BizThoughts

Naming a business can be as hard as naming a baby. Well, maybe not AS hard. But it's still pretty damn hard.

I've been reading Seth Godin's Small is the New Big and came across his collection of riffs on business naming. Fortunately, he blogged about these as well, from as far back as 2003. (Hey, did he just grab blog posts to make his book??)

Here's what Godin recommends:

1. A name that is too descriptive could be too limiting. The less it has to do with your industry, the better. International Postal Consultants is too limiting. Starbucks, Nike, & Apple are good.
2. Use real English words. Axelon & Altus are bad. Jet Blue, Ambient & Amazon are good.
3. Make sure it's easy to spell and pronounce. Prius is a bad name because it can be tricky for some people to spell and pronounce.
4. Don't obsess over getting a short name just so you can have a short domain name.
5. Add a descriptive tagline. Like "Lemonpie, the easy way to learn scuba".
6. A name should be unique enough to appear in a web search without a lot of competitors and flexible enough to gain a secondary meaning if you wish to expand your brand.
7. If you're creating a whole new product or service, give it a whole new name, not an incremental one. Sneakers is better than athletic shoe.
8. If you have lots of products and services, come up with a clear naming hierarchy, so customers can understand your offerings. Honda, Honda Civic, and Honda Accord are good. Apple, Apple iPod, and Apple Powerbook are bad, because the "i" prefix isn't consistent or defensible.
9. Names with generic words like Central, Land, or World are meaningless. They add no value and are difficult to defend.

Godin's blog posts:

• Naming a business - June 21, 2003
• The new rules of naming - October 16, 2005
• Being brave with names - June 1, 2006
• Sloppy naming - July 9, 2007
• A dumb branding strategy - March 27, 2008

Who doesn't love free stuff? I sure do. And when they can be used to make your business offerings even better, I call that Awesome with a capital A.

I was just reading Dharmesh Shah's Embarassingly Gushing Praise for TechCrunch And The New CrunchBase API on OnStartups.com and it got me thinking.

What Shah is so excited about is CrunchBase's new & free API. CrunchBase is a "free directory of technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit", much like a wiki. It's not technically a wiki yet (I believe that's in the plans though), but pulls in a ton of data (from sources like LinkedIn and Google Maps) in addition to offering manual input from editors and the community. In short, it's a fairly robust database of business information for the high-tech & internet industries.

To put it another way, it's a valuable resource for competitive intelligence. Which means if one of these online competitive analysis services were to jump on the API and start including this data, they'd have quite an attractive offering. Or aat the very least, they'll make things easier for business researchers.

Plus, CrunchBase's API is free. So why the hell not?

You know what's cool about having a blog? Other than it being a exhibitionistic platform for vanity, public self-inflection, and personal branding, I mean.

It also means getting free stuff! A PR firm recently sent me the book Family Wars: Classic Conflicts in Family Business and How to Deal with Them by Grant Gordon & Nigel Nicholson, in the hopes that I'd mention it. So in the interest of full disclosure, let me get that out of the way first.

The Pros

Coincidentally, I've always thought it would be cool to have a family-run business. Not like a "operate from the back room of the Bada Bing" type family business. More like a business legacy that I can pass down to my children and children's children.

Having such a business can be fraught with backstabbing, cheating, lying, and betraying, so say the authors. In their book, they list countless case studies, from IBM & Ford to the Mondavi & Gallo wineries. There's also the rivalry of Adidas & Puma and the in-fighting at the LA Times, U-Haul, Gucchi, Guiness, Redstone, and many many more. Each example goes into detail about their family dynamics and individual personalities, making each sound more like a soap opera than a business case study.

The book is organized like a sandwich. The first chapter starts out with their psychological theories on family conflicts. Then there are six meaty chapters of back-to-back case studies. The last chapter follows up with a conclusion and reiteration of their theories.

My main takeaways from this book are:

• Learn how to be a good parent.
• Make sure you raise emotionally and socially intelligent children.
• Make sure you teach your children how to do the same for their children, and their children's children.
• And for goodness sake, don't spoil your kids!

There's actually a lot more to it than that. The authors prescribe a few formulas for dealing with various scenarios in the last chapter. These include pratical tips such as, "develop career plans for family members", "clarify roles of all working family members", and "agree to a policy for objective third-party oversight of the leadership selection process by independent directors, trustees and/or close advisors." That looks to be some very sound advice to me.

The Cons

For better or worse, contemporary authors of business & psychology books seem to have fallen into a particular writing style formula. Books like Freakonomics, The Tipping Point, The World is Flat, How Doctors Think, and Emotional Intelligence all do it. And for the mass market, I think it works. The formula is this:

Start each chapter with an anecdote. Make it fun and dramatic. Engage the reader with a real story about real people. Then go into the analysis, theory, and data of your point. In other words, start the chapter sounding like a story from a piece of fiction, then go into the relatively drier prose of your non-fiction.

Gordon & Nicholson don't follow that approach, making their book a slower read than its contemporary peers. So if you like that particular writing style, you're going to find Family Wars tougher to digest.

Perhaps it's the academic background of Nicholson (a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School), but I found the prose quite verbose as well. I would love to give the authors a copy of On Writing Well if I could. Hell, I wish I could give every writer in academia a copy of that book.

The analysis at the end of each case study seems a bit sparse too. To their credit, they unearthed an amazing amount of personal information about these companies. From all of that hard work, I expected a deeper analysis of each company and family. Sadly, this wasn't the case.

Still, the book is worth it just for the detailed case studies alone. Not only are they an entertaining read (especially if you like soap operas), but they'll give you insight into family-run businesses too.

Guess what's been on my mind? Yup, the Amazon Kindle. How'd you guess?

While it's enlightening to praise and debate, I know it has quite a few improvements to make before it rocks the market. Sure, it has more promise than it's competitors, but if it doesn't maintain its lead, than I'll be a sad panda.

Here's my wish list of what Amazon needs to do to improve the Kindle for v2 and beyond:

• Improve it's ergonomics (hardware) and usability (software). This is probably its most well-known criticism. Hopefully they'll follow the principles of KISS.

• Continue getting more content. That means getting more publishers to release their books in e-book format. Probably not an easy task, but if anyone has the clout to do it, it's Amazon.

• Allow more formats to be readable. They don't necessarily have to be writable for now, just readable. Like PDF, PPT, and XLS file formats. (To their credit, they already support TXT, HTML, and DOC.)

• Allow readers a way to somehow "transfer" their existing books into the Kindle. I'm not sure how this could be done, as it leaves many openings for abuse. But I'd love to digitize my current library into the Kindle without having to buy all of those books again. Ugh.

• Add a touch screen interface. Touch screen UIs are nice and generally easy-to-use (if done right). They could add significantly to the usability of the Kindle—again, if done right.

• Offer a color screen. At least, as an option for some people. I'm sure this is on their internal wish list already.

• Offer a backlit screen. This could also be an option, as some people may feel its current state is better on the eyes.

• Offer multiple versions. They could differ in size, storage space, and maybe even color and outer material (imagine a leather-bound Kindle! Hmm!). If/when the Kindle catches on with younger consumers, the market for personalization accessories could be sizable too.

• Strengthen its body. Books have to survive quite a rough rumble and tumble. It would be cool if the Kindle could survive that kind of physical stress too. Perhaps this could merely be another version.

Go go Kindle go!

I'm having a fun ole' debate over the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle right now. It's taking place in the comments of a previous post between myself and Nicholas Zakas, a published author, seasoned programmer, and all-around intelligent guy.

I like debates. They give me a chance to hone my opinions and positions on various topics. I'll do my best to defend my position, but more often than not, I'll learn a new viewpoint that adds to my knowledge of that topic.

My post was about how great the Amazon Kindle was going to be. I likened the Kindle to Apple's (AAPL) iPod. Nicholas commented that:

The iPod was successful largely because people wanted to replace their large portable CD players with something that could play more…it wasn't techies that make the iPod the sensation that it was, it was the non-techies.

This implies it was the iPod's ease-of-use that made it such a commercial success. While I totally agree, I think it was more than just the iPod's simple & friendly form factor that made it great. It was also:

1. iPod's branding and Apple's great overall brand
2. The "complete package" that iTunes integration offers to the iPod

He argued that while this is true for iPods, it's different for books:

There's something about the tactile relationship between readers and their material that makes it hard to give up. I remember when people predicted that newspapers would go out of circulation when people could get their news online…

True, but the same was once said about records when first CDs came out. There was a time when people predicted the TV would replace the radio. And later, that interactive TV would replace regular TV. I've never believed that newspapers would go out of circulation, but I do believe their role will change—and has already changed. It's no longer the single source of up-to-date news. People primarily go to the TV for that now. (Those that go to the web for up-to-date news are still in the minority, though it's growing rapidly.)

He also made a comment about the Amazon Kindle falsely gaining a first-mover advantage, though the Kindle isn't the first e-book reader on the market; there are quite a few already. While he's probably just not as familiar with the e-book market, we both agree that first-mover advantage isn't a panacea for success.

To that, he followed up with a simple mathematical point:

Considering you can get great books for under $10 nearly anywhere, what would you do? Buy a $400 machine to output text, or buy 40 books? I love tech as much as the next computer geek, but even I would go for the latter.

Good point. If you're someone who will only buy forty $10 books, you'll hardly see any cost-savings benefit in the Amazon Kindle. But if you're someone like me, who's been known to spend upwards of $800 on books a year, the Amazon Kindle may be worth it.

But then this goes into the question of target demographics, which Nicholas also pointed out:

Tell me who [the target consumers] are for Kindle? People who read books like books, not just the text. The divergence between book readers and technology couldn't possibly be greater. People often read books to escape computers and technology.

I can't disagree with that. As a bookworm myself, I also love the tactile feel of a book. However, I used to love the tactile feel of a CD booklet too. Every time I'd listen to a CD, I'd read the booklet for the lyrics or linear notes. Or maybe just stare at the album cover art. I loved doing that. When MP3s first hit the market, I didn't see the appeal because they felt so ethereal and amorphous. There wasn't anything I could hold in my hands.

Then I hit a tipping point and realized that the portability and physical space savings of MP3s offset the benefits of having CD booklets for me. The same went for digital movies and DVDs. Now, I love digitizing all of my media.

What may tip the balance of books to e-books are the younger generations of consumers. They're already growing up with the Internet, mobile phones, and MMORPGs (with their virtual goods) as everyday items in their lives. It's foreign for them to imagine a world without technology like that. They also don't place as much value on CD booklets, DVD boxes, or books in the same way the older generations do—younger generations seem all-to-eager to accept digital media.

Just like newspapers, there will always be a role for books. When you're chilling in a log cabin or on a beach somewhere, you'll probably want a good solid book in your hands. But if you're on a train commuting to work, it may be more desirable to hold a device that will allow you to read any book, newspaper, or blog you want.

Potential Initial Niche Targets

One last thought. If Amazon were to approach the e-book market with Geoffrey Moore's advice in mind (as he writes in Crossing the Chasm), they could target graduate students as an initial niche. With graduate textbooks costing hundreds of dollars, they may find it more cost-effective and easier to lug around a Kindle rather than seven 5lb textbooks. The price point of the Kindle would have to drop from its current $359.00, however. But that is inevitable as they streamline their production costs.

Undergraduate students could be a viable initial niche as well, though more research would need to be done since many undergraduates just purchase used textbooks to save money. If a cheaper Kindle could tap into this market, the purchasers may actually be the students' parents.

Another initial niche could be any profession that requires access to large volumes of books at any given time, such as lawyers. Imagine the mountains of books a lawyer has to go through. Now imagine being able to search through all of that easily through a single handheld device. Not bad, huh?

This is easier said than done, of course. There are lots of tricky book publisher contracts to negotiate. Without the necessary content, these niches are impossible to reach. But still, it's not hard to imagine these users wanting a device like the Amazon Kindle, yea?

Remember your first iPod? Remember the first song you purchased from Apple's (AAPL) iTunes Store? Remember the 100th song?

I got a chance to check out Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle this past weekend. It was almost like seeing an iPod for the first time. I couldn't stop drooling and fawning over all the buttons and controls.

Much has been written about the Kindle already. Some extol its features, like being able to carry lots of books cheaply, having good battery life, and having audiobook integration. Others slam it for it's poor design and lack of social network (Um, really? You want a social network on an e-book reader? If anything, that's a P3 feature and shouldn't be part of a v1 product). It's interesting to note that many of the Kindle's original critics have changed their minds after using it for a while.

Rob Tillotson of The Gadgeteer has a deep & thorough review, Daniel Turner of Technology Review offers a good overview of its technical guts, and Mike Elgan of Macworld lists some great tips & tricks of the Kindle. These include how you can surf the web using its basic web browser (called, appropriately, "Basic Web"), download free e-books, get answers from a free human-powered search engine called Kindle NowNow, make the battery last even longer, read RSS feeds for free, etc.

My reaction? I just went out and purchased some AMZN stock. It's currently floating around the same price it had when the Kindle debuted on Nov. 19, 2007. It closed at 79.18 that day; today, it's been bouncing between 77.43 and 78.85, down from a high of 84.39 last Monday. But I don't care about that. I'm long AMZN. I'm betting that the Kindle will be to Amazon what the iPod was to Apple—and we all know how good the iPod was to Apple!

Here's why I'm long on Amazon:

UPDATED 5/24/2008: I added #9 to this list.

1. I am exactly the kind of early adopter customer Amazon wants. Although I didn't rush out to buy a Kindle (and am not going to anytime soon), as soon as the second or third version is released, I will. They're working on their second version right now, a source in Amazon tells me (and it sounds pretty good!), so it shouldn't be long before v3 is ready and relatively bug-free. And when I purchase a Kindle, I'm going buy lots of e-books. I'm a voracious reader and am always buying new books. Since Amazon's strategy is to profit from e-book sales and not Kindle sales (the Kindle is a loss leader), attracting book-hungry customers like me is going to be so money.

2. I travel often and always carry a book or three with me. That often adds extra weight that, well, just sucks. Since I usually try to travel light, carrying one Kindle versus three books sounds totally awesome. I can see other travelers wanting the same benefits. The business traveler niche could have great potential for Amazon, especially if business users are able to load their business documents onto the Kindle and peruse them during their flights.

3. I'm a bit of a digital pack-rat. Or just a big a geek, I dunno. I once had over 600 CDs. Then, to live more efficiently and have less material belongings, I burned them all into MP3s. I did the same with my DVDs. All that extra shelf space allowed my book collection to grow like crazy. Now imagine if I could digitize all of my books. How cool would that be. All of the media I'd own would be digital, portable, and easily searchable (told you I'm a big geek). That would be cool.

4. This is only a v1 product and already it's gotten a huge positive reaction. Most v1 products suck. The first generation of iPods sucked. But with Apple's branding & slick design and iTunes' ease of use & practical prices, it took over the market and surged as each new version was released. Kindle 1.0 was cool, 2.0 and higher can only get better.

5. A medical student I know took a look at the Kindle and said that if all of his medical textbooks were offered on the Kindle, he'd buy it in a heartbeat. First of all, medical textbooks are huge. HUGE. And medical students have to carry two to four of these heavy things at once. Second, medical textbooks are expensive, especially for starving students. With e-books being cheaper than regular books, a student could easily make up the cost of the Kindle over the course of his/her education. This could be a huge market for them, and the smart folks at Amazon know this.

6. Amazon has to maintain physical warehouses to store all the books they sell. E-books don't require expensive warehouses; they just require a database on a server farm somewhere, which is infinitely cheaper. This means Amazon could potentially sell more products (e-books) while not incurring any additional costs. I like them mathematics.

7. If Amazon can execute its Kindle & e-book strategy well, it certainly could go the way Apple's iPod & iTunes strategy went. According to a Nov. 19, 2007 article from Aaron Pressman of Business Week, "Apple shares (AAPL) stood at $9.51 (adjusted for a split) the day before the launch. I don't need to tell you where they are today. Ok, I will: $166." Not a bad return, I'd say.

8. I'm not the only one who expects great things from Kindle. Citigroup Analyst Mark Mahaney "expects Amazon to generate between $400 million and $750 million in revenue from the Kindle by 2010, or 1% - 3% of Amazon's total revenue," writes Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. "If Amazon executes right with its Kindle product and marketing strategy, the iPod analogy for the Kindle won't be too far stretched," Mahaney is quoted as saying. Cool!

9. Part of iPod's success came from the ease of use of getting more MP3s. Just as the iTunes Store made it very easy to download MP3s, the Kindle Store makes it very easy to download e-books for the Kindle. And even better, the Kindle Store is easier than iTunes because you can directly access it via the Kindle (no need for a computer at all).

I can't wait for the day I can look back and remember my first Kindle, my first e-book, and my 100th e-book. And also, a great big ROI on AMZN!

Not knowing your competition is like not knowing who you're fighting in World of Warcraft. Is it Alliance? Horde? Night Elves? Blood Elves? Goblins? Oh my!

When analyzing your competition, you're assessing their strengths and weakness. Your analysis should include direct and indirect competitors as well; any alternate method of solving the same problem your product or service solves is a competitor, even if it's not a formal business entity. Online Marketing Software and Marketing Experiments Journal both have nice primers on doing competitive analyzes.

For web-based businesses, there a fair number of online competitive analysis services out there. Some are free, some require subscriptions. Here are a bunch that I've come across.

Free Online Competitive Analysis Services

One of the more popular services out there, Alexa ranks websites against each other based on traffic. Additionally, it provides data on rank trends (up or down), download speed, reach, page views per user, visitor origins, related links, and in some cases, business information like number of employees, annual revenue, and business contacts.

Alexa gathers its data from users who've downloaded the Alexa Toolbar. There is some controversy over this method as some websites have gamed Alexa's rankings in the past. Also, it only provides this data at the domain name level; data for sub-domains and directories not offered.

For a general idea of popularity trends, this can be a useful service. Just give the Alexa ranks some margin of error.

Compete is also a traffic ranking service like Alexa, though it offers slightly different data. It aims to provide the number of unique visitors to a website, in addition to time spent, pages per visit, and top search keywords driving traffic to the website. Compete also makes it very easy to compare several sites at once.

Compete gathers its data by recruiting users, much like Nielsen Ratings did for US television viewers. These users come from the Compete Toolbar, ISPs, and opt-in panels. Its number of unique visitors metric isn't accurate, it's an approximation; use your traffic analysis tools for a more accurate number. Also, Compete only provides data for US users; non-US users are not counted.

Like Alexa, Compete can be useful for general popularity trends and comparisons.

One of the newer traffic ranking services on the block, Quantcast also provides demographics data, such as gender, age, household income, ethnicity, head of household education, and children in household. This data is all from US users only.

Quantcast gathers its data through research panels (essentially, anonymous surveys) and beacon tracking on websites which need to be installed by website owners themselves. Their demographic data is obtained from their research panels, which they acknowledge isn't entirely accurate.

Like all online traffic ranking services, Quantcast can be useful for general demographic information, but assume some margin of error.

Competitious is a new offering that aggregates the data from traffic ranking services into one location. So far, it only pulls ranking data from Alexa. It also provides a way to compare features across competitors and store news clippings. Your analyzes are saved as "projects" and multiple people can be added to a project.

Although its offerings aren't very comprehensive yet, Competitious has a lot of potential for being a hub for your online competitive analyzes. I'm anxious to see what features they add next.

Not really a full-fledged service, SearchStatus is an extension for the Firefox web browser. It provides a quick snapshot of any website's Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, and Compete Rank. There are also a lot of other features, such as showing nofollow links, number of links, meta tags, a whois report, the robots.txt file, keyword density, back links, pages indexed in popular search engines, and other SEO-relevant information.

All of this data is freely available. This extension simply aggregates all of it onto your web browser. It's an extremely handy tool and very popular among SEO specialists.

Paid Online Competitive Analysis Services

One of the most widely-cited sources, comScore is the Nielsen Ratings of the Internet. It provides traffic rank data in addition to typical marketing metrics such as engagement, reach, frequency, demographics, and daypart reporting. Many journalists and bloggers use comScore's numbers as a gauge of market share.

comScore gathers its data from users who've opted in and downloaded their usage tracking software. Since self-selected populations can be biased, comScore adjusts the data using weights to make sure that different demographics are adequately represented.

comScore is fairly expensive and probably out of reach for most small-to-medium sized businesses. The free traffic ranking services like Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast can provide adequate competitive data for now.

Andiamo Systems is a new service that aims to provide a measurement of a business's word-of-mouth reach. It does this by collecting mentions from blogs, forums, review sites, message boards, PR newswires, news, and other web sites. A lot of your customers could be sharing their opinions about your products & services online right now, good or bad. This service acts like a targeted search engine to aggregate all of those opinions for you.

Pricing is set on a monthly basis and increases as you get more mentions, starting at $79 for up to 50 mentions. This scale makes Andiamo more affordable for small businesses. A 14-day free trial is offered.

Not every mention out there is equally important, but this new service could provide an effective way to monitor a tiny negative word before it explodes into a PR nightmare.

Watch360 is a new service that keeps an eye on your competitors' websites and reports every little change they make. It's a way to monitor announcements and new product offerings from your competitors on a daily basis.

Pricing is on a monthly or yearly basis and increases as you monitor more companies, starting at $29.95/month for 10 companies. The top pricing tier, $99.95/month, allows you to monitor an unlimited amount of companies. A free trial report is offered for one company.

Assuming that your competitors update their website and blog regularly, this new service could give you the information you need to react to their moves.

Ever use any of these free or paid services? If so, what did you think? And do you know of any others that are also good?

Just so I could relive my college days, I attended Stanford's Conference on Entrepreneurship yesterday. The conference was just a one-day event within Stanford's Entrepreneurship Week from February 22 - 29. (You have one more day left!)

One of the sessions I attended was Professor Jeff Pfeffer's "Top Ten Mistakes that Entrepreneurs Make". Pfeffer is a professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Judging from the packed classroom, he's also a popular professor. With good reason too, it seemed. His lecture was pretty funny and engaging, with stories and personal anecdotes sprinkled throughout.

Though I jotted down a ton of chicken scratch, I was able to get Pfeffer's top ten mistakes that entrepreneurs make:

1. Too much CEO ego.
2. Too little regard for the self-esteem needs of others.
3. Too much time, attention, & emphasis on "strategy" & analysis, and not enough time on "execution."
4. Too little emphasis on the importance of people & culture.
5. Too much belief in the saving grace of "miracle" technologies & "big brains," particularly in high-tech fields.
6. Too much emphasis on budgets & financial controls; not enough attention to customer satisfaction and employee attraction & engagement
7. Not enough attention to and knowledge of competition & competitors, including tracking their sales & market share
8. Too much emphasis on individual performance and too little attention to context & situation within which that individual performance occurs.
9. Excessive reliance on financial incentives for alignment, motivation, & communication.
10. Not enough consideration of or attention to underlying assumptions & feedback effects.

This is just a quick recap; he had a ton more information. I hope he doesn't mind my posting these notes. I would guess not, since attending his lectures is an experience mere notes could never convey.

If you attended Entrepreneurship Week too, what did you think of the other sessions?