Startups and Small Business 2.0

nospam@example.com (Chris Carpenter) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:40:43 +0000

Lately I've been reading about marketing and how to create a marketing plan. One of the things I've seen repeatedly stressed is to define the benefits that your solution has for your customers. Why should they use your application or service over somebody else's? I started to think about the benefits that the Australian Business Forms application gives it's users, such as the convenience and ease of use, the ability to save your progress and no handwriting of forms. However, there are other benefits that the customer can enjoy, ones that are not just a result of the specific problem the application is solving, but benefits inherited from the application provider, the startup: being agile, quick to market, and the ability to utilise the latest technologies, such as web2.0, which enables software as a service.

Many startup enablers and commentators, such as Paul Graham and 37Signals, often mention the ability of a startup to move faster than the big companies. Large companies are usually the slowest in adopting new technologies - A survey in December 2007 found that 55.2% of companies still use IE 6. This alone would make it hard for their employees to effectively use some new web 2.0 applications. Not only that: how often do these companies upgrade the software that they sell to you, their consumers? Once every 12-18 months or more. Then you have to upgrade your systems and processes, which brings with it a range of other headaches, such as ensuring the compatibility of the new version, the IT costs involved in new hardware, testing, support etc. Whereas during this time, a fast moving startup could be constantly adding new features and content to their web based product, and these things will just flow through to you - and they may not even raise their prices.

With people now talking about Enterprise 2.0 and how large companies are looking into ways that the new technologies such as cloud computing and social networking can help them, it's time for small businesses to use their size to get ahead and utilize the technologies that are out there now. Small businesses that don't have the IT budget to build applications themselves or utilize cloud computing, should be leveraging the agility and technological savvy of the web 2.0 startups that are out there, and thus gain these benefits by proxy. Not only do they get their problem solved, but they also get to move ahead in ways which their larger competitors may not take advantage of for years to come.

Researching for a Media Release

nospam@example.com (Chris Carpenter) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:38:26 +0000

I've been thinking lately about how to get the word out about newly developed web applications and had a chat with a few people at the Sydney Open Coffee yesterday about this. An interesting talk with Paul from WebEquity.com and a conversation on Silicon Beach Australia got me researching media contacts and how to write media releases.

I found a paid service called www.ozmedia.com that will send your release to multiple media outlets throughout Australia. I used a demo they had on the site, and it looks pretty cool, but as I'm bootstrapping this, I have to save as much cash as possible ... so will start by doing it all myself.

A few Google searches later I found a list of newspaper, TV and radio contacts that can be downloaded as a spreadsheet. So I've now got the beginnings of my media contact list. As stated on that site, there are thousands of other magazines, niche publications, trade mags etc that can be found, but this is a good start.

A Squidoo lens for free web press releases created by Bart Jellema from tjoos.com looks to also be a great research time saver for getting some SEO for your startup.

As for writing the release, there are standards you should stick to. A search on Google about writing media releases finds a bunch of help sites. The main points seem to be:

- Have a catchy title.
- Make the subject line and first paragraph engaging.
- Try not to go over 1 page.
- Include contact details that your are contactable on (Obvious it seems, but many help pages I read stressed it)
- Put "press release" prominently on it.
- Put the date it can be released. "For Immediate Release" if you want it to go out straight away
- Use quotable quotes that the journo's can use.

Digital Carpenter - Marketing

Startups and Small Business 2.0

Researching for a Media Release