LSQHA Blog Reviews

Although securing and promoting your company's brand is an important step when starting a business, and although protecting that brand can be an ongoing concern, the question of what it means to associate a person with a company brand is a lot more complicated - a fact made obvious in light of Tiger Wood's sex scandals. The companies that featured Woods in their advertising had sought to latch onto Tiger-Woods-as-a-brand - an image crafted to suggest his tenacity, reliability, skill, and success. Sponsor The gulf we now see between Tiger-Woods-as-a-brand - "the perfect role model" - and Tiger Woods as a flawed human being points to some of the potential dangers in associating your company's brand with a person. Of course, few startups are in the position to build a brand based on a celebrity's image or reputation. Instead, if there is a person associated with the startup's brand, it is likely someone from within the company. Tiger Woods serves as a cautionary tale, obviously for the businesses who endorsed him but also for individuals who seek to promote themselves as a brand. Despite concerns about people as brands (branding is, after all, what we do to cattle ), the power of brands continues to be a way to quickly identify a product or service or idea with your business. For many entrepreneurs, developing a brand isn't merely a matter of creating a company brand, but of also crafting a personal brand. The idea of a personal brand is hardly new, often traced back to a 1997 article by Tom Peters, "The Brand Called You" : "To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You." It may be that some of the fallout from the Tiger Woods scandal has made the idea of personal branding seem trickier - people are people, after all, not objects and not cattle. As Doc Searls has argued in two recent blog posts, brands are " boring " at best and " bull " at worst. Technological innovation has made personal branding easier, in some regards. Registering a domain name under your own name has become an incredibly straightforward and inexpensive process . Having a domain name is a simple step in helping make sure that content you produce is readily associated with your name. And services like Google Alerts can be useful to monitor the Internet for mention of your name. The rise of social media has made creating an online presence quite simple, but signing up for social media networks or having a LinkedIn profile for example, is not necessarily sufficient or suitable for crafting your personal brand. As the information available online about all of us increases, it is likely that our ability to create and maintain personal branding will become more difficult. Undoubtedly, building trust is fundamental to business success. Maintaining reputation is crucial, whether or not you want your name to be synonymous with a product, a service or a company. What are your thoughts on personal branding? Has it become impossible? Or has it become ubiquitous? Discuss

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To Be (a Brand) or Not To Be (a Brand)

For most startups in the early-stages of development, much of the building process includes repetitions of prototyping, testing, receiving feedback and iterating the product several times over. The toughest part of this process isn't building or making changes, it's getting that valuable feedback on where your product could be improved. Concept Feedback , a simply named online service, wants to help your startup with constructive criticism from its quickly growing community of over 5,000 designers, developers, marketers and entrepreneurs. Sponsor The process at Concept Feedback is pretty simple: users can upload their concept work for the community to view, other members comment and provide their opinions and feedback for the concept, then the original user can upgrade their product, and even resubmit for further feedback. Companies can choose to post a "premium concept" which will be more visible on the Concept Feedback homepage and for which they can offer cash rewards for the most constructive comment or piece of advice. Most of the items are site are full web or logo design mockups, but there were a few rough wire-framed sites scattered through the concepts. Other, less popular entries, include films, posters, business cards and a whole lot more. For a small startup team looking to get some fresh sets of eyeballs on their latest project, Concept Feedback could be an excellent resource to do so. With most of the feedback based around design and aesthetics, startups may still need to look elsewhere for direct usage and feature feedback for their product. The truth is, with this type of feedback, you want people taking a deep dive and playing around with your product for some time before providing their opinion; Concept Feedback seems geared at providing mostly visual feedback, so usability and functionality reviews are much less common. There are several ways of gathering feedback from actual users of your site; one such service we mentioned in January allows companies to automate phone surveys and displays the results as charts and graphs. But if your goal is to show off the latest design iteration of your site, Concept Feedback is a great place to unveil it and receive some educated opinions to make it look its best before launch day. Discuss

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Get Quick Impressions of Your Latest Product Iteration with Concept Feedback

The long-closed nature of Apple's iPhone OS ecosystem is coming to a head with the addition of major new restrictions on developers. If there ever was a time when the Android world had a chance to out-innovate Apple, this could be it. Each day this week, developers have pointed out another indignity Apple's legal framework subjects them to. Could this be the pressure that gets resolved by the rise of a compelling Android offering? It seems like a long shot. Sponsor People creating applications on the iPhone and iPad platform are apparently no longer allowed to build in development environments abstracted from the preferred form of code , 3rd party analytics services are believed to be no longer allowed to track use of apps , Apple has baked in its own advertising platform and the essential requirement of winning Apple's permission to deploy apps on its platform is feeling more onerous every day.   At the same time, no one else has come close to building a User Experience that can rival the iPhone and iPad.  If someone could, a grand battle could emerge.  Instead, right now it's looking ugly. On the positive side, the number of Android applications is growing faster and faster . The Anguish Prominant iPhone developer Dan Grigsby articulated today what could become an increasingly common sentiment in a goodbye post announcing the closure of his popular iPhone development blog Mobile Orchard : Ask permission environments crush creativity and innovation. In healthy environments, when would-be innovators/creators identify opportunities the only thing that stands between the idea and its realization is work. In the iPhone OS environment when you see an opportunity, you put in work first, ask Apple's permission and then, only after gaining their approval, your idea can be realized. I've always worked at the edge; it's where the interesting opportunities live. None of the startup I've created would have been possible in an ask permission environment.... I won't work in this ask-permission environment any longer. As Google's Chris Messina put it well in some poignant speculation this afternoon, "It occurs to me that Apple is crossing a chasm. To where, I don't know. But its early proponents seem to be being left behind." Another Perspective: Despite Its Problems, Apple's Ecosystem Remains the Best Raven Zachary, President of leading iPhone development shop Small Society , offers another perspective. Android needs a better OS before we'd even begin to see iPhone developers leave. I didn't fall in love with iPhone OS due to the elegance of Apple's legal terms. It's the platform that I fell in love with. It's the best mobile platform out there, and while I appreciate the analysis by the community and the hard questions being asked, I remain committed to the iPhone platform. Of course the most probable outcome of all this is that most developers will stay where the users, the money and the best user experience are. Some will be unhappy and some will leave - but probably not enough for consumers to notice. If only someone could build an Android device that rivaled Apple's hardware, and if the issues with different versions of Android across devices could be fixed, if the Android OS was just betteer - then there would be an incredible opportunity to lure away developers and finally get more users drawn to their applications. The iPad is really incredible though and there are a whole lot of very big "ifs" in play. An effective challenge by Android sure feels like a long-shot right now, doesn't it? Discuss

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Apple's Tightening Grip: This Could Be Android's Big Chance

It is widely accepted that social media has transformed the landscape of marketing radically, and no longer can businesses - no matter their size or stage of development - afford to avoid social media. While the importance of developing one's brand online remains paramount - most obviously through the registration of a domain name - the proliferation of social media platforms can be overwhelming, and startups might feel compelled to register and interact with every service in order to quicken the spread of their name. Sponsor The multitude of social media platforms allow new businesses to establish their online presence, develop a brand and a message, and grow fans and followers - and of course customers - all without extensive investment in elaborate or costly marketing campaigns. The danger, however, lays in the proverbial "spreading oneself too thin" by attempting to make sure one's startup has a presence in every social media network. While new businesses should certainly take advantage of social networking, here are a few tips to help avoid social media overload: Avoid social-media-for-social-media's sake : Social media endeavors should always be in service of clear business goals, not merely an abstract notion of "user engagement." Develop a social media plan that supports your business plan. Use the services which which you're most comfortable : Take advantage of social media networks to which you already belong and in which you are already active. It is preferable to develop a robust presence on one or two platforms than to create profiles on every possible site, particularly if these are in danger of becoming unused and out-of-date. Engage : Despite the far-reaching power of social media networks, these services are not bullhorns. Use them to engage in dialogue with potential investors and customers, not merely to push information out to them. While social media can be a great place to share information, promote a service, and so on, it is important to be responsive - listen, engage. Track, evaluate, and adapt : Many services offer analytics tools in order to ascertain traffic levels and engagement. Be sure to check these regularly to evaluate the ROI of a platform. And as the field of social media is ever changing, be prepared to adapt. For example, just because a service like Foursquare is popular now does not mean that you should be forever wedded to location-based marketing. Although it is tempting to register for every social media site and to try to adopt every new tool, the drawback may be that in an attempt to network everywhere, your startup fails to network anywhere. Discuss

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Social Media Marketing Overload? Some Tips for Startups

Apple unveiled the 4.0 version of the iPhone operating system yesterday and a big part of the announcement was about a new advertising platform called iAd . Apple will soon provide an easy way for app developers to put advertisements in their mobile apps and keep 60% of the revenue. Tech financial analysts are going bonkers over the news , with one headline-grabbing prediction putting the opportunity at $4.67 billion per year for Apple. Why? Because the platform has the potential to change online advertising like nothing else has in a long time. Sponsor Cullen Wilson offers this explanation on the Austin Startup Blog : The reason iAd has a chance to change how users interact with ads is simple: The fear and unknown of clicking on an ad is gone. Apple is throwing its brand behind an entire ad network to create the perception that if you trust Apple, you can trust these ads too! Worried about installing malware from clicking on that ad? Hate that ads open up a new window? No problem, Apple has solved this by keeping these ads within the app itself and vetting all of the ads on their network. iAd reminds me of two ad networks I'm already a fan of, The Deck and Fusion Ads . Their ads are well designed, they advertise in applications I use and love, and they vet everyone on the network before accepting them. If you've ever used the free Twitter clients Tweetie or Twitterrific, you've seen these ads. If Apple can convince its users that it's safe to click anything with the iAd logo they will have single handedly changed the perception users have of ads, resulting in more clicks and more money made by both Apple and developers. They will have done this by taking advantage of a closed system, their own brand, and a platform that their users already love (the app store). The iPad is clearly changing peoples' experience with computing - take one out around non-geeks and you'll see strangers clamor to get their hands on it. But if Apple can transform mobile advertising from an annoyance to a trusted, appealing experience - that would be huge. The iAd platform could impact advertising more than the iPad impacts computing. It may very well generate more revenue, too. Wilson points out that though many people complain about the closed nature of the App Store, this is the other side of the coin and is worth considering. One question I have about this is how scalable vetting such a huge ad platform could be. Where there's money to be printed, there must be money to pay ad examiners, though. If the platform can prove effective and make app building all the more financially viable, then we as users can cheer for a new world of apps that will be built in the future. If Apple can deliver a high-quality experience on the iAd platform, then we as users can cheer for a less grating experience than a wild west of mobile advertising would likely deliver. There is something a little frightening about Apple's end-to-end control over the platform though, isn't there? What do you think about iAd? Do you think it will be effective? Revolutionary? Do you think it's fair? Discuss

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Why iAds Could be Bigger Than iPads