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When Testing New Products, Close your Sales Funnel and Make Pre-Sales

This article is for marketers, product owners and sales people that want to test new products or new features of existing products quickly with little risk, to see if their users or readers actually want to spend money on their new idea.

I’m going to share a detailed story of how I turned 1 single blog post into an information product that has made over $2,500 in revenue with a 70% profit margin, excluding my time of course. This is not a get rich scheme, $2.5k is not a huge some of money. But I learned a lot of marketing and sales lessons with this simple product that I have applied to other products and features of larger products.

My goal is to share what I’ve learned to get feedback and connect with other people who are working on similar projects. I’m a huge fan of specifics, real examples, and getting sh%t done and it would be great to connect with like minded people.

Before we get started, a few key lessons I’m going to share. 

  1. CLOSE YOUR SALE FUNNEL. What do I mean by this? When you are testing a new product or feature, you want a potential user, reader, or lead to only be able to make it down the path in 1 possible way. If there is only one possible way for them to go, it easier for you to track, optimize and make conclusions about what you’re testing. Especially when trying to determine if there is demand for a new product or feature you want better leads NOT more leads. Often 10 sales is all you need to convince yourself to build a prototype. Also, you need to be able to understand each number along the sales funnel so if you don’t get the wanted results, you have an idea where you can change something to run a new test.
  2. Get Good Numbers. Too many marketers are lazy at the really specific numbers that they will need to run marketing campaigns and know if its working or not. By closing the sales funnel you can gather the numbers needed to scale your market afterwards if the product is a success. In my case, I know the expected profit per free download of my product. Thus, I can use this number to run paid campaigns and know whether they are profitable or not.
  3. I’ll talk about how to take advantage of and integrate the many free tools available on the market so you can don’t need to pay money to test a product.
  4. How to get potential customers to self-select themselves if you already have access to a list/readership and if you don’t, how to gain access to one.
  5. Why it’s good to always assume your product is NOT going to work, and look for reasons why it will work. This is a much better frame and will reduce more risk then assuming people want to buy your product and search for reasons why they won’t.

First – What exactly is the product?

The product is a simple study guide with 200 questions, answers and explanations along with audio mp3 files if you want to pay more. It’s called the NABCEP Study Guide. The study guide is for a prestigious solar certification that is growing in demand with the explosive growth of the solar PV industry in the US. The NABCEP Certification is the best of the best in the solar PV industry and it also is feared by man within the industry. People are worried about not passing the exam.

How Did I test the Market?

The key challenge in testing a new product or feature is the catch 22 of the industry. I want to sell it before I have it, but I can’t sell it unless I have it.

With software and information products this most often can be overcome by giving something away for free and making pre-sales. In order to make pre-sales you need two things. First, some sort of customer insight that gives you evidence and inspiration into what customers might actually want to buy. Second, access to a list of readers that are potential customers.

Working with HeatSpring I had access to both.

Gaining Customer Insight

We have a face-to-face training NABCEP Prep Course that sells for $895. Clearly there is a need because we sell seats. However, some students couldn’t make the training and would ask over the phone, on chat or in email if they could buy just the study guide.

Access to a List

Our mailing list  is around 33k that goes out once a month, plus a blog that gets over 4k visitors per month, so I had direct access to readers of a very specific and niche market.

I know what many of you are saying and that’s “well Chris, you had everything you needed it must have been soooo easy. How can I use your advice if I don’t have access to a list or customers asking to buy a product.”

My response to this is two fold. First, just because it looked like it was easy does not mean it was. I didn’t believe it would happen until someone gave me cash, simply because someone asks for a product doesn’t mean they will pay for it. Secondly, there are many ways to gather customers insights and data and also get access to a list even if you don’t have direct control over it. I’ve done this many times with other products that I will discuss in future posts. But here is my basic advice.

Where to get customer data

I’ve found some of the best places to get customer insights are on industry forums, industry associations, and if you read between the lines in a blog article and even better within blog comments. Gathering customer insights and getting inspiration for a new product or product feature, if you don’t already have an existing customer base, is much harder but it can be done.

There’s one insight that has helped me when dealing with customer insights. In the very beginning, qualitative information, anecdotes and real conversations tend to be much more insightful then hard data. I think this is true for a few reasons. You are still trying to convince yourself that someone may buy the product. Second, you don’t have enough traffic to be confidence in any hard data but a 6 minute phone conversation can be trusted.

How to get access to a list?

If you don’t have a blog or mailing list yourself, guest posts are a great way to get access to a list. Editors and content creators are always looking for good content that will be HELPFUL to their audience. Also, I’ve noticed that editors are much more likely to like a piece if you plan on getting really specific, going in depth into numbers like this post, or going really deep into a subject by interviewing researchers, or experts.

In your guest post, make sure to give away something for free that relates to the product or feature that you’re looking to test. “Sell around the product.” This free item will start to build your list of leads and within it you can even link to a sales page for the product that you’re trying to sell.

How to NOT Waste Your Time By Making Pre-Sales

Even though I had customer insights and access to a market, I did not want to waste any time creating a study guide if I wasn’t more then 90% sure that I could sell a few copies.

So, I created a free document called the “Free NABCEP Exam Study Guide Cliff Notes”. I made all of the cliff notes available for free in a blog post and also allowed people to download the PDF if they provided their name, email and phone. This was my first experiment, if they had access to all the cliff notes in a blog post, would they download the PDF? Yes, they would!

On the PDF of the cliff notes, I had one link and a few lines of copy to the sales page of the study guide. One link. That’s it. This is what it looked like.

My goal was to not publish the study guide until I had 10 people who wanted to purchase it. Let’s review the sales process steps for the pre-sales and I’ll discuss real conversion and sales numbers below

  1. One single blog post. The URL of the blog posts and the in-page elements were targeted to 5 specific keywords. Here’s the post: http://blog.heatspring.com/free-nabcep-exam-study-guide-cliff-notes/
  2. Download the PDF which has one link to the sales page.
  3. The Sales Page is a long form sales letter which has one link to buy a PDF and one link to a PDF and audio file. In real life, those links to go a purchase page. While testing, they go to a form.
  4. The BUY NOW buttons are redirected from the sales page to a simple page with a form that says “thank you for your interest in the nabcep study guide.” Please complete step 1 with your contact information and then proceed to step 2, the payment information. When they click on the payment info, they’re re-directed to a page that says the guide is not available right now. The key will pre-sales is that the process must feel like they’re really purchasing something so you can be confident in their intention. Here is an example of a pre-sales form.

My goal in the test was to get at least 10 pre-sales before I actually put in the time to write out the study guide and record the audio files. The light bulb went off that I was onto something when I had 7 pre-sales, but I had a customer call me 3 times in two weeks asking when the release would happen. I was getting so annoyed at him calling me, I told him I would sell him my notes, unedited and unpolished. He said ok. I realized that if someone would buy my notes, then the polished product would be pretty good.

Key Learning from Testing the Product

  1. When giving away a free product, there is one test it must pass before you know it’s amazing. “Will your tool/resource/free gift be amazingly useful if the person NEVER bought your paid material”. This is key because if you can answer yes, then you free product will get readers to trust you, respect you, and they will be more likely to feel comfortable paying you.
  2. By giving away amazingly useful content, the reader will think “This is awesome and free, so their paid stuff must be amazing!”
  3. Help First. When dealing with people you don’t personally know, you need to establish trust and respect.  By giving something away, you’re helping them and building the relationship.
  4. Don’t hide. Many times with internet information products people try to hid behind the internet. Be open, put your direct email and phone number on the landing page for potential customers so they can call you if they want.

What does the sale funnel look like and what are conversion and sales numbers?

After selling the product since January until now, April 19th, here are the numbers. 

  1. Visited the post = 1,467 unique visitors
  2. Downloaded PDF = 649. 44% Conversion Rate. No A/B Testing yet
  3. Visited sales page = 404. 62% Conversion Rate. No A/B Testing yet
  4. Purchased PDF = 20 @ 29.95 = 5% conversion on the written study guide
  5. Purchase PDF and audio guide = 39 @ $44.95 = 9.6% conversion on the written and audio guide. People are almost 100% more likely to buy the written and audio guide.
  6. Total Sales 59 = 14.65% conversion with a weight average revenue is $39.70. The expected profit per sale is $27.79. $39.70 x 70%, I need to pay the author of the question 30% profit sharing)
  7. Expected Revenue of Each Cliff Note Download is $3.60 per person who downloaded the free cliff notes, THIS DRIVES CPC work. $2,342 in total revenue (for the cliff note sales funnel) divided by the total number of people who downloaded the guide, 649, is $3.60. I can use this number to drive any CPC campaigns. If I can acquire a download for less then $3.60 it should be profitable. However, one think to keep in mind is that the profitability of different funnels tends to be different due to the type of users coming from each funnel.

A good, but unexpected thing happened while I was testing the cliff notes sales. The first plan was to ONLY ask for money from people who had already downloaded the study guide. However, google indexed the weebly page (http://www.nabcepexamstudyguide.com) that I created. The page was just created to provide a place for for downloading the guide, thank you pages, etc.

When it started to gain some traffic I created a 2nd set of cliff notes that led people to a different sales page and also set up a direct buy button on the weebly page. I made sure to create a new product name with PayPal that would only be listed on the weebly page, so I could track exactly how many sales were coming from organic searches verus those comes from cliff note downloads.

Here are the numbers from January 1st until april 19th for the Weebly page. 

  1. ORGANIC Visits to the home page = 788
  2. Downloaded Cliff Notes = 22 is 2.7% conversion.
  3. Purchased AFTER downloading the cliff notes = 1 is 4.5% conversion.
  4. Purchased the guide SIMPLY from searching and visiting the landing page = 6 is .7% conversion rate. Yes, less then 1%. But keep in mind, I did nothing for these sales everything was already created, I just added a few buttons.

There are a few things to note with this sales funnel. First, I’m amazed I was able to get any traffic let alone sales from the weebly site, it’s pretty ghetto. Second, the numbers are too low for me to be confident in the conversion rates. Third, when tracking the purchases of people who downloaded the study guide first, I only had email addresses to verify and people could use two different emails so I’m not confident in this number either.

What will I be Testing?

Until now, I haven’t been testing anything out of pure laziness, but now I’m curious.

Cliff Note Sales Funnel

The challenge with running any real tests is you need a large enough sample size to be confident. So, while I would like to just increase the conversion in the funnel where people pay me money, I need to make sure enough people are visiting the sale page in the first place to make this happen.

  1. I’m going to try to increase the conversion from step 1 (visited the page) to step 2 (downloaded the guide). My hunch is that if readers feel that the the downloadable PDF has a little more, or a little better information then the blog post, they will be more likely to download it and I can drastically increase download rate.
  2. I’d like to see how I can increase the number of people who download the PDF and then go to the sales page with some email campaigns. I’ve never sent an email to the 600+ people who downloaded the guide so this would be a logical place to start. An easy way of making the emails useful for them would be to send sample questions and real answers along with a link to purchase the guide.

Weebly Sales Funnel

  1. For the weebly site, I need to overcome some credibility issue, to increase conversion rates. When anyone is searching on google and randomly comes to a website asking for money, they think it’s a scam. My plan is to make the site better and increase the number of people that I can get to download the cliff notes. I’ll do this through design, making it more personable, adding an about, etc. It just needs to look more like a real website rather then a skam.

What Tools Did I use and Why?

The best part of the fermium model of many software applications is that you can use them easily for free.

  • Weebly – Weebly is awesome because it’s free to create sites and also for hosting. Thus, all you need to do is purchase a domain name and it will be hosted on weebly. Weebly is also great because you can create pages and hide them from the general navigation bar. This is extremely useful when you’re using google optimizers, sales pages, and thank you pages that you don’t want everyone to see. There are a few other sites like weebly, I just like them the best.
  • Gravity Forms - I used gravity forms to create the download form for the NABCEP Cliff notes. It’s just the best and easiest form product out there.
  • Unbounce – I used the unbound free account to test the product. Unboune is great because you can create a sales page easily, you can also change the DNS settings of the server with-in weebly to make the URL more friendly. So for example, http://promo.nabcepexamstudyguide.com, looks better then another random sales page URL.
  • Pages – I used standard template on pages in iOS to take the questions and answers from the document to make them look pretty.
  • E-Junkie and Payal –  I use e-junkie and paypal to manage the cash and distribution of the product. You need to pay small fees, but it’s super easy.

What are the largest things I learned and how I apply this to selling now and future products?

  • Companies like information products because the margins are so high, distribution is cheap and you test easily. But it’s hard to find good customers and create a product people rave about. I think part of the success of the NABCEP study guide is that it has a very specific market and the product has a specific goal. Students are already paying $300 to sit for the exam, so a $30 study guide doesn’t seem like much. This contrasts with information products that are something like “give me $20 and I’ll show you how to create a Facebook page”.
  • Test the market with something really useful, I mean actually useful (like really, really useful) not that kind of “useful” that content markets tend to throw around.
  • When testing a market it helps to do 2 or more things at once. For example, with my free cliff notes. Even if no one purchased the study guide it would not have been a waste of time because it was contributing to HeatSpring Magazine and growing our list when people downloaded the guide. I couldn’t loose!
  • Looks don’t seem to matter much for Version 1.0. I show the sales page and funnel to my hip “designer” friends and they laugh because, and I agree with them, the page looks silly. But the numbers don’t lie, no one seems to care that there is a “this page is made with weebly” at the bottom of it. Franky, this is a place that holds up a lot of designers and programmers from launching and gives salespeople, like myself, an advantage. If you are a designer or programmer your ego is built into each product, I only care if the product sells. Also, there is a huge difference between going from version 0 to version 1, to 1.1 to 2.0. Most of the time perfectionists are only valuable when going into version 2.0, which are never new products.
  • Very small niches can be extremely profitable. The total traffic of the 5 keywords that drive all of these sales are less then 2,000 per month combined. If you ask most internet marketing people, this is too small of a niche. But again, numbers don’t lie.
  • The free cliff notes were so useful, other people started spreading it for me: http://thirdindustrial.com/nabcep-exam-study-guide-cliffnotes-solarmooc/. Also, a few times I would double check sales that were coming through with the list of people who downloaded the cliff notes. Every once and while they would not match up. Because there is only ONE LINK in the world to that sales page, people must have been sharing and emailing the cliff notes to each other.
  • There will be attrition from pre-sales to real sales and refunds will happen. I’ve made two refunds and out of the 7 pre-sales, only 4 turned into customers. I’m okay with this because the pre-sales gave me the confidence to build a product that was then sold to many more people.
  • Competition doesn’t matter. A free study guide already exists but people still buy the paid one. Why? It’s better. And also, all customers are never 100% aware of all choices, nor do they care. You can see this in the restaurant business, competitions exists but that says nothing for how well YOUR restaurant will do. If your customers LOVE YOU, and you have enough of them, you can have a business.
  • I applied this process to launching a new product, but you could apply to the same logic to adding new features or product lines to an existing product. By giving away something that is extremely useful for free, the readers or customers that are interested will self-select themselves and display their interest. You will then have a much smaller list of more qualified people that you can sell to.

Chris Williams is not a marketer, but he likes to get sh%t done and hates vanity metrics. He’s CMO at HeatSpring and Partner at Cammpus, a marketing tool that gives brands the power to create their own branded university to educate their customers in minutes with no IT.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/when-testing-new-products-close-your-sales-funne...

Simple Ways to Show Your Clients You Care

No matter what type of business you run, how many employees you do (or don’t) have, where your run your business, or how you run your business; at some point or another, I can almost guarantee you’ll have to work with a client. And since a happy client is one of the best ways to grow a business, it’s pretty important to keep your clients happy and more than satisfied with your services. Thankfully, with a little bit of effort, you should be able to rise above your competition and show your clients just how much you value their business. Here are a few ideas to get you thinking…

Provide REALLY good customer support.

I have found that over the years, the companies who I continue to do business with time and time again are those that provide really good customer support. Even if they aren’t the cheapest or the most well-known, I will be a loyal customer (and tell other’s about their service) if I feel like they actually care about me as a person and not just “another client”.

Also, as part of good customers support, make sure YOU initiate some of the conversations. Don’t always wait for them to come to you with a problem, but instead, go to them with a new idea, or just to “check in”.

Offer client-only discounts.

Offering discounts and promotions to the general public is a great way to get new clients, but I’ve found that offering client-only discounts is a great way to show how much you care about your current clients.

These discounts don’t have to be elaborate, but make it clear that the reason they are getting a discount is because you VALUE them and want to reward them for being such a great client.

Show interest in their personal lives.

This can be a little tricky, because you don’t want to seem creepy! However, if you’re able to learn a bit more about your client’s personal lives, it can speak volumes and really show that you care.

Ask them how their family is doing — especially if you know of an on-going illness, pregnancy, etc. Learn how many children/grandchildren they have as well as other details about their families. Ask them about their past — where are they from, what their was childhood like, etc. And most importantly, learn what they like and dislike, what their current interestes are, and what hot-topics you probably shouldn’t bring up!

Thank them.

This may sound super obvious… but when was the last time you really thanked your clients individually?

No matter what market your business is in, I guarantee your clients had a choice between several other companies they could have worked with… but they chose you. So make sure you properly thank them for making that choice.

Try to think outside the traditional thank-you notes too — give a donation to their favorite charity, send them a gift card to their favorite restaurant, send flowers, a gift basket, or even treat them to a fun activity. Of course, you would have to know a bit about their personal lives to make this work; but don’t you think they will remember you and your company a lot more than if you just sent them a generic card every year on their birthday!

There are plenty of simple ways to show your clients you care… and in my own experience, a little extra effort on your part could go a long way in growing your business. Not only will your happy and satisfied clients stick with your company, they will also have plenty of reasons to share your business with family and friends.

How do you show your clients you care?

top image source

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/simple-ways-to-show-your-clients-you-care/

I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here's How [Learning]

Lifehacker reader Gabriel Wyner was tasked with learning four languages in the past few years for his career as an opera singer, and in the process landed on "a pretty damn good method for language learning that you can do in limited amounts of spare time." Here's the four-step method that you can use, too (and you don't have to invest hundreds in a language course like Rosetta Stone). More »


from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5903288/i-learned-to-speak-four-languages-in-a-few-year...

A Future Vision for Boston’s Innovation Economy

Boston has thrived during the economic recovery of the past 18 months and gained substantial recognition globally as a center for innovation. A recent study published by The Economist ranked Boston as the 10th most competitive city in the world, out of 120 major cities examined. The Economist defined competitiveness, for the purposes of the study, as “the demonstrated ability to attract capital, businesses, talent and visitors.” Similarly, the Index of the Massachusetts Innovation Economy — a key benchmark for measuring our knowledge economy performance, published annually by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative — shows that we have one of the most intensive R&D economies in the world, making up 7% of our GDP.

Economist study benchmarking global city competitiveness

One of my all time favorite books on innovation and the ecosystems that support it is Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class”. Using census and economic data, Florida examines the factors that make Creative Class jobs — in science, engineering, technology, architecture, and the arts — primary drivers for economic growth. He also identifies a number of Creative Class cities that have the right kind of assets — like a strong university system, technological infrastructure, and a tolerant culture — to attract talent and support this kind of economic activity. Boston, of course rates high in Florida’s evaluation, and even though Florida published this book in 2002, I think the analysis holds true today. In the most recent issue of Architecture Boston, the Boston Society of Architects (BSA) asked business, research, and design leaders “Why Boston?”. Their answers were revealing, citing some of the very same creative assets Florida extols in his book — from the universities, to the culture of openness and support, to the multidisciplinary areas of the city like Kendall Square where the cross-pollination of design and technology can happen.

With a host of enviable Creative Class assets, strong activity in the start up, investment, and acquisition spaces, and high rankings for competitiveness on a global scale, Boston is fast becoming the place to be for innovators in a variety of industries — from software to biotech to robotics. However, our broader ecosystem still requires critical and ongoing attention if the Boston area is to continue to thrive. City of Ideas: Reinventing Boston’s Innovation Economy, a 2012 report from the Boston Indicators Project, challenges the city to a critical examination of our Creative Class economy, so that Boston does not lose our advantage in the future. Rising health care costs, continuing need for investment in local education, and the blight of economic inequality — those left behind even as other areas grow — are just some of the problems that need to be addressed in a thoughtful way. In order to drive innovation in the Boston area, we should of course continue to encourage R&D and risk taking in the funding of new companies, but we also need to invest in education, health care, housing and an inclusive civic agenda that binds us together with a vision of being a truly Creative Class city, both now and in the future.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/a-future-vision-for-bostons-innovation-economy/

Time Warner Cable brings ESPN, Fox and Turner sports live streaming to apps, website

Time Warner Cable brings ESPN, Fox and Turner sports live streaming to PCs, tablets and phones

The newly-available-on-Android live streaming feature of Time Warner Cable's TWC TV app (and TWCTV.com website) has just gotten a major content upgrade, adding many national and regional sports feeds. It looks like ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TBS, MLB Network, NBA TV and NHL Network are available in most regions, along with the applicable Fox RSNs. The full lineup of areas and channels is in the press release after the break. Of course, if you'd like to keep telling your significant other sports channels haven't been added yet and they will need to watch their reality show on the tablet while you use the big HDTV, then we can all just pretend this never happened.

Continue reading Time Warner Cable brings ESPN, Fox and Turner sports live streaming to apps, website

Time Warner Cable brings ESPN, Fox and Turner sports live streaming to apps, website originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Apr 2012 15:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/20/time-warner-cable-brings-espn-fox-and-turn...

Air-O-Swiss Travel Ultrasonic Humidifier

On a recent trip to Berlin in the dead of winter with a toddler with a cough, we found ourselves with a dilemma: buy a humidifier when we arrive and then either sell it after a month or abandon it, or purchase the Air Swiss Travel Humidifier, a little pricey at $50, but a very compact unit. I was against buying something so specific as a travel humidifier, but we were so glad we did.

It's a little bigger than a Macbook Pro power supply, and twice as thick. It has a clever water reservoir, any .5 liter or smaller water bottle snaps into a fitting, and will supply 6-10 hours of vapor, depending on the setting.

Berlin apartments are as dry as a brush fire, so we also ran it all day in the living room, and even in a large room, it made the air so much more pleasant. Then we ran the Air Swiss all night for the baby, and again it performed perfectly. That's day and night for 30-days non-stop; it's built solid.

The only drawback is that there is a rather bright blue light that illuminates the vapor when the unit turns on, which changes to a red light when the water bottle is empty. If you're a light sensitive sleeper, it might be an issue.

As someone that lives out of hotels a month or two a year, I can't imagine traveling without it. Even without a cold it just makes the stuffy dry air in a central heated building pleasant.

-- Bernie Bernbaum

Air-O-Swiss Travel Ultrasonic Humidifier
$50

Available from Amazon

Manufactured by Air-O-Swiss

from Cool Tools http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/006176.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_med...

Dish adds Pandora to Hopper Whole-Home DVR system

Dish adds Pandora to Hopper Whole-Home DVR system

Tired of walking from room to room, bringing your Entourage with you via your minty fresh Dish Hopper? Well, now you can sit down, relax and enjoy a hot cup of your favorite tunes from the same box. Dish has introduced the popular Pandora music service into its Hopper Whole-Home HD DVR System. So, you'll be able to pull up tracks, create playlists and all the usual recommendation delights you've come to expect from the personal radio service. We'd normally make Pandora's Box about this time, but we're already knee deep in the Jane's Addiction back catalog...

Continue reading Dish adds Pandora to Hopper Whole-Home DVR system

Dish adds Pandora to Hopper Whole-Home DVR system originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/20/dish-adds-pandora-to-hopper-whole-home-dvr...

Forget ‘Local’ – Now, All Politics Are Social [INFOGRAPHIC]

Forget former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill’s oft-repeated maxim, “all politics is local.” In the 2012 race for the White House, all politics are social.

People are posting political news, op-eds and their own opinions across their myriad social profiles on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. As it turns out, the type of political content you share and the way you interact with others’ shared content depends very much on your political leanings.

For example, liberal voters are more likely to use the Internet and social networks in general than their conservative brethren. Liberals also defriend people more often than others because they post disagreeable material or because they just post about politics too often.

SEE ALSO: On Twitter, The Primary’s Over and It’s Obama vs. Romney

People on the extremes of either side are more willing to click the “like” button on political content, and they’re more likely to friend someone who shares their political views.

For more, check out this infographic, courtesy of OnlineColleges.com:


Do you agree with these results, or are you an outlier? Let us know in the comments below.

More About: 2012 presidential campaign, Facebook, Politics, Social Media, social politics, Twitter, US

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/04/20/politics-are-social/?utm_source=feedburner&utm...

Early Stage Funding Poised to Rebound from Q1 Dip

Venture capitalists were prudent and calculated with their investments in the first quarter of 2012. A MoneyTree Report released this morning by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association(NVCA), and Thomson Reuters, shows declines in investments made to younger companies and an increase in money given to those in later stages. Moving forward, however, we could see this trend turn completely around.

According to the report, the total amount of money that venture capitalists spent on seed and early stage investments dropped 9 percent and 31 percent respectively.

Meanwhile “investments into companies in the Later stage of development experienced an increase, rising 11 percent and accounting for 40 percent of total dollars invested during the first quarter of 2012.”

Companies seeking capital for the first time were the hardest hit by the hesitant venture capital atmosphere. “First-time financing [...] dollars decreased 22 percent to $783 million in Q1, the third lowest level in survey history.”

Tracy Lefterhoff, global managing partner of PwC’s venture capital arm in the US, attributes these drops to “a lackluster fourth quarter in the public markets.” But she offers hope to younger companies who sought funding in Q1. “Given that we saw an improvement in the public markets during the first quarter, we could see VCs return to placing their bets on seed stage companies in the coming quarters.”

So, if your startup struggled to collect venture capital funding these past few months, don’t stop trying.  There are greener pastures ahead.

[image via andrewchenblog]

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/04/20/early-stage-funding-poised-to-rebound-from-q1-...

Nick Denton wants to turn the online media world on its head

Over the past couple of months, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton has made it clear that he doesn’t like blog comments very much, and that includes the ones on his own sites such as Gizmodo and Jezebel. He said so during an interview at South by Southwest, where he called the long-held idea that comments could somehow capture the intelligence of a site’s readership “a joke.” So Gawker is remaking comments from the ground up, Denton told GigaOM in an interview in his SoHo office on Wednesday — and the vision behind the changes that will be rolling out soon is nothing less than a reinvention of what the company is about, and also an attempt to literally flip the world of online content on its head.

This isn’t the first time Gawker has tried to fix commenting: the site got a lot of attention several years ago for launching an ambitious new commenting system that was supposed to offer readers an incentive system to encourage good behavior — a little like the membership model that other sites, including the New York Times, have adopted, which awards readers benefits for posting good comments. But Denton says now that this system actually turned out to be a massive mistake, and that all it did was encourage social-media gurus and professional commenters to game the system in order to get rewards:

It was a terrible mistake. It doesn’t work because people game it — and the people who game it are the people with time and social-media expertise, and those are not the people with information or insight. What person who actually has a job and a reputation… would give a f*** about getting some little badge like they’re in high school? It’s patronizing.

Everyone becomes a moderator of their own comments

So what is Gawker’s solution? The new commenting system, which Denton has hinted about but not revealed the details of, is designed to give everyone their own platform for commentary and discussion, one in which they control who they listen to or who they dismiss. And that includes the sources involved in a story at Gawker or Gizmodo or any of the other sites. That, Denton hopes, will appeal to people who don’t currently comment on blogs because doing so feels like “asking someone to go down to Occupy Wall Street and plunge into the mob and start shouting. No reasonable person is going to do that.”

In particular, Denton hopes that handling comments in this way will encourage the subjects of stories to become involved in rebutting these reports directly on the site, instead of calling him to rant at him about them. “I want to take all of those people and I want to have them in the discussion,” he says. “I want to see the story evolve and see the rebuttal, and the rebuttal to the rebuttal.” Not only does that produce drama — something Denton admits he has a fondness for — but he believes it could also help to get at the truth, broadly speaking.

Now I can say: your rebuttal will be given as much prominence as the original piece — we will respect you, we will protect you from the mob and we will let you say your piece. It’s great because it adds drama, and it keeps our writers honest.

Denton wants to reinvent how online media works

But Denton doesn’t just want to reinvent commenting; he wants these changes to be part of reinventing online journalism itself, by turning the traditional story model on its head. While many outlets treat comments and the discussion around a story as an afterthought, something that gets tacked on once the story is finished, Denton said he sees it not only as as the beginning of the story — but as the most important part. He said he even wants to take the discussion around a story that editors at Gawker engage in via private IMs and chats and make all of that public, as a way of sparking discussion.

This was actually the original vision behind Gawker: Denton said he noticed the discussion and gossip around a story in the newsroom or at the bar when he worked at the Financial Times was often far more interesting than the story itself — and he wanted to turn that discussion into its own form of media. In a similar way, the commenting changes are designed to make discussion among writers (who he said will be encouraged to spend far more time in the comments section) and readers and sources far more prominent, in some cases to the point where they become the story.

What’s interesting about Denton’s vision is that plenty of media sites both traditional and digital-only talk about how the “conversation” is the important thing, and how engaging the reader is a valuable tool for uncovering the truth, something that has been accepted wisdom since The Cluetrain Manifesto was published over a decade ago — but very few sites actually follow through on this promise.

Can Nick Denton manage to make Gawker into a poster child for that principle, and not only save comments and internet discourse but pave the way for the future of online media? And will anyone actually take him up on his offer to spend their day at Gawker moderating their own discussion? Stay tuned.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Jeremy King

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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/04/20/nick-denton-wants-to-turn-the-online-media-world...