It being Festivus it seems quite appropriate to air a grievance during an otherwise perfect holiday season.
My grievance is with American Express. I am deeply disappointed with them.
I had an AMEX charge card before I had a credit card. It was the first card I owned and used. Honestly was surprised that they give me one, but my first boss out of college told me to apply, and sure enough it was granted. I was a member. Have been a member since 84.
Over the years my AMEX use has grown. It is the primary card we use for household expenses. Used AMEX to buy laptops for new employees at MindSpring. Continued to use it during periods when I was traveling extensively on business, often racking up bills in excess of $10,000 per month. I think I was over $20,000 a few times. Even tried to buy my car with it though the dealer refused (I really like the Rewards Plus program and have taken many free trips to the Caribbean and mountains). I have 334,000 points in my Membership Rewards account. I easily have charged more than $1 million on my AMEX cards over the year, maybe more than $2 million. With the exception of current balances, which are not extraordinary, I have paid my bills.
I now have five AMEX accounts with nine cards outstanding. Many of these cards are used just to help with internal family accounting. Three of the accounts are used for businesses in which I am an officer. The Enfuse Group, Skribit, and another startup. Like my personal accounts these accounts are current.
So I have yet another startup, I need another AMEX account. I called up AMEX. Asked for another OPEN account. They would not even take the application. Said it would be rejected. I had too many accounts or something to that effect.
Excuse me. Here I am a long-term loyal customer with a FICO score above 800 and a life-time customer value that has to be off the charts and they are telling me they don't want any more of my business.
OPEN my derrière. AMEX you stink. I'll use that Citi card to finish up my Christmas shopping.
SoCon, the Southeast's premier social media and social networking conference is quickly approaching. In its fourth year, SoCon10 will be taking place on January 29th and 30th. The event kicks off on Friday night with a networking dinner at Maggiano's that has been fantastic in previous years. On Saturday things move over to Kennesaw State University for a day full of discussions.
SoCon10 is getting down to brass tacks with its theme of "Enough Theory; Now Show Me the Money and the Love." Keeping with this theme I am leading a break out session called "Measuring Social Media Marketing." The session will be a case study of the relaunch of ATDC, how social media was used in that effort, how the campaign was measured, and how others can use the same methodology to measure their social media efforts.
Should be a lively discussion and a great event. Get yourself registered.
Paul Stamatiou, the guy that conceived the Skribit concept, Calvin Yu and Alex Coomans are super excited about the release. So that people can take full advantage of the Pro features of the account they are offering a special deal. First year is $1. Go to sign up and select the Pro account plan. When you get to the payments page enter sign up and you’ll be taken to a payments page where you can enter in promotional code “lance”
to get the special deal.
Congrats to everyone that has had a hand in getting Skribit this far.
In the study the research team explored company founders' opinions and observations about what influenced the success or failure of their businesses. The research is based on a survey of 549 company founders in a variety of industries, including aerospace and defense, computer and electronics, health care, and services.
The researchers asked the company founders to rank the importance of a number of factors on the success of their business. The key takeaway is that these founders believe that experience, management, and luck are the biggest drivers.
96 percent ranked prior work experience as an important success factor
88 percent said that learning from previous successes, and 78 percent said that learning from previous failures, played an important role in their present successes
82 percent said their management team was important to their success
73 percent said that good fortune was an important factor in their success.entrepreneurs
Lines up pretty well with Malcolm Gladwell's conclusion in "Outliers", successful people are not that way due to personal ambition alone, it's a combination of circumstances that some would call luck coupled with expertise based on practice.
Back to the Kauffman study, some more interesting findings.
Availability of financing/capital was considered important to the success of their current businesses by 68 percent of respondents
50 percent of Entrepreneurs ranked location as not at all important
Of the entrepreneurs who received advice from investors, 38 percent said it was not at all important
The sources of funding these entrepreneurs used to start their business is of great interest. The most significant source of funding was personal savings. The funding sources broke down as follows.
70 percent used personal savings
13 percent took friends and family money
11 percent venture capital
9 percent had angel investors
Some of the findings of the study line up pretty nicely with my experience. A good team with domain expertise has a better chance of creating a successful startup. Having those attributes is good. They are actually controllable.
The subject of non disclosure agreements has come up from time to time on FoG. ATDC and investors do not sign NDAs.
Entrepreneurs don't seem to like that and often try to slip non disclosures and confidentiality clauses in presentations, emails, and the like.
I recently received this email, reproduced in its entirety. The personal information of the sender has been masked.
Please find the attached document for review purposes.
Name Founder & Chief Executive Officer MyStartup, Inc. Office #: 314.159.2653
NOTICE: This e-mail message and all attachments transmitted with it contain legally privileged and/or copyrighted, confidential information intended solely for the review of the addressee. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient – without regard of if this message were forwarded to the reader by the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any reading, dissemination, distribution, copying, or other use of this message or its attachments is strictly prohibited without the expressed written consent of MyStartup, Inc. If you have received this message in error, please notify MyStartup, Inc. immediately by telephone (314.159.2653) or by electronic mail info@mystartup.com and delete this message and all copies and backups thereof.
By downloading any attached materials, you agree to maintain the attachments as confidential. Therefore, they should not be disclosed or forwarded to any third parties without the expressed written consent of MyStartup, Inc. Any breaches of said confidentiality will be dealt with to the full extent of the law.
So here is an entrepreneur reaching out to me to review their business, seeking advice, and outlining legal action if I break some click through confidentiality agreement. I don't think so. My reply in it's entirety.
I am deleting this email. If you care to send something without the legal footer we can proceed.
It's tempting for both experienced and first-time entrepreneurs to slide notices of confidentiality into documents. Resist the temptation. It shows a certain lack of sophistication that as an entrepreneur you do not want to project.
Business.com recently published its 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study. One of the aspects that the study covered was the adoption of social media marketing by both B2B and B2B companies (apologizing in advance for the legibility of the graph captures, they are that way in the report).
Very surprising to see much deeper penetration of social media by the
business types than the consumer driven companies. But the former had more use in 11 of the 14 categories covered. B2B companies are much more active than B2C companies. They have significantly higher usage of social media sites, micro-blogging, blogging, and off property monitoring and participation. And based on some reports the B2B crowd is rapidly increasing its spend.
The other big surprise from the study was how well companies measured the success of their social media programs.
A previous study back in August by Mzinga and Babson showed that 84% of companies did not measure the ROI of their social media efforts. The Business.com study shows 60% of the B2B and 52% of B2C companies measuring results all the way to revenue. Seems like either there are some big differences in the samples of the August Mzinga study and the November Business.com study or marketers are rapidly learning they need to measure the impact of their social media programs.
This morning I found a nice message in my mail box. A snippet of what it contained is below.
Yes 336 messages awaiting my response. Each with its own little check box spread across 27 distinct pages. And to quote LinkedIn's help pages "Deleting an item from your 'Inbox' is not an available function." Good grief. They have a function called archiving but it would require at least 363 clicks to clean out my Inbox.
I am declaring LinkedIn messaging amnesty.
Guilt is not a good method to increase use. LinkedIn needs a mass Inbox delete function or use of a river metaphor to handle messages.
Back in September the fine institute for which I have the honor to carry on my work published a piece entitled "Atlanta Kills Off Start-Up Companies." The words chosen for the headline were, shall we say, unfortunate. It could have just have easily been called "Connectivity Key to Atlanta Startup Ecosystem" or by the paper's official title "The Communal Roots of Entrepreneurial-Technological Growth? Social Fragmentation and the Economic Stagnation of Atlanta’s IT Cluster." Not as catchy I suppose.
Regardless the study's author, Dan Breznitz assistant professor in the Schools of
International Affairs and Public Policy within the Ivan Allen College
of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech, has taken to the local speaking circuit. He recently presented the findings from his study to the Atlanta Technology Angels.
I have writtenextensivelyabout the Atlanta technology startup ecosystem for the past three years. I don't disagree with Dan's findings. I do have some questions about his conclusions.
On Thursday morning I intend to get those questions answered at the TAG/ATDC Entrepreneurs Society meeting. Dan is being joined on a panel with Linnea Geiss of Arcapita, Mark Johnson of Total Technology Ventures, Patrick Taylor of Oversight Systems, and John C. Yates of Morris, Manning & Martin.
If you have an interest in the Atlanta startup ecosystem this is a must attend event. It's going to be a good show. You can register here.
The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone (with the exception of comments by others of course). They do not represent the opinion or position of any other person on entity. All postings adhere to my personal values.
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