Gravitas client, Thwapr, did a great job the other night presenting at the August NY Video Meetup at AOL headquarters. Make sure to check out this great write up from NY Convergence!
CTO Eric Hoffert (at podium) explains Thwapr with SVP Leigh Newsome (credit: Lauren Keyson)
Image via CrunchBase
Lets see what the numbers say. A great post on TechCrunch, about TechCrunch called The Math of TechCrunch, Part 1: Is TechCrunch Still About Startups? was written by the founder and CEO of Breakthrough.com, Mark Goldenson. Mark and his buddy, Matthew Mengerink the GM of PayPal, executed a painstaking exercise of analyzing all of TechCrunch’s stories from launch until now to track the type of coverage the blog has posted over the years. I give these two tremendous credit for the amount of work they put into this and I give credit to TechCrunch for posting it. Part I shows the big guys are winning, but maybe this data analysis will help create more room for startup coverage going forward.
Image by Ross Mayfield via Flickr
A week ago, I attended TiEcon, a non-profit group of entrepreneurs, professionals and VCs, that host a pretty well attended conference every year in Silicon Valley. This year, the turnout was fantastic with over 3,500 attendees from start-ups to established companies alike. There were a few concurrent tracks that covered everything from mobile to social to green tech. There were also a few great panels where VCs shared their thoughts on how to raise money to what they look for in companies they do invest in.
The thing I like the most about this conference is that it is a great place to connect with folks who are passionate about Silicon Valley and the culture of entrepreneurship and hard work that is exhibited by every company representative I ran into. Almost everyone had a battle story or a success story or just a personal story that resonated with what the Valley represents – and that is this is where cool stuff happens; where the next big idea that can change the world is sitting inside the head of someone next to you! And at TiEcon, you can hear about it first!
Gravitas Communications is passionate about social, social networking and collaboration. We work with a couple of companies that are on the cutting edge of how people interact, entertain and connect so I was very excited that TiEcon had a track completely dedicated to social. Every one of these tracks were standing room only as this is a hot topic everywhere. For me, this was an especially cool moment as a company we work with, Saba, moderated the Social Media Marketing panel.
This panel had three awesome professionals sharing their war stories on how their companies use social media to increase brand awareness, stickiness and even drive customer acquisition. Some interesting things were shared that are of high interest to all enterprises, but particularly for those targetting consumers. A few findings from the panel: (1) using social games to help sell merchandise works. Nick Seth from The Gap said that they offer discount coupons for merchandise inside some of the Facebook games; (2) advertisers likes Facebook because of the great targeting that can be done and; (3) while social media marketing is growing, it is still a very small part of the overall marketing spend. In fact, many companies do not currently use social media as a marketing tools at all and B2B companies are about 18 months behind B2C companies in leveraging social media. Folks seem to agree that until there is better tracking and a better sense of ROI, companies will not be going full steam ahead.
I had a great time at TiEcon and met some great companies and entrepreneurs. The VIP dinner was awesome and I heard that the Bollywood themed party concluding the conference was pretty cool, too. I’ll be looking forward to next year’s. Until then….
Image by Yang and Yun's Album via Flickr
Here in Silicon Valley, there are many informal gatherings of groups formed by colleagues who started or worked for the same company for any length of time. I belong to a couple of these and it’s always nice to get together and catch-up. I recently went to Buzz’s “Rites of Spring” get-together, an annual gathering of folks who at one point worked with Buzz.
Now, who is Buzz? Buzz is an old-timer at Apple. This cool dude started at Apple in 1985 and stayed there for over 13 years. As a leader in the engineering team at Apple, Buzz probably worked on many of the products that passionate Apple fans loved (even before the iPods and iPads came out). And many of those who worked with him at Apple and elsewhere are loyal admirer, including me and I worked with Buzz when Gravitas was on the VoloMedia account.
It was very nice to spend a sunny, California afternoon with some of the brightest brains in the Valley. No doubt, many of those who attended were the brains behind the things we so love today at Apple and elsewhere (yes, this gathering had an overwhelming number of engineers from Apple past and present). With good food, beer and great conversation, who can ask for anything more??
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By now you are probably hearing about a big update Google has made to its natural search algorithm. The company is calling the system tweak the Panda Update. This has wreaked havoc on some big sites such as Mahalo, reportedly driving a whopping 70% drop in traffic.
So what is the Panda update? Basically, Panda buckles down on the junk that has started to infiltrate search results and starts to take a harder line on ridding natural search of all the spammy, junk farmers (link, content, etc.) that clutter the Web. We became very accustom to the seemingly clairvoyant search results Google would churn up and then things became a bit cluttered. It was in response to user grumbling and a growing know-how of how to game the system (i.e. check out stories on JCPenny, Forbes and Overstock.com on how they were punished by the Google gods) that inspired Panda.
I was at aniBreakfast meeting yesterday with three speakers who addressed some of the changes and offered a few practical tips, although I will say the best post I have seen came from an attendee of yesterday’s event, Alex Sepulveda. Now with www.rewiremarketing.com, Alex is a former Googler and has some good insights to share: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=136399373098300. I have also found a good article at SearchEngineWatch by Kristi Hines. She spells it out pretty clearly.
In a nutshell, here is what we need to be mindful of when wrestling with the Panda:
- Scrap the junk – high quality pages with relevant content are going to get ranked higher. Conversely, if you keep the low quality pages, it could drag your whole site down in the ranks.
- More is Still More – keep generating meaningful, relevant content, filled with real links. There are no short cuts to quality!
- Remove Auto Generated Pages– if you are doing this, stop. It will drag you down. And most auto generated pages aren’t fooling anyone anyway.
- Sweep for Broken Links– housekeeping people! Xenu is a good tool for this.
Generally speaking, I think the Panda shake up will greatly benefit us all and I applaud Google for its efforts to take the trash out!
Gravitas Communications Wins Stevie® Award for Communications Campaign of the Year
Gravitas Communications is thrilled to share some great news. We were recently honored during the 7th annual Stevie Awards for Women in Business, beating out nine other finalists to bring home an award for the best Communications Campaign of the Year for our work on the 2010 Motor Trend Car of the Year® campaign.
The Stevie Awards for Women in Business is an international competition recognizing the accomplishments of outstanding women executives, entrepreneurs, and the organizations they run. The awards are produced by the creators of the prestigious American Business AwardsSM.
Sara Eisen of Bloomberg Television presented the trophy to Gravitas founder Jocelyn Johnson during a gala event at New York’s Marriott Marquis Hotel. More than 1,200 entries from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted for consideration.
For the winning campaign, the Gravitas team architected a comprehensive publicity plan incorporating all major communications channels, including print, television, radio, online, social media and online video. These efforts resulted in tens of millions of consumer impressions for the Motor Trend brand.
It was a wonderful evening of sharing stories and celebrating success. We are proud and greatly appreciative to have been among the honorees and share in the festivities!
If you are not familiar, people systems and collaboration are hot sectors in technology right now. HR departments are finding new technologies to help them manage their time, people and systems. Gravitas was thrilled to engage Saba to help promote their global user conference this week in Boston. With more than 70 tracks and big name keynote speakers such as Gary Hamel (named the most influential speaker of our time by the WSJ), People 2010 was a smashing success with approximately 500 attendees. We look forward to seeing more from Saba Software!
For our first Spotlight we’re going to focus on Gravitas intern Ryan Cloutier.
This month we must congratulate Eloqua for making the Inc. 5000 list for the second year in a row. They have demonstrated that marketing automation can have a huge impact on driving revenue and that all marketers must wake-up and pay attention to their presence on the Web. The submission process was long and laborious, but clearly worth the effort.
Gravitas just wrapped up a great promotional effort between Thwapr and the Vans Warped Tour.
The Vans Warped Tour provided Thwapr with four tickets per stop on the tour and thwapr decided to give these away in sweepstakes fashion on it’s Facebook landing page. Entrants were automatically signed up to receive video updates from the Vans Warped Tour Pit Blogger. The Pit Blogger used Thwapr’s Share to Phone technology to generate and share videos from each tour stop. Entrants in the sweepstakes received these videos directly on their mobile phones and two lucky winners received two tickets each to a tour stop of their choice.
This was an exciting promotional effort and one that we here at Gravitas were absolutely thrilled to work on. Partnerships like these allow our clients to thrive and they are always fun and interesting to implement.
We look forward to working on future promotions between Thwapr and other partners such as the Phoenix Coyotes and the Lordz of Brooklyn and hope for future partnerships with the Vans Warped Tour!
