Business | Today and Tomorrow

Doing Business in Boston: Why it’s good and why we should move on

Filed under Entrepreneurship, Rants, Thoughts by Kate Brodock on 27 July 2010 at 21:56 {5 comments}

On Monday, Henry McCance wrote about why he moved his firm from Boston to Silicon Valley, and why Boston isn’t a good place to start a company.

Well, I found this to be crap, and sent it to a few locals in high places to see if they had a response. One of them was Doug Banks, Publisher of Mass High Tech, who wrote a wonderful rabble-rouser of a post on the MHT blog (you should definitely read the whole thing, there are a lot of good retorts).

I wrote a comment on the post, and I wanted to repost it here and break it down.

“Completely awesome retort. Glad I sent you the article as you’ve done a great job in countering the many points.

To add a few myself, I think it’s a pretty weak claim to say that you shouldn’t do business in a place because it doesn’t have name brands. As far as I’m concerned, probably half of Silicon Valley went to Silicon Valley simply because name brands were there, not necessarily because it was a better place to do business…..”

As I’ll allude to later, a lot of what McCance talked about was simply “I gotta be where the cool kids are.” The Googles, the Facebooks. I might argue that many of those made it out to Silicon Valley for the same reasons. Granted, they are actually the cool kids, but couldn’t it be that the reason is because Silicon Valley is a great place to start a business (it’d be silly to say otherwise) and not necessarily that Boston is a bad place. And Doug has some really great points about the reality of this claim as well – there a lot of intricacies to the Silicon Valley vs Boston landscape that aren’t so simple as “SV/Cali is bigger and better than Boston…” As an addition here (forgot this in the comments), California in general is actually a really tough place to do business in overall – employee insurance/taxes are atrocious, rent in at least San Fran and LA at least equals and in many cases well surpasses Boston and even NY….. I could go on, but will stop…..

“….I started right out of college in the start-up environment in Cambridge. To your point about MIT, in most cases, the first place MITers would go is right across the street to CIC (founded by MITers). It was like their second home. If they couldn’t get something thru the MIT tech tranfer office, they’d go next door, not across the country. And based on the success of CIC, I’d say it’s a pretty supportive environment to start a company in, and it just keeps growing.

From there, I also had my stint at places like Bose. In terms of encouraging innovation, it’s not as cutting edge as Google, but the stuff that goes on in that place, and the support Bose gives to research and “tinkering” is amazing (Dr Bose started the company based on the premise of trying to solve many of the worlds huge problems, including cold fusion. They have a car that can jump over a curb, which Dr Bose developed based solely on a physics graph that said to him “this is possible.”…”

In addition to Bose, Doug mentioned a LOAD of other rocking start-ups that started and stayed in the Boston area. Are they Google? No (well, actually, as Doug mentioned Google’s second largest “center” is in Boston…). But they’re powerful and successful companies (zipcar, Staples, Monster) and some of the newbies are poised to be big names (Carbonite, iRobot).

That reminds me, someone should do a tally of the companies that have also gotten sold for valuable price tags, because I would also consider those a success…..

“….I agree, there is some work to do, but there are plenty of organizations that not only realize this, but are pushing for progress. Orgs like Mass High Tech, Girls in Tech and Boston World Partnerships are actively pushing for more visibility on the benefits of doing business in Boston….”

And this is important. Doug points out several gaps we have, and the fact that we know we have them. This debate has gone on for so long, we would be silly not to be trying to fix every hole. As Managing Director of Girls in Tech Boston, we had several conversations about this issue internally and externally.

We’re all proud of Boston and the supportive entrepreneurship community that’s here, and we darn well know we have a lot of substantial, meaningful things to offer to any business that wants to be here.

“…..McCance’s argument seemed to be based a lot on PR issues…. Silicon Valley has the brand, Boston doesn’t. That’s no reason to claim that Boston is a bad place to do business though. It needs a few improvements in that area, and a good PR campaign… that’s all.”

This is where I think the bulk of the problem lies. It’s a PR issue. McCance really doesn’t give any more substantial argument as far as I’m concerned. Doug says, “Even [he] agrees there’s “no compelling reason” why Silicon Valley should get all the credit for consumer e-commerce companies. So if it’s a matter of perception, then what should we be doing to change that perception?”

And THAT’s the question we should all be answering. It’s not about whether Boston is a good place to have a company. It is. But what can we all do to change peoples’ views on it?

We’ve got to develop a solid PR strategy, and the organizations I listed above along with plenty of others can get the job done. There’s no point in just letting this argument be an argument, a we’re-better-than-you-are discussion, because that’s not constructive.

Doug called for solutions and progressive movements forward, and I’m calling for them as well.

I’m also calling for collaboration and partnerships to get the job done. We’ve got the people, we’ve got the brainpower, and we’ve got an awesome city, with awesome people in it.

So let’s do it.

Greylock Partners on Why You Shouldn’t Start a Company in… Boston (fastcompany.com)
Thought Leadership moves to Silicon Valley from Boston (cambridgecluster.com)
Innovation Events: a Tale of Two Coasts (vocecommunications.com)

Crowdsourcing: Opinions Managed

Filed under B2B Marketing, Events, Marketing by Kate Brodock on 17 September 2009 at 08:25 {2 comments}

Below are the notes from 9 September’s TiE Boston event on crowdsourcing that I moderated. I thank my Co-Chair Sanjli Gidwaney for capturing this information.

Topic:

“Are two heads really better than one? Do the opinions of many actually yield to better solutions and results for large and small scale companies alike? Several companies around the world are utilizing crowdsourcing models in their business today. From Amazon’s customer review system, to P&G and HP’s use of communities in marketing, product development, customer relations and even basic research and design. By definition, Wikipedia – a crowdsourcing phenomenon itself – claims crowdsourcing is a distributed problem solving process, while other articles state that it’s the process of outsourcing a repetitive challenge to large groups of people via the internet. Whichever definition you prefer, one thing is for sure, crowdsourcing, with it’s ever increasing popularity, is a powerful business model which cannot be ignored.

We welcome you to our panel discussion to learn ways in which the crowdsourcing model can be used, in order to realize more fully the potential of your organization.”

Panelists:
Jim Storer, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable
Matt Johnston, VP of Marketing & Community at uTest
Pam Randhawa, VP of Strategic Development at Sermo

Take aways:

What are some of the buzzwords that are commonly used when talking about groups of people working for you? Community, crowdsourcing, etc..

Crowdsourcing is different from community management
Groups of disparate individuals coming together
They are actually sourcing something for the company
Bringing together different skill sets to accomplish a process
When people are voting, or you’re gathering data,etc - that’s community management
When people are involved in creating something, that’s crowdsourcing
There is a blur between crowdsourcing and market research
When you’re seeking opinions from a large audience, that’s crowdsourcing

What are different types of business models in the crowdsourcing space?

Depends on the purpose of the crowd but generally…

Subscription model: customers pay for ongoing access
Transaction model: customers pay for certain access
- On the demand
- Servicing intermediaries
Cost Savings
- Newspaper model Guardian vs.Telegraph

How do you go from data gathering to a product/service?

Make sure you have a clear plan of what information you’re gathering and in what form before you start
Structured Data is key!
- uTest, tells customers what to test and how to test it
Unstructured Data is the enemy!
Moderation of users is important
- You may need to lead testers/participants back to the original goal if they deviate
- The system of moderation can be automated
- Sometimes it’s community management through posting a comment
- Ideally, you create a self-learning and self-teaching community

What works when managing a community?

When the community gets larger, leaders will emerge
Enable the community managers to communicate with community
You need a business model to keep the community active – this can get very expensive
It can be difficult to develop payment and accounting systems to compensate the community
You need to operationalize how to pay community members
Rules of engagement: How do you want your members to engage?
- Set guidelines
Creating deputy members is often a good tactic to help them moderate crowds or sub-crowds
Praise in public and chastise in private
Analytics:
- What participants like and don’t like
- How long are participants active
- When are participants most active
- Always have to match up supply and demand
Having an executive advocate of the crowdsourcing model is important if you’re trying to employ it in a big organization
- Need to create clear guidelines, or other departments may start to encroach on the process

How do you protect your company’s IP?

You have to communicate the rules of engagement to the participants
- e.g. Participants can’t blog about client products
Use participant NDAs
Develop a unique identifier for participants
The laws become blurred internationally
Reputation and blackballing act as deterrents/consequences
- Reputation tells a company who to listen to

How do you handle the participants’ IP?

It can be built into the subscription agreement with testers, e.g. the company owns the IP
The system needs to be transparent

How do you incent users and deal with user fatigue?

Make it fun if you’re not paying them
Create ongoing interactions
Look for input from users, what’s important to them
Outside transaction: offer e-books or educational video conferences
Inside transaction: money and reputation
- Recognition goes a long way in vertical testing
Educational opportunities
- SERMO brings conferences to users
Content rating system on how your peers view your work
Ask strongly active participants to share their findings with their peers
Attach praise to participants profile (badges, “medals,” etc)

Who should use crowdsourcing? How do you build it out?

Figure out what you want the community to do, and continue to re-examine this decision throughout
Determine what businesses processes you’re trying to support
Never underestimate what your strategy is going to be to keep users active
Determine your business model, how you’ll handle transactions, marketing, operations, etc
The business model has to be in harmony with the client and the community
Is your culture ready for a community? Will the community stay on its course?
Companies have to cater to communities
- Make sure the value proposition means something to them
- The community doesn’t work for the company, and you can’t treat them as if they do
Rule of 90:9:1
- Small percentage of community will engage crowd
- 1% of community is adding 90% of content
- 90% are lurkers
- Being able to pick the 1% is very hard, engage them early
- How do you turn lurkers into stars?
  - Nurture and sheppard them
  - Be cautious about what’s happening outside the eco-system where users are blogging or participating on twitter to recruit other members to community

Other notes

Communities don’t want to be advertised to, they don’t mind being educated, but not sold to
They want to make their own decisions

Brand Equity is Effected by Online Presence

Filed under new media by Kate Brodock on 2 June 2009 at 10:21 {no comments}

I’ve argued before about the importance of, at the very least, monitoring your brand image in online channels. I addressed the following in-depth:

I wonder how many of us directly correlate it to brand equity in the monetary sense, especially with clients. This is important, so let me repeat. New/social media and the Web 2.0 space have important effects on the monetary value of your company.

I also argued that:

Your brand image IS online right now, and it IS being affected. And that DOES and WILL matter when determining the value of your company. In some cases, it’s not even a matter of going where it’s hot (although that has its advantages!). Your brand is there, you should be there too. What’s more, the Web 2.0 world is completely visible to anyone who chooses to look, including potential funders or buyers of your company.

Branding Strategy Insider had a great post up last week on the topic of how perceived quality is a critical asset for brands. As part of the discussion

“Perceived quality is usually at the heart of what customers are buying, and in that sense, it is a bottom-line measure of the impact of a brand identity. More interesting, though, perceived quality reflects a measure of “goodness” that spreads over all elements of the brand like a thick syrup. Even when the brand identity is defined by functional benefits, most studies will show that perceptions about those benefits are closely related to perceived quality. When perceived quality improves, so generally do other elements of customers’ perception of the brand.”

This “measure of goodness” is now not only being determined by your own marketing efforts, but by customers who are talking about your product. And they’re talking online.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to, at the very least, be monitoring and managing your brands presence online. If a measure of your value as a company is based on the perception in the market place, you need to know what those perceptions are, and you need to have a plan in place to understand and hopefully influence how information from customers is affecting that parception.

Pricing, WOM, PR Efforts Get Recession Boost (marketingvox.com)

Mass High Tech: Videoconferencing, web conferences improve in-person meetings

Filed under Quotations by Kate Brodock on 27 February 2009 at 21:30 {no comments}

Quotation in Mass High Tech article on meeting technologies in today’s business setting.

It was just a few years ago that advocates of videoconferencing and web conferences were predicting the death of face-to-face meetings. While technology has helped the virtual meeting replace some in-person events, tech has had another unforeseen effect on the meetings business: It has enhanced in-person meetings and conference, enabling new forms of communications and even turning the annual meeting into a yearlong event, according to consultants and other experts in the meetings business.

From the simple staff meeting to the 20,000-attendee trade show, technology is having an impact as organizers experiment with new approaches to get-togethers………

Visit Mass High Tech for the full article.

Has New Media Left Strategy in the Dust?

Filed under Thoughts, new media by Kate Brodock on 30 July 2008 at 14:01 {no comments}

[This was originally posted on the Other Side Group blog]

I’m exaggerating, but I do think the plunge that companies have taken into the new media space has largely ignored the importance of strategy in a way we haven’t quite seen before.

Why?

The field of new media “gained” on us very quickly, it changes every day, new tools pop up while others disappear, and one thing will work for one company while it’ll wreak havoc on another. The focus on tools lends itself to a focus on tactics. A company that “gets it” and becomes successful either gets those tools, or they’re lucky, but the success alone makes more people want to jump in and get a piece of the action.

One of the big factors in this field is exactly the speed at which it’s developing: It’s so hot right now that people feel like they should be in it or they’ll die, but at the same time, it’s a different field almost every day.

Coupled with that is the fact that the field is open and can be used by anyone. It’s not industry specific. It’s not like a few car companies with a new technology (which can certainly cause failures for some and huge successes for others). EVERYONE wants to be in the new media space and it can theoretically be used by ANY company or individual with access to the internet. Successes and failures start adding up a lot more at that level, and it becomes harder to identify best- or worse-practices.

The Problem

What I’m seeing more and more, however, is companies that both jump-in-blind and shoot-from-the-hip. Not only do they not really get some of the technologies or platforms, but they more often than not don’t think about an overall strategy for their entry, let alone incorporating their moves into overall company strategy.

I’ve seen the following trends (some of these are very general and not meant to be all-encompassing):

Companies are going to PR agencies first, because PR agencies are the ones that tend to implement the tools. Companies aren’t consulting marketers or strategists, and often times they aren’t even consulting the marketing department inside their own companies as much as they should. Somehow they’ve decided that the two are separate functions.
PR agencies tend to use tactics over strategy. They gather up the new media tools and develop a process behind one or a few, and focus on the implementation. Strategy is downplayed, if brought into the equation at all, and the campaign ends up being sporadic or misaligned with company strategy because it’s separated and made to be simply a process.
Companies sometimes try and take new media involvement on themselves, and again, lose sight of strategy, and develop a very ad hoc system to play around with in the new media space, tool-by-tool.

What this leads to is a colossal waste of resources on a program that isn’t cohesive and doesn’t get the results one hopes for.

Fixing the Problem

Using a military example, any successful military commander that has ever lived will tell you that tactics are useless without a good strategy (or without a strategy period). You can’t patch things together into a successful fort seizure unless you have the entire plan laid out and the objective made clear.

Any great marketer or any basic Marketing 101 book will tell you the exact same thing. This was pulled from one such book, which stresses both the importance of top-level strategy to any strong marketing plan as well as the need to develop tactics and programs to support that strategy.

A few things companies can do when thinking about diving into this space:

Internally align yourself with your own marketing department and make sure that everyone is clear on how this works into overall company strategy. There have to be reasons why you think it would benefit the company and clear ways in which it can remain cohesive. As Zach said last night in his talk on Corporate Blogging: “if you want to set up a corporate blog just to set up a corporate blog, you’re not doing it for the right reasons.” [disclaimer: his talk was far more interesting than that simple statement, for more check out his blog].
If you choose to do the process internally, do not go tool by tool and use them separately. Develop a plan, do research on what others have found beneficial or detrimental, know how to use the tools and how they can work together. Then make sure that transfers into a clear strategy. Make the strategy detailed and focused, too general will lead to the shooting-from-the-belt syndrome.
If you go to an external firm for help, I would suggest going with one that highlights strategy in their process. If they’re not asking you for overall goals, what you hope to gain, they may not know themselves.

Obviously I’m a little biased, since I work for a marketing strategy firm that deals in the new media space, but I would suggest going with a marketing firm first. Most of them have relationships with PR agencies that will then help you with the tactics and programs (although, for the record, we can help on the tactical level as well). For instance, we have a relationship with Spotlight Communications for some of our PR needs: we can develop the strategy and then pass it to the communications folks. Usually, since the project is split, the cost doesn’t end up being that much more, but you get a heck of a lot more in terms of taking the process from strategy straight through to program (which is what you should be doing anyway!).

You can also easily go with just a PR agency, but choose ones that are asking the right questions and identifying the right things concerning your strategy before they start talking about all the great tools out there that you can use.

Global New Media

Filed under new media by Kate Brodock on 5 May 2008 at 13:47 {no comments}

An area of interest of mine is international similarities/differences, especially in emerging markets. Another “area of interest” is finding opportunities (which can be a pain in the butt sometimes when your mind keeps turning and it’s 2am and you haven’t gone to sleep yet, but is usually rewarding). The following is a good example of what I mean.

In our last Central Asia and the Caucasus class two weeks ago, we were discussing our possible roles as future “international people” (our school has yet to come up with one title for all of our graduates who are getting Masters in International Relations. International people does the trick for now). Our professor is great because he always pushes us on the applicability of our degree, which makes me breath a sigh of relief after three years (sweet, we’re going to actually use this stuff!).

Anyway, so here I am, about to go into the new media field, and we’re talking about the political, economical and social structure of Central Asia. Essentially, the small business world in most countries in this region is very limited under the governments (I’ll stop at that, as this topic alone could probably take up five blog posts alone). Business skills are likewise limited.

In a round about way, I came to the question of: What does new media mean in countries like this? If I were to have a project in, say, Kazakhstan, in what form would it be?

Countries/regions/companies/you-name-it have varying skill sets and varying levels of skill. A highly interactive social media site which might work here just won’t fly in many countries. But does that mean that new media is useless to them? Does it mean they haven’t reached new media levels, as we’ve* described them yet? Or does the definition of new media change for every scenario? Is their new media a simpler version of ours (or vice versa, as I’m sure there are international players beating “us”), but still considered new media? Is new media relative or comparative?

It can best be depicted by the below:

As you can see, a “simple” solution might be enough in a less developed new media environment, and, in terms of what’s needed, will be a more complete solution.

What does this say about new media cross-border? I welcome your comments.

* Don’t read too much into “we” or “us,” I only mean more developed vs less developed new media, where I consider the people probably reading this post to be at least familiar with more developed new media capabilities.

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Doing Business in Boston: Why it’s good and why we should move on

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Check out our book release!

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