Dean Newton

Is your product development REALLY driving growth? Are you SURE?

Because new features add overhead to products (generally making them more complicated), a new feature has to provide so much benefit to customers that it’s worth incurring this overhead. There is no such thing as a “neutral” new feature. “The same” means worse.

When our product changes fail to actually improve business metrics—customer retention, usage, or sales, we should have the courage to admit it. In fact, failing to make the product better is an extremely powerful moment, one in which we have the opportunity to learn something important about ourselves and our customers. If we think a feature makes the product better but our customers disagree (not by what they say but by how they behave), then something about our mental model is flawed.

In one of the startups I founded, we had an extended period where we were really focused on the conversion rate of new customers into paying customers (it was a freemium business model). Our vanity metrics were looking good—up and to the right. The graphs even had the shape of the classic hockey stick. But cohort analysis revealed that something was wrong.

We divided our customers into cohorts, looking at the new customers who joined each day as a distinct group. Then we could ask, “How did today’s customers compare to yesterday’s?” And, much to our frustration, the conversion rates were almost exactly the same. It was easy to get conspiratorial. It felt like each group had set up a conference call with the previous group. “How many of you bought the product? One out of a hundred? OK, good, we’ll do that, too.”

The frustrating part was this pattern stayed constant for months, even though we were making the product “better” almost every day. The fact that customer behavior wasn’t changing revealed that we were wrong. We weren’t making the product better, we were making it worse.

The antidote to this problem is to stop using vanity metrics and start measuring progress more rigorously.

More here:  http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/11/are-you-building-the-right-product/

www.deannewton.com

Smartphones Positioned to Cut Into Text - The App that Takes the Lead Wins Big

 

Ben Chinn likes to text as much as the next guy — he just doesn't like to pay for it.

Chinn, 37, sends most of his text messages free of charge with Google Voice and a smartphone application. He also pays $5 a month for up to 200 messages on his AT&T mobile phone plan.

"With everything with the mobile carriers, I feel I'm getting nickeled and dimed," said Chinn, of San Francisco. "I resent paying so much for text messaging, and I feel that it's not a reasonable price to pay for something that costs the carriers next to nothing."

It's customers like Chinn who are worrying the big telecommunication companies. Text messaging has been a huge profit center for AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, but that money could trickle away as free alternatives gain popularity.

Facebook Inc., for example, recently launched a smartphone app called Messenger that enables users to communicate with anyone who is a Facebook friend or has a cellphone number. And this fall, Apple Inc. will roll out iMessage, enabling the millions of iPhone and iPad owners to send messages to one another over the Internet at no cost.

More: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-texting-20110822,0,831068.story

www.deannewton.com

Three Reasons to Personally Engage in Your Business' Social Media

the No. 1 thing that entrepreneurs think they can hire for but shouldn’t is social media.

Here’s why social media is an essential job, and why you’re the only who can do it:

1. All companies are social media companies.

In the ’90s I used to say, “I own an Internet company.” Now that would be ridiculous. I mean, who doesn’t use the Internet to run their company? What business plan does not assume that the Internet will be there to streamline operations?

Today it’s the same thing with social media. According to the Pinnacle Group, 90% of communication on the Internet today happens via social media. Only 10% happens through email. This means that if you are not communicating via social media you are probably not reaching your audience. And you are probably not dealing with business partners efficiently either.

So you need to start thinking of social media as a key part of your company, even if you’re not sure exactly how it will turn out.

2. You are the strategist.

The reason you’re an entrepreneur is because you have the ideas. You can look at a world of vast opportunities and see specific areas where you add a special value. It’s a discipline, really, to think that way. It’s constantly looking out for where you and your ideas fit best into the world around you.

You wouldn’t hire someone else to do that kind of thinking for you, would you? You don’t want to hire out the most important part of your company. First of all, it won’t be fun, and second, you’ll fail.

The social media strategy for your company is the intersection of what your company adds to the world and how you get that special thing into the hands of the right people. You cannot risk letting someone else figure that out.

3. Startups must pivot. And pivoting is best via social media.

Investors in the startup world tout the necessity of the pivot. A pivot is not a business plan or a product plan, but rather a radical reaction that startups make to real-time information about their business. At this point, the pivot is an expected part of the life of a startup. The question is how well the founders can execute a pivot.

The fastest way to gather the information you need is via social media. And the fastest way to convey a pivot to a client base is via social media. But when so much of the company relies on pivots, and so much of a pivot relies on social media, you don’t want to hire someone to run that part of your business.

More:  http://www.bnet.com/blog/startup-tips/the-no-1-hiring-mistake-startups-make/178

www.deannewton.com

50 Social Media Stats for Your Next Powerpoint

On her social media and PR blog, Commentz, Sarah Evans and her staff compile a lot of stats. She cherry-picked the most relevant for marketers to share with Ad Age.

1. "Social media accounts for one out of every six minutes spent online in US." (Journalism.co.uk)

2. "Seventy-seven percent report that they use social media to share their love of a show; 65% use it as a platform to help save their favorite shows; and 35% use it to try to introduce new shows to their friends." (TVGuide.com study via TVNewsCheck.com)

3. "Facebook users are overall more trusting than non-internet others. Pew reported, 43% of survey participants were more likely than other internet users to feel that most people can be trusted." (Pew Internet via Social Media Club)

4. "22% of all grandparents in the UK are using social networks, according to Mashable. The study, which collected results from 1,341 grandparents from the UK, showed that 71% of grandparents who use a social network use Facebook, 34% are on Twitter and 9% use the business social network LinkedIn." (Mashable via Social Media Today)

5. "In the first four months after its January 2010 launch in Russia, Facebook use grew by 376%, and today more than 4.5 million people use the site regularly." (comscore.com via Mashable)

6. "The 'Weinergate' scandal caused a significant drop in tweeting politicians. According to VentureBeat, after the scandal 'the number of tweets by Republican members of Congress dropped by 27 percent, while those of Democrats dropped by 29 percent.'" (VentureBeat via Marketing Pilgrim)

7. Instagram "currently has a user base of 4.25 million in only seven months, with ten photos being posted a second." (prsarahevans.com via TechCrunch)

8. "It only takes 20 people to bring an online community to a significant level of activity and connectivity." (Ning via TheNextWeb)

9. "Nearly twice as many men (63%) as women (37%) use LinkedIn." (Pew Internet via prsarahevans.com)

10. "In the last election Google was the largest player -- the Obama campaign directed 45% of its online campaign dollars to the search site." (Advertising Age)

MORE HERE:  http://adage.com/article/adagestat/50-social-media-stats-kickstart-slide-deck/228708/

www.deannewton.com

Interesting stats from social media site provides NING.

Interesting stats from social media site provides NING.

As Internet savvy individuals use social media to change the way they view the world, custom social site provider Ning sits at the epicenter of this shift. Ning has just released a powerful study on social media tools citing that custom designed destination sites that integrate with the best social media tools into a single, seamless community give brands and a companies a huge market advantage to organize, rally, lobby, create or effect change. Ning’s study examines growth and trends in community engagement across the social media ecosystem based on data from nearly 90,000 communities and 65 million unique monthly visitors across the globe.

The Ning Point of View shines a light on the actions of its Ning community creators and participants and also ranks the most social categories and regions online. The report showed that education outranks music and politics to secure the number one spot, while California, New York and Texas rank as the top social states on the web. Other findings from the report include the fact that it only takes 20 people to bring an online community to a significant level of activity and connectivity and that there is a shift from broadcasting status updates to developing dialog, highlighting the importance of two-way conversation in social media.

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/06/20/interview-ning-ceo-discusses-new-findings-in-social-media/

www.deannewton.com

 

Amazing Android Growth in the EU / Overtaking iPhone

Android is now the top smartphone OS in six of eight key countries having edged past Nokia's Symbian in Spain, according to the latest quarterly sample data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

In the UK, Android's growth is being driven by non-smartphone owners upgrading, rather than people switching from other platforms. According to the research, 74.3% of new Android sales come from owners of "feature phones"; only 1.4% of new Android owners come from former iPhone owners.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/11/ios-android-blackberry-smartphone-data