I was in a roundtable the other day with some smart folks and mentioned that I have never worked “for the man”, besides a short internship after college I have been self-employed my entire professional life.

Afterwards someone asked me if I felt it was a positive or negative not having the corporate experience. I gave some quick answer about not missing out on fluorescent lights and cubicles. But a minute later while walking to the car I gave him another answer after processing the question a bit more.

I feel I am at an advantage because I do not have any preconceived notions.

Notions like how a company should be run

Think about it. Sure I had to learn some things the hard way. But overall I was free to create a company that was not weighed down with baggage brought with me from a previous experience.

What’s your experience? If you left a corporate job to go out on your own.. did you feel free to design the company of your choice, or did you have  a “this is the way it is done” mindset? Good and Bad.

Old Adage it is who you know and the circles you run in..

Saw this post and it started me thinking.

We have had some conversations about seeking investment for our company page.ly, but are really too busy growing it to spend much time on it [raising capital]. We are profitable, acquiring new customers daily, and have a steady up and to the right revenue graph, and we are doing it all bootstrapped with next to $0 in marketing outlay.

Actual Snapshot from our page.ly dashboard

Since we have not really dedicated ourselves to seeking investment, this is is really just me thinking out loud: Seems the techstars and Ycom‘s of the world are the way to get a startup funded these days. I wonder how they would work for a company like ours that is perhaps a bit further along path.. (moved past the idea stage into a cashflow business) but not as sexy a model as the next whatever. I would be happy for the advice and mentorship, but really seems  the “street cred” and connections/introductons that come with going through a program like that are of the most value.

We are flying under the Radar… I kind of like it.  But I struggle with the question of what could we do with a money injection, how far could we go, and how fast.

I see some of these companies getting funding, and of course I am not privy to their board meetings but I ask if the world needs another 1 of those, or how do they plan on making money. As far as I am concerned the “we need 10 million users then we can monetize with ads” model is dead.. but some folks are still investing in those ideas it seems.

Just random thoughts.. back to work.

SXSW was sic.

Got a little refresher course in networking. And here is my take-away:

Dont talk about business, or ask “So what do you do?”.

It seems like a natural question.. you are at a business conference with lots of others from out-of-town. So asking what someone does or where they are from seems logical..

All I can say is some of the best interactions I had with folks had nothing to do with business. Example: I met someone in the VIP area of a party I was at and we spent the better part of 10 minutes having a great and engaging conversation about Magic and Bird (for you kids.. best NBA sports rivalry of all time). Never caught his name… because at a pause in the conversation I asked what he did.. he deflected with a nonsensical answer and bailed. Oops.. Not going to namedrop but later I find out he was bigtime.

Also I spent the better part of 20 minutes talking with a prominent VC about our shared passion of road racing our cars… He mentioned we should connect later and I went into business mode talking about investment for our business, he went cross-eyed on me and said “Who cares about business, I was talking about cars.. We should go out to the track together sometime”.

Lesson Learned..  I should have known better. I have been an entrepreneur selling my services, and now my product (pagely) for the better part of 8 years and in that time have learned that personal relationships come first, before the business. Seems I just forget that point twice over the weekend.

MoTown was machine, a solid gold hit making machine.

Talent + Creative/Catchy Musical Hooks + A marketing/promotion machine = solid gold hits for 40+ years. Just from 1961 to 1971, Motown had 110 top 10 hits. They developed a repeatable hit making process, a formula, a hit machine. Talent goes in once side, Hits exit the other.

MoTown also led the charge integrating black music mainstream. They launched acts like Stevie Wonder and The Supremes.. exposing “black” music to white listeners everywhere.  This was pre civil-rights. Can you say Disruptive? Game changers.

Is it possible to find a similar formula for business? A process that put’s smart talent and ideas in one end, and cranks out hit companies on the back side? Is this what the likes of TechStars, and Y Comb are doing? I dont know. Just asking the question.

Say a startup business formula does exist. Can it exist here in the desert?

Could the Fractals, Dojo’s, Gangplanks, organize the technical and creative talent? Can the AIGA’s and AZIMA’s lasso in the hardcore creatives and digital marketers? Can we entice the TIEAZ’s and other business development, management, and sales people away from their Paradise Bakeries to co-mingle with the other parties? Could we get the ATIFs, Arizona Angels, SociallLeverages of the valley to invest? Finally can we get the local governments to understand their future tax base will be built on upon the jobs created by these these other groups working together?

Can these moving parts and energy forces be harnessed into some sort of formula, where each feeds off of and feeds into the other?

Smart people with solid business ideas, partnered with and advised by smart business people, with their ideas refined and executed by smart technical and creative classes, funded by local money, and supported by local government.

Could such a machine exist in Arizona? Naw, Lets build more houses.

Regardless of what you may have heard I am not part of any secret society that is orchestrating or guiding the tech community in Phoenix. Nor is Derek Neighbors, Sean Tierney, Francine Hardaway or anyone else that you would think; if there was a secret society they would be on it.

While #phx DOES have a passionate group of individuals that are working towards their ideal of a better connected, better funded, more tech {web} driven Phoenix. The only thing secret about it is that they really wish more people were involved in pursing the lofty goal of making the greater Phoenix area a haven for smart folks with passion and ideas to succeed.

Scary shit huh.

As most of you peeps know. Ward Andrews and I made Suntweets many months ago. We have/had plans to take it further into more of a real time, live game -> social media hybrid experience.

These cool cats at http://www.fanchatter.com/ have now done it, With funding from Y Comb.

Another Classic coulda, woulda, shoulda but didn’t and now someone else has. Great for FanChatter, their investors, and sports fans.. and a missed opportunity for me.

Lesson to me: STFU and DO IT.

Lesson to you: STFU and DO IT.

I am not going to pine on about the state of startup funding in Phoenix… I’ll leave that to Derek.

So.. thought I would just post a list of links on projects I have been working on the last few months. In no particular order.

• bestpartyever.com is a party planning and party ideas community My wife @bizgirl owns. Re-launched in Jan.
• Sunstweets.com and Cardstweets.com are twitter aggregator’s we (Social Sports Marketing) put together to monitor conversation, later we teamed with justsignal to power them
• Helios Agency is a new joint partnership between my firm and Drawbackwards
• Just re-launched UltimateRvRentals.com for a client (we built it back in 2006, did a backend overhaul)
• Twit.pix.ly lets you rate twitter avatars
• pix.ly lets you rate flickr photos
• BestSEOEver.com, BestStacheEver.com, Mulletwars.com, Bestcostumeever.com are silly sites I put up for fun using the pix.ly engine
• Sxswcards.com is back up for sxsw09, business card collective contest.

So that was my Nov-March, what did you do?

Last week we re-purposed a twitter aggregation service we created (http://sunstweets.com) for the superbowl. Cardtweets utilized a set filters to pick out individual tweets from the global stream matching Arizona Cardinals, and Superbowl related terms. At the peak the filters were picking up 48 tweets/minute.  These are all displayed in the traditional twitter UI style in chronological order as they came in. It was interesting to watch the twitter stream on my iPhone as I was watching the game in real time.

The usage and feedback of the site itself was all positive. With many people asking when they will see a myteamtweets.com  in the future. So first I thought I would breakdown cardstweets a bit more to gain a better understanding of what happens when one attempts to track the swarm of conversation over a real life sporting event.

1. People will talk about anything. There were tweets ranging from in depth (140 characters…) analysis of the Steelers defensive stand on a particular play, all the way to people not even watching the game talking about the traffic snarls in Tampa around the arena. The peripheral conversations are happening in nodes surrounding the main dialog. How does a sports franchise direct and channel this conversation inwards to engage the fringe?
2. Fans now control the brand. I think this is the biggest takeaway here. There is an very active and lively group of sports fans that are on twitter, and they want to evangelize their home team. In a sense they are taking the conversation with them, outside the arena, outside their living room, outside the pub.. and taking it directly to other fans across time and space. The sports franchises no longer control the brand, or the conversation. The fans now dictate in real time, what the brand is, and what the brand means. The Cardinals played a heck of a game.. and they built huge brand loyalty from their efforts as evidenced by the overwhelmingly positive conversation. Even though they lost, they scored major points for giving it a great effort. Even Steeler fanz were offering props to the Cards for such a good game. But see, the community decided this, not the Cardinals.  The community came to a consensus thru the dialog that it was a valiant effort, and worthy of praise, even if they did not win.

   As an aside, the same thing is happening with the Suns right now in reverse, the fanz are re-branding the Suns as a lost team. Whether it is fair weather fanz turning south, or the die-hards giving up.. the Suns brand equity is in peril. Even though they still sell out games, and sell jerseys.. the dialog is not trending in their favor.

3. Huge opportunity exists for cross-over conversation/media. With the fanz actively engaging, in real time.. outside the walls of the arena, there is low hanging fruit available for the franchises and leagues to pick at will. Our sports marketing company (http://socialsportsmarketing.com) is creating tools and communities where this can happen. Sports franchises have the ability to reach out from the TV screen and make meaningful brand connections thru simlu-cast video, live-blogging, twitter, photo sharing communities, SMS, etc. HINT: building another walled garden, a branded membership based fan community is NOT the right approach. Go to where the fan is, at that very instance.. and engage. Don’t force them to come to you. Make it easy for your fan to communicate., within the communities they already reside in.
4. More signal less noise. The trick with engagement across multiple channels is distilling the message down to cut thru the noise. Does a sports organization need 50 voices? or 1 strong one? Where is the point of focus? The Superbowl is a media frenzy, the advertisers and the league have 1000′s of touchpoints surrounding the game, what meaningful impressions can be made when the secret sauce is spread so thin? Pick the top online touch points, and direct the fringe to them.. utilizing communities and the inherant social graph of the individual fan.
5. Do more with more. Identify the signals that are being received, and amplify them. The @superbowl twitter account I think popped up 4, maybe 5 days before the game.  They were late to the discussion…(only 2,987  followers). Missed opportunity this year, but they are primed for next. Admittly @cardstweets was late as well.

So in summary.. All the major sports are feeling their way thru this social media thing. Some like the Phoenix Suns, are doing it a bit better and faster then others. The energy needs to come from the top down, the fans are already talking, and shaping the brand of the players, teams, and leagues. The top execs need to make “meaningful online social engagement” a top priority or risk not having a say at all.

What does community mean to you?

That word is thrown around a lot in our industry, building communities and all that. I think sometimes it is used as an empty buzzword, and other times as an accurate description of a gathering of like minded people.

The community, any community is made of disparate souls with their own self serving interests, but those interests more or less align themselves in some fashion that provides the glue to keep the community together and hopefully growing. As long as the community means something, and I dare say stands for something “bigger”, a higher purpose if you will, it will flourish. The nay-sayers, dividers, and ignorant take the stupid with them as they leave.

Within a broader community like business, there are subsets like the web crowd, the retailers, and the bean counters. At Social Media Club tonight, (after Sally‘s awesome preso), Francine Hardaway brought up an issue that faces all communities: how to outreach from the subset to influence, educate, and embrace the broader community that shares common edges with the subset. What is the answer here?

At Gangplank, the focus is community. Nurturing a new one into life.  People there are looking to do something bigger, better, awesomer, with more collaboration, more outreach, more education, and less bullshit. The form of community outreach there involves an open door that invites everyone to participate. There are photographers, web marketers, muscians, and the occasional mortgage meltdown refugee sharing the free co-working space. How do we take it to the next level? How does a group of smart, driven people break down the walls that from our side seem paper thin, but from others; appears as thick and unyielding as a brick. Does one build a ladder over the wall, a bridge around it, or do you quietly infiltrate the headquarters of the old guard establishment and drop a few percussion grenades to snap them out of their idea and energy deprived coma?

At what level does community leadership become a hindrance? Is taking a hands off approach akin to letting the insane run the asylum? Or is it necessary for some form of leadership, to establish a clear mission and objective that everyone can rally behind. You need the detail minded and big thinkers,  as well as the disruptors and technicians. What is that happy medium between input and mutiny?

One advocate shouting from the soapbox touches few, an army marching in the streets stops traffic. A coordinated campaign of education makes communities grow.

Welcome to the knowledge economy.  Participate, collaborate, and grow.. or die tryin.

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