A 140 Sec Pitch: At TWTRCON, attendees were invited to vote for six of their favorite vendors. ObjectiveMarketer (http://objectivemarketer.com) was one of them. Amita Paul, the company’s founder, got the opportunity to pitch her product in front of the audience.I am not sure she used up her 140 seconds, actually, but one thing was clear in less than 30 seconds and 30 words: ObjectiveMarketer enables you to define the right message for your buzz channels – yes “objectively” — listen to, analyze and measure what really comes back from what you send out there. If you don’t completely understand what you do, you will go unnoticed or preach in a desert of deaf ears likely to unsubscribe at some point. “If you ask five social media ‘experts,’ you get eight different answers,” Guy Kawasaki told me. “ObjectiveMarketer’s product helps you truly figure out if, and how, your social media marketing is working.” He has close to 130,000 followers. He listens to his followers and in turn wants to talk meaningfully and effectively to them.
The Art of Laconic Marketing: Weigh your Words before and when you say them: Social Media Marketing is not the simple addition of three words Marketing + Media + Social. Marketing and Media Marketing are the art of pushing messages to an audience. It’s a primarily a top-down approach. Social Media Marketing is a more complex game: You start from your message, sure, but real-time interaction does not simply require that you know “about” your “target,” but that you also listen to people (more precisely a collection of individuals) and improve your understanding of them immediately and, eventually, fine-tune the way you address them — and this, in real-time.
And you have 140 characters to do that! You can’t be “conversational” per se. You have to be concise – but not sloganish or buzzwordy, because you will turn off your followers. You have to be laconic like a Spartan, i.e. terse (sometimes witty) and provide an url. Now how can you prepare for message effectiveness and measure the exact impact and performance of your messages in real time, know what works, why, how, and how to optimally schedule your tweets? You need a completely new type of dashboard, an intelligent listening machine that guides your decisions — a control tower of sorts for your campaigns. The core value of ObjectiveMarketer is to provide guidance and analytics for your campaigns.
While Internet marketing focuses on getting visibility in general, effective social marketing focuses on message transportability and repeatability. The purpose is to scale a grassroots marketing approach, i.e. foster the storytellers that will feel like communicating your message to their friends/followers — retweet them — within their various neighborhoods, as well as to understand the actual efficiency of the levers. ObjectiveMarketer provides the statistics, the trends and comparisons across campaigns and channels, i.e. the social insight that enables campaign designers to assess the quality of their messages and the actual impact of their amplifiers. Subtle and thorough measurement is the only way to ensure wide reach.
More about Amita: Amita is passionate about her product. For a good reason: I believe that there is no similar product today. She launched the private beta and her first users are thrilled. They also like this: she listens to their suggestions and understands what they say right away, because she is both a techie and a sharp marketing brain. As a result, when you suggest a feature, you can see that she is already cogitating on how to best implement it. She is a fast speaker and a fast thinker who grasps that, in marketing, “facts, not speculations and assumptions derived from trends or impressions, are key to success. I love marketing,” she adds. “In my career, I have often felt bad for marketing folks. They never seem to have the right tools to make informed decisions. They have lots of out-and-out marketing applications for brand awareness, promotional offers, and various other programs, but nothing that helps them before something has taken place. In the real-time and personalized engagement economy fostered by social media, they need a platform to pre-empt, strategize and execute — and the ability to gauge results.”
Amita came to this country at the end of 2005 and worked as a product manager first at StrongMail Systems and then at H5 (http://www.h5.com). She loved every minute of it, demonstrated how skilled and efficient she was — eager as she was to show the high quality of her training in India. She got her Masters in Computer Sciences from the Engineering College in Raipur, which enabled her to work as an analyst at Computer Science Corporation and Seacom Solutions – and then, she went for her MBA at XLRI in Jamshedpur (http://xlri.com). The more she learned at school or in companies, the more she wanted to become an entrepreneur. She is definitely jumping in with the right product at the right time. She works around the clock with her team here and in India. So, I couldn’t help asking if it was hard for her to juggle work and family, knowing that she has a six-month old daughter, Eisha: “Not in the least,” she responded with her bright trustworthy smile. “My baby is a breath of fresh air and my husband is very supportive.” Amita’s husband, Shekhar Yadav, who recently graduated with joint MBA from Columbia Business School and London Business School, works as Director Technology at StrongMail Systems.
While the media may have found Twitter, only 5% of Americans are currently using it, according to a research performed by Harris Interactive in April. This doesn’t mean that Twitter is a fad. The adoption of new behaviors is generally a much longer process than is usually anticipated by innovators and early adopters. The truth of the matter is Twitter is still very new – and significantly enough, TWTRCON SF09 that took place on May 31, 2009, was the first conference focusing on Twitter as a business tool for marketing, customer service, PR, or to make money. Quite a few companies explained how they already use Twitter today. The conference was very well organized, very well attended and had great speakers and panelists. Here are some of the highlights for me (for a more complete survey, you may want to check http://search.twitter.com/search?q=TWTRCON).
Operation Smile: Let’s start with a NPO. A great sign (albeit rare) is when a business conference starts with an inaugural party to help a humanitarian cause and provides updates on the money raised throughout the day. Presented as a live case study of a twitter-centric marketing initiative, Operation Smile launched a Twitter 140 Smiles with the goal of raising money to help fund 140 reconstructive surgeries to repair childhood facial deformities, including cleft lips and cleft palates. Check out http://www.140smiles.org and http://twitter.com/operationsmile! Twitter is not just an American thing! It helps change the life of people thousands miles away from the Silicon Valley.
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Great speakers: The main characteristic of the major individual speakers was their authentic spontaneity.
Laura Fitton started with a pre-conference keynote, Twitter for Business 101. The first time I heard about Laura Fitton was when I read Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us . In less than two years, she has become a real social media guru (although she views herself more as a “Twitter student” than an expert), and her company, Pistachio Consulting (http://pistachioconsulting.com) focuses on ways to connect businesses to new ideas and innovations using microsharing platforms. So, find the right followers, leverage this huge opportunity to connect to customers, and integrate Twitter into your operations – just as Salesforce is integrating Twitter. Her book Twitter For Dummies (coauthored with Michael Gruen and Leslie Poston, to be published in July) will certainly convince even the most skeptical.
Twitlebrity is not the point. Efficiency is. Guy Kawasaki is a most famous twitterer, not for the sake of fame, but for business. His interview by Gina Smith was a great moment of humor and honesty. “I’m not on Twitter to make friends,” he acknowledged unambiguously, “but to promote Alltop.” View this as spam (but, you willingly subscribed!) but do not forget that Spam is a delicacy for Hawaiians. And what is perceived as ghostwriting by twittering lone-riders is teamwork potency in business. We knew that already: Kawasaki is no macho. His team: four women who have real names and are real people.
Shel Israel announced his future book, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods, to be published in September. His speech featured the stories of like-minded people, who assemble through Twitter, build personal global neighborhoods – in other words, a diverse Twitterville population, ranging from business folks to Janis Krums, who sent an image of the US Airways plane moments after it plunged landed on the Hudson River. “If the Pulitzer judges don’t consider an iPhone photo next year,” he comments, “I’ll eat my hat.”
The last individual speaker was Steve Rubel. He created a life chart using Mind Note, a mind mapping program, of where Twitter stands in the industry ecosystem and the directions the product might possibly take as a social OS that enables to a site to make social or a marketing OS. The diagram, inspired by Brian Solis’s Twitterverse, is now published at http://www.micropersuasion.com. Here below is a zoomable version of it:
Steve Rubel was definitely more exciting than the conversation with Anamitra Banerji, from the Twitter Product Management team, who rehashed that Twitter’s corporate motto is “We don’t know” for about 30 minutes. I truly wondered if I was watching the Silicon Valley aesthetization of cluelessness, a repeat of the “no-business model” snobbishness of the Internet bubble – only adapted to social media, or the elaborate staging of a revolution-to-come. Strange when there were a number of companies eager to discuss the viability of Twitter for their businesses.
Great panelists: The various representatives from large corporations were significantly more eloquent and enthusiastic about Twitter than the Twitter representative that appeared. What some of them do is already quite remarkable. Virgin America, Intuit, Phoenix Suns, PR Newswire, Boingo Wireless, Well Fargo, Comcast, Carl’s Jr,. Kogi BBQ, Dell Outlet, eBay, Cisco, and FutureWorks see Twitter as a platform: companies can strengthen their brand by engaging with their customers in real time, inform and support them better, create user communities, and generate more revenue. In doing so, each of them insisted on the necessity of defining clear strategies and measure actual results using different methodologies and various products (Radian6 was the most frequently mentioned), define rules of engagement and ways to personalize their brands, and eventually manage potential liabilities (while taking into account that the Twitter universe already has its own codes of conduct and is in many respects governed by its members — as is the case for most social tools). Even though many of these efforts are still at a fairly early stage, it is obvious to them that Twitter has the potential to drive real business, as was clear from the remarks of Stefanie Nelson at Dell, or Beth Mansfield, from Carl’s Jr. Beth has a real strategy on when is best time to tweet (the tweetspot), and she made a few people smile when she described herself as “a chubby 42-year-old wife and mother” interacting with her followers, “18-35 young hungry males.”
They are also all aware that “Twitter is dramatically changing the era of top-down management of corporate communications in real time,” as Brian Solis said at some point, and that if Twitter is a great environment to turn customers into evangelists, it also enables them to scream when they are unhappy — which turns out not to be such a big deal, as it enables marketing to better escalade problems and solve them faster. Forward-looking companies understand that the era of hidden dirty secrets is over, anyway. With platforms such as Twitter, customer-centricity is more than the one-to-one deal of the 1990’s and early 2000’s. It’s a public commitment in a world that has morphed into a public tribunal: When a first class passenger on Virgin writes a tweet to say that he is hungry, you have to feed him!
Most of these companies are also looking at leveraging Twitter within a global social media perspective and working at the its integration with not only their Web sites using products such as Hootsuite, but their overall operations and IT environment. (We can only hope that Twitter will be able to hire the right folks to address their reliability and availability problems).
On the lighter business use side, “Your Brand is a Person,” I can’t help mentioning MC Hammer on the stage with Stefanie Michaels (http://www.adventuregirl.com). While agents try shield to shield entertainers and athletes and build their mystery persona, the life of celebrities is so exposed in the media and sometimes beyond recognition, that MC Hammer doesn’t see the risk he tales. “There was socializing before there was a platform,” MC Hammer said plainly; “embarrassing yourself on Twitter is not a new risk.”
Let’s Cut to the Chase: This was the title of the last topic of the day. The Twitter concept is here to last one way or the other.How big will Twitter is going to be? That’s everybody’s guess. I believe that Jeremiah Owyang (http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/) could be quite right in assuming that the approach will turn into a universal protocol that will make it normal stuff. As far I am concerned, I tend to believe that the company’s somewhat complacent procrastination about defining its business model (even if it’s to find out the best practices nuggets, which is often absurd in a startup) may accelerate the commoditization of the concept. I hope this does not jeopardize the business prospects of the multiple — and often bootstrapped — companies that have created beautiful, interesting and useful products around Twitter. Here are some of the ones featured at the Conference: ObjectiveMarketer, PeopleBrowsr, UserVoice, ThumbFight, Jobaba.com, or Twitfunnel.
“Cisco TelePresence. Bringing people and countries a little closer together. That’s the human network effect.” A company mantra is good when it can be memorized outside the company, and even better when it is also embraced by its employees. This is clearly the case of 22-year old Marie Gassée, who joined Cisco in August 2008 as a Project Specialist in Small Business Solutions Marketing, two months after she graduated in Business Economics (with a minor in Global Studies) from UCLA. In April of this year, she spent seven days in Sierra Leone: “When you join a large company right after your undergrad years, you feel somewhat lost at first, but pretty quickly you realize that you can be part of its internal human network. One day, I saw an email from one of the Cisco groups mentioning that World Possible (http://www.worldpossible.org) was looking for volunteers to go to Sierra Leone. Word Possible is not officially associated with Cisco, but was created by four Cisco employees, Neil Radia, Megha Jain, Norberto Mujica and Pranav Rastogi. Their mission is to improve education and development in poor countries, and in order to deliver on their goal, they have built alliances with various companies. Cisco is one of them. I had heard of their successful mission in Ethiopia. So I signed up for this one”
Why Africa? I have always wanted to go Africa, on the one hand. I have always wanted to participate in a non-profit mission, on the other. So I saw this email, and my decision was made almost instantly.
How do you prepare for such a mission? There are several aspects.
First, I updated my knowledge about Sierra Leone. It’s one thing to know about the Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990’s; it’s another to get some understanding of where the country is at in 2009. So, I read as much as I could to get a feel of the country I was going to visit. Needless to say that no matter how much you prepare beforehand, you find out that you know nothing the minute you arrive. So I would say that you have to research as much as you can, while making sure to be ready to discover ten times more when you actually are in the country.
Second, you want to build support for the idea. I presented the project to my boss. He liked the idea. The truth of the matter is that Cisco truly cares about humanitarian non-profit initiatives. I involved my boyfriend, Jeremy Schwartz, who is a financial analyst at Wells Fargo in Los Angeles as he is also interested in travel and humanitarian work. Then we had to find people to donate six computers. We got our respective parents to give us miles from their mileage programs to pay for the trip.
Third, we had to be ready for our mission. We had to deliver these computers to an orphanage and train the children on how to use them. We also had a Rachel server loaded with information ranging from Wikipedia to MIT OpenCourseWare, which is a free publication of MIT undergraduate and graduate courses taught at MIT. Word Possible gave us all the guidelines to set up and deploy that Rachel Server. We had to do this because we were going to an area with no Internet. We also checked that all the computers, both Macs and PCs were working well, and were loaded with all the relevant free programs. When you are to spend seven days with kids in an orphanage, you can’t improvise and find out at the last minute that something is missing. Careful planning is key to success.
Did everything work as planned? Not quite. The trip leader who was supposed to assist us fell very ill and had to fly back to the US and the additional people who were supposed to join us could not come. We realized that there would only be the two of us to do the job. We felt somewhat awkward when we arrived, but we were able to take the boat from the airport to the location where the head of the orphanage was waiting for us. Also, my personal luggage was lost. I assumed it was stolen, yet I just recently got it back (almost a month after my trip). So from the start, I knew that I would have to wear the same clothes for the whole stay. None of these incidents, though, affected me. In a sense, the mission I had what the only thing that really mattered to me, and no mishap could get in the way. And everything went well and this was a fantastic experience.
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So what did you do? We arrived at the DOVE orphanage (http://www.internationaldove.com), founded by an extraordinary Canadian woman, Judy Nelson. She has lived in Sierra Leone for 20 years. At first, she was a missionary, and about 10 years ago she created DOVE to take care of children who had lost their parents during the war. Most of them are from the Freetown area, but a few are from Kabala, the largest town in the Northern part of Sierra Leone. Now these children are actually teens and young adults. The youngest is a 10-year old girl and the oldest are 19 or 20. There are fifteen girls and five boys. Judy has one person to help, but she manages most everything herself. She takes care of the children’s education, their health and well-being, and their security. As if they were her own children. She sends the girls who want to be nurses to the nursing school and two of the boys will hopefully join the British Army. Basically, she helps them build their future. She needed us for a reason: she is trying to obtain the donation of a Cyber classroom, but the requirement is computer literacy. So our mission was to train the orphanage as efficiently as possible. Although not all of them were equally interested in computers per se – and sad to say, but the boys seemed more interested than the girls, they all worked seriously and they all realized that learning how to use a computer was a skill that would make a difference in their lives. The youngest were the fastest to get it, especially the 10-year old girl. The first day was harder for her, but by the second day she had understood how a computer works and she wanted to know more. One of the boys, Samuel, who is 19, had already had a few classes in town but had not been able to continue because this was way too expensive. For him, these seven days were invaluable. We taught him everything we could, first because he wanted to know everything, and second, because it was key to the success of our mission to train a trainer there. Incidentally, we took him to town and went with him to an Internet Cafe. We showed him things like Google, Wikipidia, Facebook, and although they only had low-speed Internet, he was literally dazzled. We had never realized that we could bring so much joy to somebody who is just a few years younger than we are. It was incredible. So rewarding. His dream is to go to the University in the United States one day. I don’t know if he will ever be able to afford this, but I know he is the intellect to do that.
What is your takeaway from this trip? Sierra Leone is about 7,000 miles away from San Francisco. It’s very far, because it is a very poor country. At first when we arrived, we wondered if it was relevant to bring computers and if food and medicine would not be more appropriate. The reality is that they have some subsistence agriculture that enables them to get by. It’s not great, far from it, but people do not seem to be starving. And yes, as they were using computers, they knew that computer literacy would help them get better jobs. And as they were learning and despite the fact that we live worlds apart, we felt that we were helping overcome a divide, bridge a gap that is possible to bridge. In reality, when you see people so happy to learn, you can’t help reflect on everything you take for granted. For example seeing Samuel’s eagerness to study, and his dream to go a US University one day, makes you wonder how we can possibly drag our feet to attend any class. After seven days only in Sierra Leone, you know very little about the country and you still travel through the villages, looking around, speechless, because you don’t have the words to describe a whole different way of life, and a completely different environment, but you know that people are people, just like you. You can even relate to the teenage girls at the orphanage, who know their luck to be taken care of by such a wonderful woman, and yet can behave like American teenagers at times! In the end, it’s worth to give one week or so of your live to help others. You feel their gratefulness every day. But you are also very grateful to them for helping you to reflect on yourself and expand the meaning of your own life.
The May 9thOsvaldo Golijov and Dawn Upshaw Young Artists Concert, the first of two showcasing eight young composers and their original commissions (unfortunately, I was unable to attend the second concert), was an experience that is seldom afforded to audiences. The atmosphere in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall was familiar and excited – here were rows of seats filled with the devotees of the composers and performers of the evening. We were all partners in crime.
Attending a concert of new music is a tricky affair and represents polar opposite possibilities: will the program be the discovery of an exciting new voice? Or… not. As I am used to new music evenings that are, at best, uneven in their ability to hold my interest, I was happily surprised to find that I was never bored by what I saw and heard before me — far from it, in fact. I was consistently curious to see what would unfold in each of the four pieces. Even in those instances when I did not like a compositional or interpretational decision, I remained connected. This is the testimony to the four works on the docket; if there was a theme in style for the evening, it was each composer’s compulsion to grab the audience. We were not alienated by artists too caught up in their ideology to care whether we were along for the ride or left on the doorsteps following the program notes to pass the time. Kudos to Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin for his Niña Dances, Paola Prestini for her Oceanic Verses, Matti Kovler for Here Comes Messiah!, and David T. Little for his Scenes from Dog Days. All four premières were supported all the more by strong performances from the vocalists as well as the workshop ensembles, and remarkably conducted by Alan Pierson.
Matti Kovler’s Here Comes Messiah!
It is not surprising that I felt a particularly strong connection to Matti’s piece: I was there namely as part of his retinue. I am also familiar with his compositional idiom, and Here Comes Messiah! was clearly marked with the Kovler stamp. Matti’s instruments are not merely textural tools, but characters themselves. As the piece began, the breaths and physical movements of his solo singer, Tehila Goldstein (see picture with Matti), were echoed and magnified by the ensemble. From this point, there was no question that we were not watching a poem with orchestral accompaniment, but instead the group effort of a large cast of players – in which extraordinary poet-translator, Janice Silverman Rebibo unambiguously belongs. It was particularly in the second part of the piece that this group dynamic gained a strong hold over the audience’s attention. In the climax before the third and final part, the performers’ grip on the room was visceral, tangible, in a series of fortissimo pulses (labor pangs) from the instrumentalists, and exclamations from Tehila Goldstein. Here the expressivity she had already demonstrated earlier intensified exponentially, in her face, her stance, the timbre of her voice. Matti was at the piano, and he brilliantly made use of it in this passage, as both a harmonic and percussive instrument, driving the sound of the others around him.
Although his part in Here Comes Messiah! is less central than in his Cokboy (performed earlier this year in Boston), and the work revolves around a woman’s experience in child birth, it is, nonetheless, entirely an extension of Matti himself. He is wholly present in his music, and not simply because of his compositional language or aesthetic. The audience does not need to be introduced to the composer, or his thought process, to become privy to his internal world – he wills us to come in.
Great title: Yes, small companies and mom-and-pop businesses are the very texture of this country (as they are all over the world), and some of them can be grown to a significant level and address sufficiently large markets to be funded by institutional investors once their products and business model have been put to the test of reality.
Great content too: We are swamped with books about entrepreneurship. Yet, haven’t you noticed that most of them seem to be copied out of the Silicon Valley’s virtual Scriptures, telling the same sensational tales over and over, and featuring the same people with narratives that have turned bloodless because they have been hammered too often? Sramana’s book is refreshing. She picks heroes who are not (or not quite) as wildly famous and insanely wealthy, yet are very successful (and rich too) or already renowned, but not that rich – characters such as Greg Gianforte (RightNow), Ramu Yalamanchi (hi5), Manoj Saxena (Webify), Lars Dalgaard (SuccessFactors), Om Malik (GigaOm), and quite a few others. Their stories sound true. They live in a world where raising money is not a CEO’s “badge of merit,” as Saxena says, but where incremental progress ends up being the most efficient shortcut to actual market recognition. The big plus of this book is that it will help many entrepreneurs to keep away from shibboleth and preachers, and entice them to pick their phones, and sell because, as Gianforte puts it: “Sales are the lifeblood of a business, period.”
Ultimately, this book is written by a person who has a real, extensive hands-on experience. An entrepreneur, Sramana founded three companies: Dais (Off-shore Software Services), Intarka (Sales Lead Generation and Qualification Software, which was funded by NEA), and Uuma (Online Personalized Store funded by Redwood). As a strategy consultant, she has consulted with a large number of companies. She also writes a weekly column for Forbes, and she has a fantastic site: http://www.sramanamitra.com. For her, entrepreneurship is more than a business. It’s a lifestyle.
The entrepreneurial tribe and the kathaka: Interview-based books often reflect what I would call the “haphazard writer’s laziness syndrome,” typical of people who just want to have a book out there as their auto-marketing platform. Nothing wrong with that, but this is not at all what Sramana’s initiative is about: if you look at Sramana’s prolific writing, you will immediately notice the quality of her style, that she loves to write, has the courage to express her opinions – in short, that she a full–fledged author. For more proof of this, take a closer look at the epigraph that she offers at the beginning of her book: a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, Asia’s first Nobel laureate, in 1913. Definitely not your typical quotation, hastily abstracted from Quoteland or similar sources. The truth of the matter is that, because she is a good writer, she is also a thoughtful translator. Incidentally, a native Bengali speaker, she provided her translation of some of Tagore’s poems, with photographs from world famous artist William Carter (http://goldenraft.com).
The Entrepreneur Journeys is a series of interviews, designed to help entrepreneurs learn from other entrepreneurs. In the process, Sramana learned too: “The interviews and personal success stories that I compiled are just as much to teach me as they are to teach others,” she says. “When I was running my companies, I was doing things constantly. I was always in action mode. I had no time to think, no time to learn. Everything was happening so fast. It’s when I started consulting that I was able to begin to organize what I had seen and experienced from a framework point of view. Then I started a blog in 2005, totally by accident, a suggestion of my friend Om Malik; initially viewed as a notebook it became a meeting point for entrepreneurs. I invited them to talk to me and develop their story. Entrepreneur Journeys is a combination of my own learning, my synthesis as well as the synthesis from all these different stories that I wanted to put together as a complete body of work.”
This body of work is actually more than a series; it is a saga, a narrative that recounts the peregrinations “into ever-widening thought and action” of the “Entrepreneur.” The Entrepreneur, always adventurous, often solitarily rattled by hopes and agonies, encounters virtual mentors within an international entrepreneurial tribe that Sramana echoes as a storyteller: “I believe that people learn best through stories,” she comments. “You can give them lots of dry advice. It just doesn’t have the kind of recall value or resonance unless you can do it through stories. I took screenwriting classes at Fort Mason about eight years ago and one of the things, I guess, all screenwriting classes deal with, is this notion of a character arc – so you have a protagonist who is working towards something and building up that story. Entrepreneur Journeys – the whole series – deal with protagonists building towards something, and finally they succeed, and that is the character arc of an entrepreneur. So the way I have tried to approach this Entrepreneur Journeys project is from the perspective of a storyteller, a business person, yes, but very much from the perspective of a storyteller.” As Sramana was telling me this, I was thinking of an interesting coincidence. Sramana was a classical performing dancer, specializing in kathak, when she lived in India. She was still performing four or five concerts per year as she was working towards her bachelors degree in Computer Science and Economics at Smith College, in Northampton, MA. After that, she went to MIT, earned a Masters degree in EECS, and started her first company, so she couldn’t keep up. The thing is, though, that katha in Sanskrit means “story,” and that in the ancient days, the kathakas (story-tellers) used to recite and dance stories from epic folktales.
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What’s next? More books, of course, and in the very near future: Positioning to test, validate and bring ideas to market, Innovation need of the hour, and Visioning year 2020. In the latter, she will take India as a backdrop. After all, Sramana is the daughter of an entrepreneur: “I grew up in an environment in which risk-taking and swinging for the fences was accepted as a virtue. My father founded Himalaya Shipping, one of the early container shipping ventures in the seventies,” she writes in the Prologue for the edition of Volume I in India. A quintessential business woman of the Silicon Valley, Sramana also wants to give back to her community. She cannot help to feel “a national mission of sorts, a recurring theme in [her] life,” regardless of her nostalgia for an India that is unabatedly destroyed by shortsighted promoters. I recommend that you read a beautiful essay that she wrote in 2007: http://www.sramanamitra.com/2007/04/30/as-india-builds-part-1/
Note: PSS Systems was acquired by IBM in October: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ibm-acquires-pss-systems-104855574.html
Expressions such as “seasoned entrepreneur” or “industry veteran” are so worn down to the thread that most people forget what they really mean. Deidre [sic] Paknad is definitely both. She is the CEO of PSS Systems (http://www.pss-systems.com), the company that created the legal information governance software category to reduce legal risk and lower the costs of e-discovery and data management in 2004. She led the company from idea to a customer base that counts most of the Fortune 100 today. As she’s done in prior entrepreneurial stints, she started the industry’s first practitioners learning forum in 2004, the CGOC (http://www.cgoc.com); that forum counts 750 corporate members and its own professional network and is central to the company’s market strategy and leadership. Before she joined PSS Systems, she was at Nth Orbit/Certus where she launched the company’s Sarbanes Oxley compliance strategy and solution. Prior to Certus, she was the founder/CEO of CoVia Technologies, which launched the first enterprise portal back in 1998 and was inducted twice for its innovations into the Smithsonian Institution. And before that, there were quite a few other companies too, and these are the ones I want to speak about today. What makes great CEOs is not a collection of achievements, but the coalescence of multiple professional and personal experiences powered by a deep desire to innovate and the ability to breathe life into whatever they do.
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Turning inauspicious beginnings into a springboard: Deidre wasn’t exactly born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Her father, who was in the military, was killed in a plane crash over Alaska when she was nine days old. Her young mother remarried and she lived with 4 siblings in Stockton, where several generations of the family had been born. Modest means. Simple blue-collar lifestyle in a still closely-knit, primarily agricultural environment of the Central Valley (forty-five years ago, the population of Stockton was not even one-third of what it is today). Virtually the only place she’d been outside of Stockton was Santa Cruz where she had relatives; her family had no college history or means to assist in her pursuit of more education and opportunity, so UC Santa Cruz was the only school she applied to. She wanted to be a lawyer, and got her B.A. in Politics. She expedited her undergraduate years for a simple practical reason, her only way to finance college was through the survivors’ benefit plan provided to her because her father had died in the military, a limited amount of funding with an age limit. So, she graduated a year early from both high school and college. “I tried to go through undergraduate and graduate school before I turned 22, because I didn’t have another way to afford school. I was intent on more opportunity in my life and in a rush,” she says, and revealingly adds that she had to do this “before the capital ran out.”
So, off she went to Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. She was stunned by the post-modern acropolis that Frank Gehry had started to build, “an amazing architecture smack in the middle of a slum,” that she could not quite “yet process,” she says. She felt out of place not so much because she ever had any real comfort zone, but because it was difficult to engage in social activities with an older student community as the under-age odd ball. When the woman she was living with had a massive stroke at the end of her second semester, she decided to stop the race to 22. She took was what was supposed to be a “year off.” In retrospect, it was a major learning event in her life — she had worked single-mindedly to get through high school, college and law school on limited college funds. The experience gave her the agility to adapt in uncertainty and some practice re-setting big goals. Short takeaway: Never stick to a goal whose meaning had hollowed out, no matter how hard you pursued it, and be willing to reset the jumping-off point!
Creative fearlessness, the tenet of success: You don’t become a CEO overnight, even when you start your own company (people grow their CEO skills as they grow the company they founded). Most of the time, people earn their spurs through a variety of rides.
After she left law school, Deidre took a job as a technical writer in the operations group of a semiconductor company (Elmo Semiconductor, based in Burbank) for her year off. Less than three months into a job, she felt the typical “there is a better way” entrepreneurial syndrome: “I was watching how they were making the assembly instructions for custom chips for the Aerospace and Defense industry. It was so primitive! We were destroying parts because the instructions were wrong; chip assembly is very small scale and needs to be quite precise. I had seen MacDraw and MacDraft. I thought there was a better way to do this. We could create a library of chip images, draw all the ceramic packages to scale using software and if somebody needed an 8 pin DIP or whatever, we could quickly produce the correct assembly instructions. I suggested that we use these great tools to improve the process and reduce the defect rate. I had my own 128k Mac and bought a digitizer that worked like a reverse print cartridge in my printer, so I was pretty sure it would be a big improvement. My boss told me to write a proposal. And the next thing I know, I had a department of eight people with eight Macintoshes working for me and we had a fully automated process. We became a showcase on the customer tour.” Common sense (not whacky ideas) is actually the most powerful trigger for leadership. Common sense allied with a deep understanding of where modernity (not fads) takes us. Yes, Deidre bought her own Macintosh in 1984, when this meant spending a fortune (almost $2,000 – today’s equivalent to $5,000 to $6,000). Way more than her car. Probably more than her first paycheck after taxes; this was her first real “adult” existentialist bet – which proved to be a good one in less than six months: “I had my first taste of how applying technology to business problems can change the economics considerably,” she summarizes.
OK now. After two years, it was obvious that career growth at Elmo required an electrical engineering background, so she looked for new opportunities. “I went to work for a company with the proverbial two guys in a garage in 1986 in Long Beach; at the time the surf industry was very vibrant. They had the first sample product of a colored zinc oxide sun block, Zinka. They were about to launch and were looking for somebody who could take care of marketing, PR, finance, operations and retailers. In short, they needed somebody ready to work around the clock. The business boomed immediately. We were everywhere, the Today how, Business Week, the LA Times, the NY Times, and hundreds of ski and surf shops. A year later, I had 35 people working for me and was running the shop. Schering Plough’s Coppertone division eventually acquired the majority licensing rights and I had no stock in the company. But I had an amazing time.” Speak of a hands-on crash course in basically everything that makes a company work, and more specifically, on managing a supply chain and a retail channel!
She moved to Silicon Valley and went to work for another semiconductor company, Altera, three years old and growing fast, to work on new and custom product launches in Operations. Not the best time of her life, for sure, yet memorable: “I learned a ton about manufacturing operations and got a chance to implement new systems including MRP — both were important opportunities.” It was a tough work environment for an ambitious young woman in the 80s, where the culture involved management screaming at each other, but she honed her (already proven) survival skills and reinforced her intensity to succeed. After three years, she made a move to Consilium (acquired by Applied Materials), the company whose software she’d implemented and began her career in the software industry. As a Product Marketing Director, she had the opportunity to apply the operations, systems implementations and company growth experiences from her prior posts to defining, launching and selling enterprise software to companies to reduce operating costs and improve regulatory compliance. It was the first of many experiences taking new software products from conception to customer and her real professional “sweet spot.”
The rest is an ideal resume and personal happiness… Deidre transformed her “temporary” technical writer job into a career passion thanks to her Mac at Elmo. She transformed two surfers’ ideas to a brand that captured the attention of the F100 industry leader in one short year at Zinka. She learned all she could in the “angry boys club” at Altera and transformed that to innovation and market leadership at Consilium … where she hit her true career stride as a software entrepreneur. Where was her personal life in all of this? Deidre divorced her first husband after Zinka, as her professional goals hit an uncomfortable ceiling in the marriage. She remarried, Daryoush Paknad, a serial CTO and entrepreneur (he founded Mizoon, a location driven social networking service in 2007). She left Consilium to give birth to Zoe in 1993 (a freshman at Castilleja in Palo Alto), and went on to her well-documented career at CoVia, Nth Orbit/Certus — and of course, PSS Systems for the last five years. Her company is one of few enterprise software companies making a market and doubling each year. It helps reduce legal risks and operating costs from tough new discovery laws and is championed by the GC, the last C-level exec unserved by strategic business applications for control and transparency.
Incidentally the little girl from Stockton speaks Farsi fluently and has traveled the country and the world big time.
After an engineering degree in Applied Mathematics and a master in Computer Science from the University of Grenoble, Neil joined Bull, where he stayed 12 years, starting as a software development engineer and quickly becoming a “Large Systems Product Marketing Manager.” Moving in 1983 to Apple France was a radical change. The subsidiary had been started by Jean–Louis Gassée in 1981 and was garnering interest quickly. Of course, participating in the launch of the Macintosh in France was ten times more exciting than anything Neil had ever experienced. He was definitely in the thick of it as the Developer Services Manager, which entailed, among other tasks, promoting the Macintosh to third-party software developers and assisting software publishers in their marketing and distribution efforts in France. He was extremely busy, of course, but never behaved as the super-occupied guy that you have to beg to for a meeting. Just like most remarkable people, he had the art and the courtesy of making himself available and was never giving to anybody the impression that he was in a rush. Such kindness is invaluable when you are a new company and look at the manufacturer of the product on which you bet your life as a holy place! His technical background enabled him to analyze products carefully, ask very precise questions, and make relevant suggestions. Very relevant, as far as I am concerned. In 1985, I was walking with him in the yard of Apple France late in the afternoon; the company I had started, ACI (ACIUS in the US in 1987), was still quite small. We had published a game and a file manager, ABCbase, and had begun the development of the first graphical relational database. We didn’t have a name yet, and as I was telling him that we were providing a new dimension in the way to organize and present data, he suggested with his always soft-spoken tone: “Why not 4th Dimension?” And the product was named 4th Dimension – quickly nicknamed 4D by our users. Incidentally, the company also became 4D in 2000.
I lost track of Neil in 1993. I left ACI and soon after, ACIUS. Neil left Apple at about the same time and joined Hachette as the Director of a Multimedia Products Division, where he stayed until 2007. Living in the United States, I did not even know that he was the man behind the Hachette Multimedia Encyclopedia, Hachette Multimedia Dictionary and Atlas – I guess one of the first products of the kind. Now, as a consultant, he selects the companies he helps and is dedicated to his students at l’EPITA, a Graduate School of Computer Science and Advanced Technologies located in France, where he recently started to teach Project Management in English. This gives him the opportunity to progressively add information to his Web site: http://www.anglaispratique.fr, carefully thought-out for French-speaking people.
The entrepreneurial spirit is complex. Sometimes it makes you create companies; sometimes the startup is just yourself, as you keep on developing your multi-faceted persona and meaningfully contribute to the success of a large diversity of ventures. The latter characterizes a long-time friend, Melissa Eisenstat.
She worked for me in my first company in France very early in her career, right after she completed her double masters at Wharton (MBA and International Studies). I never really liked hiring trainees or interns in the various companies I ran or helped, knowing all too well that in startups, the air is so vibrant that it is hard for newcomers to jump into the fray, learn by capillarity and yet, show results. I still don’t know to this day how she survived within our gleeful mess, but she did and in no time, she had added to her French, which she already spoke fluently, all the gallicized high-tech and database jargon – so much so that when she came back to the US, she had to learn that “rubrique” did not translate into “rubric,” but into a “field.”
From one success to the other… Twenty years later, Melissa’s career is a series of successes. She spent three years at Apple Computer, four years at Pillar Corporation, a start-up specializing in financial software, before making a big jump by moving to CIBC Oppenheimer as the firm’s senior software analyst. She stayed there for nine years, working at least 70 hours per week, traveling 70% of the time, turning frantic each time Bill Gates was sneezing, yet sending chills to Siliconites by openly stating that Commerce One’s business model didn’t hold water or downgrading Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) from “Buy” to “Hold” during its litigation with the Department of Justice in 2000. In 2002, she became President of Palladian Research, an independent equity research firm where she grew the revenues 50% in 2003 and expanded the research organization from two to eight analysts and the product line from two to seven publications within one year, all of which was no less stressful. “The more you work, the more workaholic you become, and I would have probably continued to speed through existence on autopilot, were it not for my seasonal addiction to sky, and above all, my lifelong passion for music. In 2004, I made the drastic decision to focus on my cello…”
“… And of course, I worked nearly as much! As a child, I started to play the piano and, shortly after, the cello. In fact my parents were encouraging me to audition for conservatories instead of choosing to get a BA in Soviet Studies at U Penn” – incidentally, Melissa also speaks Russian. Melissa’s father, Al Eisenstat (Apple’s historic chief counsel), plays the trombone and both her parents are dedicated music lovers. “When I returned to music as an adult, though, I was playing my cello five or six hours per day every single day of the week. Of course, that’s what I had to do, and even more, to get back into shape! This was exhilarating. I joined the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony in 2004.” Given that Melissa would never settle for anything ordinary, I should mention that the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony (www.chambersymphony.com) that David Bernard founded in 1999 is probably one of the most remarkable non-professional ensembles in the country, offering professional-level music and performing in New York anywhere between All Saints Church and Carnegie Hall. “I had a moment of guilt along the way for focusing on what I liked best,” Melissa adds. “So I got lured into joining Lehman Brothers Inc. in September 2006. I hated almost every single day of the nine months I spent there. I couldn’t stand so much arrogance. The good thing is that it reinforced my dedication to music.”
As we were having lunch this week at Sfoglia opposite the 92nd Street Y, “a quintessential New York institution,” Melissa was joyfully going back and forth between the Debussy and the Ravel she is learning and her missions in various NPOs, especially at the Hope Funds for Cancer Research, which makes post-doctoral grants for basic research in rare cancers and that she joined as Trustee and Treasurer in 2008. No matter what, she works a lot! And so does her husband, Jonathan Blau, managing director and head of the leveraged finance strategy and portfolio products group at Credit Suisse – but also one of the original actors (a “Microkid”) in the 1981 The Soul Of A New Machine, an epicwhere Tracy Kidder chronicled the efforts of Tom West and his team at Data General at Westborough, MA, to build a minicomputer code-named “Eagle” in order to catch up with DEC.
Do you imagine a world without Yahoo!, Google, eBay or Paypal? Would these companies have existed without Jerry Yang (Yahoo!) who was born in Taipei, Sergey Brin (Google), whose parents came from Russia when he was six, or Pierre Omidyar (eBay), an Iranian born in Paris or Max Levchin, an Ukrainian Jew (Paypal)? What would Intel be if Andy Grove had not fled during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 with his parents, or Sun Microsystems without Vinod Khosla, from Pune, Andy Bechtolsheim, from the surroundings of Lake Ammerse in Germany, or Canadian James Gosling, the father of Java? Would the Valley be (or have been) the same without Adam Osborne, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Philippe Kahn, Suhas Patil, Alain Rossmann and hundreds of famous or not so famous immigrants? It is impossible to imagine. Although the Valley was “created” some 70 years ago and is forever indebted to William Hewlett and David Packard, as well as Stanford and Berkeley, it also thrived thanks to the droves of high-tech settlers who came over with their dreams and their suitcases, as students or as adults, with or without a family. They transformed the Valley into what Jean-Louis Gassée calls “the united nations, small ‘u’, small ‘n’,” in other words, a living organism where people are defined not by they promise but what they do.
Angelika’s international gallery: Your vision of the Silicon’s Valley’s immigrant population is unavoidably contingent upon whom you randomly meet as you walk University Avenue, as you attend dozens of conferences and countless networking meeting, be they transnational or more destined towards a specific ethnic group (where everybody else is welcome anyway). German-born and Stanford Ph.D. Angelika Blendstrup, the author of They Made It! offers her selection – while reminding us that the statistics provided by the 2007 Index of Silicon Valley show that of the 2.43 million people who call the area between San Francisco and San Jose home, 38 percent are foreign-born residents (of which 33 percent are Asian), or that the city of Fremont reported over 100 different languages spoken by students at home in its 2006 Visitors Guide.
Her collection of interviews with entrepreneurs, executives, academics, wizards, and VCs who contribute to the amazing intellectual and business power of the Silicon Valley represents the Valley microcosm pretty well. Her book is motivational for newcomers: after all, a few before them did rough it out, and made it. It is educational for second or third generation Americans who may gain in leadership quality in better understanding the live diversity that surrounds them. As Rajesh Gupta suggests: “Read across cultural languages to make sound judgments.” Of course, the challenges met by high-tech settlers come in all sizes.They are big by default: but you are here to transform mountains into mouse-hills, so don’t whine, and look at them the way Arno Penzias did: “The biggest obstacles have been a yin and yang.” Do not worry about annoying details. The Valley moves so fast that they will most likely evaporate quickly: Look, back in the early 80’s, Henry Wong was wondering where he could get Chinese food, and the best brains in the French community were truly surprised, in the mid-80’s, that they could find Pim’s Orange Biscuits!
The Valley forever? “Clearly, Silicon Valley is a better, more dynamic, and more credible place because of the contributions of immigrants from outside the US,” says Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, one of the “American Hosts,” invited by Angelika to chip in. While high-tech immigrants are scattered throughout the United States, the Valley is unambiguously the hotbed of entrepreneurship, with 52% of start-up companies created by immigrant founders (with Indians being the most dominant ethnic group), as stated by Duke researchers in 2005 and echoed since then by multiple publications. In addition, the report emphasized the contribution of immigrants to “intellectual property,” using patent data from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). “Immigrant non-citizens in the U.S. were either named as the inventor or co-inventor in 24.2% of patent applications filed in 2006, the study found. That’s a significant increase from 1998, when non-citizen immigrants accounted for 7.3% of patent applications.”
There are some clouds on the California sky, however. “One of the bizarre things about the US immigration policy is that there are fewer visas available today for foreign engineers to come and stay in this country,” Andy Bechtolsheim warns in his interview, echoing a general concern. This is a fact justifiably hammered out in multiple publications and magazines by Vivek Wadhwa, whose research at Duke University also focuses on how the immigration of engineers, one of the critical competitive advantages for the US, is now threatened by India and China. “Everyone focuses on illegal immigrants. But no one is looking at legal immigrants, people who come in the front door and do things the right way and contribute to America’s competitiveness,” he says. And because of America’s fuzzy policy and delays for visas, he also acknowledges that the U.S. faces the prospect of a “reverse brain drain:” U.S. immigrants are returning home for brighter career prospects and a better quality of life.Check out America’s Loss is the World’s Gain: America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Part 4, published in March (http://www.soc.duke.edu/GlobalEngineering/papers_americasloss.php) and a recent interview of Vivek Wadhwa: http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=ffd612a3b447ba5bfae2f6006a68beea.
Not everybody lives here and many entrepreneurs over the years have successfully made the decision to stay where they were, only opening sales offices in the US; and despite VISA problems and the recession, there are skilled foreigners springing up left and right literally everyday in the Valley. The twelve lessons that Angelika provides at the end of her book are truly useful to them – as well as to any entrepreneur, foreign or not.
More about Angelika Blendstrup: Angelika Blendstrup is the founder and principal of Blendstrup & Associates. She specializes in individualized, intercultural business communication training, accent reduction and presentation skill coaching. She works with international as well as US executives to assist them in improving their written and oral communications skills, and prepares them how to write and give effective presentations. See her site: http://www.professional-business-communications.com/
Resources: Stanford University’s European Entrepreneurship and Innovation Thought Leaders Seminars: Stanford University’s European Entrepreneurship and Innovation Thought Leaders Seminar is a weekly speaker series that presents industry leaders from Europe’s hitech startup, venture finance, corporate and university research and technology commercialization communities to share their insights and experiences with aspiring and veteran entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley: http://www.europeanentrepreneursatstanford.com/
In the very early 1990’s, whenever the Apple guys wanted to showcase great software to showcase themselves, they would invite the two women who had probably first founded companies focusing on software for desktop computers in the Silicon Valley, Heidi Roizen in the US (who started T/Maker with her brother Peter Roizen in 1983), and me (I had started ACI/4D in France in 1984 and in 1987 in the US). We had to be hyper-professional to command attention (and we knew our thing in and out), because as women we were de facto the glaring oddballs – all the more so as neither of us wore the “professional look” uniform: grey, beige faded pink, or dirty-pale-blue suits. The male formal trend that had hit the Apple world in the early nineties had not deterred us from wearing colorful clothes (this may have been one of the main advantages of the female scarcity in our world). These gatherings were great fun because of and thanks to Heidi – and if she wasn’t there because of a specific focus on data management, I was bored stiff.
I remember marveling at her ability to schmooze, to network, to make people smile and sometimes laugh, and altogether at her relaxed demeanor that looked like black magic to me, a French woman molded within a wholly different educational framework and vastly different set of social conventions. Yet, something truly transcended all transatlantic difference – her genuine kindness and spontaneity, and her ability to create an all-out party feel in each and every environment. So it’s no wonder we always kept in contact as both of us moved on. After she sold T/Maker in 1996, she became the VP of World Wide Developer Relations at Apple, and then, from 1999 to 2007, a VC with Softbank Venture Capital (later called Mobius). Over the years, she was just the same to me. Bright and quick. Lively and funny. The same “joie de vivre.” Only one thing really changed in her … her weight. Frankly, I had not realized how much this had bothered her until she started her new company, Skinny Songs. Quite a turn indeed!
Starting a company to lose weight: People start companies for all sorts of reasons. Because there has to be “a better way.” Because their old company wouldn’t develop something they feel is critical. Because they feel that they have come up with the unique idea that will revolutionize the planet. Or because they need something that they can’t find… Lots of inventions started this ways. Some of them are big. Some are small. Some are downright different. Even at a time, two years ago, when an Amazon search was already offering hundreds of “products tagged diet by customers,” Heidi couldn’t find a way to get back to her weight comfort zone, around 160 pounds. So, to be able to lose about 40 pounds, she created a company that would help her lose weight – and many other people too.
Needless to say, most of the time, when you start a company, you also take the risk gaining weight, whether you are funded or not, because the least of your worries is usually what you look like. As health conscious as the Silicon Valley may be, when you work like hell, you end up eating anything that comes your way because you are always in a hurry to get back to your computer. You have a hard time resisting late night coke and pizza parties at the office, etc. The more broke you are, the more likely you are to gain a pound at a time. Nutrition and exercise are the last thing on your mind.
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Now, when you start a company to lose weight yourself, it’s a whole different story. You can’t simply hire skinny and sun-tanned professional models. You have to talk the talk and walk the walk. You have to be the living example that what you offer does work – all the more so as the field of weight loss and diet program is encumbered. Type “weight loss” on Google and you get 90M occurrences! When you type “weight loss motivation,” you get down to more manageable number (around 266,000), but it’s still a lot. However, I looked at a few of them: they are as deterring as the weight loss and diet programs that most people dread in the first place. Neither the techniques nor the verbiage had worked for Heidi – who had tried everything, including the expensive torture of upscale spas and health retreats. As convinced as she was that she had to have a healthier lifestyle, she came to the conclusion that she needed music to stay motivated as she was progressively losing weight – and couldn’t find what she wanted. So, she started to write the songs she wanted to hear – not a trivial effort for a non-musician – and teamed up with George Daly, a veteran music industry executive, also founder and CEO of About Records, as well as David Malloy, country music songwriter and record producer and A&R executive, along with additional artists.
SkinnySongs is more than a company, it’s a platform for Heidi to help people understand that losing weight is not a goal by itself and that the purpose is not to suddenly go from size 14 to size 4. “Most of the books or programs that women consider do not allow them to exist in the real world,” Heidi says. “They are about perfection and lack reality. How much is enough, that’s the point I try to make. I address the people who don’t care for diets, but want to take care of themselves.” What I like about Heidi’s approach is that she is never prescriptive, and that she will never fall into any form of weight loss bigotry. She loves life too much and nothing will deter her from making a really good cocktail (but she has ways to make it less calorie-rich). Watch out for the book she is currently writing, Can’t Buy Thin.
A 140 Sec Pitch: At TWTRCON, attendees were invited to vote for six of their favorite vendors. ObjectiveMarketer (http://objectivemarketer.com) was one of them. Amita Paul, the company’s founder, got the opportunity to pitch her product in front of the audience. I am not sure she used up her 140 seconds, actually, but one thing was clear in less than 30 seconds and 30 words: ObjectiveMarketer enables you to define the right message for your buzz channels – yes “objectively” — listen to, analyze and measure what really comes back from what you send out there. If you don’t completely understand what you do, you will go unnoticed or preach in a desert of deaf ears likely to unsubscribe at some point. “If you ask five social media ‘experts,’ you get eight different answers,” Guy Kawasaki told me. “ObjectiveMarketer’s product helps you truly figure out if, and how, your social media marketing is working.” He has close to 130,000 followers. He listens to his followers and in turn wants to talk meaningfully and effectively to them.
