Pinyadda's Blog

Cross-Campus Collaboration in Fueling Boston’s Creative Economy

Cheryl Morris — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:54:43 +0000

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the Boston entrepreneurial scene and creative economy since commenting on Chase’s blog post in which he discussed the need for “weak ties” in Boston. In a nutshell, I was sharing my experience of getting a degree at Babson College (I’ve also written about how Babson’s curriculum and community work to “breed” entrepreneurs), but not having any idea what was going on at MIT or Harvard or BU or Northeastern for entrepreneurship and startups. I’ve heard the same from students and alumni at these schools about Babson and Olin College of Engineering, which sits right next to Babson. Students want to connect more, and recognize the power in diversity of minds.

Each greater Boston area school fosters dense pockets of innovation, top-notch professors, interesting speakers, and unique curriculums, programs and opportunities. Seeing and reaping the benefits first-hand of the support, positivity, collaboration and idea sharing happening at a lot of the Boston startup scene as well as from working in an incubator space, I can’t get away from the benefits these campuses and the greater Boston creative economy could reap from more cross-campus collaboration.

On the one hand, I understand why college administrators might not want to do this: ultimately they’re competing for talent and revenue. Their focus is on getting the best professors to their schools, the best speakers, designing the best programs and curriculums and more to lure in the best students and teach them well so they will hopefully be successful out of school and give back to the college as alumni. However, that doesn’t mean collaboration can’t bring greater value to each individual school and students as a whole.

For example, Babson doesn’t focus on engineering/programming like MIT, but we certainly have a deep understanding of markets and are well-schooled in evaluating opportunity and developing strategies to execute on ideas. Imagine what the two could do together, even simply in informal networking events. It’s the whole collective intelligence idea that I seem to be obsessing about right now. And there’s lots of other theories to back up the importance of differences in mindsets and schools of thought in fueling innovation, like open and cumulative innovation theories that have been substantiated by neuroscientist research (a good read on this is Iconoclast). Here are a couple ideas that I think could help foster more of this, and ultimately lead to more successful startups in Boston:

Student-run startups get a cross-campus pass

The first would be a simple program that allows student startups at various schools to visit events and get hands-on advice from classes at other regional Boston schools.

The events are pretty straightforward and I can’t imagine are hard to operationalize. Lots of panels and speaking events at colleges cost money to attend. Let’s face it: college students bootstrapping a startup just don’t have the money for these. However, these students are more often than not the people that can add the freshest perspective to these discussions and reap the most benefits from applying learnings to their immediate situation.

As for cross-campus classroom collaboration, I can’t think of a better win-win: startups from school A get advice from classroom at school B; students from school B apply learnings and critical thinking in a real-life case study. So perhaps a Bentley non-tech startup needs advice from a entrepreneurial programming class at MIT or creative social media class at Emerson: new ideas, un-thought opportunities or applications surface, solutions to a current challenges are offered, etc. Conversely, maybe a killer invention from an MIT student startup is struggling to identify their market potential and could reap the help from students at an entrepreneurship class at Babson. It’s benefiting the students in the classroom (think and apply knowledge to a real-life idea/startup) as well as these 2-3 person student startups that need help at their critical early stage, and who will eventually graduate and give back to the colleges later in life.

Cross-institutional incubator for early-stage recent alumni startups

This would be an incubator house in the city for most promising entrepreneurs from a variety of schools. You can imagine top-notch seniors or recent alums from these schools (pairs, trios, etc.) apply and if accepted are housed for a certain amount of time. They’re mentored by faculty at these different schools and the various startups assist one another in their critical early-stages (this happens naturally in an incubator, anyways). This would give these students a higher probability of success and a great support and learning network.

I think this would add the most value to colleges outside of Boston (Babson, Olin, WPI), where their location gives them an inherent disadvantage in terms of networking in and collaborating with the entrepreneurial scene downtown and in Cambridge, and students at other schools. These students could offer and reap a lot in this scene.

I’d love to hear what current student startupers or aspiring startupers think about this idea. And what about college administrators?

How Babson’s Community Makes It #1 in Entrepreneurship

Cheryl Morris — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:49:46 +0000

Every time I read about or return to Babson College I am more impressed by the caliber of students, faculty, administration, and staff. Yesterday I wrote about a handful of programs Babson has designed that work to “breed” entrepreneurs. Today I am spotlighting how Babson also breeds a network of adopters and supporters of startups at their early and, arguably, most critical stage.

Faculty/Administration/Staff: Making Me Ask, ‘How Can I Give Back?’

Just about every faculty, administrator and staff interaction I had while at Babson was a positive one. These Babson leaders take students under their wings and care deeply about their development, success and happiness throughout their four years. As a student, professors always made themselves available to talk with me one-on-one, be it relating to a class, organizations, future career or something more personal.

I’ve learned more recently that this care and support continues well after you graduate. I’ve been impressed and humbled at how professors and administrators like Elaine Allen and Richard Mandel have taken the time to engage with me about Pinyadda. They’ve asked one simple question: “How can I help?” (Wow.)

Thank you Babson faculty and staff for your support while at Babson, and for continuing that support post-graduation. It’s what makes me ask myself “how can I give back” and take every opportunity to do so.

Students & Alumni: Incredibly Valuable Early Adopters

While Babson has developed unmatched curriculum, programs and faculty to support successful entrepreneurs, they also breed a tightly knit community of proud students and graduates. This is a community that carries the #1 ranking for entrepreneurship on their shoulders (regardless if starting their own company or not), always eager to support fellow Babson community startups. It is their involvement and support that enhances a startup’s early-stage development, decreasing the probability that a Babson student or alum’s startup will fail and directly influencing later-stage success.

The atmosphere and excitement around entrepreneurship at Babson actually creates a truly unique base of early adopters. This is a community that many startups (particularly consumer facing startups) need and benefit from. Babson students and alums have the business-savvy and strategy prowess to understand opportunities and how to build a startup that capitalizes on these opportunities. Moreover, the industries these business mavens span post-graduation are extremely diverse: from banking to retail to CPG to non-profit. It’s this range of experience layered on a strong business foundation that makes us such a valuable community of early adopters.

Pinyadda is a beneficiary of Babson student and alumni early adopters, and we consider ourselves very lucky. This community has not only been willing, but has had a keen desire, to do their part in helping us build our platform. They have helped us with challenges, believing in where we will take the product down the road, by offering constructive and valuable feedback. Their activity and support has been instrumental in helping our product and user base develop.

Below is a list of Babson community members who have been early adopters on Pinyadda. Some we have invited personally, and others have heard by word of mouth and jumped on the platform without a second thought. Many have been inviting their friends and colleagues to the platform outside of the Babson community. Thank you all for doing this; you’ve been crucial to Pinyadda’s early-stage success. And you should appreciate that you’re just as instrumental as the curriculum, faculty, and entrepreneurs themselves in keeping Babson’s #1 in entrepreneurship rating.

Many below are following one another on Pinyadda to discuss the news and blog posts they’re reading – if I missed you, many apologies, and let me know so I can add you to the list.

If you’re looking to follow any of the brilliant business minds below, simply click their name to view their profile and click “Follow.”

How Babson breeds Entrepreneurs

Cheryl Morris — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:43:46 +0000

This weekend I coached students as part of Babson College’s Coaching for Leadership and Teamwork Program. The program is designed to help first and third year students hone their oral communication, listening, teamwork, leadership, ethics, and decision-making skills. It’s one of the many distinctive programs Babson offers in addition to it’s truly unique, cross-disciplined business education. I’ve recently more keenly appreciated how Babson’s education fosters entrepreneurialism — regardless of if you decide to take specific classes in the entrepreneurship academic division or not.

Babson was a rigorous and rewarding experience for me. I didn’t concentrate in entrepreneurship, but the implicit learning I gained from being around motivated, aspiring and current student entrepreneurs certainly left it’s mark. Babson teaches it’s students to take risks, to figure out complex business problems, how to succeed in a highly demanding environments, among many other skills. All of these skills I’d qualify as essentials to being an entrepreneur. After going the traditional consulting route after graduation, I’m now navigating my way through the startup scene in Boston and Cambridge. There’s so much I find myself applying from my education and the programs at Babson in this scene. Here are a handful of the programs that set me up best to help make Pinyadda a success:

Foundations of Management & Entrepreneurship

This is a required year-long course for freshmen, in which 60 students start with rocket pitches and vote to narrow down the pitches to two business ideas. The class splits, determines roles and positions, receives a $3,000 loan, and runs the businesses through the semester. At the end of the semester, they donate all profits to a non-profit of their choice. My company, Greenback Card Co., raked in $12,500 in revenues and donated $7,500 in profits to a local YMCA.

The biggest learning from this experience that I’m applying now at Pinyadda is know that no matter your age and experience, starting and running a business is possible.

Intermediate Program

This program includes a capstone project your junior year that runs and is administered across disciplines: finance, organizational behavior, marketing, strategy, etc. A self-selected team of students choose a company and analyze and address complex issues facing that company, ultimately presenting strategic recommendations to a panel of professors at the end of the semester. My team chose Home Depot, as Lowe’s market share was steaming ahead. We recommended a variety of strategic initiatives and answered tough questions from the panel about how these would be financed, how much we knew about the markets we were entering to name a few. We had no problem answering these questions given the thorough research we had done (we even spoke with management at Home Depot).

This program taught me the power of research and data analysis in strategic decision making. As a startup, no one tells you what to do and how to do it. As a result, we rely on data and research to drive this decision making more than anything else.

Management Consulting Field Experience (MCFE)

This advanced course pairs self-selected groups of students with an MBA student project manager. The group works with an area organization and provides consulting services. The team presents their recommendations to their client at the end of the semester. My team worked with Top Floor Learning, an adult education center facing a funding loss of $30k. They asked for our recommendations on how to make up for that loss. We performed pricing analyses, competitive analyses, demographical research, customer research, and ultimately provided implementable recommendations for making up for that loss.

MCFE allowed me to appreciate the importance of individual strengths and weaknesses in effective teamwork, especially amidst a group of friends. At Pinyadda, where we are all friends, we focus on working collaboratively towards a common goal by appreciating and honestly evaluating each others’ individual strengths and weaknesses. By doing so, we capitalize on strengths, and reach goals and develop initiatives in the most effective ways.

Honors Program Thesis

The Honors Program at Babson includes everything from advanced courses to networking events to a semester-long course on research methodologies. It provides an incredible support network and opportunities to get to know professors outside of the classroom. The capstone of the program is a three-semester long thesis project. My thesis analyzed the factors influencing Gen Y’s adoption of mobile payments. This thesis project taught me more than anything else how to self-start. No one was looking over my shoulder to complete the project; it was done independently and on my own time.

In a startup, you learn that the ability to re-energize and self-motivate is crucial — and entirely on your shoulders. No one is pushing deadlines and telling you when to work (maybe it’s why most startupers just work all the time?). Learning how to self-motivate is undoubtedly critical to startup success, so important that we’ve written it in our company conduct guidelines.

Woman’s Leadership Mentor Program

This program selects top well-rounded women undergraduate students at Babson and provides them with a scholarship and a vibrant support network throughout their years at Babson. Similar to the Honors Program, this program provided unmatched access to faculty, conferences, networking opportunities, a truly phenomenal support network of women, and a year long mentorship program with a seasoned female business leader in arguably your most busy time at Babson — your junior year. My mentor was an entrepreneur herself, truly got to know me as a person, and wanted nothing more than to see me find happiness and success. She helped me through a tough semester of juggling work, full course-load, several extracurricular activities, internship searching, and honing in on what exactly I wanted to do post-graduation.

The mentor program taught me how to balance things in my life. Startup life is 24-7, and when things are more crazy than “normal,” there’s no better lessons I learned from the Women’s Leadership Program than to immediately ground yourself by believing in your abilities.

As I mentioned, I took only a couple courses in entrepreneurship at Babson and didn’t take advantage of all the student-run entrepreneurial communities on campus like the E-Tower and Invenio Group. And while I knew I wanted to build a company down the road, I never anticipated doing it so soon out of school. I’m realizing now that regardless of my limited interaction with the entrepreneurially centered organizations and academic division, Babson still bred me to be an entrepreneur. The skills to succeed as an entrepreneur are built into so many of the school’s programs and classes, although I may have overlooked at the time the care at which Babson designed these programs and it’s curriculum in this way. The programs and learnings outlined above are without a doubt helping me navigate the startup scene and build Pinyadda. I now truly appreciate the #1 in entrepreneurship ranking.

No User Left Behind: Lucas Martinez

Cheryl Morris — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:10:11 +0000

This week I spoke with Lucas Martinez. Lucas first used Pinyadda in it’s early stages in the summer of 2009, and has since watched the platform and user base develop. He now uses the site just about every day. I really enjoyed chatting with Lucas about how Pinyadda fits into his life because he explains it as having truly transformed how he finds and receives information. That’s mission accomplished for us here at Pinyadda.

Lucas works on the marketing team for Deckers, the designer and manufacturer of the high-performance footwear you know well: UGG, Teva and Simple. On a day-to-day basis he does a lot of email and search campaign generation, copywriting, and competitive and trend research to advise the Deckers’ product team on where to move next. This means he has to stay up on what’s happening in the industry.

A tool: everything in one place

Before Pinyadda, Lucas visited and maneuvered through 10-15 sites a day to stay up with innovation and marketing news. He’d also amass a stockpile of newsletters in his inbox, which he describes as “overwhelming.” (He said they probably account for 75 percent of the emails he receives.) He likes that now he “just has to go to one site,” Pinyadda, instead of wasting time navigating through various sites and newsletters for the information he wants. In this sense he views Pinyadda as a “useful tool.” In fact, he simply keeps Pinyadda open all day to stay on top of trend research and to monitor competitor initiatives as they break.

More than a tool: what keeps him coming back for more

While Pinyadda solves a big convenience problem for Lucas, it’s not what keeps him coming back for more. The conversations and discussions he has is by far his favorite part of the Pinyadda experience. He really enjoys talking about what he’s reading, noting: “I really like to see what other people think. It’s exciting when someone you know comments … It keeps me checking in on my phone to see if someone has commented back.” Each of the users I’ve interviewed has noted the same about the social aspect of Pinyadda, and we’re becoming more confident that this is where our product/market fit lies.

Our users aren’t the only ones who note that discussing the news is the most engaging aspect of reading it online. Pew Research, recently released a report on changes in news consumption behavior, The New News Landscape: Rise of the Internet, which describe Lucas and many of of our other users as “the participatory news consumer.” The report confirms that:

“People’s relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized and participatory … To a great extent, people’s experience of news, especially on the internet, is becoming a shared social experience as people swap links in emails, post news stories on their social networking site feeds, highlight news stories in their Tweets and haggle over the meaning of events in discussion threads.”

We’re excited to be leading the way with a product that fosters and enables this new news consumption paradigm, and more excited to hear Lucas and our other users unwaveringly note this as their favorite aspect of Pinyadda.

Changing his behavior beyond Pinyadda

On the note of social, while spurred by his wanting to reach ‘Pin-domination’ on Pinyadda (a simple set of tasks that helps users maximize the value they’ll get out of the platform), Pinyadda has actually made Lucas start experimenting with Twitter. He explained that while he doesn’t like the idea of sharing where he’s going and what he’s doing with people in status updates, he does want to share useful, fun and interesting links with them. (Lucas, you can go ahead and let Jack Dorsey know Pinyadda made you start to use Twitter. ☺)

Groups: faster activation, more inviting

When I asked Lucas what he think we could be doing better or differently with Pinyadda, he brought up something that is actually on our product roadmap: groups. He feels that on-boarding people to the platform as a group, where each person knows several others, they would more quickly realize the power and enjoyment factor of Pinyadda. He also noted it would help people immediately benefit from the sharing and discussions, and ultimately help them become activated and engaged on Pinyadda more quickly.

Lucas would like to see this feature so he can invite his Deckers marketing colleagues to join Pinyadda. They currently use a private Facebook group to internally share and discuss interesting articles, and which has become a “wall of news” for them. Instead, he’d like to see his team on Pinyadda, where they can be served relevant information on right from the get-go and more easily discuss it. This was great to hear, and re-emphasized the value our platform could offer in the workplace.

Lucas, we’ll be sure to be back in touch as we start designing the group aspect of Pinyadda. Thanks for providing us a glimpse into how Pinyadda fits into your life. We couldn’t be more thrilled that it’s changed for the better how you find, receive and share information!

If you’d like to follow Lucas on Pinyadda, I’d suggest following his recommended articles on:

Facebook, Twitter and Buzz: Who shares your personal information best?

Chase Garbarino — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:40:44 +0000

John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, once stated that, “Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.” After Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments about the death of privacy, one has to wonder whether Barlow’s statement may be more relevant to the times if phrased: “Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking Facebook to respect the private information of its users.”

While there are plenty of smart people arguing the pros and cons of the effects of Facebook’s new privacy changes and Google Buzz’s auto-following model on users’ private information online, I am more interested in the business implications of these developments. The industry powers like Facebook and Google seem to be in a mad dash to make more information public; however, I wonder if this push for extended network connectivity is smart for all networks.

A recent study conducted by Nielsen found that Twitter’s “heavy users” in the UK consist of 7% of the user population and make up 79% of the total amount of time spent on the site. Facebook on the other hand sees in the UK 52% of its population as “heavy users” making up 98% of the time spent on site. While this distinction between the distributions of user activity on the two sites could be attributed to a number of things (e.g. type of content hosted, product differences, etc.), I personally believe that the network designs with regards to privacy and the nature of users information have the largest effect on the user activity distributions.

When analyzing the value of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, much of the excitement comes from data that shows digital word-of-mouth as the most trusted marketing form. Taking this into consideration, you would think that Facebook and Twitter would want to be very deliberate in making adjustments to privacy settings and product design that effects how information is shared throughout their networks, with a focus on optimizing the distribution of user activity in a way that would best support their business models.

The two networks are typically used for very different things – I think of Facebook as my “social life identity” and Twitter as my “broadcast identity“. Inevitably, Twitter is a much more public platform than Facebook which would suggest the distribution of user activity will always be a bit more skewed. However, I think it is safe to assume those over at Twitter are probably thinking of ways to engage a larger portion of their user base. From Facebook’s standpoint, I find the sneaky move to make user’s information more public by default is certainly questionable in terms of user trust, but also strange from a business standpoint. Facebook’s biggest strength is how deeply people engage with on another on the site, by making such a change I feel they could be jeopardizing this.

I am interested to hear what others thing about this – do you think it is smart for Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz all to be pushing consumers to share more information publicly? Do you think it is smart for one and not the others? Let me know in the comments.

I am also interested in hearing from any of you statistical nerds about what you think ideal user activity distributions would look like for the different networks. I’ll write a follow up post with my opinions on this if there is any activity around the idea.

No User Left Behind: Adam Boone

Cheryl Morris — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:37:06 +0000

The news junkie

Adam Boone is a news junkie. (Read on: might it be why he’s so da*n smart?) Know that beloved friend who regularly sparks a 25 chain email discussion with you and your friends about an article he found? That’s Adam.

As the Finance Manager of New York for IPC Systems (a leading provider of financial trading communications solutions), Adam manages a whopping $200M dollar P&L and a team in charge of billing for the entirety of North America. As you’d imagine, this keeps him incredibly busy. It also limits the time he has to pursue his love of absorbing and discussing the news. Until he discovered Pinyadda…

Pinyadda is his daily news outlet

Pinyadda solves a time and efficiency problem for Adam. Before Pinyadda it was nearly impossible for him to find the time to individually visit his twenty or so go-to sites for news. Pinyadda has simplified his finding and sharing by “delivering the content that I want as well as letting me see what my friends are reading and saying about it.” In fact, he keeps Pinyadda open most of the day so he can quickly glance at headlines as they break and to stay updated with what’s going on in the world.

Self-proclaimed email-chain-obsessed, it was refreshing to hear how Pinyadda’s private messages have also simplified the sharing aspect of Adam’s crush on the news. “Once you get all your friends on there, you can share articles so easily with one ‘Pin it’.” He’s such a fan of this ease of use that he thinks getting other friends and colleagues on board is the biggest source of potential for our users. This aspect is also where he thinks Pinyadda could improve. He’d like to see the addition of groups to private sharing to simplify the sharing process even more.

As you’d expect, when Adam visits Pinyadda he scans his People feed first to see what his friends are reading and discussing. More recently, however, he’s found himself addicted to his Topics feeds (which really excited me!). When realized he could receive news from all kinds of sources on specific interests, he added 30 more Topics. Like most users who follow several Topics, it’s been a vehicle for Adam to discover some really interesting sites and blogs that he had not known about.

Adam thinks big

When I asked Adam what he likes most about Pinyadda, I was expecting to hear him voice a particular feature. Nope. Instead, he reflected on his generation and how Pinyadda could help solve the larger problem of how many younger people are out of touch with world events and the news affecting their nation.

Adam went on to describe how the social aspect of Pinyadda actually makes getting the news fun. In this sense he sees Pinyadda as a “social movement.” He’s noticed people he invites who aren’t news junkies becoming news junkies. I quote:

“I think the social implications [of Pinyadda] are a lot bigger than anyone really realizes at this point. In the long run, it could have big implications on how younger generations get their news and actually get interested in it.”

On that note Adam, welcome as an official Yadda squad member! Thanks for taking time out of your busy day to chat. I enjoyed learning about how Pinyadda fits into your daily routine, and how we might improve the platform for the news junkies of the world!

Here are the topics I’d recommend following Adam on:

No User Left Behind: Max Silver

Cheryl Morris — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:13:29 +0000

This week I met with Pinyadda user Max Silver. Max has been using Pinyadda for just a few weeks, but has quickly become one of our most active ‘Power Users’. Max is a senior at Emerson College here in Boston studying Marketing and Communications. A Twitter-aholic, he’s fascinated with the way social products allow him to build a network that he would never otherwise be able to create.

Max heard about Pinyadda from the brother of one of his friends who told him he’d really like it. In true GenY social media form, he tweeted out asking for others’ first impressions with the platform before signing up.

Can’t get enough content, can’t share it quickly enough

Why Max’s friend suggested he’d love Pinyadda so much became very apparent once I started following him on Twitter. Max LOVES content and LOVES to share it. He describes sharing as something “innate in all of us” and is why he’s so impassioned about social media. He’s interned at Digitas, iMax in LA among several others and is looking to work for an ad agency focused on digital strategy. (After speaking with him at length about the future of social, I’ll shamelessly plug that he’d absolutely be a great hire.)

In this context, Pinyadda allows Max to “consume and share content more efficiently.” Always on the go from internship to class to tweetup and more, with Pinyadda he doesn’t have to go to 10 different sites and blogs (and which usually have “really bad sharing functionality”) to stay on top of his Twitter and information game. Pinyadda’s “simple feed interface” and easy pin to a social network integration means he can quickly scan relevant headlines and sources to soak up lots of information. (As a GenYer he remarks that it’s his generations perogative to “know about and be good at everything; not great at one thing.”)

Max likes that after scanning relevant headlines he can click on the select few he’d like to read more deeply, and then easily share those with his followers on Twitter with commentary. The motivation behind this is that he wants to provide value to others, considering himself a source of quality content. He had used Google Reader, but stopped because he found it too difficult/clunky to share and he wasn’t able to take a quick snapshop of what is trending.

Sharing is great, community is powerful

While the ability to easily share is most important, Max noted that the community Pinyadda enables around individual content items is truly powerful. He says he tries to have individual content item discussions on Twitter every now and then, but is incredibly annoyed with the character limits and irritation of having to go back and forth over 10 tweets to have a decent conversation.

As a result, Max has found himself interacting with LinkedIn groups for discussions around content. Fascinated with the integration of online and offline, he loves the ability to have conversations and make connections among people with shared interests. He thinks Pinyadda offers a better platform for that — what he describes as a “crowd-sourcing of your own information.” As a result, he wants us to bring back the “most pinned” and “most discussed” functionality. This was a feature we really enjoyed from the onset, and in an attempt to simplify our UX, removed. It’s great to hear a user who had not seen those features early-on now requesting it.

What a Twitteraholic wants from Pinyadda

As for his suggestions about making Pinyadda better, it’s no surprise it has to do with his avid use of Twitter. Number one, he’d like shorter Pinyadda URLs. (We’re working on it, Max, so thanks for bearing with us!) He’d also like to see an implementation of character counts when sharing to Facebook and Twitter.

Related, for individual link pages (where people land when they click on the Pinyadda links he shares), he feels a brief summary of the article would provide even greater value to the people he shares his links with. His followers could then come to the individual link page, get the gist of the article and quickly decide if they’d like to hop into the conversation around the article with Max. Since people can @ reply Twitter followers from Pinyadda, he noted this would effectively solve his frustration of not being able to have meaningful conversations around content items on Twitter.

These suggestions and insights are really important to us, especially coming from such a keen Twitter user. We pride ourselves as being the easiest way to find and share links on Twitter, and are constantly iterating to make that experience better. We’re looking forward to discussing Max’s suggestions at our next product meeting.

Max, thank you for dropping by our offices and for a really great discussion about Pinyadda and the future of social media and content sharing. You are officially a member of the team Yadda squad!

Pinyadda users, for great content recommendations and commentary, here are some topics I’d suggest you follow Max on:

No User Left Behind: Rob Gonzalez

Cheryl Morris — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:17:18 +0000

Each week I’ll be conducting an interview that highlights a different user on our site to better understand who our community is, how Pinyadda fits into their lives, and what they like most and think could be better about the product. It’s part of our customer discovery and validation process, and we’re excited to take the learnings and make Pinyadda better. We’re calling it “No User Left Behind.”

A serious need for information

The first user I interviewed is Rob Gonzalez, a Senior Project Manager for Endeca Technologies. Endeca is a leading search application technology company in Cambridge, Mass. that powers 250M+ people to more quickly and easily access information. He started in an engineering role and moved quickly up the ranks to Senior Project Manager. In this role, he plans future releases, meets with both customers and partners, evaluates 3^rd party technologies, and more generally is responsible for anything Endeca does in the ETL space from technology to sales. So, he has what he describes as “a serious need for information from a variety of sources to stay on top of my game.”

To stay on top of the information and breaking news in this context, Rob currently uses a plethora of tools: FeedBurner, Reddit, Google Alerts and general search. He also emails and discusses links on a daily basis, and subscribes to a bunch of newsletters. For him, these various outlets pose a problem – what he describes as a “multi-tool” problem. It’s a pain for him to visit all these outlets to stay up to date on his industry, so he often just skips the process if he doesn’t have time.

Pinyadda as a solution: What the iPhone did for mobile

Pinyadda solves a lot of these problems for Rob by “consolidating the values” of these various sites and platforms into one place. He describes Pinyadda solving what the iPhone did for mobile and mp3 players: “instead of carrying an RSS reader and email client and web browser around for my news, I can just use one site.”

Always stretched for time, he likes that he can come to Pinyadda, easily see headlines, click through on a few articles and get on with his life. He also appreciates the efficientcy of not having to log into another application like Facebook, Twitter, or an email client to share what articles are most pressing to his job with his colleagues.

A lurker, but also a discoverer

While he notes he’s a “lurker” on Pinyadda, checking in on what other people are reading, I was excited when he noted his favorite feature was the Topics feed. This is generally the feed we see users finding value in after they’ve “lurked” a bit. He akins Topics to some of he keywords he uses in Google Alerts. This is great learning for us, and a use case we hadn’t prominently thought about. It certainly puts more momentum behind a feature on our product roadmap – the idea of building saved searches into your topic feed to follow more obscure or specific topics.

My new favorite user, because he has great ideas and isn’t afraid to provide specific critiques

Rob is candid. We love that. Viewing Pinyadda as a tool, he has lots of ideas of some changes he would like to see that could add a lot of immediate value to the product.

The Pin, everywhere on the web. Rob wants to be able to click the Pin It icon from anywhere on the web to share his article recommendations, without having to login to Pinyadda. Easily sharing and recommending information is important to us. Awesome idea.
Pinyadda on the go. Rob wants Pinyadda on the plane. He even offered up a solution of using Google Gears to help make this happen. Another awesome idea.
RSS integration. An avid FeedReader user (and complainer of it’s limitations), this is what Rob wants most. He sees tremendous opportunity in making the switch from an RSS reader like Google Reader to Pinyadda frictionless by providing users a simple one-click import of all of their feeds. He also described the way we allow users to add sites as his “biggest annoyance.”

The feedback on #3 is particularly important to us. We realize we can’t grow our index without our community’s help. Accordingly, Rob reiterated that we need to make it easier for them to help with this. As structured now, even for someone familiar with RSS, it can be difficult to add your own feeds. I can imagine what it’s like for someone not familiar with RSS.

Engineer by nature, Rob offered some specifics on how we might consider making the process better. For example, simply entering the site’s URL instead of having to search for a site’s RSS feed. We’re going to look into solutions for this, and welcome ideas from others who may have ideas about how to make this happen. Having encountered a few RSS submission failures, such as with Atom feeds, we’re currently working diligently on accepting all flavors of RSS (thanks for bearing with us!). He also offered a good perspective on how to make the “flow” of adding a site a lot easier — such as adding his own topic tags — and we couldn’t agree more. We’d like to give more credit to the users who are adding knowledge and great sites to the platform and make the flow, in general, more fun. Allowing our community to create their own tags, for example, will allow everyone to receive more personalized content and have more control.

Rob, again, thank you for being so candid with us and for your perspective as a “multi-tool” user! Looking forward to looping back with you on your feedback as we rollout new features.

If you’d like to follow Rob’s article and blog post recommendations on Pinyadda, here are the top 3 topics I’d recommend following him on:

KISSmetrics vs. Google Analytics

Austin Gardner-Smith — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:14:46 +0000

Like most other startups using the lean startup methodology, we’ve become pretty obsessed with tracking data. We track all kinds of stuff, from internal product metrics to external referrals to conversions via the various funnels we’ve set up. We rely on these numbers to help us make key product decisions, to tell us where we should focus our marketing efforts, and generally to find out what’s working and what’s not. For a company still wiggling our way into product/market fit, these numbers are our currency, and it’s important that we get them right.

We use several sets of tools to measure data, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. In order to ensure validity, we often cross-reference these data sets against each other to make sure we’re getting the most accurate numbers possible. While I often wish there were a single solution to this problem that could provide reliable and accurate data in one place, I do find some sort of sick comfort in knowing that outliers and tracking errors can be mostly avoided by the built-in redundancy in our tracking methods. But however much satisfaction, validation, and useful insight comes from looking at the compiled data sets, there’s no doubt that tracking and gathering data can be a huge pain in the ass.

Here’s a rough outline of what we track and how:

- Traffic acquisition: We use Google Analytics for most of the basic stuff, and when I’ve taken the time to check it against some of our other sources the numbers on a high-level basis seem to be fairly accurate. Lately it’s seemed to have a hard time grabbing accurate absolute referral numbers, but the search term referral information can’t be beat.

- Conversion: This is a huge metric for any startup so it makes sense that we use every tool in the arsenal on this one. Some high-level goals are tracked through Google Analytics, but the process of hacking javascript events to resemble pages and then setting up URL-oriented funnels really doesn’t work well for us, since almost all of our pages are dynamically loaded and changed. This is where KISSmetrics really shines, and we’re using it a lot to track our specific conversion funnels. Since we load different value props based on referral, it’s really important to have Javascript-based tracking, especially at the top of conversion funnels. We can use database events to construct records for true conversion events, but the views and clicks that lead up this are really easy to define in KISS Metrics. Like I said, we cross-check a lot of these numbers against our own internal tracking of insertions and server requests, but so far we’ve had little to no discrepancy between our numbers and KISS Metrics. Which is sweet. Check out this killer post if you want a more detailed breakdown of what KISS can do.

- A/B and Multivariate Testing: If conversion is our most important metric, then A/B data is our most important weapon. Google Website Optimizer rules the roost on this one and it’s a great tool. One thing we do that’s really helped to accommodate easier implementation of GWO is to write the page variations dynamically using PHP. By adding fields to the database we’re calling that are set up specifically to handle the GWO tracking code, as well as any elements we want to test we can create new experiments without ever having to touch the actual code. It’s not rocket science, but it certainly makes it easier to quickly set up an experiment.

- Retention, Engagement, and Referral: Most of this we track using our own internal systems, but we’re using KISS Metrics again to track some very specific action funnels (how far users get in various setup processes, the various ways in which they send invitations) that are primarily Javascript-based. Again, we could probably use Google Analytics for this, but it’s hard to resist the simplicity of the KISS Metrics reporting interface. We do use Google Analytics for some basic pageview numbers and for some of our external link tracking, to give us a broad sense of how people are using the product. When we identify something we want to take a closer look at, we’ll build a little component or move to an event-based tracking system.

There’s more to it, but those are the basics. For what it’s worth, here’s a quick analysis of the two tools we use the most, as I see them:

- Google Analytics:

PRO Powerful. I mean, wow. You can do pretty much whatever you want with this tool, provided you can figure it out.
CON It’s impossible to really figure out all the way. I’m sure there are some gurus out there using every single feature, but I often spend so much time navigating the interface that’s hard to remember what I was actually trying to track.
CON Constant fear of reliability failure. We’ve had to reset our tracking code a couple times for no apparent reason, and occasionally get data that reflects strange outliers. This probably happens with any analytics suite, but the fear of data voodoo sometimes keeps me up at night.
CON Kills load times. Watch the activity monitor in almost any site you visit. That ‘13 of 14 items, still waiting’ text? Yeah, that’s the GA code.
Conclusions: A lot like owning a Ferarri with mediocre tires that sometimes won’t start. In other words, lots of power but hard to steer and just unreliable enough to keep you on your toes.

- KISSmetrics

PRO Event-based tracking. It’s built from the ground up to accommodate dynamic sites and rich web interfaces. Simple Javascript syntax makes tracking any event a cinch.
PRO Reporting interface. They built it for regular people to actually use (an amazing concept), and they give you data where the main metric is ‘People’. As in ‘20 people clicked on this button.’ So simple, makes such a big difference.
PRO Customer service. They’re a startup, and they roll lean-style, which means you can get answers to your questions. And quick. My last inquiry on twitter was answered in about 15 mins.
CON Limited functionality. Ideally I want this simple model to be able to do some more powerful things. But they’ll get there soon, no doubt.
Conclusion: More like owning a slick new Mini in Beacon Hill. Perfect for what it does, looks great, easy-to-use; probably not the right tool for bigger jobs.

The Power of the Collective Mind in the Workplace

Cheryl Morris — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:55:37 +0000

We’ve had amazing discussions around article content on Pinyadda this week. The ideas and knowledge being shared is incredible. It underscores how our information system can really advance the power of the collective mind. I also had the pleasure of listening to Mikolaj Jan Piskorski (Misiek) speak this week, who believes there is an unfulfilled need for a social networking platform for internal use at companies. By enabling and facilitating collective intelligence, Pinyadda could be an effective social networking platform for fostering innovation, communication, and community in the workplace.

Misiek spoke at a “fireside chat” at Vilna Shul (a true hidden gem in Beacon Hill with a phenomenal history of Jewish culture in Boston). An HBS strategy professor who teaches “Competing with Social Networks”), Misiek has done extensive research and written numerous case studies on these networks. If you haven’t read his work or seen his data analyses in the news, you’re really missing out. Schooled in sociology, he offers a unique, non-marketer perspective of social networking—way deeper than it as a channel—that strikes the core of why we as humans are engaging so fervently on these platforms. This includes, among others, needs to stay connected with the people we care about and needs to look for new job opportunities.

After he opened the floor for questions, someone asked if he thought there were still needs (opportunities) for new social networks. He offered two examples: one for “girls only” and one for enterprise/corporate environments. The latter struck the biggest chord with me. Having previously worked in consulting I have heard first-hand HR heads express that they realize the power of social media and want to use it internally to cultivate corporate culture and community. However, they know employees aren’t going to discuss at work how hard they’re going to party on Friday night.

As a result, companies have created Twitter handles, perhaps allow their employees to blog, add knowledge to wikis, create a fan page on Facebook, etc. Misiek remarked that what’s missing, and why these don’t actually drive engagement and community within companies, is that the initiatives aren’t adding direct, true value to the employee’s day-to-day responsibilities. More important, they’re not addressing a need in these employees’ life. On the flip side, they are also not effectively adding measurable value to the larger company’s mission or competitiveness. They’re basically just allowing the company to say, “See, we’re totally on the social band wagon.”

Enter the discussions around content we’ve seen really take off this week on Pinyadda after opening up in public beta. We’re truly seeing community amass around content: ideas being exchanged and built upon and experiences and perspective being shared. It’s reinforced my hypothesis about the value Pinyadda could offer in the workplace. Pinyadda might not only be a place to have your industry news served to you. Nor might it only be a place to discover and discuss breaking news or useful blog posts that can help your business learn to be better. Pinyadda can enable employees to see, for example, what their boss or CEO is reading and allows them to add their own thoughts, experiences, and ideas about the item in real-time.

From the employee’s perspective, imagine, now you’re no longer employee #2384 in the cube by the bathroom in the Minneapolis office. You have an identity and are sharing your ideas and knowledge cross-departmentally and with other employees and senior managers, perhaps who don’t know you. That’s fulfilling a direct need for both the individual (hey, I’m really valuable and have lots to offer to this firm) AND the company (what are our competitors doing, how can we do things differently, here’s a new idea and fresh perspective, employee #2384 is an up-and-coming leader).

At a more basic level, how many links do you receive a day to “check this out” from your boss or buddy in the cube over? Maybe it’s something about work. Maybe a YouTube clip from last night’s Tonight Show. Mostly useless threads of emails follow, cluttering what used to be a communication medium to talk about projects with co-workers and do business with partners and prospective clients. As our product lead Austin often says, I think we’ve advanced enough to separate these link chains from work inboxes with all the different media platforms now available to us. Assuming the link is work-related, the fact remains that these discussions aren’t opened up to the larger company to discuss–the collective intelligence opportunity. Perhaps a different business unit in an office in another country would have an interesting perspective on the item and offer insights that can help the other unit operate more efficiently or consider a new idea.

Bottom line: I think Misiek is absolutely right. There is a gaping opportunity for social products in the workplace. His sociological need perspective explains why most current internal corporate social initiatives aren’t doing so hot. As he noted, successful ones down the road will add value to and address a social need for both employees AND the company’s competitiveness at large. A platform like Pinyadda that can enable companies and employees to reap the benefits of collective intelligence could be an effective solution.

Pinyadda is too early stage at this point to address these needs with a custom product. However, if you are a small working group or business and think you could benefit from using the platform today, please do reach out to us. We’d love to work with you (cheryl[at]pinyadda.com or @cheryllmorris).

Regardless, we’re incredibly jazzed to be seeing some smart, valuable dialogues take place on Pinyadda this week and hope to see more as our early adopter base grows.