The first mixologist, Steven, was a torchbearer. The interactions with him defined the experience for us, the customers. It’s easy to imagine that his enthusiasm for the job rubs off on many of his coworkers (with the possible exception of the bartender that replaced him), and elevates the quality of the entire establishment. Employees like him are by far the most valuable, and must be retained even at high[er] cost. The idea of paying every worker the same is fine if you consider your employees to be commodities, but for a truly differentiated business, this shouldn’t be the case.

Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll find that it is anything but losing for Google. In fact,

In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, stated that her analysis showed that 50% of the new product launches originated from the 20% time. [wikipedia]

Some of their best products, such as Gmail and Adsense, originated from this revolutionary policy!

So what does an ordinary company get out of encouraging employees to dream up ways to do things better? Perhaps a day a week is a bit much for most enterprises, but this sort of out-of-the-box thinking can do wonders to spur new innovation or improve operations at any company. Traditionally, change follows a top-down approach: managers devise a new product, process or protocol and the employees implement the change according to instructions they receive. The communication is often one-way so feedback doesn’t effectively flow. The result is few sources of innovation and an inefficient system for improvement.

A better way is to “design” all aspects of the company culture so that any employee can have an input on key aspects of the company. Simply telling workers that “the boss’s door is always open” is insufficient, since it still requires a person to put themselves on the line. Mechanisms like encouraging employees to pursue their own ideas, setting up constant feedback and suggestion sessions (online is particularly good, since people may tend to be more honest), idea contests and frequent communication from management work far better and allow employees to feel that managers are listening and valuing their contributions.

Putting power in the hands of employees to suggest and improve their daily routines has several advantages. It allows the people who know the processes and systems the best to have a hand in improving them, instead of relying on higher-ups who may not be as well versed in the day-to-day. Furthermore, it makes employees feel like they have a chance to stand out in their company and contribute more than a 9-5 workday. The entrenched culture of many companies that exist today makes it difficult to establish such a culture, but the ones who do will find themselves amply rewarded.

So how is management engineering? A business, by nature, is a system. The parts are the inputs — employees, inventory, capital — and profit is the (hopefully steady) output. It’s popular for business managers these days to say that “the value of our business is our employees”, and that is certainly true, but the human nature of an employee means that they are inherently unreliable. Plans change, new jobs come along, retirement beckons — all of these things mean that the human element of the system needs to be designed to be fault-tolerant. An engineer understands this concept, and has a natural insight into ways of building efficiency and redundancy into the organization. A more streamlined process that reduces needless overlap while maintaining critical redundancies will maximize profit and ensure business continuity.

The sweet spot in management is a manager who can balance the vital “soft” aspects of motivation with the organizational awareness that an engineering background can provide. Either trait by itself can do an adequate job, but the combination creates a truly capable and effective motivator and manager.

The reason platforms are so important is that they allow developers to use massive technological leverage. To illustrate this point, lets use the example of Dropbox, an outstanding online backup application. Dropbox creates a folder on a user’s computer where they can drag files, and then stores those files on Amazon’s S3. S3 is a network that programmers can easily use to store files on Amazon’s servers. By simply paying a low fee per-gigabyte of disk space used, developers have access to an unlimited amount of secure, redundant disk space online on top of which they can build their own program. Dropbox is a derivative application built on top of the S3 platform, and utilizes the S3 backend to intelligently sync and back up files on individual PCs. Without S3, Dropbox and others would have to invest enormous resources into creating and maintaining a huge storage datacenter, which would almost certainly be prohibitive for the rapidly-growing startup. However, since they are able to leverage the S3 platform to handle the storage issue, the developers are able to focus on the product instead of the nitty gritty needed to get that product running.

The ability to abstract away the “nitty gritty” by using a platform is immensely powerful, because it allows entrepreneurs to build on top of existing technologies instead of reinventing the wheel for each venture. Facebook applications have been incredibly successful because they allow a developer to leverage the existing networks people have already built, rather than fighting to get people to sign up for a new website and build a new network. Before Facebook Photos, several sites attempted the tagging functionality that Facebook mastered with virtually no success because there was no way of enrolling every user that might be in someone’s photo. Since Facebook already has a huge portion of internet users, Photos (and other apps) can simply abstract away the “building a network” aspect — a huge obstacle to building a networking application — and focus on creating new and interesting functionality.

The other cool aspect that platform creators get “for free” is marketing. If a developer creates an application on Facebook, they are likely to spend time and money marketing that application. However, since that app is nothing without Facebook, any marketing that the app developer does is by default marketing for Facebook as well. While its not always this obvious, it’s always the case that the platform benefits as the child application grows — as Dropbox gains users, for example, Amazon naturally gets more business without really needing to do any extra marketing. It’s all done for them, and all owed to their killer platform.

Platforms are an amazing innovation, and we’ve seen (and will continue to see) some incredible applications arise from them. They lower the barrier to entry for entrepreneurs, so programs that used to require a team of engineers to handle “support” aspects of an application now only need one or two core developers. As a result, more products can come into the market quickly, and great ideas can rise to the top even more freely.

Five years ago, a bad experience like this would have meant that the company lost a few customers at most — maybe me and a few of my friends. But in the age of Facebook and Twitter, where people are microblogging about everything, a few bad experiences can quickly find an enormous audience. All it takes is a reader to see one or two tweets relating a hiccup with a company for that reader to avoid the company in the future. The margin of error for bad customer service is getting far smaller, since it takes far fewer missteps to destroy a reputation than it used to.

Customer service has always been important, but now days, its make-or-break for a company. When I Google for ‘flowers’, 11 sponsored links show up. The services themselves all basically do the same thing — the call one of a few local florists and have them deliver an arrangement purchased online. Since I imagine conversion for keyword clicks for ‘flowers’ on Google are pretty high, I bet that they pay $5 or more per click for traffic through search engine ads. Given that the cost of acquiring a customer is very high, a company in this type of business must do everything it can to make sure that it keeps the customers it has, since part of the rationale behind a high initial acquisition cost is that customers on average will do business repeatedly. But if a company doesn’t invest the [comparatively far smaller] money in customer service needed to keep existing customers, they will find that they can no longer afford to pay the huge acquisition costs because they simply aren’t capturing enough profit per customer over the entire lifecycle to justify the expense. Since its much easier to keep customers you already have, the competitors that can retain customers will be the ones that win out, hands down. And as the world gets more connected, these companies will have an even easier time rising to the top.

Update: I’m not all pessimism — I just had a great customer service experience with Fidelity. Read about it.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working hard to promote the site. I have no formal training in marketing, so my efforts have come mainly from trial and error and also from advice from marketing professionals, both through their blogs and from actually speaking with them. There are other guides on the internet about generating buzz for your website, but most of them are long on generalities (“Know your goals”) and short on details. This guide is an attempt to nail down some of the strategies that have worked for me, and help others that are getting involved in the social marketing landscape.

Disclaimer: this is a work in progress, so I have inevitable missed some key points or approached some things in an unusual way. I welcome your comments below!

Cover Your Bases With the Social News Sites

1. Reddit – catchy, thought-provoking titles are important. The main site gets a huge number of submissions, so posting to a subreddit (a sub-site devoted to a specific topic, like Business or Linux) might increase your chances of making it to the front page.
2. Digg – short titles and good descriptions are important. Be sure to choose accurate categories for your site. You’ll be best off if you’ve been using digg for a while and have built up a base of friends, since they’re more likely to see the story and vote for it.
3. StumbleUpon – tagging your site properly is key, since users see sites based on interests they select.
4. Del.icio.us – tagging is very important, since that forms the basis upon which others find your site.

Get the Word Out On Twitter

It’s important to create a solid presence for your site on Twitter, since it is becoming an increasingly important place for users to share links and thoughts about sites and services. Here are the steps:

1. Create a Twitter identity for your site. For Free Agents, users can follow @freeagentnet.
2. Send out several Tweets relevant to your message to get some good content in your feed so that users have something to see when they first start following you.
3. Advertise your Twitter name on your site — a simple “Follow @freeagentnet on Twitter” will do the trick, and allow users to stay up to date. Also, ask users to add in a hashtag in posts related to the site. For example, if a user Tweets about something unemployment related, they can add #freeagentnet. Hashtags are keywords easily indexed by outside agregators, so you can pull all posts related to your site together on a page.
4. Use Twitter search to find users that are talking about topics related to your site. Start following them. This has 2 purposes: first, it keeps you in touch with what people are saying about the area that you’re in. Secondly, when you follow people, they are likely to follow you if they see that you’ve been Tweeting about the same types of things, so you get a larger Twitterbase.
5. Tweet often about relevant content, new areas on your site, and other information related to your primary goal.

Things to Avoid on Twitter

1. Don’t send out too many tweets each day. Aim for 5 or fewer messages every day, with great, compelling content in them. Never use your “business” account to send out messages like “I’m eating breakfast”, or followers will quickly drop you.
2. Don’t try to follow anyone and everyone. Follow those that you think you’ll learn good information from, and read their tweets. If you’re a follower of the whole world, the information gets diluted
3. Keep your links informational, and not overly promotional. Link to relevant content that you post on your site, but limit the number of links to your top level site, since it only takes a few before people start thinking you’re a spammer.

Create a Facebook Group to Engage Your Friends

Marketing to your friends is a great way to get the word out, especially if its the kind of product that lends itself well to your own demographic (otherwise, why would you build it?). Creating a Facebook group dedicated to your concept and inviting your friends to join is a good way to spread the word on Facebook, since each time someone becomes a member, that information shows up in the feed and others see it.

You can only invite 100 people to a group at a time, so be sure to choose carefully who you add to the invitation. On one hand, you want to pick people close enough to you that will join because you’re their friend and they want to help you out. If you pick people that you barely know, they are less likely to pay attention to the invitation, which means the invite is “wasted” on them. On the other hand, if you choose your 100 best buddies from college, they might all join, but they probably all know each other, and the benefits from your group appearing on the feed are lessened. By choosing some people that you don’t know as well, you lessen the chance that they will join, but if they do, you will likely access a completely separate social circle and your product will hit a more diverse group of users.

Add Meaningful, Relevant Comments to Related Blogs and News Articles

If you run a site devoted to auto repair, you probably are interested in that subject and read related blogs and other sites regularly. If you don’t, you definitely need to, for several reasons. First of all, its important to keep your finger on the pulse of your topic online. If some bloggers break news about Callahan Auto’s new Brake Pad Division, its important to see what everyone is saying about it so that articles on your site can respond appropriately. Secondly, commenting on related blogs is a good way to reach readers that are interested in your subject area.

Commenting on blogs, like other methods of social marketing, walks the fine line between spamming and contributing to a service by adding helpful information and a link. If you run a blog, you probably receive hundreds of spam comments per day, and most are filled with gibberish and a few links. These are obvious garbage, and most get filtered out anyways. However, other posts contribute a brief snippet of commentary, and a big fat link to another site. They often say something along the lines of “great article. check out Zalinsky Auto Parts [url]“. These comments are also garbage, because they don’t contribute anything to the discussion, and are obviously there only to promote another site.

A good rule of thumb is if you can’t contribute something meaningful to the article through your comment, don’t post one. On the other hand, your site may be a great resource to readers of that article. If that’s the case, in the comment box, add a unique point of view, and then somewhere in the comment, mention your site. Most blogs moderate their comment posts to avoid spam, so the more you can contribute to the discussion along with your link, the better the chance that the blog author chooses to keep your comment on the page.

Connect with Popular Bloggers in Your Space

Figure out which bloggers are the most influential in your area. There are a variety of ways to do this — start by Googling for certain keywords associated with your website and see which blogs come up. Add these blogs to your Google Reader (or other RSS aggregator) and start reading them every day. Pay attention to other sites mentioned in articles, and check out their blogrolls.

Once you’ve identified some of the important blogs, contact the author and introduce yourself. Tell them a bit about your site and ask them if they’d be willing to help spread the word. Many blogs are happy to help out, especially if they have the first chance to “go public” with a cool concept. Be sure that you don’t look overly spammy — send polite, personalized messages to each author. I often try to respond to an article the blogger has written to break the ice and let them know that I am a reader and that I find their content valuable.

Engage in Discussions on Other Websites

On some sites, the user community is already large and established. If your product is a great complement to such a site, one great way to promote yourself is to become an active and respected user in the well-known community.

For example, if you have a restaurant reservation service, users on a site like Yelp might be interested in your offerings. One great way to promote your site is to become a very active and trusted member on the “mother site”, and rely upon the fact that your credibility will make people naturally interested in learning more about you and your service. To build this following, you need to contribute content to the existing community that others find worthwhile and valuable, and do so in a way that’s not overly promotional in nature. For Yelp, you might consider posting several restaurant reviews with thoughtful feedback and commentary. You don’t necessarily want to post a link to your site in every review, but definitely have a link in your profile so that when people click on your name to learn more, they see that link and click on it.

You might get fewer impressions by promoting this way (since users will have to see your profile before they see your links), but you’ll get more conversions too, since those who visit your site are people who have already decided that they find you interesting and worthwhile enough to click on your profile. By leveraging your credibility in one arena, you are able to apply it to another to increase the impact you have for each visit.

Overview

Creating online buzz about your product takes time and effort. Simply dumping links all over the internet with very little content around them will simply make you a spammer, and there are mechanisms online that will ensure that your links are quickly relegated to the spam heap. On the other hand, if your product is one that people find valuable, and you promote it with thoughtful contributions to a variety of places online, you will eventually meet success and attract visitors.

When I was 8, I got a 14.4 modem and an AOL dialup subscription for my birthday. It was one of the best presents I’ve ever received, and I quickly started exploring all that AOL had to offer. Soon, I started to wonder how web pages actually got on the internet, so I found AOL Personal Publisher and started messing around.

In most cases, 8 year olds don’t have too much to contribute to the world, and I was no exception. I just wanted to create a web page for something, so I settled on one thing that was well known to me and friends — video games. I created AJ’s Code Page (specializing in infinite lives, double damage, god mode, and the like) hosted on the now-defunct members.aol.com, and started trying to figure out how to get users.

It was near the beginning of the web (1993), and nobody really knew what was going on, so it was an amazing learning experience. I had never heard of Photoshop at that point, much less have any experience with it, so I found some graphic designer on a forum that made a [pretty cool] banner logo featuring a Playstation logo on the left, the words “AJ’s Code Page” in the middle, and the Nintendo 64 logo on the right. I scoured the web for links to the best code pages, and found, among others, hyper@ctive (also defunct), which had a seemingly endless supply of codes for nearly any game.

The AJ's Code Page Banner

I kept trying new ways to get traffic, and signed up for some banner exchange programs which were an early form of banner advertising where people in a network would agree to show your banner (rotated among others in the network) in exchange for you showing their banner on your site. The goal was more to get traffic than to actually make any money, although I’m sure that some people figured out ways to profit from it. To a third grader, money isn’t the first thought when you’re just trying to get people to look at a site you’ve thrown up on the net.

I plugged along, and for months the counter at the bottom of my page registered barely any page views. I continually submitted my page to every search engine I could find, yet nothing really boosted my audience. I wasn’t discouraged — after all, my goal was first to see if I could make a cool page, and second to actually get visitors to that page. However, all of the sudden, one week something just “clicked”, and the counter had over 2000 hits! The next day, another 500! A few weeks later, I was at 8000 hits, and I felt like I was on top of the video game code world!

Who cares? I had all but forgotten about “AJ’s Code Page” and the beginnings of my foray into creating a web community until several weeks ago. I was laid off from my job in Wall Street, and I wanted to set up a web site for people that were in the same position and just wanted a place to go and chat, and network informally with others. Not a job site, but a place where you could feel comfortable asking where to find a cheap drink or talking about interesting places you’ve traveled during your time between jobs. I took a quick look around the net, and soon The Free Agents was born.

It turns out that the biggest obstacle you have to overcome when beginning an undertaking like this is the self doubt that inevitable springs into your mind. Could I get any users? Would anyone care about the site? Why would someone visit my site when they could just as easily spend their time on Facebook?

The doubt almost doomed my project before I had put a single page up. But strangely, what motivated me was not anything I learned in college, or any encouragement from others. The final push that I needed was simply thinking back and remember that, 15 years ago, I set up a web page that people actually visited. If I could do it then, why not give it another shot now?

The whole idea here, and the title of this post, is the power of ignorance. Eight year olds don’t generally know that something is hard, or that they are almost definitely going to fail. They just go for it — if for no other reason, because they are ignorant of the possibility, or likelihood, of failure. Is AJ’s Code Page still around today? Nope. But that endeavor was enough to motivate me on another project, and convince me that failure isn’t a bad outcome. Will The Free Agents be a roaring success? I hope so, but probabilistically, no. However, I know that if it fails, one day I might look back and say, “I created this social network — its gone now, but it succeeded in convincing me that [whatever] is possible”. And that knowledge may very well eventually lead to something that is a roaring success.