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Tag: content marketing

The Future of Pulling Content is You

Screen Shot 2014-08-29 at 2.08.37 PMDigital content has been unbundled, segmented and splattered all over social media, aggregators, mobile Apps, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, individual websites, blogs, micro-blogs, and discussion communities. This has created a user dilemma: How to re-assemble the content that matters to you every day? If you had a view about this in 2005, like Fred Wilson did, you would see RSS at the center of it all, and as Fred rightfully pointed out, the future of media as seen from a content lens was about to get microchunked, freed, syndicated, and monetized. 2005 was a time when we were enamored with RSS feeds. RSS readers were perceived as the solution for getting a handle on your daily reading habits. And it was manageable to some extent because social media hadn’t proliferated yet, and blogs as the long tail of content weren’t as popular yet, so you could conceivably configure a hundred feeds you wanted to follow, and be happy with it. This isn’t the case anymore today, because content sources are like moving sand. They keep evolving, even more rapidly than before. Today, every one of us is a publisher, and we are publishing willy-nilly everywhere, anytime and all the time. This has created a challenge in re-assembling that content from a user point of view. I already wrote about the new Internet user stack which is getting more complicated because of the rising levels of competencies that are now required in the areas of personal robotics, cryptocurrency, smartification of things, self-quantification and the consumer cloud. But now, we also need to go hunting for content, following links, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups, aggregated sites, mobile Apps like Nuzzel, Feedly, Zite, etc… Whether we like it or not, content is rebellious and capricious, because it wants to be constantly:

  • Discovered
  • Filtered
  • Curated
  • Personalized
  • Aggregated
  • Re-published
  • Liked
  • Shared
  • Discussed
  • Annotated
This makes it more challenging to find content. And it is getting harder, not simpler. We need to be constantly PULLING content on our own. Content will not come to us assembled or aggregated like it used to come in the old newspaper. We are left to our own devices. Some of us are getting good at it, others less, but it’s a competency we have to develop. And it is time consuming. So, what is the solution? I don’t think there is a technological solution that solves the fact that content has been blown to bits, literally. The solution is you and I spending time to gather/pull all this content on our own. I wished it was easier.]]>

Roundup #17 Nov 3 2013 Conversions, VC/Entrepreneur, Content Marketing, Venture Capital, Marketing, Unicorns

SUM_ScreenshotThis weekend’s Roundup #17 from Startup Management is a manual selection from the hundreds of weekly articles being curated. Previous issues are available here. There are 15 article links in this edition. First, I have an announcement. We have revamped the Startup Management website with a new look, and expanded the scope of curation coverage according to 11 categories: Advice, Marketing, Venture Capital, Product, Ecosystem, Growth, Management, Market Data, Technology, Transactions and Think Tank. To get a feel for it, please visit the new home page, where you’ll see the magazine style, or river of news format. If you are already subscribed to the existing RSS feed, it has converted to the firehose of articles, about 30-40 per day. The feed for my blog posts only will be at http://feeds.feedburner.com/wmougayar. Also, every category or tag page will have its own RSS feed that you can access from the respective pages. Please send me feedback. We are still working on smoothening the experience, and have additional features coming-up this week. Feel free to also try it on your smartphone. User Experience Denis Duvauchelle reminds us of the 500 milliseconds rule, in Don’t lose users for eternity in the first 5 seconds: How to survive the blink test, based on a 2006 study that still holds true. He goes into details, explaining how to quickly retain users attention. My favorite part is about the “halo effect”. “The halo effect refers to how even though something has some minor flaws, the overall effect is positive and reassuring – and most importantly, trustworthy.” VC-Entrepreneur Relationship Fred Wilson and Matt Blumberg wrote a pair of related posts depicting each side of the VC/Entrepreneur relationship. In The Role of Personal Chemistry in Investment Selection, Fred explains the 4 stages of the process of getting to know an entrepreneur: first impression, subsequent meetings, reference checking, and negotiation. In Selecting Your Investors, Matt has 7 tips for ensuring you end-up with the best long-term partner as an investor. Lessons in Conversions Here are 39 tips from London Conversion Conference. It’s a bulleted list from practioners, on pricing, conversion, copyrighting, mobile, and testing. Y Combinator Startup School 2 follow-ons are worth a look. YC Startup School Mashup is a collection of speakers quotes. And Gregory Koberger has put together a visually pleasing notebook, Startupnotes, summarizing each presentation with creative graphics. Content Marketing David Armano has laid the law on The Five Content Archetypes. They are: Curated, Co-Created, Original, Consumer-Generated, and Sponsored. The drivers of attention are Mobile, Social, and Search. It’s a good framework to think about when looking at your Content Marketing practices. “The first wave of social was dominated by engagement and how to engage at scale. The second is dominated by engaging at scale plus content distribution and integration with marketing programs.Alexis Ohanian Interview If you’re a fan of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian (who isn’t?), here’s an hour long video interview with Jason Calacanis on This Week in Startups. Growth Hacking VC Chamath Palihapitiya Says He Has Cracked the Code for Making Startups Grow, and has a team of growth experts that he parachutes into portfolio companies to help them grow. Unicorn Story Only if you were under a rock during the week-end, you didn’t hear about the Unicorn Club article at TechCrunch that spurred a follow-on post from Fred Wilson on AVC. Here is a link to a tagged list of related posts, and you’ll experience the power of our new semantic tagging on the new Startup Management: http://startupmanagement.org/tag/unicorn-analysis/. Venture Capital Boris Wertz picks up on the fact that Funding is now global: location is no longer your financing destiny. This applies equally well to startups that are getting financing from outside of where they are located, and to VC firms who are crossing their traditional geographical boundaries to invest where ever there is a good opportunity. The world is getting smaller for tech investments, and that’s a good thing. Charlie O’Donnell says Don’t Send the Deck, because it’s like allowing someone to play your story on mute. Instead, go for the face-to-face meeting when pitching a VC. Marketing Debbie Laskey explains the realities behind The Blurring Lines Between Marketing and Technology. The battleground? Data. “At the core, the tension between the IT and marketing departments has grown because the two own important data.The Internet of Things The Economist Intelligence Unit has a special report, The Internet of Things Business Index, a quiet revolution (pdf). It’s a great read, and includes coverage by industry and geography. And Sarah Guo notes that 2 companies in this segment already have huge valuations: Nest at $800M, and Jawbone at $1.5B, in The Internet of Venture Dollars, Tethering the “Internet of Things”. That SUMs it up! Don’t forget to share on Twitter,  add us to your Feedly, forward to a friend, follow on Twitter, read in Flipboard, or just visit the website often and daily. William Mougayar Founder & Chief Curator Startup Management]]>

Customer Retention, Mentoring, Venture Capital, Pricing, Organizational Structure, HR, Content Marketing, SaaS, Weekend Roundup Must Read Sept 14 2013

Startup Management is a manual selection from the hundreds of weekly articles being curated. Previous issues are available here. There are 23 links in this edition. Forward to a friend, so they can sign-up and benefit too. Venture Capital David Teten of ff Venture Capital just announced the availability of a 13-page paper, The Lower-Risk Startup: How Venture Capitalists Increase the Odds of Startup Success. It was published in the Journal of Private Equity a few months ago, and you can download the complimentary pdf from this link. There’s another new 112-page report, the New York Venture Capital Almanac, published by CB Insight. It tallies the funding activities of the top VCs in New York, and their relationships with one another. Toping off the topic of Venture Capital, I wrote this analysis, Battle of the Tech Ecosystems: Boston vs. New York, relying on Mattermark data. Finally, Fred Wilson asks Are Universities the New VCs?, an idea he has promoted to a number of universities for some time now.

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