-
-
We've worked with
New Mixergy Forum: Get Your Startup Funded.
I’ll send an official announcement about this soon, but here’s an early notice about the next Mixergy Forum.
When:
Tuesday, June 3
7:00 - 10:00
Where:
The Santa Monica Playhouse Theater
Who’s presenting:
William Quigley, Managing Director of Clearstone Venture Partners
Other presenters will be added shortly
What you’ll learn:
This event will cover what you need to know to intelligently raise money for your startup.
Also:
We’ll have a post-forum mixer so you can get to know the presenters.
How you can help:
Send in your questions–either through the comments or by email. Also, if you want your startup to be used as a case study, describe it in the comments or by email.
Tickets:
Now available here: Mixergy.com/get-funding
Learning from TweetUps and Users
My goal is to make Mixergy into an invitation Web site that helps guests mix. If you give us feedback, I’ll link to you here.
At a recent event, I asked Mike Prasad, who organizes “TweetUps” for his input. Here’s what he said:
Roger Vetruba of movoxo.com says:
hey bud, I really wish [the invitation emails] contained a google-friendly time-date, so that Gmail would automatically ask to add to my calendar!
This is a tough issue.
Hosts want their guests to RSVP. If we include the event details on the initial invitation email, guests will be less likely to go to the invitation and therefore less likely to RSVP.
But I understand that guests need to get an event’s date and location by email. So I’ll try something new. After guests RSVP, I’ll send them an immediate confirmation email that will include the date and time.
Anyone have any other ideas about this issue?
Videos and Pictures from Today’s Event @ Yahoo
I took some videos and pictures to help you see who’s coming to my events.
Jon Anderson does Talent Acquisition at Yahoo! I asked him why he brought Lunch 2.0 to his office.
Allen Vartazarian of taltopia.com is an entrepreneur with big news.
Joel Ordesky hosts his own events. As the founder of Mixergy, I believe you meet more people by hosting that you do when you’re only a guest. Here’s what Joel had to say about that.
Scott Metcalf is bringing the next Lunch 2.0 to MySQL / Sun. I asked him why he’s doing it.
Click here to see some of the pictures I took.
You can see the interactive invitation I used here.
How to Get Bloggers to Write About Your Company
Marjorie Kase is the founder and CEO of Blogger Reps, a company that helps brands reach bloggers and their audiences. I met her at an event I hosted, so I interviewed her to learn how to connect with bloggers. I’ve been using what she taught me and it’s working.
My biggest takeaway from the call is when you read something, write something. Since my call with Marjorie, whenever I read a blog post that I like, I try to add a comment, or email the author, or blog about it, etc.
At first it felt awkward. I couldn’t think of anything to write and I hated the idea that others even knew what I was reading. But after doing it awhile I’ve learned how to write comments quickly. And I found that coming up with something to say forces me to think a little deeper about what I read.
Now bloggers reach out to me and I’m getting more mentions on their sites. Check it out, I’m in a post on today’s socalTECH.
For many more ideas, download my full phone interview.
Got a Pile of Business Cards on Your Desk?
Every time I go to an event I come home with piles of business cards. I tell myself that I’ll save them all to my address book, but I don’t do it often enough.
If you’re in business, I bet you have a similar pile somewhere. And when it’s time for you to reach out to someone you met, I bet you have to dig through your pile of cards to find their address? Or maybe you Google them.
Why should you have to work so hard?
This is one of the problems we’re trying to solve with Mixergy invitations. Right now, if you met someone at a past event that used Mixergy.com for its invitations, you can go back to the invitation and message that person. (There’s a message icon next to every guest’s picture.)
Soon we’ll make it even easier.
Bring Lunch 2.0 to Your City
Jesse Stay wants to bring Lunch 2.0 to Salt Lake City and asked me how it works. Since others have been asking how to bring Lunch 2.0 to their cities, I thought I’d respond to Jesse in a blog post that lists some of the common questions I’ve been getting.
What are the rules?
You don’t need anyone’s permission to start setting up a Lunch 2.0 in your city. And no one will impose a format on you.
I can tell you the format I use, but you’re free to do it your way. This is how I do it:
noon to 1:00 - guests walk around, eat and mix
1:00 to 1:10 - the local Lunch 2.0 organizers introduce themselves and the hosting company introduces itself.
1:10 to 2:00 - guests walk around, eat and mix
What’s the best way to get started?
The hardest part is finding the first company that’ll take a chance and invite people in. Once you’ve got that, everything else is snap. I recommend talking to the company you work for or asking your friends to check in with their companies. (Don’t be discouraged if it takes longer than you’d like. It took me months to find my first company.)
I’ve found these two departments to be most receptive to doing a Lunch 2.0: Business Development & Human Resources. Check in with them.
This interview with Woody Pewitt of Microsoft can help companies understand the benefits of doing Lunch 2.0
How can you grow your Lunch 2.0?
At every lunch you do thank your guests for coming and announce that you’re looking for other companies to host a lunch at their office. I get 2-5 business cards after each of these announcements.
You can also send a follow-up email asking for other lunch spots.
How do you promote Lunch 2.0?
Once you’ve confirmed your date and location, post it to the Lunch 2.0 blog (I can help you do that), invite everyone you know in tech, and ask some local tech groups to help you spread the word.
“Pen Movers”
At the Mixergy education sessions, when I see the audiences’ pens moving while a presenter is talking, I know they’re going to tell me they love that speaker. When I ask people what they thought of one of my panels, their response usually includes how many pages of notes they took. “Greatpanel Andrew! I got 3 pages of notes.”
If that’s how listeners will evaluate you, then have a list of “penmovers” prepared ahead of time. Make them short and clear so people can writethem down easily.
Examples:
- At Mixerg’s “How to Get Traffic” event Michael Dorausch said, “If you want links to your site, write articles for other blogs.”
- At Mixergy’s “How to get PR” event Ray Doustdar said, “Set up Google News alerts on your competitors, and when you get alerted to an article, email the reporter.”
Thanks for feedback on our invitation site!
If you review the Mixergy invitation process and give me feedback, I’ll post it here and link to you. Paul, Brandon, Michael and I have been working hard to make Mixergy.com the invitation site that helps guests mix. And we could use your feedback.Here’s who gave us feedback this week.
kevinmlynch.org went through the whole site and give it a thorough review. Here are some excerpts:
Once your invitation is created, you can also share your invitation to friends on facebook or MySpace. This seems to be a token effort at tapping into the power of the social networking scene because you don’t gain any advantage in terms of guest or event management by doing this. Yes, if you use contacts from plaxo, you get this advantage but plaxo is not up on my list of the most popular social networking sites. I really wish there was some way to incorporate friends from facebook into the import option for contacts. Since most of my daily social networking is via facebook, the lack of this feature means that I have to ensure that I have all my facebook contacts and their email addresses are listed in one of my other contact locations.
I think you’re right. We allow hosts to invite their Facebook contacts, but we need to make it easier.
There is a “people you should meet” pane which the host can activate. … You can then set some criteria at a very high level in terms of the work you do and general interests and people in other lines of work or interests you want to meet. If someone else is going to the same event that meets your criteria, that person will show up as a match in “people you should meet”.
That’s the heart of what we want to do. We’ll keep testing new ways for guests to get to know each other. Paul created this guest matching feature. Next week, Brandon will test a new game to help guests mix.
All in all, I like the site and the prospects of using this tool for networking events or singles events is high. It is a cleaner and crisper interface than evite. Both sites have their advantages over the other but evite is geared for the masses and is rather bland in terms of functionality and its ability to share or be “social”. Mixergy would be my tool of preference.
Thanks!
Jessica Santana didn’t like the site, but her email was very helpful because it addresses a critical part of the site: the event creation process.
I went to Mixergy to create an invite after I saw your post on Lunch 2.0. Unfortunately I’m not going to be using it right now. I was testing it out and found that I couldn’t save the invite and return later to finish it. Then to my unpleasant surprise, I received an email saying that my invite was live! You need to add a feature where users can save the invite and return later. Also, it shouldn’t be automatically live - the user should decide when it goes live. The profile link doesn’t always work either. Final jab and I’ll leave you alone - your picture search should be more user-friendly (more browsing capability) with a lot less pictures of random people at private events like weddings, graduation, parties, etc.
Evite sucks. Mixergy is a new website for managing event invitations online. Try it. Rejoice.
Blog your review of the site or email it to me, Andrew Warner: mail |at| awarner.com
How to Grow Your Site’s Traffic
To prepare for the Mixergy sessions on “How to Grow Traffic to Your Site” I did a pre-interview with every speaker. I thought you might want to see some of my notes.
5 traffic lessons from Michael Dorausch of Planet Chiropractic
- Use Google Trends to see what people are searching for. If you see a subject that they’re likely to keep searching for, write a story about it for your site.
- Write for others. Offer to write articles for popular blogs in return for a link back to your site.
- Write about others. Write articles about important people in your industry as a way of getting them to look at your site.
- Shoot video interviews with presenters at conferences. People who can’t go to the conference will want to hear what the presenters have to say.
- Focus on a niche where the competition doesn’t know as much about the Web as you do. (Like chiropractic.)
5 traffic lessons from Andrew Sorcini of TheDrillDown.com and Digg’s top user
- If you want your pages to get more attention, you can ask the top users of social news sites (like digg) to submit your pages.
- If a top submitter can’t submit your site, s/he can introduce you to someone who can.
- When you’re designing a Web site, make it easy for your users to link to any element of your site to social news sites. (Andrew & I looked at goodreads.com for example, and he liked how the site allows you to link to individual book reviews.)
- If you want to network with social media site’s top users, start by adding them as friends and commenting on the stories they submit.
- Stay in touch with the top submitters on every network you can: twitter, digg, Facebook, their blog, etc.
5 traffic lessons from Elmer Thomas of ThemBid.com and a top user of social news sites like Digg, Mixx, and Propeller
- Getting traffic from social news sites can help you get investors. Investors see the traffic growth as a sign of success.
- It’s more than a 1-time traffic hit. Sure, when a story on one of Elmer’s sites is “dugg” most readers bounce in and out of his site in a few seconds–but he says the traffic spikes help his sites rank higher in Google and has gotten him into Lifehacker, Mashable and other influential blogs.
- Connect with and support the top players first. When Elmer does joins a social news site, he adds all the top users as his friends on the site and then he votes for the stories they submit.
- Have a memorable avatar and keep it consistent. Think of your online avatar as your personal logo.
- Give your submissions a lighthearted spin. We talked about how eduFire might write a story for social news sites. Elmer suggested a blog post called “10 situations where not knowing a foreign language could get you hurt.”
10 traffic lessons from Mark Deming and Blake Newman of BlueSEO
- Create an account on Amazon.com in your company’s name and review books that are relevant to your company. Because Amazon is ranked highly, your Amazon profile will be ranked high. Do the same for other big sites.
- Decide what keywords you want your site to “own.” These are the words that you will use consistently throughout your site to describe yourself, so when users search for them in Google, they’ll be more likely to finding you.
- Your keywords need to be in the language your customers would use. Don’t use “certified automotive technician” if your customers say “mechanic.”
- Give your site’s images meaningful names. Don’t label them “Image01.jpg.” Give them descriptive names that include the keywords you want your site to own.
- Blog every day for 30 minutes. Search engines value lots of fresh data.
- Your sites URLs should be like this: domain.com/this-is-right not like this: domain.com/this_is_wrong
- Start building your site with search engines in mind. Don’t have your designers build a site and then try to jam your keywords into it.
- Be humble. I warned the BlueSEO guys that we’d have search engine experts in the audience. I asked them what they would do if some people in the audience knew more than they did. They said, “We’ll ask those people to teach us.”
- Own your name. When people do a search for your company’s name, all the top search results need to refer to your company. Your customers shouldn’t have to struggle to find you.
- Check out SEObook.com and SitePoint.com
After the sessions, we had wonderful hors d’oeuvres by Chef JoAnna and a mixer so guests and speakers could get to know each other. Chef JoAnna’s menu was:
Canapés of Roast Beef with Sun-Dried Tomato Spread
Granny Smith Apple with Chèvre and Toasted Pecan
Tamarind Chicken Salad in Wonton Pastry cups
Smoked Salmon on Blini with Dill Sour Cream
Black Olive and Caper Tapenade with Cream Crackers
Crostini with Tarragon Butter, Radish and Smoked Salt
Thank you Cause+Capitalism for sponsoring the open bar at the mixer.
Thank you TechZulu.com for being our media sponsor.
More coverage of this event here:
Elmer Thomas posted his notes here
Andy Sorcini’s The Drill Down mentioned the event
Venture Capital Journal: Mixergy Events are Where Investors and Entrepreneurs Meet
From today’s article in Venture Capital Journal:
Unlike Silicon Valley—where VCs and entrepreneurs have gathered in places like Bucks and Il Fornaio for years—Los Angeles doesn’t have longstanding networking locales. “The scene in LA changes so fast that if we had a spot the next month it would be lame and no one would want to be seen there,” says Andrew Warner, a 33-year-old who moved to the area after selling a small online contest startup he and his kid brother had started in 2003.But LA does seem to be ditching its haphazard networking model to one more akin to Silicon Valley, with regular mixers and meetings and lunches. Warner’s latest company, Mixergy, brings entrepreneurs and investors together once a month, often at places such as Fox Interactive.
The article was written by Senior Editor, Constance Loizos.
Update: “kid brother” Michael noticed a small error. We sold (not started) in ‘03.