The world’s most famous and successful entrepreneurs are easy to pick out: Richard Branson, Donald Trump, and Steve Jobs quickly come to mind. However, who are the true thought leaders among entrepreneurs? Thanks to Klout, a tool that measures online influence, The Huffington Post has enumerated the 10 most influential entrepreneurs on the Internet—at least at the moment. READ MORE
Hosting an Internet radio program over the past few years has allowed me to speak with some of the most successful social media communicators in the space. People like Guy Kawasaki, Chris Brogan, Liz Strauss, and Brian Clark are synonymous with social media. They’ve each amassed huge followings on their blogs and on sites like Twitter. They are recognized experts in the social media community for their ability to connect with people on a personal level, even when they’re speaking to thousands of people at a time through social channels. So if you’re looking to successfully leverage the power of social tools to reach people on behalf of your business and “move the crowd,” here are a few things successful people like those above have in common. They read One thing all the successful social media types I know do is read. In fact they are ravenous when it comes to reading, devouring up to 100 magazines a month. This includes national business publications, regional business magazines, industry trade journals, and specialty newsletters from professional organizations. Mixed in with the magazines are the handfuls of books they are reading. This typically means they are in the middle of four or five books, on an off subject with respect to their profession. I won’t even bring up the online perusing of blogs, white papers, and e-books they also take in. They do this because of their passion to know as much as they can about their chosen area of expertise, not necessarily just to blog. But the knowledge they accumulate allows them to create valuable content that attracts people to them. They listen The fastest way to get people to listen to you is to listen to them. Not just put up with the sounds coming out of their mouths, but to listen. And listening to others is at the heart of what successful social media communicators do. Listening and observing what people were talking about on Twitter was key to the success of Guy Kawasaki’s latest venture Alltop.com. Kawasaki is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who got his start with Apple many moons ago. Through his site, billed as “the online magazine rack,” Kawasaki finds out what people are talking about on Twitter in order to create a resource page of great content on the Web on the hottest topics. Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs, a new media marketing agency, has a huge following on Twitter, but always seems to be directly communicating with people when they ask him a question. And he asks people for their thoughts and opinions on a regular basis because he’s genuinely interested in what others have to say. They share What really strikes me about successful social media folks is their willingness to share the spotlight with others. Many of these folks have spent years writing to build audiences. This includes not only writing blog posts, but also answering numerous comments and Twitter “tweets” from their readers. The successful social media communicators also take time to help others by critiquing their writing to help them find their voice. They also use their blogs and podcasts as platforms to bring attention to people who are doing things they feel are noteworthy. And, in many cases, these popular bloggers will offer a few of their readers the opportunity to be a guest author. Liz Strauss, a social Web strategist and community builder who founded the business blogger conference SOBCon, gives out her SOB award (Successful Outstanding Blogger) each week to bloggers she thinks people should be reading. This might not seem like a big deal, but it is a huge honor if you think about it. It’s like an unknown getting a chance to be the opening act for a superstar, in front of a crowd you would never get on your own, but are interested in hearing you just because you’ve received a huge endorsement from someone they trust. They have fun Brian Clark is well known for his highly respected Copyblogger.com website, which helps people up their copywriting skills to better connect with audiences. The site is full of great information, but what makes Clark someone to listen to goes beyond his considerable expertise. I look forward to what Clark has to say because he’s also funny, and because he quotes lyrics from 80’s rappers Eric B. and Rakim. And while Kawasaki is a best-selling author, sought-after speaker and serial entrepreneur, he’s got a great sense of humor. And this is readily apparent if you follow his tweets on Twitter. Sure Liz Strauss and Chris Brogan are social media strategists and people look to them for understanding how this stuff works. They’re also great fun to talk to. Strauss shares her sense of humor on her blog and on Twitter to the delight of her thousands of followers. And Brogan’s self-deprecating humor is appreciated by anyone who has a chance to interact with him. So if you want to be successful with your social media endeavors, do what the experts do. Read, listen, share, and go out there and have fun! Brent Leary is a small-business technology analyst, adviser, and award-winning blogger. Leary is also host of a weekly radio program heard on Business Technology Radio. He is the co-author of Barack 2.0: Social Media Lessons for Small Business. His blog can be found at www.brentleary.com.
Greg Linden was one of the key developers behind Amazon’s famous recommendations system — the system that recommends books, movies, and other products to Amazon customers based on their purchase history. He subsequently went to Stanford and picked up an MBA. In January 2004, he launched a startup named Findory to provide everyone with a personalized online newspaper. You cannot imagine anyone who could be more qualified to make a startup like this a success. Yet Findory shut down in November 2007. In a brilliant post-mortem, Lindensays his big mistake was to bootstrap his company while trying to raise funding from venture capital firms; he just couldn’t convince them to invest. He should have raised his funding from angel investors instead. This is an important decision every startup founder has to make — where to raise their funding. Fortunately, there are resources on the Internet that can help you make the right decision. The three viable sources at the very early stages of a company are: Friends and family. Or yourself, if you can afford it. The Web provides an assortment of resources to read up on bootstrapping, from online communities of entrepreneurs to Guy Kawasaki’s blog. Angel investors. Usually wealthy individuals, but includes outfits such as Y Combinator. (My firm Cambrian Ventures is also in this category, although we are currently not actively seeking investments) Venture Capital (VC). These are private firms that manage pools of equity capital that is invested in high growth, entrepreneurial companies. The National Venture Capital Association provides resources about VC as do such private firms as VentureOne and vFinance. To understand which option is best for your startup, you need to understand how investors evaluate companies. While investors evaluate companies across a range of criteria, three that stay consistent are: Team, Technology, and Market. Angels and VCs evaluate them in different ways. Here’s how. How VCs evaluate startups Market. Venture Capitalists want to invest in companies that produce meaningful returns in the context of their fund size, which typically is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. To interest a VC firm, a company needs to be attacking a large market opportunity. If you cannot make a credible case that your startup idea will lead to a company with at least $100 million in revenue within four to five years, then a VC is not the right fit for you. It’s often OK to use consumer traction as a substitute for market opportunity — many VCs will accept a large and rapidly growing user base as sufficient proof that there is a potentially large market opportunity. Team. Venture Capitalists use simple pattern matching to classify teams into two buckets. A founding team is deemed “backable” if it includes one or more seasoned executives from successful or fashionable companies (such as Google) or entrepreneurs whose track record includes a least one past hit. Otherwise the team is considered “non-backable.” Technology. Venture Capitalists are not always great at evaluating technology. To them, technology is either a risk (the team claims their technology can do X; is that really true?) or an entry barrier (is the technology hard enough to develop to prevent too many competitors from entering the market?) If your startup is developing a nontrivial technology, it helps to have someone on the team who is a recognized expert in the technology area — either as a founder or as an outside advisor. Here’s the rule of thumb: to qualify for VC financing, you need to pass the Market Opportunity test and at least one of the other two tests. Either you have a backable team, or you have nontrivial technology that can act as an entry barrier. How angels evaluate startups There are many kinds of angels, but I recommend picking only one kind: someone who has been a successful entrepreneur and has a deep interest in the market you are attacking or the technology you are developing. Other kinds of angels are usually not very high value. Here’s how angels evaluate the three investment criteria: Market. It’s all right if the market is unproven, but both the team and the angel have to believe that within a few months, the company can reach a point where it can either credibly show a large market opportunity (and thus attract VC funding), or develop technology valuable enough to be acquired by an established company. Team. The team needs to include someone the angel knows and respects from a prior life. Technology. The technology is something the angel has prior expertise in and is comfortable evaluating without all the dots connected. Here’s the angel rule of thumb: you need to pass any two out of the three tests (team/technology, technology/market, or team/market). I have funded all three of these combinations, resulting in either subsequent VC financing (e.g., Aster Data, Efficient Frontier, TheFind ), or quick acquisitions (Transformic, Kaltix — both acquired by Google). I’ve written about the stories behind the Aster Data investment and the Transformic investment previously on my blog. In both cases, my personal relationship with the founders, as well as my passionate belief in the technology, played big roles in the investment decisions. Friends and family or bootstrap This is the only option if you cannot satisfy the criteria for either VC or angel. But beware of remaining too long in this “bootstrap mode.” An outside investor provides a valuable sounding board and prevents the company from becoming an echo chamber for the founder’s ideas. An angel or VC can look at things with the perspective that comes from distance. Sometimes an outside investor can force something that’s actually good for the founder’s career: shut the company down and go do something else. That decision is very hard to make without an outside investor. My advice is to bootstrap until you can clear either the angel or the VC bar, but no longer. Back now to Greg Linden and Findory. By my reckoning, Findory passes the team and technology tests from an angel’s point of view — if you pick an angel investor who has some passion for personalization technology. The company doesn’t pass any of the VC tests. Given this, Linden should definitely have raised angel funding. My guess is that this route would likely have led to a sale of the company to one of many potential suitors: Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft, among many others. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20! I have deep respect for Linden’s intellect and passion and wish him better luck in his future endeavors. For further reading, I highly recommend Paul Graham’s excellent article How to Fund a Startup. Anand Rajaraman is co-founder of the Kosmix with consumer properties www.RightHealth.com, www.RightAutos.com and www.RightTrips.com. He sits on the board of several technology companies and currently teaches at the Computer Science department of Stanford University. His latest thoughts and discussions can be found at http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky.
Greg Linden was one of the key developers behind Amazon’s famous recommendations system — the system that recommends books, movies, and other products to Amazon customers based on their purchase history. He subsequently went to Stanford and picked up an MBA. In January 2004, he launched a startup named Findory to provide everyone with a personalized online newspaper. You cannot imagine anyone who could be more qualified to make a startup like this a success. Yet Findory shut down in November 2007. In a brilliant post-mortem, Lindensays his big mistake was to bootstrap his company while trying to raise funding from venture capital firms; he just couldn’t convince them to invest. He should have raised his funding from angel investors instead. This is an important decision every startup founder has to make — where to raise their funding. Fortunately, there are resources on the Internet that can help you make the right decision. The three viable sources at the very early stages of a company are: Friends and family. Or yourself, if you can afford it. The Web provides an assortment of resources to read up on bootstrapping, from online communities of entrepreneurs to Guy Kawasaki’s blog. Angel investors. Usually wealthy individuals, but includes outfits such as Y Combinator. (My firm Cambrian Ventures is also in this category, although we are currently not actively seeking investments) Venture Capital (VC). These are private firms that manage pools of equity capital that is invested in high growth, entrepreneurial companies. The National Venture Capital Association provides resources about VC as do such private firms as VentureOne and vFinance. To understand which option is best for your startup, you need to understand how investors evaluate companies. While investors evaluate companies across a range of criteria, three that stay consistent are: Team, Technology, and Market. Angels and VCs evaluate them in different ways. Here’s how. How VCs evaluate startups Market. Venture Capitalists want to invest in companies that produce meaningful returns in the context of their fund size, which typically is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. To interest a VC firm, a company needs to be attacking a large market opportunity. If you cannot make a credible case that your startup idea will lead to a company with at least $100 million in revenue within four to five years, then a VC is not the right fit for you. It’s often OK to use consumer traction as a substitute for market opportunity — many VCs will accept a large and rapidly growing user base as sufficient proof that there is a potentially large market opportunity. Team. Venture Capitalists use simple pattern matching to classify teams into two buckets. A founding team is deemed “backable” if it includes one or more seasoned executives from successful or fashionable companies (such as Google) or entrepreneurs whose track record includes a least one past hit. Otherwise the team is considered “non-backable.” Technology. Venture Capitalists are not always great at evaluating technology. To them, technology is either a risk (the team claims their technology can do X; is that really true?) or an entry barrier (is the technology hard enough to develop to prevent too many competitors from entering the market?) If your startup is developing a nontrivial technology, it helps to have someone on the team who is a recognized expert in the technology area — either as a founder or as an outside advisor. Here’s the rule of thumb: to qualify for VC financing, you need to pass the Market Opportunity test and at least one of the other two tests. Either you have a backable team, or you have nontrivial technology that can act as an entry barrier. How angels evaluate startups There are many kinds of angels, but I recommend picking only one kind: someone who has been a successful entrepreneur and has a deep interest in the market you are attacking or the technology you are developing. Other kinds of angels are usually not very high value. Here’s how angels evaluate the three investment criteria: Market. It’s all right if the market is unproven, but both the team and the angel have to believe that within a few months, the company can reach a point where it can either credibly show a large market opportunity (and thus attract VC funding), or develop technology valuable enough to be acquired by an established company. Team. The team needs to include someone the angel knows and respects from a prior life. Technology. The technology is something the angel has prior expertise in and is comfortable evaluating without all the dots connected. Here’s the angel rule of thumb: you need to pass any two out of the three tests (team/technology, technology/market, or team/market). I have funded all three of these combinations, resulting in either subsequent VC financing (e.g., Aster Data, Efficient Frontier, TheFind ), or quick acquisitions (Transformic, Kaltix — both acquired by Google). I’ve written about the stories behind the Aster Data investment and the Transformic investment previously on my blog. In both cases, my personal relationship with the founders, as well as my passionate belief in the technology, played big roles in the investment decisions. Friends and family or bootstrap This is the only option if you cannot satisfy the criteria for either VC or angel. But beware of remaining too long in this “bootstrap mode.” An outside investor provides a valuable sounding board and prevents the company from becoming an echo chamber for the founder’s ideas. An angel or VC can look at things with the perspective that comes from distance. Sometimes an outside investor can force something that’s actually good for the founder’s career: shut the company down and go do something else. That decision is very hard to make without an outside investor. My advice is to bootstrap until you can clear either the angel or the VC bar, but no longer. Back now to Greg Linden and Findory. By my reckoning, Findory passes the team and technology tests from an angel’s point of view — if you pick an angel investor who has some passion for personalization technology. The company doesn’t pass any of the VC tests. Given this, Linden should definitely have raised angel funding. My guess is that this route would likely have led to a sale of the company to one of many potential suitors: Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft, among many others. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20! I have deep respect for Linden’s intellect and passion and wish him better luck in his future endeavors. For further reading, I highly recommend Paul Graham’s excellent article How to Fund a Startup. Anand Rajaraman is co-founder of the Kosmix with consumer properties www.RightHealth.com, www.RightAutos.com and www.RightTrips.com. He sits on the board of several technology companies and currently teaches at the Computer Science department of Stanford University. His latest thoughts and discussions can be found at http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky.
One day I woke up and realized everyone I knew was on Twitter.com. Business blogs that I love and read regularly lay neglected while bloggers twittered away instead. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. Not everyone is twittering. And not every business blog is going un-updated. Still, a lot of business people I know seem to be spending more and more time on Twitter, sometimes to the detriment of their blogs. So I set out to find out why. Twitter is a kind of public instant messenger stream. You go online or on your mobile device and send text messages (“tweets”) of up to 140 characters — or about one sentence long. Your tweets can be read by others, and you can sign up to follow the messages others write so that you can read theirs. Often the messages are incredibly mundane. “Just landed at San Francisco airport.” “Body can’t seem to adjust to the time change.” “Reading e-mails –147 in my inbox.” Some messages are so trivial that at first you’ll be shaking your head. How could extremely intelligent people — the early adopters of technology — waste their time on such banalities, you wonder? But stick around long enough on Twitter and you, too, will get sucked in. Mixed in among the short updates from friends, colleagues, acquaintances, or people you’d like to get to know, you start to notice patterns. You start picking up small clues about their personalities, about their priorities, and about events in their lives. It’s a mosaic, a backdrop that helps you understand how they tick. You become more engaged in them and in their work precisely because you learn some details of their personal existence. You start to care more about them on a personal level. Thus, you care more about their work and become a more engaged member of their community. Not everything on Twitter is trivial, either. Look close enough and you’ll find that many are using Twitter for business purposes. They’re mixing in personal trivia here and there — but underneath it all business is getting done. I asked a deliberately provocative question on Twitter, “Why are people abandoning blogs for Twitter?” And I got some interesting answers. Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com replied in typical abbreviated Twitter fashion: “I’m not sure people are abandoning blogs for Twitter (although some casual bloggers may be). It’s more like augmentation.” And it’s true that most bloggers seem to be doing both: writing on their blogs but also twittering in between as a way to stay connected, communicate with others, and learn what’s going on behind the scenes. Paul Chaney of Conversational Media Marketing replied at more length — ironically, on his blog. He pointed out some of the business benefits of Twitter, such as how you can use it to get an audience with well-known figures in the business and tech world, such as Guy Kawasaki or Dave Winer via Twitter. You can use Twitter to network; to broadcast announcements about an upcoming event or a new post on your blog; to share resources; and generally to build relationships. Lee Odden of Top Rank Blog has conducted a reader poll asking how people use Twitter. The top three uses of Twitter as I write this are: Sharing links to items of interest to your network (34%) Networking for new contacts (18%) Reinforcing current network contacts (16%) Should we anticipate bloggers giving up their blogs and writing on Twitter instead? Not so fast. Oh, I’ve seen the occasional blog here and there that now consists of nothing more than the writer’s Twitter stream imported in. Without the variety of seeing other people’s Twitter messages mixed in, those single streams of Twitter messages are crushingly boring. And like those leftovers forgotten in the back of the refrigerator, it’s not long before stale Twitter messages become unappetizing. Twitter is best enjoyed when the messages are fleeting, ephemeral, and allowed to fall off your radar screen quickly (although just like with instant messages, there is a permanent record of your tweets, so watch what you say). Blogs, on the other hand, being longer and taking more time to write, tend to be a more lasting way of communicating. In the future, I expect to see a combination of both. Entrepreneurs and business owners will continue to write on their blogs, providing the kind of great content that we value so much from blogs. But we’ll also have the added context that comes from these short-burst Twitter messages. We’ll be able to read a blog and then jump over to Twitter to layer in the context, in a real-time fashion, of what the blogger is thinking and feeling and doing each day behind the scenes. And that just might make our interest in reading their blogs grow. Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.
One day I woke up and realized everyone I knew was on Twitter.com. Business blogs that I love and read regularly lay neglected while bloggers twittered away instead. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. Not everyone is twittering. And not every business blog is going un-updated. Still, a lot of business people I know seem to be spending more and more time on Twitter, sometimes to the detriment of their blogs. So I set out to find out why. Twitter is a kind of public instant messenger stream. You go online or on your mobile device and send text messages (“tweets”) of up to 140 characters — or about one sentence long. Your tweets can be read by others, and you can sign up to follow the messages others write so that you can read theirs. Often the messages are incredibly mundane. “Just landed at San Francisco airport.” “Body can’t seem to adjust to the time change.” “Reading e-mails –147 in my inbox.” Some messages are so trivial that at first you’ll be shaking your head. How could extremely intelligent people — the early adopters of technology — waste their time on such banalities, you wonder? But stick around long enough on Twitter and you, too, will get sucked in. Mixed in among the short updates from friends, colleagues, acquaintances, or people you’d like to get to know, you start to notice patterns. You start picking up small clues about their personalities, about their priorities, and about events in their lives. It’s a mosaic, a backdrop that helps you understand how they tick. You become more engaged in them and in their work precisely because you learn some details of their personal existence. You start to care more about them on a personal level. Thus, you care more about their work and become a more engaged member of their community. Not everything on Twitter is trivial, either. Look close enough and you’ll find that many are using Twitter for business purposes. They’re mixing in personal trivia here and there — but underneath it all business is getting done. I asked a deliberately provocative question on Twitter, “Why are people abandoning blogs for Twitter?” And I got some interesting answers. Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com replied in typical abbreviated Twitter fashion: “I’m not sure people are abandoning blogs for Twitter (although some casual bloggers may be). It’s more like augmentation.” And it’s true that most bloggers seem to be doing both: writing on their blogs but also twittering in between as a way to stay connected, communicate with others, and learn what’s going on behind the scenes. Paul Chaney of Conversational Media Marketing replied at more length — ironically, on his blog. He pointed out some of the business benefits of Twitter, such as how you can use it to get an audience with well-known figures in the business and tech world, such as Guy Kawasaki or Dave Winer via Twitter. You can use Twitter to network; to broadcast announcements about an upcoming event or a new post on your blog; to share resources; and generally to build relationships. Lee Odden of Top Rank Blog has conducted a reader poll asking how people use Twitter. The top three uses of Twitter as I write this are: Sharing links to items of interest to your network (34%) Networking for new contacts (18%) Reinforcing current network contacts (16%) Should we anticipate bloggers giving up their blogs and writing on Twitter instead? Not so fast. Oh, I’ve seen the occasional blog here and there that now consists of nothing more than the writer’s Twitter stream imported in. Without the variety of seeing other people’s Twitter messages mixed in, those single streams of Twitter messages are crushingly boring. And like those leftovers forgotten in the back of the refrigerator, it’s not long before stale Twitter messages become unappetizing. Twitter is best enjoyed when the messages are fleeting, ephemeral, and allowed to fall off your radar screen quickly (although just like with instant messages, there is a permanent record of your tweets, so watch what you say). Blogs, on the other hand, being longer and taking more time to write, tend to be a more lasting way of communicating. In the future, I expect to see a combination of both. Entrepreneurs and business owners will continue to write on their blogs, providing the kind of great content that we value so much from blogs. But we’ll also have the added context that comes from these short-burst Twitter messages. We’ll be able to read a blog and then jump over to Twitter to layer in the context, in a real-time fashion, of what the blogger is thinking and feeling and doing each day behind the scenes. And that just might make our interest in reading their blogs grow. Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.
The “About” page — also known as the “About Us” page — is one of the most clicked-on webpages on a business website. It’s right up there after the home page. Yet some website owners pass up opportunities to write killer About pages that will help sell services and products, and turn one-time visitors into newsletter subscribers or regular readers. I’ve compiled a list of do’s and don’ts for a compelling About page for small and mid-size business websites: About page do’s Do be brief and credible – The basic information in an About page should be brief, yet offer enough detail to add credibility your business proposition. At a minimum it should address who, what, where and why: What: Give a brief summary of what the business does including products and services Why: Address the visitor’s needs — why should the Web page visitor choose your business, your product, your services, your site? Where: Provide location and contact information (or link to a separate Contact Us page) Who: Provide information about the business owner or team behind the business (more on this below) Do emphasize what’s in it for the visitor – Of all the information on your About page, the most important is relevant information supporting why the Web visitor should hire your company, buy your product, or use your website. For instance, the Copyblogger points to a particularly good About page in a blog and writes it was a good example because it “demonstrated exactly the reason why I would want to read his blog, and at the end, he asked me to subscribe. That’s what the ‘About’ page of your blog is for.” I would add that the same goes for any kind of site — it’s really about appealing to the visitor’s sense of “what’s in it for me.” Do give a glimpse of the people behind the business – Somewhere on your site, perhaps on a separate “About the Team” page, or on a biography page linked from the About page, be sure to tell visitors enough about the people behind the business so that visitors to your site will have faith doing business with your company. People build business relationships with other people. This is especially true for small businesses, where the business owner has such a huge influence on the business. And it’s downright crucial for freelance entrepreneurs and self-employed professionals, where the business owner — and his or her expertise — is the business. About page don’ts Don’t be boring – Make it memorable and make your business stand out. Tell a story, as this article suggests about the founders or the one crucial decision that made the business a success. Or, present your business story with flair and humor as noted in this forum thread so that people care and are interested. Above all, let your personality break out, says Jim Kukral, an online marketing consultant. “I’m a big believer in personality marketing. Let your passion and your thoughts show through,” Kukral says. He points to some of the biggest names as branding themselves through their personalities — names such as Seth Godin, author of Permission Marketing, and author/evangelist/former Apple fellow Guy Kawasaki. Don’t forget to update your About page – What’s as bad as, or worse than, no About page at all? An About page that is obviously out of date. Let’s say you are a consultant and speaker. But the last press mention or speaking engagement listed on your About page is dated 2003. A visitor looking to hire a speaker might jump to any number of false conclusions, assuming that you: do not speak publicly anymore, or have not been very successful at public speaking, or are no longer in business but just have not gotten around to taking the website down. After seeing nothing reasonably current, the visitor quickly clicks back to a search engine and continues looking. An outdated About page could actually lose business for you. Whatever you do, your About page must appear current. If there are date-specific mentions, make sure some are recent. Don’t neglect the rest of the site – This final advice comes from Kukral, who notes that the About page should reinforce your sales strategy — not be a replacement for it. “While you want an effective About page, in the end, don’t make too big a deal out of it,” he says. “People come to a website because they want to solve a problem, or to have fun, or to get information. Step back and evaluate the rest of your website to ensure it: (a) gives visitors what they are looking for, and (b) is good at converting visitors to sales, or capturing leads, or getting subscribers, or otherwise doing what you want it to do.” For more information about creating About pages in websites, see usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s “About Us — Presenting Information About an Organization on Its Website.” Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.
First place Sumerset Custom Houseboats (See ” Web Awards 2000: General Excellence.”) Second place Yadda Yadda Yadda Company: Lûcrum Inc. Web address: www.lucruminc.com Why it won: Its cutting-edge multimedia keep visitors coming back for more. Company revenues: $19 million Site-launch cost: $10,000 Judge’s view: “Nice, nongratuitous use of audio media to create, inform, and maintain [its] customer base.” –Jordan Ayan Ben Franklin’s knowing gaze presides over the home page of Lûcrum Inc., an E-business services company in Cincinnati. Those who are well endowed of wallet will recognize the image from the $100 bill. It’s an appropriate image for the business’s site, given the company’s name, which evokes the idea of lucre (money, to the uninitiated). Lûcrum president, CEO, and founder John Bostick explains that the logo and the name are part and parcel of the company’s motto: “Digital strategies that improve your bottom line.” Bostick’s dry sense of humor belies the seriousness of that message: he almost named his software-development shop Vandelay Industries, after the nonexistent company that George Costanza of TV’s Seinfeld claimed to work for. Although there wasn’t anything wrong with that, Bostick, 41, decided to stick with the existing name, Client Server Associates. In recent years the company has caught the Internet wave and refocused on E-business. The new name — and the Web site — were launched this year. Lûcrum’s site is particularly innovative in its use of multimedia. For example, the company’s customers — and others who want to stay in the know — tune in every week to Lûcrum Radio, a weekly Webcast on such timely E-business topics as customer-relationship management. Users have the choice of tuning in live, listening to an archived version, or picking from more than 40 archived titles and creating a customized CD. “Customers can throw their desired content on a CD and play it in the car on the way to work,” says Bostick. For an investment of 8 to 12 minutes per subject, Lûcrum’s customers can get up to speed on all the latest trends. The site also features a collection of video clips and a media digest of pertinent articles on such topics as E-commerce patents and digital-supply-chain issues. Lûcrum pushes hot content to its customers in a weekly E-mail blast. The idea is to give users a quick overview of what’s going on in business through a mix of media. The site gets between 2,500 and 3,500 unique visitors a month, and users stay an average of four to seven minutes per visit. Lûcrum’s sales team garners at least two good leads a week from the site. That all sounds pretty good, but Lûcrum director of marketing Stephen Smith is never satisfied. Smith and Web-content manager Chuck Fields plan to change the site’s navigation to emphasize content first rather than the glitzy (and slow) Flash intro. Says Bostick, “Above all, we want our site to be functional.” Judge Omar Wasow applauded that move. Said Wasow, “Function [must go] before form on the Web.” –Lauren Gibbons Paul Third place Cross-Country Savings Company: Dandelion Moving & Storage Inc. Web address: www.dickerabid.com Why it won: The site offers a clever way to exploit a new market by matching small moving companies with price-conscious individuals. Company revenues: $1.8 million Site-launch cost: $15,000 Judge’s view: “An innovative application of the Internet-bidding concept in a different market.” –Jordan Ayan Bret Lamperes, owner and CEO of Dandelion Moving & Storage Inc., in Fort Collins, Colo., is a true veteran of the schlepping biz. He was in the third grade when his mother and stepfather launched the company with one small truck. He grew up in the family business and bought it at age 25. Lamperes understands a particular truth about trucking: in prosperous times, people move a lot of freight and business is good. But a slowdown can hit suddenly and create cash-flow crunches for small movers. At the end of 1999, says Lamperes, “everyone was moving a ton of freight because they were worried that Y2K would shut everything down.” But in January 2000, demand crashed and fuel prices jumped. Dandelion lost $100,000 to the freight feast-or-famine syndrome. But Lamperes was not the kind of entrepreneur who sinks all his hopes and fortunes into one venture. He had already started an express courier service (from which he later extricated himself) and a ministorage business. And he had a new plan, too: a kind of reverse auction for people who need movers, in which small moving companies could bid on jobs. Typically, the lowest price would win (although some customers choose movers based on their availability on moving dates). Lamperes hooked up with Web designer Erik Madsen, who was between contracts last fall. Madsen wanted to make some quick cash before the holidays, so he cut Lamperes a deal: $8,000 to design, build, and launch the site. By March, Madsen had a working model for the site, called DickerABid.com. Then came a snafu: the company that had agreed to process credit-card transactions on the site backed out. Lamperes scrambled for a replacement, and in June he launched the site with minimal marketing. He used his existing site, Dandelionmoving.com, to direct traffic to the new site, and he registered DickerABid with search engines. Customers who came upon the site posted their moving jobs, and Dandelion and four other companies began bidding on them. At press time, the site, with one employee working on it full time, had packed in an extra $14,000 in business for Dandelion. Lamperes is looking for financing to build DickerABid into a force to be reckoned with. He’d like to expand his base of movers to 20, and he envisions the advertising potential for moving-related companies, such as those that sell blinds or furniture. In the works: a mapping module that will help movers route their trucks for maximum return. “If you have room in your truck, you can pick up a job for $200 or $400 on the way, and that pays for your fuel,” says the CEO. Our judges liked Lamperes’s line of thinking. “This site builds a market where one never existed, and does so elegantly and with a commitment to integrity and quality that all sites would do well to heed,” said Omar Wasow. –Jill Hecht Maxwell Conversation with Guy Kawasaki Judge: Innovation “I have learned that basketball is a window onto a person’s soul,” says Guy Kawasaki, CEO of Garage.com, a venture-capital investment bank based in Palo Alto, Calif., that serves high-tech start-ups. “Someone who hogs the ball on the court will not be a team player in a company. Someone who doesn’t hustle on the court won’t hustle in business. Someone who cheats — well, you get the picture.” So, too, is a Web site a window onto a person’s or a company’s soul, he says. “When you see a clean, fast Web site, you can assume that the company is pragmatic and useful. When you see a Web site that takes 15 minutes to boot with all kinds of video, music, and multimedia clogging things up, it’s a warning that the company is more flash than cash,” he says. Kawasaki’s roots with the digerati run deep: He spent six years at Apple Computer, leading the charge that put the Macintosh on the map. Yet despite his self-admitted bias toward pie-in-the-sky product development, Kawasaki has a decidedly retro take on Web-site innovation. “You may find this hard to believe,” he says, “but I’m not sure that innovation is the key factor for a Web site. Factors like usability, elegance, and speed are more important.” The sites he chose as winners, he says, merge creativity with pragmatism to facilitate rather than merely dress up business transactions. “The sites that I liked didn’t look as if they were intended to win awards. They looked like they were built to serve customers.” –Thea Singer Annual Web Awards 2000 General Excellence Marketing Customer Service ROI Innovation Community Judges Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.
Remember the “level playing field” theory of the Web? How in cyberspace size didn’t matter because even the most picayune start-up could conceal its lack of heft by developing a sleek Web site? Well, big, it seems, is no longer so beautiful. Now that vast infusions of capital are blowing up many dot-coms to unimaginable proportions, some newcomers to the scene are trying to distinguish themselves by taking the opposite approach: good things, they’re announcing, come in small packages. Exhibit A: DrsFosterSmith.com, a pet-product E-tailer based in Rhinelander, Wis. The site’s name implies that it’s a specialty store on the Web. And to be fair, two true-blue veterinarians did start the business 17 years ago. But this is no modest enterprise — it’s an online superstore run by an $80-million catalog company. The good doctors’ strategy is to marry the best aspects of being big (thousands of products; a 24-hour call center; quick, cheap shipping) with the homegrown benefits of being small (customer intimacy, superior service). And the site assures customers that cofounders Race Foster and Marty Smith, along with three other vets, “personally select or approve every product.” According to Foster, the positioning provides the company with an edge over large, venture-backed competitors like Pets.com and Petopia.com. “We deliberately wanted to be real people — we felt that was our marketing advantage,” he says. Exhibit B: HomeTownStores.com, based in Quincy, Mass. Bob Curry, who owns two Ace Hardware franchises, founded the company with his son and another young entrepreneur. Though he pals around with Web scions like Garage.com founder Guy Kawasaki, Curry has taken pains to brand his business as having the gestalt of a corner store. Yet no corner store shares Curry’s ambitions. His site, which started out selling tools and hardware, now offers 58,000 products, ranging from blankets to chocolates, and has many of the amenities of huge Web sites. Yet its folksy motto is “We run a darn good store, and we’re glad you’re here.” “In my hardware stores we give away free popcorn,” says Curry. “We can’t do that on the Web, but we can bring that philosophy here.” To that end, Curry has invested thousands of dollars in technology that allows virtual salesclerks to greet browsing customers. “I don’t want this to seem like a megamall but like a bunch of village stores,” he says. Why the mania to miniaturize? “If a business shows a proclivity to have a relationship, people will feel magnetized to it,” says Jay Conrad Levinson, author of the Guerrilla Marketing books. “There are smart ways to warm up what is otherwise a cold, impersonal relationship.”
