Marc's Voice

Trying to convince bosses to do the right thing

I’ve had a whole bunch of people tell me recently “how come there aren’t more people using your platform?”

“You’ve got the best platform we’ve seen, yet most of the white label deployments out there are boring and unsatisfying.  Nobody seems to understand the market as well as you do.”

The answer of course is that companies aren’t trying to stay on the cutting edge, create compelling experiences or do the right thing. They’ve been told they need a social network and so that’s what they’re paying for - a  simple, stripped down ghost town which will probably never succeed.

Risk is something to be avoided. Changing people’s lives is not on their agenda.  Achieving the goals of the entity or brand is.

I used to answer that it’s all about “marketing” and “sales” - but I’m getting tired of being polite.

If the client isn’t smart enough to do the right thing, what can we do?  I try and argue allot, but then I get branded “a whacko” who doesn’t know how to do sales or handle enterprise clients.

I try and soft sell them and once in a while that works, but in general we can only build what our clients and customers pay us to build.

As I always say “you can be the world’s greatest saxophone player, but yet if you’re standing on the street corner it doesn’t matter“.  So getting distribution, being at the right place at the right time and insider connects often means more to closing a sale - then being the best platform around.

We’ve always been a technology driven company.

We stand by our product, it’s features and our ability to give the market what WE think are the best capabilities and we offer growth and innovation where it counts.

But not surprisingly that doesn’t seem to factor in much when bosses consider which vendor to choose.  The smart ones do, but often we’re not talking about the smartest cookies around.

We get a llot of customers coming to us AFTER they’ve been burned by FiveAcross or LiveWorld or others.  There are a LOT of hustlers out there selling snake oil and just ’cause a company gets bought by Cisco does not make their platform good or even stable.

I think this is why VCs don’t like the while labeling business.  After abandoning consumer facing apps in the early part of this decade, VCs discovered Web 2.0 and viral effect.  It meant they no longer had to hire an enterprise sales team, wait out long sales cycle and cater to bosses who often - well lets just say “their criteria for choosing solutions and partners isn’t always based upon “best quality product or service”.

So we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place.

Should we expend huge costs to develop a sales team, and hire folks who CAN play the six month sales cycle game, suck up to enterprise IT guys and do whatever it takes to close a sale? That’s the land of white labeling we’re in today.

Or do we cater to the fickle tastes of the TechCrunch 50k (which now more like the Techcrunch 750k) and go down the  route of the never ending game of influencing early adopters - on the other side.  And even if you DO launch, create a hit and provide compelling experiences and change the world - what’s the business model?

Banner ads?

Why do you think Marc Andreessen turns down customers and sends them email responses?  They refuse to TOUCH customers.  That’s their whole model - put up templates and let them eat cake.  Ning has no intention of EVER dealing with customers directly.

But it’s the high touch, hand holding and customization work that defines what white labeling is all about. That’s why Ning is NOT a white label service. I call it a ‘meta-network’.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with folks getting templates and paying $20 a month.

But there are a whole lot of other ways to do social networking that Ning.  That’s what we do.

Clearly targeted advertising is coming, I believe folks will PAY for great tools and advanced features and more and more we’ll see affiliate relationships and mutual back scratching come into play - as traffic flow and linkage become the commodity of choice.

But right now - we’re still in this “sure sir how can I help you” mode - and that means we have to give them what THEY think they want.  Not necessarily what is the right thing to do.

Now that we can move user’s profile and social graph between sites - we can offer our customers features that make sense - but I also warn them “it’s a two-way street”.

“Just as easily as these potential customers of yours can leave some other site - or at least take a copy of their info and bring it into your site - they can leave YOUR site and go somewhere else”.  Its the level playing field of the open mesh that we’re moving towards and it’s vendors like Broadband Mechanics that have to educate and navigate this future path - for OUR customers.

And maybe THAT’s what really differentiates Broadband Mechanics and PeopleAggregator.   Our honesty in educating our customers as to “how to do the right thing“.  I think that’s called ‘consulting and marketing services‘.