Startup Revolution

People Marketing shares hard won tips, ideas and stories about loving, curating, listening to your people to create winning online marketing.

We included this link in our Startups Revoluiton Scoop.it because startups are so WIDGET focused they forget PEOPLE provide the context and emotional connection needed to SELL. It is understandable that YOU love your widget, but your customers love THEMSELVES much more.

Creating "like me" moments mean your "product" becomes a movement your customers want to join. This journey from YOU and THEM (customers) to WE is the most important journey every website and all marketing is on whether the creators know it or not.  

Content curation is key for Small To Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs) online success & Scoop.it's new Content Director makes curation a marketing reality.

Wiki-ization of Marketing: Moving From Brands To Communities
1,342 views

As digital marketing becomes more about communities and less about control Wiki-like meritocracy is taking over.
http://shar.es/1nMGyS

Invisible Giant: Why the new SEO Is So Hard To See
2,317 views

The new SEO is being obscured by the social / mobile web, Google changes and the rapidly changing nature of content marketing & curation.
http://shar.es/1nM6nl

Tomorrow's Ecommerce Today
1,318 views

Is it possible to design tomorrow's ecommerce website today? Yes
http://shar.es/1nM6rX

Great Daniel Ek +Spotify Founder Interview On Utilities As Experiences
Great conversation with Spotify's Swedish founder on +The Charlie Rose Show… - Martin W. Smith - Google+

Please Note: Waitlist Thanks to our friends at FedEx Curagami’s agency business, our incubation lab where we invest in customers and they invest in us, is currently CLOSED. With 4 active clients we have no room at the Inn. This doesn’t mean we can’t help. We have friends in every aspect of online marketing. Friends …

We are emotional people on a spiritual journey. Why is logic the most common approach to online selling? 5 Tips so your digital marketing makes less sense.

Startups BELIEVE in the widget. Talk to any Venture Capitalists and they will tell you they invest in teams not ideas. Ideas change. Teams capable of making the many pivots any new idea needs are worth their weight in gold.

Go to 100 startup websites and teams, if they are there, are pushed to the background as the WIDGET takes center stage. This is because we believe the way to "make a sale:" is to use logic.

Logic is tyranny when what we seek is emotional connection . This post shares 5 tips to avoid logic's tyranny:

* Listen More.

* Control Less, Collaborate More.

* As community forms listen and curate.

* Empower your advocates and Sherpas.

* MOVEMENTS not campaigns.

Startups need to forget the widget and remember we are spiritual beings having a human experience not the other way around.

Lunch With Smart Dogs at Triangle Startup Factory
Kip Frey (www.linkedin.com/pub/kip-frey/36/b09/384 pictured in middle above) is a smart entrepreneur who one might say has "gone to the dogs". Kip spoke at Free Lunch Friday at +Triangle StartUp Factory today about Dognition (https://www.dognition.com/ ).

Dognition is a Myers/Briggs personality test for dogs. During an hour long fascinating conversation Kip made several points we've heard consistently from Chris and Dave at TSF such as:

* Ideas that "seem true" create their own momentum.
* Look for ideas that "create a new category".
* Ideas with great partnership hooks work best since partners help create scale with OPL (Other Poeple's Lists) and OPC (Other People's Content).

Dognition is a cool idea since we humans are always anthropomorphizing our animals. Now you can do a test AT HOME with your dog to figure out which one of 9 classifications your dog's personality falls within. You can compare your dog to dogs in your area, across the country or possibly the world (soon Kip mentioned they are already speaking to interested parties in China).

I found Kip and Dognition's #brandingstrategy fascinating. Kip and the team at Dognition spent a year working on the #DIY version of their test. They needed enough data shared by "citizen scientists" after taking their test that the hard work created in the lab held up even in the DIY home version.

"I think people are more interested in their dogs than in their DNA," Kip said at one point and I agree. There are 70M dog owning families in America (so one in three roughly) and each year brings 7M new dogs to market.

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Branding            vs                   Scale

The tension between creating a brand with meaning and the scale necessary to support that meaning was interesting. Kip decided to do a deal with Purina One to gain scale. Sounds like he had to defend the sizable deal with his board because they were worried about "brand purity".

#branding is tricky. Too much scale too fast could marginalize the brand. The science at the core of the test is something that could be seen as goofy in the wrong context. By doing an exclusive with Purina One for 2014 Dognition gets millions in partner ad dollars - the test is a freebie if dog owners complete a 28 day "Purina One 28 Day Challenge" (http://www.purinaone.com/dogs/28-Day-Challenge/main-page ).

Cool promo and great legitimacy for Dognition and possibly just the right amount of scale. Partnerships bring interesting challenges. Dognition can get swallowed whole by Purina, and can anyone spot the BIG #socialmarketing error on the Purina One challenge page? http://www.purinaone.com/dogs/28-Day-Challenge/main-page

ERROR - Love that Purina is using Tweets, but seeing 46 day old Tweets HURTS the social legitimacy of their campaign. A 46 day old tweet from a customer is fine IN ROTATION, but what if the only representation I see has old content?

When curating old and new social content from Purina and users always have something in the roll that is current, only several hours hold max. Using customer Tweets is brave, but stale in its current implementation. Even if the Purina staff creates Tweets today that related to something that happened 46 days ago have something current on social.

Building  a #story off of #UGC is what +CrowdFunde is all about. Conversations require different #contentcuration and #contentcreation than promotional push. Purina One's misuse of #SMM is a perfect validation for a tool like CrowdFunde that helps create, curate and converse with the most valuable content on earth - User Generated Content (UGC).

By isolating old tweets without a clear understanding about why they are there, other than being self congratulatory, Purina destroys what they hope to build - active, alive conversations.

We think Dognition will have great conversations since learning your dog's personality feels like something MADE for social shares, but HOW you share social conversations is tricky as a big brand like Purina proves. Turning conversations into #engagemn and #loyalty is trickier still.

Cool talk today with many lessons for #startups and #Internetmarketers . Dognition is going to be on 60 Minutes in April and they will have a reality TV show on Nat Geo Wild so conversations will happen. Team at CrowdFunde wishes our fellow Durham #startup   luck and a free CrowdFunde installation if they want to discover how to build community on a scale hard to knock down or duplicate...because building ongoing engagement after initial novelty is based on the quality, frequency and value of Dognition's (and any brand's) CONVERSATIONS!

Thanks to Kip for speaking with TSF startups today! Marty

PS. Kip asked for feedback on the Dognition site and since I know there are a lot of ecommerce conversion experts that follow me send me your thoughts and I will pull together 5 to 10 "would be better if" kinds of feedback for https://www.dognition.com/ .