Seth Levine's VC Adventure

Do you 'get' new media?

I had the chance last week to speak to a group of non-profit executive directors from about 80 local Denver/Boulder/Longmont non-profit agencies as part of a session sponsored by the United Way on “Getting the Word Out – a Mass Communication Seminar”.  I sat on a panel with a bunch of local newspaper editors which consisted of an hour of the editors talking about the best way to fax or e-mail them stories so they’d get their attention followed by 15 minutes of me saying that instead of all of that, their organizations could actually be their own media, that there was larger conversation going on across a much broader community which they could/should tap into, and that perhaps rather than pitching stories to newspapers they should think of the newspapers as added distribution for the stories they’ve already created.  

Don’t get me wrong – I think print media is great and I enjoy reading (on-line, of course) many of the local papers in my area.  But the power of new media is that it takes away the control that traditional media has on the flow of news (not to mention the determination of what is news-worthy) and puts it into the hands of the masses.  And while a story in the local paper may reach one set of constituents, a well organized (but not very costly) web site (or even just an organization blog that doubles as its web site) can get multiple messages out to multiple constituents (i.e., flickr photos of a recent fundraiser; a MySpace page to recruit college-age volunteers, dynamic web site or blog for posting updates, responding to national stories, etc.). My message was really that there’s a whole lot going on out there that non-profits (or any organization) can tap into to raise the profile of their group or cause and ultimately spread their word more broadly.

The key take-away for me, however, was not all the great things that organizations can do to broaden the reach of their message or influence the media related to their work, but rather how foreign this all was to this group of relatively tech savvy execs.  Most had some kind of web-site, although the vast majority didn’t update the content on the site even monthly; and while more than half had heard of blogging (and other forms of new media), almost none had any experience either reading, commenting on or contributing. For me this was a fundamental disconnect and good to keep in mind for future conversations. I sometimes take for granted that this world in which I spend so much time has gone mainstream, but the reality is that it hasn’t yet. I was thinking of all these great Web2.0-ie things they could do to broaden their web presence, engage their constituents in conversation and generally spread the good word; they were thinking “what’s blogging again?” 

Slow and steady wins the race….

Blogging stats

Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, has another of his series on the evolution of the blogosphere up on his site.  Most interesting to mere were the results on the dominant languages of blogging.

Here are his key takeaways (quoted directly):

- Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs.

- Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.

- Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days.

- About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts.

- About 4% of new splogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.

- There is a strong correlation between the aging and post frequency of blogs and their authority and Technorati ranking.

- The globalization of the blogosphere continues. Our data appears to show both English and Spanish languages are a more universal blog language than the other two most dominant language, Japanese and Chinese, which seem to be more regionally localized.

- Coincident with a rise in blog posts about escalating Middle East tensions throughout the summer and fall, Farsi has moved into the top 10 languages of the blogosphere, indicating that blogging continues to play a critical role in debates about the important issues of our times.

TypePad and Feedburner integration

Finally!  FeedBurner and TypePad are now integrated.  Before yesterday, if you had a TypePad blog (like mine) and burned your feed through FeedBurner you were only taking partial advantage of FeedBurner's services (TypePad generates a number of feeds in different formats, and up to now, FeedBurner only captured one of these feeds).  Not only will this give you a better view of your subscriber base and their behavior on your blog, but it will also allow TypePad bloggers to take full advantage of FeedBurners's advertising and feed management services.

You can read the FeedBurner announcement here and the SixApart announcement here (along with instructions on how to get your TypePad account fully integrated).

Syndicate NYC Thoughts

Here are a couple of high level thoughts on the Syndicate Conference held a few weeks ago in New York (ok – I’m weeks late getting this up, but the next Syndicate conference isn’t for another 6 months, so from that perspective I’m early!).

First – Here’s the conference website
Next – Here’s IDG’s marketing spin post conference (which does highlight some of the announcements that came out of the week)
Finally – Here’s the conference blog site

My quick 3 take-away’s were as follows:

- there was a lot of traditional media there (Hearst, USA Today, etc.) – early adopters but mainstream nonetheless

- there were a number of large companies poking around (for example both FedEx and UPS where there)

- very few VC’s showed up; I only saw the group from my panel presentation. not sure if this was due to location (NYC) or lack of start-ups (although there were several there, some of whom were venture backed already, some of whom were not), but interesting to note.

Its just technology - comments

Andy had a good comment to my "its just technology" post, which I've been meaning to pull up to the front page.  Here it is:

I think this is a wider issue. I believe that most, if not all, early stage high tech companies suffer from the "what it is" versus "what it does" disease when selling their products.  Only the early adopter prospect who "gets it" will respond to this sales approach.  Many prospects that should be great targets may get excited about the hot technology but won't understand how it benefits them or solves any problem they care about.  They will relegate the offering to "nice to have" and won't buy - often after pulling the salesperson through a several months-long sales cycle.  I think this failure to move from product-centric to customer-business-problem-centric underlies the problem getting sales traction that a lot of new companies have - even though they are selling great technology.  So, it's a survival issue not only for new technologies but for the companies that develop them.

Syndicate - NYC

I'll be at Syndicate NY next week.  They're actually giving me a speaking role (scary, I know - something about the future of Syndication . . .).  Drop me a line of you're going to be there too.

parlez-vous blog?

Dave Sifry from Technorati put up another in his ‘state of the blogosphere’ series. This one has some pretty interesting data on the language of the blogosphere. Being a narrow-minded American I naturally assumed that English was the dominant language of the blogosphere (it certainly was by far the dominant language of the early Internet). It’s not. Not even by a longshot. English doesn’t have anything close to a plurality in the blogosphere. It’s not even the most common language of blogging (Japanese is). Hmm.

Back on the wagon

Wow. Has it really been a month since I posted? Lots of excuses about being busy and traveling a lot, but I’ve done that before and not stopped blogging. Not sure what happened – sorry about that (for those of you that noticed, that is).

One interesting observation about my unplanned hiatus: When I’m actively blogging, I often find myself viewing the world through the “blog lens”. Those of you that are bloggers will get this right away – what I’m referring to is the tendency to start looking at everything in terms of whether it would make a good blog post or not. Kind of a funny way to look at the world, but it happens when you blog a lot – probably a combination of looking for new content and more generally a rewiring of your brain to think about all things in the context of how you’d describe it to someone else. The halflife of thinking this way was probably about a 4 days. By week 2 of not blogging, I had kicked the habit - clearly reinforcing my not blogging. A good reason to not go more than a week without posting. . .

Lifescience blogging

Despite being in pretty much separate areas of technology investing, I continue crossing paths with Adam Rubenstein in a way that reminds me how small the Denver/Boulder business community really is. Adam is involved in a number of local bio related initiatives - MycoLogics, High Country Ventures and the Fitzsimons BioBusiness Incubator to name a few.

We recently had an e-mail exchange on how he might encourage more thought leaders and venture capitalists from the bio-sciences to participate in the blogosphere and I suggested that he consider using his own blog as a platform and invite VCs and business leaders to write guest posts. You can imagine my surprise today when I saw that he actually took my advice and started a guest blogger series. The first entry in the series is by Harry Ross from Aweida Venture Partners. Harry is a well respected life sciences investor and always an interesting guy to talk with. You can check out his post here. Take a look at Adam’s full blog here.

etcetera

I’ve put up a back page on my blog where I can play around with new stuff -- called etcetera. There’s a permanent link to it just below the ‘e-mail me’ on the top of the left nav bar.

I’m just starting to put some things up (tag cloud, a swicki and my del.icio.us cloud). If you bump into stuff that looks fun, send me a note about it. I’ll put up some reminder posts as I populate the page with new ideas.