Tips for Pitching to Investors

September 10, 2008 Dawn 6 Comments

I attended the Funding Universe Live Pitch event here in Portland yesterday, and I found the whole process fascinating. There were 5 companies pitching, about 35 people in the audience, and a panel made up of experts with expertise in venture capital, angel investments, and more (including our favorite Portland tech blogger Rick Turoczy). It was a very fast paced format: 4 minutes to pitch, 3 minutes for Q&A, and 2 minutes for feedback from the panel.

Keep in mind that I am not an investment expert, but I wanted to pass along a few tips based on these 5 pitches and the questions / feedback from the panel of experts.

Get to the point quickly. Granted these were 4 minute pitches, but you never really know how long any meeting with an investor will actually last. They may get pulled away for another reason, and if you didn’t make your key points quickly and early, you may not get to make them. In this case, a couple of these pitches were over before the presenter really got to the meat of the presentation.
Tell them what you do first. One of the companies started the pitch with a very long story about a briefcase, which had several of us in the audience thinking that he was pitching a company that made briefcases here in Oregon. This left all of us confused and took up way too much of his precious time resulting in an incomplete pitch. The feedback from the panel was that you need to capture the attention of the audience in 30 sec with an elevator pitch that includes exactly what you do.
Talk about your background. This is critical for the CEO, since the investors ultimately are investing in people as much as the business. Make sure that you provide an argument for why they should invest in you. Include information other key team members and advisors if you have the time.
Know your competition intimately. You should be able to discuss details about your competition and be very clear about how you will position yourself against the competition. You are not unique, there is competition everywhere, and do not underestimate the importance of the competition.
Be specific about revenue. Yes, you will need to make assumptions and probably a few guesses when putting together your revenue projections, but you still need to do a significant amount of market research and be specific about the revenue opportunity. Narrow it to a niche and dominate rather than claiming to have a very small percentage of an enormous market. Give examples of similar products, track them & use them as base for projections.
Tell them exactly what you need and how they will benefit. Be specific about how much money you need from the investors, how you will use it, and how they will get their return on this investment.
Practice, practice, practice. You need to know your pitch inside and out. You should not be spending time looking at the screen or reading the slides, which suggests that you aren’t comfortable with the material. Practice your pitch until you are completely confident about giving the presentation. If the computer malfunctions, you should be able to continue to make your points without the slides.

For those of you with more expertise in pitching to investors, I am curious what you think. What are your top tips for creating an awesome pitch?

Monitoring Dashboards: Why every company should have one

September 8, 2008 Dawn 23 Comments

I cannot put enough emphasis on the importance of using monitoring dashboards to understand what people are saying about you, your industry, your competitors and more. The information obtained can be used as ideas for blog posts, marketing messages, competitive analysis, product feedback and much more. In addition to providing inspiration, they also help you become more responsive to your customers by knowing when and where people are talking about your company and products. I usually include monitoring dashboards in my consulting proposals for anyone building a new community or trying to have a more effective social media presence through blogging or Twitter, since knowing what people say about your company and your industry is such a critical element of community management, blogging, and other engagements with the community.

Who Should Use the Monitoring Dashboards

It is important to get as many people as possible within your company to use the monitoring dashboards. Each person or function within your company will notice or take action on different elements. As a community manager, I focus on people mentioning us on Twitter or in blogs. Product management and engineering might use the information to gather ideas for new features. Bloggers within the company can respond to what others are saying about your industry. Marketing can see how people are interpreting, misunderstanding, or resonating with the existing marketing messages.

The Format

The format really isn’t that important from my perspective, since these monitoring dashboards can take a variety of forms all with the same content. Each person should be free to customize it and use whatever format is most natural for them. I’ll briefly give a couple of examples of how they can be used to help you picture what they might look like for your company.

Quite a few people like to see it in a dashboard form, similar to the example below for Shizzow (click for larger image).

Other people who already live in their RSS reader would prefer to use their existing tools to monitor what people are saying about their company. In this case, you can maintain an OPML file that each person can import into an existing RSS reader.

Content is King

It is critical that you monitor the right types of content for your situation. In general, I think that most of the monitoring falls into 3 general buckets: vanity, industry and competition. I’ll give some examples of what to monitor in each of these three areas along with some tools you might want to use; however, there are many different methods and sources to monitor with no way to ever cover all of them.

Vanity

Blogs. Use feeds from Google Blog Search, Technorati or similar services to find people mentioning your products, your company, and key people within your company. You should also be using Google Blog Search to find people linking to your blog or websites using the link syntax (link:blog.yourdomain.com).
Twitter. Even if you don’t have a corporate Twitter account or actively use Twitter, I would still monitor what people are saying about you on Twitter. I have a Twitter Sniffer for Brands that I prefer to use, since it picks up a few things that individual services (even the Twitter search) miss.
Depending on your company, you might also want to monitor what people are saying about you on other social sites: YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, Magnolia, etc.

Industry

Thought Leaders. Find at least the top 6-12 thought leaders within your industry and add their blogs to your monitoring dashboard. These people will have general insight into the industry and will provide ideas for future blog posts. You should also be following these people on twitter.
Keywords. Use Google Blog Search or similar services to monitor keywords that apply to your industry to see what other bloggers are saying about your industry. These will need to fairly narrow words and phrases in order to filter out the noise, so pick something more specific to track.
Aggregation. Services like Techmeme can also be interesting ways to find the hot topics in your industry. I recently wrote a Techmeme Keyword Alert Pipe that can used to monitor keywords mentioned on Techmeme.

Competition

Competitor Activity. Put the feeds from your top competitors blogs, news pages, job boards, Twitter, and anything else you can find with an rss feed in your monitoring dashboard to keep track of what they are saying about themselves.
Support. If your competitors have public support sites (discussion boards, Get Satisfaction, etc.), you will want to track those, too.
Keywords. Again, you’ll probably want to track a few keywords (competitor names, products, etc.) to keep a pulse of what others are saying about your competitors.
Individuals. Find a key employee or two from your top competitors who are very active on social websites. Add their twitter feeds, delicious bookmarks or other interesting information to your monitoring dashboards. At a previous job, I gathered a lot of very interesting information from the delicious feed of an employee at one of our competitors who liked to bookmark pages along with notes about how they could use the ideas to improve their product.

Getting Started

Overwhelmed yet? It really isn’t as hard as it sounds. Chances are that you have people in your company who are already tracking some or all of this information. Now, you just need to find them and get them to share with the rest of you.

Here are a few steps to help you get started:

Send this blog post or a similar list of the types of content you need around to your employees and have each of them gather a list of feeds that fall within these three categories.
Have someone very smart and insightful review these lists to pick out the ones that are most relevant and important. You can only track so much, so you are better off focusing on the important ones rather than trying to track everything.
Find someone with advanced knowledge of RSS who can use Yahoo Pipes or similar services to help filter some of the content and then create the dashboards or OPML file.
Distribute the monitoring dashboard to any employee who wants to use it. You may want to spend some quality time with the head of marketing, bloggers, and other key employees to make sure that they understand how to use the dashboard or OPML file.
Revisit the dashboard occasionally to update it with new information. For slow moving industries, you could probably update it once a quarter while others might need to update it every month.

The monitoring dashboard will be completely different for each company. Some will not care about certain types of content that I described above, while your industry may have very specific and unique items that will need to be monitored. Find the content that is right for you and your company, and find a way to monitor it.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

shared links

Community Manager Compensation Study

September 2, 2008 Dawn 9 Comments

I’ve mentioned before about how great it is that ForumOne does focused, relevant, and interesting research on the online community market, and their most recent report is no exception. They just released the Online Community Compensation Study results a week ago. Since I participated in the study, I was able to get a free copy of the entire report, but Bill does a great job of summarizing the key points in his blog post.

The entire study was great, but I was particularly fascinated by two pieces of information:

Salary ranges are all over the board
Women’s salaries are quite a bit less than men’s

Salary Ranges for Community Managers

I’ve always said that community manager salaries cover a broad range, but I was surprised by exactly how broad the range is. My advice to people about community manager salaries is that community managers tend to make $50,000 to $150,000 per year; however, I was really surprised that it wasn’t more of a bell curve. I was expecting to see a few people around $50k, a few people in the $100k+ range and most of the community managers in the $75k range, but the real numbers are nothing like this imagined bell curve as you can see from the graph above.

The number of people in $150k salary range compared to the other salaries was the most surprising of all; however, I expect that these people fall into two groups:

people in higher level strategic positions in corporate environments who head a large organization responsible for the growth and management of multiple communities.
community managers with name recognition or internet celebrity status working in high profile positions as community evangelists

The lower salary ranges, while I didn’t expect them, are actually less surprising. I suspect that many people volunteer their time to help manage communities for little or no salary. The lower end of the range is also likely to include people managing small communities on a part-time basis or in startups.

In general, community managers for technical communities (developers, etc.) tend to make more than end user, social communities. Salary also changes significantly depending on whether the role is really more low-end, tactical moderation or something more strategic, like building a new community or revitalizing a troubled community site. Job experience, scope, management responsibilities, location and how well known the person is can also make a big difference in the salary range as mentioned above.

Salary by Gender

Unfortunately, women are making less than men by what seems like a large margin to me. I’m not even going to speculate on why this might be true because they would just seem like the same old clichés and excuses that we’ve been using since women first entered the workforce. I’ll just say that this makes me sad.

Disclaimer: The graphs come from the research conducted by ForumOne; however, my analysis and commentary is highly speculative based on what I know of the industry, not the data in the report.

For more info

Bill does a great job of summarizing the rest of the key points along more information about the demographic breakdown in his blog post. I would also encourage you to take a look at the Online Community Report blog to learn more about the research at ForumOne. They have some very interesting studies and are doing more detailed research into online communities than any other companies I’ve found so far.

Related Fast Wonder blog posts

rss

Techmeme Keyword Alert Pipe

September 1, 2008 Dawn 1 Comment

Most of us have various feeds that we use to track where people are mentioning our company, products, industry or other areas of interest. It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to track articles hitting Techmeme that have a certain keyword in the title or description of the post. Eureka! The Techmeme Keyword Alert pipe is born.

Usage:

Go to the Techmeme Keyword Alert pipe
Enter your keyword and click “run pipe”
Grab the RSS feed output

Related Fast Wonder blog posts

shared links

Listen to Shizzow on Strange Love Live

August 25, 2008 Dawn

On Friday night, Mark, Sam and I spent a couple of hours with Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal on the Strange Love Live couch to talk about Shizzow. We talked about how it works, interesting things people are doing with Shizzow and our plans for the future. You can listen to the podcast, download it or subscribe to their feed if you want to hear more episodes of Strange Love Live.

Here’s what Cami Kaos had to say about Shizzow (expressed via Toonlet):

A huge thank you to Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal for having us on the show!

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

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Using Twitter for Brands or Corporate Identities

August 19, 2008 Dawn 24 Comments

As most of you know, we launched Shizzow last week, and we began using the Shizzow Twitter account with it. I’ve been doing most (but not all) of the tweeting from the Shizzow account, and I wanted to share some best practices for using a corporate Twitter account effectively without being spammy.

Starting points

This post assumes that you are already familiar with Twitter and are using it for a personal account, but if you are new to Twitter, you’ll want to start by reading Tara Hunt’s Tweeting for Companies 101.

I am also assuming that you have already read my post about Social Media and Social Networking Best Practices for Business. If not, you might want to start there. It has quite a few tips for how to interact with social media sites and online communities that apply to using Twitter, but are not covered explicitly or in any detail in this post.

Best Practices

Know what people are saying about you. After you create your Twitter account and have the name reserved, but before you start using it, set up some tracking tools. You will want to know when people are replying and what people are saying about you on Twitter. Yesterday, I released a Twitter Sniffer for Brands pipe that will help you keep track of the conversations about you on Twitter. I’ve found that the Twitter Search (was Summize) actually misses some Tweets that will be caught by this pipe. This is a copy of the pipe that I am using to keep track of the conversations about Shizzow. I monitor the RSS feeds most of the day when I have time, but no less than 2-3 times per day. For extra credit, you should also be monitoring what people say about you on other blogs (Google Blog Search with RSS feeds or alerts might help).
Respond frequently and sincerely. Knowing what people say is only helpful if you actually use the information and respond to people. You will want to keep the responses public by using @replies wherever possible instead of DMs unless you are exchanging non-public info. Going back to my Best Practices post, you also need to be sincere and remember that it is not all about you when you respond to people. Be honest about what isn’t working well and how you plan to improve your products or services. Help people find information when you see them struggling or asking questions on Twitter. Respond to the tough, critical questions in addition to the easy ones.
Follow back. You will want to follow people back when they follow you on Twitter. It will help you listen and respond while allowing people to send you direct messages. See the ‘don’t proactively follow people’ section below for some cautions about following people.
Have a personality. Companies are made up of people, and you’ll want to show some personality in your tweets. Nobody wants to listen to a corporate drone or regurgitated marketing messages. Personalize the information and act like a real person in your responses.
Variety is Important. Include a wide variety of information in your Twitter stream without focusing too heavily on any one element. I try to shoot for a mix of informational posts (new features, blog posts), links to other people’s blog posts or retweets, @replies to questions, alerts about any issues or downtime for maintenance, meetups, and fun posts.

Things to Avoid

Don’t be a link spam account. This one is a little controversial, and some people will disagree with me here; however, I don’t think that you should use your Twitter account just to post links to blog posts. If people want your blog posts, they can get them via RSS. It is OK to link to informational blog posts, but I always put some text around it so that people can decide whether or not to click through. You should also be linking to posts from other blogs that are relevant to your company or industry as a whole. These should be a fairly small portion of your overall Twitter posts (see the variety is important section above).
Don’t go overboard. You should be providing information and replying to people, but you shouldn’t go overboard. I would say that posting no more than 5-10 times a day on average is a pretty good goal. Some days will have more and others less depending on the situation; however, if you post too much, you’ll start to lose followers who can’t keep up with the volume.
Don’t be too self-promotional. You should use your Twitter account to promote your activities; however, it should be a part of what you do. If every post talks about how awesome your company is, people will lose interest fairly quickly.
Don’t proactively follow people. People will find your Twitter account when you @reply them, and you can use your website / blog to promote it. You don’t want to start by following a few hundred (or thousand) people who don’t care about you or your product. It seems creepy to be followed by a random brand that you aren’t already following, and it just makes you look spammy. See the follow back section above for how to do this right.

For more information

Jeremiah Owyang just wrote a couple of interesting posts about corporate usage of Twitter: Why Brands Are Unsuccessful in Twitter and Web Strategy: The Evolution of Brands on Twitter. They provide some additional information and a slightly different take on how brands use Twitter.

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General

Twitter Sniffer for Brands

August 18, 2008 Dawn 9 Comments

Many of you are probably familiar with my Twitter Reply Sniffer. This pipe is a variant of the Twitter reply sniffer, which only looks for @replies, while the Twitter Sniffer for Brands pipe finds other mentions of your brand on Twitter along with @replies.

I’ve found that many of the Twitter search services are unreliable, and they return different results when searched. Even Twitter’s own search misses some tweets. This pipe currently combines three separate Twitter search engines into one result with duplicates filtered out and everything sorted by date.

Usage:

Go to the Twitter Sniffer for Brands pipe
Enter your Twitter username and click “run pipe”
Grab the RSS feed output

If your brand name is not the same as your Twitter username or if you want to track multiple products, you can repeat the steps above and grab several RSS feeds. If your brand name contains a space, you will want to put it in quotes in the ‘Enter your Twitter username or Company name’ field: “green dragon”, for example.

The pipe will work best for brands that have an uncommon name. You can always clone the pipe and add some filters if you are getting too many irrelevant results.

I want to thank Justin Kistner at Metafluence for creating the first rev of the Twitter Reply Sniffer. Please let me know if you see any issues or bugs by leaving me a comment on this post.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Fast Wonder

Tips for Pitching to Investors

Monitoring Dashboards: Why every company should have one

Recent Links on Ma.gnolia

Social Punishment: The “Bozo” Feature

Pistachio Consulting Inc. » Twitter for Business Reading List

Media

Google Chrome and the future of browsers | FactoryCity

12 New Rules of Working You Should Embrace Today | Zen Habits

Group Studies

Community Manager Compensation Study

Techmeme Keyword Alert Pipe

Recent Links on Ma.gnolia

Strange Love: strange love episode: shizzow!

Cyborg Anthropology in Slightly More than 140 Characters | Amber Case, Cyborg Anthropologist

Experience: The Blog: Consumers in Charge: Shaming Brands with Social Media

Online Community: Compensation Study – Online Community Report

Listen to Shizzow on Strange Love Live

Recent Links on Ma.gnolia

Why Brands Are Unsuccessful in Twitter

Online Community Governance: The Project Brief – Online Community Report

What Makes for a Good Blog? | 43 Folders

Experience: The Blog: Eight Considerations to Help Branded Communities Succeed

Iterasi Evolves Into A Must Have Research Tool

Twitter Sniffer for Brands

Open source, research, and other stuff I'm interested in posting.