JumpStart: IdeaExchange Blog

LinkedIn is fabulous for personal networking as you already knew — but you can also use it to grow your business! Learn how you can leverage this popular social media to close deals, increase market share, and enhance your online presence on June 22nd from Dave Gowel, who was coined the ‘LinkedIn Jedi’ by The Boston Globe.

To get a taste of what you can expect - and get caught up on the last couple JumpStart educational events – check out our Event Videos.

Hope to see you on June 22nd!

Cathy Belk is the Chief Marketing Officer of JumpStart. She specializes in branding, marketing communications, and business management. She brings 16+ years of experience in a variety of marketing and business roles, but gets her energy from working daily with entrepreneurs and their growing companies.

Last week I was in San Francisco, where I had the chance to learn from and interact with a number of entrepreneurs, investors, and others in the West Coast entrepreneurial ecosystem. While I heard a number of valuable presentations and panels while there, there’s nothing quite like a punchy quote to grab your attention! Here are a few I found most intriguing, exciting, or otherwise out of the ordinary!

5. “I invest in 1 or more of the 7 deadly sins”, said Reid Hoffman, Founder and Chairman of LinkedIn, angel investor, and new venture capitalist at Greylock

His rationale: Sins matter to people! We care about them! We are passionate, emotional, seduced, irrational sometimes, about the “sins”. LinkedIn is all about greed. Obviously the big idea here was that the company’s product or service has got to be incredibly compelling to a big market of people, but I like to think it’s even bigger — that the best ideas are those which people literally will be unable to decline for both rational and emotional reasons.  

4. “This is the decade of the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer),” said Josh James, Founder and CEO of web analytics company Omniture (which went public and then was bought by Adobe for $1.8 billion)

Well, of course I wrote this one down! But aside from my personal interest, the backstory on the thinking was provocative. James suggested that the 1990s were about the CFO (ERP, cost management, installing financial discipline), the 2000s were about the CIO (IT, infrastructure, client servers, the internet), and now, the 2010s will be about the CMO. The opportunity that will define CMOs and separate the good from the bad — particularly for online marketing companies — will be customer experience. How does digital interactivity and optimization really enhance and improve the customer experience? How do companies take all the data that can be individually available (such as a person’s purchase behavior via web purchases, qualitative feedback through Twitter, number of Facebook connections, etc) and turn that into an unparalleled, brand new customer experience? Or, to make the idea more tangible — if I, the consumer, could tell you exactly what I like — what types of offers work for me, what my social networks are, how I use promotions, how I shop and purchase merchandise — how will you tailor your customer experience to me specifically?

3. “The work starts when we make the investment,” by Felda Hardymon, Senior Partner of Bessemer Venture Partners and professor at Harvard Business School

The meaning? Money is just the beginning of the value that an investor can bring to a company. I was struck by the fact that this was being said by an investor, as opposed to an entrepreneur (although certainly entrepreneurs would agree)! Investors see their role — in fact, hold themselves accountable — for creating value beyond just the money, and entrepreneurs who leverage their investors for knowledge, skills, and connections are wise.

2. “Biology is the science that will drive everything else in the future,” by Dr. John Hennessy, President of Stanford University

I was not familiar with Dr. Hennessy’s background but was immediately impressed with his street cred regarding areas of innovation and entrepreneurship. (As a quick summary, he has a PhD in computer science, used a sabbatical year to found a company which commercialized his research in processors, and is a board member at Google and Cisco Systems, among others). So it was especially interesting to hear from an accomplished IT academic and entrepreneur of his belief that the next area for innovation will be the application of technologies and science — IT, physics, and chemistry — to solutions which address medical challenges. Putting his money where his mouth is, Dr. Hennessy built an interdisciplinary research program called “BioX” (x = any of the sciences, fill-in-the-blank style) to encourage students and researchers from across the sciences, engineering, and IT to create collaborations and solve the world’s biggest biology-based challenges.

1. “Wow…congratulations…you should be extremely excited to have an exit right now,” by various people in California

Yes, this wasn’t a quote attributable to any one person, but it was a frequent comment I heard in reaction to the news that JumpStart Ventures portfolio was about to have an exit. JumpStart Ventures portfolio company DIY was acquired last week, generating positive IRR for JumpStart and representing our first exit. It’s a real milestone for our portfolio and demonstrates that the model we have been executing for the last five years can work. Congratulations to the JumpStart Ventures team, the DIY and Yardi teams, and thank you to our donors for their continued financial support over the last five years and in the years to come!

Cathy Belk is the Chief Marketing Officer of JumpStart. She specializes in branding, marketing communications, and business management. She brings 16+ years of experience in a variety of marketing and business roles, but gets her energy from working daily with entrepreneurs and their growing companies.

I just returned from the NVCA strategic communicators’ meeting in the fabulous Microsoft NERD Center in Boston (Incidentally, NERD stands for Northeast R&D, but they fully embrace the acronym — love that). It’s a do-not-miss event for me because I always leave with a handful of new tools, tricks, or knowledge. This time, it was the session with HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan which rocked my world in all good ways. Here are the 5 things I took from his presentation (with many thanks and all credit to Brian…).

(As a bit of set up, Brian’s core belief is that we have been through a seismic marketing transformation in that we have moved from push marketing (content is pushed to people, who have little control over it - think TV advertising) to “get found” marketing (content is available and people find it have the control, or the power, over how other people can find it.)

5. To see what a marketer has “done”, just go online. Brian recommended that any portfolio company hiring a director/VP of marketing look at the online presence the person has led or created…whether that be a website, LinkedIn profile, Facebook page, blog, twitter activity, or other content. Look at it and discuss it together. If that person doesn’t have substantive experience that impresses you, the person might still be a very smart, capable marketer, but one with old school skills. Is that what you want?

4. Content is king. Marketers now need to think like publishers. What is the content that you want to make available? Ebooks? White papers? Webinars? Videos? Obviously it’s got to fit with what makes sense to your audience, but making it available is what attracts people to you. With nothing to attract people, how will your audience/customers/constituents engage with you?

3. Marketing departments will be changing dramatically. As JumpStart’s web presence work has grown, I’ve noticed a shift in our work, with much more of it in digital communications and distribution (such as video, SEO, blog distribution, etc) relative to even a year ago. Not surprising, says Halligan, who suggested that marketing departments of today and tomorrow would actually be organized differently: 1) people who create “get found” content (e.g. writers, videographers, etc), 2) people who convert those people who have found you into customers, advocates, or brand loyalists, and 3) people who analyze results and push the organization to continuously evolve.

2. Relationships and connections still matter. While in the past relationships and connections were fostered or nurtured in person vs. the current norm of online, the number of people with whom you are connected still matters. In fact, in a world where content distribution is a major objective and it occurs through individuals who control that distribution, perhaps those relationships matter more. As an example, Halligan mentioned that he hired someone who brought with him 20,000 blog followers. Those connecting assets are actually an important part of your resume. Have you thought of hiring someone based on their online connections?

1. Marketing can create your strategic advantage. Warren Buffett said that in business, you strive every day to build a moat around your company that will protect your business from competitors; every day, you work to make that moat wider, deeper and swifter. Halligan notes that if you are doing the things outlined above– creating connections, strengthening your links to your customers/audience members, and building them aggressively– you are effectively making a moat that it is almost impossible for your competitors to cross. That’s why it’s worth doing.

What do you think?

Cathy Belk is the Chief Marketing Officer of JumpStart. She specializes in branding, marketing communications, and business management. She brings 16+ years of experience in a variety of marketing and business roles, but gets her energy from working daily with entrepreneurs and their growing companies.

Despite one of my teams still thriving in March Madness, I’m a bit less engaged than normal. I thought it was because my bracket is in shambles, but that’s not it; I think it’s because I have a new love. I never thought that this girl (with many formative years in North Carolina) would shrug off the ACC, but it’s just so much more fun to love the Cavs.

The thing is, it’s not because I’m turning into a huge pro sports fan, or because there’s more exciting basketball in Cleveland than you can generally find in the Big Dance. I think it’s because I’m being seduced. Every time I go to a Cavs game, see them on TV, visit the website, get a tweet, I’m pulled in more. The Cavs brand delivers, every time, the same attributes:

• Aggressive
• Wildly entertaining and fun
• Extremely high potential for success
• Risk-taking (in a smart way)
• Energizing, pulse-pounding, blood-pressure-lifting (in a good way…)

(You probably have others…feel free to add them below).

So what have I learned from the Cavs that early-stage companies can consider as well?  

5) Talent matters. Yes, a blinding flash of the obvious, but with big implications for cash-strapped high growth companies. It means you need the right Board of Directors who can balance your skills, make connections, and provide the strenuous, rigorous debate you’ll need. It means compensating that first critical new associate at market rates, even though that person is passionate, committed, and wants to take on the risk of working at a high growth company with you. It means paying for the very best that you can afford in partners, such as legal counsel.

4) Create expectations. At its essence, developing a brand is the creation of consistent expectations: of product or service performance, of how associates behave, or of how you feel when you interact with the brand, for example. With service organizations as big as the Cavs, it’s especially hard to deliver a consistent brand experience, but the fact that I can make a list of attributes I fully associate with their brand indicates how consistent they are. In this case, size does matter; early-stage companies can do this a bit more easily because they are smaller. Developing brand expectations can start with identifying key operating characteristics or values. Do you want to be known as incredibly professional? Entrepreneurial? Fun and energetic? Rigorous thinkers? Idea people? Reflective? Then figure out how your associates can make sure they bring those values to life in every interaction they have, and you are on your way.

3) Keep it fresh. Rituals are important for every brand, but so is freshness. Cavs games have familiar elements (such as the player introductions; LeBron is always last) but they also are always mixing it up with new brand activations. Remember Snuggie night, when all attendees came home with the Cavs burgundy Snuggie? The perfect promotion to activate the brand today (but would be too stale next year). It could be tempting for early-stage companies to think for a time about the brand, put together a few tools and work to bring them to life, then move on to other topics without revisiting the brand for months or years. Especially right now, brands need ongoing life. When opportunities to bring the brand to life appear, take a few minutes to think about them and see how you can take advantage of them right now.

2) Work with partners. How can you tap into the marketing work of partners or other entities to make your limited marketing investment go much further? The Cavs do this regularly with their active partner marketing program. For example, the CavFanatic website regularly gives some of its most loyal fans special rewards through its partners. At its anniversary last year, the 10,000 fans registered on the site were offered a free burrito at Qdoba. With over 3,000 burritos redeemed (>30% of its audience), both consumers and partners were happy. While all early-stage companies don’t have partnerships like these, they can all use small marketing resources to get bigger results by working with partners. You will learn more about this, among other things, by attending the Tai Chi Marketing Growing Bright Ideas lunch session at JumpStart on April 29, so be sure to register.

1) Have fun. We should all have as much fun in our work as the players — and the marketing dept — would appear to have!

Anything else you’d add to the list?

Cathy Belk is the Chief Marketing Officer of JumpStart. She specializes in branding, marketing communications, and business management. She brings 16+ years of experience in a variety of marketing and business roles, but gets her energy from working daily with entrepreneurs and their growing companies.