Carrier billing doesn’t have the hype of digital wallets or NFC, but it’s still a pretty convenient way to tackle mobile payments. After all, why enter a new set of credentials when you can simply have something added to your cellphone bill?

Payvia, a company that has pushed more than $2 billion through its carrier billing platform, announced today that it has purchased Mogreet, a mobile marketing company that offers text and media messaging for brands. With the acquisition, Payvia will now be able to market products to consumers, as well as offer a way to buy them.

It’s a union that makes a lot of sense, especially since carrier billing is expected to move more towards physical goods over the next few years.

Payvia claims it’s the largest carrier billing firm in the U.S. with a reach of 120 million mobile users. Naturally, Pavyia and Mogreet will integrate their two services as part of the acquisition. Additionally, Payvia says Mogreet’s customers will see mobile video quality double, as well as faster messaging speeds. Mogreet will now have an international reach across North America, Europe, and Asia.

This Boston-based startup provides agencies, brands, media, and retail customers with a platform to publish and effectively distribute content. It has a database of more than 20,000 professional writers that publishers can use to recruit and manage freelancers and keep track of workflow.

“The art of content marketing is in the beauty and quality of the writing itself – its voice and ability to speak to an audience in a personal and compelling way,” the company said on its site. “To excel at the science of web content creation, you need a technology framework to adhere to the 3 Ses of successful content.”

The three in question are “searchable, snackable, and shareable.” Once content is created, Skyword recommends keywords and suggestions for SEO and provides built-in tools for sharing across social media. Skyword also includes analytics so publishers can track marketing and writer performance, social media metrics, and search engine rankings and make editorial decisions accordingly.

Clients include IBM, MarketWatch, and AutoTrader.com. Cox Media Group led this round which will expand the team and help the company meet increasing customer and partner needs, “as content marketing becomes an integral part of brand marketing initiatives.” Skyword was founded in 2010. This brings its total capital raised to $12 million.

Photo Credit: Mike Cogh/Flickr

Working with video rental stores in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Domino’s stamped DVDs with heat-sensitive thermal ink and scented varnish. Since DVDs and Blu-Ray players tend to get hot during operation, the discs warm up throughout the movie. By the time the movies ends and you pull the disc out, you’re both seeing an image of pizza on the DVD … and smelling what you could be tasting.

And, in thermal ink, a message invites you to enjoy your next movie with a “hot and delicious” pizza from Domino’s.

Here’s the video:

That’s simply a brilliant marketing campaign. And a very savvy mixture of both high and very standard technology.

While broadband has killed the video rental store in North America and much of Europe, Brazil’s Internet is not quite so robust, according to the marketing agency that created the campaign for Domino’s. So unless you’re wealthy or in a neighborhood with good Internet, chances are, you’re still using DVDs.

photo credit: bunchofpants via photopin cc

Marqeta blurs the lines between online and offline commerce with its “pay in advance” approach. Consumers make their purchases online through the platform, and Marqeta sends them a free card to swipe when picking up their purchase. Retailers use the platform to offer perks like gifting, loyalty, promotions, cash back offers, charitable donations, and so on. Customers earn rewards as they use their card and Marqeta keeps tracks of all that information in one place. This system saves consumers money and offers retailers a channel for loyalty and marketing campaigns.

“Consumers are challenged with managing multitudes of offers, gift cards, and reward programs along with a lack of meaningful incentive to provide repeat business,” said Jason Gardner, the founder and CEO of Marqeta in an interview. “Retailers struggle to crack the code to easily capture customer loyalty and often need POS installation to run a rewards program, and enterprises are often unable to readily participate in relevant transactions within the payments stream, limiting their opportunities to optimize revenue. Marqeta makes the successful ‘pay-in-advance for your coffee’ Starbucks card model possible for everyone.”

The system works without any new software of hardware at the point-of-sale and requires no cashier training. Through the API and platform, merchants can customize their campaigns with different product uses and features. It is available at nine million locations on the Discover network.

Marqeta also announced today that its +M platform will drive Facebook’s gifting product Cards. Cards are like regular gift cards but work at a range of retailers like Jamba Juice, Olive Garden, Sephora, and Target. The cards can be reloaded and the balance checked from Facebook.

“Gifting is a very unique form of e-commerce, and we thought there was a lot more innovation that could be going on there,” said Gifts creator Lee Linden in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

Marqeta claimed in a statement issued this morning that the gift card space is worth $115 billion, but that merchants face significant challenges maintaining consumer relationships once the gift cards are issued. By requiring users to register on Marqeta, retailers can convert their loyalty campaigns into a “true marketing and engagement engine.”

This funding will go towards forming new national partnerships, “aggressively” expand its footprint, and contribute to product development. Existing investors Greylock IL and Granite Ventures participated in this round, along with new investor Commerce Ventures. Marqeta was founded in 2010 and has raised $22 million to date. The company has 37 employees and is based in Emeryville, Calif.

William Griggs is marketing communications manager at Mass Relevance and host of The Startup Slingshot podcast.

The second annual Growth Hacker Conference in San Francisco, run by Gagan Biyani and Erin Turner, features some of the smartest growth hackers from the world’s biggest tech companies, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. Collectively, the products they’ve worked on have acquired billions of users/customers and created loads of value for customers and investors alike. The conference happened last week, and videos of speakers should be available on Udemy in the near future, but I wanted to share what I leaned in the meantime. (And if you attended, I encourage you to share what you learned in the comments at the bottom of the post.)

Below are six key lessons I took away from the conference:

1) Order of operations is paramount

As in math, order of operations is important in growing your company and acquiring customers. Executing tactics, programs, and campaigns in the wrong order or with the wrong goal can be disastrous. In his keynote, Khosla Ventures investor Keith Rabois shared the optimal order for growing a tech startup he learned during stints at Square, Slide, and Linkedin. Here’s the order of operations:

1. Develop a product
2. Iterate & establish your product’s value
3. Grow your customer base
4. Experiment with growth hacking

2) The path to growth follows a process

In order to follow the plan Keith laid out in his keynote, you will need a better understanding of what growth looks and how to achieve it. In his talk, Sean Ellis, CEO of Qualaroo shared the phases of growth that he learned while working with Dropbox, Eventbright, Xobni, and LogMeIn helping to grow their customer base. Also, check out this blog post for more info. But just to break it down, here’s the path to growth:

1. Product/Market Fit
2. Transition To Growth
3. Growth

3) Sustainable company value only comes from real user-engagement

When most people think of growth hacks they think of short-term tactics that drive large spikes in key metrics like usage or customers. While these short-term tactics help drive startups, Greg Tseng, CEO of Tagged explained that sustainable company value is all about real user engagement. In short, focus on tactics that increase real user-engagement, not vanity metrics.

4) You can validate your product in under 48 hours

Noah Kagan of AppSumo challenged the audience to figure out ways to validate businesses like Square and AirBnB in under 48 hours. After a lively conversation with seat neighbors, audience members shared ways they could validate each business, proving it could be done without any coding, design, and in most cases money. He followed this challenge by urging the audience to see if they could make their first dollar with the business idea they’ve been noodling on. Also, Kagan put together this handy resource outlining this topic that’s worth checking out.

5) Inception is not just a movie, it’s a growth hacking strategy

Josh Elman, Principal at Greylock, knows growth and shared his learnings from his time at Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter with the audience by outlining a three step framework (Purpose, Inception, Adoption) for growing a startup’s customer base. While Purpose is fairly straight forward, Josh spent a good bit of time elaborating on the concept of Inception. This step covers how you make people aware of your product and the problem it solves. In his talk, Josh emphasized you need to train people to get the most out of your solution by spreading the right messages via your product (think how you can optimize your signup flow) and external communication like press (what story you are telling).

6) There are 3 ways to optimize for growth

Many marketers find it easy to get bogged down in how and where to optimize your product. To make it easy, Elliot Shmukler of WealthFront revealed three ways you optimize your product. Opportunities to optimize include:

1. Reduce Friction — Make stuff easier to do
2. Increase Incentives — Sprinkle in social proof and do a better job at communicating your products value
3. Increase Exposure — Ask people to high value tasks in your product more often, more prominently, or in more places

Conclusion:

Overall, I enjoyed the conference and I appreciate all the work that went into this event by both the speakers and the conference organizers. Their hard work paid off.

Top photo credit: Jim Scheinman/Twitter

William Griggs is obsessed with helping startups acquire customers. Currently, he is spends his time helping Mass Relevance (Austin, Texas) scale their marketing operations and acquire customers. In addition to his work helping startups, William writes about his experience for publications like VentureBeat, Mashable, ReadWrite, and Under30CEO. He also hosts The Startup Slingshot, a podcast that delivers actionable advice to startup founders.

SendUs launched out of stealth mode today and revealed  that it is backed by $17 million in funding. The company provides a video submission and management platform so brands can use video content created by fans to their own advantage.

“SendUs was founded to address the needs of brands to tell better, more engaging stories along with their consumers,” said executive chairman George Crowley in an email. “Consumers and brands alike care about co-creation and one-dimensional brand messages are no longer impactful. ‘Likes’ and retweets are hardly real engagement. When considered against the opportunity for more authentic content created by the like of YouTube, brands can no longer ignore the need to loop their audiences into marketing and programming.”

According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, 80 percent of consumers are interested in being involved in projects with brands they love, however less than 1 out of 5 companies are actually involving consumers. The SendUs platform lets brands sent out a call for content from their audience. People upload content from their phones, computers, and social media. They transfer the media use rights to the brand, which can then review and publish it. SendUs automatically adds the brand’s watermark to the content so it is integrated with other marketing efforts. Enterprise brands, small businesses, creative agencies, non profits, and other organizations can use the SendUS widget and API for added customization.

SendUs was founded in 2012 and has worked with brands like FremantleMedia (creators of American Idol), Singapore Airlines, Peugeot, Nextel International, Sierra Club, and the Susan G. Komen foundation. Today, it made its public debut and revealed a hefty $17 million from private investors. It is based in Los Angeles

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Sales professionals rely on phone calls for making connections, following up on leads, and closing deals. RingDNA released a voice communications platform today that provides sales reps with relevant, contextual data when they need it to make the most of their sales calls. The company also announced raising a $1.9 million seed round.

This iPhone app integrates with Salesforce, Twilio, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and company news feeds. When a call comes in, RingDNA delivers CRM data, social media activity, and behavioral marketing information to eliminate “blind spots” and give reps “actionable business opportunities” in real time.

“Sales reps spend most of their day making and taking calls, but existing mobile CRM apps do little to improve those conversations,” said CEO Howard Brown in an interview. “We don’t see anyone addressing the fact that phone calls and surrounding data are the center of a sales reps’ world. Reps want to know as much as they can about their prospects. Our app focuses on helping enterprise sales reps close more deals by delivering sales intelligence data before, during and after any call.”

RingDNA is not the only startup addressing the demand for data in today’s business environment. Base and Close.io provide comparable products, but Brown said they require switching to a new CRM while RingDNA integrates with existing ones. There are also other products that focus on email, and RingDNA’s approach is “intelligent telephony,” which focuses on the phone as the hub of activity.

Brown previously founded a marketing consultancy called DemandResults and observed the challenges his clients had integrating call metrics from marketing, sales, and service centers into their workflow. Furthermore, he said over 40 percent of sales reps fail to hit their quotas each year. He wanted to build a way to get the right call data to the right person at the right time and improve sales performance as a result.

RingDNA presents users with contacts’ past account history, previous communications, and social data as well as activities from Salesforce. The calls are automatically logged and recorded and the resulting data collected. Executives and marketers can access performance metrics through a dashboard and track what percentage if revenue is closed over the phone, how many inbound calls became leads, and call volume by campaign, channel, or region.

The app was first released to beta testers in August. RingDNA raised $1.9 million from angel investors including people from Salesforce, DropBox, CloudConnect, LeaseStar, Appirio, and Propertyware. Customers include Optimizely, Appirio, and Lease Advisors.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by Katie Hollar, marketing manager at software research site Capterra.

Many companies are adopting marketing automation each day. But they aren’t necessarily changing their marketing habits as a result. So, is this new technology just enabling marketers to essentially spam people?

The current answer is yes, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

In recent years, the marketing automation software industry has exploded in popularity, and it’s become one of the fastest growing segments in the enterprise software space. For instance, the term “marketing automation” has had more Google searches in the beginning months of 2013 than it has at any other point over the past three years. And even on my company Capterra’s site, where millions of people come to search for business software each year, organic traffic for marketing automation software has grown by more than 20 percent year-over-year.

But according to a recent study by iContact, 56 percent of businesses say they plan to increase their use of email marketing in 2013, and on average, they only plan to grow their email lists by 28 percent this year.

So, more companies are buying marketing automation software, and as a result, they’re sending more emails more frequently. But their list of subscribers isn’t growing nearly as quickly as their email sending habits (actually, it’s shrinking at a faster rate due to people unsubscribing).

All this suggests that marketing automation is nothing but a glorified spamming engine. In fact, when I recently explained to my family what I typically do at work, several said, “Oh, so you SPAM people?”

“No,” I protested. “They’re opted-in! These people want to hear from us; they’ve found us through search and other inbound channels, and then filled out a form. Marketing automation just allows us to respond to them more efficiently.”

Despite my best efforts, they didn’t really understand how that was any different than spam. Which is precisely the problem.

To marketers like me, marketing automation has been a glorious solution to our problems. We (and by “we” I mean the general marketing community) knew all along that we shouldn’t be sending batch and blast emails to our entire email database, but without the time to segment lists, A/B test messaging, and send one-off emails the moment someone fills out a form, we were forced to just send out the blasts (and wrestle with the morality of that on our own time). With the advent and adoption of marketing automation software, all those pent-up ideas of how we should be sending emails were suddenly made possible. So we took advantage of the technology and started sending a lot of them.

But to consumers like my family members, the fact that we can now send emails with personalized messaging and specially-tailored offers the moment someone lands on our website doesn’t negate the fact that, at the end of the day, we’re sending them more emails.

Marketers need to catch up to the true capabilities of marketing automation technology, instead of using the technology to catch up on their marketing. We could be using marketing automation to send the same emails we sent before, but at a more relevant time, with more relevant content, and with more emphasis on the prospect. What we’re doing instead is sending the same old batch and blast emails from before, plus all the new, custom-tailored ones we wanted to send all along.

Fellow marketers, let’s agree to put an end to this before it gets too out of hand. Together, we can harness the powers of marketing automation software for good and not evil.

Katie Hollar is marketing manager at software research site Capterra and frequently blogs about B2B marketing.

Businessman sending email via ra2studio/Shutterstock

Entrepreneur and former journalist Courtney Boyd Myers [above] has launched an agency, dubbed Audience.io, to help young businesses with their digital marketing efforts as they move across the pond. More specifically, Audience.io will provide strategy around media and content, business development, and product management.

The new transatlantic agency is tailored to tech startups that are on the cusp of international expansion.

“The London startup scene is just getting to the point of growth where companies are looking at international expansion,” Boyd Myers explained in a phone interview.

Boyd Myers has seen startups struggle with relocation on both sides of the Atlantic. She built her personal brand as the East Coast editorial director for tech blog TheNextWeb, and worked as the London-based director for online course startup General Assembly.

Boyd Myers currently lives in the UK, but frequently travels to New York, and sees areas of cultural overlap between the two cities. ”Silicon Valley might be the obvious choice [for startups looking to expand], but I see potential for a cool, connected ecosystem between London or New York,” she said.

Audience.io has secured two clients (MakeShift.io was the first customer) and has brought on TakeOut’s founder and CEO Judith Clegg as an advisor. TakeOut is a global consulting firm that works with large brands, and will provide office space to the Audience.io team.

Audience.io is a self-funded effort, and Boyd Meyers said she does not intend to raise venture financing.

Admit it: You’ve thought about dabbling in affiliate marketing. After all, who wouldn’t want to make an extra buck by sharing a few products on their blog or Twitter?

But unless you’re an Internet superstar, chances are you won’t end up making much from traditionally low-commission affiliate programs. Amazon’s program, for example, starts at just 4 percent for purchases (you can earn more with digital download commissions).

New York City-based Consignd believes it has a better solution. Instead of dealing with an online retailer’s affiliate program, Consignd lets you create your own storefront to show off cool products. You can also easily pin items from your storefront to your Pinterest account (no surprise there as Pinterest is incredbly popular for e-commerce).

Much like Fab and other online shopping sites, Consignd has drop-shipping relationships with companies and their brands, which means orders come directly from the manufacturer. The big benefit to that: Higher commissions for you.

“By taking the retailer out of the equation, we never hold any inventor risk,” said Luke Sherwin, Consignd’s cofounder and operations head, in an interview with VentureBeat. Since it took out the middle man, Consignd sees a surprisingly high margin of 40 to 45 percent with a typical brand relationship, which lets it offer its users commissions between 20 and 25 percent.

Consigd is a member of Enterpreneur Roundtable Accelerator’s most recent class of startups in New York City. Sherwin and the rest of the Consignd team are feverishly prepping for ERA’s demo day, which is being held tomorrow.

Consignd has certainly come a long way since my initial chat with Neil Parikh, cofounder and head of business development, a few months ago. The company was initially focusing on smaller sellers, like people who offer products on Etsy or sell at local flea markets. Now it’s aiming for “Etsy graduates,” as Sherwin described them, and bigger brands.

Since launching its beta five weeks ago, the company has nabbed 55 brands, including Braun, Soul Bicycles, and WeWod, and has accrued a waiting list of willing partners twice that size. It’s also attracted three of the top 20 Pinterest users, according to Sherwin.

Consignd is currently raising a $750,000 seed round.

Contactually has tools to consolidate and organize all your contacts  across email, address books, social media, and enterprise systems. It automatically prompts you to follow up with important people and provides contextual reminders about your previous conversations.

“We want to make it really really easy for people in referral-based businesses to stay in touch with people in their network,” said founder and COO Tony Cappaert in an interview. “Right now, contacts are scattered everywhere, and people who don’t do a great job of staying in touch miss valuable opportunities. We essentially tell them every day who they should be talking to. This update will take that to a whole new level.”

Customers include freelancers, real estate agents, financial advisers, and others who have large and distributed networks and bring in business by reaching out to people. Cappaert claims that right now, Contactually’s customers are able to generate 12 percent to 15 percent more referrals, which translates into a “ton of money.” With the new features, he seeks to raise that 20 percent ceiling to 30 percent.

The second generation of Contactually includes five major updates. It has a tool to perform more efficient introductions, email templates that make it easier to send messages, and a content-sharing tool for saving and sharing relevant articles. Another new feature is personalized group messaging; the company says you can use it contact a large number of people in seconds without seeming impersonal. Contactually also released an iPhone application that imports phone contacts, logs calls, and provides mobile access to the system.

Contactually closed a seed round of $1 million in March of this year from Point Nine Capital, Boston Seed Capital, and 500 Startups. The company is based in Washington, D.C.

Photo Credit: Contactually

The technology converts digital content into affiliate links. Brands or publishers can then earn money through affiliate marketing without making much of an effort. The company’s SkimLinks product turns normal links into affiliate links, while SkimWords uses natural language processing to detect product references in the text and direct people to where they can buy them.

“We are the only technology in the world that can detect granular product references in content, in real time across multiple verticals, and link them accurately to the most relevant retailer of that product,” the company said on its site.

Skimlinks has a network of 140,000 active publishers and 17,000 affiliate programs. According to a statement issued this morning, Skimlinks generates seven-figure revenues each month from its network and processes 300 million clicks per month. Clients include Conde Nast, Gawker, AOL Europe, WordPress, Hearst Digital, Amazon, and eBay. The company anticipates it will drive $500 million of e-commerce sales globally in 2013.

The amount of this round is undisclosed, but the company says it will use the funds to build out its products and expand into Asia. Along with the funding announcement, SkimLinks’ Japanese-language website went live this morning.

Greycroft Partners led this round — its portfolio includes other ad tech and online publishing startups including Buddy Media, Klout, and the Huffington Post. A group of Japanese angel investors also participated, along with Forum Foundry and existing investors. Skimlinks previously raised $7.02 million, closing its second round of institutional financing in November 2011.

SkimLinks was founded in 2007. It has 55 employees, with headquarters in London and offices in San Francisco and New York. It will open operations in Asia this year.

Photo Credit: Shiraz Chakera/Flickr

Swipp, the much-hyped app for sharing your opinions, has nabbed an additional $2 million in funding.

Swipp’s app asks you to share your opinions

After emerging from stealth mode in June 2012, Swipp has marketed its app to consumers. Sign up via Facebook to share with other Swipp fans (and brands) how you feel about products, news, and other topics. You can also access a real-time stream if you’re simply curious about what people think.

With its new infusion of funding, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company also announced the launch of “Swipp Plus,” a new business offering. Brands can pay to access relevant data; for instance, a major retailer might be interested to learn about how customers are reacting to its new spring line.

I downloaded the free app and gave it a try. The experience felt a bit awkward — I don’t personally know many of the folks on my Swipp stream — and frankly, don’t really care what they think about a scene from Die Hard. But Swipp is betting that most people love to share and that this information will prove useful to big brands.

Moreover, the data brands are collecting from Facebook and Twitter is often unstructured and scattered. So Swipp may have a real opportunity to pull in revenues if it can reach a critical mass of consumers.

Brands like Macy’s or McDonald’s can use the app to pinpoint top influencers — those who frequently “Swipp” their products. The company says marketers can also use the app to keep tabs on the competition and track how their products are perceived over time.

A Swipp Plus dashboard for brands

Swipp is hoping you’ll use the app as an alternative to — or alongside — Facebook and Twitter.

“We look at social as it is today as version 1.0. It’s really just the first instance,” Swipp CEO and co-founder Don Thorson told VentureBeat in a recent interview. “What kind of applications would the world come up with if you had everyone persistently connected on the globe?”

Swipp isn’t the only app that is gauging consumer sentiment. Knotch uses a color scale (as opposed to Swipp’s smiley face) and asks consumers to express how they feel about anything from the latest Game of Thrones episode to their experience at the gym. Likewise, Knotch intends to make money by helping brands target consumers. ”For marketers, this data is really valuable,” Knotch’s CEO Anda Gansca said in a recent interview.

This new infusion of cash brings Swipp’s total funding to $5.5 million. Venture firm Old Willow Partners lead the previous funding round.

Specifically, this strategy led to growing Udemy consistently 20 percent almost every month for the last few years, helping Lyft’s launch in LA be more successful than San Francisco, and a host of other successes that are not yet public.

What made us more effective than other growth hackers? We applied lean startup methodology to marketing (“Lean Marketing”). Of course, we’re not the only ones to do this, but somehow the art of customer development has been largely lost in the fad that is growth hacking.

To be an effective marketer, you can’t just be great at running and analyzing large swaths of data. That’s table stakes these days. Everyone knows how to A/B test, what the cost/benefits of each channel is, what viral marketing is, and the basics of LTV/CAC analysis.

With all of our obsession over quantitative (“performance”) marketing, we’ve forgotten one of the core ideas of building brands. Brands are built by understanding the customer. The better you understand the customer, the better you are at everything growth hacking:

• Copy and calls to action are more compelling. You pick words that convert the highest because you understand why customers will buy your product and what triggers their curiosity to learn more.
• Images convert better. You know who your customer is, what they look like, and what they’re attracted to.
• Better channels. You understand what your customer reads, where they eat, and who they follow on Twitter.
• Improved targeting. You’ll be able to create personas of your ideal target customers and use those to build better targeting on your ad spend.

The problem is that most growth hackers spend too much time in spreadsheets and not enough time out of the building. They obsess over numbers and prefer to work behind a screen. That’s a necessary skill set for effectively building viral loops and optimizing performance marketing campaigns, but it is not enough. Even the best marketers could be better if their initial tests were better. Say you have 50 ideas for copy that could work on a Facebook ad. How much time would it take to A/B test all 50 ideas? How much money?

What if instead, I could tell you what the top five of those ideas were with a reasonable level of reliability? All of a sudden, I’ve saved almost all that money and a hell of a lot of time. The best marketers know how to pick those five, and you can be one of the best too. Just get to know your customers better.

What’s the best way to know your customer? Meet them. Go out and do real user research — just like UX designers or lean startup entrepreneurs. Steve Blank, Eric Ries and Janice Fraser provided us with an incredibly good framework by which to do said research. Apply the same thing to marketing.

Three methods for success:

1. Interview your customer. Get out of the building and pick up the phone. Talk to your customers — at least five of them — and make sure they are fairly representative of your user base or target market (I usually find that after five, it’s repetitive).
2. Pitch your customer in person. Take what you learned from step 1 and start testing copy by pitching customers in person. If you are a food app, set up shop at a farmer’s market. If you are a payments company, go pitch startup entrepreneurs at a tech event. Whatever you’re selling, go to where people are buying and convince them. Iterate on your pitch constantly, and by the end of the day you’ll have an incredible understanding of your prospective user. This is often faster and far more cost-effective than A/B testing. Now you have a shortlist of amazing phrases that you can then A/B test the shit out of online.
3. Repeat periodically to “refresh” your understanding and test new ideas. Just like with Lean UX or Lean Startup, this process doesn’t end. It continues indefinitely — you and your team should constantly be bringing in users to interview them and understand their motivations for buying.

Ultimately, marketing is part art and part science. As a startup community, we’ve done a great job recently of perfecting the science. However, the best marketers are good at both. You can be too; just get out of the damn building.

Gagan Biyani is an entrepreneur and growth hacker. He co-hosts with Erin Turner the Growth Hackers Conference, which is on May 3, 2013 in San Francisco. Also, he has led marketing at marketplace startups Lyft and Udemy. You can follow him on twitter: @gaganbiyani.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We’ll drive 2.8 miles for a sandwich, but 7.1 miles for a great Italian restaurant. And while we may only go 3.6 miles for a coffee shop, we’ll easily go almost nine miles for just the right mall.

Nagivation services company Telenav knows a little bit about what people will drive for — and when it’s worth showing hyper-local ads to them.

Powering navigation apps like Scout for iPhone and running its own advertising team gives Telenav billions of monthly data points on ads and services that people will drive for. The company has summarized that data in a new report, unveiled today.

“Location is an extremely powerful tool for targeting mobile ads, but most advertisers are still applying a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to location targeting,” Eli Portnoy, Scout Advertising GM said in a statement. “For example, I live in Los Angeles and it makes no sense to show me an ad for coffee in Pasadena because I will never drive the nine miles it would take me to get there. That would take me over an hour.”

One size especially doesn’t fit all when you look at different cities.

While shoppers in Dallas, Seattle, and California’s Bay Area routinely drive between 7-8.5 miles for shopping, New Yorkers and Chicagoans drive few than five. And in San Diego, car owners travel on 2.7 miles for gas, while Houston drivers almost need a top-up station on the way to the gas bar, driving 7.1 miles, on average, to fill ‘er up.

All of which data needs to inform your local marketing strategy.

Here’s all the information, in visual form:

Image credits: Telenav

Clearly, those BlackBerry users are far too busy working.

While social and search are obviously critical for digital marketers, email marketing continues to rank as one of the highest return-on-investment activities that marketers do. However, where we read and respond to our email is changing as mobile devices penetrate farther into our lives and our work.

Today, about 75 percent of us read and answer email on our phones in addition to — or instead of — our computers.

Marketing automation firm GetResponse, which offers email marketing services for companies like iStockPhoto, the Blue Man Group, and Men’s Health, recently studied how to optimize email for mobile. And it turns out that companies that learn to deliver email that’s better formatted for mobile get up to 30 percent higher open rates.

So, how do you optimize for mobile?

Some of the information is fairly obvious to long-time marketers: Keep it simple, keep it short, use large enough fonts so consumers can see your content on a small handheld device, kill the Flash animations, and so on. But interestingly, GetResponse says that iPhone users open rates are almost double Android users and an astonishing 73 times higher than BlackBerry owners. Which means that you need to know what devices your customers own and adapt your strategies accordingly.

Here’s all the data in visual form:

photo credit: marimoon via photopin cc

Shift begs to differ.

“We’re bringing the market alternative to the closed, rigid marketing cloud that Adobe and Salesforce have created,” Shift CEO James Borow told me yesterday. “If you look at their marketing clouds, it’s really only about companies they’ve acquired and built. But the problem is, as the market moves, you really can’t acquire or build companies fast enough.”

The concept of a marketing cloud is a interoperable suite of tools that together provide the digital marketer — and today, is there any other kind? — everything they need to find, understand, attract, engage, monitor, communicate, and track consumers, fans, and customers.

Today, that’s largely about search and social.

So what Shift has done is assemble what Borow considers an all-star cast of digital marketing tools together in one platform. It’s not buying them all and not integrating them all into one inseparable suite, but making them all available in one environment, with a certain amount of interoperability, data share, and single sign in.

“Ultimately, we’re trying to break down these silos of communication,” Burrow says.

Today, those tools include:

• Aggregate Knowledge (media buying intelligence platform)
• Convertro (conversion-tracking and ROI optimization)
• Curalate (marketing and analytics for Pinterest and Instagram)
• Expion (social media management)
• Fan Appz (personalized social media marketing)
• Kenshoo (search and social ad tools)
• Moontoast (rich media social ad creation)
• Offerpop (social media marketing campaign platform)
• Optimal Analytics (Facebook advertising and analytics)
• SocialFlow (conversion tool for Twitter and Facebook)
• The Trade Desk (online media buying platform)
• GraphEffect (social advertising)

Shift has brought all these tools together within one network with its own graph, somewhat analogous to Facebook’s social graph, that tracks marketing actions and attention-needed data points within each tool and provides that data in a social-network style feed.

In other words, yes, sort of like Facebook for your marketing campaign.

Source: Shift

Shift marketing cloud

The result is that all the members of your marketing team, whether internal, freelance, or at an agency, can visit the site and see what’s happening with your marketing campaign in a simple, linear view. The site incorporates a permissioning model so that people in different roles see appropriate information, and many of the updates are generated by the tools you’re using themselves.

So, what’s the cost?

“Shift is totally free,” Borow says. “And Shift will always be free.”

You can sign into Shift, create teams, invite colleagues, and go to the “app store” to install marketing apps. If you have existing accounts with them, they’ll just automatically sync up and you can use those tools within Shift’s collaboration network. If you don’t and you do happen to sign up to a new tool, Shift will take a small revshare from that transaction.

“Today, we feel like we have a really competitive stack against all the other marketing clouds,” Borow told me, adding that Shift will be adding new tools and companies on a quarterly basis. “The enterprise to date has focused on closed systems, but our thesis is that closed systems end up less dynamic and less competitive.”

That may be so, and there’s a lot in Shift’s open marketing cloud.

But there’s also so work remaining to be done. Integration between the participating apps is a little slim right now, with some integrations requiring developer work. Customer relationship management is perhaps the most obvious gap at the moment, especially considering that is natively to Salesforce clients. All of which is coming, Borow said.

And, as the company adds more tools to the toolbox, the solution will become more compelling with time.

photo credit: gordonr via photopin cc

Tealium has raised $15.6 million of growth capital to fuel product development, customer operations, and go-to-market resources. The company provides enterprise businesses with tools to deploy and manage tags across multiple channels. Using the platform, marketers can more effectively manage customer interactions and data to optimize their online presence.

Over the past few months, Tealium launched Tealium DataCloud, a digital data platform that consolidates consumer interaction data; released major updates; launched a new tag management delivery network; held two customer initiatives, including a tag management training program; and opened a new headquarters in San Diego.

This third round of funding follows a successful first quarter of revenue, sales, and customer growth. Tealium now has more than 250 businesses including Petco, Lenovo, A+E Networks, Mattel, Fox Networks Group, Urban Outfitters, Nokia, NHL, Sony Online Entertainment. Tenaya Capital, Battery Ventures, and Presidio Ventures contribute to the round, bringing Tealium’s total capital raised to $27 million. Read the press release. 

Photo Credit: Jennifer Nickert/Shutterstock

Peter Shankman is the founder of The Geek Factory and author of “Nice Companies Finish First: Why Cutthroat Management is Out, and Collaboration is In.”

In the 80s, in the days of Michael Milken and Gordon Gekko, the rule on the street was “eat your young.” Nice guys finish last, hold your information, keep the rules to yourself, and win at all costs, no matter who you have to trample.

Today, with the advent of mobile technology and 24-hour-connectivity, those days are long gone. And those who have yet to realize that are on their way to being eliminated. If your company isn’t “nice” from the top down, not only will your profits will suffer, but you’ll actually spend more money on marketing than you have to.

We live in the “sharing era.” People share for two reasons: To share happiness with a slight tinge of smug (oh, check out this photo of the room upgrade the Westin just gave me!) or to share disappointment, with the logic that someone isn’t truly miserable about their situation until they’ve made everyone around them miserable, as well.

(Listen to the cell phone conversations the next time your flight lands three hours late.)

We share more now than ever before simply because we can. Every phone is a broadband ticket to immediacy, with the ability to upload statuses, photos, and videos to the world in real-time.

Thus, want to improve your marketing and drop your costs? Teach your employees to treat their customers one level above crap.

Let’s face it – in addition to being a society of sharers, we’re also a society that expects to be treated like crap. You expect the fast food place to screw up your order, you expect your exit-row window seat to be replaced by a middle seat in the last row of the plane. We expect to be treated like crap, because it’s what customer service has generally become.

But, being nice can change all of that. When the rest of the world treats their customers like crap, treating yours one level above can make all the difference. And it doesn’t even have to be above and beyond (although that’s nice, too) but just one level above.

I walked into a hotel last month, having been delayed four hours in getting there. I had no status at that hotel, and half expected my room to be given away. Instead, I was greeted by name, and offered a hot towel. This wasn’t a five star hotel, it was a regular chain. They’d seen my flight information, and noticed I was late, and took it upon themselves to not only hold my room, but give me a brief sense of relief when I arrived. That hot towel made all the difference, and you can bet that my followers and friends knew about it immediately. That personal recommendation is what will drive new customers.

The key to being nice is focusing on the customers you have, letting them get you the new customers you want. Think about it – if one level above crap results in someone telling their friends how impressed they were, that impression will translate into new customers: “Well, Peter stayed there and really enjoyed it, I’ll go there, too.” This is TRUE marketing, and even more importantly, it’s BELIEVABLE marketing. It comes from a place of trust. This is worth more than any media buy, or any PR firm hit you could ever hope to get.

This works in any industry, whether B2B or B2C. Face it – in B2B, companies don’t buy. Someone at that company does. That’s the person to whom you want to be nice.

And even more importantly, it’s not about sucking up – it’s about treating customers with a level of respect they don’t expect. It’s about training your employees from top down as to why this is important, and most importantly, it’s about giving your front-line employees the ability to do this …explaining to them that you’re empowering them to make the company better and to do little things that go a long way, whether it’s topping off an order with a little something extra at no charge, or upgrading a room to a bigger one because it’s available.

And know this: The ROI you’ll get from these will almost ALWAYS be higher than the margins on the profit you’d make by not doing it.

The call to the enlightened CEO is this: The old “kill your young” way of doing business is over. Without joining this new movement of “nice,” your business will simply fade away. More than ever, consumers have the ability to choose with whom they want to do business. And with those choices being made more and more from the recommendations of those within our personal network, the chances of maintaining the old school “they’ll get it the way we like it” mentality and still keeping your customers is growing slimmer by the day.

The new age of being nice starts with your CEO, and goes down the chain to the front line employees. The last two years of research for my book have proved it: Nice companies really DO finish first.

Peter Shankman is the founder of The Geek Factory, Inc., a Marketing and Customer Service agency with clients worldwide. His third book, “Nice Companies Finish First: Why Cutthroat Management is Out, and Collaboration is in,” hits stores on April 2.

photo credit: BenSpark via photopin cc

Collective Bias has raised $10.5 million for its approach to consumer engagement. This “social shopper media company” connects brands with consumers through its Social Fabric community of 1,400 influencers. These influencers tell “real-life” stories about their shopping experiences and product usage and share them on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The company claims to have an aggregate, multichannel reach of more than 50 million people.

“Collective Bias was founded to create a solution to the challenges posed to shopper marketers by social media,” said founder and CEO John Andrews in an email. “Specifically, we create an alternative to traditional ways brands and retailers have reached shoppers along the path to purchase.  Our goal was to create a predictable social shopper media format that has measurable scale and performance that is superior to existing mediums.”

This marketing method seeks to harness the power of social media and integrate into people’s everyday life, so brand promotion seems more authentic (and hopefully persuasive) than display ads. Clients include Walgreens, Sears, Disney, Nestle, Tyson, and Starbucks. These companies set their parameters for a campaign, and Collective Bias taps the appropriate influencers to generate content about a specific product.

With this first round of funding led by Updata Partners, Collective Bias will work on developing new products to streamline influencer identification, content delivery, and campaign management. It will also grow the Social Fabric community member training and technological support and continue to expand regional offices into NYC, Chicago, Minneapolis, and San Francisco as well as push into Canada and the UK.

Collective Bias is headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, the home of Walmart.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock/Collective Bias

SAN FRANCISCO — Those in the mobile gaming industry, whether developers, publishers, or investors, are at odds about whether Android is a good platform to develop on and whether it will grow.

“Today, I think 26 percent of developers prefer working with Android,” said PlayJam founder Jasper Smith during a panel on the future of mobile gaming today at the Game Developers Conference. “My prediction is in a couple of years, that’s going to be 60 percent.”

Android currently has the most marketshare around the globe in terms of the smartphone market. Because phones are a huge element in the gaming market, anyone who has a smartphone is a potential customer, as Nizar Romdan, the director of ecosystem and media processing division at ARM, noted. It only makes sense that mobile game developers would want to tap into that market.

But not everyone sees Android as a great environment.

“Android is not a great environment — certainly not for graphics. Our programmers loath it,” said Chris Doran, the founder of Geomerics, (which helps developers incorporate light into their games) during the same panel. “We have to do it; it’s pretty dominant. But it’s not good for graphics at all. Google just doesn’t put enough love into it.”

Michael Ludden, the technical marketing manager of Samsung, was quick to point out that people didn’t love developing for iOS at first. But as the tools advanced, so did the love for the platform.

Despite the pain the platforms might cost you, however, the industry experts all seemed to agree that the real cost mobile game developers are going to have to pay attention to is marketing. Because of the app store’s structure, production costs that seem to matter so heavily in console development give way to marketing costs — trying to get your app noticed in the sea that is Google Play or the Apple App Store.

“Just putting your game in the app store isn’t good enough anymore, “said Geomeric’s Doran. “Marketing is unfortunately going to go through the roof.”

Android illustration via Tom Cheredar/VentureBeat

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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SAN FRANCISCO — After looking at a bunch of data points, the gaming community needs to realize three things: Ladies and old people love games; reviews really do dictate your sales; and your game is good — but marketing will make it even better.

Video game research firm EEDAR revealed its latest findings today at the Game Developers Conference and the results may delight and disappoint you.

Let’s start with the delight.

The ladies, and your grandparents, love gaming, too

It seems a little obvious. Of course women are interested in gaming, but the numbers increasingly support this. According to EEDAR’s research, adult women now represent 30 percent of the gaming population. That’s more than the 17-and-younger boys segment.

The amount of female and, in fact, elderly players has significantly increased with the introduction of the smartphone. Indeed, since the smartphone was released, we have nearly reached an equilibrium between 18 and younger players, 19-49 players, and 50-plus players.

Mobile games have done more than bring new types of players into the pastime. They’ve also changed the reason we play games. Overwhelmingly, 60 percent of people who play mobile games do it simply to pass the time. It has moved from an individual activity that you did in your living room and has expanded into the broader world.

“We basically have a gaming device in every single pocket,” said Geoffrey Zatkin, a researcher at EEDAR. “It’s now social acceptable to play games anywhere.”

Got a bad review? Sorry, that really does suck and might affect your bottom line

Unfortunately, that 1-100 review score your game gets really does have an affect on your sales. EEDAR’s study found that games in the 90-100 review-score range sold many more copies than those who scored in any other levels of reviews. Looking at games only released through from each platform’s launch through December 2012 for the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, and the Wii, EEDAR found that only 72 games made it into the 90-100 range. Those games grossed an average of 1,123,000 units sold in their first three months on sale. That’s compared to 454 games that scored an 80-89 review that grossed an average of 449,000 units sold in their first three months.

That’s 382 more games that sold an average of 674,000 fewer units in the same time frame.

EEDAR did a study of three groups of gamers playing PopCap’s casual game, Plants vs. Zombies. They paid everyone $10 apiece and asked each group to read a set of reviews before playing the game — one group read good reviews, one read bad reviews, and the other read a mix (the control group). The results were as expected. Those that read the good reviews all ranked Plants vs. Zombies higher in their own reviews versus the control group and versus the “bad reviews” group.

It got interesting, however, when EEDAR asked each group if they’d rather take the game instead of the payment. Those in the positive group took the game in far greater numbers than those in the negative group, showing that reviews really do affect whether someone is willing to “spend” on a game.

But despite the need to make a really great game, your marketing budget and the timing of your game’s release really could really make the different between a hit and a flop.

Marketing, marketing, marketing = money, money, money

So, you’re about to release a game. You’d better start considering the buzz you want to generate. You have a few ways of doing this: Getting covered in a magazine (see all that review data up there) or a website and buying advertising.

If your game got a bad review, marketing should be your next biggest push.

“Marketing is basically steroids for your games,” said Zatkin.

But marketing is dominated by the big guys — at least in terms of advertising. Over the past few years, Call of Duty has dominated “pop advertising,” or those advertisements you see when you walk into a game store. In 2012, Assassin’s Creed III and Madden NFL 13 also topped the charts in pop advertising positions. But that’s because these games all have huge publishers and big marketing budgets.

How does the little guy get in there? By getting editorial mentions. This can also be a challenge, however. From 2010 to 2012, shooter games dominated the cover-spots on major gaming magazines. Indeed, 53 percent of games featured on magazines were shooters in this time period.

Regardless, marketing is crucial.

He explained in the chart to the right that if you both get great reviews and spend a lot on market, your games are going to sell that much better. If you have low reviews and don’t spend all that much, you’re going to do poorly in sales. But that’s obvious. What about if you compare getting poor reviews and spend lots of marketing money, or the inverse, you spend little money on marketing and get great reviews? Turns out, marketing always wins. If you spend the marketing cash, you are statistically more likely to sell better on the PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360.

Photos via Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Yahoo might see significant growth for the first time in years, with analysts predicting net ad revenues rising by 3.2 percent to a total of $3.28 billion for 2013.

Ad and marketing research firm eMarketer is also forecasting growth in Yahoo’s search marketing revenues: up by 7 percent to $1.23 billion for 2013.

When it comes to display ads, Yahoo has actually been posting negative numbers in years past. eMarketer expects that to turn around for the first time in 2013, with Yahoo posting one percent display revenue growth this year and increasing that growth to four percent by 2015.

Granted, the online and search ad market is growing at a greater rate than Yahoo’s gains, and companies like Google and Facebook are posting truly killer year-over-year numbers. All this means that while Yahoo’s bottom-line numbers will grow, its share of the domestic online ad market will decrease, shrinking to just 6.2 percent. For contrast, Google claims more than 72 percent of the total online ad spend in the United States.

But as eMarketer points out, 2012 was the first time in several years that Yahoo posted such revenue gains at all, and that trend continuing through 2013 is a very good sign.

“eMarketer … remains bullish about Yahoo!’s display business and expects growth in 2013 and 2014 as the company removes clutter and increases prices with higher-quality inventory,” a rep stated via email.

In terms of display ad revenue, eMarketer expects newcomers like Twitter to post dwindling returns while Yahoo makes a slow but steady comeback and Google continues to hold steady at around 35 percent growth year-over-year for the foreseeable future.

Other signs Yahoo is staging a comeback: a string of splashy acquisitions (the Dailymotion buyout, the Jybe acquihire, and then Summly) , a new data center and added jobs, and CEO Marissa Mayer’s zero-tolerance policy on WFH slackers, underperforming mobile apps, and cluttered homepages.

Overall, Yahoo’s stock price has gone up around 48 percent since Mayer took the CEO’s seat and is currently trading at $23.54:

Image credit: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

The personal assistant application announced today they are making it easier for brands and publishers to connect to users with their new Embeddable Notebooks.

Embeddable Notebooks are an extension of the popular Pinterest-style digital notebooks: collections of projects, photos, and ideas that help users organize information and get things done.

The Embeddable Notebooks can be implemented on websites, blogs, and Facebook Pages. Similar to YouTube videos, Springpad Notebooks can be branded, shared, followed, and re-embedded. Springpad users can save Embedded Notebooks to their personal accounts.

More than 15 brands and publishers including Glamour, Trip Advisor, Del Monte, Snooth, Breville, Wayfair, and Curve Magazine launched embedded Notebooks today; and the new product is poised to offer a strong, direct line of communication to brands’ customers.

With one click, consumers can follow the Notebook on their web and mobile devices and receive alerts anytime the Notebook is updated with new content, useful information, and relevant offers. Users can share Notebooks on their own website or personal blog, generating a wider potential audience.

Also launching today is Springpad 4.0, a major redesign across web, iOS, and Android services that includes intent-based search. The new design features top navigation to access recent saves, Notebooks, and searches, which can be narrowed down to users’ collections, users, and collaborators, or users and those they are following.

Springpad Actions, the intent-based search, is based on personal interests, context and intent. Because everything saved in the application is dynamic, results are continually updated to better serve users when they are ready to act.

Since 2008, Springpad has been making information and project management easier with their personal assistant application, and has grown to over four million users.

B2B marketing startup Demandbase has raised $15 million in new funding to help it add more sales members and push for growth in U.S. and European enterprises.

San Francisco-based Demandbase offers real-time targeting and personalization for B2B marketing efforts, and its tech can be embedded into other systems. It helps you see which companies are visiting your website and gives you ways to reach out to them or change content on your site based on visitors. Companies such as Adobe, HP, Dell, and Informatica have already embedded Demandbase’s software into their marketing systems.

Scale Venture Partners led the new funding round, with participation by existing investors Sigma Partners, Altos Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Adobe Systems. Including the new round, Demandbase has raised $44 million to date.

“Demandbase’s unique ability to not only personalize a prospect’s first engagement with a brand site but also to focus ad spend on reaching target customers is why ScaleVP is so excited to work with [founder and CEO Chris Golec] and his team.” Scale Venture Partners partner Stacey Bishop said in a statement. “We believe Demandbase delivers tremendous value to B2B marketers, and we look forward to helping fuel its growth.”

Marketing concept via Peshkova/Shutterstock

Being quietly brilliant isn’t all that helpful if it doesn’t help you sell phones.

HTC, it seems, has come to realize that. With sales plummeting, the company is retiring its ineffective “Quietly Brilliant’” tagline in favor of a bolder, more aggressive approach, marketing chief Benjamin Ho told the Wall Street Journal.

“We have a lot of innovations but we haven’t been loud enough,” Ho said.

The move has been a long, long time coming. For what seems like forever, HTC has had one main problem: It makes great phones but completely fails at marketing them effectively. This reality wasn’t lost on CEO Peter Chou, who hinted at the new changes in tone months ago. “Our competitors were too strong and very resourceful, pouring in lots of money into marketing. We haven’t done enough on the marketing front,” Chou said in January.

“Quietly Brilliant” was introduced in October 2009, long before HTC would realize just how ineffective/ironic of a tagline it would eventually become. (Chart via Benedict Evans)

We’ve already seen signs of this new, more bold HTC in some of the company’s recent marketing ploys. HTC North America president Mike Woodward, for example, was particularly bold in his reaction towards Samsung’s Galaxy S IV. “We were pleased to see no innovation in the design itself,” he quipped.

HTC also targeted Samsung by showing off the HTC One and giving away hot cocoa outside the Galaxy S IV’s launch event earlier this month. And then there was the whole #theNextBigFlop Twitter campaign that the company launched.

HTC’s aggression towards Samsung is understandable. The HTC One and Galaxy S IV are set to go on sale at roughly the same time next month, and HTC is rightfully concerned by how badly that standoff could go for it. After all, Samsung spent more on marketing last year than HTC made in a single quarter. How can HTC possibly keep up with that?

So far, the answer to that question is pretty clear: Be bold, aggressive, and note, over and over, that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Frankly, it’s the only thing HTC can do at this point.

Rest in peace, ‘Quietly Brilliant,’ and may you never be heard from again.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

People on online forums, publications, and blogs say their Google Alerts have dwindled to the point of uselessness. Trade publication The Financial Brand reported that its Google Alerts have slowed to a “trickle,” with the volume decreasing by at least 80% and dropping from 20-35 emails per day with 4- 12 results down to 4-8 emails per day with 1-3 results each. Furthermore, “the results are crummier than ever.”

As a result of these findings, The Financial Brand wrote on open letter to Google stating its complaints and criticizing the search engine giant for neglecting its users:

“Searching the Internet is what Google is was known for, it is was what Google (once) did better than everyone else. But Google has become distracted with “Shiny New Syndrome,” wasting tremendous amounts of time and energy (yours and ours) on ideas that fall way outside the search model.”

Using Google Alerts, people set up a personal monitoring system around specific search terms. For example, an entrepreneur could receive notifications every time his company is mentioned, or you could use it to follow a topic that interests you, whether it be a news story, medical condition, or sports team. Google’s system searches for results that match the query and dispatches them in emails.

The Financial Brand used Alerts to surface content relating to its audience — marketers in the financial services industry. The publication set up alerts for terms like “bank marketing” and “credit union Facebook promotion” and claims to have published ‘hundreds upon hundreds of articles’ as a direct result of those leads, as well as advising its audience to use Google Alerts themselves. This is the case, no more.

“The Financial Brand has frequently encouraged bank and credit union marketing executives around the world to use Google Alerts. This advice is now fully retracted. Google Alerts was once a very important and efficient tool to monitor mentions of your brand on the web. It is now so unreliable that it has been rendered effectively useless.”

Besides this criticism from The Financial Brand, the Google Search forum has a string of posts from individuals and business owners complaining that their Alerts have come to a halt.

“I’ve been using Alerts for several years to find inventory for my business,” JesseNewton posted in the forum. “They worked fine, and I received 20 or 30 a day. Now, I rarely receive more than two or three per day. I can go into Alerts and manually run the searches, and tons of results pop up for which I never received email alerts. I haven’t changed anything, and they’re all set to “All results” with “immediate” delivery.”

There are similar reports on Search Engine Land, a news and information site that covers the search engine industry, and niche trade publications like Eco Press and BizSugar. Google has not yet responded to a request for comment.

The myth of the “average shopper” is dead, according to New York City customer analytics startup Custora.

Instead, retailers are better off relying on the mountains of available data to determine just how valuable individual customers are, as well as predict what they’d like to buy next. Not surprisingly, that’s exactly the service that Custora is offering.

This week, the company is launching a new version of its platform, which grants retailers an unprecedented ability to test marketing strategies across any group of customers. It’s an evolution of Custora’s existing technology, and it’s also a sign that data science isn’t just for stuffy academics anymore. The new “marketing lab” tool lets retailers devise experiments — complete with a control group — to test the effectiveness of just about any campaign.

Custora’s extensive customer analytics may sound a bit scary and invasive, but according to co-founder Corey Pierson, it’s where the industry is headed.

“Retailers previously lived in this world focused on the average shopper … and as we started uncovering information about interesting [customer] segments, we found a lot of our clients started to extract some of that information,” Pierson said in an interview with VentureBeat.

The availability of customer analytics tools also means consumers won’t have to deal with as much irrelevant marketing. That leads to less junk mail that you’ll toss instantly and more relevant offers that could potentially save you money.

Bonobos and Revolve Clothing are already taking advantage of Custora’s new marketing platform, Pierson tells me. Revolve Clothing used the marketing platform to target the best customers for its recent catalog mailer campaign, but it can be used to test practically any strategy. Once retailers find a good technique for attracting their customers, they can automatically apply that technique to the rest of their relevant clientele using Custora’s platform.

“The benefit of this is retailers want to be able to reach out to different customer segments in different ways, but a lot of the tools today don’t talk to each other,” Pierson said. “So an email provider may know who’s opening emails, but they don’t know who likes what products. We now expose all of those segments and make it very easy for marketing teams to get access to [them].”

The two-year-old company spent its first year building its technology for deep customer insights, while its second year was focused on helping marketing teams act on those insights. Custora spent the past six months developing the marketing lab tool, Pierson tells me.

The company raised a small round of seed funding around two years ago, but since then it’s been growing revenues steadily. The company is now profitable, and it’s not currently seeking any more funding, Pierson says.

As for what’s next, the company says it will continue to focus on building new tools based on its extensive customer insights.

“If you can predict the long-term value of customers, there are some really interesting implications,” Pierson said. “There’s more room for them to figure out more ways to integrate with the ad buying world, and it has implications for acquisition campaigns as well.”

Marketing strategy photo via Shutterstock

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The new-and-improved site includes better browsing and search features to make finding new things easier. Pinners can explore an entire board without leaving the page they are on, look through all pins from the same source, and see a “people who pinned this also pinned” screen.

Like anyone going through a style transformation, Pinterest is highlighting its best qualities while also going through a health regimen to firm and smooth the interface. Design changes include bigger pins and features new navigational capabilities. However, true makeovers are not only about the surface (Cher taught us that in Clueless.) Pinterest also rebuilt the backend foundation to make it more reliable and easier to improve.

“We also responded to some feedback from pinners who told us they hated losing their place while browsing,” said lead product designer Jason Wilson in a blog post. “Now, when you scroll through pins and click on something that interests you, the back button lands you right back where you were no matter how far you’ve gone.”

Many of the changes were in response to user feedback. Dedicated members are a significant part of Pinterest’s success. People love to pin, and companies, brands, and online retailers love it when they do. You can create boards of images on the site related to their interests. Visitor numbers recently surpassed 25 million, and last week, Pinterest launched Web Analytics to help brands and marketers see what Pinterest members are doing with their content.

A massive fan base is great, particularly if you can monetize on it. The impact of social media on consumer behavior is hotly debated in e-commerce, although cosmetics retailer Sephora said that its Pinterest users spend 15 times more than its Facebook fans. Pinterest Web Analytics is a big step toward making money off of its users. It will tell marketers how many people are repining, how many people see those pins, and how many visits to the original website those pins generate. It will also show ‘most pinned,’ ‘most clicked,’ and ‘most recent pins.’

Pinterest is valued at $2.5 billion and has raised $200 million to date. Despite its celebrity, the company knows that to stay in the limelight, it has to keep up appearances, stay chic, and remain beloved by its fans.

Photo Credit: Pinterest

HG Data uses a data-driven approach to help salespeople build lists of potential enterprise customers, and is ready to disrupt the legacy IT market.

The Santa Barbara-based startup today closed a $2 million funding round led by EPIC Ventures.

“While LinkedIn maps the connections between people in business, HG Data maps the connections between businesses themselves – who sells to whom, who buys what, and who partners with whom,” said Craig Harris, CEO and founder of HG Data in a statement.

The company has been building out its algorithms for the past two years. More specifically, it uses machine learning technology to updates its databases with information that is publicly available from press releases, white papers and the like. One of HG Data’s customers might use the tool to pinpoint a company that still runs on a specific type of legacy hardware, and pitch them an alternative.

The company claims its customers can use the data to bolster lead generation, market share analysis and marketing automation.

Angel investors in the round include Kevin O’Connor, founder of DoubleClick and current CEO of FindTheBest; Eric Kanowsky and AJ Rice, both co-founders of Software.com; and Tim Baskerville, former CEO of JupiterResearch.

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