markh’s posterous

ScamVille: Let's not be too hasty

There’s been a lot of hubbub in the social gaming / tech media recently about incentive rewards. These are typically used in social gaming to allow a user to earn currency by completing a bunch of marketing offers. However, some of these offers spark a lot of complaints because of how misleading or flat-out scammy they are.

You can read more here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/

Or just view it in action: http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/31/video-of-arrington-shukla-fight-highlights-controversy-of-special-offers/

While this concept is new for a lot of people in the gaming space, the backbone of these offers have been in existence for many years, and likely you’ve even participated in one.

I wrote a comment on the topic, and thought it’d make sense to replay it here. Since then, some of the leaders have decided to remove some of the more scammy offers. I’d argue that they’d likely do this anyway, but it’s a smart way to help take a leadership position in this PR mess – other companies haven’t made as smart a move…

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/scamville-hotornot-plentyoffish-facebook-myspace/

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Why The Face on all the hubbub about this stuff? It’s lead-generation advertising, people, and it’s the same low-response offers that have been around for ages. I give some credit to the Gambits, OfferPals, SuperRewards of the world for taking that existing model and making it fit into gaming and beyond.

But the core offers has long been provided by people at NetBlue, NeverBlue, Azoogle, and all these companies that you don’t hear much about, unless you happen to be a marketer looking to acquire masses of customers. They’re the same guys powering the ads on some of these networks. And if they’re not using the third-party, they’re definitely talking directly with the same exact advertisers.

The quality of leads are often terrible. The methods are spurious at best, but when you’re dealing en masse, the ROI from customers through these low response rates can actually make these cost effective.

I think it’s a little too easy to line up the social gaming companies and shoot at them for using these channels. Why not line up the hundreds of mainstream consumer services and marketers outside of gaming who have used the same exact offers from the same exact clients in lead-generation and affiliate marketing — they’re just doing it directly via the ad networks and not through the game-reward go-between. Look at any major subscription service, especially those in mainstream gaming, personals, hosting, photo services, personal finance, etc. — you’ll see many of them using affiliate systems.

And so the problem really is mostly with the advertisers, often affiliates. While they’re supposed to be held to a higher standard, it’s very difficult to police all of their methods, especially again, when you’re doing it at such large volumes. Thankfully, they’ve gotten better than they used to be, but there are always new affiliates and advertisers, and these are some of the most aggressive people you’ll meet in marketing.

I wouldn’t credit to the social-rewards companies for inventing a brand new way to make money, but I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to single them out. It’s in their best interests to weed through the chaff, and the ones I’m working with or have talked with are earnestly trying to do that. If you don’t have good offers, you won’t get repeat users, and the companies will stop integrating them. Customer satisfaction will force a finite lifespan on those who don’t weed the junk out.

Surfers tackle 15 foot swells at Scott creek beach

Fascinating inside look at Twitter operations and internal strategy

Coming from hacked/stolen company documents...interesting to see how ev + biz run things with the team...

Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet”
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-laid-bare-to-be-the-pulse-of-the-planet/

[excerpt]
The documents include employment agreements, calendars of the founders, new employee interview schedules, phone logs and bills, alarm settings, a financial forecast, a pitch for a Twitter TV show, confidentiality agreements with companies such as AOL, Dell, Ericsson, and Nokia, a list of employee dietary restrictions, credit card numbers, Paypal and Gmail screen shots, and much more.

These are the last two documents we are going to share: a subset of the detailed notes from a set of executive meetings that took place between February 12 and June 9, 2009. Much of the information in these notes is either personal in nature (new hires, etc.) or too sensitive to share. What’s interesting of the rest we are posting here with our commentary. These notes include never-before revealed discussions between Twitter and Google, Microsoft, and others, as well as details of product planning, company goals, employee retention, and new proposed terms of service and APIs. Even acquisition targets such as CoTweet and Twitpic are discussed (and sometimes dismissed). It’s important to note that we have been given the green light by Twitter to post this information - They aren’t happy about it, but they are able to live with it, they say (more on why they did that in our later post).

One other caveat - as we’ve said before, these documents are rough meeting notes, not polished documents meant for broad consumption. There are lots of typos and outdated information. But on the plus side, the rawness of it shows the dedication and deep commitment of this team to making Twitter into a world-class company.

a bunch of pictures from E3 2009 #e3 #fb

Gaming still alive and well. Wish we would've seen more innovation though.
Not a good sign when you look at a bunch of games and can't tell one from
the other...

good design on the cheap: crowdsourcing design

I’ve had an interesting debate with some friends at early-stage startups about the right core team members to get a product started. Despite outsourcing channels, I think strong local tech talent is probably always essential for most online products’ early life. But what about design? Some services put design first (“it’s the Apple way, darnit”) while others say you can improve that as time goes on, too.

Regardless of your preference, it’s hard to find someone who is equally adept at everything from interaction design, to visual design, to web development, to flash design, to marketing creative. Sometimes you get lucky, but it’s tough, and frankly, probably pretty unrealistic.

Nevertheless, I’ve had luck finding people who are multidisciplined, but I still end up shoring up some of our needs with contractors. I find agencies tend to act really big and have costs to match (and don’t make sense for small startups to use anyway, and rarely even mid-size companies). Small boutiques are a better fit, but even their models require them to be fairly cost prohibitive for new startups. Contractors are a good route when you can pull it off, but I find that to be hit or miss, too. Sometimes you have a good match/partner, and sometimes you don’t. And sometimes you don’t really know until you do some work together.

So along comes Crowdspring (http://www.crowdspring.com) , and its predecessor, 99designs (http://www.99designs.com) . Spec work, priced by the market. The head designer of Mint.com (whose design I absolutely love and think is brilliant) suggested trying out Crowdspring.

The concept is simple. Propose a project (typically visual web design or marketing creative), write up a simple brief, price it, and put it in front of thousands of designers. Those designers will attempt to win your contest by building proposed designs. You then provide feedback to help the artists revise their work, and then settle on a winner or two at the end of the contest (the intermediary website takes a cut).

This model can work well for marketers and product managers. You get a wide variety of designs to choose from, and can eventually strike a longer-term relationship with designers that you like. I’ve created landing pages for 1/3 the price of other contractors. I’ve created solid Flash ads for 1/10^th the price of other folks (with the opportunity to choose from 65+ different design proposals – whoa!). I also like that it’s economically efficient.

Between the two, I’ve had different experiences.

Crowdspring is a generation ahead of 99designs, but the site is essentially unusable right now (performance issues). They’re hard at work at making it better, but until speed improves, go to 99designs. Crowdspring seems to have higher quality artwork, and folks that are more adept at  a wider variety of web projects (i.e., not just flash ad jockeys). The site tries to mitigate some of the issues of a short-term client/contractor relationship by having the client do more upfront work to educate on the brand, target, voice, etc. That’s pretty good. They also make it easy to communicate, rate submissions, and share relevant documents. I found it took longer for me to get submissions on Crowdspring, and only a couple were high-quality, but it also might be a reflection of my original proposed bid.

99designs was the first (from what I can tell at least), and seems to be more focused on marketing creative. That said, the site is very very easy to use, straightforward, and with an extremely active community. I had 24 Flash ads created for a few hundred bucks, drawing more than 65 proposals in 3 days. 75% of them weren’t very good, but I had 3 finalists who all produced very viable options for me, understanding our marketing brief, what are target was, and being very responsive to suggestions and change. That’s pretty solid.  

There is a movement (quite angry one actually -- http://www.no-spec.com/ ) of people who are against spec work, as they feel it devalues the role of designers and is a disservice clients, ultimately. I think the subtle undercurrent is obviously that market efficiency will drive down the price of design work to what the market is truly willing to bear, and that’s an unwelcome reality. Understood.

Frankly, I think it’s a service to the client because you can try on various designers before you buy, and ultimately decide to strike longer-term relationships. Building a relationship where a designer understands the client’s needs comes with time, but it doesn’t mean it absolutely can’t work in the short-term. It’s a compromise that you make in the interest of cost.

In any case, I’ve found these services to be viable useful ones for us. I wouldn’t say they replace the need for designers in every situation, but it’s certainly a viable way to bootstrap your option and continue to focus your resources and attention on other critical initiatives.

sympathy for the noobs (aka, my first 2 hours with a mac)

jenn's old hp laptop died, so i decided to take the plunge and buy a macbook 13" (the new aluminum one) to replace it for her. it cost 2x as much, but all of my friends say it's worth it, so i'm giving it a shot. (i used to be a big mac guy, but gave them up during the Clone Wars of the late 90s. my path back? ipod shuffle -> ipod nano -> iphone -> macbook. ipods are the gateway drugs to macbooks).

so here are a first initial reactions. i'm logging this for two reasons: 1) to remind myself what life is like for someone brand new to your service or program, and 2) to piss off my dear friend albert poon, aka the Jim Jones of appledom. :)

first problem. i can't figure out how to turn it on. no, really. can't find the power button. oh, there it is. so smooth and subtle, i miss it. i push the power button. nothing. i push it again. nothing. i hold it down. nothing. i yell over the cube? how do you turn it on? "bwaaaa" the startup noise finally responds and it starts up.

nice fancypants graphic video at the beginning says welcome in a bunch of languages. wow, get over your nice work with babelfish. show me what this puppy can do.

i get involved with new computer reg, etc. definitely faster than windows, and not technically freaky. that's good. i'm not scared.

second part. it's really hard to use this trackpad. i hate the doubleclick. can't i just tap the trackpad once for what i want? or what about using a keyboard shortcut? i want to migrate to apple os, but you're forcing me to learn a new way of doing things. not easy for an old windows guy, but i'll get there. ("you need to get over your bad habits" i hear albert saying).

i want to move files from my windows machine to the laptop. how do i do that? i try getting the mac to read my laptop on the network. i make my windows machine as visible as possible (max sharing). macbook can't find it on network. i try ad hoc wireless connection. computers connect, but alas can't see files. i try an "smb connection" that i learned about on the web. permissions blocked. i search the web for answers. about 20 posts with people having the same problem. no one with an authoritative answer other than "crossover cable". i successfully connect with bluetooth! yay but only lets me do individual files at a time (no folders). boo. i don't have a crossover cable, so i have to wait to connect to an intermediary hard drive to transfer. boo. migration hard.

it's such a pain to have to close this window trail left behind by everything i click. i faintly remember a keyboard shortcut to solve that problem, but until then, i'm in click hell to keep things clean and neat.

i like the taskbar at the bottom. that's kind of cool. bouncing icons are fun.

i install iwork 09. superfast. nice. can't wait to check that out.

i install boxee. wow this is neat. slick interface for getting video content. nice work boxee. let's listen to flo-rida, because why not? whoops hard core crash. i can't escape anything now. "you spin me right round" i can't control quit. is there a magic key combo to get it to force a close of the program? "spin you right round when you go down" i don't know it. what do i do to get out of this? somebody stop flo-rida!

hold the power down and force a shutdown of the computer. well, at least one thing works exactly the same on the mac as the pc.

ok, i'm truthfully eager to try out garage band, get bootcamp set up, get it hooked up to my home media server, try out time capsule, etc. will take me some time to figure out how to navigate, what i can actually do with the computer, get portable more easily, etc. it's hard shifting to a new world. thought it'd be easier. will be interesting to see how much easier it is for jenn to switch. the true test? will jack be able to make the switch...

stay tuned.

 

tips for job-seekers from a hiring manager

You would think that in this economy, where the California unemployment rate has topped 10%, that it'd be a total piece of cake for hiring managers to find great folks to fill any job opening. But I think that in my 15 years of hiring, right now is still a pretty hard time to hire folks, too.

Why? The signal-to-noise ratio is way out of whack, and it's about finding the right fit.

My most recent Senior Product Manager opening has attracted 125+ LinkedIn candidates, 200+ Craiglist applicants, and another 100+ coming from referrals, twitter, other job sites etc. Recruiters have probably screened another 500 candidates for me, so call it 1,000 applicants. I've phone screened probably about 25 people (~3%) and brought in 6 people for interviews (0.6%). My earlier post for an office manager role attracted the same volume, including former VPs from Merrill Lynch. It's a tough market out there.

People have gotten smarter with getting hiring managers' attention. Obviously, it's easy for me to filter out the semiconductor engineer from Cairo, Egypt (true!) for my consumer online job. Thankfully, I'm seeing more candidates who more closely meet the requirements to try and get a phone screen. Great! Btw, I'm willing to take a chance on people who may not be a perfect fit if they bring other unique things to the table. I'm sure others are, too (so take heart, mr semiconductor)

So, first off, congratulations on swimming in a really tough current, and getting noticed. Now, that you have my attention, here are 5 things you can do to help me think you're the right person to bring in (this may be biased toward product managers, but can apply universally, I think).

1) Spend time with the product. A lot. Go figure, but very few people I talk with spend more than 10 minutes with the product, if at all. It shows really fast when you ask them questions about the experience. It's important to spend time with the product for a lot of reasons, but I'm mostly interested when you use that time to...

2) Share your top 5 ideas for making the product/service/experience better. This tells me a lot. It tells me whether you did #1, and also, how you think about addressing customer needs. I don't care if the ideas are wrong, or if you missed the customer, but if your ideas are good at helping improve the user experience, and ideally, advancing the company in a strategic way, I'll immediately be intrigued. Chances are we'll only have time to talk about one, so have a little depth, but be prepared to discuss others.

3) Ask good questions. How do I know whether you're really interested in my company, or whether I'm just Company #235 on your list today? By the questions you choose to ask me. I always save time at the end of interviews to see what questions people have. If it's only about next steps, then that's not enough. Ask the questions that will help me know you understand what it takes to be a great part of the team (i.e., if you're a product person, ask insightful product questions. One example: Ask how we learn about our customers and their needs.)

4) Have some understanding of the marketplace. I love it when people understand what we're facing in the marketplace, how that might be affecting our strategy and revenue model, and how competitors may have influenced this thinking. Industry knowledge isn't in the top 3 of criteria for me, but knowing you've done some homework, even if you're not from the space, helps me know that you can adapt quickly, and that you'll have a context for making good decisions.

5) Show me you care. The market is terrible, yes, and I'm very hopeful that I can do something to help you and as many others as I can. Ideally, I want to know at the end of the call, or cover letter, that you're the person I should get to know because you LOVE this kind of role and LOVE this kind of company (e.g., startup), and LOVE this kind of space (e.g., consumer online). Passion goes a long way, but it has to be focused in a relevant way for it to matter. Btw, I share opportunities at other companies with former candidates I've spoken with who I thought were great, but not a right fit with my place, so if I'm left with that feeling, I'm going to want to help you, and stay connected with you. Who knows what will happen down the road.

My best advice: Apply for fewer jobs. But when you apply for one, really invest your time so anyone would be a fool to not bring you in for at least a round of interviews. The rock stars I was lucky enough to hire in the past all did these five things with flying colors...

I'll be surprised if anyone is surprised with these tips. No brainer, right? Well, I don't think it happens enough, and it surprises me. So I hope this can be helpful to someone. Let me know if you have any tips to add in the comments below, and let me know if there's anything I can do to help you.

 

 

röyksopp single happy up here

Happy Up Here from Röyksopp on Vimeo.

Official video for the first single from 'Junior'!
Directed by Reuben Sutherland
http://royksopp.com/music/happy-up-here

ok, i don't think that they were necessarily going for this, but this new song and video are just really cute. i like the space invaders motif. the song is supercatchy, too. i hope they pick up a lot more fans.

pretty good data on iphone apps

Horrible picture of garbage truck explosion on 101

By horrible I mean you can't make out that it is a truck, it exploded, and that it is on 101. But there is smoke on the left so just trust me, it looked cool.