Marketing, Startups and Networking in Los Angeles – Cliff Allen

Cliff Allen is someone I've known for quite a few years and he's a go to person for me when I'm thinking about issues around marketing, sales, technology, startups and networking.

Of course, when I started thinking about Visible Networking, I immediately went to Cliff to check in to see how he's doing and to get his feedback, thoughts and ideas on the concept.

Cliff, remind me about your background?

My first career was spent building radio and television stations, then running the programming side of those businesses. I moved into writing software to analyze audience data, and wrote a lot of computer graphics software. In 1986 I started an advertising and public relations firm to serve software and hardware companies, which became a marketing consulting business (www.Allen.com) when I moved to L.A. in 1998.

Along the way, I co-authored three books on one-to-one marketing (http://www.amazon.com/Cliff-Allen/e/B001H6OERG/) to help marketers learn how to built and nature relationships with their customers.

It's great to know that you have the radio and TV background. One of the places where eHarmony really took off was on radio. Lots of online marketing before that, but we had some great results when we were picked up by a national radio program. Hey, radio. Maybe that would make sense as a marketing channel.

What are you working on now?

A few years ago, my CTO spotted a need that local groups and organizations have in handling RSVPs and registrations for meetings and events. After a considerable amount of market research, we created the SureToMeet system that’s now used by organizations around the country.

I also write about holding events (http://blog.SureToMeet.com), and I’m writing a series about integrating marketing strategy with marketing tactics (http://blog.Allen.com).

I've been following both of your blogs for a while. Great stuff. Of course, part of the reason that I went to you when I started thinking about visible networking is that you run a company that's right in the middle of this. So, naturally I have to ask:

What are your thoughts on my concerns around networking and particularly visible networking?

Different types of people need different types of networking. For those of us who are online throughout the day, “visible networking” online is a lot more productive than driving across L.A. for face-to-face general networking events. I like the thread of comments that occur on popular blogs, especially those blogs that notify you when additional comments have been posted.

Blogs also make it easy for new people to find those interesting conversation. LinkedIn discussion areas are good, but it’s frustrating when people send me links to discussions in LinkedIn Groups where I’m not a member (and can’t join without leaving another group). In this era of “open source” everything, open conversations on blogs make a lot of sense.

That's great to hear. I'm going to be curious to see how this unfolds. Certainly having a chance to engage a bit with you, Cliff, is great. Normally we drive across town to spend two minutes together at an event. Never get all that deep.

Any specific thoughts on things I should do to make Visible Networking better? What have you seen elsewhere that works?

What keeps you up at night?

Growing our business! We’re pleased with its growth but, as with any Web-based business, we’re looking for additional organizations we can help.

It's good to hear that a person who I go to for marketing advice has the same challenge as the rest of us. What's working and not working for you? Are you leveraging social media at all? What do you think about using Browse My Stuff / a Topic Hub to reach influencers in the meeting organizer space?

On a separate note, Cliff, should I add your blog.allen.com to the B2B Marketing Zone?

And while I'm on the subject of your blog, you've got great stuff, but what are some of your best posts that I should go look at?

Since I have two blogs, here are a few from both:

Events Should Be Money Well Spent

Seems to echo some of my concerns about the value of events. It's interesting to see that from someone who runs a company that helps people hold events.

Top 10 Business Networking Tips Series

Using Storytelling in Networking

Great points about business networking and how storytelling is a better way to network. So, natural question for me. How do these tips change when you are talking about visible networking? Cliff, what recommendations do you have for me?

Marketing 2.0 Strategy

Mind Maps Make Marketing More Meaningful

Good post talking to mind shift related to marketing today. The one on mind maps makes me wonder: (1) Cliff, where's your mind map for SureToMeet? (2) How do these mind maps change in a 2.0 world?

What networking events in Los Angeles or Southern California do you go to? What was the best one you’ve been to recently?

For most of this year I’ve shifted my networking to events where there is a speaker, who sets the theme, and meetings where there is a purpose and agenda.

For events where there is a speaker who is matched to the audience I like MOTM (www.motms.com). For meetings aimed at helping salespeople network, I like B2B Power Exchange (www.b2bpowerexchange.com).

If the MOTM is worth the drive out to the valley, that's saying something.

Besides Tony Karrer for software/web development in Los Angeles ;) who are some of your go to people in Los Angeles?

Here are a few people who keep me plugged into what’s happening:

• Hannah Bubis
• Alan Coon
• Kurt Daradics
• Susan La Sky
• Heather Vescent

I know Kurt and Heather. I'll have to get to know Hannah, Alan and Susan. Thanks for the pointers.

Where can I find you for more visible networking?

Here’s where I hang out:

• http://blog.suretomeet.com
• http://blog.allen.com
• http://www.linkedin.com/in/cliffallen
• http://www.twitter.com/cliffallen

Cliff, I'm looking forward to diving in a bit deeper on this stuff with you over the next few days/weeks.

And, since this is one of my first attempts at visible networking, I hope that people will chime in with thoughts around what aspects of this works and doesn't work for you.

Los Angeles Social Media Starters

I'm hoping you can help me figure out who I should be connecting with on this.

I find myself speaking at various venues in Los Angeles to tell people (most often service providers) about how I've used social media and particularly my blogs, LinkedIn, twitter and topic hubs as part of my own services business.  These presentations always inspire people to do more with LinkedIn, create or improve their blog, and maybe do more with Twitter. 

Invariably I'm asked by an accountant, lawyer, wealth manager, placement specialist, insurance agent, etc.:

How can I get more help setting up my blog?  Doing these things you are talking about?

And while I always tell people to just dive in and do it (and mention that if they get stuck, just ask a 25 year old to help you), there are definitely a lot of people in the audience that need more hand holding.  They need some help getting started.  They need someone who does consulting, hand holding, cracks the whip a bit, gets the stuff in place, knows different tricks and techniques.

Of course, this normally is a bit more complicated than just the technical aspects.

What's their specific niche?  Who's the audience?  Where are they online?  What do they search for?

So this person needs to understand how to quickly move through marketing analysis 101 type things.

My perception is that most services professionals like this are not going to want to spend a lot of money on these things, but I've not market tested it.

I'd like to be able to point them to a few different options.  I'd especially like to find people in Los Angeles.

Who do you know that might fit?

What is Visible Networking?

This past week has had an interesting confluence of events that's led me to conclude that I want to start doing a lot of visible networking among the tech / web crowd here in Los Angeles. I want to take you through a bit of what brought me here, because I think it will help explain what I mean by visible networking.

Networking Events – Questionable Return on Your Time

Last week I posted about Networking Events in Los Angeles and Southern California and received back some interesting comments, some of the best from a LinkedIn Group. Several of the comments there echoed what I've been feeling:

Person 1: I have attended a plethora of networking groups and have also found it harder and harder to continue to be motivated to go.

Person 2: Very discouraging (few if any happy with their networking efforts) but not unexpected. I've not found any great groups either.

There were some suggestions in the LinkedIn group, but nothing that made me think … wow, that would be great.

To top this off, at the LA CTO Forum we had Mark Suster as the presenter. I really enjoy his blog and I can't wait to mix it up with him some more on the value of Hollywood money / connections. But to the point here, when we were talking about networking events, Mark and the group generally were hard pressed to say what events were worth attending. Mark mentioned Twiistup and VentureNet, but generally the room felt that it was hit and miss with all events.

And when you think about the return on your time, it becomes even more discouraging. Most of the time when I go to an in-person networking events in Los Angeles, it takes me at least 3 hours. More often 4. Especially with traffic. And that doesn't count the time for Prenetworking – see Secret for Networking at Events – Prenetworking and Pre-network with LinkedIn.

I'm not saying that I'm giving up completely on in-person events, but I think visible networking will provide a more effective use of time.

Social Media / Online Networking – Better Use of Time

I present a fair amount on the topic of how to use social media. The same Friday as the LA CTO Forum with Mark Suster, I presented to a group of about 40-50 mostly service providers on use of social media to build your reputation and grow your business. I showed them how I can do a LinkedIn search and connect with all sorts of people in a few minutes. I discussed how I often will set up 30 minute conversations about particular topics with people I know or folks that I meet through LinkedIn. These conversations are generally really great and I meet all kinds of interesting people. I actually find that they are much better than conversations at most networking events.

While I was presenting, I said:

It's a much better use of my time to use LinkedIn to spark a conversation than it is to go to networking events.

Blogging an Online Conversation

At the same presentation, I told that audience that

Blogging is an online conversation.

I'm engaging in conversation with other bloggers all the time. And with my perceived prototypical audience member. I've talked a bit about this before in posts like: Conversation Topics.

Combined to form Visible Networking

The above events caused me to think:

Why don't I combine my online networking activity along with my blogging activity to network in the open – to do visible networking?

What do I mean by visible networking, well it's simply the idea that instead of having a 30 minute phone conversation, why not have that conversation out in public view. Twitter is pretty much that already. But I'm thinking about deeper conversations than I have on twitter. So, clearly it would make sense to do this in my blogs. And I'm thinking about having these conversations both with people I already know and people that I've just met or are just getting to know.

The advantages are simple:

• I won't forget the conversation.
• It's likely much more time effective than in-person networking.
• I can have relatively meaty conversations.
• And by making it open, then it provides value to other people and hopefully to the broader network.

I'm not 100% sure what this will exactly mean in practice. I know that I'll be getting to know more of the influencers in Los Angeles and having blog conversations with them. Sometimes, I'll send them a note through LinkedIn or even an email (gasp) and strike up a conversation. And I'll post about it. And maybe they will post about it. And I'll do my best to make as much of the conversation visible.

Now I'm sure quite a few people will be saying something along the lines of "Tony, no duh." That's what this stuff has been all along. But sometimes it takes me a while to catch on.

With that, I look forward to visible networking with you.

And certainly if you have ideas on how to best make this happen, please let me know.

Startup Metrics

A post by Fred Wilson pointed me to Dave McClure's Startup Metrics presentation. This is a great presentation and one that I'm going to point out to startup / early stage company CEOs.
Normally, when I am talking to the founder of any startup trying to figure out what they need to do, one of the things I always try to do is understand their business at its core. In many cases, I can break it down into:

• Customer Acquisition Cost – how will you reach prospects, how will you convert them and how much will it cost to convert them
• Customer Lifetime Value – how much will you make off of each converted customer

This very simple model works for a surprising number of business models. This kind of a simple model also helps:

• Define the early proof points for the company. Often, what we are trying to do initially is show exactly how these numbers play out. You only build what you need to prove that model. If these numbers work out, then often scaling is more a question of capital. In fact, this often becomes the mantra that we live by.
• Define what you need from a metrics and reporting standpoint. We'll need to look at different customer acquisition channels, figure out how they are converting, and the expected lifetime value of customers acquired through those channels, and apply cost to those channels. We need to make sure we have these numbers. Quite often the goal is to get them into an excel spreadsheet in a form that allows people to easily play with them.

Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp, Sept 2009) from Dave McClure

What Dave McClure's presentation does is point to some additional metrics that are useful to think about and consider:

• A: Acquisition - where / what channels do users come from?
• A: Activation - what % have a "happy" initial experience?
• R: Retention - do they come back & re-visit over time?
• R: Referral - do they like it enough to tell their friends?
• R: Revenue - can you monetize any of this behavior?

These are captured fairly well by his slide:

The beauty of what he's defined is the relationship between retention and referral efforts and lifetime value. Often, what you find in simple, first cut models are a very simple pipeline. His picture provides a much richer understanding of what will be going on, but still in an understandable and measurable way.
I'm not quite sure I believe the way he exactly models the value from each of these points as is shown in the following graphic, but a similar kind of model can certainly be developed.

The other thing that I think he's really done well is his look at value of different marketing channels.

A couple other great things – wow – I'm going to have a lot to come back to and comment on:

• Progress is not equal to features (Less is More)
• Focus on User Experience
• Measure Conversion; Compare 2+ Options
• Fast, Frequent Iteration + Feedback Loop
• Keep it Simple and Actionable

What's my business model?

• Get Users (= Acquisition, Referral)
• Drive Usage (= Activation, Retention)
• Make Money (= Monetize)

Startups have problems in 3 key areas:

• Management: Setting priorities, defining key metrics, reporting progress
• Product: Build the right features, getting product out quickly, testing for conversion/adoption
• Marketing: Accessing "web 2.0" channels (search, social, viral, new media), cost-efficient distribution

He also points a fair bit to Eric Ries – The lean startup.
Great stuff. I'm sure I'll be coming back to this and pointing people to it.

Software Development Companies in Southern California

I've helped organize the Los Angeles CTO Forum for almost 10 years. As part of doing that, I've had the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of different chief technical officers from different kinds of companies over those years. This is a private group of CTOs who are responsible for software development within their companies. They are generally the senior most person responsible for custom software development, database design, database administration, web development, etc.

In a recent conversation with a fellow CTO, we lamented about the fact that while there's very active software development and web development going on in Southern California and West Los Angeles, yet there didn't seem to be as much of a community around it. Yes, there are some events around particular technologies. But where do the software development companies in Southern California congregate?

Part of the reason is that when I look at the CTOs, we see that the industries (games, entertainment, aerospace, retail, etc.), size of company (startup to very large), stage (early stage to established firms) vary widely. Most networking events tend to either focus on specific technologies (PHP, .Net, C#, Microsoft, LAMP, MySQL, Open Source, Hadoop, Java, etc.) or focused on industry or type of company. They are most often not focused on a particular functional area. Actually, there are some CFO events. But not really CTO events. Part of this is that CTOs have a tendency not to go to networking events. :)

Actually this is something that the Software Council of Southern California realized a few years ago as we changed to focus on broader set of companies – and rebranded to become the Technology Council of Southern California. It was an interesting discussion among the board during that transition.

Even still, this barely touches all the different companies in Southern California where software development is happening. For example, an online retailer probably doesn't see themselves as a technology company.

What that means is that while Southern California is a vibrant software development location, when you look around for Software Development Companies in Southern California, often you come up fairly empty. As an example, I did that as a search on SoCal Tech Central and Software Development Companies really didn't come up with much.

Bottom line – if you are looking for Software Development Companies in Southern California – you are probably going to need to drill a bit deeper. This is also discussed in Los Angeles Web Developer.

Networking Events in Los Angeles and Southern California

I've updated this a few times now. Most recent additions to Los Angeles Networking Events:

• Open Stack Meetup - cloud computing and storage, discussing OpenStack deployment, coding to further the project, and creating a collaborative local community.
  
• LA Ruby Meetup - anyone interested in learning or sharing experiences with "Ruby" or "Ruby on Rails".
• SoCal Web Designers - Web designers and developers talking about technology and design process.

Additions Fall 2011

• LeanLA Startup Circle Meetup

  I’ve gone to a couple of these. Often the presentations are pretty basic because of a fair number of newbies in the audience. However, there are some great folks who have lots of experience also attending so the networking and discussion is generally pretty great. Especially if you are looking at early-stage start-up issues.

• Social media week Los Angeles

  Runs week of Sept 20 - 24. Lots of scattered events around LA on social media.

• SoCal Kanban/Lean software meetup
• Coloft

  They have a line up of events there. Doing a good job of helping to make events happen. And for what it's worth, a few folks I know have used their space as a coworking space and say they really like it.

Don’t forget to check out Plancast. I sometimes find some interesting events through that system.

Great post by John Shiple. He talks about a bunch of the different networking events that occur in Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California. In his post, he mentions the following events / event organizers, and you should visit his post for a bit more on each of them.

• LA CTO Forum
• Dealmaker Media
• Digital Family Reunion
• Startups Uncensored
• Social Media Club, LA
• Twiistup
• Mindshare LA
• LA Hadoop Meetup
• Dorkbot
• Geek Dinners
• LA Cloud Computing
• LA Web Application Developers
• LA PHP Developers

In addition to these, I'd recommend looking at:

• Technology Council of Southern California – Surprised John didn't mention this one. They put on great events.
• VentureNet – Great annual event by the Technology Council.
• CalTech MIT Enterprise Forum – Great events on various topics – there's one this Saturday that would be great to go to.
• AITP-LA – Monthly events. Often very IT focused, but can be interesting topics.
• TechBizConnection – Orange County monthly events. Often good topics and interesting networking.
• AWT So Cal - Association of Women in Technology
  

Update: I was just sent a link to Todd Zebert's blog where he has a list of networking events in Los Angeles and Southern California along with some commentary. Here some of those groups:

• Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs
• LA Mixers
• Twestival LA
• Digital LA
• Los Angeles LinkedIn Networking Event
• ExecTec
• So Cal Sushi
• XING Community Los Angeles
  Challenger Networking Group
• Ventura Highway Networking Group
  Pasadena Professionals
• L7scene
• Work It Forward; Bootstrap 2-2
• LA Tweetah

Update: Just pointed to another great post. It discusses more than just local events, but offers quite a list of organizations and events, so here are some additions to the list:

• Word Camp LA
• LA Twestival
• Tech Supper Club
• Media Leaders
• ThinkLA
  
• Digital Hollywood

And here's where you can find more events:

1. SoCalTech Calendar – A great aggregation of events around Southern California that has been pulled together for years by Ben Kuo.
2. Mixergy - A great calendar of events.
3. TechZulu - Another great calendar. I believe that a lot of the events on Mixergy come from TechZulu.
   
4. Meetup – My personal experience has been mixed with these.
5. Southern California Tech Central – Brings together posts from top bloggers around Southern California including John's blog and this blog. You can use keywords like: Events in Los Angeles or Southern California Events or even Santa Monica Events.
6. You can also use Southern California Tech Central's list of Organizations to find possible events: UCLA, CalTech, Twiistup, USC, AeA, TCVN, OCTANE,
   BarCamp, Enterprise Forum, TCOSC, LAVA, UCI, LINC, UCSD, AWT, Digital Hollywood, WITI, TechBiz, ASP, Stirrers and Shakers, AMA, ACG, Pepperdine, PMI, CTC, LMU, LARTA, AITP, iHollywood, Media Leaders.

Quality of Events

Of course, the bigger issue with events is finding the ones where you will have a really good opportunity to network with interesting people. I guess I should confess that I used to go to a lot more networking events. Now, I'm more likely to only go to a few and to heavily use Prenetworking – see Secret for Networking at Events – Prenetworking and Pre-network with LinkedIn. This is why I say that Local Event Organizers Need to Adopt Social Media.

These days, it might be more effective to just invite a small group of people to get together for an interesting discussion than it is to attend an event.

Hard to Evaluate Knowledge Workers

Some Dilbert backup on why it's hard to Evaluate the Performance of Knowledge Workers: