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As a company, we haven’t been shy about sharing our opinions on topics of interest, linking to interesting blogs online, or recommending books to read or software development tools to use.
But we have been hesitant to make money from our website or from blogging in any other way than by selling our software product, also called Infovark.
Many other start-ups sell books or seminars or advertise related products on their websites — it’s a matter of survival in this tough economy — but we’ve always felt that it would somehow dilute our message and our company focus.
We’re also a bit worried that our reviews and recommendations would seem less honest if we joined any partner or affiliate programs. I think it’s a healthy trend that more and more bloggers are disclosing these relationships, and that readers are becoming more comfortable with them.
So, in an effort to help subsidize our coding (and reading) habits, we’ve signed up for the Amazon affiliate program, and we’ll be linking our book reviews through Amazon from now on. If you buy a book from via one of these links or from the Infovark bookstore, you’ll send a nice bonus our way. We’d sure appreciate it.
And we’ve had a CafePress account for some time. We use it to make some of the swag we take to conferences. Buying a button, sticker or T-shirt from our Infovark shop will also help us continue our Infovark experiment, by giving us some free advertising and a small percentage of the item’s price.
I’ll add both these disclaimers to our about page, and I’ll also describe our participation in the Microsoft Partner Program.
And now, back to our irregularly scheduled varkiness.
Now that we have the 1.0 release of Infovark under our belt, and after a much-needed vacation, we’re ready for the next step in our Infovark adventure: Marketing.
Marketing doesn’t come naturally to introverted, burrow-dwelling tech geeks like me and Gordon. We’d much rather spend our time and energy tinkering with Infovark instead. But we have to support our coding habit somehow, and that means finding people that need a good personal information management tool and introducing them to our product.
Yikes. I’m scared already.
Marketing is tough for geeks, and strangely, it has been really hard for Dean and Me, too. One of the most enduring problems we’ve had in our virtual marketing department has been figuring out a slogan.
The word slogan originates from an ancient Gaelic word sluagh-ghairm, which roughly translates as “Battle Cry” — it’s kind of weird to think of the most enduring slogans as battle cries, with a bunch of business guys storming into battle in suits, throwing business cards and yelling “Just Do It!” or “Things Go Better with Coke!” as they tear across the misty moors of the Scottish Highlands towards a horde of rampaging barbarians…
With Infovark, we have churned through a few of them, and some of them have stuck, and some of them have not.
The Enterprise Wiki that builds itself!
This was our original slogan, that we used for all our internal previews — I still kind of like it, because it shows an important feature of Infovark (auto content generation), it’s short, and it has an exclamation mark in it. (I really like them!) In the end though, we decided that it contained too much misinformation. After all, Infovark isn’t an enterprise Wiki like Confluence or Social Text, and while it does have a few wiki features, we felt that people would get the wrong impression. So that was the end of that.
Our next brainstorming session produced:
Your Personal, Portable, Connected Information Engine
This one had its charms, but ultimately we felt that it was too long and complex, and perhaps too geeky. The only real feature it highlights is portability, which is fairly obvious since most of the content that Infovark collects is on your local machine anyway. And while developers and IT guys are fine with the notion of an “engine” lots of people just think of cars.
The portable connected Information Assistant for People on the Go
We flirted with this one for our entry into the Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad. To be frank, I hate this one. I really like the notion of Infovark as an assistant, but the word has been ruined by talking paper-clips, and “People On the Go” sounds like some kind of cheesy advert for a laxative. This one didn’t last very long.
And then, in the middle of yet another difficult marketing brainstorm session, Dean came out with this gem:
Share all your work, without all of the work
Well, I said it over and over, and liked it more and more. It tells you exactly what Infovark does best (share) and tells you that it can be done with no effort (auto content generation). It highlights what I think is the coolest feature of Infovark, that it’s a “contribution engine” (oops — again with the engines) and that it can overcome the biggest barrier to user adoption — forcing people to change the way that they work.
So, that’s the new Infovark slogan. (For now, anyway.)
Now, off into battle! (Where did I put my business cards?)
When preparing our video for the Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad, Dean and I found we had a problem.
The problem is that, let’s face it, the world of Enterprise Software is pretty boring. So trying to create an exciting marketing video is a big challenge.
If you look at existing enterprise software marketing, it’s all about “ROI” this and “increased productivity” that.
For instance, Microsoft explains its primary enterprise offering, SharePoint, like so:
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.
Messages like these might be important to a CIO, but are not at all interesting to most people. How will this software tame that overflowing inbox, help you transcend a difficult process, or avoid an annoying colleague? “Strategic focus” and “investment in the future” is great for the boss, but how’s that going to help you, right now, clear away all the bothersome tasks that prevent you from getting things done?
As far as software goes, the CIO is the most important person in the whole organization. After all, they hold the checkbook. The guys doing the work don’t have the checkbook. Why would you want to pitch to them?
Empowering the people
As consultants, Dean and I struggled valiantly to attain the nirvana of “User Adoption” (cue angelic chorus). We worked hard to integrate tons of tools that were the product of the CIO’s checkbook. And then we worked even harder to explain to everyone that wasn’t a CIO why they should use the Frankenstien’s monster we’d created. It was impossible.
That’s what we tried to fix with Infovark. We want the actual users of our software to be its major beneficiaries. We want people to enjoy using it. And truth be told, we don’t even care what the CIO thinks of it.
Sure, at first we crafted some of that mealy-mouthed enterprise software marketing gobbledygook:
Infovark is an ad-hoc, peer based collaborative social network, designed to harness the existing tacit efforts of your knowledge workers, facilitate effective information transfer, and minimize duplication of effort, improving productivity.
The problem was that, while Infovark actually does that stuff, that’s not why we built it. It isn’t about the money, or the processes. We built it for you. So you could get on with your work, and not have to worry about feeding the machine, or attending another training course on how to effectively and responsibly manage corporate information using some weird new system.
Enterprises are made of people, and Infovark is a tool for people, so the video we came up with in the end was this one. We hope you like it, and thanks so much to everyone who voted for us — we were humbled by your support!
Also, a big thanks to our awesome voice talent, Ben Holland from Spotland Productions. We highly recommend them!
Thanks to everyone who voted for us in the first round of the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad - Infovark has made the “Sweet Sixteen” of finalists!
The next round is a series of 1 minute videos, so Dean and I are trying to figure out the best way we can show how Infovark can help you in 60 seconds.
So, watch this space – we’ll be posting our video as soon as we can get it together!
(And then we’ll no doubt be nagging you to vote for that too… )