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Make It Easier on Your Customers
Tweet Share on Facebook June 24, 2009 Comment (73)Everyone is in customer service. All of us have the responsibility to help customers. In large companies, though, it can become a struggle to find a real live person to help with a problem.
Jeffrey Hayzlett, chief marketing officer at Kodak, talked at the 140 Conference in New York about how large companies are using Twitter to put customers in touch with a real live person to get them help with their products. Corporate management may ask, what's the return on investment on Twitter? Hayzlett replies, well, what's the ROI on ignoring customers?
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Is There Too Much Venture Capital?
Tweet Share on Facebook June 16, 2009 CommentThe National Venture Capital Association recently released its first-quarter 2009 analysis of venture investing. Not surprisingly, the number of venture investments was substantially lower than in recent years.
In Q1, there were only 549 venture deals adding up to a bit over $3 billion in funding. This was the lowest number of Q1 deals since 1995.
Many see reduced venture funding as a huge problem. But others believe that the industry investment rate of $25 billion to $30 billion per year over the past decade is way too high and that the venture capital industry needs to be restructured and to shrink.
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Start-Ups Should Think About Charging for Content
Tweet Share on Facebook June 3, 2009 Comment (83)The Newspaper Association of America recently hosted a meeting of the nation's top newspaper executives to discuss charging for online content. Several San Francisco Bay area newspapers, including my local paper, have already announced plans to charge for news. They are joining a number of online content providers attempting to charge end-users for content.
The reason for this shift is straightforward: Advertising-supported content providers are having a hard time making money. This is especially true for traditional media companies, which tend to have higher cost structures because of their legacy offline businesses.
Many start-ups and small content companies have already recognized the need to move to fee-based business models. Open Table, for example, charges restaurants a fee for each reservation made through its service. Its recent IPO success has resulted in even more interest in fee-based services.
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