SEO Werkt!

Creating Analog Experiences

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Ramon Ray (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen)

So much of what we do in business today can be done virtually, digitally and technically.

So much so that I believe we actually have to make an effort to meet in a way that allows us to acquire hugs and handshakes in the good old fashioned offline analog way. In fact, I further believe that making an effort to fuse the online and offline worlds is how you build deeper and richer experiences much faster.

Ramon Ray hosting the Small Business Summit

A few of my favorite ways to create analog experiences:

• Bring five customers together for lunch so they can meet each other
• Host MeetUps focused on a very specific topic of interest
• Go spend some time shooting video of a strategic partner or customer
• Host a small peer-to-peer panel discussion with customers and prospects
• Create a day long event co-hosted by several strategic partners
• Hold annual customer appreciation events or learning events
• And of course, don’t forget to get out there and attend some events

Once you get the hang of creating offline events you could even take this to much higher level and start creating paid and sponsored events.

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Ramon Ray, Editor of Smallbiztechnology.com and producer of the long running Small Business Summit, which he has co-produced since 2006.

In this interview Ramon shares:

• The benefits and pitfalls of creating events
• Technical details you need to get started
• The best ways to create an engaging program
• How to get people to sign up for events
• How to attract sponsors to underwrite the event
• The math of making money with events.

Mixpanel, the analytics startup backed by Sequoia Capital, hasn’t yet succeeded in its goal of unseating established analytics services like Omniture — but momentum is building.

Let’s start with the biggest number that co-founder Suhail Doshi shared with me this week. He says the company is now tracking 4 billion actions every month. Back in July 2010, that number was “only” 1 billion. He also says there are more than 2,500 organizations who are sending Mixpanel data every month (I guess that’s Mixpanel equivalent of an “active user”). And that customer base was built through word-of-mouth because, Doshi says, “We basically do almost no marketing” the startup’s total monthly marketing spend is between $3,000 and $5,000.

Mixpanel charges customers based on the number of actions it’s tracking, so with billions of actions tracked, it’s not too surprising that the business model seems to be working as well. Doshi says revenue has quadrupled since nine months ago, that Mixpanel now on a run rate for several million dollars of revenue a year, and that the company is cash-flow positive.

Even though Mixpanel launched in 2009, Doshi attributes much of the recent success to the launch of a new data store last summer. As a result, he says Mixpanel is now able to examine data at a much more specific and customizable level, on multi-dimensions rather than just one. For example, rather than just telling a customer how many visitors came to their site from Twitter, Mixpanel can show how many visitors came in from Twitter, broken down by country, and limited to those were between the ages of 10 and 13. Doshi also says that mobile analytics have been a big draw — of the startup’s top five customers, he estimates that three or four are mobile-only.

“Our next goals involve figuring out how to really grow the company and continue to offer more tools and services around our vision,” Doshi says. “How can we help the world learn about our data? How can we make organizations really data-driven?”

In addition to Sequoia, Mixpanel’s backers include incubator Y Combinator, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Square COO Keith Rabois, and Bebo co-founder Michael Birch.