design a special app that mobile users can employ. As for mobile style sheets, these are normally stripped of all the bulky content and the content that serves for decorative purposes only (for example, eye-pleasing images). The mobile version of a site, in its turn, would normally be more compact and more easily navigable than a company’s “regular” website. As far as mobile applications are concerned, www.opentable.com/mobile, for example, offers an entire range of mobile apps that can be installed on all sorts of mobile devices. And, in case your device is not supported, they have a neat mobile version of their site, too – http://m.opentable.com. Besides, mobile apps tend to perform much better in terms of usability than the other 2 options (CSS sheets and mobile subdomains). According to Jakob Nielsen : Full (non-mobile) sites have a 58% success rate (perform well only on iPads and laptops)  Mobile sites have a 64% success rate and Mobile apps have a 76% success rate. The future of mobile SEO Many experts believe that, with mobile browsers, sites and apps evolving, the bar for the mobile user experience is being constantly raised. Besides, mobile users have gotten savvier and already know what to expect from their browsing experiences. So, in the future, we are likely to see more mobile optimization wonders, in both site optimization (making a site render faster on different mobile devices) and user experience enhancement. Has your business gone mobile yet? Perhaps it’s time to think about it. Not long ago, we did a post on how to optimize websites for mobile users that you can use as a practical guide to mobile pages creation. Just see if that would be a priority in your niche and consider which one of the mobile SEO options (a CSS, a mobile site or a mobile app) to choose. The views and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Marketing Pilgrim. About the Author Aleh Barysevich is Marketing Director and Co-Founder of Link-Assistant.Com, a major SEO software  provider and the maker of SEO PowerSuite tools. Link-Assistant.Com is a group of SEO professionals with years of SEO experience. Based on their expertise, company’s four-app  SEO toolset was created, setting the industry’s benchmark for technology-powered Web professionals with years of SEO experience. Based on their expertise, company’s four-app  SEO toolset was created, setting the industry’s benchmark for technology-powered Web promotion.