Ross Mayfield's Weblog

From withholding to sharing information for Sales & Marketing

B2B Sales & Marketing has traditionally been driven by withholding information. A tradition that is turning on its head rapidly.

Marketing would entice a prospect with the lure of an asset, like a whitepaper. You fill in a form, providing your information, in order to gain access to information. PR held back on its best information to gain an exclusive with a top journalist. MarCom and Corporate Comms primarily added value by filtering outgoing information. Brand marketers held true to the one true promise of their brand. Sale held back on information to gain access to power. Want pricing? Get us in front of the decision maker. 

Social Media is changing all that. Want pricing? Tweet and you will find other buyers willing to share. Brands are a lie, except the conversations that define them. People who use to run filters now drive feedback. We've moved from a world of exclusives to one of inclusives.

Let me provide one biased example from a company I advise. Slideshare is turning the whitepaper industry on its head with a Business product called LeadShare. Lead generation is done in the context of a professional sharing community. You can provide the lead form in the middle or end of a presentation, whitepaper or webinar. This lets marketers engage through sharing the actual content before posing a more natural, "want to learn more?" to an engaged prospect.

My bet is that B2B marketers that share information will out perform those who horde.

The More Than RSS Market

Richard McManus of RWW notes the continuing decline of RSS Readers, suggesting the market is largely dominated by Google and in disarray. Five years ago there was a perception that this was a hot category. An underlying standard was freeing up new atomized content and conversations that could be pulled and curated. Bloglines was acquired, and new clients were popping up weekly.

I believe an opportunity to cooperate beyond the syndication format, on standards for the basic usability of subscribing (the Coffee Cup problem) was missed at the time when it mattered. Innovation continued with the rise of Netvibes with the widget model, and Google Reader as a Bloglines 2.0. But then it stopped.

Last night I found myself looking at RWW's list of the top 10 RSS Readers, and Tweeted: Why didn't a single top RSS newsreader adapt into a Twitter client?

We all know that Twitter cannibalized RSS Reader habits with something simpler and social. And innovation happened elsewhere for aggregation with simple focused things like Techmeme. And that enterprise RSS innovation moved away from clients. But iGoogle and Netvibes widgets as Twitter clients were developed by third parties. Perhaps it was innovator's dilemma on a compressed scale, but the Readers didn't expand what could be read.

There is a ton of innovation in the Twitter client space. From Seesmic to Tweetie (I paid for it) to Brizzly (Jason Shellen created Google Reader). 107 clients on oneforty.com. There are some that bring baseline newsreading and conversations together, like Threadsy. With blogs adopting the Twitter API, the future will be reverse engineered.

Jeff Nolan and I usually spend our time disagreeing about politics and agreeing about tech, further demonstrating that smart people can be idiots. I can't disagree with him that there is no RSS Reader market today. But I can surmise that if the original players in the market stopped thinking of it as software, and kept evolving it into something closer to FriendFeed for people who want less information -- the network would be the market. And an opportunity remains.

Health Reform: Taking the Wrong Risks

This week the NY Times explores how failing to pass health reform will have an impact on innovation -- and archetypal Silicon Valley startups.

In the cradle of American innovation, workers are making career choices based on co-payments, pre-existing conditions and other minutiae of health insurance. They are not necessarily making decisions based on what would be best for their careers and, in turn, for the American economy — that is, “where their skills match and where they can grow the most,” as another Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Cyriac Roeding, says. Health insurance, Mr. Roeding adds, “is distorting the decision-making.”

...Only 46 percent of companies with three to nine employees offer health insurance, down from 56 percent a decade ago, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation...

Without health reform, entrepreneurs will continue to take the wrong risks. Starting a company is the art of making do without resources. This often means limiting your own compensation and forgoing health insurance at the start. When recruiting employees, its difficult in the early stages of a company to offer health benefits that are comparable let alone competitive with those of larger companies. This despite the fact that when a startup employee gets sick, it can have a broad impact on the productivity of the company overall.

As the economy is recovering there is no better time to start a new company. Silicon Valley is getting back to what it does best, we need Washington to do the same.