The Directory of Venture Capital and Private Equity Firms 2004 - Research and Markets: "The Directory of Venture Capital and Private Equity Firms 2004 " May be usefull for aditional data...

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WHY SLOW TAKE OFFS ARE BEST FOR BRAND BUILDING: "There are two theories for launching a new brand.
Theory A (for airplane) is the airplane launch. Your new brand rolls slowly down the runway for thousands of feet and then after a massive effort your brand slowly lifts off the concrete. After your brand is airborne for awhile, it starts to accelerate into its cruising altitude.
Theory B (for big bang) is the rocket-ship launch. Your new brand takes off like a rocket and then coasts into orbit.
Should you use massive advertising to launch a new brand? Or should you just use PR?
Big bang for advertising
Advertising favors the big bang launch because ad programs are traditionally launched with a big bang. That's the only way to create enough attention to get above the noise level.
PR has no choice. It has to use an airplane launch. PR programs are invariably rolled out over an extended period of time. That's the only way PR can deal with the needs of media focused on scoops and exclusives. (You can't call up the media and say: 'Everybody run my story on Monday. I'm launching my new brand with a big bang.' That's not the way the media works.)
What about the real world? Do new brands take off like a rocket ship? Or do they take off like an airplane?
Take a typical new brand in the beverage industry. This brand took four years to break $10 million in annual sales and another five years to reach $100 million.
Red Bull's airplane liftoff
The brand is Red Bull, a brand built primarily by PR and a brand that took off like an airplane, not like a rocket ship. (Today, Red Bull does $1.5 billion in annual worldwide sales.)
Take Microsoft, for example. It might be hard to believe, but the brand took even longer to get off the runway than Red Bull. Microsoft took 10 years to exceed $100 million in annual"

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MediaDailyNews 08-16-04: "BuzzMetrics is releasing its first viral impact study to the public--a report that attempts to demonstrate how online word of mouth turned a controversial trans-fat lawsuit against Kraft into 'a major food industry crisis.'

the tipping point in the trans-fat phenomenon was the lawsuit consumer activist group Ban Trans Fats brought against Kraft's Oreo brand. But by studying word of mouth, Carson said "you can understand how the buzz leading up to the tipping point is what actually causes it to tip." Prior to the lawsuit, the "buzz," he said, was locked away in esoteric circles, like the blog and discussion forums of fitness gurus and nutritionists.

For the trans-fat case study, 2.5 million consumer conversations from over 125,000 individuals were monitored. According to the analysis, the Ban Trans Fats legal assault against Oreo increased the total number of online discussions on trans fats more than eightfold, and resulted in linking the issue to 90 percent of the Web discussions involving Oreo. For the Kraft brand, 30 percent of online discussions were linked to the issue following the suit.

Other data shows that Kraft and Oreo were mentioned in 17 and 26 percent of trans-fat discussions, respectively, while Doritos (16 percent), Crisco (16 percent), McDonald's (8 percent), and Skippy (8 percent) were also mentioned.

According to the study, much of the interest surrounding the trans-fat issue has been consumer-generated. On the Google search engine, for example, 40 percent of the top 100 results for "trans fat and oreo" were for blogs, personal home pages, and message boards. Top media sites like NYTimes.com, CNN.com, and MSNBC.com accounted for only 20 percent.

Carson said viral communication also presents a challenge for media planners, who need to "not just understand a single message, but develop an understanding of the full range of emotional connections to a brand."

While interest in the topic of trans fat surged after the lawsuit, Carson noted that only 6 percent of consumers thought the activist group's case against Oreo was valid. He said that Kraft did the right thing by taking a public stance toward trans fat and dealing with the issue as a health concern, rather than as something the brand should try to cover up. Carson said the lawsuit was a red herring--a cover for the real issue, which was a health concern, not a scandal.

BuzzMetrics measures word of mouth through a database on the scale of a billion consumer conversations, according to Carson. This includes message boards, chat rooms, blogs, product review sites, and other public sources of consumer information. Comcast, Mazda, JetBlue, and Hewlett-Packard are among their clients."

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MediaDailyNews 08-16-04: "Some leading companies are quietly implementing an innovative solution called search engine reputation management, or SERMA for short. SERMA fuses the best of reputation management skills with search engine optimization. It is founded on a simple premise: according to research firm, Jupiter, 75 percent of search engine users never scroll beyond the first page of results. And it is very rare for a user to scroll past the top 20 (two pages) of search results listings. The critical battleground for reputation management is what appears in the top twenty listings under a relevant company searches.
By fusing advanced and highly ethical search engine optimization strategies together with other reputation management techniques, companies can, and should, dominate the top listings under their name. The benefits are two-fold: it provides a highly-visible forum to provide new and accurate information about a company. Second, and perhaps most importantly, it pushes negative listings off the 'visibility cliff.'

While the approach may sound simple enough, accomplishing it requires a highly nuanced understanding of advanced search marketing optimization, link building and reputation management. It must also bridge a company's marketing group - Web marketing, corporate communications, sales, content development, information technology -- that often work in conjunction with distinct objectives and goals. Further, it must be implemented carefully to ensure that it stays fully within the terms of service of Google and other engines. "

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MarketingSherpa.com : Practical News & Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing & PR: "The Ultimate Email Glossary: 180 Common Terms Defined"

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Email spam & tools About Pivotal Veracity | Solutions Spam quiz answers:

Which of the phrases below are used in popular content filters to identify spam.
The answer is all of them.

says the recipient registered at your site
contains the word "Free"
contains information on how to
unsubscribe
contains "information you requested"
contains a 1-800 number
contains the word "investment"
contains mail-in order information


Rank the font colors from least to most "spammy":
Yellow is scored least spammy. Green most spammy – 7x more spammy than yellow. Red & Gray are right in the middle.


_1_Yellow _2/3_Red
_4_Green _2/3_Gray


An HTML email with images also has text content; which email is more likely to be flagged as spam – the one with
The answer is 800-1000 words of text scores higher as probable spam than 600-800 or 1000-1200.

600-800 words of text
800-1000 words of text
1000-1200 words of text

For what reasons could your company be listed on a real-time black list:
The answer is all except NO Open Relay. Having an Open Relay, however, may put you on an black list.

Someone who uses the same ISP as you
is listed on the black list
Your email service provider is listed on
the black list
Your mail server has no open relays
Your ISP did not respond to a black list
admin.'s request to discontinue service
for another company
An undisclosed number of people have
complained you are spamming them


Can your email be blocked because:
The answer is Yes to all of them.

You send high volumes
You do not have Reverse DNS enabled
You use multiple internal mail relays
You attempt immediate redelivery on
bounced emails

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Business 2.0 :: Online Article :: Tech Investor :: Is Craigslist a Google 2.0?: "tech investors would do well to keep their eyes on Craigslist.org, the San Francisco-based international swap meet. Craigslist began as a daily e-mail sent out by founder Craig Newmark in 1995 and is now a motley collection of want ads and personals, with a little space left over for rants. Most of those ads are free, so the site has never seemed to have much of a business model.
But it has something in common with successful Web businesses like Amazon (AMZN), eBay (EBAY), Google, and Yahoo (YHOO): a fanatical user base. Craigslist is incredibly popular. In July the site crossed the 1 billion monthly pageviews mark for the first time -- doubling its year-ago traffic level, according to CEO Jim Buckmaster. 'Like Google and eBay, people have fantastic experiences with Craigslist and that's what spreads the word,' says Gary Stein, an analyst with Jupiter Media.
It's been profitable for five years, and until this week, the only way it made money was by charging $75 for each job posting on the Bay Area page. It just announced that it will begin charging $25 for job listings in New York City and Los Angeles, two cities that make up half of the 120,000 job postings the site runs in an average month.
By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, the site, which employs only 14 people, will be making about $25 million per year on 12 percent of its available ad inventory. That's peanuts for most public companies. But if it decided to charge $75 across the board for all its job listings throughout its network, the company could near the $100 million mark -- making it about the size of Ask Jeeves, a publicly traded search site. What if Craigslist decided to charge 50 cents to post a photo along with an item for sale -- a service that's currently free on the site? Or to charge $50 to run a real estate "for sale" ad? That $100 million figure could quickly fade in the rearview mirror.

To their credit, Newmark and Buckmaster have done a tremendous job keeping the site user-focused and true to its neo-hippie grassroots philosophy. That has meant turning away dozens of offers from venture capitalists over the years. "We've been fighting off the VCs," Buckmaster says. "[VC approaches have] increased in the last year, but the company isn't seeking venture capital. Craigslist is sufficiently capitalized."

I asked Buckmaster if he'd ever consider taking the company public. "We have no plans to go public," he says.

Then he hedges: "[But] we're not immortal. If we decided that the site would be better off with the users of the site being the owners of the site, if that provided the best chance of the site running the same way it is now, then we'd consider it." If Google can show sites like Craigslist that it's possible to be "good" and wealthy, I think you may eventually see a publicly traded Craigslist. And based on its growth rate and fanatical user base, I think it'd be a smash hit.

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Catch the buzz and blog it How to benefit from Internet Buzz : E-consultancy.com: "How do you become first to such a Search Trend?

You may think this is similar to the manner by which reporters get their 'scoops' for newspapers - investigations and good speculation to unearth a good story. Well, the internet works a bit differently, and these trends can be identified quite quickly and easily. Often these trends will be either started or perpetuated by Blogs that discuss the topic and other blogs discussing it as they too discover other blogs reporting on the topic. These sites all provide a listing of the most discussed topics by bloggers:

Daypop
Popdex
Blogdex
Technorati

Its a good idea to regularly check these sites and look for new trends that are relevant to your own blog. Also, make sure you have a good headline and the first few lines of the post are strong enough to hook the surfer - search engines will display this text in the search results listing for your blog. If you get that part right, and you get the timing right, you could get a great boost to your traffic during brief life of this trend."

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Orbitz "viral" ad game campaign

Campaign Insights


As part of an overall mix of online initiatives, Orbitz runs pop under ad units that are designed to drive traffic to specific landing pages within the Orbitz Web site. Since we know consumers do not have favorable opinions on these ad units, our goal is to surprise and delight them with an unexpected diversion, as well as connect consumers to the playful side of the Orbitz brand.

We have had high levels of engagement within the advergames that we have done for Orbitz in the past, but in this instance we had an additional challenge to underscore the notion of easy.

The Orbitz consumer positioning is that finding a low fare is so easy; all you have to do is just Orbitz and Go. How do we make a game that is challenging enough to make it appealing from a game play standpoint and communicates easy to find? The idea happened quite unexpectedly in a meeting with Orbitz, where the client was giving examples of easy, and the notion of shooting fish in a barrel was mentioned. The idea of fish in a barrel struck us as funny and we thought it would be a great context for an interactive game.

The banner ad took three weeks to develop and involved a team of illustrators, designers, writers, programmers, and project managers. The game just launched and so far is performing above expectations. The interesting addition within this game is that we included a “tell a friend” link. So far this viral component has generated 8,130 additional referrals with friends passing the game along to others, helping to make more people aware of the ad and get exposed to Orbitz in the process.

Ultimately we feel what is significant about this ad is that it uses the power of the interactive medium and allows consumers to physically engage with your brand in a fun and unexpected way. We believe this helps to communicate a more tangible brand character to consumers as well as helping to differentiate Orbitz from it competition-oh yeah, and its fun too!
-- Mark Rattin, President and Creative Director, Pop Studio

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£15 for single user FreePint - E-Newsletters: A Guide for Publishers: "E-Newsletters: A Guide for Publishers
1-904769-06-3 - August 2004

Is your e-newsletter destined for deletion? Do you pour time, energy and resources into its creation, only to be rewarded with resounding silence? Why are you publishing that newsletter, anyway?"

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Sequoia Capital's Moritz on how to be the next Google

Sequoia Capital's Moritz on how to be the next Google: "The accidental entrepreneur
Commentary: How do you get VC Mike Moritz to invest?

By Bambi Francisco, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 12:01 AM ET Aug. 10, 2004
E-mail it | Print | Discuss | Alert | Reprint | RSS

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) - How do you become the next Google, Yahoo, Apple Computer or Cisco Systems?

If you asked Mike Moritz, a veteran venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital, who funded at least two of the world's best known Internet companies -Yahoo (YHOO: news, chart, profile) and Google - the answer is simple as it is wise.

"It's the idea that the founders are doing something that they think is useful for themselves," he said to me recently, in a rare TV interview that will air soon on our business magazine show, CBS MarketWatch Weekend. "And, then, eventually perhaps, coincidentally, perhaps accidentally, they discover that the product or service that they have built because they wanted to use something like this is that of great interest to lots of other people."



His thoughts are particularly apt as five-year-old Google (GOOG: news, chart, profile) tees up to go public at a $32 billion. They describe the process of how to establish a company whose goal is to serve the public with useful products, rather than sell the prospects of a company to a nation of gamblers.

Mortitz's approach was certainly true for the founders of Apple Computer (AAPL: news, chart, profile), who built a computer because they and their buddies were interested in playing around with computers, he said.

"I think they were as amazed as anyone else 10 or 15 years later, at how a hobby or doing something for themselves actually translated into a large personal computer business," he went on. "The same goes for, certainly, the founders at Yahoo and the founders at Google."

No one ever thinks that being a businessman is like being a public servant. Yet it's a perspective that we all need to keep in mind. It's a perspective I agree with, and one that Moritz zeros in on.

"We don't want people who are get-rich-quick artists," he added.

"I know it's bland; I know it sounds idealistic. But on a whole, if you have people developing services or products that do something useful for their customers, and, there are a lot of customers, things will work out OK."

Sitting down with the calm, methodically-spoken Moritz, I get the sense that he personally follows the same guidelines or rules-of-thumb filters he applies to those he chooses to invest in.

If he weren't a venture capitalist, he'd be an artist, he said.

Some artists, much like some venture capitalists, seek to create a world of possibilities. They paint or draw or write because it means something to them first. When it's commercialized, money is byproduct but the real reward and real lasting satisfaction is the meaning it gives to others.

Other character traits that Moritz looks for in potential entrepreneurs or executives are humility and a sense of frugality. Moritz, who sat down with me to talk at length at why he chose to invest in Plaxo, typically will turn away from anyone looking to "hog the limelight."

See related story: Will Plaxo follow Yahoo, Google story?

While I managed to get Moritz to speak at length about his views, his own written words back in 2000, at the height of the boom, are worth recalling.

"If arrogance was apparent at the dawn, it will inevitably permeate the company," he wrote back then. "If frugality, confidence, humility and a desire to develop a wonderful product or service were evident when an idea got started, then these will weave themselves into the corporate fabric. If modestly talented engineers were there at the beginning, the only people they will be able to hire will be the lame."

What else he looks for...

So, how does one get the toughest VC in Silicon Valley to sit down and listen to their pitch, I asked?

"E-mail me," he said, with a chuckle.

How do you discern a good investment?

"We make a lot of mistakes," he admitted. "We've made maybe 500 investments over the course last 16 to 17 years at Sequoia. Every time we think we've got it down, we know all the secrets, along comes something else. We've learned a fair amount of what makes a good investment or a bad investment.

"There are hallmarks of things that we try to look for. We try to anticipate a need that customers have - whether they're consumers or enterprise customers. We try to anticipate making an investment in a company that seems to be solving a problem that's brewing. Not a problem that's well recognized, but a problem that's brewing and that's only going to get bigger."

I had heard that Moritz was tough on entrepreneurs, so, I had to ask: How would others describe you and how would you describe yourself?

He took the fifth on the latter question, but on the former question he used diplomacy.

"I think people who invest in us would say the guys at Sequoia Capital are among the harder working people in the venture capital business," he said. "And, they're fairly steady. And, pretty devoted to their business and haven't gotten distracted by a whole lot of outside interests, and beyond their families and the venture business, they don't do too much else."

Finally, Moritz did touch on the future of social networks, the current buzz phrase in the valley.

"Social networking is one of those phrases like the phrases of recent years, whether it's B2C, or B2B, peer-to-peer - I'm not sure what it really means," he said. "There will be a bunch of services that will blossom and flourish. Five years from now, they'll be but little footnotes in the back of next set of history books written about Silicon Valley."

So would you buy Google shares at this price?

related stories:
How do tech entrepreneurs prosper in hard times?: "When times are tough, where are all the entrepreneurs? "

Rate your chances for success an an entrepreneur: "The Valley's entrepreneur dating game
Take the test: What are your chances for success?"

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Google Search: "everywhere is beautiful"

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Amazon.com: Early AdoptersAmazon.com (AMZN) has begun publishing a Web log targeted at people who like new gadgets and gizmos. It's a blog of blogs. In a section of the retailer's site aimed at "early adopters", the company is publishing Blogcast, "interesting blog posts from all over the web". It's a combination of announcements about new products and snippets from news stories about technology. Blogcast has a small universe of resources. It's deriving all its content from two other tech blogs: Engadget and Gizmodo.com.

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