Blog @ Percolate

Let me get something out of the way before we get started: In case you haven’t heard, Facebook is going to IPO this week.

Okay, seriously, all this IPO talk has driven people to dive into Facebook’s business model and lots of folks are coming up with doubts. As Peter Kafka points out, even Facebook has its doubts, mentioning as much in their IPO filing: “We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads.”

But what does that mean really? And what’s the opportunity? And, most importantly in many people’s eyes, does Facebook really have the opportunity to be a bigger company than Google?

While I don’t know the precise answers to those questions, I do have lots of opinions and since it happens to be Internet Week in NYC, I’ve been having these conversations a lot (mostly on panels). The bulk of the argument against Facebook revolves around their lack of “intent” data. This, of course, is what Google has in bulk and is the reason they are a multi-billion dollar business. Being able to target people at specific points in the purchase process changes the way marketing works. It allows advertisers to do something that was all but impossible (you could buy in-store and outdoor around stores, but that’s a whole lot less efficient). This is an amazing thing for marketers and Google’s market cap reflects it.

But if you ask most advertisers why they spend millions (and sometimes billions) on traditional ads, it’s not to harvest people who intend to buy, it’s to create demand: continuing to grow a business requires continuing to bring in new customers constantly. However it makes you feel, most ads exist to remind you that you need something new. That shoe company with billboard isn’t trying to get you to buy their shoes over a competitor, they’re trying to remind you that you need new shoes and, they hope, when you walk into the store you’ll spring for their brand.

That’s where brands spend real dollars. When startups show off “the chart” (you know, the one with the gap on time spent versus ad spend), they are looking at the effect of digital platforms not having a good answer to intent creation.

That, I believe, is where the opportunity for social is. We’re not there yet, but the promise is that you can use your understanding of a user’s interests to present them with messages that let them know about things they want before they want them. If Facebook figures this out it will be a bigger company than Google.

So how does content fit in?

Using the traditional purchase funnel, I think you still have a gap between awareness and intent. Once someone knows about your brand or product, how do you create need? One really good way of doing that is to remind them you exist (a large portion of CPG ad spend is used for just this). The way to remind people you exist is to create content they’ll see. To create content they’ll see on Facebook you need to a) be engaging enough that it builds organic activity and pushes beyond the base distribution you get through EdgeRank or b) buy Reach Generator. The two big goals (awareness and intent creation) have paid actions associated with them in Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. If these companies continue to build on these ideas and find better ways to target users based on their interests they will be solving a real problem for advertisers, something that hasn’t really been done on the web since paid search in the early 2000s.

Of course, there are lots of ifs here. The products are not quite there yet (targeting, for instance, is still largely based on social connections instead of interest connections), but I think these platforms will get there and I think they’ll succeed.

Like a lot of companies these days we use Google Docs for collaboration. Yesterday I opened up a doc that was shared with me and was surprised to find a research tab on the right side of the screen. Turns out it’s brand new. Here’s what Google said about it yesterday in a blog post:

The research pane taps into Google Search directly from Google documents, so whether you want to add a cool destination to your itinerary for an upcoming trip to India or you’re looking for the perfect presidential quote for a political science paper, you don’t even have to open a new tab.

One of the big goals of Percolate is to prompt community managers and social editors with content. This is right up that alley, allowing people creating documents to find relevant content as they go. Always exciting to see others working on similar problems.

Here’s what it looks like inline (to bring it up just right click on any word in your doc):

A few months ago I was talking to my mom about an afterschool program she works with called The Lighthouse Program. Lighthouse is based in Bridgeport and gives about 2800 children in 26 schools a safe and enriching place to spend the hours after school until their parents return home. Bridgeport is one of the poorest cities in the northeast, and the program can’t afford all the necessities it would like and they were looking for iPads to use for educational purposes by students.

The question was how to get these iPads donated, since the program certainly couldn’t afford to go out and buy them.

So we at Percolate got together to spend a bit of time thinking about how we might be able to help. Rumors of the iPad 3 were swirling and we were all coveting the next big gadget. However, like so many, we had older, perfectly serviceable models and no matter how fancy the new screen was going to be, it’s hard to justify $500 on something you definitely don’t need.

Which got us thinking, what if we ran an “iPad Appeal” and played into exactly that sort of thinking? Rather than asking people to give us money for iPads or donate their old ones, we would ask people who were thinking of upgrading to make the purchase they really wanted and we would make it as easy as possible. The Lighthouse Program could even offer tax deductible receipts. They were willing to sweeten the pot with free shipping, an expense they could manage. (They’ll send a prepaid box to send your iPad back in).

So we spent a bit of time putting together a site for them and now we’re ready to start appealing. So … Do you have an old iPad? Do you wish you had a new one? (That retina display is oh so nice.) Maybe you’ve got an iPad 1 and you really wish you had the new version instead of that crappy black case, but you just can’t justify the upgrade since a new case isn’t really worth the $499 price tag. Perfect. Let us take the guilt away. Just head over to iPadAppeal.org and sign up to send us your old iPad. All the instructions are there, but in case you’re not up for reading them, it’s simple: Fill out the form on the site and The Lighthouse Program will send a prepaid box for you to ship your old iPad in. As soon as they receive it they’ll send you a tax deductible receipt and you will have a new iPad, along with the knowledge that you made a difference for a kid who couldn’t afford the tech we all enjoy on a daily basis. Come on, what are you waiting for?

Back in March 2011, I was managing a team of eight hyper-talented journalists for an emerging markets news service called FT Tilt.

FT Tilt was the latest – and ultimately, the last – adventure in what had been an exciting career at the Financial Times, which I joined as a graduate trainee in the fall of 2006.

That March, FT Tilt was only two months old, the future was bright, and Noah Brier had just deferred a planned breakfast meeting due to a bout of SXSW flu.

Noah and I had been introduced over email by a former FT colleague who believed in “connecting people who live at the intersection of technology and media”. (Thanks, Kevin!)

[As an aside, I'd started using an early version of Percolate one month prior - in February - on the recommendation of William Owen of Made by Many]

When we finally met, we spent 90 coffee-fuelled minutes talking about everything from project management software to the crazy awesomeness of Red Bull Island.

That breakfast turned into another, and then another, until we were meeting about once every month to talk media, technology, product launches, managing teams, bug reporting protocol, javascript, hash bangs, hot sauce and, inevitably, project management software.

And then, in October, the FT decided to close Tilt down - and I decided to leave the company. And so it was that at our next “coffee talk”, in December, Noah popped the question: “so, how’d you like to come work for Percolate?”

At the time I was ‘in talks’ with other media companies about reporting and editing positions, and also contemplating academia. (Moving back to the Caribbean was another option, and a much longer story.)

But Noah’s offer was intriguing. In my (recently-past) life as an FT journalist, I’d combined blogging, reporting and editing with project and product management. I loved being a part of “the future of media” as much as I loved reporting on complex financial products (seriously). And I was always happiest when I managed to combine the two, working first on FT Alphaville and then on FT Tilt.

Which is another way of saying that I was, and am, an unabashed geek and a lover of words with a blogging habit that stretches back to the dark ages of blink tags and uploading HTML files to FTP servers.

And I absolutely wanted to work for a company that lived at the intersection of technology and media, that cares deeply about hiring good people, and that  -  yes, this matters – has excellent project management habits. A commitment to health and community certainly don’t hurt.

So I said yes to Noah’s question. And now – after some wrangling with US immigration services – I work with a team of awesome developers, one phenomenal designer, an amazing client experiences manager and a properly impressive sales team. And, of course, with Noah and James.

Percolate is all about helping brands be interesting at social scale. In my new role, I work with everyone on the team to help us achieve this goal – with the developers to build products our clients will love; with our designer to make these products beautiful; with the business team to understand where the market is going and what we need to do to anticipate and fulfill clients’ needs.

And I get to edit the Percolate blog. So if you spot any typos – in this post or anywhere else –  let me know.

PS: it’s absolutely true that journalists and developers are very similar, though programmers drink more beer. Ask me all about it at the next likemind event.

A few months ago we started talking to the fine folks over at The Awl about what we could do together. We’ve been huge fans of what they’re up to for awhile and were excited to find an opportunity to help them spread their voice with the help of Percolate.

Politics seemed like a natural space to play for lots of reasons (election year, lends itself to absurd headlines, there is no shortage of insanity to report on). Thus was born Approve This Message, the newest media site powered by Percolate (joining the fine company of Counterparties). Each day the team at The Awl curates stories from around the political web as bubbled up by the algorithms of Percolate.

Nieman Journalism Lab has a nice story covering the launch that includes this nugget:

Approve This Message is a link machine with a cyborg brain that is part Awl and part Percolate, the same team that developed Felix Salmon’s Counterparties at Reuters. Percolate is like a butcher with an algorithm, serving up lean news by separating the meat from the fat around the web, whether via Twitter, RSS, or elsewhere.

I think we might just make that our new tagline.

Percolate: Like a Butcher with an Algorithm

Anyway, go enjoy Approve This Message.

Oh, and it may include the first Percolate advertisement. You can refresh the page a few times to find it or just check it out below:

James has a good post over on AdAge on a topic we’ve been discussing a lot lately at Percolate: The lack of special boxes for brands in social. By that, we mean the crazy fact that all the biggest platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc.) don’t have IAB standard ad space anywhere on the site (except maybe that logout ad for Facebook).

Here’s how James breaks it down:

With attention flowing this way, valuations and business models on these platforms will follow. Besides all these platforms being social in nature, the other common theme is that they all have (or will likely have) business models that are about helping brands acquire audiences. First, you buy or build your audience, then you pay to reach them and the larger network on the platform. The better your messages resonate, the less you have to pay, and the more you naturally grow within the ecosystem.

All this without special boxes the brand can buy.

Go read the whole thing.

In July of ‘34, at the height the Hoover Dam’s construction, over 5,000 men were on site working for six separate companies, blasting rock, pouring concrete, wiring turbines, and moving canyon walls. Basically; getting epic stuff done. It’s awe inspiring, and for me the greater miracle is that this team built one of the great technical marvels of any time with only two essential project management tool: their voices (probably shouting) and confidence in co-workers.

We’re not building a dam at Percolate, I promise. There’s no Percolate concrete being poured on Broadway, I am confused by those wooden things that look like root beer barrels in Ikea furniture, no chance I’m rerouting water.

We might not be building a dam, but we are working as a team and doing it well. I wanted to share a little on how we do it.

Talk.
Things haven’t changed that much since ’34: talking still works. Weekly meetings involve every team member presenting their goals for the week and grading themselves on the previous week, while also encouraging everyone to ask for help if they need it. These meetings are important, because communicating helps us all get better and encourages listening, which may be even more valuable than the actual sharing. We are a relatively small team now, but as we grow this process will remain intact.

Be Clear.
We aim to communicate so anyone and everyone on the team can understand. Dom is a master at this, by beginning each project and feature with a story that easily translates to a vision and something that can be explained. We strive to use human language on everything from training documents to SOWs. Extending the Hoover Dam analogy, if you yelled your last email down a mine shaft would it be understood or would the foreman walk out of the mine and hit you in the mouth?

Care.
We strive to do things well because we care. Our clients are companies made up of interesting and nice people and we strive hard to build tools to make their jobs more enjoyable and easier. Our caring sparks healthy debates, passionate discussions about all of our features, and many late nights worrying if we made the right decision. But it also does something greater; it translates into the Percolate product constantly improving and our client projects being more enjoyable because we are vested in each and every one being great.

If your own interaction with coding or clients is small, it doesn’t lessen the impact you can have. Just because you’re a junior planner, you can still impact a project with something as simple as taking the extra second to be clear when communicating between teams or taking an extra pass over a presentation. How enjoyable is it when a customer service person slows down, really listens and helps you out? It’s awesome. We strive for that with everything.

Pick Good Tools.
It’s not all high-fives, coffee talk and hugs at Percolate.  Here are some tools we love.

Asana - Fantastic application for tracking tasks, mapping out our releases, assigning things to do and communicating through bugs and features. Love the interface, email functionality, clean design, and the satisfaction of checking things off.

Workflowy – Perfect, lightweight tool to outline a project or plan. It’s a really nice way to bullet out what has to happen or where things can be found.

GitHub – GitHub is makes it easy for us to code and see what is happening with each other’s code. The biggest difference between GitHub and document collaboration software is that it provides some mechanisms for helping several people work on the same file at once and logically “merge” all their work together, even over different times and conflicting changes.

Talk, care, pick some good tools and be clear with each other. Not much has changed since 1934.

I started this year with a mission: revive likemind.

In 2008, when the NYTimes wrote about it (and took the photo below), likemind was fresh, energetic, filled with ideas. It was the place to be – places, really, since there are chapters all over the world.

By January 2012, likemind had lost a bit of its momentum. It needed a new direction to reflect the current state of the media and tech community.

When Noah and James asked me to help revive likemind, I have to admit, I had doubts. I went to the likemind site and read the about section:

who: people like you

what: an opportunity to enjoy coffee and conversation

why: because drinking good coffee with likeminded people is fun

when: the third friday of every month (just about)

I reread the section a number of times and I found myself asking: What is this morning meet-up all about? Do people really show up in the morning on a Friday? Will I really meeting interesting people?

And so I proceeded with the task at hand – revive likemind globally and get likemind active again here in NYC. Fast-forward to the February edition of likemind. 6 people showed up and I knew 4 of them (thanks for coming, Percolaters). But a good idea with interesting people is evergreen. Fast-forward one more month to March edition of likemind. Roughly 50 people attended! I met a likeminder from Sweden who was in town visiting and decided to join the NY chapter to meet new people. We chatted for 2 hours, sharing stories, ideas and interests. Doubts completely eliminated, I left this likemind with a new friend and a feeling of inspiration!

Let me take this opportunity to give you a little more intel on likemind from my point of view.

What is likemind?

likemind is a morning coffee meet-up that occurs globally on the 3rd Friday of every month. The mission is to bring together people from a variety of industries to share ideas and have great conversations with new people with some good coffee.

Why should I go to likemind?

The power of likemind lies in the people.  We are all busy in our lives with work and personal activities. This is a time to step outside of your routine, meet someone new, and open your mind to ideas and people.

I encourage everyone to come this month to likemind and experience it for yourself. It’s awesome.

Here are the details for NYC:

Where: ‘sNice Café – 45 8^th Avenue

When: Friday, April 20^th, 8am – 10am

See you at ‘sNice!

What gives value to data?

At Percolate, we make use of data, a lot of data. By itself, data is pretty useless. What adds value is the ability to get answers from it – that is, turning data into information.

A SQL dump alone is worthless. But as soon as you load it on your shiny PostgreSQL server, you can start executing queries and getting results out of your data. This is because the data is structured, relational and the server is optimized to give you an answer in real time – thousands of answers per second.

Living in a perfect world, your server will always be fast enough and available. But we don’t, life is interesting, and hiccups happens.

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Will my server crash any day?

In operations, the first thing you learn by experience is that you never ask yourself if a server will crash, but when. Your job is then to have a plan, automated or not, for what you will do when the crash happens.

Any freshly installed and configured server looks pretty solid, but according to Wikipedia, the uptime record is 6 years. It might be longer, but the reality should not be far from it: Any server will crash some day.

Want to take care of it?

The Percolate team is growing (and we are hiring), but as an early startup we all must do a lot of things. Great! but this also means that we need to make choices on how we will spend the hours (never enough) in our days. Operating a bunch of MySQL servers is something we needed to do, as we wanted to ask questions of our data 24/7.

And we did it for months! Spending precious hours doing what every other sysadmin did. And at some point, we decided that our value was elsewhere: we ended up using AWS RDS as a replacement for our MySQL servers.

Why AWS RDS?

Before choosing RDS, we took into consideration a lot of factors.

Price
The cost of an RDS instance is the same as an EC2 instance of the same type. And you can scale up and down any server transparently: increasing capacity or lowering cost.

Time
Configuration, backup, monitoring, and all the work the AWS team did is all included, and that’s time that your engineers can spend on something else.

Independence
RDS are packaged SQL servers. Dump your data and go anywhere you want.

Scalability
We are limited to what’s available in RDS: Vertical scalability and asynchronous master slave replication (by adding read replicas). It’s not a lot but it’s click & play. Anyway, we never thought an SQL server would be scalable, it just gives us some time to scale horizontally.

Visibility
All the features coming with RDS servers exist, are used, and we know we can use those whenever we want. With in-house operations, you need to plan the implementation of those tools. More immediate options means more velocity for your company.

In 2012, a startup won’t succeed because their MySQL cluster is the most optimal ever, but because the project it builds is useful to some. We prefer to focus on what makes us useful.

SQL & NoSQL

In the end no one at Percolate wants to go back manually riding those MySQL horses. Of course we can’t optimize those servers as much as the big guys do. But the relational data of our platform is not large enough to be more than what a bunch of MySQL servers can deliver. And when we do get to that point, we’ll stop scaling vertically and jump on the NoSQL bandwagon, using the best of both worlds.

But that’s another story…

Yesterday I did a presentation at AdAge’s digital conference about “Finding Your Brand’s Inner Publisher”. I presented right after Randall Brown, who runs digital strategy for Gatorade (and was great).

AdAge wrapped up five points from the two of us including something I said about balancing promotional and non-promotional content:

Maintain a Balance Between Selling and Non-Selling Messages
Mr. Brier shared his stock vs. flow analogy. “Stock” are the durable observations that brands can make — the high-production-value messages that brands are already good at producing. “Flow,” on the other hand, is more fleeting, the “breadcrumbs” that brands aren’t good at getting a handle on. While stock attracts new customers, flow is what keeps them engaged. The challenge is to find a balance between both of them, said Mr. Brier. “What we do in marketing is sell stuff,” he said. “So when you think about your social content, you have to think about how you’re going to break down the selling and the non-selling.”

Thought maybe it was worth sharing the slide that went along with the balance point. What I was trying to say is that one of the big things you’re trying to do when you create content is to raise the value of your ad space. The more interesting your stream is, the more likely people are to interact with your more promotional messages. Check out the slide below (click to get full size):