We are about to embark on a 7-city Recruitment Drive and we are on the look-out for fantastic Brand Ambassadors & Event Managers across the UK – we’re looking to balance the male/female ratio on our books so these interview are just for the chaps – any ladies waiting to come on board, not to worry, we’ll be in touch early next year.

Any current Mashers who want to recommend a male friend or colleague to join us, we’d be delighted to hear from you.

NEXT STEP

No need to call in about this, have a look at the interview dates below simply email chrissyd@mashmarketing.co.uk to let her know which interview slot you are able to attend (give first and second choices for time for your preferred city), and she’ll respond to let you know which slot we can confirm. We look forward to meeting you to get involved with our award winning agency!

Please have a good look at our website for info on the kind of campaigns we work on and what it takes to become a successful MASHER!

The interview dates, times and locations are as follows ::

MONDAY 5th DECEMBER :: BRISTOL : 11am, 1pm, 3pm, 5pm

TUESDAY 6th DECEMBER :: BOURNEMOUTH : 11am, 12pm, 1pm

THURSDAY 8th DECEMBER :: EDINBURGH : 9am, 11am, 1pm, 3pm

FRIDAY 9th DECEMBER :: BIRMINGHAM : 11am, 1pm, 3pm, 5pm

SATURDAY 10th DECEMBER :: MANCHESTER : 12pm, 2pm, 4pm, 6pm

MONDAY 12th DECEMBER :: LONDON : 10am, 12pm, 2pm, 4pm

TUESDAY 13th DECEMBER :: LONDON : 10am, 12pm, 2pm, 4pm

FRIDAY 16th DECEMBER :: NEWCASTLE : 12.30pm, 2.30pm, 4.30pm, 6.30pm

Please contact our UK Brand Champion Chrissy either via our dedicated Recruitment FB page or via email to get booked in.

We look forward to welcoming you on board.

(MASH would like to thank all applicants waiting to join our books for their patience)

Cheers,

Greg

Gregory Mason

Talent Director

Mash Marketing Ltd.

Social media has come of age. Marketers now have the ability to augment their traditional marketing approaches with rich behavioral and activity-based targeting that should increase marketing ROI significantly.

However, businesses are facing an uncomfortable truth: There are no “best practices” for measuring a successful social media campaign. Crowd behavior is dynamic and context-specific, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to build a “one size fits all” solution.

A structured approach to capturing, measuring, analyzing and refining marketing strategies in near real time is essential to executing a successful social campaign. Initially, however, companies need to invest in infrastructure to make such a learning cycle possible.

Invest in Data

Measuring the impact of social media campaigns is systemically different from that of traditional marketing campaigns. Since the medium touches all the aspects of the customer purchase cycle, a holistic measurement of awareness, transactions and brand impact is essential.

Additionally, social media is a two-way communication medium and businesses need to invest in listening capabilities that capture the activities of their existing or potential customers online. Several paid and “freemium” tools that monitor online chatter can be found online.

While data is abundant, it is by nature unstructured. Integrating listening data with internal web behavior metrics captured by JavaScript tags, customer care logs, brand surveys and transactional data can enable a business to get a 360 degree view of the activities of customers across all of the purchase touchpoints.

Real-Time Monitoring

A typical online conversation has a life span of about one to two days. As a result, it is imperative for companies to respond to conversations in nearly real time. During this short window, they not only need to understand the context and content of the conversation, but also create an effective response mechanism. All of this underscores the need for real-time monitoring and analysis.

Companies like Dell and Best Buy are adopting different strategies for listening to Internet chatter. These investments help keep a finger on the pulse of every conversation active on the networks.

Sentiment Analysis

Text mining and sentiment analysis are the flavor of the season for social media analytics and a common complaint is that the current tools are not able to classify a high percentage of the comments about your brand.

Step back and think about a conversation you had in the last 30 minutes. How many statements in that conversation were unambiguously positive or negative. Not many, right? Getting a 20% sentiment mapping for individual comments is a very high number.

On the other hand, think about the same conversation; Was the overall sentiment of the conversation positive or negative? That is far easier to cognitively classify. If businesses shift their focus to a conversation-based, rather than a comment-based sentiment analysis, they will be able to get a far better read on the aggregate sentiment of online chatter.

The need for improvisation and identification of new metrics is high. Currently, three categories of metrics need to be developed to enhance our understanding of social activities.

Metrics that help understand conversations and engagement (e.g. aggregate sentiment, conversation heatmaps),

Metrics to spot influencers in a community (e.g. influencer score, Klout score), and

Metrics that help in measuring holistic impact of social media activities on the business.

The Interplay Between Buzz, Branding and Sales

Measuring the impact of increased chatter for your brand might not always translate to more revenue for the business. Measuring cause and effect between buzz, branding and sales might show different dynamics for different product groups. For example, the Old Spice social media campaign saw an 800% increase in Facebook interaction and a 107% increase in sales. The numbers are related, but not necessarily 1:1.

Testing Mechanisms

Social media is a fertile testing ground, and businesses need to appreciate the importance of a robust testing protocol for social media-based actions. Having a mechanism to measure the effectiveness of comments will ensure that businesses can learn quickly and adapt to the social dynamics.

A key point to remember is that the instance and context of the test is as important as the test itself due to the temporal nature of conversations.

Some of the tests that can be conducted are:

Who are the right “influencers” to target for a particular product or service?

What is the right time to message these influencers?

What is the impact of competition activity on our buzz?

What is the impact of traditional marketing on social media and vice versa?

What are the type of comments that work for selling a product?

What are the type of comments that work for selling a service?

What are the right pricing strategies?

How should the business tap into current affairs?

Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral targeting dramatically changed with online advertising, and now social media can take this effectiveness to new heights. Activity-based segmentation is far different from traditional demographic segmentation, and this is typically driven by a difference between the purchasers and the consumers of a product. Businesses can draw parallels from traditional marketing (targeting kids so that they can influence their parents) and build a unique social targeting mechanism.

Crowd Behavior

Businesses have tried to artificially stimulate a conversation by mettling in their own communities or creating artificial hype. This approach usually fails miserably. They need to understand that social networks emulate real-world interactions, and excessive policing of user generated content can be detrimental to the natural growth patterns of a network.

Math, business technology and behavioral sciences are the key ingredients for good decision making. Understanding organizational dynamics, flock behavior and complex adaptive systems are all directly applicable to social media. Integrating analytics with a deep understanding of how humans interact in a sociographic and psychographic sense can help a business stimulate a conversation within a community, or trigger flock behavior amongst customers.

Integration Into Existing Business Models

Once companies understand the impact of lead indicators, like buzz, on transactional metrics, like revenue, they can include such metrics into their forecasting models and predict short-term revenue with greater accuracy. Additionally, since a good social media campaign will improve the brand health, the long-term impact of these campaigns can be assessed.

While every business wants to understand the impact of its social media spend, it might not be so easy to integrate that into a media mix model. A good social media campaign might manifest itself in increased brand scores or customer loyalty and will impact the lifetime value of the customers more than the immediate transactional metrics. Including indirect metrics like buzz or sentiment might be one way to capture social behavior.

Product Design

Social media can be a direct line of communication with the end user of your products. Businesses can leverage this very effectively in product design by soliciting input from the end user on what features they prefer in the product. Getting feature specific intelligence from the customer can help in building a product that caters to most of the population and also helps in building a sense of loyalty among the user base. Good examples of this include Ideastorm, Vitamin Water and Fiat.

Conclusion

The framework above is the first step in helping companies understand the who, what, when and where of social targeting. The obvious next step is to integrate all this knowledge into traditional marketing and CRM.

Source: www.mashable.com

First up to walk the Mashing walk of fame….

Rachel Walker joined Mash back in October 2007 and has gone on to deliver campaign after campaign with consummate professionalism and a wonderful smile on the face. Rachel always responds brilliantly to the huge variety of briefs thrown at her and has often accepted ‘last minute changes’ with complete flexibility and positivity.

Rachel is also one of our main ‘npower girls’ and has contributed to the ‘best team yet’ and we’re all looking forward to the remaining 4 Tests from the end of July.

It’s great to have you Mashing Rachel – Well done!

Just who is the face behind Facebook? It’s the face of man who’s a savvy dealmaker, a confident businessman, and a brash leader – but it’s also the face of a man who’ll sob hysterically in the men’s bathroom after a meeting.

Meet Mark Zuckerberg, the coding wunderkind from Harvard who turned the concept of the annual booklet of incoming college freshmen into a game-changing digital empire. The Facebook CEO’s story is fraught with emotion, inspiration and determination – with a sprinkling of college geek humor.

In released excerpts from Fortune contributor David Kilpatrick’s soon-to-be-released book “The Facebook Effect,” Zuckerberg is a Harvard prodigy who shows moments of extreme maturity while creating the social networking juggernaut before being able to legally rent a car.

Kilpatrick, who had total access to his subject, portrays Zuckerberg akin to the Val Kilmer character in the 1985 teen classic movie “Real Genius.” Brash, confident with a propensity to wield a fencing foil about the room when he wanted to make a point, Zuckerberg is all ego and bravado in pajama pants.

Before the mega-corporations came calling, Zuckerberg lived in Palo Alto, Calif., with seven male friends in an environment that was more dorm than deluxe. There were parties, there was beer, there was college humor.

The house mascot was Tom Cruise, according to the excerpt. “Pretty soon the resident nerds were naming their computer servers after characters in Tom Cruise movies: “‘Where’s that script running?’ ‘It’s running on Maverick.’ ‘Well, run it instead on Iceman, I need Maverick to test this feature.’”

Zuckerberg and cohorts would insert lines from “Top Gun” into the burgeoning Facebook site. In a likely nod to Dave Chappelle he printed up a version of his business card with the title “CEO … b**tch.”

Yet Kilpatrick’s excerpts show a young man of amazing maturity and business acumen. Zuckerberg handles a private jet ride on a Gulfstream V with a hard-driving MTV executive with a combination of thrilled disbelief and the ability to hold his cards close to his chest.

Zuckerberg is also portrayed as a young man bound by ethics. In a key meeting with the venture capital firm Accel that would exponentially increase Facebook’s worth, Zuckerberg leaves the table and bursts into tears in the men’s room. He is in agony because he has already made a deal with Washington Post scion Donald Graham and does not want to renege on their honorable, but less profitable deal.

“Graham was disappointed, but he was also impressed. “I just thought to myself, ‘Wow, for 20 years old, that is impressive – he’s not calling to tell me he’s taking the other guy’s money. He’s calling me to talk it out.’ ” Graham knew that even his first offer was very high for a company so tiny and so young. “Mark, does the money matter to you?” Graham asked. Zuckerberg said it did. It could, he went on, be the one thing that could prevent Facebook from going into the red or having to borrow money. “Mark, I’ll release you from your moral dilemma,” said Graham. “Go ahead and take their money and develop the company, and all the best.” For Zuckerberg it was a huge relief. And it further increased his respect and admiration for Graham. (Zuckerberg eventually asked the publisher to take a seat on the Facebook board.)

Zuckerberg, now 26, now has a nearly $5 billion stake in Facebook.

“Unless I feel like I’m working on the most important problem I can help with, then I’m not going to feel good about how I’m spending my time,” he says. “And that’s what this company is.” The ultimate payday is not a priority. Changing the world is.”

I came home tonight to a techmeme filled with news about Amazon’s boffo earnings, rumors about Yahoo! and Microsoft’s interest in acquiring Foursquare, and a Bloomberg Business Week analysis of whether Pincus’s Zynga can continue to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from people buying virtual hoes in his games on Facebook. Brad Stone’s story about sharing credit card transactions in public was already filed for tomorrow New York Times. Waiting for me on the kitchen counter was a copy of this week’s New Yorker, filled with an essay by Ken Auletta “Publish or Perish: The Ipad Takes on the Kindle.” Next to it was New York magazine, whose cover “Life is Tweet” features Sam from drop.io, Karp from Tumblr and Dens from Foursquare. All the while, my mind was still adjusting to the new contours that had been etched into it, first by Twitter’s annotation feature announced at its Chirp conference last week, and then by Facebook’s Open Graph blitzkrieg yesterday. It feels like something big is about to pop, something on the AOL-buys-Time Warner richter scale.

All of which begs the question, what gives? The great recession of 2008 is a distant memory, as we move through the Spring of 2010 with stocks like Apple and Amazon up more than 100% from their lows. The Nasdaq chart from the financial crisis up until now looks something like this:

And to think, the seminal stock of the social media era, Facebook, has yet to trade a single share in the public market. One can only imagine how much pent-up demand there is from mutual funds, hedge funds and retail investors for stock in this company that has established the default identity system for what will soon be over 1 billion people around the world. One could argue that the value of this resource on a macro economic basis is commensurate with that of oil (ie Exxon Mobil) or of the two primary computer operating systems (Apple and Microsoft), and that the “mature” value of Facebook in 2012 might be closer to $300b than $30b.

And yet, against the breathlessness of what might be, is the reality of what once was. All we need to do is look at the Nasdaq chart from the 1998 Russian financial crisis through the dot com bubble of 2000 to give us pause:

Although I am not a market technician, my spider sense is tingling. The wheels of capitalism are back in motion, and liquidity is flowing from the top to the bottom of the cap structure. University endowments are trying to distinguish deal flow quality from the PayPal mafia versus the Xoogler community; Web 1.0 bankers are reuniting to capitalize on the coming Web 2.0 IPO liquidity, and startups with big ideas, hockey stick user growth, but relatively little revenue, are commanding eight figure Series A valuations.

Markets tend to overact on the way up and on the way down, so we may well see an extended period of bullishness over the coming months or even years. The Nasdaq has another 100% to go before it gets into the same trough to peak range we saw 10 years ago. The bubble needs to wait for companies like Facebook, Groupon and Twitter to transition from privately held to publicly traded before bursting. But burst it will, as it always does. Not before, however, some very fortunate entrepreneurs, investors and bankers make out with new fortunes.

In light of all this, it hadn’t occurred to me until now how uncanny my experience last Saturday night was. Tina and I ventured out from Marin into SF to join Kara Swisher and Quincy Smith for what we thought was going to be smallish dinner honoring Bob Pittman. Yes, that Bob Pittman. The one who, along with Steve Case at AOL, bought Time Warner. The one who made us all shake our heads in amazement that Monday morning ten years ago. As we walked into the back room of Tres Agaves, we quickly realized that this was no small dinner party. There had to be at least a hundred friends and colleagues milling around: Google execs, angels, VC’s, Public and startup CEOs. Everybody was enjoying the open bar and free flowing conversations. As I made my way to the back, to take a breath, there was Bob Pittman, off to the corner, looking fit as ever. The only noticeable difference was a fresh shade of sandy gray stubble matching his sandy gray hair. Every few minutes, somebody would venture up to him and shake his hand and reminisce about the last time they met. The younger startup folks seemed to have no idea who he was and were more concerned with putting together their tacos from the cart. Little did they know, however, how much their future will be shaped by his past.

However, it’s never too late to get started, and begin harnessing the added firepower that digital activation can deliver for your events happening in the real world, in real time.

While there are a myriad of digital channels for you to consider, we believe Twitter is the single-most effective and dynamic social media engine for promoting events and generating consumer dialog around experiential marketing campaigns. One of our favorite examples of using Twitter for a consumer experiential program is the Taco Bell Truck (Link), which shares info on where it will be traveling to give out free tacos, fun trivia and news about all things tacos.

Here are some basic steps on how you can use Twitter to take your experiential marketing campaigns to the next level:

Drive the Conversation – Set up a Twitter account and commit to a regular stream of tweets (posts) about your program, and generate a simple hashtag (#) that you include on every post. Make sure to add value for your followers by providing them with interesting info about your brand and relevant offers, and encourage feedback. For larger experiential campaigns, we recommend setting up a Twitter stream that is specific to your program and separate from any general brand or company Twitter stream you may have in place. This allows followers to self-select to specifically follow updates on your events – and you can still promote this separate stream by selectively re-tweeting your posts within your other brand accounts.

We’re currently utilizing this tactic for our client Coca-Cola via the @WorldCupTrophy Twitter feed, which is being utilized to start conversations with soccer fans around the world and generate excitement about the Coca-Cola-sponsored World Cup Trophy Tour event in Houston in May.

Follow Too – Brands that just broadcast one-way information fail in effectively deploying Twitter, so be sure to listen to your followers and take time to monitor what they are tweeting about. In addition, search on your brand and other relevant terms to find conversations from users who might be interested to attend your events and follow your info. Join their conversations, directly respond to those who ask you questions and thank those to re-tweet your content.

Cross-Promote – Promote your Twitter stream via all of your other communication channels, including email, website and other social media sites like Facebook. In addition, post your account address and hashtag at your events, and offer incentives for consumers to continue following after they have attended your experience such as trivia contests, Twitter-only discounts for your products, etc.

Follow Through – Don’t think of Twitter as just a way to promote your experiential programs before they happen, also be sure to tweet during your events. Tweet photos and video of the activities, and also tweet out thanks to followers who show up. This will encourage more interaction, and allow you to gain feedback about your events in real time. It also allows followers who are not physically present to still share in the experience (further enhancements of tweet photos and video can include posting longer video clips on YouTube or even live streaming the action on sites like Ustream).

Of course, this works both ways, as social media can be utilized to drive event participation as well. We recently executed an experiential campaign for PayPal in New York, Chicago and San Francisco called the PayPal Tweet Hunt (Click here to view photos). Consumers were encouraged to follow PayPal’s @PayPalShopping Twitter account, which made them eligible to participate in the Tweet Hunt and win prizes such as flights, jewelry, gadgets and gift cards.

Listen – After you have started the conversation on Twitter, be sure to follow where it goes. There are many listening tools that allow you to track followers, retweets of your posts and direct mentions of your Twitter account name or related hashtags. All of these metrics can be measured and tracked, and can be used to build a scorecard for how your Twitter activity drives additional connections with consumers around your events.

One of the advantages to Twitter is that it is extremely easy to get started. Plus, it’s free.

We’ve even given you a head start. Just follow these simple suggestions to begin extending your brand’s offline experiential and promotional marketing campaigns into social media.

“I started SpeakerText in October 2008 during the financial apocalypse. No one funded us. No one was gonna fund us. And I’m definitely a nobody. We launched in January 2010 after burning through just $4k of cash. While I’m still mostly a clueless hack, there are a few things I learned along the way that I think founders and proto-founders reading this blog might find useful. Here’s a few them, in list form:• Fake it ’till you make it. No one is interested in the company you’re going to start in the future. Starting is a declarative act. Just go for it. People won’t follow unless you lead. And once you convince yourself that you’ve got something, it’s a lot easier to convince others to join you”

• Pitch like a mofo. The difference between your initial idea and your ultimate product is the difference between a slab of rock and the David. There’s a thousand problems you need to solve, and the only way you learn about them–much less solve them–is to pitch, pitch, pitch and pitch again to every smart person you meet. Listen to what they have to say and regardless of how jumbled and contradictory their suggestions or complaints are, try to look for patterns and distill the deeper underlying pain points or problems with your model. Think of it as crowdsourcing. The masses have much to teach you, if you let them.

• Advisors, they’re easier to find than you think. This goes along with my above point about pitching everyone you meet. Most people are afraid of embarrassing themselves, so they keep quiet, especially around successful, important people who could help them. Don’t. I landed my first advisor–Joe Kennedy, the CEO of Pandora–when I pitched him after a talk at Stanford. He gave me his card; I followed up. There was no formal arrangement or anything, but I was persistent, hit him up with questions only when I was truly flummoxed (ie didn’t waste his time), listened and kept him updated on our progress.

• You need a Co-Founder, not an Engineering Bitch. Lots of business-y, idea-type people who say they’re looking for a co-founder are, in reality, looking for what is best described as an “engineering bitch.” Here’s how the pitch sounds from the engineer’s perspective: ‘For ten whole percent of equity, you will slave away to build a prototype out of my shitty idea, not have any say in the decision-making process…and oh yeah, you could be fired at any point.’ This does not make for a happy long term relationship. Instead, find someone you know and trust–I called up an old college friend–who will call you out on your bullshit and push back when you overreach. Date for a bit, then split the equity.

• Recruit college kids. They’re young, hungry and don’t need a living wage. Experienced, talented software engineers have lots of options in life, and most of them involve getting paid. College students, on the other hand, have less options, and probably have their living expenses covered by financial aid. Thus, the opportunity cost of joining your half-baked venture is dramatically lower than it is for legit professionals. For students, your startup is more like a resume-enhancing ‘extra-curricular’ than a regular job. The right person will love the responsibility you’re handing them. Score for you, score for them.

• Go to job fairs. You’ll be the only startup there. This is a corollary to the previous point. I went to the Columbia Engineering Career Fair in October 2009 and left with ~150 resumes. We hired three guys from that batch and paid them in iPhones. Doubtful we’d have access to such a rich employee pool any other way. Bonus: Distinguish yourself by being the approachable guy in the T-shirt. Lots of the attendees will be wearing suits for the first time–and hating it. Your casual garb will looks very enticing.

• Sell the Vision, Not the Reality. You may or may not have a working product. Your product may or may not suck. You “team” may not really exist. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is your vision of what the product will be and how it will change the world. That is what gets people excited. That is what will make people work like dogs for no money, tell all their friends and drop everything just to get a product built.

• Treat everyone you hire like a co-founder. In normal jobs, people put up with a lot of grief and bullshit because they’re getting paid. In a ghetto startup (like mine), that’s not really an option. Treat people well, be honest, and don’t bullshit them. Trust and your rep is all you got. Err on the side of sharing too much. It builds trust and earns buy-in from the people you hire.

• Try before you buy. When you’re hiring folks, don’t promise equity upfront. Specify some sort of trial period where the person is to accomplish a specific, delineated task. Make sure you own all the IP created during this trial period, and make no promises for later. After the month or so is over, then sit down and talk equity. Making this clear from the outset will put both parties at ease.

• “Stealth Mode” = FAIL. Your idea, as it exists today, sucks ass. Ok, let me rephrase that: My idea started off sucking ass. But I pitched smart people…and dumb people–and learned from both. Originally, SpeakerText was going to be a tool for journalists (I was a journo) to automatically transcribe and search within their audio interviews. Tiny, contracting market. Huge upfront software licensing fees. Customers are technophobes.
FAIL just waiting to happen. Had we kept our plans a secret, SpeakerText would probably just be one big bucket of fail today. Instead, after having tons of holes poked into our idea by friends, cousins, VCs, baristas, entrepreneurs and bored women at parties, we turned SpeakerText into a tool for video publishers and even our crappy v1.0 works with the massive market that is YouTube. Outcome: last night a Biz Dev guy from Disney/ABC sent me an email asking about partnering with some of their online properties. Reminder: we launched on just $4k.

• In case you missed it earlier: PITCH PITCH PITCH. Over the last 15 months, I have pitched nearly every sentient being I have met. This includes a guy I met at 4am after doing CPR on his mom (I’m a paramedic). The dude turned out to be a senior partner at a major international corporate law firm, and 6 weeks later he offered to take me on as a pro bono client. My point here is that you never know who can help you and you never will until you open your trap and pitch. Not only will this help you find help, but it will DRAMATICALLY improve your pitch and lower your fear/nervousness when time comes to pitch real investors. Plus, it adds big time on the competition research front, because your friends/acquaintances/ex-girlfriends will see articles about competitors and share them with you on Facebook.

• Vest, young man. Starting a company without vesting your stock is like getting your girlfriend pregnant on the first date. Sure, it could work out, but if it doesn’t, you’re completely hosed.

• Get creative with compensation–use the iPhone Payment Plan. Imagine you’re a highly-trained software engineer. A crazy guy with a “startup” (i.e. me) approaches you about doing some work. Scenario #1: Dude, I’ll pay you $2,000 for 150 hours of work…3-4 months from now. Scenario #2: Dude, promise to build this and I’ll give you an iPhone right now. Plus, as long as you’re working on it, I’ll pay your phone bill. If I like it and it works, I’ll toss in an extra $250 at the end and we’ll talk equity then. If not, you can keep the iPhone and I’ll even cover the cancellation fee if you want to ditch AT&T. We tried both approaches at SpeakerText, and surprisingly, Scenario #2–despite being a lot cheap–actually worked out a lot better. There’s something about the psychology of receiving a cool gadget that doesn’t quite equal out to the cash equivalent. Also, paying up for the iPhone upfront fosters trust, which in turn boosts productivity.

• Yammer is an awesome tool for fostering camaraderie on distributed teams. Use it.

• Build something people want before you attempt to raise money. The word for “visionary investor” is “entrepreneur.” If you’re an unproven schmo with no credentials like me, people generally–and investors in particular–will tend dismiss you and your crazy idea. (If you’re a former Google VP, then you can probably ignore this tidbit.) The only–and the strongest–track record you can have is the product you’ve built and the traction/market feedback you’ve gotten.

• Need legal advice? Do the Lawyer Hop. Every lawyer will give you an hour of their time for free. Remember that. Need 10 hours of legal counsel? Talk to 10 lawyers. Need to learn about IP, patents, etc.? Call a patent lawyer! More questions? Call another one! Don’t feel the need to restrict yourself to a local geography either. You can call up America’s leading legal luminaries and get an hour of their time for free, every time. This won’t work for producing legal documents, but it will work for fundamental questions of “is this legal?” “do I need to patent this?” etc. Also, different lawyers have different perspectives, so the lawyer hop a good way to get a holistic, composite understanding of a particular issue. Plus, when you need to actually hire a lawyer, you’ll know what a good one sounds like–and have a fat rolodex of people you’ve already talked with to draw from.

• Patent lawyers will always want your money…except the good ones. Asking an IP lawyer, “Is my invention patentable?” is like asking a car mechanic “Does my car need any work done?” Unless you find a good one, the answer will always be yes. That’s how they make their money, but not how you make yours. Buyer beware.

• Start a blog. Sound intelligent. Be interesting. The same reason you’re probably dying to pitch Fred Wilson and/or Chris Dixon is the same reason you should start a blog. Again, if you’re a no-name nobody like me, you’ve gotta build a name for yourself from scratch. Writing an intelligent sounding blog and then submitting posts to Hacker News, Digg, etc. is a great way to put yourself on people’s radar. Just last week I met up with an big time seed investor from the Valley. He had messaged me on Facebook after seeing one of my blog posts on Hacker News. Now he’s making intros to other big dogs and generally helping to legitimize our brand.

• Tell a good story. Deep down inside, all Americans love entrepreneurs. People are suckers for the crazy, epic shit we do as founders. Don’t downplay it; wear it your on your sleeve like a badge of honor. Although it may not feel like it now while you’re in the trenches trying not to die, you’re living what lots of people (especially older, middle-management types) consider the dream. Tell your story to the right person (i.e. the frustrated wannabe founder with 3 kids and a mortgage) inside of a big organization and they’ll become your champion, guiding you through the sales process and giving you lots of actionable intel.

• Comment on Brad Feld’s blog. But don’t kiss his ass. Important point to remember: powerful, successful people tend not to like having their ass kissed. People do that to them all the time, and my sense is that they hate it. And if they don’t, fuck ‘em–don’t waste your time on people who want you to kiss their ass. More often, people in positions of power crave genuine interaction. The more powerful the person, the more they are surrounded by sycophants. Don’t be a sycophant. Outside of intros, a good way to approach these guys is to comment intelligently on their blog. I turned an exchange in the comments section of Brad Feld’s blog into a pitch for SpeakerText that turned into an intro to someone else. Never met Señor Feld before, but we had a legit exchange in the comments and took it from there.

• Help people. It just feels good. Honestly, I feel very lucky to have been helped and guided by lots of smart people who probably had much better things to do with their time. Guys like Seth Sternberg, the Founder/CEO of Meebo. Awesome dude. Sequoia-backed. Ridiculously helpful. When I grow up, I want to be like him. Starting a company can be really stressful and scary; depending on the day, it’s easy to lose hope and dwell on how fuct/clueless/ready-to-fail you and your startup are. If for no other reason, helping people who know even less than you do will make you feel good about yourself, boost your ego and as a result, make you into a more productive founder. Win-win-win.

• Tenacity is impressive. A lot of people “start” companies, but very few actually have the tenacity and drive to bring a product to market, hire people, etc. People will expect you to quit, and part of how you will impress them is by simply keeping at it, iterating your idea/product/vision, and making progress. As my Dad likes to say: Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/02/startup-lessons-for-the-protofounder.html

It’s the internet world now, so you can speak to anyone anywhere in the world – right? Blog away, and every Tom, Dick and Harriet from Anchorage to Cape Town can admire your wit, marvel at your wisdom and might even offer a comment in return. Sign them up to your Facebook site, where you can now boast 300,500,1000 friends.

But how well do you really know all these peopl? Would you really respond with a cheque for £50 to an em-ail plea from one of them? OK, OK, I know a suprising number of people get hoodwinkey by 15-year old Nigerian spammers on a franky old village internet connection, but I’ll warrent that most of you aren’t so gullitile – and it’s precisely because you don’t treat everyone on your Facebook list as equally worthy of interest.

The bottom line is that our social worlds are actually very small. It’s easy to add friends to your social network site (or SNS in the trade) but it’s another thing whether you’d really lay down your life for all of them. The reason is simple: our brains aren’t big enough to allow us to have deeply meaningful relationships with more than a handful of people. There is a general relationship between brain size and social group size in monkeys and apes, and that relationship predicts a natural group size of just 150 for us human beings, now known as Dunbar’s number (thanks to some anonymous internet wit).

In fact, 150 – give or take a few – turns up in all sorts of obscure and not so obscure places. It was the average size of villages in the Domesday Book and 18th-century England, as well as in traditional small-scale societies today. It’s the average size of parishes among community-focused sects such as the Amish and the Hutterites, and the typical size of companies in most armies around the world.
When Brigham Young sent his fledgeling 5,000 Mormons of f to found Salt Lake City and the Mormon state, he did so in groups of 150.

It’s the average number of people to whom most of you send Christmas cards – not the number of cards, but the number of people in the households to which you send your cards. It’s the number of relations, friends and aquaintances you think enough of to be worth the time, effor and expense of writing out a card.

Dunbar’s number seems to demarcate a clear boundary between those with whom you have relationships of trust, obligation and reciprocity and those you don’t.
Beyond lie the many people whom you recognise by sight, might even be happy to have a passing conversation with, but whom you really wouldn’t count among your personal friends.
We are able to remember the names and faces of many of these “outsiders”, but we don’t have significant past histories with them.

But even within the hallowed circle, all is not equal. In fact, your social world consists of a series of circles of friendship, running from an inner core of about five intimates, through a series of layers of increasing size but declining intimacy until we arrive at the cliff edge at 150.

One slightly curious feature of this social world is the extent to which we people it preferentially with kin. Kinship, it seems, still has a singularly strong hold over us. We have examined large numbers of personal social networks – all laboriously and generously listed by long-suffering subjects in our studies – and there is a very striking tendecy for the number of friends to be inversely related to the number of kin included. Especially so from those who come from very large extended families, who as a result have fewer friends.
And kin are interesting for another reason if we don’t actively keep up our friendships, they gradually but inexorably slide down through the layers until eventually they will drop off the edge of the 150. But not so kin.
Not only are we stuck with them from birth (or marriage), but we can ignore them and abuse them and they will still come to our aid in a way that no similarly abused friend would ever do.

But for the rest, it is the opportunities that we have to interact that lie at the core of building relationships. We have to work at it in ways that only seem to work well if we do it face-to-face. There is no substitute, it seems, for doing stuff together if you really want to get to know someone to the point where you have a reciprocal level of intimacy, trust and obligation. It’s got something to do with triggering deeply buried emotional responses that need to be physically triggered by touch, smell and sight.

And this is where the virtual world of the internet lets us down. Yes, we can list 1,000 names on our social network site, but names is precisely all they are unless we have first grappled with them in the flesh.
The bottom line is that a touch is worth a thousand words. In real life, we gain signals about an individual’s true feelings and honesty from a touch taht we simply cannot replicate virtually on the internet.

And that’s why it is easy to be deceived by that terribly nice young man in Nigeria. In real life, ever senistive to subtle hard-to-disguise signals of the underlying intentions, we would never fall for this so quickly. It’s the way someone smiles at you that we notice, not just the fact that he smiled.

For those who don’t fall prey to scammers, our internet world is not that different from our everyday life. Most of the traffic on a website, or the texts that stream out of the mobile phones of our children, are directed at small numbers of individuals. And when we hit the keyboard on our own SNS, we seem to assume we are speaking directly to that handful of intimates.
We think we are engaged in one of those intimate late-night conversations. But on social network sites many other are peering in. It’s another version of those infuriatingly public mobile phone calls on trains.

For some, that’s the whole point: for them, a blog or an SNS is just a lighthouse beaming out its message to the anonymous world, a form of exhibitionism that offers its own pleasures. But the lesson that the world is full of voyeurs whom you don’t necessarily want to see the photos of your drunken behaviour in Ibiza takes time to learn. That’s why, in the end, SNSs have introduced options for censoring who has access to what parts of your life.

In real life, our social network consists of semi-isolated sets of people – family, work friends, the group with whom we play football at the weekend, the painting class we attend on Tuesdays and sometimes go on outings with. Most of us maintain different personas for each of these worlds, for they are just sufficiently isolated from each other to allow us to do that. The internet has cut a swath right through taht. Everyone from Granny to the stranger with whom we carelessly swapped addresses at that party now see the same “us” whether we like it or not. Defriending has become a necessary part of the SNS toolkit.

The internet has had another unexpecteed effect. Those indefinably special friendships of the late teens adn early twenties reappear casually on Friends Reunited. Forged in the white-hot heat of the emotionally most turbulent period of our lives, there is something deeply enduring about these relationships. Not a few old flames have been rekindled, sometimes fatally disturbing current relationships.

This is a reminder that some deepy meaningful relationships can remain half-buried in our minds, for ever occupying slots in a way that prevents later friends reaching those coveted innermost five positions of greatest intimacy. More evidence, perhaps, that our social world is limited by our capacity to manage relationships.