Alex Halliday

This is the presentation I gave in Silicon Valley Venture Summit about SocialGO. What you can’t see is the presentation on the other screen so it doesn’t make that much sense without it but you get the drift.

I have had an interesting week staying in San Francisco and then moving over to Half Moon Bay for the AlwaysOn Venture Summit Silicon Valley. We have met with startups, VC’s and banks and presented the product to raise awareness about SocialGO amongst the tech community here. 

The first thing that really struck me is the mood here. Watching ABC news there was story after story regarding the closing of stores, bailouts etc. The California state has a $26bn deficit (along with 28 others)  and is ina  financial crisis with things like school meals and countless infrastructure projects on the chopping block. Grim.

Place this within the context of startup funding, most Silicon Valley VC funds have cut their deals per partner from 2.5 deals PA to under 1. Startup triage is taking place. 1/3 will continue to be funded, 1/3 will be partnered (merged with another or similar), and 1/3 will die. 

Listening to the various presentations, there was a measuredness about their expectations. A deep realism has been setting in and revenue models and patterns where presented. This year will be a tough one for many companies, many will die, merge or change and a few will soar to new heights.

Really busy at the moment with SocialGO. So many things in development…stay tuned to the SocialGO blog for announcements.

I will be back soo!

All I can say is wow.

Ok….well maybe a little more then…..We opened up our main site last week and got some great writeups on Rotorblog.com and Mashable and since then have had some great feedback from initial trials of the system.

The energy in the office is great and we are cracking through feedback and bugs amazingly fast. We plan to open up the service next week which is exciting and are just getting everything ready for the real fun to start.

We are in an interesting space and there are some great competitors out there but I beleive that this is not a 1 horse race. The very nature of social website builders is that they cater to so many situations, most of which have yet to be put into practice. We are at the beginning of a revolution in the way that groups, businesses and other organisations represent themselves online and we intend to make SocialGO the simplest most powerful way of creating this next generation of social website.

The best is yet to come…..

By the way, if you aren’t already make sure you follow me on Twitter.
http://www.twitter.com/alexhalliday

Is if you have yet to do so, check out http://www.faceyourmanga.com/  to create your own funky avatar….looks like me right?

I know I join many people out there in venting my frustration at the awful release of the iPhone under o2 this week. We have all been massively excited at the biggest gadget launch of the year so far. So what a let down for it to be such an awful experiance for existing customers.

First of all, the o2 iPhone store experianced massive technical difficulties….Apparently they “did not anticipate such huge demand”…..highly unlikely considering the amount of coverage of the launch, huge spike in traffic to their website leading up to the launch and success of the first iPhone. Have they not heard of cloud computing? It would have been very easy to to use a service like Flexiscale or EC2 to fire up a few hundred extra servers for the day and would have kept all of the current customers quite happy.

Secondly, new customers are able to buy phones at o2 stores and Apple stores in London while existing customers are being turned away. While the economics of this move seems logical (if not a bit unfair), in this day and age of Blogging, twittering, texting Apple fans, the average iPhone consumer is far better informed than 5 years ago. This is obvious, irritating and a cheap shot. By drawing forward this revenue a few months, they do little to better their position in the long term and piss off the early adopters.

Finally, the phone itself. It just isn’t as nice as the original iPhone. Cheap plastic feeling, lower battery life and NO dock included. Give me something for free one time and i expect it the next time….very irritating.
Anyway, i look forward to Nokia’s iPhone competitor and let’s hope they take a leaf out of Steve Job’s book :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0UjU0rtavE

So BETA is underway and we have some great networks coming along.  If you are part of a group that would like their own Social Network powered by us, then do drop me an email. We have some great features in the pipeline and loads of great features already live so do give us a go!Drop me an email at amhalliday @t gmail.com and we can get you rolling  

While preparing for the launch of SocialGO, on issue that has been a source of much debate has been how are we going to handle the customer service side of things. We tried a number of different services including Kayako support ticketing system and a few others but something wasn’t quite right.

Then we started to use Get Satisfaction, a new, fun and extremely open support system that allows companies, employees and customers all get involved in the customer service discussion. I love it because it makes me feel great as a user and as an employee.

First of all, everthing is public. This is interesting because it makes your customer service that much more critical. Perform well, and potential customers will feel encouraged that you provide a good service. Perform badly on the other hand and you will air your dirty laundry for the world to see.

The effect of this super-openness is interesting. From a customer point of view, brand loyalty is built as customers can see their problems in a public place. As fellow customers  watch the issues they feel like they are contributing to the service and a quasi-celebrity status within the brands commuity. From a company point of view, it puts serious pressure on them to perform. No longer, can Norma  the moaning accounts manager from Middlesborough be ignored. Everyone gets an answer and by the way if she really is being unreasonable other customers will tell her. I have noticed everyone in the company react positively to the pressure that our GetSatisfaction presence has started to place on us.

GetSatisfaction turns your support dialog into a public advert for your business, a self-ranking suggestion box for new ideas, a knowledgebase for all and a self-help area for your users to help other users so you can spend your time more productively…

One concern that the CRM-traditionalists have had is that it could expose the bugs in the system. But in all honesty, I think you can have as many bugs (in the early stages) as you like as long as you fix them quickly enough. An evolving exciting service is a million times more exciting than a stale perfect one. I remember using GetSatisfaction.com myself in the early days and it being very buggy but they reacted quickly and continuted evolving the service. That kind of energy around a web service turns me on. Quick evolution, quick response to problems and an eargerness to please…. all qualities that make consumers excited.

Ok, so I am turning into a bit of a fanboy. But it’s not just me! Their traffic is going through the roof and more and more big brands are hiring “community liason” officers to get involved in the conversation. My final thought is about the openness of the service. They a full API allowing you to recreate the entire GetSatisfaction website on your server……and someone has. ‘Sprinkles’ (after their obsession with muffins?) is a PHP based application allows you to do just that.  We are currently working on creating a SocialGO support commuity with full GetSatisfaction integration. It’s a few months off but I’m excited……… 

Image by orwellsvision

For the templating competition, we produced this quick whiz through of the features of socialGO. 

So we are now officially called SocialGo.com!After blood sweat and tears deciding a name we have finally got one. I am rather pleased with what we ended up with.There is a great energy around this at the moment. The whole team really beleives in what we are creating and it so great to see it all coming together!We thought it would be fun to launch a competition to find a logo for our product. On 99designs.com we launched a competition to see what other people thought our logo should be. I started the competition on a thursday morning and by lunchtime i had 50+ entries! An absolutely staggering response. In amongst the Good the Bad and the Comic Sans there where some interesting ideas and some reoccuring themes….but it certainly helped in the creative process. Being stuck developing something for 2 years doesn’t really make you the best person to come up with the brand for it.Enough gushing…..I have got a launch to prepare for. :)Check out the logo entries at http://99designs.com/contests/6024 and email me if you have a group that would like to participate in the BETA.

 I’m in AXM next month talking about what i’m up too!