Archive for August, 2009
Some London Plugs
Having taken the unusual step of re-locating from San Francisco to London, the merits of the city are often on my mind. To risk offending residents of both locations by boiling it down to a sentence: the valley is better at encouraging you to take the leap and build something while London is better for selling things.
The up and downsides of each place are substantially more nuanced, and I’ll try to do it some justice soon. In the meantime though, I just wanted to point out a couple local (well, local to us) companies doing great work with live music, video creation, and social monitoring. And if you’re an entrepreneur hoping to join the growing ranks of global London startups, Seedcamp applications are open (I’ll be there as a mentor — let me know if you’ll be around).
And since the last office picture we posted prominently featured a living room, here’s a quick shot of part of the space we now share with Songkick and some other cool companies.
As you can see, we’re one areca palm closer to being able to seal the windows and never go outside again (although the weather has been quite nice since… Thursday). But until we get our hands on about a hundred more of them (to create a biodome and enjoy the fabled 20% productivity boost), the coffee machine will have to tide us over.
Animate your ancestors
A quick note to highlight a cool Minivid campaign for Sony’s Year One. If you’ve ever dreamt of saying something witty to Jack Black while in ancient Rome, then today is your day!
Sysomos’ Inside Twitter report has sparked some good discussion regarding tweeting robots and the disproportionate output of the top five percent of users. But tucked at the bottom is a bit of great (and arguably more interesting) data on how we’re currently marketing through Twitter.
Twitter is clearly important to us as a group — marketers are 50x more likely than the population at large to have passed the lofty mark of two thousand friends. However, while listening can help us catch bad PR and keep an eye on key influencers, we’re still falling short spreading positive brand sentiments beyond our [relatively] tiny groups of followers.
When a real, live customer gives our brand, product, or service an enthusiastic thumbs up, we are too often the only one paying attention. Most of our customers don’t hear a thing. We are leaving huge amounts of marketing value on the table by failing to properly leverage these quieter (but equally powerful) voices. A thoughtful Amazon review creates value for months while equally thoughtful tweets have an unfortunate tendency to fall where nobody is there to hear them.
If making better use of social highlights is something that’s been on your mind, we’d love if you would drop us a note or comment with your thoughts as we get ready to move Stream into beta.
