Bernaisesource

This is a busy week, but I wanted to call your attention to a webcast I am hosting this week,Thursday Oct 2nd at 10:00 AM EDT. It’s a roundtable I put together that includes PR and marketing representatives from some of the world’s leading brands with corporate headquarters in greater Atlanta.  These representatives will discuss their companies’ use of social media. 

To listen and/or participate, please log on here.

The live, on-the-record webcast will address the growing importance of social media and how marketing and corporate communications are leading the way in advocating its adoption. The panel will showcase greater Atlanta based companies but the issues they face are global in scale.

PR Newswire is sponsoring the event, which will be hosted at Coca-Cola’s headquarters.

The panelists include:

Adam Brown, Director, Digital Communications, Coca Cola Company (blog)
Debbie Curtis-Magley, Manager of Corporate Public Relations, UPS
Bert Dumars, Vice President E-Business & Interactive Marketing, Newell Rubbermaid (blog)
Jennifer Martin, Director Public Relations, CNN (blog)
Michael Pranikoff, Director of Emerging Media, PR Newswire

Listeners will be invited to submit written questions for the panelists to address.

As the former head of corporate communications at Atlanta-based EarthLink, I have long been interested in understanding how companies are using social media as a business model and a principal marketing channel – especially for companies based in Atlanta.

PR and marketing professionals are recognizing the importance of social media, but questions persist on securing management buy-in, identifying best practices, and determining a return on investment. This roundtable is an opportunity for some of Atlanta’s biggest companies with some the best known brands in the world to share how and why they are using social media. This is not to minimize the many smaller companies that are using social media, but larger established companies face a unique set of issues.

I hope you can listen in.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Social Media; Atlanta Social Media Roundtable; Atlanta; Adam Brown; Jennifer Martin; Bert Dumars; Debbie Curtis-Magley; Michael Pranikoff; New South Media Buzz; Bernaise Source Buzz;

Save to del.icio.us

Startup requisite: empty pizza boxes

Key take-aways from this post:

• Startup communities don’t always happen organically; they need direction and committed drivers.

• When possible, capitalize on existing infrastructure.

• Start Atlanta has the potential to serve as a model for other cities trying to reach critical mass for their startup communities.

This past weekend I attended the kick-off of Start Atlanta held in the Appcelerator offices in Buckhead.

The irony of the meeting location was not lost on many in the group of more than 20 entrepreneurs who came together interested in forging a stronger high tech community here in Atlanta. Appcelerator’s Jeff Haynie recently moved to Mountain View, California in the heart of Silicon Valley as part of a $4 million deal led by Storm Ventures.

Haynie has long been a leader in Atlanta’s high tech community and his departing blog post provided some of the inspiration for Start Atlanta.

Start Atlanta is another indication of a growing movement to deepen the area’s high tech’s roots, build a climate for investment and innovation, and attract and retain a younger generation of developers, designers and entrepreneurs.

It’s vencorps meets Y Combinator meets Kiva.

It’s recognition that there is no simple mechanism to fund companies. As one of the organizers described it, Start Atlanta is a breeding ground for community. It’s about sharing resources, cross-pollinating angel investors with entrepreneurs who in some cases have nothing more than an idea. It’s about facilitating connections, raising a collective consciousness and bootstrapping a community.

Gang of Five plus 2

I first learned about Start Atlanta from Patrick Clements whom I met at a recent Capital Lounge hosted by Michael Blake and Scott Burkett. Patrick who began Big Web Apps, (blog ) is part of the Gang of Five (actually seven) that meets regularly over coffee. Its members also include:

Loren Norman who has started several companies including Snowcap Labs (blog ), Alan Pinstein, founder of Showcase Real Estate Web Sites, Wei Yang Co-Founder, Business Development at EasyAutoSales.com (blog), Matthew Sweezey, Duncan Freeman whose company Band Metrics (blog ) is in private beta , and Ray Abram (blog)

Part support group, part strategy session, the Gang of Five decided it wanted to give some permanence to the many events popping up around Atlanta.

And so for two days and three nights, a group of mostly entrepreneurs and some investors met and brainstormed. This week they hope to unveil a community site.

Among those who attended the first night was Jason Ardell, a 25-year old entrepreneur. He is looking to help build a community and get Atlanta more recognition. His company feedscrub.com (blog) is in alpha. Think of his company as a spam filter for RSS feeds, an algorithm that helps find relevant content.

Rather than starting from scratch, Start Atlanta elected to build a site based on code from recently launched Hackers and Backers.

Hackers & Backers (Beta) is a meeting place for entrepreneurs, technical specialists, and investors. It lets you post a project and invite others to join. It helps search for people with relevant skills in your geographic area and check out their connections and credentials.

As co-founder , Ho-Sheng Hsiao who was on hand this past weekend told me, “Hackers and Backers is a combination of a social networking site and classified ads.”

He said he had a hard time looking for other entrepreneurs and thought a social networking site could spark community. “Start Atlanta is doing the same thing I wanted to do with Hackers and Backers. I wanted to see if there was a way to work together.”

And so Start Atlanta is building off Hsiao’s platform. They are adding several features to support development of the community, including a mini-project called Badgely.

Badgely prototype

As Alan Pinstein emailed after day 2, “Badgely is a system we have devised to track individual participation in the community and attendance at community events.”

To understand Badgely badges, think merit badges for entrepreneurs. These badges are meant to increase visibility and reward participants who attend and actively engage in events around the city devoted to startups and the high-tech community.

Through the first weekend, Alan wrote me that they “decided to focus on first getting the core community-fostering infrastructure in place while we make sure that we get buy-in from anticipated funders.” Plus, he added, “it’s going to take us at least several weeks to get the legal issues sorted out.”

There will also be an offline component to Start Atlanta where investors and entrepreneurs will be able to interact. It will also leverage the many existing events in Atlanta to help educate entrepreneurs and investors.

And so now the really hard part begins – sustaining a movement. At least for now, Start Atlanta joins Startup Lounge, Startup Riot, and Startup Weekend in establishing a viable community for entrepreneurialism.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Start Atlanta; Angel Investment; Atlanta; Badgely; Hackers and Backers; Startups; New South Media Buzz; Bernaise Source Buzz;

Save to del.icio.us

I went by the New York City Web 2.0 Expo yesterday. I caught up with friends and met people I only knew through email. To be honest, it had a very different vibe than the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year. Perhaps it was an east coast thing or maybe the news from Wall Street was on the back of everyone’s mind.

I hope the lines for free food is not a sign of things to come.

I was most interested in looking at social networking companies and I visited with Awareness Networks, HIveLive, Jive Software, OneSite, Oribius, Pringo, and Sparta Social Networks. We talked about price (upfront costs, monthly and yearly costs, licensing fees, hosting and maintenance fees, storage fees, usage fees, etc) and the SaaS model. While this model is compeling, I always worry about who owns the content if I chose to part ways with my vendor. I also asked about the role that data mining and CRM is playing in social networking. As I have written before, I think data mining is powerful selling tool to convince management that is slow to embrace social networking.

My sense from talking to companies is that CRM and web analytics will play a more integrated role in social networking’s future, but that we are not at that point in the adoption curve. It certainly wasn’t a feature that companies stressed in our conversations.

I also talked to folks at Brickfish, a social media advertising platform. It made me think of Atlanta based Vitrue, which is using social media to extend the brand. I was interested in hearing how you sometimes need to seed a site with legitimate user generated content to attract others to create their own. No one wants to be the first to show up at a party.

In addition, I talked with Twing, a search engine dedicated to online communities and forums. Traditional search engine results don’t always accurately reflect conversation threads because these discussions generally link to each other, not other websites. In other words, without link love there is no love potion to drive search results higher.

Anyway I head back to Atlanta today. There was just too little time to digest all the sessions and visit all the companies I wanted to see.

Finally, for those who haven’t noticed, I have changed the Photo of the Week sidebar to Bernaise Source Photos. I will be highlighting photos from various events I attend because we can’t live by words alone.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Social Networking; Social Networks; Web 2.0 Expo; Twing; Brickfish; Vitrue; Awareness Networks; HiveLive; Jive Software; OneSite; Oribius; Pringo; Sparta Social Networks;

Save to del.icio.us

MFG.com’s A.J. Sweat and Mitch Free

In my search for Atlanta based Web 2.0 companies I came across MFG.com; it is the match.com for connecting suppliers with buyers in manufacturing, and it’s proving to be one of Atlanta’s notable high tech success stories.

It’s a social network, but don’t expect members to “poke” one another. Their needs are not California cool or Atlanta hot. Instead the company is focused on the 300 processes that fabricate, mold, cast, extrude, forge, and stamp.

MFG.com is an online marketplace servicing the global manufacturing community. Its platform simplifies the complex process of sourcing and selling manufacturing services. The technology connects buyers with suppliers of manufacturing services while directing the collaboration, quoting, due diligence and analysis processes.

MFG.com consolidates the once-fragmented world of custom manufacturing into a more efficient marketplace, enabling products to be sourced and built more easily, quickly, inexpensively, and at higher quality levels.

An Early Inspiration

MFG.com’s founder and CEO Mitch Free began his career as a machinist on a factory floor. An early inspiration for MFG.com came from Lendingtree.com’s tagline ( “When banks compete, you win.”) Free recognized that this same philosophy could be applied to manufacturing.

With operations reaching internationally, Free is succeeding where past B2B marketplace sites and software developers (VerticalNet, PurchasePro, and FreeMarkets) failed. Many other so-called B2B companies rose and fell spectacularly during the dot com bubble meltdown.

This I know first hand. I bought VerticalNet on March 10, 2000 at its peak. The next trading day, the Nasdaq bubble began bursting many a retirement plan.

Today approximately 180,000 companies around the world have registered.

What is the secret of their success? Delivering value is one reason; Web 2.0 is another. Where Web 1.0 was static and about controlling the environment, Web 2.0 is dynamic and about engaging customers internationally to build a better online experience.

Mitch recognized the power of community to drive transactions. Search engines can’t do it. Nor can directories, which need user lists to work. With Web 2.0, content generates the circulation, and community creates efficiencies.

While the adoption curve may take longer with communities, the connections are stickier. With the MFG.com community, Free sees an opportunity for people to interact, collaborate, negotiate and leverage collective intelligence.

The process takes time. Manufacturing in general has been slower to embrace the Internet. And suppliers in particular are not accustomed to transparency. The shift in control puts prospects and customers in charge.

To help extend the power of the community, MFGX.com was created under AJ Sweatt’s direction. The goal is to facilitate discussion and let users voice their opinions. Unlike other companies, MFG.com is not concerned about negative comments. The community is self-policing, and Free would much rather be aware of what is being said than discourage negative feedback.

With MFGX.com, users create their own profile to network with peers, build their reputation, promote their company, find employment (or employees), and buy and sell things.

Why MFG.com

MFG.com is interesting on many fronts for me. One is its commitment to Atlanta.

Despite his company’s success, Mitch had considered heading to the west coast, particularly given Atlanta’s attitude toward web 2.0 and its adoption rate. He decided to stay recognizing that he would be trading one set of problems for another — finding developers and scarcity of resources for the West Coast’s hyper competitive environment.

MFG.com is embracing Web 2.0, a technology that runs counter to its industry’s prevailing culture, and its understanding of negative comments is unusual for many companies in general and Atlanta corporate culture in particular.

I am particularly interested in what MFG.com is looking to do in its next stage of development. In fact, it was through my conversation with Mitch Free and reading MoneyBall that I have begun to understand how data can be used to sell social media. Social networks generate immense amounts of data, which in turn can spur new services and transform companies. In other words, social media is not a cost center.

That’s what Free is doing. Buyers and suppliers are always looking for new information. Their transactions generate data. Free is mining that data and helping MFG.com create a new generation of services.

One service is predictive cost modeling. Based on data about parts ordered, MFG.com can help suppliers and buyers predict the cost of products with similar features and how much to charge.

While I know far less about drill bits than digital ones, I appreciate how MFG.com has embraced Web 2.0 and applied it to new areas. Its success is a valuable lesson for any company who questions the power of community to drive innovation.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: MFG.com; MFGX.com; Atlanta; Mitch Free; Web 2.0; Manufacturing; New South Media Buzz; Bernaise Source Buzz;

Save to del.icio.us

Photos by Maigh

The other night, I attended the inaugural meeting of the ATL Tweet-Up in midtown Atlanta.

As its organizer Maigh explained it to me, the ATL Tweet-Up was an outgrowth of APWBWGTTD– Atlanta People With Blogs Who Get Together To Drink.

Now to be honest, I learned about the ATL Tweet-Up via email, not Twitter. But as I have admitted more than once, I still only use Twitter (http://twitter.com/bernaise) intermittently to capture random observations.

I know many people who swear by it, but I know even more people who have never heard of it.

Nevertheless, Twitter is gaining traction. Here in Atlanta, Mike Schinkel hosted a “Why You Must Have a Twitter Strategy” at the August session of the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs Meet-Up.

And fellow Atlanta blogger Toby Bloomberg did a great posting on local companies and organizations that use Twitter including The Home Depot, Delta Airlines, and the Fulton County Office of the Sheriff.

I have written about Twitter’s business applications myself, but I was intrigued that a social event could be driven by 140 characters at time.

Now at this ATL Tweet-Up there was not much tweeting going on – at least what I could see. But that’s OK. I had a chance to catch up with Grayson Daughters, Lance Weatherby and meet fellow bloggers Scott Lockhart and Kimberly Turner. Their startup Regator (blog) “gathers and organizes the web’s best blog posts to make it easy to find them.”

I asked them about Twitter or it’s more formal name – microblogging. For them, it’s a good way for individuals to communicate. But it’s not a high priority given that there are at LEAST sixty million blogs online right now to trudge through, according to Discover magazine, and about 175,000 more are added every day (about two every second).

For me, I am approaching Twitter with an open mind. You clearly can’t ignore its personal and professional utility. But perhaps Evan LaPointe’s newly launched blog TATTOPITW.com says it all. I also met Evan at the Tweet-up (which goes to show you the power of social media to connect.) TATTOPITW stands for because there are two types of people in the world. Business or pleasure, there are those who get Twitter and those who never will.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Twitter; Microblogging; Atlanta; ATL Tweet-Up; Regator; New South Media Buzz; Bernaise Source Buzz;

Save to del.icio.us

WorkLight, Unisfair, and Velingo are among the approximately 15 to 20 Israelis companies that are expected to attend a unique Web 2.0 conference this September 24 and 25 in Atlanta. It’s called “Empowering the Connected Enterprise,” and it will bring together some of the most innovative Web 2.0 Israeli companies with some of the biggest names in American business.

The American Israel Chamber of Commerce is organizing the event. Their goal is to spur investment by helping Israeli companies gain a foothold in the United States and for American companies to benefit from Israeli expertise in Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is clearly on everyone’s minds these days. I am heading to New York in a week to attend Web 2.0 Expo. The AICC conference is part of an effort to better understand how web 2.0 technologies can transform business and facilitate communication and collaboration between the enterprise and its customers, vendors, and employees.

IBM is sponsoring the event. I recently spoke with David Boloker, IBM Software Group’s CTO, Emerging Internet Technology. He is one of the speakers and organizers of the conference. Dave is a futurist and strategist. He spends about a third of his time talking and working with venture backed companies and is greatly involved with Web 2.0 initiatives.

Dave was part of the team that brought Java into IBM and helped it flourish. Now he spends a lot of his time working on AJAX and next-generation collaborative systems.

Part of the challenge is defining what exactly is Web 2.0. Especially from 2003 to 2006, the hype around Web 2.0 made it a perfect case study for the Gartner hype cycle. Starting in 2005-2006, Boloker began to see a change; he began noticing that these tools could do more and were getting easier to use. User Interfaces were getting advanced while still supporting pure Ajax.

Boloker breaks Web 2.0 into 4 categories — standards, rendering, social interaction/social networks, mashups/content – to better understand what Web 2.0 can do and how it is evolving.

We have developed standards/defacto standards like Atom & RSS that allow syndicated content to be read across different browsers or viewers. Today, we are better at rendering so it easer to see content (static or streaming ) and read files of almost any type all within the Web container. Social networks now can use APIs to engage members & businesses to extend their reach, create profiles, and interact. We are now able to easily import, combine, and repurpose content across many different contexts from business to consumer.

In fact Boloker thinks we may actually be at Web 2.5. We are moving from the desktop to mobile applications. We are taking advantage of the long tail where more money can be made in narrow market niches.

In his position at IBM, Boloker works with many startup companies including Israeli companies. According to the AICCSE, Israel is one of the world’s most dynamic sources for high tech companies and has produced over 4,000 startups in the past few years. Outside of the US and Canada, Israel has more companies publicly traded on the US exchanges than any other country.

And what are some of the Israeli companies that are driving this innovation? Some companies expected to attend are:

WorkLight provides Web 2.0-style access to corporate data that reside in enterprise applications. With WorkLight, employees themselves define how information they need is aggregated and presented, regardless of the source.

Unisfair powers the world’s virtual events and virtual business environments. Virtual events and business environments are used for marketing, recruiting and training purposes.

Velingo developed a new and unique Social Search technology. Unlike other technologies that need user interaction (tagging for example), Velingo community knowledge is totally transparent, which dramatically enhances search.

PLYMedia has developed an interactive Web-based platform (BubblePly) that lets users create their own pop-up videos by inserting comic-style speech and thought bubbles.

KENSHOO SEARCH™, is an end-to-end SEM platform, which automates the process of building and optimizing cross channel search campaigns.

These companies are a cross section of Israel’s web 2.0 companies. Their services are increasingly in demand in Atlanta, which currently lacks a strong web 2.0 presence.

If successful, AICC Vice Chairman Lorin Coles wants this conference to not only help make introductions and attract investments; he hopes it will change perceptions and help put Atlanta on the map as a high tech alternative to Silicon Valley and New York.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: IBM AICC; American Israel Chamber of Commerce; David Boloker; WorkLight; Unisfair; PLYMedia; Kenshoo;

Save to del.icio.us