Congrats to the Razoo team for their coverage on the front-page of the Washington Post business section yesterday. 

Social Networking for the Socially Minded
District Firm Razoo Joins Other Web Site Builders Trying to Reinvent How People Give Money to Charity

The WashBiz blog also picked it up in the post Social Networking For Social Causes.

Viget has been working with Razoo, which launched a public beta this past summer, for more than a year.  It’s always a thrill to see clients earn major coverage like this.  I expect this is just the beginning of this kind of press for Razoo.

Derek Scruggs, founder and CEO of The Enthusiast Group, gives a candid interview to David at Colorado Startups.  His company just decided to shut down after working for a couple of years to create a series of niche social networks targeting outdoor enthusiasts with sites like Your Cycling and Your Running. 

With web businesses hot again and huge acquisitions grabbing headlines, it’s good to get a dose of reality.  Most startups (web or otherwise) fail.  Not surprisingly, when they do, most of the founders don’t feel like talking about it publicly.  Derek’s willingness to share his experience is valuable for any would-be entrepreneur, but it’s particularly relevant for anyone considering launching a web-based business.

Seth, intro’d as “the #1 marketing guru in the United States” (which he politely disputes,) posted this 6 minute video on his blog today.

It’s a quick summary of a lot of the themes he talks about on his blog and in his books including the recent history of marketing — a great way to get to know Seth and how he thinks. Some points:

• Old marketing (i.e., “yelling at people”) doesn’t work on TV, and, contrary to the hopes of marketers when the Internet arrived as a marketing platform 10 years ago, works even less online. Traditional Web advertising fails because ads are too easy to ignore.
• Getting permission to connect with potential customers is the key to successful marketing today and in the future.
• Web 2.0 is a lot about how customers can “market” (positively or negatively) on behalf of companies over the web — most of the results for product searches are for web pages not built by the product company.
• The key here is that the product / service needs to be truly remarkable so that people will be inspired to talk about it.
• Marketing for the next couple years will be all about empowering your biggest fans / customers to talk about your business.
• Web 4.0 will be when “the Net just gets smart” and — with permission — knows what you’re doing at all times and can therefore manage your life better.  His example: your flight is delayed and it not alerts you, but reschedules all of your meetings on your behalf. 
• Social networks grow fast and often die fast because “the party gets so popular that no one wants to go to it anymore.”  The key to success is balancing scarcity such that the right people are in the network, but enough activity so that these “right” people can find each other.
• He notes that blogging — not pounding the networks in Facebook and LinkedIn — is the best way to build credibility and foster this kind of discussion.
• Seth ends with words like “authentic,” “transparency,” and “reputation” — without these, none of this stuff works.

Brad’s latest tweet is right.

outlook is my social network. i’m so perplexed that microsoft hasn’t taken advantage of that yet. linkedin / outlook integration is an A.

So why not?  This isn’t a simple “upload my Outlook contacts now and then” idea.  It’s a much tighter integration.  I’m not too keen on Microsoft knowing everything about every communication I have with everyone, but the upside of a tool that tracks (without me doing anything extra) my contacts, correspondence, discussion topics, meetings (through calendar), and more, and then leverages that data to intelligently compare it with similar data from my first, second, third (and so on) degree relationships could be significant.

One hurdle is privacy. Right or wrong, people assume their email is relatively private and secure, where correspondence through LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., is considered more public.  If Microsoft drops a social network onto Outlook, do they hurt that perception of privacy — even if there are clear ways to opt-out — to the long-term detriment of that product? Is it worth the risk?

I think the perception problem is manageable if the technology solution is sound, and the potential value of the right product to end users would be a significant incentive to give it a shot.  I would.