Where are you on the Tweetire Curve?
I tweeted today about conference I spoke at this morning on the subject of the role of social media in venture capital and private equity (not from an investment perspective, but how VC and PE professionals can use social media – blogs, facebook, twitter, etc. – to be more successful investors; more on that idea in a separate post). I joked in two tweets after the event: “one person in today’s crowd (of 150) had a twitter account. i definitely had my work cut out for me!” …
June 11, 2009· 1 min read
A post a day
I’ll admit (since it should be obvious to anyone who follows this blog) that I’ve done a terrible job this year of blogging consistently. I’m sure that much of it has to do with my schedule, but then again there are a lot of people who blog regularly who are plenty busy, so that’s not such a great excuse. I suspect that much of my problem is that I’ve just gotten out of the habit of regular blogging. What’s doubly frustrating from my end is that one of my explicit goals for the year for myself was to “blog more consistently”. So far, not so good on that front. …
June 10, 2009· 1 min read
hello? …. echo …. echo …. echo
Apologies for falling out of the blogging habit over the last month. A nice, mostly off-line vacation was followed by a few weeks of slowly catching back up. Blogging (and keeping up on my blog reading as well) fell to the bottom of the list. Or maybe I was just being lazy. Either way, I was off the blogging circuit for a while and I apologies for any of you who may have been waiting with breath held for the next post (hopefully you didn’t delete me from your feed reader). …
August 8, 2008· 1 min read
Jason Mendelson Blogs!
I know what you’ve been saying to your self: “Self – I’ve been looking to read a blog written by a reformed drummer, software guy and lawyer who is now a venture capitalist. Where can I find one of those?!?” All joking aside, I’d encourage you to check out the blog that my partner Jason Mendelson (who is all of those things and many more) has just started. Jason is actually a long time blogger – writing regularly on Brad’s blog and as one of the founders of and main contributors to AskTheVC. Mendelson’s Musings will have a more personal flair (although will continue to cover investing and venture capital topics as well). Along those lines be sure to check out his music page for great new music suggestions. There are many things I admire about Jason – he’s an extremely interesting and creative guy (especially for a former lawyer!). He’s also an excellent writer. I think you’ll enjoy what he has to say.
May 27, 2008· 1 min read
Your company should have a blog
I participated in a panel presentation last week on corporate blogging. While each of the panelists brought a slightly different perspective, the overall message to the group of a few hundred local small business execs that were in attendance was that blogging can help their company. Specifically blogging can allow them to participate (or lead) conversations in their industry; increase significantly the meaningful content on their site; provide a way for them and their key customers to evangelize their products; help their search rankings across their site; allow a platform for talking about corporate culture (to both an internal and external audience) and in many cases save hard dollars spent on press releases and certain marketing activities. Here are a few ideas from the panel on how to get started: …
May 22, 2008· 2 min read
Looking for embarrassing blogging stories
I’ve got some great corporate blogging use-case stories for my panel presentation on blogging next week. Now I’m looking for some embarrassing ones. They can be personal or corporate related. Feel free to leave them in comments (if you’re ok with the world seeing them) or just email me directly.
May 7, 2008· 1 min read
New look, same Seth
With thanks to Ross for actually pulling everything together, I’m launching a new look and a new site today. Seth Levine’s VC Adventure is now hosted on my own domain – http://www.sethlevine.com – and is sporting an updated look. My old TypePad site is still active (although I’m no longer posting there) and in theory (at least until it breaks) is redirecting traffic to my new site (and should be directly specific posts to their respective post here at sethlevine.com). Let me know if you find anything broken or in need of editing/updating/improvement/better design.
January 21, 2008· 1 min read
Do you ‘get’ new media?
I had the chance last week to speak to a group of non-profit executive directors from about 80 local Denver/Boulder/Longmont non-profit agencies as part of a session sponsored by the United Way on “Getting the Word Out – a Mass Communication Seminar”. I sat on a panel with a bunch of local newspaper editors which consisted of an hour of the editors talking about the best way to fax or e-mail them stories so they’d get their attention followed by 15 minutes of me saying that instead of all of that, their organizations could actually be their own media, that there was larger conversation going on across a much broader community which they could/should tap into, and that perhaps rather than pitching stories to newspapers they should think of the newspapers as added distribution for the stories they’ve already created. Don’t get me wrong – I think print media is great and I enjoy reading (on-line, of course) many of the local papers in my area. But the power of new media is that it takes away the control that traditional media has on the flow of news (not to mention the determination of what is news-worthy) and puts it into the hands of the masses. And while a story in the local paper may reach one set of constituents, a well organized (but not very costly) web site (or even just an organization blog that doubles as its web site) can get multiple messages out to multiple constituents (i.e., flickr photos of a recent fundraiser; a MySpace page to recruit college-age volunteers, dynamic web site or blog for posting updates, responding to national stories, etc.). My message was really that there’s a whole lot going on out there that non-profits (or any organization) can tap into to raise the profile of their group or cause and ultimately spread their word more broadly. The key take-away for me, however, was not all the great things that organizations can do to broaden the reach of their message or influence the media related to their work, but rather how foreign this all was to this group of relatively tech savvy execs. Most had some kind of web-site, although the vast majority didn’t update the content on the site even monthly; and while more than half had heard of blogging (and other forms of new media), almost none had any experience either reading, commenting on or contributing. For me this was a fundamental disconnect and good to keep in mind for future conversations. I sometimes take for granted that this world in which I spend so much time has gone mainstream, but the reality is that it hasn’t yet. I was thinking of all these great Web2.0-ie things they could do to broaden their web presence, engage their constituents in conversation and generally spread the good word; they were thinking “what’s blogging again?” …
November 13, 2006· 3 min read
Blogging stats
Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, has another of his series on the evolution of the blogosphere up on his site. Most interesting to mere were the results on the dominant languages of blogging. Here are his key takeaways (quoted directly): Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs. Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates. …
November 6, 2006· 2 min read
TypePad and Feedburner integration
Finally! FeedBurner and TypePad are now integrated. Before yesterday, if you had a TypePad blog (like mine) and burned your feed through FeedBurner you were only taking partial advantage of FeedBurner’s services (TypePad generates a number of feeds in different formats, and up to now, FeedBurner only captured one of these feeds). Not only will this give you a better view of your subscriber base and their behavior on your blog, but it will also allow TypePad bloggers to take full advantage of FeedBurners’s advertising and feed management services. …
June 8, 2006· 1 min read