Marketing. You asked for it Arnold and 84 others (so far). So I'm gonna talk about marketing. I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga, bud, viagra). A very experienced and successful entrepreneur came into our office a week ago to pitch his latest company. At the end of his pitch he showed us some numbers.
Normally for a raw startup we see almost all product and engineering expenses (headcount). But his plan had a monthly budget for customer acquisition. After he left, we talked about his plan and my partners focused on the customer acquisition number. So a few days later, I called him. Zynga has spent millions on customer acquisition and continues to do so. In my talk at Harvard Business School, I said "Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. 4) Events – Find live events to launch at. Geckoboard - Realtime Business Status Board. VideoGenie. Leftronic Dashboards. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Software, Reporting and Analytics Dashboard | Ginzametrics. AdGrok | Search engine marketing for the masses. Chart Your Growth With YC-Backed Chart.io.
YCombinator-funded database analytics company Chart.io launches today, giving businesses access to enterprise level analytics tools that they need to rock their databases in realtime. In the same space as Metricly and Stats Mix, a tool like Chart.io would have been unnecessary 10 or so years ago, but now co-founder Dan Levine says, “It’s easier than ever to have a database” so everyone and their mother seems to also need interpret one. Levine, who used to work as a Research Analyst for TechCrunch, got the idea for Chart.io while managing our very own Crunchbase.
Currently most companies view and analyze data in a pretty clunky way, by exporting their database into a file and then looking at it in Excel, which aside from being an unwieldy pain, is also bereft of the benefits of realtime and automation. In terms of future plans, Co-founders Levine and Dave Fowler plan on building better visualizations with more charts connected to more data sources.
The 12 Best Ways To Customize Your Facebook Pages. When a service such as Facebook limits users’ creative freedom, it is inevitable that other add-on services will overcome this limitation. This is why then, we see more and more Facebook tab apps that give us more control and freedom when it comes to customizing a fan page or a personal profile.
I can’t really understand why Facebook doesn’t create an editor that lets users create a super fan page. I can only guess they don’t want to deal with it and prefer their uniform design, which may be boring but at least it is consistent and familiar. Instead, Facebook lets other people get creative and offer an array of Facebook related apps built on the API. In any case, you must know this by now: A personalized page can drive more attention and probably, more traffic to your brand. I’ve written about this subject over, and over, and over again here at TechCrunch. But I digress. How it works: You just need to log-in with Facebook Connect, then the service will recognize your existing pages. Federated Media Publishing.
Federated Media Buys Semantic Profiling Technology From TextDigger. Ad network Federated Media is announcing an acquisition today, buying a semantic profiling technology platform from semantic search startup TextDigger today. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. TextDigger, which was incubated at CNET in 2005, spun out a platform for semantic search and related services. TextDigger’s technology allows owners of large content collections to add semantics indexing on top of an existing keyword search engine. Federated Media will use the new technology to add semantic technology to content tagging, filtering, topic extraction, and SEO. The technology will also be used for ad targeting, and semantic search engine optimization for a site or network of sites. As you may know, Federated went beyond just serving ads a few years ago, to giving advertisers and publishers a marketing toolbox to see how people interact with these ads. Marin Software Integrates Facebook Ads Into Paid Search Management Platform.
Market research & statistics: Internet marketing, advertising & demographics. ComScore, Inc. Influence or data? How to spend a marketing budget. (Editor’s note: David Goldenberg is co-founder of PigSpigot.com, a user-generated greeting card site. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.) My company recently faced a tough decision. Like most Internet startups, we wanted to get the word out about our product, but our marketing budget was tiny.
We debated whether we should we hire a PR professional/social media guru to help us or if we should spend our money on an online ad campaign. Ultimately, it came down to this: Influence or data? That’s not to say, of course, that it’s a clear-cut delineation. A lot of press releases, for example, have measurable SEO components, and even the most SEM-dependent company has a Twitter account these days. But to slightly torture the already beleaguered baseball/business analogy, here’s the deal: very few startups can rely on the “Field of Dreams” method of marketing, and many of us can only afford to pursue one of these strategies effectively. So let’s back up and break it down. The downside? What The Fuck Is My Social Media Strategy? SEO and Social Media Campaign Monetisation. SEO Blog | SEOmoz Blog Featuring Search Engine Marketing News &. Digital Marketing and Advertising News.
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