More PR Follies on Techcrunch

I always find these amusing, and they also seem like worthwhile cautionary tales to share. If you're following Techcrunch, you might have already seen this one.

Seriously, Timothy Johnson, Your Idea Of How To Do PR For Clients Is A Joke

Surfing, Silicon Valley-Style: What is the Lifespan of Your Business?

When you travel and people hear that you're from California, they usually imagine Baywatch -- oceans, beach, and surfing. Here in Northern California, the ocean is cold and the surf is 30 minutes away or more, depending on traffic. Instead, most of us here ride waves of business driven by cycles of technology and the economy. From semiconductors in the 80s to the Internet era in the 90s and on to today's social, streaming, web 2.0 wave, you can see the rising forms grow, carry us, and finally break over time.

Once and a while I'm called on to help an MBA student work through some project assignment. Typically, the assigned case study projects require some historical analysis of a business decision at a select moment in time. The funny thing about history is that your knowledge of the broader story means that your decision can't really be unbiased. Imagine an example of a case study for a pen computing platform set back in the 1990s. Regardless of the actual issues presented, knowing that pen computing will fail, doesn't the smart decision include a common denominator of "take the money and run"?

Most companies have a lifespan. Often in calculating business strategy or imaging a business in theory, people tend to imagine the company as going on forever or at least having a lifespan similar to IBM. Here in Silicon Valley, it's easy to look across the landscape and see the empty skeletons of former titans, market leaders that were not immune to time and the evolution of technology. Whether it's the old Boreland campus in Scotts Valley, Sun Microsystems various campuses, or the once great empire of SGI that's now inhabited by Google, time has claimed all of these former corporate stars.

While it's easy to see exit strategy as an important factor in start-up strategy, what about more established companies? We keep seeing parts flying off of the Yahoo motor, yet it's still trying to race down the road. Remember when they were one of the blue chip Internet stocks? Think about all of that money that they've spent over the past ten years in failed acquisitions and technology development -- would they have done better pocketing the cash?

Companies that start to run amok tend to give off a dying vibe. You start to hear stories -- problems with the work environment, layoffs, crazy control systems and cost cutting measures. If the work and stress of building a start-up brings the excitement of growth, riding the wave of a company in decline is all about the stress of waiting for the wave to collapse on you. 

Having a sense of history about the lifespan of a business also bakes in a certain amount of cynicism. When you find yourself in an interview, you're always looking around trying to get a sense of where the company is in it's cycle of life. Are the people excited? Too busy to spend much time talking? Do they look they are having fun?

Just because a company seems like it's in decline doesn't mean that it's not potentially a worthwhile opportunity. In the same way that there are people who thrive in the chaos and excitement of growth in a startup, there are some people who are well suited to managing a company's end-of-life -- it's just that marketing pros are not usually in that group. Growth and marketing kind of go hand in hand. Typically, companies that in decline are looking for replacement followers of their existing strategies, not pivots. Of course, if you're brought in chartered with bringing transformation, then you may be able to turn that wave into an interesting ride.

While I'd like to wrap this up with some sort of exciting take-away thought, I think that the best way to leave this is with the same kind of feeling you might get at the beach, watching the waves form, move through space and time, then break. Big ones. Small ones. Waves of different shapes and different heights. Maybe the waves aren't as big as you expected. You should have been here yesterday.

Growth Hacker vs VP of Marketing

Just a brief follow up thought related to the idea of the growth hacker concept referenced in the link in my previous post. The core premise behind the growth hacker is that startups in earlier stages need to be focused on growth -- dynamic, agile, and even experimental. Often, when people think of qualifications for a VP of Marketing, they think grand plan, strategy, and years of experience in a specific industry. What this may also translate to is limited adaptability outside of a focus industry and correspondingly, a less agile, less dynamic engine for growth -- someone who just wants to replay the classic hits.

I suspect that the right fit actually falls somewhere in the middle. A good marketing pro doesn't just repeat the same formula. Every business, every situation, every moment is different. While the idea of a growth hacker relentlessly experimenting, trying to crack the growth nut is a compelling image that captures a sense of necessary urgency, for me it underplays the importance of fluency in a broader vocabulary of the practice. First and foremost, before you can ever begin to conceptualize and hack growth programs, you need to have a strong understanding of those same programs and the language that their constructed from. You can't play guitar simply by watching music videos and you can't hack a .php form by simply browsing the web a lot or even reading stories about code injection.

Beyond vision and program execution, there is an equally important aspect to having a grander vision -- an understanding that some growth vehicles have a dark side and not all hacking is white hat. Look at Zynga and some of the other social game companies profiled in the Techcrunch Scamville series. While Zynga was able to ride these questionable practices to an IPO and, theoretically, some operational reforms, several of the companies that used this approach got burned. The recent stories about JCPenney and some of the more noteworthy SEO manipulation highlight kind of issue. Understanding the risks and being able to weigh those against the potential benefits requires some conceptual understanding beyond simply figuring out an execution path.

Ultimately, whether you're a VP of Marketing or a Growth Hacker, the bigger problem is that often people simply want to repeat a lightning strike. Sometimes, beyond time and space, there is some luck involved. Just because Twitter took off at South by Southwest, doesn't mean that going there is a strategy. And yet, simply understanding how something like South by Southwest has impacted a number of social networking software startups should be part of your marketing vocabulary. In that way, I would thing that the job description should probably read something like, "creative, experimental problem solver with a broad marketing background and a solid vision of the big picture needed..." But somebody like that can probably also solve the problem of what title that they should have.

Are you a Growth Hacker?

I was doing some typical morning, poking around the web browsing and I came across an interesting topic that I thought I would share with you. I've been thinking about what to write on the topic, but I've got errands to run and a day to work through, so I thought I would start with sharing a quick link with you.

This is Find A Growth Hacker for Your Startup by Sean Ellis. Read and enjoy.

An Animated Look at Where Good Ideas Come From

Here's another RSA whiteboard animation worth watching.

Motivations In The Workplace Animation

A friend sent over a link to this earlier this week, tucking into an NPR planet money post. In discussing, the presentation has been around for a while, but the animation is really what helps make this interesting.



There are more video presentations that have been animated using this whiteboard style of animation posted on YouTube, so check them out if you get a chance.

Follow-up On Google Hiring: A Kinder, Gentler Google

Following up on my post, If Google Posts A Job Opening, Does It Really Count As A Job Opportunity, I came across this article that was pushed out on Twitter by Google Recruiting (@googlejobs). Google tries new angle on hiring by Richard Waters of the Financial Times is an interesting read into how Google is trying to change their hiring practices and culture. I felt so moved by the piece that I thought, maybe I should go ahead and send them my resume and apply for a couple of openings. I am one of those "people with entrepreneurial, rather than purely intellectual, talent." Then I got to the last sentence of the piece, "It is currently receiving 75,000 applications a week," and, remembering my original post, I decided to write this blog post instead.