A Prototyping Conundrum

A good friend and I are working on an invention that we believe will solve a problem faced by urban bikers. I can’t say much more than that, but that’s probably all you really need to know in order to consider my prototyping conundrum. It deals with a common problem, I believe, that arises when prototyping to test your concept versus prototyping for manufacture.

When should we be thinking in terms of the final (manufactured) design and when should we be thinking in terms of the design that is required to test and get feedback on the concept? You see, we’re planning on doing a short run of the device (say 100 units) so we can do some testing and it doesn’t make sense to have them cast. Following this, we have to change some elements of the design to accommodate manufacture by other means.

Should we have two separate prototype paths?
In reality, the details aren’t THAT different but it can be confusing because we haven’t been good as saying “with respect to the testing prototype, I think we should …” My gut tells me that we just need to add some structure to our process to resolve this issue for now. But, you do have to wonder how to balance your time and effort between the two prototypes.

Is it a marketing issue?
Some of the details in question are purely aesthetic or at least partially aesthetic and it’s unclear how much weight to give them. Though clearly, that’s more of an issue with the manufacturing prototype. There’s also the issue of cost of goods sold and how our choices will effect that. Our designs have evolved quite a bit so we haven’t had the chance to speak with potential manufactures about the impact of our choices. My partner is an engineer, but still we don’t really have a sense of if we’re talking about dollars per unit or cents for some of our choices.

When should we think about cost? For me, and with regard to this device,  it boils down to the fact that no matter what we do our device will cost significantly less than other devices in the same category …. so I’m not really worried about cost too much at this point. Maybe that’s wrong, but it seems to me that we should come up with the “best” solution and try to control costs from there. I guess this stems from my belief that people are willing to pay for great products and that pricing is in large part irrational (refer to Predictably Irrational if you want more on why).

I welcome your thoughts!

Building Brands on Social Networks

I recently produced an event for Sprout entitled Building Brands on Social Networks and am writing to share some of the presentations and content from the half-day summit. We had an overwhelming response and ended up with a packed room, which was very exciting. I hope you’ll find value in the assets below.

I also want to put out a big thank you to our presenters and to San Francisco Social Media Week and the San Francisco Chapter of the American Marketing Association for their help getting the word out. And, thanks for Justin.tv who produced the live video feed which is archived below.

My presentation
Building Brands on Social Networks
Note: the video from the event did not start until part way though this preso, so we’ve added the audio to the slide deck on slideshare.

Alexandre Roche’s presentation
Dog Book: Lessons Learned from the Popular Facebook Application
Twitter: @alexroche
Facebook: facebook.com/alexandre

Deborah Schultz’s presentation
It’s the People Stupid
Twitter: @debs
Website: www.deborahschultz.com

Kaz Brecher’s presentation
Rock The Space Toyota/MySpace from the Schematic Perspective

Archived video from the event at Justin.tv

A Useful Web Strategy Tool

This is a quick post to share a simple web strategy tool that I learned about from Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group. Incidentally, Jeremiah is speaking at an event I’m organizing entitled, Building Brands on Social Networks. It will be taking place in San Francisco on Feb 4th, in Silicon Valley on Feb 18th, in Chicago on March 31st, and finally in New York on April 1st.

Jeremiah’s web strategist blog is definitely worth checking out if you find this tool helpful. Here’s a link to his post The Three Spheres of Web Strategy in which he defines what each of the areas signify.

I find this tool most helpful as a validation tool that sits at the end of other strategy practices.

Web Strategy Spheres

Are Facebook Apps At The Core of Effective Social Networking Strategies?

This is a repost of an article I wrote for Sprout.

As marketers look for the best ways to build brands on social networks they’ve experimented with a wide range of strategies from friending campaigns to network ad buys, but what efforts are most effective? A recent study by MarketingProfs shows that branded applications top the chart, but are under utilized, with less than a quarter of all respondents having created one. At Sprout, we know from first hand experience that applications are at the heart of the most successful campaigns.

eMarket’s article What’s Working for Social Media Marketers? sums up the research well and identifies branded applications as a rich opportunity area. At Sprout, however, we also understand that getting the most out of a branded applications requires an integrated approach to your overall Facebook experience with fan pages, viral content, and sharing opportunities.

As brands move away from traditional marketing strategies, campaigns are becoming increasingly iterative and conversational in nature, with consumers participating through content generation and sharing. In general, consumers have greater expectations around engagement with brands where they socialize online. At Sprout we work with brands to drive engagement opportunities a key points in the cycle (click to enlarge):

Sprout Engagement Cycle

Attract
The first stage of the engagement cycle is focused on attracting consumers. For brands that are establishing a presence on social networks, this often means relying on display ads that sit inside and outside of the social networking platform. Sprout helps brands with engaging interactive display ad solutions that include Twitter feeds, RSS feeds, polls and more. Of course, we can make these ads shareable as well to support viral spread.

Identify
The next step is to get fans to engage with your brand on the social networking platform by identifying themselves as fans. We create engaging fan page solutions that are social, interactive, and rich. Our fan pages include viral hooks and incentives to encourage fans to share your page with their friends and drive new fan acquisition.

Engage
With a fan page in place to serve as the foundation for managing relationships, it’s possible to place rich interactive messages into the stream with our Sprout Publisher tools. For example, some of our clients use this to send out weekly coupons, music releases, or polls. It’s even possible to create applications that are shareable within the news feed, so that your fans can engage and share without leaving their page.

In stream messaging is one tool to drive the initial engagement with branded applications that can include games, quizzes, polls and more. Brands that are still building momentum online may also use ad placements to drive application use. For those brands that have built an extensive fan base, they do not need to rely on ad buys because their fan base is large enough to drive the viral spread of the application experience.

Measure
Throughout all the points in the engagement cycle Sprout provides performance metrics to measure the success of ads, fan pages, and applications. Our technology platform allows us to modify all of the above in real time so we can optimize campaign performance based on real time data and take advantage of time sensitive opportunities.

With this cycle in mind, we agree with eMarketer that apps are at the core of successful brand building on social networks, but that in order to take full advantage of their value they must be incorporated into the larger engagement cycle. We believe that this understanding was part of the reason that we were selected to be a Preferred Facebook Developer.

Thanks for reading and we’d love to hear about your experience using applications as part of an integrated strategy.

Case Study: Carrott Cloud Backup & Recovery

In the Summer of 2009, while I was still on the board of the San Francisco Chapter of the American Marketing Association, I met Mehrdad Saberi at one of our events after the Ad:Tech conference. He shared with me a remarkable story about a business that he had built from the ground up that has been providing storage, backup, and virtual computing services since long before anyone used the term “cloud computing.” While he’d started by catering to ventures in Silicon Valley he has been expanding and outgrowing his britches website-wise. He came to the event looking for help creating a better online experience that included social features, SEM, improved content management and more. After discussing his business, I ended up working with him to reposition Carrott and create a new website to support the next phase of his company’s growth.

Today it’s fun working with small and medium sized businesses, because there are many inexpensive tools available that can be used to make a significant impact. In this post, I’ll share some of the work we did together and how it impacted Mehrdad’s business, Carrott Cloud Backup & Recovery.

INTRO

Carrott was started back in 1994 as an off-site data protection and information storage service for Silicon Valley ventures. Since them, they have explored a variety of opportunities around that industry space including backup recovery, virtualization, data-security consulting and more. In the meantime, the industry itself has evolved, segmented, and grown. In order for Carrott to be competitive moving forward it was clear that they needed to reposition themselves relative to their competitors before starting the process of building an refreshed website.

THE CHALLENGE

Right from the start Mehrdad was clear that he had limited resources to dedicate to this project, so he was looking for a highly efficient and pragmatic approach. He knew that repositioning was going to be important because he’d been watching new competitors spring up in a variety of niches around his business. He also knew that his website needed to include some social hooks to feel contemporary. And finally, he understood that findability online was very important and wanted to make sure that whatever solution we came up with would include an SEM plan.

THE WORK

As with many small and medium sized businesses, Mehrdad had an ambitious set of goals but limited resources. Fortunately, one thing that Mehrdad also had was a deep understanding of the competitive landscape and lots of information that he’d been collecting in advance of the project. It’s a great experience to work with a client who’s able to hand over a bunch of research before you even start.

With his research in hand we started a three day sprint that included  additional competitive landscape research, a positioning exercise, and an elevator pitch exercise. We quickly identified the key market segments and found that Carrott was straddling several niches without coming across as best in class at any of them. Nor was Carrot positioned as a full-service enterprise solution that could afford to back up a truly comprehensive service offering. Part of what we also realized was that Carrott’s messaging needed to be updated to reflect and anticipate new industry terminology.

By working closely with Mehrdad, it quickly became clear that Carrott’s real unique value proposition lay withing the backup and recovery space. Though Carrott had been providing “cloud” solutions before it’s competitors it was not positioning as such. Further, there were few brands trying to own the term “cloud backup and recovery” which was the perfect fit for Carrott. At this point in the project things really started to gel.

To solidify the new positioning, unique value propositions, and messaging we jumped into an information architecture exercise to organize the content of a new site. At the same time, we started thinking about our SEM plan and how a blog might fit into the new site, what kinds of content categories might we offer? How could we use Twitter? What other online channels should we investigate, and how should we manage the social media mix? There was also some planning involved at this point because Mehrdad needed to know what kinds of ongoing costs would be associated with maintaining a blog, AdWords program, or other programs.

Once we plowed through those questions, we were ready to take on the final phase of the project which was wire-framing. I’ve taken many different approaches to wire-framing from rough hand sketches to high-fidelity illustrator decks. In this case, Mehrdad was most comfortable working with PowerPoint, so we developed the wire-frame with that software. It was a first for me, but it ended up working really well. Though the site was mocked up with boxes and lines, it was able to contain interactive links and call-outs which gave Mehrdad what he needed to approve the design.

KEY DECISIONS

There are many turning points and hard choices in any project like this one, here are a few choices of note:

The Platform

Because Mehrdad doesn’t have a huge staff to manage a website, he knew he wanted something that would be easy to use when updating content and easy to keep maintained. After many such projects, I didn’t have to do any research here because I knew that WordPress was the perfect fit. With a large portfolio of third-party plug-ins we had everything from Google Analytics, to Feedburner and Twitter integrated quickly.

We also wanted to make it easy for Carrott to throw up landing pages as needed for their SEM campaigns, events, or other sales initiatives. With WordPress we created templates that make this a snap.

The Home Page

Part of Carrott’s positioning is around high-touch customer service, so we put the contact number right up top. We wanted customers to know that there were real people behind the scenes ready to answer questions and recover their data if necessary. In addition, we wanted to make it super easy and fast to get a quote, so we put a contact form prominently on the home page. We located it just to the right of an animated content frame so we could drive people’s eyes to the contact form as the animation resolved.

The animation frame itself will allow Mehrdad to quickly update the main interactive content of the site as needed. And, below this frame there are three content wells, two of which surface dynamic content. The first highlights the most recent testimonials about his service and links to related case studies. The second surfaces the latest entries from his blog Carrott Talk. In the center well, visitors can find the top ten reasons to choose Carrott.

The Blog

The Carrot Talk blog is an important area of the site because it is designed to be the most active area. We can up with a category scheme that would support the two live content wells on the home page as well as case studies and SEM results. Two key categories are “Jargon Watch” and “Myths Unveiled” that serve to educate anyone looking for the straight story about cloud storage. We also set up a Twitter micro-blog that Mehrdad can use to share links to all the ongoing research he does about the industry.

The Name

Carrott used to be “Carrot Technologies” but with the repositioning we decided to change the name to “Carrott” and drop the word “technologies” in favor of “cloud backup and recovery”. One benefit of this is that people trying to find the site would be more likely to use the domain name that Mehrdad uses for the company, www.carrott.com.

THE RESULTS

Taking a quick look at the old homepage there is a cluttered visual design with both a horizontal and vertical navigation scheme that isa  confusing starting point. The main content area shows a mother and child in front of a computer, but it’s unclear how this relates to the service offering which is positioned as “communication networks.” The logo breaks the rigid visual grid of the page which makes the whole experience feel of balance. Finally, there isn’t anything that feels fresh on the page, no immediate way to get in touch and no clear call to action.


The new Carrott site opens with an animation that shares key positioning points, selling points, and a call to action. From there, visitors can immediately get in touch and indicate what they’re looking for via the input form on the right. The content wells at the bottom of the page contain dynamic content and make the experience feel more engaging. The clean overall design is balanced and light rather than rigid and static.

Finally, the site is fully plugged into Google Analytics so Mehrdad can track how the site performs moving forward. That said, the site itself is really a foundation to support his ongoing efforts to deliver value to his customers and provide them with tools to help spread the word about his service. I’ll write an update to this post when Mehrdad has data to share about his success publishing shareable content through his blog and setting up landing pages for a e-mail campaign or AdWords Campaign. In the meantime, check out his site to learn more.