Winning Richard Branson’s PitchTV Contest.

Recently, ShareMeme participated in a contest put together by Sir Richard Branson of Virgin called PitchTV. The idea is simple: entrepreneurs get to submit video pitches of their companies, the best ones are selected as finalists and the public votes for their favorite pitch.

We learned about the contest thanks to our friends at Razume who had submitted their video also for the contest. Since we are quite proud of the great video that iStrategyLabs produced for us last year, we submitted it to PitchTV. A few weeks later, thanks to all the votes we received, we are one of the winners!

As a winner, our video will be featured on Virgin’s Atlantic monthly PitchTV Show, so if you book a flight with Virgin, make sure to watch it.

We are very excited about the opportunities that this could open for us and want to thank Sir Richard Branson and Virgin for this great initiative. Most importantly, we want to thank all of those who voted for us. We really appreciate the support!

Ahson Speaking at TechStart 2009

ShareMeme’s CEO, Ahson Wardak, will be speaking at TechStart 2009 at the University of Virginia next Thursday.

If you are in the area, stop by for what should be a great roundtable discussion.

The Bookmarklet is Getting Popular

Here at ShareMeme, we’re quickly realizing that the bookmarklet is the most popular way to use ShareMeme. Just for the sake of it, we want to quickly review how it’s done.

To set it up, logon onto ShareMeme, and in your dashboard below the Quick Mode box and the Recent Activity feed, you’ll see a button next to the word Bookmarklet, as below. Drag that button labeled ‘ShareMeme’ to your browser’s bookmark bar in Firefox or Safari.

The Bookmarklet makes it easier to share links with ShareMeme.

From there, if you ever discover a link that you want to share with your friends, you just click on the bookmarklet while browsing that page. After that, you just select the friends you want to send it to using ShareMeme. It’s that easy. One button to share a link with all of your friends. With ShareMeme, we create a discussion board for you with their comments that looks like this:

An example of a link shared on ShareMeme with the discussion bar.

Book Report – The Little Red Book of Selling

In Jeffrey Gitomer’s The Little Red Book of Selling, there are a few decently helpful themes in the books for web entrepreneurs. For the most part, it’s a motivational self-help book that’s big on obvious answers and an underlying “never say die” approach to selling. At most times of day, this is exactly what most salespeople need to hear.

In the end, it’s a great book for web entrepreneurs for two reasons:

1. Sales is all about engaging the prospect. Similarly, in most websites, you have to engage the user to immediately engage and use your site. Most sites have some sort of registration or participation process, and you have to be creative in engaging them. There are different styles to doing so, but you have to have a strategy from that start and/or splash page to engage the user as a returning customer of your site. The point is that you cannot hope that some bit of “technological sweetness” will push users towards your site alone.
2. Learn to be creative. Read about it. There are several lists on Amazon that can point you in the right direction. My first book on creativity and product development was IDEO’s The Art of Innovation. If you can understand how the human creates novel ideas, then you’ll be more prone to create it. In sales, it’s being creative in asking insightful questions to create opportunities.

In any case, the Little Red Book of Selling is a great first book to read to get some exposure on how to sell yourself, your site, and your services.

What’s this blog about?

Product Update: Notifications

You can now edit notifications on your account. You can choose to be notified via email, AIM, Google Chat, Twitter, and SMS.  When your friends reply to your link, poll, or invite, you can get the messages in the way that you’d like to.  Up until now, you have had to rely on their Recent Activity feed, and you can still pull that to your favorite RSS reader by clicking on the icon the right of the Recent Activity feed.

Notifications Tab on ShareMeme

We hope that you find this new feature helpful in getting up-to-the-second information on who’s clicked your link, RSVP’ed to your invite, or answered your poll.

Book Report – Book Yourself Solid

Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port is a book about becoming a independent contractor. The book lays out strategies for developing business and consulting gigs. From the beginning, the book is more about marketing and selling ones services. It’s a book that you might need to do one or 2 consulting gigs to boostrap your business. not the ideal solution ever but you never know so it’s good to have some knowledge on the field.

The high points of this book include:

Imagine your ideal user/client You have to imagine and characterize your ideal client, much the same way that we have to imagine ShareMeme’s ideal user. When you stray away from seeking out your ideal client, you have a tendency to stress yourself out and not get the most of your independent contracting or service for your client.

Don’t sell everything on the first try. The typical sales cycle should move gradually up from free, less priced services to higher priced services. At some point, the website should give away something for free even without registering. Lower the barrier to entry even more to your website.

Network. The book recommends that when you get someone’s information, that you use it to keep in touch. Even if you never talk to that person again, it’s helpful to have their information. Later on, they can be added to a newsletter or something.

Practice pitching. The basic framework proposed by Port is: 1) explain the target market, 2) explain their primary problem, 3) explain what you do, 4) explain a dramatic result from a previous client, and 5) explain the benefits. This pitch can be pared down to shorter versions for different discussions.

What’s this blog about?

ShareMeme – Redesign Coming Soon

Here at ShareMeme, we learned a lot from the first couple months of our beta launch. We’re working hard right now on redesigning our site, so you can start sending messages to your friends quickly and easily. Our main goal is for you to understand using the site, as soon as you login to ShareMeme. We have had great press and support from the local DC tech community, family, and friends. In roughly a month, you’ll see a cleaner, leaner ShareMeme, and we’ll continue to strive to have ShareMeme the center of your social messaging universe.

We made a couple of mistakes, but we’re working to learn quickly.