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How PostSecret Uses Social Media to Grow its Mission - The Frank Warren Interview
I used to think that Frank Warren had it easy. I didn’t think he had to do any work at all to grow his site: PostSecret. PostSecret is a collection of secrets that people write on postcards and mail to Frank’s house. It’s one of the top blogs and I thought that’s only because the idea is so extraordinary that people naturally have to talk about it.
In my interview with Frank, I learned that a lot of work went into developing his community. So I asked Frank to teach me some of what he did. Here are a few ideas that I learned (listen to the full interview to learn more, directly from Frank):
Know the tools - I foolishly tried using every single social media site for one thing: to get more people to pay attention to my company, Mixergy. Frank uses each site differently. He uses Facebook for his event invitations because the site’s news feed makes events go viral. He uses MySpace’s blog features to interact with his readers. And he uses YouTube to co-create viral videos with his audience, based on the secrets he gets.
Live - Frank takes his community offline by speaking at colleges. He meets his readers in person at book signings. And he displays the postcards he gets at art shows.
Mission - If you listen to my interview, you’ll hear me pound Frank with questions about how he uses different tools to grow his audience. He answered all my questions and gave me good advice that you can use to grow your your onlien business. But when I listened to the interview again while editing it, something hit me: all of these tools work for Frank because there’s a sense of mission behind what he does. He’s not just an audience or a business–though he readily says that PostSecret is NOT a non-profit and he IS a businessman. There’s a sense mission behind what he does. He wants to give voice to the people who mail in their secrets. He wants to touch his readers. And he wants to connect with everyone who sees him in person.
Right click to download the interview
(40 minutes)
Surprising Customers with Amazing Service - The Tony Hsieh, Zappos Interview
I interviewed Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, to find out how he took a little online shoe company and made it into a billion dollar a year online retail success story.
Here are some of the things I learned from our conversation. Download the full interview to learn more directly from Tony.
Shocking customers - Doesn’t every company say that they have great customer service? When Tony told me about the level of service that Zappos gives its customers, I tested it by conferencing in the phone number on his web site. When I asked for a pair of shoes that they didn’t have in stock, the woman I spoke to offered to find it for me somewhere else. I was shocked, but if you listen to Tony’s voice at the end of that test, you’ll hear that he didn’t find it extraordinary at all. That’s just how his company operates.
Surprise - Tony told me that Zappos tries to surprise its customers by giving them more than they expect. For example, they’ll routinely ship an order using a faster delivery method that the customer paid for. Can you imagine how excited customers get when they receive a package sooner than they expected?
Social Media - Zappos encourages its people to use tools like Twitter (see them). I tried to understand how many extra sales they got from it, but Tony taught me that’s not the way to look at it. He’s doing a billion dollars in sales, the few orders he gets from Twitter won’t impact his bottom line. But the connection with his customers is priceless. Social media, for Zappos, is about letting the world know that there are real people behind the online brand.
Right click here to download the interview
(Thank you Tara Hunt for making the introduction.)
You Don’t Need Outside Funding - The Magento Interview
At several Mixergy events, I introduced Varien’s founders to investors. They were always courteous, but they had little interest in getting outside funding. They’re funding their baby the old fashioned way, through profits. Here’s what I learned from them.
Buy low - Google ads were really mis-priced when they bought them. They bought cheap Google ads to advertise their consulting business. The ads costs them pennies, but they earned millions in consulting work.
Blog - They’ve told me several times before that having a blog helped them build an audience, which helped them build their business. In today’s interview they told me that their blog was written for free by an intern.
Invest - Profits from their consulting business are now being plowed into their new project: Magento, an open source ecommerce platform.
Don’t sleep - I love visiting startups because you can feel the determination in the room. While everyone else is sleeping, these guys are developing or responding to their community’s issues.
How to Develop Intiutive User Experience - The Eric Stephens Interview
Don’t you love web sites that just seem to “get you”? Everything on them seems to be placed exactly where you want them. That’s not an easy experience to create, but Eric Stephens showed me how to do it using listening labs.
Eric learned how to do listening labs when he worked at Creative Good, a consulting company focused on good user experience. He uses them at Mahalo, where he’s the Director of User Experience and at BeerMenus.com, a site he co-founded.
You’ll have to listen to my full interview with Eric to hear step-by-step instructions for conducting a listening lab for your web site, but here are some of the basics:
Basically - In a listening lab, you interview people about how they use the web and watch as them use it.
Be a fly - The most important element of the process is to try to be a fly on the wall. You want to see how people use the web when no one’s there.
Find subjects - You want to study people who are in your target group. You can find them by posting an ad on Craig’s List. When you’re starting out, you can save some money by interviewing your friends.
Interview - First thing you do is ask your subjects how they use the web. Your goal is to create a list of tasks that you want to watch them do online. Don’t go fishing for information. Just listen. When they tell you that they use your competitors site make a note of it. If they tell you they have issues, make a note of it.
Watch & listen - At this point, you get them online and ask them to do the tasks you wrote down. Get them to put their brains on “speaker phone” so you can understand what they’re doing.
Suggest - Suggest they use your site. If possible, don’t tell them that it’s your site. You don’t want to bias their reaction.
At this point, you’ll notice problems with your site that need to be fixed ASAP. Eric says they’ll be so obvious you’ll feel the pain. You’ll also know more about your users’ overall internet experience, including how they interact with your competitors.
Right Click to download the interview
(about 40 minutes)
How to Become Internet Famous - Robert Scoble Video Interview
Here’s a video interview I shot with Robert through TechZulu.com:
When I posted a note on Mixergy asking if any startups wanted to show their sites to Robert Scoble, I got mobbed with requests. I think that’s an example of the power of being “internet famous.” I walked with him through a tech party and in a web company’s office, and in both places I saw people drop what they were doing to look at Scoble.
So when I interviewed him, I asked Scoble how to become internet famous. Here are some of the ideas he told me:
It’s Google’s World - That means you need to publish a lot of content. The more you publish, the easier it is for people to find you.
Get Naked - Or do something outrageous to get attention. Here’s what Robert did some time ago.
Passion, baby - It takes a long time to build fame. You have to find something you’re passionate about so you’ll keep working in the early days, when only 15 people are coming to your site.
Enough with the 2.0 - Web 2.0 is covered to death. Find your own niche. Gary Vaynerchuk, for example, is tearing it up by focusing on wine.
Quickly Building and Selling Sites - The Matt Mickiewicz Interview
There was an article in the NY Times recently about people who are buying web sites and flipping them for a quick profit.I called up Matt Mickiewicz, founder of SitePoint.com. The Times article said his site is where the entrepreneurs are going to buy and sell web businesses.
If you download my conversation with Matt, you’ll hear step-by-step how to take a web site from idea to profits. Matt should know. Not only is SitePoint.com a hub for online entrepreneurs, but the site is profitable in its own right.
Like me, Matt believes in building companies for the long-term, so we discussed what we could learn from flippers about building long-lasting value.
Here are somethings he told me about:
Niche - The Times article talked about flippers who turned a profit by buying and selling a bird cage business. That’s the kind of super-targeted niche that Matt says is most successful.
Content - Don’t write it yourself. Just buy it from guru.com.
Community - In my interview with Andy Oliver about PR, I learned the same thing that Matt taught me. You don’t have to build a community on your own site to be part of the conversation. Andy told me about Twiistup using sites like Facebook. Matt talked to me about the value of participating in relevant message boardsand including a link back to your site.
Right-click to download my podcast interview (45 minutes)
How to Get Your Startup on the News - The Rich DeMuro Interview
Rich DeMuro of KCAL news stopped by today to interview me about the videos I’m posting on Mixergy.com. So I turned the conversation around and interviewed him. I asked him how startups can get on the news. Here’s what he told me.
It’s teleVISION - When you pitch your startup to TV you need to find a way to make your story visual. Rich told me about a dating site that made itself more visual by hosting a dating party. A web page isn’t very visual, but a party is.
He reads email - You can find many reporters’ email addresses online. Email them directly. But remember that they get lots of email, so keep your message short. (Here’s Rich’s site, by the way.)
Hook it - Look for a current news story to link your startup with. For example, remember that big new story about a computer engineer who was accused of withholding access codes to San Francisco’s network? A security company used it as a hook and pitched Rich a story on weak passwords.
After the interview was over, I asked Rich how I could become a better interviewer. I’m never sure where to look when I interview people. So Rich helped me out. The key, as you’ll see in the video that I included with this post, is to go back and forth between looking at the camera and the person I’m talking to.
You can see some pictures here.
Launch in Phases - The Roger Ehrenberg Interview
When Roger Ehrenberg’s company, Monitor110, closed down, he wrote a post mortem for it. After reading his reflections, I called him up to for an interview to get more insight.
My biggest takeaway from the conversation is the importance of releasing a site in phases. Roger told me that people’s expectations for Monitor110 were so high that the company didn’t want to launch until they had a finished product that could live up to those expectations.
By doing that, they robbed themselves of real-world user feedback. “It created an enormous distance” between the company and its clients, he told me.
Writing the post mortem and having this conversation with me couldn’t have been easy. But Roger has invested in some of the web’s most successful companies. I know his CEOs will benefit from reading and hearing about his entrepreneurial experiences–just as I did. Thank you Roger!
Right click to download the podcast. (32 minutes)
Do-It-Yourself Public Relations - The Andy Oliver Interview
I noticed when Andy Oliver of LewisPR takes on a new client they seem to appear everywhere.
If you see stickam shooting live video at a conference, it’s because they’re Andy’s client and he keeps emailing organizers like me to ask them to include stickam at our events. If you noticed Robert Scoble shooting video at twiistup, it’s because they’re a client of LewisPR. When Andy heard that I was meeting with Scoble the day of twiistup, he kept emailing me to find a way to get Scoble at the event.
I love watching what he does, but I wanted to learn more. So I did a 1 hour interview with him and peppered him with questions about how you and I could use some of his techniques.
Here are some of my notes from our interview:
Do-It-Yourself - You can generate a lot publicity for your brand by yourself because so much of new media is accessible. New media tools like blogs, twitter, and Facebook are available to anyone. You don’t need a PR team to start using them and seeing results.
Influencers, influencers, influencers - You need to identify influencers in your industry and start going after them. Andy likes tech conferences because attendees are early adapters who influence others’ decisions.
Get others to talk - It’s nice to talk up your own brand, but it’s much more effective to have others talk about you. Get quotes from venture capitalist investors, analysts, bloggers and other trusted sources. I used this idea right away and asked Andy for a quote about my interviews. Here it is:
“I think it’s clear that entrepreneurs can learn a lot by these short interviews.” –Andy Oliver
Right click here to download the interview. (1 hour)
Andy Oliver is a Vice President at Lewis PR. You can see his profile here.
Is Goal-Setting Outdated? –The Rosalind Resnick Interview
My business mind was shaped by reading books like Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich as a kid. Most of those business philosophy books talked about setting clear goals and refusing to stop until you achieved them.
As you’ll hear in my conversation with Rosalind Resnick, that’s not how she built NetCreations. She didn’t set out to build an opt-in email business and take it public. As far as I can tell, she didn’t start out with a burning desire to get into the email business in any way. She and her partner tried a bunch of different ideas. Most of them either failed or just did okay. One of the ideas they tried was an email list management business. It hit. She loved growing it. And that’s the business that changed her life.
Have you read Founders at Work yet? Most of the entrepreneurs in that book started out chasing one dream and ended up realizing another. Evan Williams tried building a project management tool and ended up with Blogger. Max Levchin was focused on the Palm Pilot before steering PayPal towards what it is today. And Steve Wozniak was just trying to build cool stuff.
So here’s the question: Is goal-setting an outmoded idea?
Right click here to download the interview!
(1 hour long)
If you’re an entrepreneur, you can hire Rosalind’s company to help guide you and you can read her book about what really goes into building a great success.