Part 2 -Socially, ill equipped — The things you learn in the first six months of a Social Media / Machine Learning startup.

In part one of this post, we talked about what we have learned from our customers over the last 6 months from building our Smart Social Media platform welikeit. It makes sense to read that first, but in this post we talk more generally about a few other things we have learnt along the way about the Market.

The Mobile marketing world is big and attractive, but it is still a complete minefield; NO ONE really knows what’s going to happen, but you can see the battle lines being drawn

What do we know, well some of the laws of advertising are being questioned. On the Web, people in general seem to accept that Advertising is the necessary price for the internet and mobile is certainly where the eyes are, but when it comes to their most “personal” devices there is clearly a strong backlash against the Ad market as it exists on these devices today.

The technical ability to create real time platforms to sell, manage and serve ads mean that they are blighted with the impression (forgive the pun) that they will be beautiful, targeted, personal and highly relevant but actually, they just aren’t. At least not yet. What’s more, most of the Mobile display ads served in App are still downright ugly and intrusive, and this whole mess is made worse as deterministic user identification is still not completely possible on mobile browsers, so knowing and tracking your target audience is tough.

Crowdsourcing staff creativity to make user generated Ads will not be cheered on by the professionally creative ad folks, but at the moment the RTB world of pay and spray with low quality is also causing a lot of noise about the value and special sauce that exists in the world of the old school Agencies. Those of us in this world can see these markets evolving in App, Browser and Social while also having to embrace technology to find ways around ad-blocking of different flavours.

There has been a consumer, and now Network backlash against “traditional” mobile ads in the form of Text, Push and Display in browser and App and the active usage on Social means that there is a surge in the number of plays in this market from businesses trying to be where the eyeballs are “Socialising”. Every week it seems there’s a platform Du Jour. The prize is considered so rich that there is still very little collaboration between the Social giants that allow publishers to purchase inventory, publish and analyse results across each platform. This in itself creating a niche for more third party tech offering cross-platform capabilities.

All this is happening while Social advertising is still in it’s infancy and we see Social Selling, Influencer Selling and Employee Advocacy all take their place in the value chain.

It does seem like common sense that companies that harness the genuine goodwill of their employees to create authentic Social Word of Mouth will enjoy the benefits of cost effective reach that also has sincerity and trust on its side. This is where we think welikeit can play.

The battleground looks certain to intensify in this space of mobile Ads across Social, Web browser and App. The trend for ad-blocking continues with whole networks now installing their software. Interesting times indeed as the technologists and exchanges respond with ways round blocking, and so it goes on. In our view and in reality this places more focus on how the Social platforms operate and either collaborate or try harder to build walled gardens.

All B2B Software is becoming commodity, so you really do need a USP

In the last five years we have seen both “software eat the world” and we have seen the “consumerisation” of software. But what do these things mean?

Well historically, the cost of Software tools/licenses has implicitly accommodated the cost of the computing that sits under the hood and the cost to develop it. These days software is deployed into virtual environments with huge processor and storage capacity is almost laughably good value and software development processes are infinitely more effective thanks to the techniques and approaches that have come from Value driven Agile and Lean movements.

If you were in the business of selling high contract value Enterprise software even 5 years ago, things got really tough for you lately as new, truly valuable alternatives came into being. Data migration used to be the scourge of the new system world but the means by which large amounts of data can be manipulated these days has vastly simplified in the world of open source and APIs

It’s fair to say that there isn’t an area of B2B or Enterprise computing now where you can’t find a free or nearly free tool. Hosting, Storage, CRM, ERP, CDN, e-Commerce, collaboration, planning, you name it. If it used to be expensive, it simply isn’t any more.

This has lead to a world where software tools start in the personal user domain and then monster the B2B market. The old arguments of IT security, Ops, Data privacy, SLA’s just don’t stack up any more as, despite some high profile security breach examples, companies are somewhat accepting the risks to get the benefits and all the technical issues to enable security and data privacy are now largely known. The companies that have benefitted are manifold:

Atlassian, Box, Dropbox, Google, Pinterest, join.me tools are just some examples of tools that have grown from the user base into the Enterprise and there are so many more. The Social platforms themselves are now well and truly in this phase. And it isn’t just us saying this stuff, CTOs and CIOs have known this for a long time and the Market makers really believe it too.

The fact is that the software buyers in Businesses don’t see as much value in big ticket price Software because we now expect it to be a commodity and so anyone buying any B2B software needs to know it does something extraordinary. To us at welikeit extraordinary is our belief that we enable companies to generate Digital Marketing at incredible low cost, increase Employee Advocacy and Media Value and make Content Management simple using Intelligent Machine Learning techniques.

We do feel that our platform shows it’s ROI in a very short timeframe but that this kind of functionality should also be affordable for even the smallest of companies.

So our journey continues and we are really excited about our prospects and to summarise our learnings I would say:

• Business is getting Social but it’s got a long way to go yet to quantify and maximise its material value in a way that is clear to some Execs and Boards
• The market opportunity is huge for someone who can provide a simple single toolset to help customers derive transparent value for the least effort across the major Social Media platforms
• The Mobile advertising players, winner, losers and platforms are a way off clarifying themselves but the eyeballs on social are ripe for skilful marketers
• Basic Social Media Management platforms will become “commodity” quite quickly and operating across these platforms to simplify things is common sense
• There are dual, mutually reinforcing benefits in Employee Engagement and Media Value generated by using your biggest advocates (staff) to create and endorse content and in recognising and rewarding them when they do so
• Use computing for what it’s good at; heavy lifting of lots of data to help you find and publish the right content at the right time to the right audience, preferably using Isla 8^)
• Roles and jobs are changing as fast as the tools and platforms that support those people and their time is precious; so tools must be simple, intuitive and time saving
• There’s gold in your content, collateral and campaigns that you can unlock quite quickly by using a tool like welikeit.
• You have to be realistic in what you charge for software and it has to have a compelling value add USP for Customers to consider purchasing it

If you want to talk to us about what we can offer and how you can achieve these benefits then please contact us through our welikeit website or simply sign up to our Beta product where you will get three months free usage and support from us.

We are really excited to have more feedback and to go through the next round of listening to our customers to give them the next highest value thing they want.

Thanks,

The Welikeit team.