Posts

Posted on

Blogosphere Says Cartoon Character Blogging Is Lame – I Say Too Early To Say

There are a number of influential bloggers out there saying that blogging by cartoon characters is lame and a waste of time. See here and here, plus trace through some of the links and comments for a general feel. As examples of cartoon characters blogging, here are links to  GEICO’s Gecko blog and Captain Morgan’s blog. What triggered my return visit to the subject of cartoon character blogging was that John Nardini was nice enough to send me a link last week to his new Moosetopia blog associated with Moosetracks ice cream.

My take on this: Too early to tell whether cartoon character blogs (as a general market) will work.

At one point in time, we said that the security in Netscape browsers couldn’t get hacked. Too many key combinations to try in our lifetime, etc., etc. Then (perhaps not getting the specifics right) some 17-year old figures out how to hack the security in a matter of minutes.

Someone says it can’t be done. That just challenges the world to find the right mix.

The right mix may lie in:

  • having a real person blog for a cartoon character in a non-secretive way (like John Nardini does)
  • having complementary Jeckl and Hyde type blogging sites (I think I have seen this style on the net before and it seems to work because one can get the benefit of anonymity plus extreme views)
  • applying audio blogging or other multimedia aspects (e.g., for kids)
  • having the cartoon character visit from time to time
  • having a cartoon character blog counterpoint
  • creating a cult-like following … only those in the know will know about who is the blogger behind the cartoon character (a la In-And-Out Burger’s secret menu).

We allow authors and bloggers to use pseudo names all the time. While cartoon character blogging is clearly not the same thing, there is the added benefit of near-infinite creativity.

All said, I am all for companies that do some experimenting with cartoon character blogging. I think it’s great for guy’s like John to try to pave the way for the rest to learn what works and what doesn’t. There’s not enough data points and posts out there to call this one yet.

Update (4/18/05): Spelling correction on "Jeckl". Should be "Jekyll". My favorite drummer is Dave Weckl, and I made a subliminal spelling mistake.

Posted on

Examples Of Both The Power and Pitfalls Of Storytelling In Management

The following has been cross-posted at The CIO Weblog.

I’ve been catching up on my marketing reading over the past few weeks, and what’s great about some of the material is the use of storytelling. In fact, storytelling and the use of analogies are a great thing to use not only in marketing but also in areas like IT and general management. Storytelling can be used to get people motivated and on the bandwagon.

A Computerworld interview with Harvard Business School’s Professor Jan Rivkin, captures an excellent condition where analogies and storytelling work in the IT area:

Why is analogical reasoning so useful in a field like IT?
Analogies are most powerful in settings where there’s not enough
clarity to use deductive reasoning nor so much ambiguity that you have
to go for trial and error. Many pockets of IT have this middle ground
that’s familiar enough to make links to more familiar settings but not
clear enough to identify cause and effect. In that middle ground,
analogies may be the only options we’ve got.

What I like about the Computerworld article, however, is that it also explicitly touches on some aspects of organizational behavior (OB) and decision making. The OB field is something that I am particularly sensitive to and is something that is not covered by all business schools as a course in of itself. Here are examples of two OB biases addressed in the article (brackets added by me to clarify original text snipped out of context):

[A] potential problem [with using analogies] is the anchoring effect. Can you explain?
People get attached intellectually and emotionally to their analogies,
and it’s very hard to shake. If you look at Sun, Scott McNealy often
uses analogies drawn from the auto business. He argues that buyers
should be interested in the whole package, not the components, because
when they buy a car, they care about the whole car, not where the
carburetor comes from. But you have to question how dispassionately he
can assess that analogy. His father worked for years in the auto
business, and his sons are named for auto models: Maverick, Scout, Colt
and Dakota.

Tell me about confirmation bias. It appears that human
beings tend strongly to seek out data that confirms their beliefs and
invest too little in seeking out disconfirming data. We like to be
right. If analogies come into our heads, we can always find elements of
reality to confirm our belief in them.

I also have to give a positive plug for the warning on confirmation biases. This is a key thing taught Day 1 at many management consulting firms to test and mitigate biases for, but it is something which operating company employees seem to be less aware of (based on my anecdotal experiences). Not sure why this is so, but to be fair, management consultants also have tendencies for certain blindspots as compared to operating company employees.

But I digress. In any case, by all means use storytelling in management, especially when trying to establish some ground in a complex business area, but be aware of the pitfalls because anchors can be hard to shake and because stories should not be taken as universal truths.

Posted on

Uber Blogger Kottke Zooms Past Ramen Noodle Barrier

I have pretty limited access to the network right now, but thought I would link to a funny but insightful post by uber blogger Kottke that reports on his fund raising results to support himself as a full-time blogger. The graph on the front page is instructional for bloggers aspiring to support a career solely through blogging … Kottke reports he was clearly able to break the "Ramen noodle" barrier, which is as reported by Kottke, "the point at which I could each something besides ramen noodles for every meal". He wasn’t quite able to make his comfort zone of 1/3 pre-blogging salary …

For those that eat two Ramen noodle meals per say, that’s like a budget of $0.50 per day, right?

Amazing how a brand like Ramen can not only describe a near bottom-end point of one’s sustainable lifestyle but also be a widespread loved food and tasty snack.

In other fund raising news over the weekend, Joshua Schachter reports more on the investors in del.icio.us.

Posted on

Where Cockroaches Are Loved In The Tech Industry

Jason Caplain has some good notes from an NVCA meeting today. Good overview of the where the markets are at, where the shift in the tranche financings are going, and what has happened to some of the VC partnerships (relative to past speculations). What caught my eye was this (emphasis is mine):

There is a very healthy IPO and acquisition market with good companies that have gone through bad times.

Paul Brown and I used to use a term for this. Not a very good marketing term, but for early-stage companies that survived for more than 18 months after the nuclear holocaust, cliff dropoff in customer prospect propensity to buy, and bubble 1.0 fallout … well we referred to such companies as the "cockroaches" of the industry to reflect their resiliency to survive. Looks like cockroaches are coming into favor. All together now, "We are the cockroaches."

Posted on

Past Study On Search Funds

Andy posts and points me to some Stanford business school information on Search Funds. A free, Stanford business school note/search fund study is here (before clicking: note PDF link). The Stanford site indicates:

Conceived in 1984, the search fund is an investment vehicle in which investors financially support an entrepreneur’s efforts to locate and acquire a privately held company. Recent MBA and law school graduates are using this approach more and more frequently to become entrepreneurs shortly after graduation, despite their lack of operating experience.

It’s something I thought about doing (for a passing moment) when I originally moved to Dallas – for some reason I’ve never heard the name of this type of thing. Perhaps it is because it’s kind of a hybrid between middle-market investment banking, LBO, and angel funding deals. I never learned about this type of fund at the University of Chicago’s course on Entrepreneurship, Private Equity, and Venture Capital. Additionally, I’ve not run into any friends that have used the term. Kind of funny. I suppose another explanation for me failing to catch the term "search fund" is that I tend to like straight-up equity deals better – then I can forget about all of the "complex" finance stuff associated with debt deals like unlevering the beta, using the adjusted present value(APV) method, etc. 🙂

Posted on

Interesting Entrepreneur & VC Dialogue

Jason Calacanis (connector, founder of Weblogs, Inc. and respected serial entrepreneur) recounts an interesting phone call with an associate at a VC firm. An associate (as opposed to an analyst) is typically an entry-level, partner-track position within a venture capital firm. To be truthful, the nature of Jason’s conversation is similar to ones I’ve seen and heard in the past, typically between Type A personality entrepreneurs and traditional VCs.

The typical conversation plays out as follows …

VC:

  • testing
  • trying to understand
  • testing

Entrepreneur:

  • ego
  • coy
  • ego

Although this backdrop of talking over one another is amusing, Jason sums up some great core values about running a business:

  1. Hustle
  2. Passion
  3. Resiliency

These are basically the characteristics of winners and entrepreneurs. To be fair though, the VC is just trying to understand the business model and slot the investment opportunity. If you applied the three things Jason mentioned to a coin-op laundry place, you would have a successful business too. It would be hard to find a VC or even a roll-up firm pursue that kind of deal though.

Update (4/7/05): Brad Feld also weighs in on Jason’s post. Looks like the conversation pattern is frequently the same the whole way along the food chain in the VC (seller)-VC (buyer) discussions.

Update (4/8/05): Paul Kedrosky at Infectious Greed has a post on the marketing value of Jason’s post.

Proudly powered by WordPress