My New Year’s Eve has been the same for the past 9 years. I’ve never celebrated in a big city, but from what I hear, it’s awesome… until you realize it’s 2 AM, 12 degrees, and you’re a long way from your nice warm bed. You made the smart decision to leave your car at home, but now what? Everybody in the city is trying to get home at the same time, and every cab that drives seems to be full. You’ll probably die of hypothermia before you can hail a cab, so you might as well use an app to find a ride. Uber can get you a black car or a cab, but their “surge pricing” will make it hurt. If there’s a time to try Lyft, it’s tonight (though Lyft has its own surge pricing called “Prime Time Tips”). They are a San Francisco, CA based company that offers “on-demand ridesharing” in nearly 20 cities across the country. They call it “your friend with a car.”
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There’s no question that social media is important for businesses of all kinds, but it’s a relatively new channel that offers an uncertain return on investment. Most of my investment in social media marketing has been a flop, but I know that plenty of other brands have had major success. Companies that are investing in social need to do so wisely, and that often means getting professional help. Optimal “is the leading social advertising and analytics platform, with offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York, Chicago, and London.” They started in 2008 when social really began to take off, and since then “have managed and optimized over 100 billion impressions for advertisers and agencies.”
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Lately when I talk to new parents, I like to compare what they’re going through to what I’m going through with my puppy. I know that it’s a completely ridiculous comparison, but I enjoy the fact that it makes them a bit uncomfortable. We all know that parenting is one of life’s biggest yet most rewarding challenges. Today’s parents are lucky that there are all kinds of resources to help them do a better job (that’s true for puppy owners too!). One is CafeMom, a New York, NY based digital media company for moms that reaches more than 20 million users every month. Their properties include CafeMom.com, MamásLatinas.com, TheStir.com, and TheProwl.com. The goal is to bring “moms together by hosting hundreds of communities that reflect moms’ personalities, passions and needs.”
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I’m pretty sure that I said this like two weeks ago, but when it comes to advertising, creative and placement are both very important. A terrible ad can sometimes be effective with the right media buys, and a fantastic ad can be effective with almost no placement. However, if you put the two together, you get outsized results. Horizon Media is “the largest independent media services agency in the world.” That “independent” part is important because so many media agencies today are held by large holding companies. New York, NY based Horizon Media’s tagline is “business is personal.” I think that says a lot about how they stand out from other agencies.
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We usually think of advertising geniuses as the people who come up with the creative, but the media side (where you show the ad) is often just as or even more important. Everyone has noticed a disastrous ad placement, but how many of us take note when a marketing message appears in the right place at the right time? The people at Crossmedia certainly do. They are a New York, NY based (with offices in LA, Philly, and Germany) “independent channel-driven agency delivering communications planning, media services and international account management.” They offer a variety of services that are built with “an equal mix of business, media and agency performance.”
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Local marketing has been all the rage for the past few years. All kinds of startups have popped up to help small business owners use technology to reach more customers. It’s easy to forget that local marketing doesn’t only happen online. Radio and live events are two marketing channels that have been complemented instead of replaced by technology. That’s good news for Townsquare Media, since they’re a Greenwich, CT based “local media and entertainment company that owns and operates radio, digital and live event properties in 66 small to mid-sized markets across the country.” The last part of that sentence is important because it means that they have jobs all across the country. Townsquare Media owns more than 300 radio stations, and that makes them the third largest owner of radio stations in the U.S.
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Today few businesses can afford to ignore online marketing. The baseline has changed, and customers expect to find an online presence. Whether you’re a local restaurant, a consulting firm, or a toy manufacturer, people want to learn about you and interact with you on the web. The problem is that most small and local businesses don’t have the expertise or the resources to make wise investments in social media, SEO, SEM, and other online marketing options. They need affordable automation, and that’s exactly what Signpost offers. They are a New York, NY based company that has moved out of the deals space (just like yesterday’s company) and into offering a “cloud-based platform that makes digital and mobile marketing simple and effective for SMBs.” Without options like Signpost, small businesses would have to hire a full-time person just to run online marketing (I know that you’d prefer that they do that).
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InvestmentNews is our sponsor this week, and they would like to tell you about their NextGen Virtual Career Fair on November 8th. It’s an awesome opportunity for students and interns to network and find finance jobs on the spot.
When I’m talking to a potential advertiser for One Day One Job, I tell them how special our audience is. I’ll spare you the details since you certainly know how special you are, but the point is to convince them that they should pay more to reach you. Nearly every publisher does this, but most publishers don’t have special audiences. How do the ones that do prove it? That’s a problem that Umbel is working to solve. They are an Austin, TX based company that helps publishers “leverage social and big data to prove your premium audience story to advertisers and sponsors.” What I think is really cool about Umbel is that they can even help publishers whose audiences aren’t that special on average by segmenting out the groups that are most valuable to advertise to.
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InvestmentNews is our sponsor this week, and they would like to tell you about their NextGen Virtual Career Fair on November 8th. It’s an awesome opportunity for students and interns to network and find finance jobs on the spot.
When we featured Duraflame, I thought they’d be the only company that I’d write about with an office on a boat (excluding companies that use boats as parts of their businesses, of course). Today’s company really made a name for itself when they turned a retired ferryboat into a floating workshop on the San Francisco Bay (they now have offices all over the world). That move certainly helped build the Landor brand, which is kind of funny, since that’s what they do for clients–they “help the world’s best brands stand up, stand out, and stand for something.” Many of their clients already have massive brand awareness, so Landor is tasked with making the most of that brand equity.
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I’m not much of a gamer, but occasionally I get wrapped up in a mindless iPhone game. It starts as a little diversion while waiting for something, and before I know it, I’m staying up past my bedtime playing. The addiction usually lasts a few weeks, and then I forget about it and get my life back… until I discover a new game. I haven’t tried any games from Pocket Gems, and I don’t intend to… I never intend to. They are a San Francisco, CA based company that “develops free-to-play mobile games that are ridiculously fun.” While their games may be pretty simple, Pocket Gems takes them very seriously. That’s why their dual mission is to “build the world’s best mobile engineering team” and “become a global leader in the mobile entertainment industry.”
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How many times have you been watching tv when a familiar advertisement comes on. You know all of the words, but five seconds after the ad finishes, you say to yourself, “Wait, what was that ad for again?” It happens to me all the time. So many brands have gotten too complicated with their messaging. Good branding is almost impossible without simplicity. That’s why Siegel+Gale has made a name for itself as “a global strategic branding firm committed to building world-class brands through elegantly simple, unexpectedly fresh strategies, stories and experiences.” The agency is based in New York, NY, but they also have offices in San Francisco, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and six international locations.
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Nearly every tv show that we watch is sponsored by a number of companies, yet we never would think to thank the sponsors. The same can be said for websites. It’s pretty rude of us, isn’t it? Shouldn’t we be more grateful for all of the things that we get in exchange for a little bit of attention? Maybe we should, but we’re not going to be. The one exception is events. When a corporate sponsor puts on an event, I feel that I owe them something. That’s probably why Mirrorball believes that “if you want to move the needle, then first, you need to move your consumer.” Mirrorball is a New York, NY based consumer engagement agency “that connects brands and people through a fusion of social media and live experience.” Experiences are engaging, and if you can create them win the right way, you can reach people with messages that they might ignore in other settings.
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When social media started picking up steam as an essential business tool, it was mostly tech brands that were investing in it. They the huge national brands started tweeting, Facebooking, and Instagramming. Now it’s time for the local brands to jump on the bandwagon. Social Media Beast is a Chicago, IL based agency that is helping some of Chicago’s most notable brands do social right. Much of the cost in hiring a full-time social media person are centered around training and managing the individual. Why would a small business waste resources doing that when they can just hire an agency like Social Media Beast?
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A couple months ago I was raving to you about our web host WP Engine. While I’m still generally happy with them, they had a pretty big screw up a couple weeks ago. I worked with their support team, and we were able to find a resolution (though it took much longer than I would have hoped). All of the communications ran through Zendesk, which is “beautifully simple customer service software.” It’s basically a platform for managing all of the back and forth that is typically a part of delivering good customer service. Zendesk is based in San Francisco, CA, though they were originally founded in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2007 (they made the move in 2009).
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When I was in high school, it was the golden age of free music. High speed Internet connections were becoming commonplace, and file sharers weren’t really being prosecuted yet. You could have (permanently) almost any music you wanted for free. Those days have long passed, but we’re in another period of at least semi-free music access. Thanks to companies like Spotify, you can listen to what you want when you want to… as long as you’re willing to put up with some ads. F# is a New York, NY based company behind many of those ads–they connect “brands to consumers through the power of music in purposeful ads.” Brands know that music is a great way to connect with consumers. And that means ad-supported online music services provide an amazing opportunity.
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On Tuesday we talked about DataXu and how they’re helping advertisers make the most of their advertising budgets by crunching tons of data. Unsurprisingly, publishers want in on the optimization action too. I’ve seen firsthand how a few tweaks to an advertising setup can have momentous impact overnight. While Altitude Digital doesn’t take a big data approach like DataXu, the Denver, CO based company does “empower publishers to effectively monetize and optimize their online display, video and mobile inventory.” Doing that well has landed them at #54 on the Inc. 5000 with 5,162% three-year growth to $11.4 million in annual revenue.
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Targeting advertising used to be pretty simple–all you had to do was buy ads in the places that your target market frequented. Whether it was a billboard, commercial, or print ad, your first concern was where the ad would be placed. While the basic principles of advertising haven’t changed, the way that we target ads has. There are now far better ways to reach someone than to assume that they’re part of some large group. Today’s advertisers have access to massive amounts of data, but they need to know what to do with it. It may seem like overkill, but there are actually NASA and MIT scientists working on this stuff. Some of them are DataXu, a Boston, MA based company whose “platform enables [their] clients to manage and optimize marketing investments across all digital channels, realizing significant performance and cost benefits.” DataXu came in at #5 on the Inc. 5000 with 21,337% three-year growth to $87 million in revenue.
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When you look at a bunch of advertising and communications agencies, you start to see a lot of the same words. They all claim to excel in areas like strategy, creative, and insights. You’ll often see the word innovation used, but it’s not always listed as a core competency. One word that I wasn’t expecting to see on an agency’s capabilities page is “culinary,” but that’s the exact word I found on the Sterling-Rice Group What We Do page. They are a Boulder, CO based “strategy, innovation, and communications firm that grows businesses and builds brands in considerable ways,” and they clearly have separated themselves from the pack by being total foodies in addition to everything else that they are.
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From the beginning One Day One Job has been built on top of WordPress. To many it’s simple blogging software, but it’s amazing how far you can take it with a little bit of tweaking. The problem with self-hosted WordPress (as opposed to WordPress.com) is that it requires running your own server. You can find a host that makes it easy to get started, but as soon as your site starts to grow, you’ll run into problem after problem. I used to spend at least a week’s worth of workdays every year worrying about server stuff (downtime, optimization, security, and all kinds of other details). That all changed when I moved my sites to WP Engine. They are an Austin, TX based company that “host tens of thousands of the 75 million WordPress sites and apps on Earth.” I’ve had almost zero downtime since I switched, but more importantly, I no longer worry about my server configuration (and I’m even paying less than I used to for hosting).
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People are completely irrational when it comes to travel deals. Sometimes it means wasting an entire day of a five day trip in some random airport (in the opposite direction of where you’re headed) to save a hundred bucks. Other times it means spending hours looking for the best fare only to end up paying more than if you had booked right away. It’s almost become a sport–even really rich people do this–and that’s why travel websites are such a great business. You can get a ton of attention for only saving people a few bucks. Smarter Travel Media is a Boston, MA based company that has developed “a unique group of online travel planning brands” that cater to the massive number of people who gain immense pleasure from getting the best fare or rate. The brands include Airfarewatchdog, BookingBuddy, Tingo, OneTime, Smarter Travel, and SniqueAway.
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Nearly every Internet business needs to either buy or sell traffic to make a profit. Companies like Google and Facebook are the ultimate traffic sellers, while companies like Amazon, Expedia, and GEICO are massive traffic buyers. (There are some companies like Ask.com that do both and play the arbitrage game.) Companies on both sides of the transaction are always looking for a new edge. For traffic buyers, they want cheaper, higher quality clicks. For the sellers, it’s all about finding new ways to get users to click. Taboola is a New York, NY based company that serves both parties quite well. Put not all that simply, “publishers, marketers, and agencies leverage Taboola to retain users on their site, monetize their traffic and distribute their content to drive high quality audiences.” Taboola’s tagline is “content you may like.” I find that interesting, because the average Internet user won’t ever realize that he or she is interacting with Taboola.
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I remember when social media was a great way for upstarts to get a lot of attention. It wasn’t that long ago, and it’s still possible, but we’re already at the point where big brands dominate social. Why did this happen so quickly? Because brands can afford to throw big bucks at expensive agencies to do social for them. One of these agencies is BLITZ, a Santa Monica, CA based company that makes “brands Favorites by building digital ecosystems that result in durable connections between brands and consumers.” And when they say brands, they mean BRANDS. We’re talking Nike, Dell, Adobe, Starbucks, Red Bull, Disney, Microsoft, and lots more.
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I find Flo from Progressive pretty irritating, but I think that’s kind of the point. The car insurance business is all about branding, and that means getting a name to stick in your head. The fact that you probably know who Flo is is proof enough that brand advertising works even if it’s annoying (though I know some of you are screaming, “But it doesn’t affect which company I buy my insurance from!”). While big brands often have big advertising budgets, they need an exceptional agency to generate a strong ROI on those budgets. I’d say that Arnold Worldwide is an exceptional agency. Not only is the Boston, MA based agency behind Progressive’s Flo campaign, but they also have done work for Jack Daniels, New Balance, Surfrider Foundation, and Volvo. Clients like those demand great work, and that’s exactly what Arnold Worldwide has produced for them.
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I’ve been dabbling in social media marketing since social media became a buzzword. I’ve typically been disappointed by the results. I’ve learned that it’s harder than it looks (and that most people don’t want to be social about their job search–which is why we built GIF Me a Job). The prospect of having millions of people telling their friends how awesome you are is pretty tempting, but it’s just not going to happen for most businesses. There are certainly exceptions, and many of them are major brands. When you already have millions of customers, it’s a lot easier (but still really hard) to truly engage them through social channels. SocialCode is a Washington, DC based “social marketing solutions provider” that “builds targeted communities, engages those audiences and converts them to customers and evangelists for leading global brands.”
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Yesterday we took a look at View The Space and how they’re changing the commercial real estate business. Today we’re going to talk about the kind of real estate that you’re more familiar with: residential real estate. While I was looking for a new apartment, I did most of my searching online (though walking around the neighborhood that you want to live and looking for For Rent signs is an underrated tactic). While Zillow was my preferred searching tool, I ended up on Trulia a lot. In case you’ve never used it, Trulia is a site that “displays more than 4.5 million real estate and rental listings nationwide.” The company is based in San Francisco, CA and also has offices in New York, NY and Denver, CO. They’re only about 9 years old, but they’ve grown to nearly 500 employees and are already publicly traded.
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There are certain “brands” that I follow on Facebook that could be in my feed constantly, and I wouldn’t get annoyed. There’s my dog breeder, my favorite fishing lodge, and Bonobos. They don’t really need to advertise to me–they just need to keep posting content. But most brands are going to have to be smart about how they reach me; otherwise, I’ll ignore them. How can they be smart? By using the data they have on me to deliver perfectly targeted ads. GraphScience is a company that helps brands do this. They are based in Palo Alto, CA, and they “leverage the social graph to generate revenue and optimize marketing spend on Facebook.” I will never get as excited about an ad as I will about a video of my soon to be puppy, but I know that brands can do better than what they’re doing now.
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Everybody thinks that they need a revolutionary, unique idea to start a business. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s often much better to do something well than to do something new. That thought has been reinforced by reading about Beyond Spots & Dots. They’re a Pittsburgh, PA based “full service advertising agency dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients.” They’ve only been around since 2006, but they saw 151% three-year growth between 2008 and 2011 to $3 million in revenue. There are probably thousands of agencies in the U.S. that offer similar services, and even dozens or hundreds in Pittsburgh, yet Beyond Spots & Dots has still found a path to growth.
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If you’re taking your job search seriously, you’ve probably read at least one article that advised you to start monitoring your personal brand online. Most people who spend time doing this face the sad reality that nobody is talking about them. Still, it’s nice to get a notification when your name does pop up. For many brands this kind of tracking is a necessity. The tools that you or I might use can’t keep up with the volume, and that’s why Brandwatch has grown so quickly. They’re a Brighton, UK based company with a growing New York, NY office that is “all about monitoring what people say about your brand, products, competitors, industry or any related topics.” If someone is saying it on a publicly accessible website, they’ll find it.
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When social media marketing first started getting serious attention, I was all about it. SEO had been huge in helping me grow this site, so I thought that social would be the next big thing. But as I started working on using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites to drive traffic, I realized how ineffective they were. I’ve recently decided to give social another shot because I see a lot of companies making it work for them (though I fear that the Careers space will never be as social as it should be). Most companies that take social seriously use a platform “to measure, engage and advertise across social media.” Unified is a New York, NY, San Francisco, CA, and Chicago, IL based company that offers exactly such a platform. Unified’s software is especially focused on “activating social audiences and impacting consumer actions.”
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Amy and I are headed to Japan for our honeymoon, but not yet. We decided to take short, domestic trip to relax after the wedding, and we’ll do the real honeymoon sometime early next year. Japan isn’t the most traditional destination for a romantic trip, but we’re excited by the prospect of experiencing a country that is radically different in terms of culture, but relatively similar economically. While experiencing the difference between Eastern and Western culture makes for a great adventure, it can be a huge business challenge. btrax is a San Francisco, CA based company that helps clients overcome those challenges as a “cross‐cultural consulting, branding and marketing agency focused on the US and Asian markets.”
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