Posts from March 2009

Peter Hershberg, co-founder of leading search engine marketing firm Reprise and a longtime veteran of the search marketing business, wrote a great post on Business Insider (fka Alley Insider) yesterday. 

The following part, in particular, got my attention:

The big takeaways from this are data and targeting as the hook for marketers and the need to integrate the paid marketing offerings into the user experience natively.

This doesn't mean that social media platforms simply need to copy the search engine's monetization systems. Its going to be more complicated than that. But there are plenty of parallels between search and social media, including that they drive traffic very effectively.

And studying the lessons of the fits and starts that search went through from its early days in the mid 90s to the time when overture finally figured it out and google perfected it in the early part of this decade is a really useful exercise for everyone seeking to monetize social media.

Thanks Peter for the post. It certainly got my mind working this morning.

I've never been to SXSW. That's a confession of sorts given how big of a deal SXSW has become among the digerati and twitterati. But it always seems to conflict with my kid's spring break and family is first always with no exceptions. And this year is no exception.

I am already bumming out that I am not there. I'd like to go fishing with Ben Kweller and I'd like to meet and hang out with JLM. And I'd like to see our fantastic investors at UTIMCO Lindel and Mark and their colleagues. And I'd like to have breakfast at Las Manitas and I'd like to catch a show at Stubbs.

And I would have liked to see Steven Johnson's keynote on hyperlocal and news. Steven's partner Mark Josephson live tweeted the talk just now and I got the gist of it. And Steven is going to post the talk in its entirely on his blog tonite or tomorrow.

My favorite snippet from Steven's talk (as tweeted by Mark) is:

That is so true. Just look at my post last night for proof. One hundred and forty characters drives almost 10% of the traffic to the long form posts on this blog. And that trend will continue to grow.

Steven and Mark are building a very interesting company with Outside.in and I am excited to be part of it. For those that don't know, Outside.in aggregates all the content (long form, short form, and everything in between) that's out there on the web by geography so you can find out what's going on around you. And for SXSW they've created this cool map to see what people are tweeting about and where. I can't take advantage of it but hopefully some of you all can.

I have been looking over the referrer logs of our portfolio companies and have been paying special attention to social media (facebook and twitter in particular) and I've been noticing that both services are making significant moves up in most every referrer log. I can't reveal the specifics due to confidentiality, but there are some companies that count facebook and twitter as the second and third most important sources of traffic after the big daddy google.

Mike Arrington posted TechCrunch's twitter traffic trends today and I figured I'd do the same here and also show facebook traffic trends.

Here's the past six months of Twitter traffic to this blog:

The traffic to this blog from twitter has tripled in the past six months, from around 600 visits per week to over 2,000 visits per week.

And here's the past six months of Facebook traffic to this blog:


The traffic to this blog from facebook has gone up 5x in the past six months, from around 50 visits per week to over 250 visits per week.

I send all of my twitter posts to facebook via the twitter facebook app so I am publishing the same number of links to both services. But the interesting thing is that on twitter, my posts are only responsible for about 4,000 of the 28,000 visits in the past six months. The vast majority of the visits are coming from others either posting links to this blog or retweeting my posts. I don't think that happens very much on facebook (yet). You can see that in action because the twitter traffic comes from 952 accounts and the facebook traffic comes from only 55 accounts.

I expect that these numbers will continue to rise as twitter's user base grows and the new users become more sophisticated about sending links and retweeting. I also expect facebook's numbers to increase as the changes they are making to facebook encourage more of the same kind of activity on facebook.

Links are the currency of the web and traffic is money so these are important trends for our portfolio companies and for everyone who does business on the web.

I spent some time this morning putting together my deck for my “There’s No Such Thing As A Crystal Ball” talk tomorrow. Since I’ve already blogged this “meme” and got awesome comments on it (several of which have found their way into the talk), I figure I should keep going by posting my first draft of my deck. Please keep the comments and suggestions flowing. I will make sure to credit this community with the co-creation of the presentation.

Image via Wikipedia

I was asked to speak to a group of entrepreneurs later this week. I agreed to do it and asked them what they wanted me to talk about. I got this response:

I thought about that for a second and decided that I'd talk about the exact opposite. I don't know what the future will hold any more than anyone else. There is no such thing as a crystal ball and I can assure you that I don't have one.

So the title of my talk will be "There's No Such Thing As A Crystal Ball" and I will talk about what I do and what every great entrepreneur I've ever worked with does to figure out what bets to make. It starts with getting your hands dirty and engaging deeply with the leading edge products and services that are in your market.

I am fortunate that the leading edge products and services that are in my market are social media and web based services that are filled with people who are doing the very same things I am doing. And so I get to do this in parallel with all of you and exchange notes.

That process leads me forward and informs the bets I want to make and who I want to make them with.

I'll put together the deck tomorrow morning and post it on slideshare and let you all check it out.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

There's a sense out there that clicking on an unsubscribe link will just give your email address to more spammers. That may be true at some level.

But I'm here to tell you that over the past two weeks I've been on a mission to unsubscribe to as much email as I can. I've made it a point to click on every unsubscribe link I can find. And when I am on my blackberry, I forward emails I don't want anymore to Dorsey who helps me by taking care of the unsubscribe.

It's made a big difference. I think my unwanted email is down by at least 50% and I am going to keep doing this until it reaches zero.

I've got two spam filters, postini and microsoft's junk mail, working for me. They do a halfway decent job but I still get a ton of unwanted email. Most of the unwanted email isn't technically spam, it is email that is at least halfway legit, but I still don't want it.

I don't have any hard numbers, but I think I get about 200-300 unwanted emails a day in my inbox (in addition to 400-600 wanted emails). I am very encouraged by the impact of all this unsubscription activity over the past two weeks and I think I can basically eliminate the unwanted email by continuing to click on the unsubscribe links.

So, to all of you who avoid clicking on the unsubscribe links, I say give it a try. You'll get rid of more spam than you'll create for sure.

On friday, Google briefly dropped below $300/share. I had a limit order in place at that price and so I am long Google again and feel very good about it.

I've placed another limit order in for the same number of shares at $275/share. Last fall, I bought Google during the downdraft and sold them when the market recovered in early 2009. I made a nice profit and wanted to take a pause and see how things were going for Google.

Since then Google has reported a decent fourth quarter and has been rationalizing its business and making cuts. Eric Schmidt says things are pretty bad out there and that's certainly true. But I think Google's business, balance sheet, and market position are as strong as they come and I'm happy to be back in the stock and will be buying more if it goes down significantly more.

I know that I should be selling puts at $275/share instead of placing limit orders at $275/share. I'd like to try that approach and will eventually get around to doing that.

I tend not to write too much about Twitter these days. God knows enough gets written about it elsewhere. But we had such a great experience with Twitter at Hacking Education on Friday that I feel compelled to share it with everyone.

Hacking Education was what we call a "Union Square Sessions" event. We've done a number of sessions events now and we use the same format for all of them. We find a nice venue here in NYC, we put together a big table where everyone faces each other, and we talk for five or six hours about a single topic. There are no presentations, no panels, just discussion that is lightly moderated by the Union Square Ventures team.

We record, transcribe, and photograph the event so its easily bloggable. And there have been some terrific blog posts that have come out of these events in prior years.

This year we added Twitter to the mix. Here's a picture of Sir Ken Robinson kicking off Hacking Education:


You'll notice on the far wall that we had Twitter up on the big screen. It was up there all day. We set up a hashtag (#hackedu) and announced that publicly in a number of ways.

At the start of the event, most of the messages on the Twitter screen were coming from the room. David Wiley, John Bischke, and Jeff Jarvis where effectively liveblogging the event. It was interesting to see what nuggets they "pulled" from the discussion and shared with the outside world.

It is hard to moderate a conversation of 40 people and there are times when several people want to make a point but one gets the opportunity. I started to notice that the others would simply post their thought to twitter instead which allowed the rest of the room to see what they wanted to say in parallel with the point that was being made live.

So within an hour of the start of the event, we had a very lively discussion flowing on Twitter. Then I saw people outside of the event start to take notice and send out notes to their followers that the discussion on the #hackedu tag was getting interesting. That brought quite a few new people to the Twitter stream that were not in the room.

By 11:30am (an hour and a half into the session) #hackedu was trending on Twitter. It eventually got to be the fifth most popular item on Twitter search and stayed there the rest of the afternoon (but fell off during lunch when nobody was posting from inside the session).

I found it very easy to both listen and participate in the live conversation and also follow the discussion on Twitter. It helped that my seat was directly facing the big screen (I took the Sir Ken photo with my blackberry).

So here are my top three takeaways from the experience:

1) Twitter adds a lot of value to a live event if you have enough people at the event who are comfortable live blogging it. In our case, three or four active participants was enough. Their job, so to speak, is to find the juiciest comments and throw them up on the board.

2) It also provides a way for less agressive people in the group to share their thoughts with the rest of the group even when they can't get a word in edgewise.

3) It provides an ability for others who are not at the event to both follow the event live but also contribute to the event in real time.

When we do this next time, I am going to make sure we do a few things differently. First, I think there should be at least two large screens so that nobody has their back to the Twitter stream. Also, I think we should have tried to loop the conversation happening outside of the room back into the room. Maybe have one person whose job it is to pull the most interesting tweets coming from outside the room and feed them into the conversation.

If you are doing an event, whether its a small invitation only event like ours, or a larger public event like a conference, I highly recommend you include a live Twitter stream as part of the conversation. It's a big win for everyone.

When Josh showed me Pocket Guitar on his iPhone a few months back, I said "when will we go to a concert and the band will come out playing iPhones?"

Looks like it's happening even sooner than I thought. Thanks to Jen Robinson for the tip.