Bill Solominsky

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at ProductCamp Austin. My presentation, “Leveraging Current Events for Product Design and Marketing” was voted as one of the 35 to present out of the 50 that were offered. The voting took place that morning, and the schedule soon followed. I was up right off the bat at 10am, which allowed me to enjoy the rest of the day’s sessions instead of going over my slides in my head all day.

The session had about 25 attendees, and a good solid mix of presenting and conversation. The basic premise was to discuss lessons learned from my two start up projects, BankOfObama.org and National Event Rental. BankOfObama.org dominated the topics, likely because of its recency and larger reach. We covered Product Design: Timing, Market Research, Development, and Pricing. Next was Product Marketing: Memory, Press/Media, and Grass Roots.

Quick summary:

Timing: make sure your product life cycle is congruent with the expected length of the media coverage of the current event.

Market Research: No time for traditional market research. Instead, use interviews from news, twitter trending topics, etc. to find the thoughts and feelings of customers.

Development: Agile development techniques work well. Quick, open, short development.

Pricing: Aggressive and dynamic. Change price if needed (up or down), and use as many revenue sources as you can. Remember that if you target in general is the United States, and if you have already reached 1,000,000 visitors, there are still over 300,000,000 people that don’t know your product.

Memory: Media and press have already done your branding campaign for you.

Press/Media: Even if you media is calling you, still “sell” your story to ensure coverage.

Grass Roots: Many current events cause groups to spring up. Contact these groups from both the top and bottom to get your message viral.

Other sessions that I attended:

• Roadmaps: The Bridge Between Strategy and Tactics (Byron Workman)
• Anatomy of a Modern Launch – How to Use Internet Marketing Techniques to Launch Your Physical Product (Vicki Flaugher, CEO of SmartWoman Publishing)
• Twitter for Small Business (Chris Sherrod)
• Link Building: Finding Your Most Valuable SEO Link Prospects, Faster and Easier. (Ben Wills, ontolo.com)