A few lessons from this program

Have you noticed how much press Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo, keeps getting?

I have (including here, here, and here), so I asked him to show us how he does it. Here’s an edited excerpt of what he taught in his Mixergy program. (Download the full program to get the complete lesson.)

If you show them something and you deny the market, you’re going to get caught. Journalists are smart. So when we launched Mahalo Answers, the first thing I did is say: “Here are the top 5 Answer sites out there. Here’s Yahoo! Answers. Here’s wiki.answers.com. And here’s Naver.com that you might not know about. They’re in Korea.  Here’s the competitive landscape. Here’s everything I learned about knowledge exchanges.

“Here’s what we’re doing that’s different. We realize that knowledge exchanges exist. We realize they’ve been a tremendous success in terms of traffic. We realize that they haven’t been a tremendous success in terms of quality. So we want to make something that’s a lot higher quality.

“Here’s how we’re doing that. We have a virtual currency. Nobody’s ever done that. We have multi-media-style answers. Where you could put in images and videos and audio files. And we have a curation team that deletes bad answers or obnoxious answers, 24-hours a day, 365 days a year. We pay them $10 per hour. They work from home. And so the best way to make the quality of a site go up is to get rid of the misspellings and the bad stuff.”

And what I just told you in 30 seconds is exactly what I told people over a 20-minute session–with examples. Showing not telling. I don’t have the ability to show you right now. I would if we were sitting in front of a computer. That same process hold true with a journalist.

And have something of significance. If you don’t have something of significance, you don’t want to waste their time.

Do you know how to excite people when you tell them about your business?

Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo, is a partner in the TechCrunch50 conference, where he helped rehearse most of the 50 startups who presented. In this video (which he did exclusively for Mixergy) he talks about how to present a new product. Here’s the paraphrased text of what he said:

The key to presenting is showing, not telling.

When people get up on that stage, at any point, when they start talking about what their product does, I stop them.

I say, “Stop. You’re talking about the fact that the product has great search features? Show the search. Do a search for ‘Tesla’ and show that you disambiguate between Tesla the car, and Tesla the scientist, and Tesla the rock band. Show it. Don’t talk about it.”

And if you can’t show it, then your product’s not ready. I think that’s where people get caught up. Even if they have a good product, they start talking about what they’re going to build next. And they forget to talk about what they have now.

I think Steve Jobs is a good road map for this. He doesn’t talk about what’s coming. He talks about what’s here. What you can buy now.

And Howard Stern also had a key point about that. Jay Leno and David Letterman would always want him to be on their show. They knew that it would be their big night for ratings because he was so outrageous. Well, he only went on when he was selling a book, a pay-per-view, a set of CD’s, or moving to Sirius radio.

You saw him on David Letterman before Christmas two years ago. He came with a Sirius Satellite radio,  handed it to David Letterman, and said, “It’s a great gift. I want to suggest everybody buy this over the holidays.”

Howard Stern is one of the most famous people in media. And he’s out there saying, “hey, buy this product. I’m proud of it. I’m proud of what I’m doing.”

You have to be willing to sell. And most people are not. And that’s fine. If you’re not willing to sell your product, then it gives more market share to those who are willing to.

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How are you building your brand online?

Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo, has built over a dozen brands. In this recent video that he did exclusively for Mixergy, he talked about how build a brand. Here’s the paraphrased text of what he said:

When I ran Silicon Alley Reporter magazine, I had an expression, “You have to live the brand.” I had tshirts made up that said, “Silicon Alley Reporter” and I wore one every day.

And it had a beautiful logo. I’m a believer in beautiful logos and really great brand names.

The brands I launched–Engadget, Autoblog, Joystiq, Silicon Alley Reporter, Digital Coast Reporter, Mahalo, TechCrunch50–all have memorable names.

And if you look at the logos, I spent extra time on the logos. I’m a little bit obsessive about a beautiful domain name, a beautiful logo, a domain name that you can spell over the phone, that is under a certain number of characters.

I think you need to have a really solid brand identity. And you have to suffer over creating it.

Even Autoblog, we debated that name because it was so simple. But we made it a good looking logo and it became a brand over time.

The mug I’m sipping from has the Mahalo logo. When you come to our office and have a cup of coffee, you’re going to be drinking from our logo.

Be the brand–in all ways.I would go to events wearing the Silicon Alley tshirt. I would have a backpack filled with 100 copies of the magazine. And would be walking around with a handful of them. I think some people thought I was a little crass, but I would rather be known as being a little over-aggressive or crass than have people not know Silicon Alley Reporter.

I handed a copy of my magazine to John F. Kennedy Jr. at a Knicks game and wound up having a conversation with him about it. I sent one to Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine, and to Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair magazine, and wound up talking to both of those guys about the magazine business.

You have to be aggressive in getting your message out there to people and building a great brand.

If you don’t live it, why should anybody else?

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How do you use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to promote your business without being one of those annoying hucksters whose every word feels like spam?

Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo, has the right mix. When he promotes his business to the tens of thousands of people who follow him on various networks, they actually want to hear what he has to say. Here’s how he does it.

“Social Media Optimization,” I guess they call it, has become a very big term. I think rightfully so.

It’s kind of icky to think about social optimization–optimizing your friends and relationships–but it does go back to building the brand and being the brand. There is no separation between you and your business.

And there’s becoming less of a separation between your business life and your social life. So people know me as much for Torus and Fondue (my dogs), the Tesla (the car I drive) and the company I run. And I’m okay with that.

I put out little nuggets of my life. I’m playing poker with this famous person. I’m at Paris Hilton’s house. I’m driving a Tesla. I’m walking Taurus and Fondue. I’m at Sundance. Little nuggets of what I’m up to. I’m making cassoulet.

I’ve had more people talk to me about the cassoulet we made over the holidays than Mahalo. But it’s an authentic conversation. People like cassoulet. People like duck confit. And it’s fun to make.

If you use your social presence strictly to promote yourself, people get bored very quickly. I probably am 50/50 between my personal life and my professional life on my social media presence.

And I think that’s the new guerrilla marketing.

This is one in a 4-part series of videos with Jason Calacanis. Come back to Mixergy.com next week for the next video.

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