I've been kind of quiet over the past month on my blog. My time over the past 8 weeks has been in testing, demo-ing, and bringing the new company, Genoo, to its launch, which happened on Monday (June 16th).
I see so many articles and webinars on the subject of how businesses can utilize the "social" media options in their marketing, that I thought it would be an interesting series of posts to use my experience as a kind of case study in the possibilities for using online marketing and social media, etc. to get the word out about this new company, so here goes.
As a point of quick background, I've been working with companies and their internet strategies since 1995, when I spearheaded the technology-side of the nation's 16th largest major metropolitan newspaper's Internet presence. I then went to a bank, who is the nation's largest Ag financial lender in the nation, and in 1997 put together an online community for Pork farmers with news, information, and discussion forums -- you could say, a web 2.0 offering ahead of itself. As you know, the entire community definition has morphed into the "social media" phenomenon that we're engaged in today.
I've been working with marketers specifically since 1998, helping to answer the question, "how can companies leverage the internet for advantage?" In 2000, that took the form of my company Einsof, which offers an infrastructure set of tools that enables organizations to publish and manage all of the content for their Website, Sales Portal, and Partner Portal - with permissions easily established, and not requiring the help of IT, once it was set up. The purpose was to bring easy to use, integrated internet-based tools to the mid-market. Einsof went beyond content management, and included discussion forums, surveys, email marketing, auto-notifications, eCommerce - it is essentially a set of tools that can be combined and used in a myriad of ways, to create an internet presence and easily manage it.
But with Einsof, we could never figure out how to get folks launched without a sizeable setup fee, and a pretty good ongoing monthly fee. Some of my colleagues kept challenging me to come up with a Software-as-a-Service offering that would be super easy to just go out and set up -- but the challenge was in how to allow enough flexibility in the customer-facing pages, so that branding, etc could be employed and utilized.
At the end of last year, after what you could say was 4-5 years of considering different approaches, the idea for Genoo was born, and it was feasible. I was reading David Meerman Scott's book, The New Rules of Marketing And PR, that talked about how to use the different online avenues such as bloggers, social media, and others to tackle the PR and marketing challenges. And I thought Genoo could be an example of launching a company using these different media options.
With some marketing folks, we put together the Genoo pre-launch website, to reveal what Genoo would be over a series of months while the development was getting finalized, and to build interest and recognition for the name and the ideas. We started with a list of about 3500 names, and began an email marketing campaign. We also worked on ensuring that each story was search engine optimized for specific keyword functionality. The pre-launch site displayed more content with each new email that we sent -- we added another article that revealed the need for another capability that Genoo would have. All of it based on the work done with marketers and the challenges faced in fulfilling the internet marketing paradigm -- which is relevance and niche segmenting right into the interests that your buyers have.
I have been active with the social media options, pretty much all of them that I've come across -- Rollyo, Squidoo (which I learned about reading Seth Godin's book, Meatball Sundae), Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
I attended the Online Marketing Summit in late February, and had Genoo cards printed up that I could hand to the folks that I met and got in conversations with -- I used those conversations to get initial feedback on the idea for Genoo -- and it met with fairly good enthusiasm. Almost everyone I spoke with about it, handed me their card and said they wanted to get more information as we moved forward. I added that stack of business cards to the Genoo mailing list -- and I looked each of them up on LinkedIn and followed up with an email, and added them to my LinkedIn network. The conference was very well done, small enough that really good conversations could be had, and the speakers were well versed in their subjects.
Originally planning to launch in April, we started our pre-launch articles and email marketing efforts in February, with an email and new article being added every other week or so, through mid-April. But we weren't ready to launch in April -- as with all of the best laid plans, we were still testing. Near the end of April, I started giving demos of Genoo -- for the first time. The people we gave demos to got excited - and we signed up some of our initial "customers" who will be some of our first case studies as they engage with the tools. People were excited about the ease with which they could set up microsites, capture leads, and conduct integrated email marketing as well as lead nurturing through drip email campaigns based on dynamic segmenting of lead activity. And what almost every one of them were excited about was the fact that they wouldn't have to engage with their IT groups. But by mid-May we still weren't quite ready to launch... and now we had folks really wanting to get started...
No email marketing efforts or new articles were added to the Genoo pre-launch site -- we had fulfilled that plan -- we were working to get feedback, and give those who wanted it a view of Genoo, to see who else we might 'sign up' as initial customers.
Genoo is now live (officially went into public beta on June 16th), at www.genoo.com. Feel free to check it out. The folks who've seen it so far have given great reviews and what we've hopefully started is a conversation that will grow and morph in ways that our customers will drive -- providing exactly what our tag line says: "Online Marketing Tools At Your Fingertips!".
So that gives you an overview of the first part of our marketing experiences -- and I'll continue in my next posts to share more about what has become an all-encompassing endeavor to launch a new company using the social media and new marketing practices and philosophies.... so stay tuned...
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