Armistead Whitney, CEO, Preparis, one of 60 firms presenting at the upcoming Southeast Venture Conference.
By Allan Maurer
When jets plowed into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, Armistead Whitney, now CEO and founder of Preparis, was president of a New York City-based media firm.
Along with many other company executives based in the city on that fateful day, Whitney was faced with questions about how he and his 200 employees should react to the terrorist attacks.
“I was immediately faced with some critical issues,” he says. “What should I do to ensure my employees will be safe? How will my operations, revenue, shareholder value, and brand reputation make it through? I simply had no clue.”
He and his staff made it out of the city safely, but Whitney writes that he made it his mission to find out what he would do differently if faced with such a situation again. He met with leaders form emergency preparedness and response organizations, then with CEOs of companies of various sizes. Whitney wrote about how it all on the Preparis website.
Guidance on what to do
After considerable research, he started the Atlanta-based company Preparis Inc., a startup selling an SaaS-based platform that delivers expert information, response protocols, communications and training to help businesses meet unpredictable threats from terrorism, pandemics, and natural disasters.
Preparis is one of 60 innovative showcase firms that will present business plans to venture capitalists and angel investors representing billions in capital at the 6th Annual Southeast Venture Conference in Tysons Corner, VA, Feb. 29-March 1.
Companies face 21st century threats
In today’s world, terrorist attacks are only one threat among many that can disrupt global businesses, Whitney tells us. “Threats of the 21st century have become more complex, especially as companies outsource more. They have operations globally, in third world countries, and clients in places impacted by local troubles.”
Nowadays, then, a business has to face pandemics, cyber terrorism, nuclear meltdowns, natural disasters from hurricanes and floods to earthquakes and wild fires. Floods in Asia can hamper production of electronics parts made there from hard drives to tablets.
Yet, Whitney points out, the only preparations for meeting such disasterous business interruptions is “A plan that sits on s shelf. It can be challenging for that to be effective.”
While most larger Fortune 1000 firms do have plans in place – policies, procedures and teams, they want tech to automate it all, Whitney notes.
They need a way to automate plans
“They need a way for tech to automate it, bring it all together so that it can be accessed from any place on any device, how to protect the workforce from threats, response instructions if you receive a bomb threat, an anthrax letter.”
Technology can take those stale plans on a shelf and make living breathing programs, he says.
Downstream at smaller organizations such as a law firm, “We become their entire ecosystem with everything they need, even an emergency notification system (such as Virginia Tech installed following deadly shootings on its campus).
The Preparis system knows who do what with the product at each level and everyone from the CEO to employees can use it.
“We’ve sold to about every industry, Fortune 1000 companies, banks, attorneys. Every industry at every size has an appetite for it,” says Whitney.
In the past, most such disaster preparedness was done through consultants Preparis does it through its SaaS product that a company can download from the web and being using immediately. “We’re creating a new category,” Whitney says.
Dealing with cyber threats
Looking ahead, the company is getting into how to deal with cyber threat issues. “As new threats evolve – the pandemic fears of a few years ago for instance – we quickly add guidance for our clients.”
In the recent “Trifecta” of an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in Japan, for instance, the Japanese government was telling its citizens it was ok to eat the food grown in Japan. But the Preparis product told its clients, “No, it is not ok to eat the food from Japan at this time.” Later tests showed that much food was contaminated with radioactivity.
“We also had a lot of our clients use the emergency messaging system when trying to find their employees.”
It must be doing something right. It has a 100 percent client renewal rate. How many software firms can say that?
The 20 employee company has raised $5 million in Series A funding. Whitney says the company is looking at a B round for growth.
“We signed a strategic alliance with Wells Fargo, which is bundling it with their products for their insurance customers. It’s a huge opportunity. Its the fourth largest insurance broker. We don’t need money for the product, but we need to hire more people to facilitate meeting increased demand for the product. That’s the main reason we would raise a B round.”
The company’s growth plan also includes mobile and social integration. Already clients can log in to the product with Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn names and passwords.
In the ten years Ian Jones, founder of mobile app company meet.com, marketed online dating sites from Friendfinder to Match.com, he tried most of them out – without success.
“I didn’t have one successful meeting,” Jones says.
His complaints about the online dating sites echo those of many others – he would discover that the photos the women he contacted had posted were a decade old. Or they sounded great online but didn’t come across so well in subsequent phone conversations.
So, in 2010, Jones decided to do something about that and created meet.com, a mobile app set to launch in March that already has 700,000 pre-joins acquired through affiliates and marketing.
Presenting at SEVC
The company, which has about 20 employees and currently has a single angel investor, will present its business plan at the upcoming Southeast Venture Conference in Tysons Corner, VA, Feb. 29-March 1. The 6h annual SEVC highlights both early and later stage investment opportunities from: Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington DC.
What makes it different?
Jones tells us that one of the biggest surprises in setting up his startup firm was the “overwhelming support for the meet.com brand and the growth in the smartphone and mobile app markets.”
The brand name is one of the things that differentiates meet.com from its competitors, says Jones. “It has a much higher response rate than ‘Scout,’ or ‘Blender,’ or ‘Grinder,’ based on our research, he notes.
Another differentiating feature is the way the app will work with Facebook. It allows users to connect via Facebook and even communicate with Facebook friends for free after downloading and installing it.
Jones assures us that the app will have strong privacy and security settings and users will be in control of who they connect with.
Once users communicate with people outside their network, however, a $4.99 a month charge begins via the iTunes or Android market stores.
Jones says the app is initially going to work with the iPhone and Android operating systems with Blackberry coming along a bit later.
There are other mobile apps out there that connect people on the go, but Jones says “Our matching technology is superior, our look and feel is superior, and our privacy settings are superior.”
Jones says he thinks we’ll all be experience a “mobile bubble” that will be much more significant that the dot com boom was in the next few years.
Mobile advantages
Mobile has advantages. People are more willing to pay for mobile apps than they ever seemed to be for online services, for instance. “There is much more acceptance from consumers,” Jones says. “It’s much more common for people to push a button and buy a 99 cent or $5.00 app than it is for them to pull out a credit card and charge $19.95.”
Part of the reason for the increased acceptance on the part of consumers is that it’s more secure than online purchases, he suggests.
“People have their credit cards on file with the iTunes store or Android and there are no charge back issues.”
In terms of dating itself, the immediacy of the way the meet.com app works when people are actually on the go and out and about is a major difference from the stale photos and descriptions on online services.
The U.S. dating services market is a now a $2.1 billion business, with online dating services soaring in popularity since 2001 and representing 53% of the market’s value, according to a recent report from Market Research. But, dating website revenues are expected to grow only 7.5% this year as the U.S. market becomes saturated with 1,500+ sites and free dating sites and competition from popular social networking sites attracts cost-conscious singles, the report says.
In the not too distant future he thinks the prices on smartphones will fall even further, greatly reducing or eliminating any price barriers to consumer adoption.
Meet.com is seeking under $500,000 in an angel round and will present the details of its business plan to investors representing literally billions in capital at the SEVC.
Here’s the company’s video description of its product:
The Southeast Venture Conference has disclosed the first round of companies selected to present at the upcoming conference scheduled for February 29th – March 1st at the Ritz Carlton in Tysons Corner, Virginia.
Sixty showcase companies from around the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions will present at SEVC 2012. Showcase companies will range from pre-IPO firms to earlier stage high growth firms.
The presenting companies are the present and future of the region’s innovation economy, representing some of the most promising technologies from a diverse range of industries, including energy, mobile, health, security and Internet among others.
The first round of announced presenting companies include:
Traditional job searching, interviewing and hiring is a backwards process that is undergoing a transformation, a certainty that will be demonstrated at the Digital East 2011 conference September 28-29 at the Sheraton Premiere Tysons Corner hotel. It is one of a dozen innovative firms to demonstrate new tech at the conference, which includes dozens of top digital media experts offering the latest tips, techniques and best practices at the event Wednesday and Thursday.
JobOn co-founder and CEO Jody Presti will show how his company’s technology is changing the way that retailers, restaurants and food service companies hire hourly employment.
One of a dozen DEMO firms
JobOn is one of only a dozen selected to present at the conference’s DEMO Showcase, which will be heard by 800-plus attendees including interactive marketers, senior Internet executives, online strategists, web entrepreneurs, bloggers, designers, usability experts and other new media professionals. (See links below for interviews with participants on SEO, Killer Facebook ads, phone apps for low income groups, web analytics tricks, deploying company video successfully, and creating excitement around a brand.)
JobOn combines employment listings with the ability for applicants to submit a recorded video interview. They answer a few common interview questions via a webcam or smart phone, and then click to send the responses to employers with jobs to fill.
For job seekers, this saves the time and cost of going to each employer to fill out a paper application and then scheduling an interview. At the same time, for less than the cost of a classified ad, employers get to pre-screen applicants before calling them for a second, face-to-face interview. JobOn hosts the videos, which are free for job seekers.
Says Presti, “Employers know within a few seconds if someone is a good fit, so we put the interview first to prevent employers from wasting time on paper applications and inappropriate interviews.”
The market for this technology is significant: there are 80 million employees and nine million workplaces that hire for retail, restaurant and other food services. Turnover ranges from 70 to 200 percent each year, which often leads managers to make “panic hires” that don’t last.
For a look at what some of the other digital media experts will be discussing at Digital East see:
One of the things Ted McDonald, Web Analyst for Verisign noticed at both his current and his last position, was the amount of junk traffic cluttering up reports with misinformation.
McDonald, who managed the web analytics program at Carfax before joining Verisign and managed web analytics at National Geograpic before that, will be discussing a few unusual tricks of the web analytics trade at the Digital East conference in Tysons Corner, VA, next Wednesday and Thursday (Sept. 28-29).
He is an expert at using Omniture products, like Discover and TestandTarget, and assessing the ROI of SEM and social media marketing efforts McDonald will be joined by dozens of experts, executives, and entrepreneurs in digital media, e-commerce, and the web world at the event.
Traffic that mucks up your data
One of the things he’ll discuss is how to detect that junk traffic and what to do about it.
At Verisign, he says, he has to deal with “A large number of people trying to hack us.” Seeing a lot of Eastern European traffic might be one clue that is happening, he notes.
Another problem he deals with is that of registrars hitting the site dozens of times a day. So to solve that and filter other traffic that isn’t relevant to the company’s consumer report, he looks at IP addresses and domain names.
He has triggers set up in the company’s web analytics program, Omniture, to alert him if a certain IP address is looking at the site’s Whois information a number of times a day and so on.
An allied problem to be on the watch for, says McDonald, is that for some reason, a number of site cruising bots – whatever they are – start visits on a site’s order confirmation page. That can seriously distort results if hits to the confirmation page are being used to count transactions. “It mucks up your data,” McDonald says.How
How many visits result in a transaction?
We asked if there are any metrics people should be looking at they might not be aware of. Mostly not, he says, but added, “There is one metric I like to look at that most analysts don’t: the impact of your pageviews on transactions. What you don’t know from a lot of standard reports – the top pages report, bounce rate, all of that – is of how many of the say 1,000 visits to a page resulted in a transaction five or six steps down?”
That is information that’s not readily apparent and “It’s something I look at that most folks don’t even know is an option,” he says.
McDonald says he’ll elaborate on these topics and others at the conference next week.
People don’t get up at 3 a.m. and search for cruise vacations, says Search Engine Marketing expert Kevin Lee, CEO of Didit and first chair of SEMPRO.org. “Marketing initiatives – including paid advertising – stimulate search,” Lee says.
Getting the right marketing mix to drive search interest and harvest the resulting demand requires some “high level communication between search marketing, public relations, paid marketing and social media teams,” Lee adds.
Otherwise, “You can end up shooting yourself in the foot.”
If a company ships a million product catalogs, for instance, “Search goes through the roof,” says Lee. If the people doing the catalog were not part of a wholistic campaign, he notes, “The company may not have enough staff budget to harvest the demand created by other marketing activity.”
Speaking at Digital East
Lee will be discussing how to create media mix models, given any size budget, to create demand and interest the way traditional media does at TechMedia’s upcoming Digital East conference in Tysons Corner, VA, Sept. 28-29.
Lee’s Didit was part of the 2007 Inc 500 (#137), and has received a #12 position on Deloitte’s Fast 500 for 3 years in a row. Kevin authors a “Paid Search Strategies” column for ClickZ and has written several books, his most recent is Search Engine Advertising. Kevin was recognized as an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2008
A set of strategies and tactics for a marketing media mix “Boils down to applying economic theory to media and advertising,” Lee explains.
Strategic thinking required
In the end, though, he says, “Trying to allocate a marketing budget across options is a mathematical challenge, although it is more of a process than a formula. You may end up with a formula that does a good job for each marketer, but the way you arrive at it is different depending on what business you are in. The way a person makes a decision to buy flowers is different from the way they decide to buy an automobile.”
So, he says, “Someone in charge of the media mix model needs to understand the buying triggers and the processes people go through for each purchase. You can’t build a buying crescendo to get someone to buy a dozen roses. It’s an impulse decision made in the hour of purchase. But the process of buying a car or deciding where to go on a honeymoon may take a month or more.”
It requires a lot of strategic thinking, Lee says.
He adds, however that companies with smaller marketing budgets – under $4 million a year or so – may not have enough resources and data to accomplish that, but “If you have a couple million a year in your marketing budget, you need to figure this out.”
A few years ago, the idea of paying for virtual goods online with real currency seemed outlandish to some. “It blew people’s minds,” says Rogelio (Ro) Choy, COO of the question & answer social site Formspring. But game companies such as Zynga, creator of Farmville, among other popular Facebook games, are successfully using that model.
Choy is one of dozens of Internet mavens, social media experts, marketing gurus, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs participating in the upcoming Digital East conference in Tysons Corner, VA, Sept. 28-29.
He’ll be discussing how to monetize social media efforts. He’ll address display advertising, brand advertising, performance advertising, social currency, mobile advertising and virtual currency. He’ll discuss each in some detail based on what he’s learned in a career packed with social media experience.
Choy was previously the CEO of Peerpong, a Q&A service using NLP/semantics for identifying interests and knowledge from social streams. Prior to Peerpong, Ro was Chief Revenue Officer for RockYou and responsible for leading all the business efforts for the company and Director at eBay Motors, leading the online parts business. Prior to eBay, Ro co-founded Cima Systems, a leading VOIP software provider for auto dealers.
Advisor on social media
Choy serves as an advisor to a number of social media focused startups including Applifer, Nanigans, Wildfire Interactive, Project Slice, Adnectar, 500 Friends, Guestmob, Facepad, Replybuy, J2Play, GamesthatGive and Groupcard.
We asked Choy to elaborate on using virtual currency to monetize social media.
“It’s a completely different way of imagining how people can make money on the web,” Choy says. It works because making social media platforms such as Facebook an intrinsic part of the game dramatically reduces the cost of acquiring customers.
In 2011, according to eMarketer, Choy notes, “27 percent of all Internet users were social gamers of some sort and 42 percent of all social networkers play games. In all 62 million people are playing social games of some sort. So a lot of people are playing games in a social network and buying certain types of virtual products.
Those virtual products are consumables tied to achievement in the games, not permanent objects, usually, Choy says.
Hooking people on achievement
“It’s the concept of hooking people on achievement within the broader concept of gamification. You get people used to making short goals,” Choy says. Then you present them with a longer, more difficult goal they may wish to attain, but they may lack the time to complete and want to speed up the process. “That’s where you monetize.Once they’re hooked on achievement, then you charge.”
The concept can be applied to anything, content, e-commerce, any experience that’s social in nature and involves friends, Choy adds. “Where people want to surpass time or material constraints, that’s where you monetize. Build achievement into how you think about offering your products or services on social media platforms.”
Choy says there are compelling opportunities in brand and performance advertising, social commerce and mobile marketing as well. Social commerce, for instance, “Is probably the least developed, but potentially the most compelling,” he says. We could tell from our interview that you’ll be hearing practical ideas that will get the gears of your mind cranking.
Not many tech products or services target the low income consumers, although it is a large and growing segment of the U.S. population. But says Ken Eisner, vice president for Policy and New Business Development at One Economy Corp., there are a number of reasons why the smartphone and app development industry should focus on that group.
Eisner plans to elaborate on this idea at the upcoming Digital East Conference at Tysons Corner, VA, Sept. 28-29.
For one thing, Eisner points out, “Some of these populations are expanding the use of a smartphone as their primary way to access the Internet.”
He notes that a recent Pew Internet study showed that 87 percent of African Americans and Latinos own smart or featurephones and are more likely to take advantage of a wide array of phone data functions. They send as many as 200 more text messages a month than whites consumers, for instance.
Maximize profits while doing social good
Corporations could maximize profits while doing social good by targeting these lower income groups, Eisner says. But right now, “There is no focus on this group. There is no pricing oriented to them. And there are not enough apps developed for it.
“Look at app stores, you’ll see things created specifically for this group. Apps to monitor diabetes medication, or how long you have to wait in line for a government servcie, or how to file for earned income credits. But too few are developed. Most developers in Silicon Valley don’t have much contact with this group. They have no knowledge of the need. They have the notion there are no business models to be built around it.”
To help remedy that situation, One Economy has developed the concept of apps for social good, with a focus on apps for health, education and civic participation created especially for this group, Eisner says.
In June, the company and AT&T disclosed winners of its first App for Good contest. The grand prize winner was Brendan McBride and his colleagues from New York City, for their application “Remás.” The team received $10,000 to continue the development of their “app” that enables users to find the lowest cost overseas money transfer option closest to their location.
Other winners and their prizes include:
• Ysiad Ferreiras won the $5,000 Health prize for his application, SnapFresh,
which helps food stamp recipients find healthy places that accept Supplemental
Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP) payments (formally known as food
stamps).
• David Simnick and Daniel Doll won the $5,000 Education prize for their webbased
application, TalkChalk, which leverages the power of social gaming and
networking and applies it to how students learn.
• Nick Jacobsen won the $5,000 Banking prize for his application, MobileSaver,
which is a mobile web portal for the management of an Individual Development
Account.
• Robert Hellestrae won the $4,000 Gaming prize for his app, Nutrition Missions,
which introducers users to delicious, nutrient dense foods by completing steps of
varying difficulty through fun and healthy “missions.”
Other opportunities
Others opportunities for marketing to the low income group would be apps around the jobs market, considering the current unemployment situation, says Eisner. “There is also a great opportunity on the banking side,” he adds. “Sometimes we need to take our cues from abroad, where mobile banking and mobile payements became a fantastic business.
Eisner plans to go into more detail about how to approach this group at Digital East.
“From the One Economy viewpoint, it’s better to hit some true needs (with smartphone app development). Instead of just looking at the top of the pyramid, try to solve bigger problems such as those banking and mobile payment issues or new forms of communication that focus funds at the lower end.”
Today’s video, higher quality and more accessible than ever, can save companies scads of money on travel expenses alone, but too few use video well enough to realize the ROI it can provide. So says Tim Markey, president of Visual Bridge and former Director of Cisco’s Global Performance Services for Business Video.
Markey is one of more than 80 top digital media, Internet, and social media experts participating at the 2011 Digital East conference in Tysons Corner, VA, Sept. 28-29.
Markey was responsible for all Services for the Americas Region as part of TANDBERG.
TANDBERG was the leading manufacturer of video conferencing and collaboration infrastructure and endpoints prior to being acquired by Cisco. Tim joined TANDBERG from Amdocs, where he was the Vice President of 4G Wireless and was responsible for the successful deployment of Sprint/Clearwire’s 4G Wireless back office suite of systems.
Markey says that over and over again he’s seen cases where companies buys a lot of video equipment but doesn’t get a lot of uptake or use, so they miss out on the ROI possible. “A lot of the time the IT department goes out and buys this stuff on the ‘build it and they will come’ theory. It’s not that easy.”
Some companies even deploy their video resources in a fashion that makes it awkward to use. “I’ve seen cams ten-feet in the air looking at everyone’s head,” Markey says, “and small equipment in a huge conference room. I’ve seen cams next to a window where sunlight keeps people from even seeing that you’re on video.”
Best practices really help
So, Markey, says, “Best practices really help in deploying video, lighting, where the cameras are located, equipment that is appropriate for the room – do it right the first time.”
Video often needs a champion within the company to get full ROI from deployments, he says. “The COO of a Virginia company that was spending $60 million a year on travel said he could cut that in half with video. Once it was deployed around the world, it saved more than half. A champion drove the change in video behavior.”
Another best practice is to provide some education. “I’ve interviewed people in companies who didn’t know they could use video – or didn’t know how to use it,” Markey notes.
Internal marketing campaigns help
He says an internal marketing campaign, including simple educational materials such as how-to-guides, make people aware they have a video option and prevents them from being intimidated by lack of knowing how.
In any event, Markey says, “Video is the wave of the future. Travel savings are the easy ROI. Day to day productivity also increases.”
Visual communication can help improve a firm’s level of communication and make meetings go more quickly, he says. “Just having eye-to-eye contact forces you to pay more attention,” he adds.
The video deployment was very successful at TANDBERG, where Markey says “We used video every day. Desk phones rarely rang. Once you do it, going back to regular phone calls feels like you’re moving backward. I had meetings with people in Singapore and Hong Kong on video in my office. It made us a much more productive, efficient and lean company,” he says.
What to consider before a video deployment
If you’re thinking about deploying video in your company, he suggests you ask yourself what the business case for doing so is. “What do you want as a benefit? Save on travel? Increase efficiency? How are you impacting the people of your organization? Look at your overall processes. Will any change because of video? How will you pay for it?”
Travel savings using video don’t have to relate only to meetings with people in Singapore or Hong Kong, he points out. “We’ve seen lots of savings in government agencies with an office in Virginia and another in Maryland where people had to spend hours getting from one to the other every day. You can save on travel across town.”
Markey says he fields lot of other questions about the business use of video and you can ask him a few of your own at Digital East.
Marty Weintraub, CEO of aimClear, author of "Killer Facebook Ads"
By Allan Maurer
The current buzz says that brands should not be selling, selling, selling on Facebook, but rather, building community. While there is definitely truth to that, “We’ve sold hundreds of millions of dollars of products on Facebook,” says Marty Weintraub, CEO of the online marketing agency aimClear and author of the new book, “Killer Facebook Ads.”
His agency has managed Facebook ad campaigns generating over 10 billion impressions internationally. Client credits include MarthaStewart.com, Siemens, Second Life, Budget Direct, and other global brands.
He’s written extensively for respected Internet marketing trade publications including SearchEngineWatch, SearchEngineLand, SearchEngineRoundTable, and been quoted in many others.
The aimClear Blog (aimclearblog.com) has been cited as among the Technorati Top 10 Small Business Blogs, Cison Top Ten Social Media Blogs, PRWeb’s 25 Essential Public Relations Blogs You Should Be Reading, and listed in the AdAge Power150.
Weintraub is one of hundreds of top Internet mavens participating in the upcoming Digital East conference in Tysons Corner, VA, Sept. 28-29. He’ll be talking about demographic targeting on Facebook, particularly targeting by occupation.
More than 20 billion Facebook impressions
Weintraub has a wealth of experience to draw upon. “We’ve been doing Facebook ads since 2007,” he says. “We’ve served more than 10 billion impressions on Facebook.”
People who say they can’t meet their goals on Facebook “have the wrong goals,” Weintraub says.
The first thing anyone who plans to buy Facebook ads should consider, he suggests, is “Understand what you get free and what you have to pay for on Facebook. That’s really important.” The site monetized its viral elements, he says.
Second, he says, “Understand who your customers are.” To do that, he says, use the Facebook Paid Advertising tool. Facebook will let you drill down to very specific sets of demographics – people 51-54 in the U.S. Midwest interested in Popular Mechanics, say.
“Use screen capture to find out who your customers are,” says Weintraub. He points out, however, that just targeting the bullseye in not enough.
Keep an open mind about other interests
Someone interested in tennis is the obvious choice if you’re selling tennis rackets. “But,” Weintraub asks, “Can I get them interested in water bottles or fuzzy wrist bands? If they’re 58-61 and live in New York, can I interest them in the New York Philharmonic subscriptions? You have to have an open mind about their other interests.”
Then, take action. “You have two options, serve them ads or chat with them,” he explains. So you’re goals will be to sell things, or to get them to like your Facebook page or provide information.
The selling itself should take advantage of the medium, Weintraub notes. If you’re trying to sell radically new MRI technology to a neurology surgeon, you don’t advertise, “Radical new MRI equipment.” Instead, “You go, ‘Because it’s so sad when children die of neurology disorders,” with a photo of a grieving parent. “The person clicks through with an emotional connection,” Weintraub says.
Then you don’t take them to a landing page that shoves a form in their grill. You take them to a story about how the equipment saved a kid’s life.
“Don’t look just for literal targeting. If you’re selling organic cereal bars, look for people into sustainable living, recyling, and the environment. If you just target for organic cereal bars, you won’t have that much success. People are too literal in association sales.”
Be likeable
Another type of association to look for is competitive, where you target positive or negative sentiment toward a competitor’s product. That’s where you sell Xooms to people who say iPads suck.
You have to provide content that actually matters to the Facebook user, he says. “You have to play, ‘Now you’ve got me right where I want you.’ But you have to talk to them respectfully. If you’re crude, you’ll turn off the Facebook user.”
Even if all you’re trying to do initially is to build a Facebook fan base, he says “You have to offer something that matters to people for them to like you. The best way for someone to like you anywhere is to be likeable.”
The Southeast Venture Conference has disclosed the first round of companies selected to present at the upcoming conference scheduled for February 29th – March 1st at the Ritz Carlton in Tysons Corner, Virginia.
