One of my top employees, a veteran of startups and the startup investment worlds, frequently emphasizes with me the need for employees to grow as fast as the startup they’re working for. In his words, “if you want to grow at 40-50% then your employees need to grow at 40-50%.” It’s a powerful point, but…
One thing most entrepreneurs remain concerned about at all times is “feeding the funnel.” In other words, introducing prospects to the product or service being offered. The more qualified prospects exposed to your offering, the more sales you are likely to convert. This same concern crosses the boundaries between different types of businesses. B2B and…
As I was writing about the “hit and run” web traffic phenomenon (“Traffic for Traffic’s Sake“), it made me think about the value of loyalty. That post addressed social network traffic and how many visitors from sites like Digg don’t provide any value to a web site because they simply enter quickly and leave just…
Words matter. They communicate meaning from one individual to another. Used effectively, the message will be clear and understandable. Sometimes, however, words can serve to confuse. Or worse by leaving the message sender and its recipient with different understanding of the meaning. I got to thinking about this when I saw an item in yesterday’s CustomScoop…
Yesterday I spent some time thinking about saying “no.” It started with Fred Wilson’s blog post on the subject. He talked about a board meeting he attended where he learned that one of the company execs has a favorite saying: “the best answer to most questions is no.” I had never quite thought of it…
Over the past couple of weeks I have begun to dip my toe into the Second Life waters to find out what it is all about. For those not familiar with it at all, Second Life is the hot “virtual world” that has people talking. Essentially, it is an online game where you have the…
Steve Rubel essentially puts the question today: is pay for performance journalism right or wrong? He specifically discussed ZDNet which now reportedly compensates its writers, in part, based on how popular their blogs are. Here’s an excerpt from Steve’s take: Many of the ZDNet blogs are written by veteran journalists turned bloggers. So, I don’t…
Shel Israel’s post over on Global Neighborhoods a couple of days ago got me to thinking. The thrust of his posting was that a lot of "recovering publicists" (his words) were now taking to providing PR services in the blogging/new media space. "We all see huge opportunities and expect to be joined by many other…
Steve Rubel seems to be spending the last week of the year writing obituaries as part of what he hopes will become self-fulfilling prophecies. First, he killed the page view. And now it is the term "social media" that he intends to send to the grave. I’ve already opined on the page view, now let…
Hitwise reports that for the first time Google Blogsearch has generated more pages views in a week than Technorati. So Technorati is now the second place blog search web site, right? Maybe, maybe not. Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch points out that the comScore numbers disagree. Unfortunately, the comScore numbers appear to be highly erratic…