Jen van der Meer

I’m excited to give this talk at SXSW 2012 - see you there.

Why do brands resist being human? Understanding the question, and its answer, reveals much as to the reasons why companies continue to struggle with the adoption of social business practices. Fear not! You can do something to make your company more connected, more human, and you can do it now. This seminar is for all you enlightened brand strategists, hard working late night community managers, and social business practitioners. We will show you: how to build the business case for being human; how to properly measure the ROI and engagement value of each conversation; how to convince senior managers to give you more headcount; and how to prove that people can scale. At a more macro level, you will understand hidden fears of CMOs, and how to speak their language. You will walk away with real life examples, measurement models, and a plan of action. Let the humanizing begin!

October 24th, 2011 | Category: Communication | Comments (177)

Posting this morning on the Dachis Group Collaboratory. Inspired by my colleagues’ fierce and firey prose, it’s time to start blogging again.

Social thought leaders have formed a consensus around fan counting: don’t do it. The argument: if you measure what you manage, and you are only measuring fan counts, then you might rely on short term acquisition tactics that fail to result in long term engagement.

And yet we hear every day that while a Social Strategy Director is focused on engagement, the Senior VP or CMO and even members of the board want to understand the plan to reach higher fan and follower acquisition benchmarks.

But maybe that Senior VP, CMO, and board member is responding intuitively to the what fan counts mean for a brand. They are after all trained to look at a brand compared to a competitive set. Senior executives think about the metric of market share a great deal, both share of revenue, and share of profit. When a CMO sees an emergent competitor outflank her own brand on Facebook by a large order of magnitude, she knows something is wrong. After all, that competitor brand actually has more friends.

Old school metric: brand relevance

When fan counts across a competitive set differ wildly from market share rankings, this is a potential signal that leading brands are suffering a relevance gap. Brand relevance is an old school metric employed by large scale brand managers. Typically measured as a tracking study through survey methods over time, brand relevance determines whether the existence of a brand predisposes someone to pay a higher price, and become loyal, repeat customers. If a brand is relevant, the investment in brand building will have a commercial impact by affecting the customer’s buying decision.

David Aaker, one of the greatest brand thinkers of our time, came up with these simple conditions for creating brand relevance:

1. A product or service category (or subcategory) exists
2. A customer segment has a perceived need or desire for that category
3. The segment sees a particular brand as being material to that category

For example, a market share leader of dish washing fluid might be alarmed if survey results revealed increased consideration and willingness to purchase an upstart dish washing fluid competitor. Now, with the public focus group that is social, and you have a proxy for brand relevancy. If that upstart dish washing competitor now has three times the fan base as the dominant market share leader, then fan count is a signal of decreasing brand relevancy in a category.

So, what do you do if you are a social strategist sitting on a brand that is a market share leader, but whose presence on the Facebook and Twitter leaderboard is not dominating the category? Senior execs are pressuring you to do something, anything to have the size of your social tribe reflect your position in the marketplace.

When you are finally given that multi million dollar budget, but only have 10,000 followers across all of your social channels, don’t be afraid to plan a fan acquisition effort as one of your first projects. Couple acquisition with a deep listening strategy to diagnose why your brand is lagging in social, and determine which tactics, content, and programs succeed in attracting a likeminded fan base of loyalists and advocates. Count your fans, count them every day, but get to know who they are, and how the actions you take in your company affect the quantity and quality of the conversation.

May 25th, 2011 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (3,273)

All art projects, small businesses, collectives, social/eco impact without huge financial growth expectations, and hardware/hardgoods-based businesses that do not leverage the social graph in any way - we love you. And we are creating another series of events for you to help you get your ideas into the world.

As for those whose ideas are potential concepts for NY-style VC investors, here are some links for you to prepare:

Dave McClure’s visually cheesy but useful “How to pitch a VC” - warning: suggestive cat photos.

Fred Wilson describes a “how to pitch a product.”

Duke Fuqua School of Business Start up Challenge - warning: lots of Duke school spirit.

Naval Ravinkant has lots of advice.

And this great pitch outline we will discuss in the pitch clinic today.

From ReadWriteWeb: A trove of resources including the David Rose TED Talk:
The Art of the VC Pitch: A Roundup of Advice from 6 VCs.

Finally (and mentioned in the above article) check out the VCs we have invited - know what kind of companies they have invested in, so that you don’t waste your time educating them about things they know more deeply than yourself. They know ITP. They understand social topologies, network effects, game layers. Spend more time showing off your idea with screenshots, demo, or better yet - traction - a thriving and fast growing community of super users!

Thanks @ehuddleston and @bradkenney for your suggestions.

March 25th, 2011 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (2,771)

Audience at SXSW:

Here are books and links that will give any marketer or techie a basic framework for how to truly measure financial value.

Valuation - Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies

The classic MBA book - still focused on “the primary goal of a company is to return value to shareholders” - but the math and financial framework provides one of the more accessible lessons on how to value a company.

Measuring Customer Lifetime Value

A tool provided by Harvard Business School Press. It includes the discounted cash flow time value of money within the tool. No algebra needed.

Managing Customers for Profit

Professor V. Kumar explains how Customer Referral Value is more useful and relevant than Customer Lifetime Value, and explains the difference, constraints, and limitations of our more traditional world view.

His site is filled with additional research, calculators, and links.

March 16th, 2011 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (4,829)

Here is the presentation:

I’ll be speaking and teaching geeks and marketers how to actually measure the ROI of relationships, during a time when ROI is completely under criticism, and attack. ROI fans, unite!

From the Dachis Group social business summit:

“What’s missing in most #social business attempts is a systematic link to metrics that matter.” @jbernoff

“We are at an inflection point, a social generation replaces spreadsheet generation.” @jobsworth

“ROI analysis for social software is a ‘fool’s errand’ - John Hagel

From SXSWi Conversations:

“All of you who just worry about metrics, numbers, roi, you’re going to die” @garyvee

“The value is not inamassing Facebook fans, it‘s what you do with them.” - Forrester

All those who say, ROI measurement, yes we can, come join me tomorrow at 3:30.

Ballroom F, Austin Convention Center.

March 14th, 2011 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (4,918)

This was how Majora Carter started her talk at the Sustainability Panel this past weekend at the Women’s Entrepreneurship Festival at NYU ITP. Way cooler, because rather than meet with the Davos crowd and pontificate about worldchanging ideas, we were talking about how visionary women were bringing their worldchanging ideas to fruition.

The conference was organized by Nancy Hechinger, an ITP professor, Joanne Wilson, the famous GothamGal of NYC, and Diana Rhoten of Startl, an education technology incubator, with the explicit intention of convincing “pre-entrepreneurial” women to make the leap and make their start-up idea happen.

As was typical of former female students I’ve had at ITP, and many of the women at the conference, many are uncertain if a company is something they want to start. It’s not because their visions are small and sheepish, it is because they are enormous beyond measure. Mission-driven, with a desire to bring about the change they wish to see in the world, these women are not content to force their vision into the current for-profit and not-for-profit structures we have in place today.

Let’s face it VC funding is great, tech entrepreneurs create jobs, and high growth high scale industries are exciting to invest in, and help grow (I’m in one right now, and am having a blast). However, the mechanism of VC-funded startups are not designed for solving intractable social or environmental issues that many of these women entrepreneurs want to solve.

Let’s take the case of the 5 women on the panel I had the good fortune to moderate.

Let’s start with Majora. TED video darling and MacArthur genius. Hero of the South Bronx. A “recovering Executive Director” with a business plan to launch a national, urban agriculture brand. Majora has shaped and adapted her vision to not just confront environmental justice issues of poor air quality in the South Bronx, she is solving for the most intractable challenges in a city like NYC - employing the “most expensive citizens” in jobs that provide dignity and purpose. I’m looking forward to seeing how this idea of training “urban agriculture technicians”

Gwen Schantz is an urban farmer and co-founder of Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop soil-based farm in Long Island City (”Yes it’s in Queens and it’s called Brooklyn Grange. Get over it.”) Gwen shared the entire financing and operational story for how they got the farm up and running - startup costs of approximately $200k, almost half of which went to pay for the soil, funded through friends, family, Kickstarter, and loans, creating a break-even farm within a year. The farm is operated as a for-profit enterprise because the founders wanted to demonstrate that urban farming was a financially sustainable enterprise. To serve the needs of the local schools and tour groups that want to visit the farm, the founders decided to create a separate non-profit 501C3 organization to fund educational efforts and other community outreach efforts in a manner that did not take a toll on the successful, working farm.

Sarah Beatty, the founder of Green Depot, started her company after experiencing a mold scare following the renovation of her NYC apartment a week before her first child was due. After spending substantial time trying to find replacement products and materials that were less toxic, she started Green Depot with her husband, who had been running a more traditional building supply business. Sarah still spends a great deal of time on product filtering and selection, sorting through greenwashing claims and false certifications, and creating a way for contractors and end customers to make better decisions. While Green Depot is not interesting in creating their own certification, you can see the thought and consideration put into the products on display at the company’s flagship store on the Bowery in lower Manhattan. Built inside of a converted YMCA, it was the first LEED certified Platinum-rated remodel of a landmarks building. Green Depot is doing relatively well despite the huge decline in contraction and building projects in the last two years, and Sarah is interesting in expanding her business on the web to reach the community of green customers that have greater influence over smarter renovation decisions.

Britta Riley is an ITP grad who is applying her school-acquired knowledge of communities and online participation to start an indoor farming movement. Her venture, Windowfarms, was conceived as an art project while she was an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam. “Turn our cities’ windows into vertical vegetable farms” was the rallying cry that led to raising $28k on Kickstarter and launching a community website and initial Windowfarm kit. The product of Windowfarms is less important to Britta than something she calls R&D-IY - a community of people adapting Windowfarms for their own local environments, and sharing their maker tips. Britta is tapping into “personal scale innovation” and the motivation of people to start doing something to improve their quality of life by creating a fresh food supply. She has spent a great deal of time exploring whether or not to grow as a 501c3 or as a for profit structure, and has learned that a hybrid model is necessary to generate the right level of funding for the outcomes she seeks. Underlying the entire project is a passionate commitment to open source, shared intellectual property, and a transparent policy for how ideas are commercialized within this ecosystem. When asked whether she considered financially incentivizing members of the community, Britta cited the lessons taught at ITP by community expert Clay Shirky - there is a cultural magic that goes along with a volunteer spirit and a genuine desire to participate that is broken when financial incentive structures are built in. Keeping that magic may become Britta’s secret sauce to long term success of Windowfarms.

Finally, Valerie Casey walked us through her several year journey to lead a social and sustainable design movement. Full disclosure - I consider Valerie a close friend, and am on the board of the Designers Accord, a not-for-profit organization that Valerie started to enlist the interest and curiosity of designers around the world. I’m a fan. But so are other designers and sustainability-minded people Valerie has reached along the way. Valerie spoke about deliberately choosing not-for-profit status as a way to signal her intent. To encourage collaboration and sharing among traditionally competitive designers and firms, Valerie felt it was important to show that this organization had no profit motive, and also had an end date in mind - giving the organization 5 years to accomplish its goals and become part of the way designers and design educators behave, talk, and influence decision-making. Designers Accord started as a blog post and mission statement, and today counts over 300,000 adopters worldwide. Designers, educational institutions, design firms, and corporations who all agree to the guidelines which encourage a public and active dialogue about social and sustainability impacts, and an ongoing commitment to share learning and knowledge.

I’ve been wondering about the “difference” in female vs. male entrepreneurship and I do not think there is one, there is just a strong pattern - most of the women driven to start their own mission-driven organizations approach their work differently than an entrepreneur who is more focused on personal wealth creation. In the words of Diana Rhoten as she wrapped up the day, “these women are not angling to make the system work for them,” but breaking and building a system “so that it works for everyone.” Does this distinction answer the question of why only 3% of VC tech startup funding goes to women-founded companies? Perhaps.

There IS ample room for VC, foundation, angel, and socially conscious investor funding of humanistic, sustainability focused ideas. The institutions we’ve created to house these ideas should not get in the way, and these entrepreneurs are deftly experimenting with hybrid models to attract the right kind of capital for their growth plans.

When VC funding is right, expect VCs to be looking for more women-founded companies if only to expand the breadth and diversity of the companies they fund. When “AVC” Fred Wilson, husband of conference organizer Joanne Wilson was asked about his intention to invest in female-founded companies, he answered: “i would simply say that we’d like to see more women pitching us and more women in the teams that pitch us.” So future entrepreneur women. Go forth. Pitch. Ask for what you need to have us all benefit from your giant ideas.

February 4th, 2011 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (4,021)

Tomorrow I’m participating in a “Breaching Boundaries” conversation at the American Anthropological Association’s yearly event.

Here are my thoughts as a layperson and fan of anthropology;

—

I went for a whole 10 years once without anthropology.

After a few ethnography and anthropology classes in undergrad to support a comparative religion major, I took what I needed for critical thinking skills but tucked the rest of those liberal arts away so they wouldn’t interfere with my job search.

Somehow I talked my way into Wall Street, analyzing emerging technology companies that made semiconductors, the machines that made semiconductors, the first Internet companies. There might have been anthropologists hidden away at these places I studied, but they did not push any of the levers on my Bloomberg screen, so they remained hidden from view.

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November 19th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (3,990)

Children of Miramar collecting water from a leaking Municipal tank

We tend to tell the story of developing world crisis in numbers:

• Almost 1 billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water.

• That’s one in eight of us.

• Every day more than 4,000 children around the world die from diseases caused by poor water sanitation

• In Africa alone, people spend 40 billion hours every year just walking for water.

These statistics are abominable, shocking. But do they motivate us to act, or make the right decisions about what we can do about the water crisis?

Ned Breslin, CEO of the nonprofit Water For People, argues that this metrics-focused way we tell the water crisis story tends to result in inefficient and ineffective philanthropy. Western world foundations, NGOs, and government groups, and even private citizens get excited about raising money for a well or a number of handpumps. But Breslin points out a growing catastrophe of failed water implementation efforts. In his January 2010 essay “Rethinking Hydro-Philanthropy,” Breslin cites statistics of the long term failure of these efforts, and the key steps that donors, NGOs, local governments and communities should take to create long term change.

A typical story about the water crisis may also use the story one child that misses school to collect water for his family, or one mother who risks disease because her only available supply is a muddy ditch. Yet the truth is that this child and this mother are often walking by broken failed water infrastructure project attempts by government and aid agencies, poorly engineered solutions that solved an immediate need, but did not succeed in the long term. These numbers are what Breslin considers as more relevant: 50,000 rural water points broken in Africa, $215 - $360 MM of investment wasted because of poor programming and careless implementation.

Breslin proposes a shift in defining the metrics of success:

“Success will require less single-minded focus on the absolute number of people without access to water and sanitation facilities and more focus on the serious questions around long term impact and sustainability. So that years after the cameras have left, the donor reports have been filed, and the press release circulated, the community is not forgotten. A new partnership between philanthropists and development agencies would focus less on how much money the sector supposedly needs to solve the global water challenges and more on how creative philanthropic giving can be used as leverage to install financial responsibilities for improved water supply and sanitation on communities and governments in developing countries.”

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October 15th, 2010 | Category: Eco Impact, Footprint, Health, Measurement, Uncategorized | Comments (4,708)

Writing for @Inhabitat American Express Open Forum

Sep 30, 2010 -

For years scientists have been arguing that the rest of us do not see what they see when we look at data about climate change. While the documentary An Inconvenient Truth provided a compelling narrative, few feel that awareness of these issues has led to wide scale behavior change.

It seems that it is natural human behavior to forget about rising CO2 levels and warming glaciers when we make the critical decisions that negatively affect the environmental. Despite all of the increased data and knowledge about global warming, do you know which decisions impact the earth the most?

Enter the power of data visualization to attempt to connect the dots between data, personal decisions about energy use, and behavior change. Several large companies and startups have taken on the challenge to build feedback loops for us to use to see the impact of our actions, and give us a construct for us to understand how we change our behavior.

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September 30th, 2010 | Category: Behavior Change, Eco Impact, Innovation | Comments (3,849)