Learning branding lessons from chess champions

Chess may be one of the ultimate strategy games, but marketeers can learn a lot from the game, and they don’t even have to know the moves of the pieces.

A few weeks ago we had the Women’s US Chess Championship matches here. They took place a few blocks away from my office at the St. Louis Chess Club, a dandy new spot in the ‘hood that also was the scene of the US Open earlier this year. As part of the festivities welcoming all the chess nerds was an event that I attended at my favorite local art museum, the Kemper on the Washington University campus, where the women chess champs were going to play roulette chess. It was a great evening, a combination of smart women and interesting ideas. What more could this geek want?

At the museum, I got to meet the current, three-time women’s champion, Anna Zatonskih and the woman who invented roulette chess, Jen Shahade. Both are babes, to say the least. This year’s tournament netted Zatonskih a cool $15 grand, the largest purse of a women’s tournament ever. Granted, this isn’t big money for other kinds of contests, but in the world of chess, it is a lot.

I am not a very good chess player, although I learned when I was much younger only to get routinely trounced by my younger brother, who continues to play and even doesn’t need a chess board to keep track of his moves.

While it certainly was fun to meet the women champions, I was more interested in seeing how Shahade has done such a great job branding herself online. Here are just a few links to get your juices flowing:

First off, she wrote a book entitled, Chess Bitch, about the current crop of women chess players. Apart from the brilliant title, it is a great idea for a book. In chess, many players refer to the all-powerful Queen with that moniker, something that I wasn’t aware of. (For those of you that don’t play, while the object of the game is to capture your opponent’s King, the Queen has the most allowed moves on the board.)

Second, she has all these wonderful ideas about how to invigorate chess by making it more like a sport or like poker, ideas that I have to say I find interesting (and play off my earlier column about making science a spectator sport here).

She even wrote a column for the New York Times a few years ago about it (now that is great branding just right there).

Third, she understands that sex sells, and apart from being a very attractive woman, she does things like play chess while spinning a hula hoop and against a naked (sadly) male opponent. These are two separate activities, but all in the interest of getting more attention to the game. She claims the naked chess is better for her to hone her concentration, as well as to ensure the opponent isn’t hiding any assistive electronic devices. Yeah, right. In any event, you can check out her video on her Web site here:
http://www.jennifershahade.com/

Finally, she does a lot of different events, both demonstrating unusual ways to play chess as well as getting inner-city girls excited about the game. Thus, she combines her passion with some solid volunteerism, which as you should know is a great way to spread the word on your brand.

So those of you that are looking for some new ideas, check out some of these links. The combination of video, catchy titles, and stimulating ideas is enough to give you your own ideas on how to brand and market yourself online. Even if you don’t play chess.

Behind the scenes at the Cisco AXP Contest

Today Cisco announced the winners of its AXP contest. If you haven’t heard of the contest before, you aren’t alone. It was an interesting combination of people, places and events. The goal was to design an application for a relatively new add-on module to Cisco routers called Application eXtension Platform (AXP), a Linux “blade” that allows third-party applications to be integrated with Cisco’s IOS router operating system and network applications. It has its own CPU and can store from 1 GB to 160 GB of data, depending on the model. Here is a more details Q&A about the AXP.

Earlier this year, Cisco announced the contest and a $100,000 prize purse. They received 100 submissions from teams around the world, and the three finalists were announced this week. Check out the winning entry from MAD Network here – it is a very clever use of a variety of materials to explain their innovation, and I am sure one of the reasons why they won.

Brian Profitt, one of the judges in the contest, wrote about his experiences in a blog post here. When I spoke to him, he was very upbeat about his participation. “Initially, I was skeptical that we needed apps there on the AXP, but after seeing the apps from the contestants, I realized that it is a good thing and they made a believer out of me. It is definitely a platform that you can build something that is useful for businesses. Cisco could have kept this all to themselves and developed all of their apps in house. By having this contest, they opened the door for people that probably wouldn’t have gotten to otherwise. They asked people to play with it, and certainly the prize was a big motivation, but this was a very significant move. I am hugely surprised and pleased by the number of international entrants. We had teams from all over the place – South American, Europe, elsewhere. I think this is a product of Cisco’s strength and how well they are known globally. I saw a number of women in the demo videos, which also was good too and runs counter to the notion that all coders are men.”

Profitt, who is the community manager for Linux.com, think that this is a very viable model for how you can really get developers into your enviroment. It also was his first time working with Cisco too.

How to start a 100% virtual company

As many of you know, I spend a lot of time with young entrepreneurs
here in St. Louis as part of a volunteer organization called the
Venture Mentoring Service . But sometimes there is no substitute for experience when it comes to starting a new company, and that is where my dinner with Bruce Fryer comes in. We caught up with each other last week when I was out in Salt Lake City on a business trip, where I was doing some screencast videos for Symantec.

Bruce and I are the same age and have known each other for more than 20 years, back when he was toiling in the fields of IT and I had just left those fields and become an editor for PC Week. We both were getting interested in local area networks and how they could connect to IBM mainframes, which at the time was cutting edge technology. Fast forward to the present and Bruce is embarking on his latest startup, a company to try to cut the costs of delivering worker’s compensation treatment for clinics.

What is interesting about the company, called ProtoHit.com, is that it
is 100% virtual. Fryer works out of his home office. He isn’t even on
payroll, because there is no payroll. Everyone is a contractor. He
uses a set of cloud-based tools that he has cobbled together himself
– why bother building a data center? He’s got a deal with a New
Mexico bank that handles his treasury operations. He has a lawyer in
New Mexico and VC investors scattered all over the landscape. And he loves every minute of being, as his lawyer calls him, COE – chief officer of everything. Like me, he is a lone wolf, trying to sell his vision and make a few bucks along the way. It is the wave of the future.

What he really calls his idea is Cheap Bastard Startup, because he
doesn’t have a lot of dough to invest in fancy digs, tools, or
high-priced talent. He’s been down the high-priced road before and
came up short, indeed, is still paying off the bills from it. There is
nothing like learning from your last blow-up, and so this time Fryer
is determined to prove that he can do it on a shoestring.

So what are some of his tools, just in case you are interested in creating your own cheap startup? Go to his website and click on some of the links here.

Great domain huh? Thanks, that was my idea. Yeah, I just added another $10 a year to his cost structure.

He starts off with Amazon’s EC2, their cloud-based computing services.
Amazon recently added VPN services, which when you think about it
makes a lot of sense – now you can have your cloud and still have an
encrypted path into and out of it to your own office, if you have an
office. He uses DropBox, a cloud-based file synch and storage service,
so he and his staff can share their common business documents. He is
building his app using Google Gears and Mozilla Prism, so his
customers will have a desktop experience but still have the best of
the cloud world too. He uses vTiger for his customer relationship
management – no need to spend the megabucks on Salesforce.com. His
team is using WebCollab for project management and task tracking. All
in all, he spends less than $1000 a year on his infrastructure. Back
when we were young pups just getting started in IT, you couldn’t even
pay your monthly mainframe utility bill or write a requirements
document for $1000. It sort of gives you perspective. I wish him well
and feel free to share other tool tips that you are fond of that
support this model.

The different Twitter account types

I have been studying a presentation that Brent Payne made earlier this year and can be found here, entitled “How to Connect Great Journalism with the Greatest Possible Audience.”

Payne is in charge of the search engine optimization efforts for the Chicago Tribune Web site, and knows a lot about what he speaks. The presentation is chock full of a lot of great stuff, and I would urge you to download it and study it as I did. One particular section bears further discussion, and that is how to deploy a corporate Twitter strategy.

Payne talks about several different Twitter account types that are part and parcel to any business use of the popular microblogging service. And until I saw them delineated, I didn’t realize how important it is to keep them straight. The four basic types are:

News feeds — Here is where you automate posts from your blog sites and other RSS properties to this account. Don’t follow anyone or send any direct messages from it. An example of such an account is @ccnbrk, the breaking news feed from CNN.

Celebs – You should force them on Twitter and give them the freedom to be human and Tweet about their personal lives and follow/respond to their followers. If you want some extra assurance, work with Twitter to have these made into verified accounts so people will realize that they are legit. @Andersoncooper and @oprah are two of these, I am sure you can think of dozens more. If your company doesn’t have a celebrity spokesmodel, then don’t worry about this.

Brand Personae – These are characters or avatars or Twavatars (I just made that up), something that your customers can identify with and lead brand awareness and perception on Twitter. This is the social media face to the public of your brand. They can engage your audience and represent you in the Twittersphere. Think of what Spencer the Katt did for PC Week back in the heyday of the PC era. And as we did with Spencer, we protected who it “really” was that was writing that important back-page rumor column as a trade secret (no, I never penned the column while I was there).

Ordinary folk – For the rest of us that don’t fit into any of the above categories, it is still important to be on Twitter. Make sure you set some ground rules about how people will participate and what they will and won’t Tweet that is part of your corporate acceptable use policies. Make sure you give employees some basic training in libel laws and also mention that they should be able to Tweet about competitors and speak honestly. Understand that mistakes will occur and that sometimes human resources might have to help out here. Don’t get too heavy-handed though.

Finally, make sure you promote your Twitterers. List their IDs on their business cards, in their email sigs, and on your corporate Web site right next to their email addresses in your contact page. What you don’t list email addresses on your Web site? Hmm, that is the subject for another day.

When you think about it, the different Twitter accounts is similar to the different ways that companies use blogs too: the difference is that with 140 characters, a Tweet can be a lot more flexible than a longer blog entry in terms of developing a personna.

PC World: Mastering your own Internet domain

Seinfeld episodes notwithstanding, buying a domain name may be easy, but managing the domain and making smart technology decisions is another story. In my story this week in PC World, I take a look at the steps and decisions involved in setting up Web and e-mail hosting accounts for your a domain.

Playing Innovation Games

I went to Dallas this week to play a few games. Not Scrabble or Monopoly but serious games that are used as a mechanism to help customers better direct the features and futures of their software products. The setting was the annual user conference of Teres Solutions, a leading provider of credit union back office operations software suites. Facilitating the games was Luke Hohmann, the CEO of Enthiosys, who wrote a book, developed the idea and does dozens of these gaming events around the world every year.

The day of games was at times part encounter group, part revival meeting, part chaos, but totally serious work. The facilitators used a variety of public speaking, psychology, standard marketing techniques and group dynamics – along with the games – to elicit ideas and thoughts from the participants about product features and future product roadmaps and strategies for Teres.

“We tried to do other sessions at earlier conferences that involved our customers telling us what they wanted to see in our products, but they were unstructured and they turned more into bitch sessions,” said Rosa Trachta, a senior product manager at Teres. “We really didn’t end up getting the information that we wanted but saw the games at another conference and wanted to bring them here.”

The games we played involved no fancy technology – for the most part we used things found at office supply store such as index cards and flip charts rather than computer screen projectors. But more important than the materials was the processes used to get people talking to each other and collaborating on ideas.

The first game we played was called “20/20 vision,” based on when you visit your eye doctor and try to find what prescription will improve your eyesight by comparing lenses in pairs. In the game, the group expressed their preferences to a series of product enhancements that were printed on a series of index cards, and had been seeded ahead of time by Teres’ product managers. In the room were customers of Teres who managed departments at various credit unions. For each product enhancement, the customers would justify what they thought, how it could improve their jobs, or be better than what they have at present from Teres.

What impressed me is that unlike many breakout sessions in numerous conferences that I have been to, there was a constant give and take of conversation among the customers and with Hohmann leading the game. It was an honest stream of consciousness, almost too dense and thick for me to capture as a reporter – part of this was because the information was too technical for me and specific to their industry; but also because many people were speaking to each other at once. What I liked about this process was that Hohmann could get all sorts of information about the product and features without having actually touched it. He got down into the weeds about each feature and explored exactly what it meant to the daily user of the software.

I also liked that the customers started talking about their underlying business practices and how they did their jobs, such as working with credit bureaus, originating loans, and so forth. Given the current state of confusion in the financial services industry, it was fascinating to be at ground zero with the people in the room who actually have to approve consumer loans. These were people who were passionate about their application, because their daily jobs depend on it.

As more index cards are posted on the wall, the ranking changes as people argue for higher or lower placement of the specific features. It also becomes more difficult to rank them, and people would get into the finer points of the implications of each feature. We finished this game by evaluating a few of the features in more detail in terms of their financial benefits and costs.

The next game was called “Speed Boat” and involves eliminating obstacles, or anchors that will drag down a product, or slowing down a user’s productivity. A new set of index cards were distributed with a new group of participants to fill out. “We generally don’t do more than one game a day with the same people, because the process is so demanding,” says Hohmann. Then the fun began. Each person came up to the front of the room and pasted their cards on the wall, and others moved them around – the bigger the drag, the lower the card is placed on the wall. Within a few minutes, the wall was covered with items. The wall served as the basis of discussion of why these features were an issue and how they impacted a particular credit union’s business processes. As in the morning session, there was a lot of interaction with the audience, with suggestions flying fast and furious.

The third game was called “Buy a Feature” and this involved handing out Monopoly money that is used to purchase particular product features. (Some of Enthiosys’ other clients have actually minted their own currency. For example, the games at Intuit had pictures of founder Scott Cook on the bills.) Like Vegas, this game is rigged ahead of time because there isn’t enough dough to go around, and people have to pool their funds to get what they want. Again, a lot of give and take here among the participants.

How did the overall process fare? Jack Jordan, VP of product development for Teres, says, “One of the features got more value from the participants than I expected, and one feature that I thought had more priority ended up at the very bottom of the queue. This would have been a lot of development effort; we could very easily have built this feature into our product. Overall, the sessions have been very helpful.” What I saw was a very direct display of different priorities – some customers wanted X or Y features, for example, while others would find X or Y features not useful but want A or B.

I have done a few encounter sessions with computer product managers over my years as a consultant and reporter, and I have to say that the games process is a very efficient mechanism for getting very precise feedback and to help improve products. I was glad to be a witness to this process, and would urge other product teams to employ Enthiosys and its channel to help with their future product strategies. If you want more information, buy Hohmann’s book (which goes into detail on many more games that he’s designed) or attend one of his seminars.

Hatching new ideas at Washington University

One of the most fun things that I get to do professionally is be a volunteer judge at some of the entrepreneur competitions over at Washington University. Today I was listening to nine different student presentations for the final class projects at the “Hatchery“. The students learn to write business plans, refine their ideas, put together a slide deck and presentation, and figure out funding models and how they are going to create a new business during the course of the semester.

What was impressive were the presentations by the kids themselves. As a professional speaker, I can appreciate all the hard work that goes into polishing up a talk and making your points — and they only have 15 minutes to get across a lot of information for us to judge whether they make the grade. We have an additional 15 minutes to ask questions and all the students did well under our scrutiny.

Here are some of the lessons that I learned from my day at Wash U:

• Know your P&L’s. The weakest parts of the presentations were the financial portion. While the students submitted full accounting statements in their written backups, some of them made absolutely no sense to me. Either they were giving away too much equity for too little value, had odd gross margins of 89%, structured unsecured loans as their initial capitalization, or whatnot, clearly they all could use more work in this area.
• These are the Google generation, and many of them were all over Adwords and other online funding models. But one caution that I would have is that the best plans combined some aspects of online and offline funding and marketing mechanisms.
• Odd uses of IT resources. Some of the teams over-estimated the costs of IT support, some grossly underestimated them. $120,000 to build a Website? Try to do it for $1,000. A part-time CTO with a company that is still developing their iPhone app? I think not.
• Sales was another weak spot. One team that produces a very good student magazine was planning on expanding the magazine to other college campuses. They had never sold advertising until now — because Wash U. supports the publication. While they had some good ideas on how to do this, shoe leather and visiting local watering holes is not a sales strategy.
• Focus on the first hires. The most impressive presentation was by a company-to-be that is going to sell custom women’s sleepwear. What got me, apart from some of the girls modeling the goods, was how the CEO knew what she didn’t know and needed to hire right off the bat. She also had some very clever ideas on using user-generated contests to help refine and perfect her initial prototypes.

I wish all of the students well in their ventures, and I hope to see good things from some of them as the summer goes on and they put their ideas into practice.

Leveraging online and offline marketing at the NHL

This is probably the first time in my writing career that I have interviewed someone from the National Hockey League. In our MediaBlather podcast series, Paul Gillin and I talk to Mike DiLorenzo, the publicity director of the league, about his use of blogging, Twitter, and other online tools. What is interesting about the NHL (and believe me, I am as uninterested about watching hockey as one can be) is how they are working both online and physical worlds to leverage the best aspects, all to spread the word and get more fans of particular teams connected.

You can hear the entire podcast in episode 96: Social Media on Ice here. Yes, ep. 96! Paul and I have a lot of fun with this series of almost weekly podcasts, and you should subscribe to our feed and listen to some of the older ones too.

PC World: Do E-mail Marketing Right

While all this Twittering and Facebooking has gotten plenty of attention, the basic bread and butter of any small business is the care and feeding of its e-mail lists to connect its customers, suppliers and partners. The better you are at doing e-mail lists and sending out regular and informative communications, the more business you will have.

You can read the first of a two-part series in my column this week in PC World here.

Custom publishing 2.0 with MagCloud

Not every Web service has to be completely an online operation. Take as an example Netflix – when they started it wasn’t really possible to stream an entire DVD across the Internets and they developed a system to mail DVDs to their customers. Now, of course, they have some very innovative ways to “watch instantly” your videos, including to Ethernet-connected Blu-Ray and Xbox players.

But the combination of on and offline components isn’t widely exploited by many businesses, either because they are so enamored by Web 2.0 (or whatever we are calling it this week), or because they lack the offline skill sets or institutional memories to be effective in both camps.

Let’s take a look at one service that does a great job in both worlds, called MagCloud.com, which is sponsored by HP. As someone who once ran the editorial operations of several computer magazines that have gone by the wayside (no fault of my own in particular, at least so I like to think), I welcome the effort.

It works this way. Let’s say you want to produce a small number of copies of a custom published magazine – say something more than a sales brochure that has actual editorial content. You want to approach this project with the same kind of quality that a regular printed magazine would entail – full color printing, nice graphics and layout, and mailed to potential readers. This is the idea behind their service. You create your magazine just as you would with the usual Adobe tools, upload the digital files to their service, along with the mailing addresses of your readers. HP takes care of printing, proofing, binding, polybagging and postage.

You can get an idea of what is involved by browsing their Web site and seeing some of the magazines that are offered for sale there. I got a copy of “Georgia Speaker” – a magazine that is published by the Atlanta chapter of the National Speakers Association (an organization that I am a member). It was well put together and arrived in the mail in a few days and cost about $5 all told.

What I like about MagCloud is that it combines the best attributes of print-on-demand with online access for searchability, marketing and awareness. The price is reasonable and you can set up any number of custom-published pieces. Obviously, HP Is doing this to tout its printing business, but why not?

When I first heard of MagCloud, I thought the service would email me the PDF that I would then print myself. And I was pleasantly surprised when the magazine arrived in my snail mail a few days later. Then I realized the genius of this service. How much stuff do you get in the mail that you actually look forward to these days? Other than paychecks from my clients and my Netflix DVDs, not a heckuva lot. This can be high impact just because it is something so retro that it stands out.

Now, I don’t know if MagCloud has a future, but certainly it can bring some bright spots of hope to some of the 11,000 journalists who lost their jobs last year (according to the Columbia Journalism Review). While that is small change compared to the number of idled GM or US Steel workers, it still means that there is a large talent pool to produce custom-published zines. And if any of you do produce your own custom magazines using the service, please let me know and I will post links to them here.