I recently had the opportunity to speak at this years Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. I was part of the Web2Open sessions that were organized by the Podcamp Foundation (Hats off to Whitney Hoffman), and in traditional “unconference” fashion, those of us who were asked to speak could do so on any topic we wanted.

The theme of this year’s Web 2.0 Expo was “The power of less,” and with that in mind I took this opportunity to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, get back to my roots and start talking about my experiences with entrepreneurship, starting a business, bootstrapping, and all of the lessons I have learned along the way…. so far. The Web 2.0 Expo theme was a perfect fit to “beta” a presentation I dubbed: “Bootstrapping: Building a Business Funded by Revenue.”

The Web 2.0 talk was the first step in developing a series of posts and presentations that I will be focused on throughout 2010. Though my story is still very much “in progress,” I have started several businesses, and have been building my most recent company, Blue Sky Factory, for almost 9 years. I’ve learned a wealth of lessons through my experiences building a business from the ground up with zero funding.

The Framework:

As mentioned earlier, the Web 2.0 talk was in “beta,’ as I am still very much flushing out the various topics and segments I would like to cover. As I have been thinking through things, there have been three main topic areas that seem to encompass the spirit of what I would like to talk about. They include the following:

1. Start-up Lessons

Just as it sounds, and what essentially encompasses most of the presentation below, there are oh so many start-up lessons to discuss, and every entrepreneur has their own. Sometimes, more often than not, they all have their own version of the same lesson. I plan on discussing several of the ones that I have experienced and have processed.

2. Building a team

At the end of the day, any good entrepreneur will tell you their company is only as good as its people. It is so true. Over the last 9 years there have been many different people who have joined my company, and each one of them play a key role in our operation. I plan on talking about building teams who are aligned, motivated and constantly executing.

3. Managing growth

It is often said that managing growth is simply the act of trading one set of problems or challenges for the next. There is a lot to be said for that statement. Growth isn’t easy, but if you find yourself managing it, then you are doing something right! There are a several “stages’ of growth to be discussed in a variety of topics (team, technology, infrastructure, finance, sales, etc).

Below, are the slides from the Web 2.0 talk, which tend to focus mostly on the first topic of “start-up lessons.” I would love to hear your input, or questions in the comments below. I will be continuing on this topic organically, and hope to begin to drill down on the high level topics listed above shortly.

This coming week I will again be heading to one of my favorite places on the planet, NYC. I will be attending Ad Tech on Wed and Thur, and will also be speaking on a panel at Graham Lawlor’s Ultra Light Startup’s on Thursday November 5th at 6:30 at Sun Microsystems. The event is dubbed “Email Marketing for Startups”.

I am looking forward to it and I will be joined by some incredible folks who I can’t wait to meet. The panel looks like:

Moderator:

* Maisha Walker, President of message medium and e-commerce columnist with Inc. magazine

Panelists (alphabetic order):

* Greg Cangialosi, CEO of Blue Sky Factory
* Neil Capel, Founder and CEO of SailThru
* Lisa Klieman, Vice President, Business Development at Innovyx, Inc.
* Adam Rich, Co-founder and Editor-in-chief of Thrillist

If you are coming let me know and lets be sure to link up. If you are going to be at Ad Tech and want to link up as well drop me a line. I will be roaming the exhibition floor most of the time. See you in NYC!

I am really excited about Bootstrap Maryland. When Jared Goralnick first asked me to be a part of it I hadn’t even realized he had been working on such an interesting and important event. I’ve always thought an event that brought together similar entrepreneurs who have experience building businesses outside of the most common routes, (ie. raise friend and family money, raise angel investment, raise VC, etc) would be extremely valuable to the next generation of entrepreneurs. Our region is ripe with talent, ideas, and products that are already in “the lab” and just waiting to officially “launch.”

I look forward to sharing my story and advice around building businesses with little to no funding at all. It certainly isn’t easy, but it can be done with, as Jared states “drive, brains and little creativity.” Details on the event are below, or you can click here. If you are thinking of starting a company, or already are out of the gate and are looking for some additional inspiration. Hope to see you there on May 2nd.

Bootstrap Maryland brings together young entrepreneurs and the necessary tools for running a lean and successful technology business.

At the Bootstrap Maryland Conference on May 2, 2009 you will learn how to turn your web or technology idea into a business. The presentations will cover topics such as:

* What you need (and don’t need) to get your business off the ground.
* Most products fail due to lack of marketing, not failed technology. How to get the word out inexpensively with social media, events, and creative PR
* The most relevant technologies people are using today, and ways to get the technology right the first time
* Stories, lessons learned, and discussions from young people who have built successful businesses

I rarely do this, but somehow the stars aligned where I actually spoke to 3 entirely different groups of people, 3 days in a row about social marketing and macro level trends that are happening in the marketing communications space. The audiences were as follows:

1. Technology Council leaders of North America
2. A global provider of testing & certification centers.
3. A large law firm.

This proved to be very interesting for me, because 99.9% of the time I speak to marketers. So, taking essentially the same message and applying it to the non-profit, testing & education, and legal professions proved to be interesting, and it worked.

The one nugget that I found to be the most interesting of all was that EVERYONE GETS IT (for the most part). I started every presentation with 4 key MACRO trends, the first one being that marketers finally understand, and get the fact that we are now in a two way media landscape. The batch and blast mentality of one way media is so old school, and so foreign to the modern marketer. I feel people are starting to get this on a broader level, and they are embracing it.

Why do I feel this way? There wasn’t anyone in the room at ANY of the three talks I gave that challenged or countered some of the statements and trends that clearly outline a shifting landscape of communication for organizations and businesses. In the past someone always didn’t agree, or there was big push back on some level, once we got into the details. I actually always look forward to it, because a healthy debate / friction is always good. The closest we got on a debate was the whole personal vs. company profile, mixing the two together, or not, etc. Good one for sure.

Maybe it was just that the folks I spoke with were primed and ready to hear more. Either way, as a person who goes to a ton of events and speaks to a variety of audiences, in my mind companies are beginning to adapt. More and more marketers and organizations are applying more social marketing tactics and mediums to their outreach programs. Its not just marketers that get it either, the “organization” as a whole is starting to get it. This is good, because as many of you well know, it is happening. We are in a world of dialog marketing, so embrace it.

Would love to hear your thoughts below.

I can’t stress how much respect I have for Tony Hseih. I had the pleasure of watching him give the opening keynote at SXSW last week. His message is very powerful. Zappos “gets it.” Video highlights of the keynote and his slides are below. Enjoy:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Zappos – SXSW – 3-14-09

View more presentations from zappos.

Steve Kruskamp came to Blue Sky Factory’s HQ today to interview me for his MBA class in entrepreneurship. We sat down and did a hour long interview. If you are interested in hearing about some of my experiences and thoughts around entrepreneurship check out the recording below:

I wanted to put out a quick post to remind folks about SocialDevCampEast 2, which is taking place this coming Saturday, Nov 1, at the University of Baltimore in the heart of Baltimore City. For those of you who are in the region and are involved in technology, social media, marketing, development, etc this is a must attend event. For those of you hearing about it for the first time:

“SocialDevCamp East Fall 2008 once again invites east coast developers and technology business leaders to come together for a thoughtful discussion of the ideas and technologies that will drive the future of the social web.”

SocialDevCampEast is organized by Dave Troy, with help of a bunch of volunteers and sponsors. The first event was in May of this year, and was a super success. You can read about my recap of last May’s event here. Blue Sky Factory was a proud sponsor back in May and will be sponsoring once again this weekends event. I hope to see you there!

I just returned from the lovely city of Seattle where I attended Gnomedex 8.0, the incredible event put on by Chris and Ponzi Pirillo. Blue Sky Factory was a sponsor of the event and this time we set up a table, gave out our minty fresh email marketing gum and also sponsored the wifi. In short, we love Gnomedex, its a one of a kind event, and my favorite conference of the year.

Throughout the event, I broke out the Sanyo Xacti and asked a random sampling of the attendees why they come to Gnomedex, below is the video we cut of the responses. Check it out:

One of my speaking initiatives for 2008 was to branch out a bit from talking about email marketing exclusively, and to do some presentations around the overall changing media landscape, the social web, and my experiences around social marketing. As a result, I have developed a “working” presentation dubbed “From Inbox to iPod: Meshing Social Media into the Marketing Strategy.” I say working, because I have never given the exact same presentation twice. The landscape moves so quickly, things change, so I adapt the presentation usually on an almost “up until the time I get to the podium” basis. Sometimes, a thought will come to me right before starting my talk, and I will add a slide, a bullet, or an image to the deck. Its definitely one of the topics I have fun with, and it has been well received amongst the people who have seen it.

One of the key points that I make during the presentation is in regards to the concept of “Publishing is Marketing 2.0,” and I carry on the early mantra of “content is king,” no matter how many times we have heard it before, it has never been more relevant in its time than now. And it is this very point that presents one of the larger challenges for organizations to overcome, both now and into the future. That is one of the marketing department’s transformation into becoming a publishing organization.

Sure, its no mystery that marketers have always published information on behalf of their companies and organizations, but its the landscape that has changed, not the concept of publishing. It is the way that the content that we publish is consumed, the way that it moves around the social web, and is globally syndicated that is different. This landscape has also opened up other forms of content for organizations to produce, specifically you can now add audio and video content to the already rich mix of blog posts, articles, white papers, research and surveys, etc.. These are mediums that once had a very large barrier to entry and were commonly associated with heavy production budgets. Not anymore.

The Challenge:

In keeping relevant to every reader, I want to address the common challenges that any size organization may face when making the transition to becoming a truly next generation marketing operation. When it comes to producing content in the “publishing is marketing” realm, I am talking specifically about an organization that is committed to producing a continuous flow of blog posts, white papers, research briefs, surveys, webinars, and audio & video (new media). These are some of the core published products that any organization taking advantage of the new media landscape will be producing on a regular basis. Each one serves a key role to the overall marketing mix, and each can be seamlessly promoted using the tools of the social web.

Hence the question, how do you create a publishing machine that stays not only on schedule but also stays aligned with your marketing objectives?

One of the first and foremost considerations is your talent. It really all begins with your team. You have to find out if you have people in your organization who want to be heard, who want a voice, who want to become industry thought leaders, and be known for subject matter expertise and experience? If so, then you are in a very good position, and it is your job to foster that drive into great content for your company, while at the same time developing thought leadership within your organization. To get the content machine going at full speed organically and from within, I believe this is a critical ingredient.

If you are not as lucky, or are a one person show, or a small startup, do the best you can. Think about the medium you are best with and use it to your advantage. Can you write well? Then blog. Can you or your colleague talk intelligently about your product, service or industry? Then hit the record button and publish a regular podcast. The barriers to entry are just too low not to be taking advantage of these mediums. The best advice I can offer to anyone though is to be consistent no matter what.

All that said, content is key. No matter what size organization you are, at the very minimum is the desire for your team to want to be heard and share their expertise with the world, but the content has to be the real deal to make it work. You have to give people the goods, or as they say “give them something to talk about,” because if it is good, they will talk about it.

You certainly don’t have to be the best out of the gate, and for many I realize this in and of itself is the true content challenge, but so long as you are not putting out garbage, and are timely and relevant with your content and have your audience in mind, just keep on striving to get better.

Just remember, this isn’t a game for being just the sizzle, you have to be the steak at the same time, almost all of the time.

Common Scenarios:

No matter what size your organization is, you will find it challenging at first to organize your content creation processes, and even tougher to keep it on schedule when doing it to scale. Scale to me is publishing on a frequent basis, i.e. blog posts, podcasts, etc).

Publishing to scale merits the question of what to produce, and where to focus? Again, you can’t just be throwing out any old content. It makes a solid case for taking a hard look at just exactly what it is that we are producing as organizations. First, you need to ask yourself, how present, and how relevant are you within your industry? What are people saying about you or your brand? Is there a conversation happening?

First, listen to what is being said about your brand and your industry online. What is being said, who is saying it, how influential are they, what is your relation to them if any? Monitor and listen to the conversation. Then create your own marketing communications program around the conversation taking place, being relevant in as many ways as possible.

As more and more organizations become educated on the aspects of social media and begin to invest in the ways that they can engage their brand online, the eventual apparent need for any organization to produce good quality content will shine through. There is this need right now, and many companies are struggling to understand their role in the new media landscape.

Another scenario that I have seen lately is that there are those stuck on the other side of the equation, that of content excess and how to leverage all of it. These tend to be the larger organizations, with their dilemma being not one of content, but one of distribution and having a sound strategy to deploy the content in a meaningful and orchestrated way. To some of us this sounds like a luxury, and to many others it is a bear to manage such content flow in a meaningful way that also stays in line with the company’s marketing objectives, and generates results.

The Editorial Calendar:

After many years of envisioning a “publishing as marketing” organization in regards to my company’s marketing practices, only now are we just getting the company on rails from a publishing perspective, and we still have a way to go. After starting our blog, The Thinking Inbox, a few years back, and toying around with podcasting, and having gone through all of the challenges of infrequent posting, to zero posting, etc we are now beginning to hit our stride with buy in from all areas of the organization. Technology, account management, creative, sales and management are all blogging. This as you can imagine, is a good thing, and develops a broad range of topics that speak to the wide variety of readers who make up our audience.

One you achieve organizational buy in and active participation is in motion, your challenge then becomes the orchestration of the content. What is being produced, when will it publish, and what medium will it be published on, and most importantly, how do you control it?

We found that the development of an editorial calendar is becoming a key tool for us to be able to organize the content challenge within our organization. Although we are still working to get this implemented across the company, and make it a part of the content flow, conceptually we have buy in across the organization.

We moved in this direction at Blue Sky Factory once we began to frequently publish 2-3 blog posts on the same day, instead of spreading them out over time, etc. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that everyone has something to say and wants to contribute, but we also need to maximize that knowledge and spread it out over time so that our blog publishing is consistent over the course of each week.

Now that there is an active editorial calendar that is shared company wide, we all have insight into what topics we want to focus on, and more importantly know when we need to publish. Almost everyone in the company now blogs, and writing / producing / contributing has officially become part of the culture at Blue Sky Factory. We have also begun to release a series of podcasts and viral videos to help get our message out.

I guess you can say that our content train has officially left the station.

Final Thoughts:

In closing, I would like to repeat the key message that I outlined at the beginning of the post. The landscape has changed for marketers. In order to maximize the opportunity of amplifying your organizations signal in this shifting media landscape, you must think strategically about how publishing can help you achieve your goals and objectives.

Although challenging for any size organization, with some planning and organizational buy in, transforming into the “publishing is marketing” model is achievable for any company.

What do you think? Are you implementing a publishing is marketing model at your organization? Is it working? I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

If you would like any additional info or thoughts around this post, feel free to email me directly at gcangialosi [at] gmail [dot] com, or leave a comment.

Thanks for reading.

Julia our rockstar marketing intern for the summer has been busy making lots o media the past few weeks for Blue Sky Factory. If you follow us on Facebook or Twitter you probably have seen the videos. Below is one of her masterpieces Here is our office tour in MTV Cribs style format. Hope you enjoy it!