Scoble: Start-ups need to be more savvy

by admin on December 12, 2009

in Marketing

It’s not often I agree with Robert Scoble but on this occasion I think he’s knocked one out of the park. While I was running around in Boston, he was at LeWeb, a conference I usually attend every other year. It’s a great showcase for startups, attracting well known speakers and a crowd that has grown to 2,000. Given we’re in the teeth of a recession, that’s got to be a more than creditable performance by organizers Loic and Geraldine LeMeur. Anyhoo – back to the plot.

Scoble was more than a little ticked off that French (but I suspect the same is true of many EU startups) have in his opinion made some fundamental mistakes in getting their message out to the market. Bear in mind that he’s taking a US centric view but even so, it is hard to argue against the logic of how you get attention in a noise filled startup environment. I hear this a lot from the accounting startups: How do we get people like you to take notice? How do we get attention when we’ve barely got enough cash for beer and pizza? I have my own answers but in essence they’re not that far adrift from most of what Scoble says. As examples:

First, if you meet with journalists, influentials, and bloggers who are coming from outside your country I assume you want to build a world brand. After all, if you only want to be big in France then why waste your time meeting with USA journalists?

I’d argue the same is true inside country but it is a point well made. I strive to make it hard for people to get me to venture out of Spain. There’s a reason. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time or money. Nothing is more irritating than taking days out of a schedule only to find limited value I can put back into the market. Another example:

Four CEOs told me their companies weren’t on Twitter and that they didn’t have enough time to join Twitter. That got me quite angry. Why? Because in the room were people with hundreds of thousands of followers (and not just me). If you aren’t on Twitter I can’t follow you, I can’t pimp you after the event, and I can’t follow up with questions. IT IS A MAJOR TURN OFF.

We can all say a lot about Twitter and its value but there is no avoiding the fact that is where people like myself and many others go on a daily, hourly basis. It is where we are communicating and where we’re picking up news of interest. Witness my last post about Pearl? No press release, no PR, just a random Tweet from a company I am following. The quid pro quo is that my blog posts get Tweeted so what we have here is an exchange of value that I can instantly amplify to around 4,700 people along with those who read what I’m saying via RSS and other means. That’s worth remembering.

Contrast that with saasu. Last night I received a Tweet message asking me why I’m not talking about them. They’re invisible to me and seem concentrated on a single market. That’s a limited vision in my view.

Some of what Scoble says is a bit off for me. The notion of business cards (his note 8) for example is a bit old hat. If you’re an iPhone user I’d prefer you use Bump to automatically share information with me. If not that then help me use Evernote and the built in camera function to capture an image. Way more eco-friendly and less likely I’ll lose your contact details. Similarly his insistence that you should know the hot news of the day is a stretch. People like Scoble and I follow this stuff as a part of our day job. An entrepreneur’s focus has to be elsewhere much of the time – like building a sustainable business. Better to use us as a resource than try do it all yourself and then decide what you really need to follow.

Love him or hate him, Scoble’s broader points on this occasion resonate well with me. In many senses it is 21st century PR101 which as regular readers will know, I see as very different from the old ‘skool.’ The good news is that when doing some of the things Scoble recommends, it is inexpensive and effective. It may seem overly US centric but there is much we can learn from our friends across the Big Pond.

BTW – the same goes for professionals but that’s another story.

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Tagged as: Le Web, Online Communities, Robert Scoble, social networking, Twitter

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