Photo of Launch attendees by Keith Powers (CC BY on Flickr)

With a crowded conference space for the launch of new startups -- DEMOspring, DEMOfall, TechCrunch Disrupt -- is there room for another springboard for interesting start-ups?

Yep. The first Launch conference, held Wednesday and today at the San Francisco Design Concourse, showed off a wealth of entrepreneurial talent -- and proved to be entertaining at the same time, thanks to the conference prowess of founder Jason Calacanis and the on-stage cleverness of judges such as VCs Dave McClure, Yossi Vardi and actor Kevin Pollak, who instructed startup founders to target "the C- to B+ students" who have grown up to become the vast midsection of U.S. consumer culture.

About 1,300 attendees turned out, and more than 100 startups competed for one of the prized placements on stage.

Here are a few of the startups I found interesting, both on the stage and in the demo pit:

Group{in}: Organize your work & personal lives

1Appconomy's Group{in} is a mobile app that lets you organize your work and personal life into "the groups and people that matter to you" and across the channels you already use. By simplifying group communications across multiple channels, including private in-app messaging, e-mail, SMS, phone Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more, Group{in} makes working in groups easy, efficient and fun. It looked pretty cool to me, though the judges seemed unimpressed.

Give2Gether: Democratized social fund-raising

2Anyone can instantly raise funds for a cause with give2gether, a welcome addition to the social good space. CEO/co-founder Amon Shafir gave me a deep dive into the service, which appears to be much more effective than efforts like Facebook Causes. While the average donor on Causes gives 70 cents for each cause he joins, the average person on Give2Gether has given $75 -- about 100 times more -- during the early going (about 30 projects). The trick is in sharing causes with your social contacts and monitoring the results in your dashboard. Says the site: "Think of it as the Twitter of philanthropy -- a tailored, self-service SaaS platform helping non-profits monetize social interactions. Give2Gether turns strangers into friends, friends into donors and donors into fundraisers, at one-third of the traditional cost."

News 360: News & multimedia on your iPad

3In the demo pit I met Nina Grigorieva, CEO of Moscow-based News360, who showed off its marvelous capabilities on an iPad. (I'm waiting for version 2 of the iPad before buying one.) It has the same elegance as Flipboard and, unlike News Corp.'s The Daily, it's completely free and has some nice social sharing features. It aggregates thousands of news sources, tracks your favorite news sources, creates personalized news feeds by topic and lets you share interesting stories with your friends. If you own an iPad, you'll want this app.

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Guest post by Rand Fishkin
Founder & CEO, SEOmoz

Facebook has had an incredible run for the last six years -- see the graphic above. Twitter has had a remarkable four years under its belt, now reaching 200 million members.

The growth of these twin networks has brought new discipline to the practice of traffic generation, branding and customer engagement on the Web: social media marketing. But for those of us who participate in the practice, there are clear signs that Twitter and Facebook aren't enough.

Plenty of recent facts and figures have helped to hammer this point home:

• Social media spending is estimated to be 10% of marketing budgets in 2011 (source: CMO Survey by Duke University)
• StumbleUpon, despite having less than 1/10th the US users of Facebook and about 1/100th the engagement, sends more outbound traffic (source: Statcounter via The Next Web)
• Quora, the social Q+A site, is nearing 500,000 users and momentum is growing (source: TechCrunch + FastCompany)*
• StackExchange, a platform for Q+A sites, already exceeds 650,000 registered users (source: StackExchange)
• Reddit grew 230%+ and now receives nearly 1 billion page views/month (source: Reddit via Mashable)
• LinkedIn has likely passed 100 million users; they were at 85 million in November, adding about 1 million/day (source: CNN Money)
• Tumblr just entered the top 40 US sites (source: Financial Times)

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For online collaboration to work, forget internal corporate structures, just build human relations

Here's some of my coverage from the ICIS Conference in St. Louis. I was covering the event for Dice and Dice News.

When you're collaborating online with a virtual team, which relationship dynamic works the best? A rigid internal structure of system roles or human relations?

The latter, discovered Nabila Jawadi, an assistant professor at Amiens School of Management, in her research paper, “Leader-Member Exchange in Virtual Team: Exploring the Effects of E-Leaders’ Behavioral Complexity.” The paper was co-authored by Mohamed Daassi at the University of Brest, Marc Favier at the University Pierre Mendes France and Michael Kalika at the EM Strasbourg Business School.

Jawadi and team tried to see what were the rules leaders used to facilitate communications and create a good e-collaboration environment. They found that internal system rules that deal with control and coordination don't carry much weight in a virtual environment.

For those leaders looking to improve online collaboration, said Jawadi, have a suite of communications tools in place and use human relation rules, not power structure, for management and facilitation.

A location-based mashup uses APIs to plot YouTube videos about the World Cup on a global map using geotagging. There are countless ways in which brands can use APIs.

In Silicon Valley, open APIs have long been a staple of how tech companies do business. Twitter has an API. Facebook and Yahoo! have APIs. Google kick-started the API phenomenon with the Google Maps API. eBay and Amazon.com pioneered APIs as a lucrative business model.

Now an increasing number of brands are getting in on the action: Best Buy, Sears, MasterCard, MTV and Rhapsody now sport APIs alongside upstarts like HotUKDeals, Zappos and Wine.com.

At last week’s Content Marketing Strategies conference in Berkeley, Calif., Lori H. Schwartz, chief technology catalyst for McCann WorldGroup, said that smart brands are increasingly turning to APIs as a way to entice would-be partners to take your datastream and reuse it in the burgeoning number of different media environments: mobile, Internet-enabled TV, the real-time Web and other places where customers are increasingly hanging out.

A quick primer for readers who aren’t familiar with APIs. An API, short for application programming interface, is simply a set of rules and protocols that allow websites and apps to work with each other. A typical API pulls data from a source – say, pricing data or inventory – and performs a function, such as parsing the content and displaying it in a new way – say, a nicely formatted row of Flickr photos, or text that appears larger for the vision-impaired.

APIs let businesses plug into the social Web

Businesses large and small are now catching on, as brands are evolving into social media platforms rather than stand-alone destination sites.

The North Face and REI have released skiing apps that display snow conditions at dozens of resorts along with forecasts, trail maps and more. Real-time weather data is pulled into the apps through APIs. Etsy, an online retailer of handmade merchandise, has cultivated a distributed network of developers who used the Etsy API to create apps like Etsy On Sale and SoopSee. Best Buy recently released a new AP:I that not only lets you browse its vast catalog of merchandise but lets you take part in an end-to-end transaction on a third party site.

As brand strategist Brian Phipps writes: "The monolithic brands of the industrial age are giving way to the distributed, participative and democratized brands of the digital age. The forward strength of brands will be free-flowing from the bottom-up, rather than dictated and manipulated from the top down."

Here are four reasons why your brand should consider creating its own APIs:

1. Increased sales

Depending on what you’re selling on your destination website, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to drive additional sales by deputizing bloggers, affiliate retailers and boutique online shops into becoming part of the sales process. Make it easy for ecommerce allies to grab relevant data and present it to the world using their interface but adhering to your standards. If you’re lucky, a Web service developed by a third party could generate new sources of revenue.

2. Increased innovation

What if the community built new products and services on top of your brand’s foundation? The magic of APIs is that your development team and contractors don’t have to create solutions for every possible use of your product or service in the marketplace. You do know that you can’t possibly handle every imaginable use case and build for every platform and media format, don’t you? In a sense, APIs are the ultimate form of crowdsourcing. By releasing an open API with specific terms of use, you turn the community into developers and co-collaborators for your brand – at almost zero cost. By building out an external developer ecosystem, you’re essentially adding outside expertise and novel insights to your R&D process.

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I must admit right away that I am a disciple of the seminal book on the Internet revolution and what it means for business, The Cluetrain Manifesto.

The main premise of the manifesto is that markets are conversations and that no matter how ardent and impassioned the man at the lectern may be, the audience now has the power, through the Internet, to compare notes real-time, to heckle and critique without being shushed.

When this was written, there was neither Twitter nor Facebook—and the blog was still in its infancy.

I have been collecting all sort of quotes that I have been wanting to address and believe that I can write 95 posts just based on the Cluetrain’s 95 Theses, but for today I will just focus on number 83: We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.

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Social activity in Manhattan from The Hotlist, a mobile startup.

Advice from three startups on the digital creation process

In any project you decide to embrace, there are key ingredients that must fall into place to build a solid foundation for success. We caught up with a number of new mobile and Web app startups and a user experience design expert from the agency side to pick their brains on the key ingredients needed to make that perfect risotto. That is, to build a startup from the ground up.

After years of working with brands and startups, it amazes me how great ideas get muddled when it reaches the execution phase. When I was part of a product management team, it was a challenge to convince executive management how design needs to be an integral part of the process. $3 million down the drain later, they’ll circle back and say, "Jessica can you show us those architectural sketches again?”

Here is a summary of the advice from all three startups with perspective from my personal experience in the digital creation process.

Timing is everything

When the visual search startup Search Me launched in 2005, the tech world was excited! $43.6 million later and only 1.8 million users to show for it, they had to shut down. The world was not ready for visual search at that time.

However, timing has worked very well for Tango.me, a free mobile video calling service with 6 million users available in 135 countries and on 45 different mobile devices. Uri Raz, founder and CEO, adds that “the improvement of smart phones and video was excellent timing for Tango.me. Why limit video calls on the PC when improvement in mobile technology makes it more accessible and convenient.”

In the million and one ideas that you have in your “ideas” folder, look for one that the market is ripe and ready for. Observe the changes in the space that you would like to service, do your research, find the gap and improvements you can implement, then make your bet.

Find your product’s focus

Most startups don’t find the sweet spot of their product the first time they launch. It takes a number of prototypes, many days of testing, collaboration and iteration to get to the phase where it is finally ready for public consumption. Uri adds: “When your product is able to provide something useful to a massive group of consumers, you won’t need to convince them about its usefulness -- they will make sure you succeed by supporting your product.”

A powerful example of this experience is when Tango.me first launched in Korea. “Korea is one of our first adopters," Uri says. "When we first launched, there was a flaw in our platform. Our system was not working with the structure of Korea’s phone number system. A user discovered a way around this and posted it in his blog. The next day Tango had 120,000 downloads. We’ve fixed that issue, yet this memorable act of love from our users is a testament to how our product is connecting lives.”

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Increasing your brand's visibility on Facebook won't get you a $136.38 ROI per fan, but it will solidify customer relationships on the most important social network in the world.

Tactics to stay on your fans' radar — begin with targeting their news feeds & making your updates count

This is part 4 of a 4-part series on using Facebook strategically. Updated a few hours after publication to include news from Facebook about its upgrade to Pages today.
Also see:
• Part 1: Demystifying how Facebook’s news feeds work
• Part 2: 15 ways to increase your Facebook stature
• Part 3: Cheat sheet: Key principles of social media marketing on Facebook

Your brand or business has a Facebook Page. That's nice. Are you getting much traction, and is it worth your investment of time and effort?

I get the sense that many brands understand that Facebook needs to be an important part of their business strategy. But they're fumbling the execution. What steps should your business take to increase your reach and visibility on Facebook and to turn supporters into paying customers?

And how will Facebook's upgrade of Pages, announced today, affect managing your brand's Page?

First, a dose of cold reality: Your brand isn't reaching as many people as you think through its Facebook Page. Most people who “like” your Page never go back to it. Jeff Widman of BrandGlue found that 88 percent of Facebook members never return to a Page once they’ve clicked the Like button.

Your opportunity lies in engaging with fans through their News Feed. (Let's call them fans until someone comes up with a better term.) But here's a second harsh truth: Only 1 out of every 500 updates makes it into your fans' critical Top News feed, which is how 95 percent of Facebook members get their updates (excluding mobile users), according to Facebook itself. (The percentage of Page updates visible in a user's Top News feed may be even smaller today.)

Bottom line? Many of those status updates exquisitely crafted by your Facebook team will never be seen by the vast majority of your fans.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Several major brands -- Starbucks (nearly 20 million Likes), Skittles (15 million Likes), Adidas (7 million Likes), Best Buy (2.5 million Likes), Target (3.8 million Likes), Buffalo Wild Wings (3.9 million Likes) and others -- have learned how to use Facebook intelligently, as a conversation-rich public square rather than as just another marketing/promotional channel. With the time users spend on Facebook now far exceeding the time they spend on Google, and with traffic driven by Facebook often matching or surpassing Google referrals, it's time to turn your Facebook presence into a larger conversation strategy for your brand.

Here are 15 tips for your business to stay on your customers' radar by increasing your visibility and reach on Facebook.

Connect Facebook to your website

1When Facebook unveiled a slew of social plug-ins last year, it benefited not only Facebook but businesses, too, by lowering the barrier for people to react to products and services. When someone clicks the Facebook Like button on your site, an average of 40 of their friends see it. Genius! (See Mashable's use of it at right.) Other plug-ins include Comments, Recommends, Like Box and Registration -- see which ones make sense for pages on your website. Twisted Oak winery, for example, lets people Like and post Facebook status updates about specific wine bottlings. As the Spaniards say: ¡Perfecto!

Find your rhythm

2You'll want to post regularly: Try to get into the habit of posting every day -- and certainly not just when you have a marketing announcement. One or two strong Facebook updates per day is better than a half dozen scattershot updates that fly by and don’t have the staying power to attract people’s feedback. You may find that you have a more active community that responds to frequent postings. Every brand is different, so find the rhythm and pace that work for you. Use Facebook Insights to see which updates resonate with your fans.

Use the 80-20 rule

3It's not all about you. Brands starting out on Facebook almost uniformly focus on pitching themselves. What they eventually discover is that Facebook is about conversations. You want to stoke conversations and Include links to stories that are interesting, remarkable, sexy, funny or newsworthy -- whether they're on your site, blog or an outside website. Use visuals if possible -- our eyes are naturally drawn to imagery. As a rough rule of thumb, post four status updates on items about outside news items or discoveries for every post promoting a product. And when you do mention a product or service, try to do so in a helpful way.

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Stash Tea lures newcomers with a sweepstakes and charms them with Tea Haiku Friday.

 
The following is excerpted from Facebook Me! A Guide to Socializing, Sharing, and Promoting on Facebook (Second Edition) by Dave Awl. Copyright © 2011. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and Peachpit Press. This is part 3 of a 4-part series on using Facebook strategically.
• Part 1: Demystifying how Facebook’s news feeds work
• Part 2: 15 ways to increase your Facebook stature
• Part 3: Cheat sheet: Key principles of social media marketing on Facebook (below)
• Part 4: 15 ways to increase your brand’s impact on Facebook

Guest post by Dave Awl

Whether you're promoting yourself or a client, Facebook gives you the opportunity to reach many people quickly and for no or little cost. But if you misuse the site, you may do more harm than good. Here's how to take advantage of Facebook's potential.

Facebook tools like status updates, Notes, Pages, photos, and videos make it easy to grab the attention of your friends and fans—and give you the opportunity to reach out to their friends as well, without being pushy or annoying about it.

For more about the tools, read 12 Tips for Creative Pros on Facebook. But first, let's look at some of the ABCs of social media marketing and how to keep your Facebook presence engaging.

Strengthen emotional attachments with customers

An experiment conducted by the Harvard Business Review in early 2010 found that Facebook Pages can be very effective at creating stronger “emotional attachments” between businesses and their customers. HBR e-mailed a survey to thousands of customers on the mailing list for a Houston-based bakery called Dessert Gallery (DG), then set up a Facebook Page for DG and invited everyone on the mailing list to become a fan of the Page. They updated the Page several times a week with news, positive reviews, info about contests and specials, profiles of DG employees, and of course, lots of photos of scrumptious desserts. (I want to click the Like button just reading about it.)

Three months later, HBR surveyed DG’s customers again. They found that becoming fans of DG on Facebook “changed customer behavior for the better”: Customers visited the store more often after becoming fans, were more likely to recommend DG to their friends, were most likely to say that they preferred DG to its competitors, and reported a greater emotional attachment to DG (3.4 on a 4-point scale, compared to an average of 3.0 for customers who weren’t Facebook fans).

Cheat sheet: Key principles of social media marketing

I thought it would be useful to give you a checklist of some of the most important do's and don'ts of social media marketing in one handy bulleted list.

• Don't advertise—engage! People come to Facebook to socialize, to be entertained, and to get useful information, but almost nobody comes for the deliberate purpose of being advertised to. To reach people on Facebook, you need to grab their attention by giving them something they need. See "Free ice cream: Delivering value to your fans" (below) for more on this.

• Show, don't tell. Remember that the best way to persuade Facebookers that you have something great to offer is to use Facebook's sharing tools to give them a taste of how great that something is, rather than just telling them about it.

• Don't just talk—listen. The great value of social media is that it creates a two-way connection: an opportunity to build a stronger bond with your audience by listening to what they have to tell you and responding to them directly. In a world where customers who try to contact companies are routinely greeted with, "Please listen carefully because our voice menu options have changed," genuine communication is a killer app. If fans know they can get your ear by visiting your Facebook Page, that can do wonderful things for your traffic.

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Look at company email behavior and you'll see the problem

Here's some of my coverage from the ICIS Conference in St. Louis. I was covering the event for Dice and Dice News.

When a company is sinking, everyone knows, and everyone gets scared. They look to others for support and start agreeing with each other’s concerns.

These were the findings of the research paper “Understanding Communication Network Cohesiveness During Organizational Crisis: Effects of Clique and Transivity” by Shahadat Uddin, Shahriar Hasan Murshed, and Liaquat Hossain of The University of Sydney.

The team from Sydney base their knowledge of crisis behavior within an organization by scanning all the emails passed around at Enron, just before the company collapsed. Looking back, the emails showed people forming cliques, as people felt safety in numbers, and their communications became more transitive meaning people were more apt and eager to agree with each other.

To avoid being the next Enron, Uddin recommends organizations track the behavior of emails over time and compare it to previous months or the same month in the previous year. If they notice that there’s more transitive and cliquish behavior then it could be a sign of impending doom.