Areas of Interest from kbs+p Ventures Summit

Posted by Darren on Jun 6, 2011 • (Comments)

We launched kbs+p Ventures about 6 months ago as an early stage investment arm of our agency, kbs+p.  Last Friday, we hosted a summit where we brought a small group of people with both visionary and tactical backgrounds to help us filter the areas that are of potential investment focus.  While most firms keep this confidential, following Fred’s recent post over at AVC, I’ll open these thoughts up as well.

Why?  I hope that any of you reading this blog might help point me/us in the right direction of entrepreneurs who are innovating in any one of these spaces.  You can easily get in touch with me here or on Twitter or LinkedIn.

In no particular order:

1.  Virtual Currency – what will the impact be of Facebook Credits?

2.  Measurement – how do you measure engagement?  How do you value “social”?

3.  Fan Acquisition – what are the best ways to acquire “fans” and “followers”?

4.  In-Stream – should brands participate in the stream of conversation and if they do, what are the rules to play by?  A company who is participating here is 140Proof

5.  Influence – how do you buy influence?

6.  No two networks or channels are used the same way.  I.e. While Facebook is a social channel, so is Linked In.  Think about the differences in your usage.  Compare this to 20 years ago when ABC and NBC, both television stations, were used similarly.

7.  With millions of web publishers, how do you match creative to each individual publisher?  It’s tough.

8.  We spend a lot of time targeting specific audiences, but an additional filter to overlay is “mindset.”  Are they currently in the “mode” to purchase? How do we differentiate messaging based upon where audiences are in the funnel?

9.  How do we combine SEM + social media monitoring.  If a topic is trending, how do we buy SEM against it?

10.  Predictive Trending – how do we predict what might trend and then purchase advertising around it.  (current company doing this is buzzfeed)

11.  How do we create video at low-cost, and then scale the distribution

12.  There currently isn’t one cohesive “stream” of me.  How can we harness the entire stream?  Where will the meta-stream live?

Leave comments and/or questions.  Would love to elaborate on any or all of these.

Tagged as , , , , , , , , + Categorized as Advertising & Marketing, Internet & Web X.0, Startup & Venture Capital, Technology
  • I really like number 6 and number 9.  Both good insights/ideas.  That recent Pew research said ~30% of traffic to news sites was via Google and I don't doubt it (e.g. trends/news and sem seem very complementary).

    Is no one doing anything with that?

    For 5, i think it depends on context and definition of influence.  Talk to some corporate communications types about that and they probably have ideas for certain very-hard-to-influence types that could be interesting.  In my experience, almost the definition of non-scalable.  The way the question is worded is a little distracting, I don't think "buying influence" is a constructive a way to put it.  A bit like "buying love".  If you could do that, everyone would be doing it.  Maybe I'm wrong

    For some very interesting notes on fan acquisition v. retention as a priority (specifically re: Fbook but generally interesting), check out this guy Justin Kistner's post here: socialfresh.com/facebook-ads-t...

    Great stuff thanks for sharing
  • Ethan, thanks for stopping by. Love these comments. I think we should take
    them offline to a coffee shop in the near future?
  • That would be fun...I should be in NY end of July, will look you up

    Ethan
  • Definitely drop by. Looking forward.
blog comments powered by Disqus