This week I attended an event in Palo Alto in the old Facebook headquarters building. It wasn’t your typical event, but it was definitely a good one. Organized by the fbFund, this event featured several great thought leaders in the realm of social media and startups, including renowned author of The Facebook Era Clara Shih, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang, Stage 2 Consulting head Jeremy Toeman and Microsoft BizSpark “marketing dude” Jacob Mullins.

What is the fbFund? According to the Facebook website, it is a group of developers selected by Facebook to help innovate and create unique social experiences relating to Facebook Connect and they offer seed funding ranging from $25k  to $100k investments along with mentorship to help accomplish this goal.

So what’s so important about this meeting, you might be asking? Well it’s because since it was organized by a group dedicated to helping developers, that means also startups (aka small businesses), right? The goal of this particular meeting was to answer some really fundamental questions:

- When’s the right time to launch?
- Hire a PR person in-house, outsource, or do it themselves?
- How much should you invest in marketing vs product development?
- Right mix of social media marketing vs more “traditional” channels?

Here are some of those answers.

With over 250 million users and 1 million developers in over 180 countries, Facebook marketing is becoming a really big part of garnering new business. According to The Facebook Era author Clara Shih, sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have changed the paradigm from the world wide web to the world wide web of people and even user expectations have changed. No longer are you simply banking on a “spray and pray” policy to work. Instead, the way to do business with your customers is to understand who they are. It’s all about having targeted marketing – they expect you to know about their problems, issues and to show them what you can do to help them. Let’s be customer-centric, not product-centric.

Shih brought up an interesting phenomenon during her presentation – that being of transitive trust. What is this? With social media, it means that the probability of you trusting someone would increase based on the marketer having the trust of a common person you trust. So if a guy from Salesforce.com is interested in reaching out to your demographics, they might seek out a trusted source you follow and then you might be more inclined to at least listen to what they have to say (whether there is a transaction is entirely up to you).

Moreover, Shih also believes that with this paradigm shift in promotion, so to has there been a change in how we communicate to our customers. With the advent of the telephone, it was a 1:1 ratio where businessmen talks to customer. Then with web 1.0 (static websites, email marketing, etc.), the world changed to be 1:many. Now with web 2.0, you’re now looking at many:many. Ultimately, Shih believes we’re in a new age where Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn has forced it to be a ratio of everybody-to-everybody.

In a tie-in back to Facebook, Shih’s accomplishments include creating the first Facebook application integrated with her previous stint at Salesforce.com. Just how integrated was it with social media? It had a Facebook portion that allowed you to link up with other people you know on the platform and employs transitive trust. Also, it allows you to better target any sales through LinkedIn’s friend-to-friend network and lastly works on customer service through Twitter…all in Salesforce’s system.

A key point made throughout the afternoon was that you don’t have to work with big agencies to promote your brand. Instead, it’s all about networking, going to events, showing the benefits of your product in the ecosystem through partnering with influencers and others. According to Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang, there are three rules that he would like to see for startups to do in order to try and succeed:

- Be specific in what problem you’re solving.
- Crowdsource your support.
- Be a part of the dialogue happening online.

Owyang says that with Twitter, it’s alright to have a non-engaging profile for your brand/company BUT you need to have at least one person listed on that profile so that customers can engage with someone from your company.The company Twitter page can simply be a news feed of press releases and other blog posts – and state that the Twitter page is not an active account.

For startups eager to engage in blogger outreach, Stage 2 consultant & blogger Jeremy Toeman suggests that you need to know who you are talking to. Actually reading what they write and building a trust with the blogger over time through comments, conversation and engagement is a necessity in order to have them even care about what product you’re creating. Toeman also suggests that if you’re reaching out to big blogs such as Mashable, TechCrunch, etc that you should probably try and influence those people that the editors listen to – the concept of transitive trust.

It should be noted that the panel of Toeman, Owyang and Microsoft Bizspark “marketing guy” Jacob Mullins all believe that positioning is more important than exclusivity when dealing with bloggers. You need to tell the bloggers and even your stakeholders and customers “this is the problem and here’s how & why we solved it”. Frankly put, Toeman says that if you haven’t built a good user experience in the first 30 seconds of your customer or stakeholder trying out your product, you don’t have a good product. It’s your best selling point and you need to make sure that it has all the potential to succeed.

This session at the Facebook headquarters highlights an good philosophy that Jeremiah Owyang harped upon – be specific in what problem you’re solving. Without actually addressing this problem, your startup and product may not last very long.

You can watch the entire recording of this presentation by clicking here.

Jon Malkin of Vocal Joystick

Jon works with user interfaces and there is no easy way to describe this session other that a really cool way to interface with a computer. With the use of vocal tones he was able to program the mouse cursor do all kinds of things and when used in combination he was actually able to play a video game. All everyone talked about how this could do amazing things for disabled individuals to interact with a computer when they never could in the past.

The Hubble Project (not the telescope)

The Hubble Project was presented by Arvind Krishnamurthy and Ethan Katz-Bassett. Hubble helps find black holes across the internet. Specifically, looking at why some websites become persistently unreachable. A black hole is when paths are available to a web server, but traffic persistently does not reach the server. So how long do black holes last? According to a 3 week study start 9/17/2007, 31,000 black holes involving 10,000 network had 60% last more than 2 hours each.

For more information, check out the website and to see it working go to http://hubble.cs.washington.edu

Boxee

Dave Mathews is serial entrepreneur having served as the Forward Thinker at Sling Media, identifying consumer trends leading to the development of the latest in digital media products. Prior to Sling, Dave was handpicked by the former chairman of Radio Shack as the Director, Product Innovation to develop their modern home strategy. Before joining Radio Shack, he was co-founder of Digital:Convergence – creator of the CueCat – a first-ever consumer barcode reader, distributed through Forbes, Wired, Parade and Nielsen Media publications.

He is the “user experience guy” at boxee and a consumer product expert, specializing in the convergence of digital entertainment devices. Boxee is essentially an open source version of Apple TV that allows you to put it on any kind of hardware. It is currently in Alpha and I just got an invite to try it out. I will do a review in a future post.

Mars 3.0 with Scott Maxwell

Wouldn’t it be cool to drive the Mars Rover? Scott Maxwell does it every day. He talked about the evolution of going to Mars in its 1.0 and 2.0 iterations. He clued us into why the rovers have gone so far past their 90 day mission – they expected to have the solar panels covered in dust making it inoperable but they didn’t anticipate high winds that would clean them.

Scott’s goal for the presentation was this:

“Ultimately, my goal is to ask the audience to help design the future of space exploration — what I’m calling, admittedly with a certain bias, “Mars 3.0.” How could NASA use the Net not just to communicate better with the public but to actually enable the public to meaningfully participate in this grand adventure? To help the audience help me, I start with some background about JPL’s role within NASA, summarize how Mars 1.0 and Mars 2.0 worked, and describe how we drive the Mars rovers today. Then I discuss some of the legal, contractual, and practical restrictions on involving the general public in our mission. Finally, I’ll invite the audience to suggest approaches and help solve some of the problems that currently stand in the way of Mars 3.0.”

He showed beautiful pictures of the Martian Landscape and blew people away with pictures of wispy clouds that you would have thought was taken right here on earth. He showed Mars moons eclipsing the sun, how far the sun was and how small it was compared to what we see on earth.

Then came the little yellow dot.

At the end of his presentation he showed a picture of a small yellowish dot. I thought it was another picture of the sun, but it was a picture of earth. Sounding like the Heir Apparent to Carl Sagan, he had the audience in complete silence as he said “everyone we know, we love and ever met, all our wars, our disagreements are on what Carl Sagan calls that Pale Blue Dot”. It brought chills to me and everyone in the room and showed us for that moment how things we think are so important are so insignificant in a huge universe that is just waiting to be explored.

He finished and then…

HE GOT THE FIRST STANDING OVATION FOR GNOMEDEX 2008 and the SECOND IN GNOMEDEX HISTORY. This picture below shows it. It was awesome and would compete with any presentation given at TED. It was very cool to be a part of this kind of history.

BugLabs Overview with Jeremy Toeman

Jeremy said he had a hard act to follow after Scott’s presentation, but he didn’t disappoint. He talked about the past history of hardware and its closed environments. He showed of the modular systems from Bug Labs which are different kinds of modules that can be programmed to do certain things and joined together to perform even more powerful functions.

Here is a link to his presentation slides and video of his presenation on the Bug Labs site.

He also announced a contest for everyone at Gnomedex and watching to come up with their own use of the Bug Labs components. It is located here. Enter (here) by Friday, 8/29. Reps from Bug Labs and Gnomedex will review the submissions, and pick the winners!

Gnomedex 2008 is a wrap

With a final session of Ignite Seattle! we are done. Some closing thoughts in my final post.