A while back Fairchild semiconductor invested in a start-up called Silicon Wireless. The partnership revolved around an impressive patent portfolio provided through a NC State Professor ubiquitous in the area of semiconductor physics (he wrote most of the electrical engineering textbooks that semiconductor professionals refer to when they really need to solve a problem). Well, the little start-up got some amazing results in the lower frequencies, but had some heat issues at the upper frequencies due to the nature of vertical devices (in this configuration flip-chip, gold ball bonding limited the CW power). The professor worked directly with Silicon Wireless who extended their portfolio into high power high efficiency planar semiconductor devices and changed their name to Silicon Semiconductor. NDA’s in place with the MOT folks and complete tours including inspection of Smith charts at the DUT. MOT has a lateral RF power device that was in its 5 or 6th generation at the time and was pretty hard to beat. At the lower frequencies, our device was almost noiseless – superior in that regard. Without a military business strategy, Silicon Semiconductor eventually moved all resources to the power semiconductor area and began to farm out the intellectual property, some of which was shared with Fairchild Semiconductor to other entities, but eventually Fairchild bought sole rights to the technology. Today, I catch up with one of my dream-team from Silicon Wireless and he tells me the story of a couple years ago when he met our professor and shared what he had learned about what was happening to “his” technology. Apparently, the intellectual property we were unsuccessful in generating high power cellular revenue from was “unknowingly??” used at HVVI in pulsed avionics. Now the interesting part is that using social networking tools (like Linked-in), the small network of gifted RF professionals is small, but deep in connections. I am connected (by 1 degree of freedom) to 6 of the employees including the CTO and CEO. How did I not know about this company? Further investigation yields inter-connections with the Fairchild people that were responsible for our product line in the fab…and the MOT people appear as well, in 2nd and 3rd degree connections…Moral to the story is that it is a small world and sometimes things are hidden in plain sight. My Wow for the day!
Archive for the ‘Social Network’ Category
Trustworthiness
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012
The way you look means a lot—especially if you’re in the financial industry—and the more trustworthy you look to potential clients, the more you’ll attract higher investments.
Despite appearances and first impressions, a recently published study in the PLoS One journal reports that even if people hear negative information about you, they’ll still be more inclined to invest their money with the person whose face is perceived to be more trustworthy.
“Trustworthiness is one of the most important traits for social and economic interactions and our study examines whether people take potentially costly actions in line with their face-based trustworthiness judgments,” Chris Olivola, one of the study’s authors, said in the University of Warwick’s press release. “It seems we are still willing to go with our own instincts about whether we think someone looks like we can trust them.”
Researchers from Warwick Business School, the University College London and Dartmouth College gave participants real money and asked them to choose who they’d invest with out of the face images provided. The volunteers were then given bad and good information about each of the faces, and asked again who they’d invest their money with.
Despite knowing the different reputations, the outcome didn’t change: participants were still more likely to invest their money with those who had more trustworthy-looking appearances
The team used a software created by Alex Todorov from Princeton University to produce 40 faces—20 pairs of faces at opposing ends of the trustworthiness scale—and altered features to “correspond to the way natural faces are perceived in reality.”
The study says that the difference in a trustworthy face and one that isn’t as much results from features that look “slightly angry or slightly happy, even when these faces are ‘at rest.’ ”
Basically, the bottom line is saying when it comes to investing, the way you look and the way people perceive you is a lot more important than your reputation.
Blogging tips and techniques for engaging content
Monday, March 19th, 2012You have to be emotionally prepared – that blogging is not a part of your business- it is a small business you run in the context and for the support of your main one.
- It is a time consuming job – so you have to plan time for it
Writing interesting, engaging posts, using the appropriate keywords, clean language and proper grammar is hard work! Therefore trying to plan and manage your time from the beginning will turn you from a DESPERADO to a successful blogger and marketer.
The solution: get prepared in advance with a batch of articles. A good rule is to get them all done at the beginning of the next posting unit. For example: if you have decided to update daily, you can have seven articles ready by the end of the previous business week. If you update monthly, you can get all your articles done by the beginning of the last quarter of the previous month.
Buy.com – store centric sales platform
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
Buy.com integrates with Facebook.
Facebook changes to timeline and breaks Buy.com strategy (was supposed to allow embedded shopping cart)
Buy.com create share link.
$5 Facebook campaign
Monday, March 5th, 2012
It cost him only 6 cents to do it.And for that price, he was able to bombard our people with ads. The cost of that inventory is a 30 cent CPM, which means it costs 30 cents to show a thousand ads. So he was able to send 200 highly targeted messages, as he details in this post on the Facebook Microtargeting trick.
Sounds less like advertising and more like super-targeted email marketing, doesn’t it?
And, in fact, it is, except for this:
• You can send these messages without needing someone’s email address.
• You pay only when someone clicks it (yes, it’s cost per click advertising).
• An impression is guaranteed when the person next opens Facebook (whereas in sending an email, you can only hope that someone will open it).
Now imagine that you’re a software company like Webtrends, building relationships with other agencies that resell your social analytics software. The founders of the data visualization agency JESS3 come to visit and you’d like to strengthen that bond. Maybe you spend $5 on a micro-targeted campaign like the one above, but slice it up to put the ad image more compactly next to the stats. You absolutely bombard anyone who works at that firm with your message almost 3,000 times. If they have 50 people, that’s 60 ads per person. Who cares that we got only 9 clicks (of which 4 happened to become fans)? The goal is not the click, but the awareness.
Total cost: $5.67 in Facebook ads
Create a specialty video with a customized message
But you could take it a step further, since those folks who do click through on the ad can come to your landing page. So imagine that we send all employees of the email marketing company ExactTarget to this Facebook landing page (warning: there is sound). And how much did this landing page cost? Only $5. We have a network of dozens of freelancers that will do voiceovers, take photos, sing songs or do whatever for a few dollars. More examples of specialty videos here.
Social media success is about pinpoint precision targets — we’re simulating the one-on-one conversations that friends have among themselves
While each of these examples might be clever or interesting, the question becomes: How do you scale this? Social media success is about pinpoint precision targets — ultimately, because we’re simulating the one-on-one conversations that friends have among themselves. But if you want to have 1,000 conversations, you need 1,000 different ads and 1,000 different landing pages. Who has the infrastructure, staff, or the budget to do that?
This is where smart automation comes in. Here’s an example of our scoring platform at work:
Webtrends sells analytics software to the big boys who don’t mind paying $100,000 per year for analytics software. Trouble is that every website needs some form of analytics. Maybe they’ll use Google Analytics — it’s free and pretty good. But we want to talk to only those customers who have the money and need for enterprise analytics software. It would be suicide to buy the keyword “web analytics” on PPC because of all the players that offer web analytics for free or super cheap.
So we took the Fortune 1000 and ran a script that collected a wide range of data — market cap, their industry, annual revenue, P/E ratio, website url, homepage pagerank, pages indexed, Facebook page, number of fans, company logo from Google images and so forth — dozens of metrics. See the detail from our spreadsheet/CSV file below.
Click to enlarge
And then we ran this data through our scoring algorithm to calculate their Social Score — how well they did versus peers in their industry. We might say, “Shell, you got a 56 and rank 7 out of 9 in Oil and Gas.” Or we might say, “Shell, why do you have only 53,548 fans while others in oil and gas have 184k on average?” Then we target people who work at Shell — not just everyone, but those people who have titles of VP of Marketing, Chief Financial Officer, Public Relations and so forth.
There might be only a couple dozen people and not everyone puts their information on Facebook, but it’s enough. And you can bet it gets their attention! They come to a landing page that has their social scoring report, which shows a portion of the metrics that we’ve gathered. But they have to click Like to see the rest of the report, which is grayed out.
Now what happens when that person clicks “Like”? Of course, some of their friends and co-workers see it. And as all curious co-workers will do, they want to check out what you found to be so interesting. And then when these people see our ad, it shows that their friend liked it, which makes our offer of a report that much more credible (image at right).
A move to quality targeting over mass media blasts
Now do you see how this works? It’s quality over quantity, folks. Think about who you want to target as precisely as possible. Where do they work? Where do they live? What kind of car do they drive? What TV shows do they watch? What industry conferences do they attend?
Let Facebook do the work for you, running ads that target journalists who write for the Wall Street Journal, Mashable, Forrester, VentureBeat, the New York Times
Can’t afford $15,000 to exhibit at your favorite conference, plus the $3k to ship the booth out, the cost of the people to have to man the booth during Expo Hall hours, the schwag you have to give out and so forth? Then run an ad for the three weeks leading up to the conference targeting fans of the conference.
Bingo, you’ve now spent $5 to target this audience with your message and you have plenty of time to set up in-person meetings with those folks who are worth talking to, as opposed to any random people who might wander up to visit you at the show. And then you can thank them later.
Click to enlarge
Need some PR help, but can’t afford a New York PR agency for $10,000 a month? Then let Facebook do the work for you, running ads that target journalists who write for the Wall Street Journal, Mashable, Forrester, VentureBeat, the New York Times or whoever. What would you like to say to them?
Can’t afford to hire a big sales staff to cold call people who don’t want to talk to you? Easy. Just run ads targeting the competitors of your existing customers. Let’s say that Marriott is your client and you’ve got a great case study there. Run ads targeting the folks who work at Hilton, Starwood, Motel 6 or whoever. You can bet they want to know what their competitors are doing. Inquiring minds want to know!
Making waves with 5 bucks in your pocket
By now, I hope to have shown you that with some ingenuity and $5 in your pocket, you can make some serious waves on Facebook. If you’re a small business or start-up, learn how to master some of the techniques mentioned here. If you’re a big brand and looking to scale, then you’ll need some process and software automation to make this happen across thousands of conversations.
Know of any companies that offer software that will do mass personalization of ad and landing page content? Ad agencies are good at throwing bodies at client accounts — great service, but no scale. Software companies are good at building code based on a predefined set of rules that can be repeated. But success for your company can’t be solved by either a pure agency or a pure software company. The agency can’t throw enough people at the problem and the software company can’t offer a one-size fits all solution to everyone.
Only you can work the magic at your company. As much as we’d like to sell you some software, vendors like us can only assist you in coming up with the creative strategy that resonates best with your customers, the PR strategy that gets the press talking about you, a unique way to position how you solve your client’s pain. Ultimately, these $5 campaigns, whether you run just one of them or 10,000 of them, boil down to a marketing strategy — a unique, compelling message — that we can multiply out to your customers and get those customers to spread on your behalf. (Again, if you’re a smaller company targeting just a few potential or existing clients or partners, go for it yourself!)
In our next segment, we’ll explore that topic in more detail — how to get your fans to do your marketing for you. The techniques that work are probably not what you’d expect, since the world of Facebook relies upon the game dynamics of News Feed Optimization, advertising, applications and Open Graph widgets. We’ll show you how the harder you make it for customers to convert, in certain instances, the more likely they will take action. Stay tuned to learn why.
High-IQ investors are more likely to…
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012create an interesting chart based on Finnish male IQ tests. Interesting source
Source->Abstract
Webinar Lessons from the Super Bowl XLVI
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
Watching superbowl social media lessons…
Any marketer can use these lessons
#awarenessinc
Taulbee Jackson
Linked-in groups can be email blasted – didn’t know that they were the ONLY social network to allow this.
If you like the superbowl follow our stream, follow our brand.
Less known brand… Talk about benefits of liking your page (in order to get social likes)
What were people focusing on>
Twitter example of typical conversation on twitter:
What to wear to super bowl village tomorrow night?
Reply from super bowl village: Check the weather by texting WEATHER to SB2012 for updates courtesy of @WISH_TV
Superbowl had 50 dedicated suberbowl social media contributors.
Content is king – once again
Content calendars (creating a content calendar should contain contents completion date) New Product release shouold be on the content calendar. Social media on the next day and for 5 more days. Response time (real-time workflow) batch of groundswell will dictate calendar. Put non-social marketing email
What f it was held in Vegas?
Back to Edgerank….
Slideshare directly links to saleslforce. Didn’t know that.
Measurement:
Share and retweet are same thing
favorite of tweets is a like
clickthru is defined as a link that goes to somewhere else. – DIFFERENT domain or different area or place
Channel Type check audit trails.
Same cost as buying a superbowl spot
30 sec tv spot is ~ 3.2M -3.5M
This is an owned media (no renting eyeballs)
http://info.awarenessnetworks.com/Free-Trial-14-Day.html