Go Socially… Confidently

Lately I have been involved in helping companies leverage social networking tools for business development. It has been a nice experience of sharing what you learnt and what you practice to help others.

Straddling across so many tools – FB, Twitter, Orkut, Linkedin, Buzz etc –  becomes a daunting task. To update the status across each network and reply to people. When you are doing it for a business organisation, the challenges are even more. You have to be alert to look for mentions, references and respond accordingly. Today’s social media has a power to create positive or negative impact about your product and services within very short span of time.

Though there are some tools like (bit.ly, tinyurl etc) available that help you post your status across some of the networks simulteneously, those provide limited functionality. For a business it is important to monitor the response and get a sense of effectiveness of its efforts. You need more features such as :

1. Monitor number of responses to your news from each network – number of fans/ followers clicking from FB / Twitter / Buzz/ Linkedin etc This helps you to understand the effectiveness of the network. You can take corrective action or tweak your contents accordingly.

2. If your audience is spread across multiple timezones you need a tool to schedule your post at particular time intervals. For example on Twitter, when you tweet at a particular time, your followers may not be in a active mode in other timezone. When they get active after some time frame, your post might not appear on their timeline. You need to reach out to them in their timezone. That is why you need ability to schedule your post.

3. Auto Welcome message. If your business has more than 20 followers joining you everyday you, you need auto response to them else it becomes very time consuming activity

4. Many companies want to encourage their fans to discuss or post comments on its FB page or want them to re-tweet their posts. You would want to know most active fans/ followers per week or per day or per month.

5. You would want to see geographical spread of your fans / follower and number of visitors etc.

I have gone through few of such tools (there are many with some variations), but I found that what matters most is some one who can help you customise to your needs apart from offering the standard features. On that count I found this tool Go Socially to be best in its class. It is developed using open source components – PHP, MySql and hosted on Linux server. This company is promoted by very enthusiastic professionals who have returned to India after 8-10 years of working in USA. I am noticing this trend of professionals coming back to India after good experience and setting up own businesses. It is very encouraging. The team of Go Socially brings professional approach, global experience and understand the local needs – making their offering very competitive.

I liked their positioning of the tool – “You go where the consumers are, instead of waiting for them to come to you”

They have a one month trial subscription as well if you want to try it out first.

So now you can embrace the social networking tools for your business more confidently and can feel its effectiveness.

Learning from Mobile Cloud Computing Asia Conference

I had an opportunity to give the opening presentation at the recently concluded Mobile Cloud Computing Asia conference at Singapore and chair the event for Day1 on July 14th.

It was because of my interest in this subject and being involved in advising companies in mobile space for business development, that I agreed to chair the Day1.

The presenters were nice mix of Telecom operators, application provider, platform provider and security consultant. This helped me to learn and understand different perspectives.

The key learnings were :

1. Majority of the telecom operators had recognised the need to embrace the new ear of cloud computing.

2. The need to collaborate with application vendors, cloud platform providers and grow the revenue through these channels is well understood.

3. Most of them have started experimenting with some offering or the other to test the waters and most are willing to take it forward

4. There was so much creativity in creating new revenue models on the part of participants in the conference. I am not sure how much of that is backed by the respective organisations.

5. It was great to get wider perspective from the participants coming from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and USA

Unfortunately I could not attend the 2nd day proceedings. I am sure it would have been a good experience.

Presso

That 1st presentation… 1st pitch

While pitching to the investors one has to address many things, lets see what are the key elements of the pitch that investor is listening for the first time from you.

Even before you pick up any tool to start making the presentation, you have to prepare the outline in your mind or on paper. It should address the following elements :

1. Who is the audience. Most often a standard product presentation is given to the investors, users and well-wishers. How is that going to help to create interest. As a creator / entrepreneur you have reasons to love your creation, but why others should love it and pay attention to its features and functions. Each audience has different interest. Hence your pitch has to be different for each of them

2. Second thing that you should ask yourself – what do you want to achieve after this presentation. As Jerry Weissman, in his book “Presenting to Win” says that you should be ready to take the audience from Point A to Point B.

This is just the initial preparation. Lets talk about these two points in more details from Entrepreneur pitching to Investors perspective.

Fine-tunning the pitch to the audience :

It is important to note what would be the interest of the investors. Most often the entrepreneurs do the product presentation. They think, if I love this product so much, others would also do. Not true. Investors are putting in money and they are interested in return on their money. They would look for :

Are you solving any problem, is it a big problem, would it address large enough market size and how well are you in a position to address the market.

More often entrepreneurs shy away from saying what is the key problem they are trying to solve. They start with market size, market opportunity – but most  of the time investors know about the market, because they have sat through hundreds of such pitches and updated fairly well – unless it is a very niche market you are addressing.

To give an example – there are lot of products / offering people want to bring to market to tap into the growing use of smartphones using location based services. Most investors, by this time, know the impact of smartphones accessing internet in terms of number of smartphones being sold, use of social media sites through smartphones etc. What is of their interest is what problem are you trying to solve in this space.

The best way to articulate the problem is story telling. Tell a story of a typical user and highlight what limitations he / she has, how it is not being addressed, how through your offering if you solve this problem he/she going to be so happy that he/she would be ready to pay.

You can make the storyline quite engaging by use of audio-visuals, nice pictures etc. The simpler the better.

What do I want to achieve after this presentation – End in Mind

Once you have created this outline, that what do you want to tell to whom, then you have to ask the next question, what do I want to achieve after this presentation.This is similar to ‘End in Mind’ thinking as highlighted in Stephen Covey’s book ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective people’

Though, your ultimate objective is to get funding from the investors, you are not going to achieve that in first step. Your first step should be (more often) to get him /her interested in you, your offering. He / she is not going to cut a cheque after first presentation.There are going to be series of talks / meetings, exchange of information before you get the money in your bank. So your first presentation should be to really make him/her say :

“wow, lets talk more”

Wow, it was great, lets see how much money you need”

Wow, this is interesting, this is a real opportunity and we are impressed with your understanding and energy”

Now, he/she may not say all of the above adjectives publicly, but if you get a 2nd meeting with positive impact on the investor’s mind to cut a cheque, you have achieved the objective of 1st presentation.

Then of course there more factors that you have take into consideration while presenting – such as style, energy, timing etc. We would see those as we go.

Startups pitching – what went wrong at echelon2010

I was attending the echelon2010 event yesterday. An excellent event, great speakers and wonderful audience. Greate place to be in if you are a start up company, entrepreneur, want to understand what entrepreneurship is all about, meet up with potential investors and mentors.

The last session of the day was pitching by the startups which was judged by the panel of experts. This is an excellent opportunity for startups to get feedback and pitch their company/ products to potential investors. There were 12+ startups who presented but only one of them stood out (foound) and received positive attention from audience and judges.

Other 11 failed to impress, not because none of them had good idea or good product but simply it was a matter of lack of proper communication and presentation. There were lot of comments on twitter ( #echelon2010) about reasons. Dave Mcclure who has become darling of the audience and other panellists were trying to coach the presenters, beside judging them.

In my opinion the number one reason was that these companies failed to define for whom were they presenting the solution. What did they want to achieve after the pitching.

I felt that they were confused if they were presenting to investors for money or they were presenting to potential buyers of their offering or they were presenting to fellow geeks. Your contents, pitch all depend on this factor. If you don’t get this very first thing right, then you are not going anywhere. Then you need to follow other presentation techniques as well.

I was feeling like going out and spending some time with the startups to help them get their pitch right. I would be happy to do so today, if any of the today’s start-ups want some help.

Towards the victory for collaborative forces against mighty one?

Android Shakes Up U.S. Smartphone Market

First quarter 2010 information from The NPD Group’s Mobile Phone Track reveals a shift in the smartphone market, as Android OS edged out Apple’s OS for the number-two position behind RIM.

This news caught my attention more than anything.

Apple, which has been making great news through its iPad launch and ‘lost-found-sold-returned’  iPhone 4 , has given a new dimension to the smart phone market. Till Google launched Android platform and Nexus One phone, there was no real competition to iPhone in consumer segment.

When Google launched Android there were many sceptics, not many were convinced that it would be able to take on Apple’s iPhone. After all, Apple has millions of die-hard fans and it had taken a big lead in establishing the apps market. However in my January post I had argued that Google’s approach of getting more players to launch Android based phone has far more chances of winning against mighty Apple, than Google taking on Apple on its own.

Though the above news is based on one quarter data only, it is very encouraging. It says that more Andorid based phones have been sold than iPhone in the last quarter in USA This would give further boost and encourage more players to adopt Android platform.

For me, this brings hopes of having open platforms and more collaborative environment. This would mean faster innovation and transparency.