Category: Marketing

  • The Unicorn Awards 2013

    Our friends over at TechVibes have posted a call for nominations for 2013 Canadian Startup Awards. This just screams that we also need an Ig Nobels/Darwin Awards equivalent.

    • Zombie Startup of the Year Award – Recognizing a Canadian startup that continues to live on the brains of its’ founders, but not customers.
    • The Snapchat Award – Recognizing a Canadian startup that won’t sell to Facebook, even if the offer was for more than $4B.
    • Stop the Gravy Train Award – Recognizing sketchiest use of tax payer money in our burgeoning startup ecosystem.
    • The Twerk It Award – Recognizing the media accomplishments of an exemplanary Canadian entrepreneur, who is getting as much coverage  as Miley Cyrus in 2013.
    • Keeping up with the Kanadians Award – Recognizing the startup that has watched previous episodes of startup reality TV but failed to comprehend the complex plot lines.

    We’ll be announcing the awards before Christmas…And we need your help. Send us a tweet, leave a comment, or just drop us an email with a suggestion for the awards. Or just leave an anonymous nomination.

  • Testing the market before you build a product

    Mangabox on Instagram

    Jason Kottke’s just shared an interesting story about Instagram shops which are doing gangbusters in Kuwait.

    A description from ‘shop’ owner Fatima Al Qadiri:

    If you have an Instagram account, you can slap a price tag on anything, take a picture of it, and sell it. For instance, you could take this can of San Pellegrino, paint it pink, put a heart on it, call it yours, and declare it for sale. Even my grandmother has an Instagram business! She sells dried fruit.

    Amazing. This is not only such a low-impact way of testing the market for a particular product, but it’s so smartly circumventing issues around modern shopping cart systems.

    Specifically, the sellers can:

    1. Easily update their inventory from their mobile phone.
    2. Quickly share new inventory across multiple networks.
    3. Easily conduct their business from their mobile phones by leveraging low-cost options like WhatsApp.
    4. Leverage another network without the need to integrate APIs. In this case, by using Instagram directly.

    No storefront maintenance, no hosting requirements, no need for a desktop or tablet, no fancy marketing. Just the goods.

    This kind of lightweight testing is great for getting an understanding of market interest in your product and can lead to great insights, just like the four noted above.

    [Ed.note: This post originally appeared Say Yeah! blog on Friday, July 12, 2013. It has been republished here with permission]

  • Being a Hustler is Not Enough

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Kevin Swan LinkedIn . Kevin has cut his chops doing product management at Nexopia.com before becoming it’s CEO. He moved to the dark side with Cardinal Venture Partners and is now a Principal at iNovia Capital.   Thankfully he is an MBA dropout and that’s why we like him. This post was originally published on April 2, 2013.

    Often the startup community attaches itself to buzzwords. We all know them. Growth hacker, lean, gamification, pivot, MVP, viral, ninja, disruptive, etc. I, and you, have been guilty of using them. These terms are not bad by nature and most have real meaning behind them. However, often they start becoming ubiquitous terms that lose their meaning and are sensualized by those using them. I have a new one to add to the list – Hustler.

    U can't knock da HUSTLEWe all know the Hustler. Relentless in connecting with people, customers, partners, investors, etc. Always at every event, following up on every lead and never taking no for an answer. You give them a lead and they turn it into ten new opportunities for their business. They will iterate through their MVP (whoops, I just used a buzzword) 20 times to reach product-market fit if they have to. They never give up and their tenacity is off the charts.

    Like most buzzwords, they start off with good intentions. There is nothing wrong with the Hustler. In fact, I wouldn’t want to invest in, or work with, anyone that doesn’t hustle! But, being a Hustler is not necessarily going to lead to success on its own. In fact, it can have the counter effect of resulting in a very inefficient way of building a company.

    The entrepreneurs that I have come to truly respect and admire have a characteristic that hustle can’t replace. The only problem is I don’t yet have a buzzword to describe so I will just use this:

    savvy /?sav?/ : having or showing perception, comprehension, or shrewdness especially in practical matters

    The best entrepreneurs have an amazing ability to navigate a startup through all the ups and downs, risks and opportunities and challenges it encounters. They are never caught off-guard by a development and always have a plan B. They can spot opportunities and paths to take that most can’t. Having an engineering background I often think about making things efficient. Savvy entrepreneurs are just that – efficient. Where a pure hustler is running around trying ten different approaches to a problem the savvy entrepreneur has a calculated plan that nails it in the first couple attempts. The savvy entrepreneur uses their time, relationships and public appearances very stringently. They don’t take a ‘throw it at the wall and see what sticks’ approach. They are thinking three steps ahead all the time. They know the next steps they have to take and aggressively push forward.

    In my experiences these entrepreneurs are not that common. If the low costs, low barriers to entry and ability to iterate quickly have had one negative effect it is the belief that a successful startup can be the result of a bunch of experiments and hustle. Sure this works sometimes, the startup world is built on outliers. But, these are just that – outliers. The majority of successful companies are built by savvy entrepreneurs who know their domains, have an unfair advantage and are always three steps ahead of everyone else.

  • 6 Tips for Selling to Big Business

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by entrepreneur Aydin Mirzaee (LinkedIn, ), who is a cofounder and the Co-CEO of Chide.it creators of  FluidSurveys.com and ReviewRoom

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    Attribution Some rights reserved by paul bica

    When founding a startup, everyone involved gets used to being told “no”. They are told no for their ideas, no for funding and no for sales. There are two ways to react to no, either get discouraged and give up, or realize that eventually there will be a “yes” and continue working towards that end goal.

    The successful startups are those that both persevere through discouragement and try something different

    “You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.” – Richard Branson

    Stepping out of a comfort zone and doing things that others might not, is the thing that can lead to success.

    This was the case when I founded FluidSurveys.com. FluidSurveys.com is an online survey and form building tool. Back in 2008 when we launched, there were already thousands of survey tools available on the market, including a well-known and well financed market leader, SurveyMonkey. It was the focus on selling to large organizations in the early days that has led to FluidSurveys.com becoming one of the top survey providers in Canada and it’s adoption by customers in large organization in over 50 countries including governments, educational institutions and Fortune 500 companies. These are my six tips on selling to large organizations.

    1. Get Customer Testimonials Early On

    Most of the time, large organizations are skeptical about buying from a startup for a number of reasons. Validation is the best way to get around this issue. Getting positive testimonials from beta customers who were involved in the product development phase and presenting it to large potential clients is an excellent way to validate the product and the company.

    2. Try a Pilot Project

    Pilot projects are popular with large organizations. FluidSurveys regularly performs pilot projects with large organization and has had successful sales as a result. “Get the targeted organization on a reduced rate pilot project and have them use your product for 6 months to a year. After that, why wouldn’t they buy from us instead of the competition? They are already familiar with us and our work at that point.”

    Essentially you want to have the company use you on a smaller scale first, which is a small step towards the goal of establishing a strong relationship. From there, they are comfortable with the product and they will be able to move to using the product on a large scale, and the big steps will be much easier.

    3. Understand the Buying Process

    With large organizations, the product user will not necessarily be the purchaser. In Business-to-Business sales especially, there are almost always several people to consider in the buying process:  initiators, users, influencers, gatekeepers, and deciders.

    When contacting a company, try to understand who your main contact is. While they may not be the decision maker, they could play an incredibly important role in whether or not your product is purchased.

    Another important point to consider is the buying timeline your customer may be on. Consider if they will be more likely to purchase at a particular time of year and how long the process may take.

    4. Pitch to as Many People as You Can

    As a general rule, the product should not be pitched to just one person. Because there are a number of people involved in making decisions, if they can hear the pitch from you, you can be confident they received the right information

    Tip: Avoid talking about price until the key purchasers are present. Rough numbers are fine but the final quote should be given after the full presentation.

    I would often have to speak to not only the people within the company that make the buying decisions, but also the managers of the IT department. The reason for this is because large organizations are interested in central management: the ability to control the product themselves instead of having you come into the company. The IT department was an influencer in the buying decision since they had expertise with software products.

    5. Consider Tiered Pricing

    The way that the product is priced is another key component in landing sales with large organizations. The concern is always pricing too high vs. too low. If you’re priced too high, you might lose a bid to the competition. If you’re priced too low, prospects may not value the product. So what do you do?

    Here the advice is to implement tiered pricing. Tiered pricing tends to work best for large organizations because their requirements may vary. For example, access for the first 100 users may cost $200/year and the next 100 users may cost $150/year. This is applicable to all sorts of products, not only software. You have to give the impression that you are not coming up with pricing on the spot and keep in mind that large organizations need all the numbers to plan for budgetary concerns. Prepare this information before you initiate a conversation with a potential client.

    6. Address the Bankruptcy Concern

    One last hurdle for startups to jump is the bankruptcy concern. Large organizations tend to worry about what would happen to their data in the event that the startup should go bankrupt, or has other financial issues. The best way to reassure these enterprises is to have good measures in place in the event that bankruptcy does happen, and be able to easily explain them to large organizations.

    The most favorable way to alleviate these concerns from organizations is to give them the ability to download all of their data at any time or keep all of the data (and possibly the software itself) with a 3rd party (this is called escrow). The agreement and the conditions for the release of that data would then depend on the end situation.

    In the end

    The key is to be able to answer every question that big customers have. Better yet, covering their concerns before they even ask is a sales tactic that demonstrates your previous experience in working with other large organizations.

    These sales tips for selling to large organizations have helped FluidSurveys.com more than double in staff, users and revenue in the past 6 months. Selling to large organizations is the key factor that I attribute to our current product and corporate success.

  • For Startups, Target Audiences can be a Challenge

    Bullseye by Joe Prosperi (prosperij) on 500px.com
    Bullseye by Joe Prosperi

    Within a marketing strategy, it goes without saying that target audiences are a key consideration.

    For all the focus on nurturing an idea, addressing a point of pain and developing a product, the ability to achieve traction hinges on the ability to connect with target audiences. Again, it’s an obvious statement.

    The trick and challenge is identifying target audiences, their demographics, needs and buying behaviour. For some products, target audiences can be straightforward, while other products appeal to a variety of target audiences with slightly different needs.

    For startups, getting a good grasp on target audiences can be a challenge because they may not have the resources to conduct in-depth research – be it through surveys, interviews, focus groups, etc.

    It means developing target audiences can be a quasi-guessing game that include a number of assumptions. In an ideal world, these assumption are pretty accurate so a startup’s sales and marketing activities are aimed in the right direction.

    It also possible the target audiences that had been identified are either not right or a startup attract customers who weren’t originally identified or seen as a priority.

    It is important to continually get as much information about their customers. Who are they? How did they find you? What are their needs and motivations? How did you find you? What alternatives or competitors did they consider?

    Getting this information provides valuable insight that can confirm target audiences or deliver eye-opening information about new customers and new sales opportunities.

    So how does a startup begin the target audience process?

    It begins with creating personas that identify a customer’s age, education, needs, goals, purchase risks, how they get information and do research, and the buying process. This will help you create a pretty good buyer profile. Keep in mind, there can be multiple buyer personas for your products.

    Buyer personas provide direction and insight into the ways to reach the different parts of your target audiences. If possible, you can interview people who fall into these buyer personas to test your assumptions and, if necessary, tweak or overhaul them.

    The reality for startups is nailing their target audiences can be difficult to achieve out of their gate. But by taking the right approach, you can establish a good foundation upon which to build.

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in Sept 18, 2012 on MarkEvansTech.com.

  • Creating a Referral Engine for Your Startup

    This post is recap on some of the highlights from a how-to created by Ilya Lichtenstein of mixrank.com. I feature some of the most impressive startup strategies we encounter at StartupPlays and share them free, here at StartupNorth.ca. Enjoy.

    We recently did some work with a brilliant young guy named Ilya Lichtenstein from Mixrank.com, a company which has seen early investments from 500 Startups, Y-Combinator, and Mark Cuban. While in college Ilya was working side jobs with startups and getting deep into the affiliate marketing world. He grew a $300 investment into six figure revenue numbers in his first year. He has applied the behaviours and characteristics of major affiliate programs and adapted them to  smaller scale customer referral programs for startups, this is his “best practice manual for building a customer referral program”:

    Major Affiliate Programs

    Websites like Amazon and Netflix have elaborate affiliate networks anyone can join and receive an affiliated commission from a signup or purchase on their websites. This works because these companies have determined some of their most important baseline metrics, things like:

    • Cost per acquisition of a customer
    • Lifetime value of a customer
    • On page conversion rate
    • Variants between traffic sources
    • Cost of buying traffic within the industry
    They use these metrics to determine what affiliate commissions they can set for the business to turn the channel into a profitable one. If affiliates can purchase traffic at a cheaper price than the payout (typically between $0.50-$4.00 per click) then the program is sustainable. You’ll need to determine what these numbers are for your startup, even if you ball park it, here is an excel template that will help you do it.

    How Building your Referral Engine is Different

    A customer referral engine is a lot like an affiliate program only scaled down and involves much higher participant engagement. Building a referral program is not for the light of heart but has massive payouts for everyone involved. When creating a referral engine you won’t want to label participants “Affiliates”, but instead something like “Partners”. Your “Partners” will be composed of two segments:

    1. Existing Users
    2. Content Producers within your Niche

    Existing users are easy advocates since they’re already familiar with your brand and understand your offering. Incentivizing them to tell others what they may already be telling people is a win-win.

    Content Producers within your niche have clout and often an engaged audience on the web, they may even be looking to monetize their content and this provides them with a non traditional medium that has higher revenue potential and that sucks a lot less than one site ads.

    Compensating your Partners

    As an early stage startup your base metrics probably wont warrant a direct flat fee compensation for a new lead, you’ll be compensating partners in your referral program based on a percentage of or flat fee per paid conversion. Be careful to avoid revenue share in perpetuity, this may hurt you down the road when approaching investors. Major Affiliate programs will payout anywhere from  $30-$40 for a credit card submit on their site (this is what you’re aiming for). If you have the ability to set up coupon codes on your website, give your partners a custom coupon code, this instantly creates a value add for their audience and makes it easier for them to share with people they know. (People LOVE sharing deals)

    1. You’re an e-commerce vendor: Give partners a commission on each sale they drive.
    2. You’re a SaaS vendor: Give partners straight cash per transaction, if your offering is tiered your affiliate commission can be as well.

    When you setup an affiliate program you are effectively sharing the risk and the reward.

    If your sales funnel is: visit page -> email submit -> purchase

    You can compensate affiliates for either the page visit, the email submit, or the purchase. You will need to compensate the affiliate more for actions that are further into the funnel, as you are placing the risk on the affiliate to convert the user. If you compensate them at the start of the funnel, you can pay them less and the risk is on your side to convert them.

    You will need to determine the right risk / reward ratio to determine which action will be most profitable – and attractive – for both you and the affiliate.

    Tracking Referrals

    You need to use a third party to track referrals, this guarantees no foul play on your side ands building confidence in your program into your program. It also helps limit fraudulent activity, you can review partners as they apply, and send payouts once customer payment has been confirmed on your end.

    Here are some third party services you can use to set up a program like this:

    1. Zferral – I prefer Zferral to others because of its ease of use, and support. If you’re having issues with setting up you can use their support centre to screencast your issue and have it resolved within a few hours.
    2. HasOffers – Custom referral programs, easy setup.
    3. LinkTrust – This is a costly alternative, but is the undisputed gold standard within the industry.

    White Glove the Entire Program

    Send your partners a monthly recap, keep them updated on how other partners are doing, and how the program is a smashing success! It will keep them involved and give them a benchmark for how well they can do, and how much money they can make by being part of your program.

    The customer referral engine is a win-win channel for driving online sales generally untouched by most early stage startups. If you have a startup that could benefit from a referral program, talk to us in the comments!

    photo credit – armando cuéllar

  • Startup Marketing: Does the Competition Matter?

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in April 12, 2012 on RocketWatcher.com.

    CC-BY-20 Some rights reserved by Paolo Camera
    Attribution Some rights reserved by Paolo Camera

    I have heard people make the argument that startups shouldn’t think about their competitors. I agree that many spend too much time worrying about how their feature set stacks up against another offering’s feature set. On the other hand, prospects are evaluating your solution against alternatives (which may not be products) and communicating how you are better than those alternatives is a key part of great startup marketing. Simply put – you should care about competitive alternatives if your prospects do.

    Startups are not Big Companies

    I very rarely see useful competitive analysis done by startup marketers, mainly because they are trying to do it like big companies do it. The big companies I’ve worked for have had departments dedicated to creating large detailed check mark matrices that showed how our feature set compared to competitive offerings. These matrices almost never included any feedback from customers. Needless to say, the products and their markets were very mature.

    This approach completely falls apart within the context of a startup. Your competitors, from a customer point of view are almost never so easily defined. For startups, your offering is often competing with “do nothing”, “hire someone to do it”, use spreadsheets/documents/paper, or some other solution that might be completely unsuited to the task but is free/easy/what has always been used. Comparing features of one of these alternatives to your startup’s offering to makes absolutely no sense in this context.

    A More Customer-Centric Approach

    In the context of a startup the only competitive analysis that makes sense is the one that is happening in side the heads of your prospects. The more you understand about that, the more you can use that knowledge to improve your marketing.

    Instead of the traditional competitive comparison matrix, a more useful competitive alternatives snapshot for a startup would look at what customers perceive to be the major benefits of the alternative, what risks they see that might stop them from choosing your solution and how you might address these issues in your messaging.

    An Example

    Here’s an example for CRMster, a fictional solution aimed at mid-sized consulting businesses to help them manage their customer information. The points here are just to give you some ideas about how this might look:

    Competitive Alternative Benefit customers perceive Risk in selecting your offering Value of your offering Proof points
    Do nothing – we don’t use a CRM tool and that’s fine by us Free
    Zero effort required
    Budget spent on this will mean less money for other thingsConsultants will have to learn the tool and record data they don’t today More accurately predict future workloads so you can budget/staff accordingly and increase your profitability.Gives consultants access to more complete customer information making it easier to do their jobs. 3rdparty data: Research shows companies using CRM are X% more profitable.Customer data: CRMster customers have x% average increase in revenue/profitabilityEnd user quote “CRMster makes collaborating easy. I want to marry it! ”Customer case studies
    Manage customer data in spreadsheets FreeEveryone knows how to use a spreadsheet Budget spent on this will mean less money for other thingsConsultants will have to learn the tool Eliminate the need to consolidate spreadsheets – a process that is time consuming and introduces errorsEasier, more effective team collaboration means projects are delivered on time, on budget. Customer quote: “Consolidating spreadheets was a pain and our data stank. CRMster lets us accurately forecast our business.”Customer quote: “CRMster got our teams working together better so we could deliver projects on budget”End user quote: “So fun to use I gave up playing Angry Birds at work!”Analyst opinion: “Folks using spreadsheets are big losers”
    Use CRMFree, a free CRM tool Free Budget spent on this will mean less money for other things Expert customer supportProvides features for consulting companies that generic CRM tools don’t have. Analyst data: X% of CRM deployments fail because end-users don’t get good support.Customer quote: “Their support is so great we send them chocolates on valentine’s day”Press quote: “If you are a consulting company you are an idiot if you buy anything else”Customer logos, case studies
    Use BigWig CRM, a CRM tool for mid-sized businesses of any type A safe bet: an established brand CRMster might go out of businessThe software might be unproven, buggy crap CRMster is way cheaper.Provides features for consulting companies that generic CRM tools don’t have. Pricing and guarantees.Screen shots, product demosTeam bios – emphasizing successes and background in this market.Investor profiles, investment announcementsCustomer logos, case studies

    For this example, only the last couple of rows get into any discussion of product features and even there those aren’t the only considerations. The other thing to notice is that the feature discussion can happen as part of a higher-level theme (we’re better because we are cheaper, more targeted to this market, or a more elegant solution) rather than a checklist of niggley esoteric features like you would for mature products in a mature market. If you are going head to head with an established player in the market you’re doing it because you have something radically different.

    The Output: Better Messaging

    The next step is to look at the themes and develop key messages that highlight your differentiated value while addressing the potential big concerns. I’ve written about messaginghere and here and I’ll talk more about how you would take the next step and construct messaging upcoming post.

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in April 12, 2012 on RocketWatcher.com.

  • Early stage companies don’t need money, they need customers

    Note: This is cross posted from WhoYouCallingAJesse.com by Jesse Rodgers, who is a cofounder of TribeHR. He has been a key member of the Waterloo startup community hosting StartupCampWaterloo and other events to bring together and engage local entrepreneurs. Follow him on Twitter @jrodgers or WhoYouCallingAJesse.com.

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    The popular belief in Canada is that the tech startup world has been fairly light on investment dollars relative to other industries in Canada. Because there is such a disparity in seed or angel round investment size in Canada vs the US people tend to point to that as a reason people go south. The perceived result of the funding problem (and likely the weather) is that there are 350 000 Canadians in the Valley. No one can argue the talent to build global calibre tech companies exists in Canada (or at least has Canadian passports) but you can certainly argue Canada lacks that certain something to keep them here.

    Five years ago Paul Graham observed that the total cost to get a tech startup started had dropped dramatically and will continue to do so.

    So my first prediction about the future of web startups is pretty straightforward: there will be a lot of them. When starting a startup was expensive, you had to get the permission of investors to do it. Now the only threshold is courage. – Paul Graham, 2007

    There is a lot of attention around getting young people money but does that help them? Does that keep them in Canada? I would argue that the ones that do need and can use capital don’t pull up stakes and leave town for the investment. They leave town (or the country) because they are missing something more valuable than money — customers, mentorship that helps them get customers, and a network of peers.

    Know thy stage

    The problem with comparing funding deal levels in Canada and the US is that it ignores the stage the company is in relative to the stage of US startups raising money for the first time. The Startup Genome report 01 and the Startup Genome Compass offers startups an excellent way to measure themselves against a benchmark of over 3 000 startups. In the report there is a table (shown below) that gives you some overall averages for all startups.


    From the Startup Genome Report 01.

    In last seven years of being involved in the Canadian startup community (mostly in Waterloo) and in the last three years leading what is arguably the best student focused incubator in Canada while founding my own startup. I saw dozens of companies peek into the Discovery phase, a few move on through to the Validation phase.

    What I have seen happen before the discovery phase:

    • Talk of raising money is used to pull in a large group of talent.
    • Focus is not on customers, it is on technology or raising money.
    • There is little help by way of mentorship that takes the time to understand the dynamic of the group.
    • Mentors focus on finding a way to get them money so they can work full time.

    What founders fail to do:

    • Define the problem.
    • Find out what people are looking for.
    • What else do they need in a system?
    • Determine what they might pay for it by getting them to pay for it and talking to our customers.
    • Measure, iterate, repeat.

    Startups need to focus more on customer acquisition and growth in Canada, enough talk about raising money

    There are so many business plan and pitch competitions one could make a career out of attending them. This gives a false sense of success because the ‘winner’ is determined on a lot of factors except their ability to actually get customers. The game becomes about (and has been it feels like) how to put together a report on an idea (business plan) and present in a way that makes you look confident.

    The game is really about getting lots of people to give you their money because you provide value to them. What makes you better than others is that you are chasing a much bigger problem that will provide value to a full percentage of the world’s population. Bonus points if you change the world.

    Note: This is cross posted from WhoYouCallingAJesse.com by Jesse Rodgers, who is a cofounder of TribeHR. He has been a key member of the Waterloo startup community hosting StartupCampWaterloo and other events to bring together and engage local entrepreneurs. Follow him on Twitter @jrodgers or WhoYouCallingAJesse.com.

  • Do Startups Need Community Managers?

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in March 26, 2012 on MarkEvansTech.com.

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    Do start-ups needs community managers to operate their social media activities…and a whole lot more?

    It’s an interesting question. On one hand, social media is seen as a low-cost marketing and sales channel for lean and mean start-ups. On the other, every full-time hire is a major decision so start-ups need to decide whether having a community makes sense, or whether having another developer or salesman is a more pragmatic option.

    If the right person is hired, a community manager can be a valuable asset for a start-up. There are, however, several important skills a community manager needs to possess. These include:

    1. Have in-depth knowledge of social media strategy and tactics. It’s more than knowing how to tweet or post an update. It means knowing how to execute, when to get involved in a situation and when to lie low, and how to build relationships and connections.
    2. Excellent communication and writing skills given so much of what a community manger does is engage and talk with a variety of people in a public forum. A good community manager has the ability to prepare blog posts, presentations, case studies, and speak at conferences.
    3. Understand and appreciate the business development process. In talking with lots of people and consuming tons of information, community managers have the ability to discover, identify and nurture prospects, which can then be passed along to the sales team.
    4. Provide top-notch customer service. It means having the knowledge and patience to deal with all kinds of issues and problems – big and small – that emerge. Some of them can be handled online, while some needs to be tactfully taken off-line.
    5. Sell and, even, close a deal: There are potential customers who make it clear about the products they need. A savvy community manager will be all over these opportunities with the goal to complete a sale.

    Like a stellar five-tool baseball player, community managers require a variety of skills to not only be effective but provide startups with maximum bang for the buck. They need to multi-task AND be good at all of the tasks that pop up during the working day.

    Community managers who have these skills can completely justify their hiring and, in the process, serve a startup in many ways to support its operations and growth.

    What do you think? Is there a right time for a startup to hire a community manager?

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in March 26, 2012 on MarkEvansTech.com.

  • Getting Attention

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    Mark Evans’ post about Do Canadian Startups Get Enough Attention? annoys me. It is not Mark, it is not Canadian startups, it is the assumption that Canadian media outlets should write about Canadian startups.

    “But the fact is there are a lot of great startup stories that go unreported or receive a smidgen of the coverage they deserve. It is a situation that frustrates entrepreneurs, investors and people within the startup community who believe the spotlight should be burning a lot hotter.”

    Let’s start by answering Mark’s implication that “startups stories go unreported or receive a smidgen of the coverage they deserve“. Bullshit! They don’t deserve coverage. They have to earn coverage. They are noise. And as an entrepreneur you need to learn how to rise above the noise and tell stories that the media want to share with their readers.We have many examples of Canadian startup success and failure stories that have managed to figure out how to tell media friendly stories. Sarah Prevette at Sprouter managed to become a media darling:

    Why was Sarah Prevette so much more successful in getting press coverage for her startup than other entrepreneurs? Is she smarter? Does she have more hustle? Is her startup more successful? I challenge Mark’s assertion that Canadian startups deserve coverage. I think the first step is doing something worthy of coverage. And as entrepreneurs we need to understand the stories that media want to tell, and begin to hustle to take away time and space from the big players. Tim Ferriss told his story about getting on national television, From First TV to Dr. Oz: How to Get Local Media…Then National Media. You have to work at crafting a story, building relationships and being newsworthy. So rather than assume that all good startups deserve coverage, how about we as entrepreneurs go out an earn it. Aim higher. Make something newsworthy.

    Resources for Getting Media and PR Coverage

  • PR Tips for Startups: How to Get and Keep Media Attention
  • Getting Press and Media Coverage for your Startup Company – Who needs a PR Firm?
  • Tips for Getting (Follow Up) Press Coverage for Your Startup
  • From First TV to Dr. Oz: How to Get Local Media…Then National Media