creatorbase

Customer success without boundaries …

For more than 4 years since creating it with Blaine Mathieu, former CMO at Lyris, and my agency team at the time from Blanc & Otus, I’ve been refining and relying on an integrated marketing and communications strategy I call a community practice. The illustration is a model of the strategy including four core programs; see more details in a new CMSWire article.

But if you only have a few minutes to review this proven strategy, envision your business or team organizing with a community practice strategy and consider these five ideas:

1. Begin with a customer success manifesto including details by vertical, geography and/or persona segmentation; tweak annually based on new insights.
   
   
2. Enable current and future customers with content and experiences that span many segment lifecycles and meaningful stories.
   
   
3. Build, continuously improve, and empower your advocates with a resourced community hub and spokes operation. Weave in some fun with gamification with tools like Influitive.
   
   
4. Cultivate, harness and share thought leadership from within your organization and outside via the community.
   
   
5. Real-time business now requires a Command Center, reporting systems and dedicated staff.

I’m all for keeping things short and sweet with social media but I think you’ll gain much more by reading my complete CMSWire article. Feel free to use the community practice strategy illustration above but kindly reference the source as @creatorbase.  

Elon Musk is a sustainable design master

Elon has several ambitious plans in the works. The founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX seems to thrive when the pressure is on. He sat down with TED curator Chris Anderson in February 2013 to share details about his visionary projects, which include a mass-marketed electric car, a solar energy leasing company and a fully reusable rocket.

When you listen to Elon speak, he's clearly on a mission -- and has mastered an approach -- to design or redesign business models that put sustainability front and center. In other words, what's good for people, business and our planet. It's inspiring to see how he and his team successfully innovate with incredible risks and uncertainties at play. 

Sustainable Design Initiatives

With Earth Day coming up on April 22nd, this ~21 mins. video above is a good way to kick-off a month that we're dedicating to communicate about sustainable design initiatives.

In particular, members from the creatorbase community recently entered the creatorstand^® in the 'Sustainable Brands Innovation Open 2013' competition. Community voting for 1 semi-finalist is from April 8 - 14th and SBIO judges will pick 9 semi-finalists for a total of 10 to pitch their sustainable business ideas at the Sustainable Brands conference in June / San Diego.

Follow @creatorbase and stay tuned for related posts in April.

Get into the crowdfunding game in 2013

Rory Eakin of CircleUp; video recorded December 2012

There’s a growing movement underway that you can participate in to help the economy, support local businesses, and gain something valuable in return. Seriously, everyone can benefit from this game depending on how they get involved. Another win for the web!

I use “game” loosely in this context because crowdfunding execution and success requires a team or community approach. And the campaign process can be fun! In essence, we’re talking about a crowdfunding ecosystem that’s growing and poised to take off in 2013 with years of momentum including social media adoption, crowdfunding innovation, and the JOBS Act with pending SEC rules.

Players and playbooks

Businesses and people are raising money for a wide variety of causes, products and creative pursuits. In simple terms, there are (8) crowdfunding roles from a business to consumer products perspective. What roles interest you?

Provider: CircleUp, Indiegogo and Kickstarter are examples of crowdfunding providers. Rory Eakin from CircleUp touches on some of the differences between crowdfunding models/services in the video above; here are more details.

Creator: Business leaders, entrepreneurs and technologists from startups to early stage organizations responsible for fundraising, product development, go-to-market strategy, content creation and execution.   

Supporter: Friends and family members play a critical role in all successful crowdfunding campaigns. Feedback, helping-hands and initial financial support make all the difference in campaign success or failure.

Expert: Crowdfunding campaigns usually require expertise from outside the inner circle. Creators responsible for crowdfunding strategy should not skimp when it comes to expertise and resources needed for successful outcomes.  

Media: Both social and traditional media practitioners can have a field day with crowdfunding campaigns and stories. There are so many to choose from with interesting characters and narratives.

Contributor: Without financial support from people and businesses, contribution-based crowdfunding campaigns go nowhere. Pre-orders and donations from contributors, with a lot of uncertainty, are critical for success. Note: Contributors don’t have to be direct consumers of the perks.

Investor: Equity-based crowdfunding with platforms like CircleUp provide accredited investors ROI opportunities during the early stage of business growth. Like all investments, there are risks.

Consumer: We’re all consumers and benefit from products and services that fulfill a need or desire. Crowdfunding perks are often exclusive, discounted and/or warm many hearts. 

Qubits crowdfunding campaign

It’s not uncommon for businesses and people to play multiple roles in the crowdfunding game. For example, I’m participating in the Qubits 2.0 campaign on Indiegogo in supporter, expert, media, contributor and consumer roles. Mark Burginger of Qubits is someone I met in 2011 via the Shark Tank community. I like his new product and pre-ordered Qubits 2.0 for our young kids. I’m not getting anything in return for these roles except satisfaction in helping another creator and a perk that my kids think is “cool.”

For more on crowdfunding strategies, trends, campaigns and best practices – read these Search Engine Watch articles. Follow creatorbase on Twitter and Facebook to participate in this community. We’re on the lookout for more crowdfunding campaigns to help.

On a related note, go San Francisco 49ers! 

What's your labor of love? Fund it with Indiegogo.

It's safe to say that many of us have a business/product idea, creative project or personal cause that is either a part-time pursuit or something we would like to get more serious about if only we could.

What's holding you back? Approval from others including an employer, money, time, or something inside that says it's not possible?  The Labor Day 2012 weekend is a perfect time to shed some light on this issue and how to make your creative pursuits a reality with a little help from others ... people on the web who care.

Fortunately, our world continues to change for the better with the Internet given recent developments including crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo, social media adoption, and the JOBS Act that was signed in April 2012 by President Obama. These things and related now make it possible and less risky to create, fund and launch something you're passionate about and others will find valuable.

I recently talked with Danae Ringelmann, co-founder and COO at Indiegogo based in San Francisco, and we discussed:

• Why Indiegogo is the best crowdfunding resource for creators in general
• The JOBS Act and what it means for startups and entrepeneurs
• 3 tips for a successful crowdfunding campaign

With full transparency in mind, I'm an Indiegogo fan and currently running a campaign for our creatorstand product. However, my initial experience with crowdfunding started a year ago as a backer on Kickstarter for Qubits Toy -- an ABC Shark Tank friend -- and more recently as an entrepreneur for creatorstand. I quickly learned the big differences between Kickstarter and Indiegogo; there are many crowdfunding platforms to choose from worldwide.

If we're connected on Facebook or Twitter, you probably know that crowdfunding our creatorstand product is top of mind right now. Our Indiegogo campaign has been a huge learning experience, not only with crowdfunding but also what to do -- and not do -- via social media. I appreciate all those who have been tolerant of my trial and error work with crowdfunding, and people who have supported our campaign including:

• Family members
• Terry Earlywine
• Janet Roberts
• Dan Recine
• Tammy Steiner
• Ektron/Bill Rogers
• Influitive/Mark Organ
• John Rampton
• Hope Frank
• Bret Sewell
• Craig Conkling
• Paul Markun
• Bill Cava
• Tony Deblauwe
• Judy Reed
• Ray Reeves
• Mark Chessler
• Tom Bartel
• Pookie Foster
• John Engler
• Brandon Atwater
• John Phillips
• Carolyn Ngyuen
• Simona Carini
• Ron Young
• Blaine Mathieu
• Roger Hollander
• Rick Castello
• Jason Henderson
• Many more ...

Like most new initiatives with the web, there are discoveries along the way that present opportunities to make adjustments. Further, there are lessons learned and I definitely want to share what I now know after researching crowdfunding these past few months and launching our own creatorstand initiative on Indiegogo. That said, I have some good news to share.

I'm starting a new column on crowdfunding success for Search Engine Watch with the first article planned for release this month. In the meantime, watch and share the video above and please provide your input for the new SEW column. 

For example, what questions or ideas do you have about crowdfunding and how to be successful? What not to do, etc? I will consider your input as I write the upcoming Search Engine Watch article and my own crowdfunding and social media efforts for creatorstand. Please share here with comments or contact me directly via email.

Ask yourself this. What's your labor of love and how might crowdfunding help you move things forward in 2012?  Let me know if I can enable you via the creatorbase community and upcoming Search Engine Watch column.

 

SES San Francisco: How to Take Your Blog to the Next Level #sessf

Whether you're into traditional- or micro-blogging or somewhere in between, blogging daily is essential for search, digital marketing and customer experience management (revenue creation) efforts.

Most people will likely agree that blogging and social media in general help businesses with content creation, reach, engagement, earned media, conversions and community building. Where things get a little fuzzy are … what exactly does blogging and social media success look like daily and how much should we continue to invest quarterly?  Join John Rampton, founder of Blogging.org, and I today at 1:30 in our Talkback session at SES SF. 

Take Social from Cool to Critical

One problem I continue to see in many businesses is they are stuck in their old, classic marketing mindsets. When quarterly lead generation and/or revenue goals are not being achieved, it’s often a time when “media” related budgets like PR and social are either trimmed or cut, and more emphasis is placed on outbound marketing. This is a mistake and counter-productive given:

• Progress and work to date via social and engagement tactics
• Where the world is headed with content and inbound marketing
• Your top competitors probably aren’t cutting their media budgets

Businesses and marketers need to focus now and forever on taking social media from cool to critical. I recently talked with Nate Elliott, principal analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. about this (watch our video conversation; Web Innovation Now). According to Nate, social media spend is projected to be nearly $5 billion by 2016 – that’s a significant increase from 2012 and budget opportunity going forward.

I recommend all businesses/marketers double-down on their current blogging/social media spend to continue making progress and serving customers, partners and prospects via the web. How do you present and rationalize this with your executives?

Move from “B” to “C” thinking

Just like that natural flow of the alphabet, businesses and marketers should move Blogging to the next level by thinking Community instead. It becomes more about them and their success -- customers, partners and community members -- and less about you. POV publishing gives way to responsiveness, content/inbound marketing and service delivery via the web.

Further, the lines between traditional and social media are blurring so we should organize strategy and programs with the following media landscape in mind; all work together but the first two bullets are the focus:

• Owned media
• Earned media
• Paid media

Here’s a simple model I’ve been using for a few years based on community and media strategy and execution:

 

Essentially, markets are communities and communities are markets. Since revenue and scalability comes from customers and partners, all community and media activities should revolve around customer and partner success.

If this model makes sense, one approach is to organize with (4) programs:

Customer Stories & Enablers

• Create cohesive stories that help people experience and see the world you’re creating for them. Watch a video interview with Chris Brogan and I on the topic of storytelling
• Use a wide variety of content types including video, white papers, blogs, infographics, etc. to enable understanding and success
• Ensure your optimized for mobile content consumption and creation

Community Hub & Spokes

• Community is all touch points, digital and in-person
• Attract, mobilize and reward bloggers inside and outside your organization with advocacy and gamification (Influitive is a great tool)
• Apply a community hub approach and continually develop and optimize you spokes to the hub. Be where your customers, partners and prospects are and apply appropriate segmentation
• Work from personas when possible
• Content (owned media), reach, engagement, earned media, conversions and revenue growth from collective efforts are key metrics / KPIs

Thought Leadership

• Simplifying complex topics and provide some level of future casting as to what’s coming and what you should do now
• Involve your community in all thought leadership efforts to create content, preview it, be included in it and share thought leadership from the community and not just the company
• All businesses, from startups to major enterprises should cultivate and communicate with thought leadership

Command Centers & Reporting

• It’s been said before many times but monitoring and listening to fully understand sentiment, issues and opportunities is now a business critical requirement for all organizations
• Resource and staff appropriately with tools and intrapreneurs (creators) for strategic work and by time zone for tactical work; for digital and in-person events like conferences
• Immediacy with quality content and response is a killer app – this requires budget and commitment

Why this Works

I stand behind this strategy and program approach based on ~5 years of execution with prior clients/companies. This is more of a B2B strategy but it can also be applied for B2C and even a startup in bootstrap mode.

Case in point, I’m currently working with a virtual team from the creatorbase community to launch a new, patented consumer product called creatorstand. It’s an easier and more meaningful way to learn, work, shop and be social with digital gadgets and the web.  Our lean team is applying the same strategy and tactics (model) mentioned above.

The creatorstand was announced on August 9^th with help from Indiegogo.com, a crowdfunding platform, and Typepad a blogging platform. We’re also using Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, PR, email and word-of-mouth. Together, all these community channels and media tools are intended to:

• Tell a story about a new, eco-friendly product and how it will help/enable customers who choose to pre-order our product as part of a crowdfunding effort

• Typepad is serving as our community hub and Indiegogo is the crowdfunding platform that also enables us to make transactions and encourage social sharing. The various social channels are spokes to the community hub

• Our Inner Circle is about 200 friends and family on Facebook and LinkedIn. I would use Influitive for our Inner Circle activation but it’s not setup yet for creatorbase; it's coming soon

• Thought leaderships comes in by the way we describe how this new, eco-friendly and web-oriented product is better than many other similar products designed before the Internet and not in sync with a community and media strategy

• We’re using Google Analytics, Indiegogo Dashboard, Typepad Dashboard and Facebook Page Insights to monitor, understand and report out results to the team and our contributors. I would use a pure monitoring/listening tool like Brand Monitor or Radian6 but have not implemented yet because we’re bootstrapping for now

Seven Community & Media Tips

1. Move from a blogging mindset to a community practice (disciplined) mindset
2. Create quality content daily for multiple channels based on customer and partner success (for current and prospective customers and partners) and share stories that matter and inform
3. Double down on your community and media budget even under pressure from classic marketing thinkers
4. Remember to make all your digital content mobile-first and equip staff with tools and freedom to publish content and engage in real-time from anywhere
5. It’s all about taking blogging/social media from cool to critical because the opportunity to do so in a bigger way is both a customer requirement and will distinguish winners from losers
6. Hire intrapreneurs to help you take social media (and community) to the next level – and stay there –  for customer experience and competitive advantages
7. Help us bring creatorstand to market in Septmber with your pre-order  in August; Let's make a stand with crowdfunding (and blogging)