Watching out for J-CAP

Another lunch story. This time was with the old CTO of another startup that I worked at which we ultimately sold to a competitor. That was another interesting experience.

Anyway, I was sharing the story about how some of well-to-do Manhattan Jewish families are adopting baby girls from China. And, it would be interesting to see what happens to Wall Street and other places in 20 years when these babies are grown women and start to exert their influence...

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Mr Whup-Ass's event has blown over mostly without new wrinkles. He was able to help us change the "was" in the press release so we can all move on with our lives.

Of course, officially, the verdict is not out since our board still has to approve of the change. I do not believe it would be wise to ask Mr W to resign at this junction, but, with the board, you never know.

The PR agency change came about easier than I originally thought. I tried to call the out-going account manager on Thursday afternoon without success. But, I was able to connect with her on Friday morning. Since our contract stipulated that we can terminate the relationship with a written note, I told her on the phone first and then followed up with an email to confirm the conversation. She was a bit shocked of the change, but took it well. I told her that we really enjoy working with the firm but the new firm made an offer that we/I did not want to turn down.

With the new firm, there was one contractual change from the proposal. Initially, we had a 30 day notification for terminating the contract. I call them up and said that I want the ability to terminate the contract immediately. Not that I plan to end the relationship before signing up. But, I do not want to have carry an agency for 30 days knowing that there is no incentive to perform. In exchange, I offered to sign up for 90 days to put a bit of our skin in the game. My thinking is that I would need to give them at least 90 days to ramp up and prove themselves. And, this also give them a way to justify the change. Anyway, they agreed to it and we started the relationship this Monday.

It is obviously too early to say what is going to happen with the new agency. So far, they have been pretty good at asking questions. I think they will put together a detail proposal next week. But, I am pushing them to start our weekly call this Thursday. We'll see.

The Google thing is interesting. I have gone in and started to kill ad's that do not perform well. Usually, there is a clear drop off. One type of ad that I tend to leave in are the webinars. They usually do not perform as well as other ad's, but I do want to see if there is some way of improving it.

My gut feeling is that webinars do not work as well as the standard sales ad's since few people are motivated to mark their calendar in advance for something that they know little about. As I trim the ad's with low click through rates, I hope to collect more data to confirm webinar's performance.

A related idea is to start offering whitepapers and articles through Google. I think this could be something that might entice people to click through because a download is considered a significantly lower commitment than a webinar.

Two other ideas that I am thinking through are 1. have a canned/recorded webinar and 2. the Google targeted site programs. Still doing research.

Oh, I finally got the new product pages pushed out. It is note worthy for two reasons. For the company, I am glad that these pages are out because it is actually the biggest revenue generator for the company although it is a stealth product. We still see people searching for it on the web-log and I am glad to offer the information on the corporate site again. From a marketing perspective, I am glad because now I can start to work on additional web components that will deal with the partners program which is both more interesting and more important for the growth of the company.

Speaking of partners program. We have interviewed and extended an offer to a dragon lady. She seems very competent and has all the relevant experiences. But, as I was talking with Mr Proper, Sales VP, she seems like a ball-buster... Anyway, my plan is to have the partner pages ready before leaving Spain. And, in parallel, work with our new PR team to push the program and its success with press like CRN.

I am starting the email newsletter program. For the longest time, I was reluctant to do it because I do not feel like I have enough content to keep it going for the long haul. However, with the influx of articles, whitepapers, customers, etc. I am now comfortable with the idea and will send out the first one tomorrow. One interesting thing about newsletter is that you have to keep it information rich to make it sticky with readers. So, I actually spent quite a bit of time talking about user experiences, press coverage, and only minimum spins on attending our webinars. I even suggested that people forward the newsletter to their friends. We will see if anyone takes me up on the offer. :-)!

The webinar program wanes and waxes in terms of attendance. In the past week or so, it is in the wane stage. So, Mr Proper suggested that we change the date and frequency to have one every Wednesday. I do not have a good reason on why the change because we started the webinar program with a respectable bang. The mystery of the web.

Actually, I am looking into a number of tools that will help to answer some of my conundrums. I really need a full time web person to get these things implemented...

Finally, the second website draft came in. It looks better than the first one. However, I made some changes to it as a counter-proposal. I hope the designer does not kill me. But, I actually thought the counter-proposal makes more sense in terms of eyeball movement patterns. We will see how she reacts to my ideas.

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...Mr CTO thought about these baby girls from China in the Manhattan Jewish homes for a second and said, "Hmm, J-CAP's. Jewish Chinese American Princess."

I thought that was a good line.

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