Online privacy - does it exist? Should it exist? (Source: ars technica)

“There are no limits to what types of information can be collected, how long it can be retained, with whom it can be shared and how it can be used,” said Susan Grant, director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America. “Consumers simply have no legal control over being spied on when they go online.”

Online tracking is legal and companies currently aren’t bound by government rules to show people what they know about them. Advertisers argue in their favor that if a broad number of people sign up for “Do Not Track” option, it will undercut the effectiveness of the Internet model and online advertising.

84% of consumers prefer not to be tracked (Source: BestTechie)

A poll done this summer for Consumer Watchdog, a California public interest group, found that 84% of respondents wanted to prevent online companies from tracking personal information without a person’s explicit, written approval. Media experts argue that consumers don’t realize that tracking improves their Internet experience by offering the stories they like or keeping track of their saved information so they don’t have to re-enter it every time they shop online. They claim that these benefits are taken for granted.

Responding to the consumers’ desire for privacy, Microsoft is adding Tracking Protection to Explorer 9. Previously, a handful of Internet and tracking firms, including Google, Yahoo, BlueKai, Lotame and eXelate, made such information available on their own sites. However, few consumers were aware.

Microsoft claims its coming tool is potentially more powerful than a do-not-track system that relies on companies to comply with the user’s request. Users will be able to subscribe to lists of the web addresses used by tracking companies. Internet Explorer would then automatically block those companies from the user’s computer. Tracking Protection will block the tracking completely and instantly.

Randall Rothenberg, Chief Executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, is concerned that the new blocking features in browsers will also block the advertising that supports free content on the Internet and as a side effect may also block news, entertainment, and social media as well.

Correlate sales with your efforts online even if they come in over the phone

In the past, we’ve had clients who didn’t see the value in making special landing pages or websites. Most of their sales came in over the phone, not from the Internet. They would go to the trouble of creating an online campaign but there wouldn’t be any visible connection between those efforts and actual sales. When we built our call tracking tool, suddenly we could prove that specific sales made over the phone were the result of an online ad campaign or a particular landing page.

How does it work? Well, it’s easy, really. When you want to track a campaign, you just use a new phone number and include it with your message. When someone calls, you can tell that they called in response to a specific message, ad campaign, or anything you want to track. It’s painless and powerful.

A/B Testing with Phone Numbers

Beyond proving that a message creates a response and measuring its degree, you can go a step further and use phone tracking to compare performance between variable elements in a campaign or between two or more different campaigns. For example, you might run a split test comparing two different messages (one highlighting a specific feature, the other describing a benefit) and measure which phone line receives more calls. If you have a sufficient sample size, the line that gets more calls is the one tied to the better message. You can use split testing to incrementally improve any campaign. Even modest improvements, discovered by this kind of testing, end up creating significant savings.

Read more about call tracking:  “What Can Call Tracking Allow You to Do?” 

Call Tracking in Lytiks

Lytiks Pro offers the easiest tool available for call tracking. Quickly buy numbers and they’ll be automatically correlated to ads and/or websites.

Tracking
Web tracking is getting more and more intrusive as tracking gets smarter. It is not a coincidence when mortgage rate comparisons show up on the ad bar of the screen as one is trying to refinance. The information gained as a result of tracking is considered as marketing gold because it allows businesses to invest their marketing money where it is most profitable.

Web Tracking Ecosystem (source: WSJ)

Listening
Businesses show increasing interest in web tracking to learn about their customers. However, David Jackson, Founder of Clicktools, thinks that the listening aspect of business is often ignored in an effort to push marketing on the customers. He writes,

“Marketing is a dialogue but the listening part is often the poor relation to the desire to get ‘the message’ out. Just look at budgets and what is spent on listening vs. other marketing communications.”

In a world where marketing managers are eager to get their perspective across, the idea of hearing the consumer is often more foreign than it should be. Listening has always been considered part of effective communication. Now marketing is turning its listening ear to the consumers to make marketing an art of effective sales. Companies like Kodak and Dell are hiring ‘Chief Listening Officers’. These dedicated listeners keep a tap on their company’s products’ reviews, blogs, and consumer response to their competitors’ products. Consumer posts and videos are considered valuable data to shape their product’s image and bring business strategy in line with the market needs.

PR+MKTG Camp™ East is a highly interactive one-day conference. Its goal is to help PR and marketing professionals maximize their impact in reaching new influencers in today’s increasingly socially-driven, media landscape. PR+MKTG Camp’s format combines case studies, audits and extensive group discussions, and it’s very relaxed, unlike traditional conferences. It is recommended for a select number of managers, directors with communications, brand and sales support responsibility and who oversee the vision, strategy and execution of social/traditional media. PR+MKTG Camp™ East draws from companies, agencies, non-profits, government, associations, and educational institutions.

This year’s focus is on integrated strategic engagement – ways that organizations and companies can benefit from internal collaboration and aligning communication, customer support, sales, and community management and moderation.

Goggans is going to be a panelist in a discussion on business impact metrics and analytics. Among the other participants are:

Joelle Keane Tramel – Agency Relations Manager: IPG, Google
Damon Burrell – VP, Consumer Marketing, MTV Networks
Peter Fasano – Engagement Manager, Dachis Group
Ayush Agarwal – Head of Products, CoTweet
David Berkowitz – Senior Director of Emerging Media & Innovation, 360i
Dean Landsman – President, Landsman Communications Group
Michael Pranikoff – Global Director, Emerging Media, PR Newswire

In this session, the panelists will use their expertise and experience in the field of web analytics to develop a consensus on which metrics are most meaningful. They will also consider which tools are best to measure them, who is in charge of collecting and sharing the data that is collected and most importantly, how the data is used.

About Nick Goggans
As Co-Founder and President of Lytiks and previously in Conversion Associates, Nick has been involved in web analytics and digital marketing since 2006.

Nick has contributed to a number of conferences and events as a speaker or presenter, spreading his ideas on the evolution of web analytics. Last week Goggans spoke at Connecting Companies with Capital, a BREW event, sponsored by AMS. Previously, he has spoken at the Innovation Breakfast at the British Consulate-General Boston.

In addition to Lytiks, Nick is host and executive editor of 20onFive. An interview show featuring media innovators speaking for 20 minutes on 5 subjects: innovation, communication, analytics, advertising, and startups.

Microsoft BizSpark is designed to give young high-potential companies a boost at a time when credit and funding are more difficult to come by. The program targets early stage software startups, with resources including access to Microsoft platform software and development tools with no upfront costs. The program will also provide access to technical support and marketing visibility from Microsoft, as well as support through a select group of network partners to help entrepreneurs accelerate product development and shorten time-to-market cycles and to foster innovation and entrepreneurialism.

The global support network includes organizations such as economic development agencies, university incubators, hosters, investors, and peers. Among these are the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), European Business Angel Network (EBAN) and The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE). They provide guidance, mentorship and resources for the startups.

To be eligible for the Microsoft BizSpark Program, startups must be actively engaged in development of a software-based product or service that is a core piece of their business model, have been in business less than three years at the time of enrollment, and have less than USD$1M in annual       revenue. Enrollment is only by invitation.

Says Nick Goggans, Co-Founder and President of Lytiks, “We are really excited to join the Microsoft BizSpark Program and its entrepreneurial community of mentors and fellow startups. We’re already experiencing the benefits of the program in terms of updating our developer software. We are happy to extend our offer to help other members as well. It’s an honor to be part of this community not only locally, in Boston, but also globally.”

BizSpark also has a database at www.MicrosoftStartupZone.com/bizsparkdb with a list of startups that are developing innovative software applications.

About Lytiks
Lytiks helps businesses, agencies, and publishers measure the performance of marketing campaigns and easily analyze consumer behavior.  To do this, Lytiks combines web analytics, phone call tracking, video tracking, web form creation, contact management, email tracking, display ad tracking, social media, and mobile application tracking in one web-based platform.

The highlight of Lewis’ presentation was his summary of the challenges facing every marketer or small business owner who has decided to delve into social media:

1. Inability to scale
2. Security and consistency of message
3. Lack of buy-in and resources
4. Lack of policies and regulations
5. Reporting is ad-hoc

He also urged everybody attending to try to come up with a solution to the problem of automatizing social media marketing. He added that it would be a real feat to do so. I can’t help agreeing from personal experience. Currently, despite the overwhelming number of apps to link and manage social media accounts which exist, there are none that are comprehensive or automatic enough, so the huge time commitment remains necessary to maintain a social media campaign where timeliness is the most crucial factor.

Further, Mike Lewis described four types of social media marketers, depending on their level of experience in the field. The first is the least experienced one who follows social media but feels entirely overwhelmed: the Listener. There there is the Explorer - somebody who has reached the next level in mastering the social media game. He/she still feels somewhat lost but is starting to make sense of it all. Third comes the Influencer who is actively involved in producing social media campaigns and his/her messages are being heard, but are not quite becoming a hit yet. The last level, the one every social media marketer aspires to but few manage to reach, according to Lewis, is the Luminary. He/she is the one who knows how to excite the crowds and bring conversions. We saw few impressive examples of luminaries in the industry such as History Channel with their Foursquare campaign.

The second half of the panel was led by Corissa St. Laurent from Constant Contact. She gave a detailed introduction to social media marketing along with some best practices.

Overall, Social Media Marketing – The Future is Social turned out as another excellent Future M event, well attended and with a lot of take-home messages for the beginner social media marketers. It also provided great opportunities for people from small businesses to network and build connections, which after all, social media is all about.

Moderated by Adam Towvin, Jumptap (@atowvim), the panel boasted an impressive speaker set: Steve Bagdasarian, Hill Holliday (@stevebags); Brenna Hanly, Mobile Catalyst, Mullen (@brennahanly); Brett Leary, VP/Dir of Mobile Marketing, DIGITAS (@digitas); William Nann, Director, National Advertising Sales (@crispwireless); and Jon Phenix, VP Sales, Nexage (@Nexage).

One of my favorite questions from the night–I tweeted about it here on @JamieLytiks–was from Jon Phenix to William Nann in regards to placement of mobile advertisements: “Is the Wall Street Journal reader who also plays Angry Birds just as valuable while they’re playing Angry Birds?” Well, are they?

While it got laughs from the crowd, I think at the heart of this question lies an insight into the multiple mind of the consumer. Sure, I read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, but I also read plenty of webcomics and play games on my phone. My mindset certainly changes depending on what activity I am participating in, but my interests, preferences and curiosities as a person as a whole haven’t changed. So am I just as likely to click on an ad for a product or service when I’m following one pursuit and not the other?

I think the answer is no.

I’ll offer my quick take on the explanation why: when a potential customer is searching for “high-tech vacuum cleaner”, they are indicating by their query that they are further along in the buying cycle for vacuum cleaners–they’re actively searching for one. This same person may still need a vacuum cleaner a day later, but if you show them an ad for your VacuuX-9000 while they’re not doing something household related, it’s less likely to be effective.

I’m willing to bet that this concept ports over to display ads on full browsers as well as on mobile–context is everything. I’ll end on another great sound byte from the event, this one coming from Steve Bagdasarian in regards to targeting: “You don’t have to be everything to everybody. Just being everything to somebody can be very valuable.”

MHT/Future M Demo Event Weblogo

The Companies

Boingnet
Boingnet’s personal URL (pURL) application Boingnet.com provides direct marketers with an easy way to create landing pages and personalized URLs for their campaigns. Using the product, a business can create a web page where customers can provide information, or take advantage of deals. PURLs are web addresses, personalized for each recipient and tied directly to a marketer’s brand, which direct recipients to custom-tailored Internet landing pages. This allows measuring the effectiveness of each campaign. Boingnet is run by a team of experienced marketers.

Episend
Episend is a way to avoid the limitations of email when it comes to sending files. It offers an online platform in which a user can create a message containing various multi-media objects like images, video, text, etc. Just upload them and then re-arrange them by dragging around the work space. When you’re finished arranging, Episend creates a link to the message which can be emailed or shared on social media websites. To send directly through Episend, one needs a special account.

In September 2009, Episend was named as a 2009 Adobe Max Awards semi-finalist. In June, 2010, Episend was named a PricewaterhouseCoopers Promise Award Winner by MITX.

Direxxis
Direxxis is a company leading the way in delivering integrated multi-channel direct marketing solutions that enable clients to build great relationships with their current and prospective customers. The fundamental purpose of their integrated marketing solution is to deliver individuals the right offer and message, through the right channel at the right time for a measurable ROI. For this purpose, Direxxis has developed a suite of tools, dmEDGE™.

JitterJam
JitterJam helps consumer-facing brand or business capture relevant conversations on the real-time web and turn them into lasting and trusted customer relationships. They combine social media, email and mobile engagement with their own intelligent contact database and a suite of tools, designed to capture relevant conversations on the social network to turn and turn them into new opportunities for revenue growth.

Media Armor
Media Armor is a privately funded company changing the display media industry both online and mobile. They provide actionable insights to advertisers and publishers while being the first company offering an independent, 3rd-party impression verification tool specifically tailored to work in both the online and mobile space.

By utilizing their products and insights, advertisers make intelligent decisions with their marketing spend, and in that way, increasing revenue, reducing cost, and ultimately improving ROI. Publishers and Networks are able to differentiate their media offerings from the competition, and astutely position themselves for success.

Offerpop
The idea for Offerpop came together in 2009. In January 2010, Offerpop released their first social marketing app and started building out a full set of marketing apps for Twitter and Facebook. Today they offer a complete web-based social marketing platform for retailers, brands and community owners, and the agencies that serve them. Offerpop works with customers around the globe from our headquarters in New York City. Their mission is simple: to provide high-value, super easy-to-use social marketing apps which help their customers deliver fun, effective and professional campaigns optimized for social media.

Performable
The Performable software platform gives you a powerful way to quickly create and test your landing pages to optimize your visitor traffic. Optimizing your landing pages (or any web page) has never been as fast or easy as it is with Performable. Continuously test your message, improve your design, optimize your landing pages, conduct A/B tests – you can take ownership of your online business.

Piehead
Piehead is about combining art and technology. They’ve got the creativity, technical know-how, and online savvy to influence audience behavior, and impact your bottom line. Piehead takes pride in its ideas and strategies which impact brand growth through social, mobile, and virtual experiences. It specializes in online strategy, experience design, creative services and using technology.

Grasshopper Group/Spreadable
Grasshopper Group has been making it easier for entrepreneurs to start and grow their small businesses since 2003.

With Spreadable you can increase word of mouth referrals. It makes it easy for customers to tell a friend about your business via e-mail and social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, and more. Word of mouth referrals are FREE and convert higher than regular visitors – ultimately making you more money while decreasing your cost per acquisition (CPA).

Unlike other services that share a single news article or URL, Spreadable shares one consistent message about your product, brand, or service. Its real-time dashboard tells you what your top referral channels are, where on your site the sharing is happening, where geographically the referrers are sharing from, as well as who they are. You can link the Spreadable widget from everywhere your customers are – on your website, in emails, in support tickets, direct mail pieces, business cards and anywhere else you communicate with customers and prospects.

And of course, there is us, Lytiks
Lytiks is a multi-channel marketing goal tracking software platform. It combines web analytics, phone call tracking, email, video, display ad, form response tracking, and more in one easy-to-use real-time web-hosted tool. It is designed from the ground up to help clients achieve clarity, effectiveness, and efficiency in their marketing, i.e. to do more with less. We also provide professional support for your day-to-day use of the Lytiks tool, Google AdWords, and Google Analytics.

We wish to change the way companies measure marketing.

“Demos with a Capital M” is a tech business networking party that will include demos from New England-based startups showcasing their digital marketing and media products to experts, entrepreneurs and executives. The event will feature startups specializing in marketing platforms and analytics, two Boston-Cambridge specialties. The event is part of FutureM, a first-ever multi-location series of events being held in the Boston-Cambridge area during the week of Oct. 4-9.

“Massachusetts, and all of New England, quite frankly, is home to some of the smartest thinkers in technology. As innovation in media, marketing and online community-building drives the future of business, companies like the ones we’ve chosen will be the ones leading the way,” said Douglas Banks, Publisher of Mass High Tech.

The 2010 Mass High Tech/FutureM Demo Night will be held Oct. 7, 5:30-7:30 p.m. at Office Environments of New England in Boston’s Seaport Innovation District. Participating demo companies are:

• Boingnet
• Episend
• Direxxis
• JitterJam
• Lytiks
• Media Armor Inc.
• Offerpop
• Performable
• Piehead
• Spreadable/Grasshopper Group

“Innovation in media technologies is clearly thriving in the Boston tech community, this is a great opportunity to share our perspectives and see how we can continue to create solutions to the new technical challenges facing digital marketing,” said Nick Goggans, President and Co-Founder of Lytiks.

The future of marketing is technology-based and it’s here. Join us as we celebrate by registering here:

About Lytiks
The Lytiks software is a multi-channel marketing goal tracking platform. It combines web analytics, phone call tracking, email, video, display ad, form response tracking, and more in one easy-to-use real-time web-hosted tool. Lytiks is designed from the ground up to help clients achieve clarity, effectiveness, and efficiency in their marketing, i.e. to do more with less.

About MHT
Mass High Tech specializes in covering New England’s next-generation technologies and the people and companies behind the Northeast innovation economy. Technology and life sciences executives, investors and entrepreneurs rely on MHT to track the pulse of local market forces, to identify new trends, detect emerging competition and uncover new opportunities. As an information resources company serving the needs of influencers working throughout New England’s innovation economy through a variety of media: a biweekly print publication; a daily tech news website; daily and weekly opt-in email news products; and networking/educational events that include our quarterly Forum Series, All-Stars, Tech Citizenship, and Women to Watch.

#MHT10Demos
#FutureM

Getting Off the Ground
Basically, you need to be a little crazy. Crazy good. Not everyone can find the focus and passion that is required, the kind where you’ll get up at 4am to write customer service and sales correspondence until 7am before going to your day job as Todd Garland did when beginning BuySellAds (Garland, a former Hubspotter, acknowledged his apologies to former boss Dharmesh Shah who was in the audience).

Programming knowledge may be required. As we’ll see below, for a tech/software startup it is talent that is the most expensive cash overhead, especially early on. Programmers are expensive, hard to find, and further, if you have no understanding of programming, trying to figure out who’s valuable at what price is next to impossible. The biggest take-away from the panel, I think, is this, if you want to bootstrap a tech company, you better teach yourself how to program – the entire panel had done this to varying degrees. Now, this doesn’t mean you need to be able to write the full program, but I think it means that you need to be able to understand the basics of how programming language works, the logic involved, and just enough to build a very basic prototype.

Another way to put this: Get enough programming under your belt, so you can have a conversation with a programmer and understand – just basically – what C# or mySQL is, know what it looks like, etc. Further on your way to this knowledge, maybe you can play with it just enough to be able to build a prototype that you could show in sales to get that crucial first order (and possible cash for your programmer).  (Prototypes are also critical for angel investors, but I won’t go there now.)

The Telescopic / Microscopic Paradox
The bootstrapper has to have the full vision. Both Hauser and Conine talked about the need to take the long view. In their opinion, to be successful as a bootstrapper you should not  be thinking about exit or liquidity, but rather be dedicated to creating a company where you can work with people who share your enthusiasm to design solutions to market problems (or new spaces) that you’ve identified. And yes, it does need to be fun. Fun doesn’t mean you have a nintendo in the office. It means that there is a motivated and excited team of people who like working together.

The reason “fun” is important is what Garland mentioned (and I’ve heard and experienced before); the hardest part is the roller-coaster ride of emotions. As a football coach once said to me about football, “It’s got the highest highs and the lowest lows.” One second you see people enjoying your product and you’ve made a big sale and you think you’ve figured it out, while the next, an old client comes in reporting a major bug or maybe your computer hard drive crashed, effectively shutting down your server (with your clients applications on it). This is where a team helps. It’s the social support to stay level (not always positive), but steady and even, making sure you improve every day.

As Hauser said, you need to always beware of the cash position, but when it’s looking tough, “if you think about it for more than two seconds – you will fail.” While this got laughs in the room, I think this may have been one of the more important points. This returns us to the “crazy factor” – you need to be lucid enough to understand the seriousness of your position when something bad happens, but “crazy” enough to digest it, think of a solution, and move on it.

Bootstrapping Advantages
When we speak of advantages, we’re going to focus on “advantages to building the business” (as opposed to ownership controls, etc). The consensus of the panel seemed to be that it’s the focus this provides. Said Hauser, “A VC company doesn’t have to figure out how to make money,” point here being that the constraints that are placed on your cash flow when you don’t take VC money forges a focus on 1) getting your product out as soon as possible, and 2) figuring out how to build cash (as opposed to, say, building users and figuring out revenue later, as you could with VC cash).

Talent
One of the biggest decisions a young company makes is hiring talent. This is especially true of a bootstrapped software company where the first wrong programmer hire could be deadly. Further, this is generally your key early overhead (especially in Massachusetts with the tax and insurance laws). With these realities stated however, this is where you can also find an advantage against VC-funded companies that can go on a hiring spree.

It basically returns to the larger point, “Less is More”. You may have founders or programmers working in customer service (or receiving “it’s not working” emails). It may be better for key players to be intimate with such feedback rather than new hires in a back office creating custom company responses. Why? Because some of the critical pivot points come from these areas.

Yet, when pressed about where he could you see himself advising someone on taking VC money for talent, Hauser said, “If you’re a company that is going to go after enterprise sales and are making an investment in salespeople on deals that could take months that could be a situation.”

PR & Promotion
Another advantage of taking venture capital money is the press that comes with achieving funding. Further, this press can be exciting internally, as well as helping to influence potential customers. But the panel tended to dismiss this advantage. Again, Hauser (known for the wild chocolate covered grasshopper campaign) responded to this by saying that the bootstrapper can do it too, “You’ve got a great story. You’re a super cool company, you’re not VC funded, and you’re making money. That’s compelling. Make phone calls and build relationships with the press.”

Business Plans
Ok, you don’t need one. But again, I think all conversations on “business plans” must begin with the question, “What is a business plan?” The panel seemed to agree, so I’ll define  it as they did. All founders (and moderator Laura Fitton, founder of the fantastic Twitter application directory OneForty.com) agreed: it’s just a 1- or 2-page document with an excel appendix that is used to chart the course of the business. Its goals, I think, are two-fold: 1) getting everyone on the same page from sales to IT, and 2) a historical document that you check in on often and you may adjust. It’s like a captain’s log. You have the chart book, but you want to record your path and the changes in the journey and you want to keep your decisions recorded when you make strategic or tactical adjustments.

A business plan should be a well-worn map with frays and ink on the side, the kind of thing you keep in your pocket for reference. If you’re veering from it, that may be ok, but you need to know when you’re veering off.

Wrapping Up
A great discussion with some great minds and kudos to Web Innovators Group and David Beisel (twitter: @davidbeisel ) for bringing the bootstrappers to the forefront of this WebInno. There are plenty of tech bootstrappers in our Boston community we don’t know about and more events and information to help them make it is an important vacancy in the Boston tech community (though it is improving).

And one closing question
In the Q&A there was a great question and I offer it as a challenge to our community to discover or build it: “Where can I find a list of self-funded companies in Boston?”