Everyone is a celebrity these days; Nombray can be your online brand manager
In this segment, Bambi Francisco interviews Venrock's Venture
Capitalist Brian Ascher about how to control your online image and brand. On the Web,
consumers, particularly the younger generation, are certainly learning
how to take control of their lives. At the same time, they're becoming too transparent, through their presence on the social networks.
Is there a way to control their brand as people become overly transparent?
She interviewed Venrock venture capitalist, Brian Ascher, to get his view.
BF: Thanks for joining us. Talk to us a little bit about how can we
control our brand if there is a way to do that.
BA:
Right. I think that more and more consumers are realizing that in
today's online world, or online life when you go on an interview, you
go have a business meeting with someone for the first time, or you go
on a date, you're going to get Googled and people are going to form a
first impression of you before you even walk in the door based on what
they find online.
BF: Or Twittered... these days
BA: Or Twittered.
Absolutely. More and more consumers are realizing that they to need to
impact on what shows up on Google or what they see.
Nombray is a seed
investment we've made that enables you to own your name in the Web.
Literally own your name in terms of acquiring a URL that represents
you. So
BrianAscher.com. And, for you to then very conveniently do
something with that. So we all have profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and
elsewhere and so you can have those appear as tabs since you've already
spent a lot of time investing in the profiles and then add other
content to it about you whether you blog or microblog or other
interesting things you've been reading, etc. or interesting
presentations you've given. So, by doing this under your own URL, this
naturally rises to the top of Google rankings and it can't suppress
things on the Web that are out there that you don't want people to see
but showing up tops in the rankings, it puts a good first impression.
BF: So you're making a bet that people really want to take control and have a crafted version of who they are.
BA:
We're making a bet that more and more people are realizing that they
are a brand whether or not you're a CEO raising money, you're an
individual employee or you're out of work especially, you need to stand
for something. You need to show prospects that you have worth, you
differentiated, you're smart and valuable and they want to do
business with you or hire you. So this is the theme that is both
evidence of Nombray and also another company called
Slideshare, which
is
YouTube for PowerPoint, which at first you think, "Come on why do we
really need a destination site for PowerPoint?" PPT is just a
medium for rich self expression and it's amazing the growth rate
they've experienced because its a way for people to show what they
know. And its a lot easier than blogging in a way because a PPT
can have a very long shelf life for years people can refer back to a
great PPT whereas blogging you need to do on a daily or weekly
basis.
BF: How does
Slideshare compare to Docstoc, what is the competitive advantage. And then what is the business model?
BA:
So
Slideshare has really focused on the ability to come and search for
great content in PowerPont. Docstoc from what we know of them has been
more about many different document types you might want to share an
excel spreadsheet that you built with a great model in it or a template
of a legal document. All of those serve very different purposes than
Slideshare which has really been about self expression and personal
branding. The business model is going to be lead gen most likely
because there are lots of folks putting PowerPoints up because they
want to be found. They're advertising people who want clients, a real estate person who wants prospects
BF: What kind of metrics are you looking for in that company to show that they're having success?
BA: Really two. number of PowerPoints uploaded and then traffic.
Avtually you asked me earlier about the Sequoya powerpon
tthat went streaming around. We loved it. It was mostky distributed on
Slideshare.
BF: What is the model for
Nombray?
BA: Nombray's model is very simple. Consumers know that in order to have
a personal domain and URL, you pay for it. So for Nombray you just pay
per year to have the domani and then the service enables you to do
something interesting there.
BF: So are they working with Go Daddy or some of these other services?
BA: They have a wholesale agreement with one of the registrars.
BF: So you go to Nombray, register your name through them. They offer all these other services. And, consumers pay.
BA: Absolutely.
BF: Well good luck with those two.
BA: Thank you.
Steven Loeb
