ARRiiVE: All the Best on Alltop Marketing

ARRiiVE is now listed as one of the best blogs in Marketing, as listed on Alltop in their MARKETING TAB.

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Copyright © 1999-2008 by ARRiiVE Business Solutions. All Rights Reserved.

Guy Kawasaki discusses Alltop.com on ARRiiVE Radio

Guy Kawasaki, Author, Entrepreneur, Venture Capitalist, discusses his new website "Alltop.com" on the ARRiiVE: Innovations In Business Show this week. This show promises to be highly informative and entertaining, so mark your calendar!

Show Time: May 7, 2008 2:00PM PST / 5:00 PM EST

Join in: Dial (724) 444-7444 Enter 37798 #Enter: 1 # or your Talkshoe PIN

To join from your computer (with LIVE CHAT)or listen after the show, visit: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/37798

Notes: Join Scott, as he interviews Guy Kawasaki, former evangelist for the Macintosh Computer, and an author of many books, including The Art of the Start, a book ARRiiVE recommends highly. Hundreds of thousands of people follow and read Guy's blog (Google Page Rank PR7) and through his company, Nononina, he recently launched two powerful websites, Truemors and Alltop.

Guy Kawasaki is a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics on the web. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

You won't want to miss this dynamic, educational, and fun guest.

Call in to join the show:Dial (724) 444-7444 Enter 37798 #Enter: 1 # or your Talkshoe PIN

To join from your computer (with LIVE CHAT)or listen after the show, visit: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/37798

It's SIMPLE and EASY! See you (or hear you) there...
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Copyright © 1999-2008 by ARRiiVE Business Solutions. All Rights Reserved. SUBSCRIBE.

When Should I Roll Out My Service?

Here is a question I fielded today that I just had to share with you:

Question: When Should I Roll Out My New Service?

My Answer: After you're tested that: (1) People in your target market will buy it; (2) You can ship and support it; and (3) You get high satisfaction remarks from those who bought it.

Notice, I didn't say "when you think of an idea" or "when you've designed the marketing" or "when you get a stream of orders" as none of those are proof the new service will succeed. Now, the difference with the typical marketer and the BEST marketer is that the BEST already have BUZZ pre-release of any new product or service. So, for a master marketer, you can roll-it-out when you can prove simply that people will buy and you are pretty sure you can support what you've shipped. You already have high satisfaction remarks from other products, but you want to make sure you hit the nail on the head.

Remember when Apple first rolled out a hand-held device, called the Newton? It flopped, even though it was a cool advice. Why? Well, probably because Apple did not have the savvy marketing vision then that is does today. Last year, Apple rolled out the i-Phone and I'd say this was a highly successful launch. Everywhere I go, I run into people using an i-Phone. At Apple's i-Phone launch at the MacWorld seminar, Steve Jobs announced the killer product 20 minutes into his speech: "Today, we reinvent the telephone." And, they did. The product forums went crazy with buzz, and the pre-release was as exciting as the release itself. In fact, I'd say that the actual release was a bit anticlimatic.

Can you create buzz like that? If you can't, then follow this simple process:

Question: When Should I Roll Out My New Service?

My Answer: After you're tested that: (1) People in your target market will buy it; (2) You can ship and support it; and (3) You get high satisfaction remarks from those who bought it.

Do your homework, put together a great service idea, test it, and make sure people like it, you can support it, and you get high satisfaction marks. After all, that's what high quality service is all about.
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Copyright © 2007-2008 by ARRiiVE Business Solutions. All Rights Reserved. Want More? SUBSCRIBE. Want more traffic to your company's website? We can help: Call 1-805-459-6939 and ask me how.

A New Social Website

Have you heard the term Web Democracy?

I heard Guy Kawasaki, the former evangelist for Apple Computer, mention his new baby, Truemors, and he called it "Democratizing the Web". I'd not heard of that expression, so I checked it out. At first, yet another social networking site. But I had to dig deeper. Basically, I see Truemors as being kind of like Digg, but more social (not just tech/geekspeak). You can become a Truemors blogger or journalist through their system, and thus then become a contributing member of their system. I'd consider Truemors a new type of social website.

Guy built Truemors with very little investment other than lots of time and staking his name on it. Initially, he received some negative press. However, I'll point out that press garnered over 300,000 page views within ELEVEN days! I wouldn't mind negative press that send that many visitors to ARRiiVE, because I'm sure most of those visitors left feeling like Truemors has a voice and a place on the Web to accomplish their vision: democratizing the web.

The idea is to share information, and to share it freely, across multiple categories. "But, isn't that what we're already DOING on the web?" you might ask. Well, yes, and no. When I dug deeper into what is going on with Truemors, I think it is more about the QUALITY of content than mass sharing of content. During the initial launch, there were 450 posts. Of those, roughly half got deleted for being "crap" posts.

I can't blame Guy for that, at all. In moderating a group on Advanced Collaboration at Plaxo, I have found that roughly 50% of all posts into the group are either non-related, unfocused blogshares, or spam. In other words, crap. I've been criticized for moderating my group at Plaxo, but my point is this: what value is a group when posts are filled with UCE, SPAM, poorly written messages, and other crap? Wouldn't you rather have a group moderated for high-quality content? To which, I'm now starting to get some kudos and applause from the group. My hope is that other members will join me in helping moderate the contributions to the Advanced Collaboration group in a positive manner. My own goal in creating Advanced Collaboration was to build a collective platform to contribute, gain ideas, and eventually promote what I'm working on over at Semantic Collaboration.

Although Truemors claims to be unmoderated, the truth is that Truemors is HIGHLY moderated. In order for Truemors to claim quality, they have to be. I, for my part, think that Truemors may succeed. I feel the same curiosity around it as I did when Steve Jobs invested in Pixar. And, we all ought to know how that ended up for Steve (Pixar was purchased by Disney for $7.4 Billion). That's a cool $3.7 Billion dollars in value for Steve Jobs. Not bad, huh?

Not only that, but he gained a seat on Disney's board, which means he can steer future direction of that stock's performance, too, and gain leverage to integrate more Apple-related solutions into Disney, which will help Apple's performance, too. Now, how will this pan out for Kawasaki? My gut tells me that he'll sell it when he feels it reaches such a critical success that someone larger, like Time Warner, might come in and purchase it for billions.

I'm still learning about Truemors but my initial impression is that this site advanced social websites with a more intellectual bent, an "NPR for the eyes," as Guy calls it.

Kudos to you, Guy. Please keep me informed as to how it goes. Heck, I might even post a little there, myself.
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Post by Scott Andrews, CEO of ARRiiVE Business Solutions.

ARRiiVE Business Solutions helps executives improve sales, launch products and services, and build dynamic, cross-functional collaborative teams. For more information, contact info (at)ARRiiVE (dot) com or call us at 1 (805) 459-6939.

Copyright © 2007 ARRiiVE Business Solutions. All Rights Reserved. Truemors is Copyright © 2007 Nononina, Inc. ARRiiVE Semantic Collaboration, Apple, Pixar, Time Warner, and Guy Kawasaki are trademarks of their respective owners. No infringement intended. You may republish this article only if you publish in WHOLE with the COPYRIGHT and ALL ACTIVE LINKS intact.

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