Marketing Your Company With Short Messages

June 15, 2010 1 Comment

Getting a message out about your company is easier than ever with technology and the Internet.  This is probably not a big surprise to anyone.  If we want to get a new message out here at Avantica, we write something in our blog or post it on our Web site, and then work the social networks to spread the word.

Our top communicators each have hundreds of solid connections across facebook, LinkedIn, and other networks that we can tap.  We also use subscriptions to this blog and followers on Twitter.  Add in our contact lists and a service like Vertical Response and just like that we can reach thousands of industry people with a few clicks of a button.

Take for example the recent announcement about Open Mountain becoming part of Avantica.  Here’s how we got the word out about that:

  1. Press release on prweb.com that aggregates to thousands of sites
  2. Updates to our statuses, profiles, etc. on LinkedIn and facebook
  3. Blog post expressing our personal thoughts on the merger going out to subscribers and RSS feeds
  4. Emails and phone calls to key clients, contacts and bloggers about what we are trying to achieve together
  5. Coverage in the press about the changes.

All of this is easy to do provided you do some up front planning to get contacts and connections in place. Let me provide some tips for how you can prepare your company for the messages you need to send:

Social network upwards and out – Make connections that expand your sphere of influence in addition to recognizing the connections you already have.

Twitter, tweet and follow – Your activity should be about preparing to share information and not only about your own personal daily activities.

Use great tools – Find the best tools to measure your exposure and coverage.  Try to select the most effective tools and not just the ones you find easiest to use.

In the end, the major challenge we faced was the length of the message.  People have grown accustomed to shorter more precise messages.  Twitter’s 140 character limit is tough when you are trying to cover all the reasons why you merged.  Recent studies have shown that a significant number of people get their news just reading the headlines of posts without bothering to click the link for content.

Hemingway boasted he could write a complete story in just six words.  His story was simple: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. Pretty effective, don’t you think?  Plot.  Drama.  A compelling tragedy in just 6 words.  What am I complaining about?  In fact, there are quite a few contests spawned from this story like this contest on Wired.  My favorite in here is: Epitaph: He shouldn’t have fed it. That one cracks me up!

In the spirit of “Papa”, I thought I would take a shot at reducing our core message down to just 6 words.  You tell me if you think this is effective or not.  Here you go:

Launch.  On Time.  Money left over.

What do you think?

Filed under Development Management

Avantica merges with Open Mountain (a.k.a. Why did we do it?)

June 2, 2010 3 Comments

Some of you looking at this post might be a little confused right now.  You navigated to the Open Mountain blog and now you are here.  You may have clicked the Avantica blog for the first time and found posts with references to Open Mountain.  What gives?

On May 1, 2010, Avantica acquired Open Mountain. The Open Mountain blog officially became the Avantica blog.  You can read more about the acquisition here.

In the coming months, you will see a new blog emerge with more content and contributors.  Maybe you’ll even appreciate some new opinions having read mine the last few years.  In honor of the change over, let me finish off the Open Mountain blog with this final post.

Why did we do it?  Why sell the company to our top development partner Avantica?

First, let me dispel any concerns.  We didn’t need to sell to survive this economy.  We created a profitable and growing business in one of the toughest economic climates in recent history.  Our friends and family are happy we survived as well.  Take a look at this post about different ways to start a company and you’ll get a sense for how we managed our bottom line.

Earlier this year we began to consider how we could achieve our next set of goals for the company.  Not just financial goals but goals for expansion, for enhancing our services and really for becoming a leading company that start-ups call the second they need a team.  On our own, we knew we could get there.  As part of Avantica, we decided we could get there sooner.

That’s it.  No smoking gun.  No definitive reason that forced our hand.  Really, not a bad set of choices.  Stay the current course and have nice stable growth. Join Avantica and engage with a larger base of customers and a broader set of opportunities.  Joining Avantica was really about what we could do together by sharing our knowledge and resources.

Of course, we had our fair share of sleepless nights wondering if we were doing the right thing.  Letting go of the first company you created is a bit like sending your kids away to college.  There is some pride at what you have done and remorse at watching it go.

You wonder about the terms.  Is the valuation fair and the employment agreement reasonable?  What if we don’t like it? This is just the kind of thought to wake you up at night.  Multiple nights actually.  But if we we didn’t have any trepidations, odds are we wouldn’t have created something of any value in the first place.

The decision was grounded in one simple objective that we feel we can continue to meet as part of Avantica.  We started Open Mountain because we truly wanted to help start-ups and companies bring new products to market.  The energy of new projects is exhilarating.  The creativity from figuring what to do and how to do it, often starting from scratch, represents the most fun you can have on a project perhaps except for astronomical success.  That’s the way we see it and our experiences at start-ups like Ariba, Arbor Software and others represents some of the most fun and rewarding work we have done in our careers.

Over the last few years, we created a lot of products and technologies.  Open Mountain worked with clients to do interesting projects like the community we created for students preparing for college or the community we did for cancer survivors to share their experiences and connect with others.  We built a site that provides education around corporate benefits.  We worked on technology to support small business payroll and technology to provide up-to-date information to doctors. We worked on a site for CEOs to discuss the challenges they face with their peers.  We even did our own project to help consumers manage their home inventory and worked on a site to help consumers buy comfortable organic cotton products at a reasonable price.

Do you now see why we like this type of work over working on the same product for several years?  Man, this is a great job!  We definitely look forward to doing the same type of work on a larger scale as part of Avantica.

Thanks for supporting Open Mountain all these years,

Bob & Tom

You’d be surprised how many issues you can resolve over a good bottle of wine!

Filed under Company Updates Tagged with , ,

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