In This Issue: October 10, 2003
• Welcome to the 280 Insider
• Companies to Watch: Omniva
• 280 Group Announcements
• Marketing Brilliance?
• What's Hot: Leveraging Google
• Books To Read: Purple Cow
Welcome to the 280 Insider
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Dear 280 Group Subscriber,
Welcome to the 280 Insider. When we announced the newsletter a little over 4 weeks ago we had no idea that we would get such a positive response - over 500 people have already subscribed!
In this issue we’ll be covering a hot startup named Omniva systems, talking about Google search engine optimization, reviewing the New York Times bestseller Purple Cow, and discussing some bad moves in branding.
Comments, criticism and ideas for articles and companies to cover are welcome. We're also looking for people to contribute articles - contact us if you are interested.
Brian Lawley
President
280 Group LLC
280 Group Announcements
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- 280 Group referral program – make an easy $10k
- 280 Group announces Google Rank!
- Will Iverson speaking at OReilly/Apachecon conferences
- Silicon Valley Marketing Resources Directory launched
For full details on announcements click here
What's Hot: Leveraging Google
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Can potential new customers really find your company and products on the web?
Imagine that you are one of your own target customers, and that you haven’t heard of your company yet. You decide to search the web to look for companies that provide the products or services that your company offers.
Think of one short phrase that you would type into a search engine to find your company (not your company or product names). Now, using this same phrase, go see if you can find your company in the major search engines. Check to see if you show up on the first two pages of results. Make sure you try each of the most popular search engines, as ranked by the usage statistics:
32% Google
25% Yahoo
19% AOL (including Netscape)
15% MSN
9% Others
Now go to each of these sites and type in “Marketing Consultant Silicon Valley” and see if you find The 280 Group and/or Brian Lawley.
Chances are you didn’t find your company (unless you are already incredibly well known in a specific category), and that you did find the 280 Group.
I’m constantly amazed by the number of companies that do little or nothing to optimize their positioning and placement in search engines. They spend hours agonizing over content and design...
Click here for full article
Companies to Watch: Omniva
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With email being so ubiquitous and easy to use a whole new range of problems have cropped up for smart entrepreneurs to solve. Getting rid of unwanted spam is one of the obvious ones, but there are others that are perhaps just as critical to solve. In particular, how do you control who reads your email and where it travels once you send it?
Years ago back at Apple when we used Applelink, a primitive early email system (though it had advantages over SMTP in the you could see who had read your message and where they had forwarded it). I once sent out a critical and confidential email and a week later checked to see who had read it and forwarded it. It turns out it was sent to over 1800 people inside and outside the company. This is NOT what I expected to happen, and the content of the email would have been dramatically different had I known in advance.
One company working on this problem is Omniva. I first came across them when they launched at DEMO several years ago under the name Disappearing Inc. Funded by Kleiner Perkins, Red Rock, and Mitsui, Omniva’s initial product concept was simple and compelling – put a time limit on your email ...
Click here for full article
Marketing Brilliance?
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Branding Gone Wrong: Industry Standards
The wonderful thing about industry standards is that they give companies an easy way to add value to their products and they give the consumer a stamp of approval that all is well and that products will work together. A few examples include Wi Fi, USB, Firewire, and Ethernet. The downside of industry standards is that they quickly become checklist items on a feature list – everyone includes them and this allows for no differentiation.
A few companies try to get around this by attempting to brand industry standard features. I recently had two experiences with new products that pointed out why doing this can work horribly against a company. Both were with major brands, Apple and Sony, and both are a good example of how a company can become disillusioned into thinking that their power and influence in the industry is beyond what will matter to their customers...
Click here for full article
Books To Read: Purple Cow
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Purple Cow, By Seth Godin
4 out of 5 stars
Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable.
4/5 Stars
New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Businessweek Bestseller
I first became a fan of Seth Godin’s books when he came out with Ideavirus, a study of viral products and ideas. Ideavirus was marketed very cleverly. In fact, you can get a free copy of the entire book at www.ideavirus.com. Seth’s bet was that the book was so good that you would end up buying a printed copy and buy products from him for years to come. His bet worked with me.
Seth’s latest book is Purple Cow: Transform your business by being remarkable. The book is an easy read. Entertaining and informative, its message is even more critical now than ever for companies that want to create winning products. With all of the half-baked products and broken product promises that customers endured during the boom, this book preaches that it’s time to get back to creating products and services that are truly remarkable.
Purple Cow advocates that in order to stand out, in order to have your marketing and all of your other efforts make any impact, you must ...
Read the full review here...
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Brian Lawley runs the 280 Group, a Marketing and Product Management Consulting firm in the Silicon Valley Bay Area. If you need an acting Vice President, Director, or interim Product Manager or Marketing Manager, the 280 Group can provide you with hand-picked, high-quality talent. For assistance with product launches, writing market requirements documents, customer research, developing sales tools, competitive analysis, positioning, pricing or other Marketing or Product Management tasks contact the 280 Group for a free quote and proposal.
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