The Social CEO Series is supported by MessageMaker Social, the social media management system (SMMS) that lets you publish and manage targeted content across a large number of social interaction points while generating actionable intelligence. Visit messagemaker.com/social and follow us @MsgMkrSocial on Twitter.
Three years and 11 million users later, Evernote is the archetype of a flourishing modern day startup — it’s nimble, its product is accessible anywhere and it’s tapping into the power of social media to improve its product and encourage word-of-mouth testimonials.
At the helm of the emerging note-taking empire is the personal-memory-assistant-obsessed Phil Libin. As a blogger, active Tweeter and Google+ neophyte, Libin is the quintessential social CEO, and he bet the success of his company on mobile and social media — before it was cool to do so.
“Most of our roadmap comes from [social media] discussion,” says Libin, on the company’s approach to listening to social channels to gather product ideas from customers and evolve its mobile, desktop, web and browser-based arsenal of products. “It’s almost like cheating.”
The startup, currently in the midst of a social product transformation and nicely cushioned with $50 million more in the bank, has colossal ambitions; Libin aims for Evernote to become a 100-year company.
Will social media play a role in Evernote’s long-term success and evolution? Keep reading to find out.
Q&A With Phil Libin, CEO, Evernote
Does Evernote have a social media strategy? If so, how was the strategy developed and how has it changed over time?
I think “strategy” is too generous a word for it. Let’s say we had a social media hunch. Our hunch was that social media has already connected everybody to everybody else and lets people spend a huge amount of time talking to their friends. What do people talk about? They talk about stuff they love. So we figured that we didn’t need to be “social” to get everyone to talk about us, we just needed to be great.
So our first social media strategy was to find out what our users loved and talked about — and make more of that, so that our users would love it even more and talk about it even more, etc. Genius insight, I know.
Then we started measuring stuff and found that users who had been referred to Evernote by a friend were much more valuable to us than users who had stumbled across us by themselves. So this got us thinking and eventually turned our whole approach to marketing upside-down.
You know how every company has some department in charge of getting people who have never used their product to become first time users? Usually that’s the job of the marketing department. Not at Evernote. The job of getting someone who’s never heard of Evernote to use it for the first time is the job of our existing users. The job of our marketing department is to help our existing users do that job.
“The job of getting someone who’s never heard of Evernote to use it for the first time is the job of our existing users. The job of our marketing department is to help our existing users do that job.”
That’s the role of social media for us: (1) find out what people love so we can make a better product, (2) educate our users so they get fully engaged with the product and feel comfortable referring us to their friends, and (3) spread the best stories, tips and experiences so that one enthusiastic Evernote user can inspire a thousand new people.
Also, I try not to swear in the podcast. Is that strategy or tactics?
Mobile seems to have been a priority for the company since day one — long before the iOS and Android platforms took off. How were you able to recognize and predict the significance of mobile applications?
We didn’t predict it, we bet on it. And then we hoped really really hard that we bet right.
From the start, we made a big promise to our users — we would help them remember everything. In order to live up to that, Evernote would need to be easily accessible from every computer, phone or other device that a person used, for the rest of their lives. So, it wasn’t that we predicted the rise of mobile, as much as we felt that mobile would be critical to our success.
It’s important to keep in mind that although mobile platforms and browsers were less powerful, the underlying technology was already in place, and we took advantage of available capabilities. The thing that we could not have predicted at all was the rise of app stores and the effect they’d have on our growth and on the whole ecosystem.
Evernote is transitioning from a mostly personal note-taking service to a social note-taking platform. Why do you feel the need to add social features — and in doing so, change part of the purpose of the product — to an already successful service?
Fundamentally, Evernote is for individuals to save and find their private memories. If I look at my own account, I see a huge array of memories from presentations that I’ve given, to meals that I ate in Japan, to the latest gadget that I clipped from Uncrate. Most of this stuff is only relevant to me, but there are some memories that I want to share with my friends or my coworkers or my family. If Evernote is to be a full extension of memory, then we must embrace a very important part of memory: sharing.
Now that Evernote users can more easily share notebooks and notes on Facebook and Twitter, are they using these features? What specific types of behaviors are you noticing?
Yes, the adoption of these new features has been great. Sharing was a very popular feature request. There was a clear desire within our user community to selectively share the notes they love. It’s much more than Facebook and Twitter, we’re seeing a lot of users sharing entire notebooks with their colleagues and classmates. Our sharing functionality is not fully deployed yet, but we’ve got some major new additions coming out soon.
What are your thoughts on Google+? Are you thinking about ways to integrate Google’s social network into the Evernote experience (or vice versa)?
I love it. G+ is the first new Google product in a while that I was seriously impressed with from the first time I saw it. It’s obviously going to be a part of our social sharing strategy, but we’re giving it a bit more time to develop before we jump in with engineering resources. I’m very optimistic about the future of Google+.
Are there any standout moments that you can recall when the Evernote community rallied behind the startup using social media?
One such moment actually happened fairly recently with the launch of Evernote Peek. We had the idea for a learning app that could be controlled by the iPad 2 smart cover. We were excited about the app, but we weren’t sure how the community would react to this new addition to the Evernote family. The response was tremendously positive. It was without a doubt the most social media attention we’ve ever had for a release, and it even became a trending topic on Twitter. It was really interesting to watch as word spread about the app.
What are some Evernote use cases that you’ve discovered through your community members?
We’re constantly learning from our community — that’s the key area of focus for our marketing team. Almost every week, we have a user story or case study on our blog that highlights a new and unexpected way that someone is using Evernote.
One of our users suffers from a traumatic brain injury and literally uses Evernote to help with his memory. We have small business owners that use Evernote and its sharing capabilities to run virtually every aspect of their business. One of my personal favorites was a user who told us that he used Evernote to remember his sins for confession. It’s astounding to see all the variety.
You’ve stated that you want Evernote to become a “100-year company.” Do you think social media will play a role in the company’s longevity? Why or why not?
Yes. Although I think it’ll just be called “media” well before the century is up.
The growth of social media is one of the most exciting developments of the past few years. It lets us spend 90% of our resources building a great product by giving us huge leverage on the effectiveness of that other 10%. Social media has created a positive feedback loop: You make a great product, people talk about it, which helps you make a better better product, which makes more people talk about, etc. Systems with built-in positive feedback loops are much more sustainable and much more likely to last for a 100 years.
When you talk about Evernote’s future, you speak of the service as becoming a “trusted second brain for all your lifetime memories.” How do you plan to make that vision come to fruition?
That’s a critically important question. Over the past several years, we’ve focused our development on creating the means for capturing and finding important information and ideas that occur in the course of our daily lives. That’s a part of memory, but not all of it.
You’re going to be seeing lots of new products and extensions to Evernote — some made by us, some by our partners — that will add layers and functionality on top of the platform that we’ve already created. In addition, Evernote itself will continue to improve and evolve. We want an elementary school student that’s using Evernote today to be able to quickly search through millions of notes twenty years from now to find her first book report. That’s a big challenge that we’re excited to tackle.
“We want an elementary school student that’s using Evernote today to be able to quickly search through millions of notes twenty years from now to find her first book report. That’s a big challenge that we’re excited to tackle.”
Another part of the plan is to optimize all of our financial structures, data policies, company culture, etc. for long term trust. We’re spending a lot of time on that.
As a blogger, Twitter user and seemingly well-rounded social media CEO, what advice do you have for other founders and CEOs looking to use social media sites effectively?
I know that calling me “well-rounded” was a fat joke, but I’m going to overlook it.
I guess my main observation is that social media users can smell inauthenticity in much less than 140 characters. Enjoy yourself, have fun with the conversation, be yourself. You can’t fake it.
Series Supported by MessageMaker Social
The Social CEO Series is supported by MessageMaker Social, the social media management system (SMMS) that lets you publish and manage targeted content across a large number of social interaction points while generating actionable intelligence. This smart, simple SaaS solution elevates your company’s social presence among thousands of social Pages and accounts, helping you meet compliance regulations, maintain brand consistency, maximize engagement and generate actionable intelligence — without adding additional human resource costs. Visit messagemaker.com/social and follow us @MsgMkrSocial on Twitter.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Johan Larsson
More About: evernote, Social CEO Series, social media, startupFor more Business & Marketing coverage:Follow Mashable Business & Marketing on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business & Marketing channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
Posted on Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:00:35 +0000 at http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/c7dWFDgI49k/
Comments: http://mashable.com/2011/08/11/evernote-phil-libin-interview/#comments
Three years and 11 million users later, Evernote is the archetype of a flourishing modern day startup — it’s nimble, its product is accessible anywhere and it’s tapping into the power of social media to improve its product and encourage word-of-mouth testimonials.
At the helm of the emerging note-taking empire is the personal-memory-assistant-obsessed Phil Libin. As a blogger, active Tweeter and Google+ neophyte, Libin is the quintessential social CEO, and he bet the success of his company on mobile and social media — before it was cool to do so.
“Most of our roadmap comes from [social media] discussion,” says Libin, on the company’s approach to listening to social channels to gather product ideas from customers and evolve its mobile, desktop, web and browser-based arsenal of products. “It’s almost like cheating.”
The startup, currently in the midst of a social product transformation and nicely cushioned with $50 million more in the bank, has colossal ambitions; Libin aims for Evernote to become a 100-year company.
Will social media play a role in Evernote’s long-term success and evolution? Keep reading to find out.
Q&A With Phil Libin, CEO, Evernote
Does Evernote have a social media strategy? If so, how was the strategy developed and how has it changed over time?
I think “strategy” is too generous a word for it. Let’s say we had a social media hunch. Our hunch was that social media has already connected everybody to everybody else and lets people spend a huge amount of time talking to their friends. What do people talk about? They talk about stuff they love. So we figured that we didn’t need to be “social” to get everyone to talk about us, we just needed to be great.
So our first social media strategy was to find out what our users loved and talked about — and make more of that, so that our users would love it even more and talk about it even more, etc. Genius insight, I know.
Then we started measuring stuff and found that users who had been referred to Evernote by a friend were much more valuable to us than users who had stumbled across us by themselves. So this got us thinking and eventually turned our whole approach to marketing upside-down.
You know how every company has some department in charge of getting people who have never used their product to become first time users? Usually that’s the job of the marketing department. Not at Evernote. The job of getting someone who’s never heard of Evernote to use it for the first time is the job of our existing users. The job of our marketing department is to help our existing users do that job.
“The job of getting someone who’s never heard of Evernote to use it for the first time is the job of our existing users. The job of our marketing department is to help our existing users do that job.”
That’s the role of social media for us: (1) find out what people love so we can make a better product, (2) educate our users so they get fully engaged with the product and feel comfortable referring us to their friends, and (3) spread the best stories, tips and experiences so that one enthusiastic Evernote user can inspire a thousand new people.
Also, I try not to swear in the podcast. Is that strategy or tactics?
Mobile seems to have been a priority for the company since day one — long before the iOS and Android platforms took off. How were you able to recognize and predict the significance of mobile applications?
We didn’t predict it, we bet on it. And then we hoped really really hard that we bet right.
From the start, we made a big promise to our users — we would help them remember everything. In order to live up to that, Evernote would need to be easily accessible from every computer, phone or other device that a person used, for the rest of their lives. So, it wasn’t that we predicted the rise of mobile, as much as we felt that mobile would be critical to our success.
It’s important to keep in mind that although mobile platforms and browsers were less powerful, the underlying technology was already in place, and we took advantage of available capabilities. The thing that we could not have predicted at all was the rise of app stores and the effect they’d have on our growth and on the whole ecosystem.
Evernote is transitioning from a mostly personal note-taking service to a social note-taking platform. Why do you feel the need to add social features — and in doing so, change part of the purpose of the product — to an already successful service?
Fundamentally, Evernote is for individuals to save and find their private memories. If I look at my own account, I see a huge array of memories from presentations that I’ve given, to meals that I ate in Japan, to the latest gadget that I clipped from Uncrate. Most of this stuff is only relevant to me, but there are some memories that I want to share with my friends or my coworkers or my family. If Evernote is to be a full extension of memory, then we must embrace a very important part of memory: sharing.
Now that Evernote users can more easily share notebooks and notes on Facebook and Twitter, are they using these features? What specific types of behaviors are you noticing?
Yes, the adoption of these new features has been great. Sharing was a very popular feature request. There was a clear desire within our user community to selectively share the notes they love. It’s much more than Facebook and Twitter, we’re seeing a lot of users sharing entire notebooks with their colleagues and classmates. Our sharing functionality is not fully deployed yet, but we’ve got some major new additions coming out soon.
What are your thoughts on Google+? Are you thinking about ways to integrate Google’s social network into the Evernote experience (or vice versa)?
I love it. G+ is the first new Google product in a while that I was seriously impressed with from the first time I saw it. It’s obviously going to be a part of our social sharing strategy, but we’re giving it a bit more time to develop before we jump in with engineering resources. I’m very optimistic about the future of Google+.
Are there any standout moments that you can recall when the Evernote community rallied behind the startup using social media?
One such moment actually happened fairly recently with the launch of Evernote Peek. We had the idea for a learning app that could be controlled by the iPad 2 smart cover. We were excited about the app, but we weren’t sure how the community would react to this new addition to the Evernote family. The response was tremendously positive. It was without a doubt the most social media attention we’ve ever had for a release, and it even became a trending topic on Twitter. It was really interesting to watch as word spread about the app.
What are some Evernote use cases that you’ve discovered through your community members?
We’re constantly learning from our community — that’s the key area of focus for our marketing team. Almost every week, we have a user story or case study on our blog that highlights a new and unexpected way that someone is using Evernote.
One of our users suffers from a traumatic brain injury and literally uses Evernote to help with his memory. We have small business owners that use Evernote and its sharing capabilities to run virtually every aspect of their business. One of my personal favorites was a user who told us that he used Evernote to remember his sins for confession. It’s astounding to see all the variety.
You’ve stated that you want Evernote to become a “100-year company.” Do you think social media will play a role in the company’s longevity? Why or why not?
Yes. Although I think it’ll just be called “media” well before the century is up.
The growth of social media is one of the most exciting developments of the past few years. It lets us spend 90% of our resources building a great product by giving us huge leverage on the effectiveness of that other 10%. Social media has created a positive feedback loop: You make a great product, people talk about it, which helps you make a better better product, which makes more people talk about, etc. Systems with built-in positive feedback loops are much more sustainable and much more likely to last for a 100 years.
When you talk about Evernote’s future, you speak of the service as becoming a “trusted second brain for all your lifetime memories.” How do you plan to make that vision come to fruition?
That’s a critically important question. Over the past several years, we’ve focused our development on creating the means for capturing and finding important information and ideas that occur in the course of our daily lives. That’s a part of memory, but not all of it.
You’re going to be seeing lots of new products and extensions to Evernote — some made by us, some by our partners — that will add layers and functionality on top of the platform that we’ve already created. In addition, Evernote itself will continue to improve and evolve. We want an elementary school student that’s using Evernote today to be able to quickly search through millions of notes twenty years from now to find her first book report. That’s a big challenge that we’re excited to tackle.
“We want an elementary school student that’s using Evernote today to be able to quickly search through millions of notes twenty years from now to find her first book report. That’s a big challenge that we’re excited to tackle.”
Another part of the plan is to optimize all of our financial structures, data policies, company culture, etc. for long term trust. We’re spending a lot of time on that.
As a blogger, Twitter user and seemingly well-rounded social media CEO, what advice do you have for other founders and CEOs looking to use social media sites effectively?
I know that calling me “well-rounded” was a fat joke, but I’m going to overlook it.
I guess my main observation is that social media users can smell inauthenticity in much less than 140 characters. Enjoy yourself, have fun with the conversation, be yourself. You can’t fake it.
Series Supported by MessageMaker Social
The Social CEO Series is supported by MessageMaker Social, the social media management system (SMMS) that lets you publish and manage targeted content across a large number of social interaction points while generating actionable intelligence. This smart, simple SaaS solution elevates your company’s social presence among thousands of social Pages and accounts, helping you meet compliance regulations, maintain brand consistency, maximize engagement and generate actionable intelligence — without adding additional human resource costs. Visit messagemaker.com/social and follow us @MsgMkrSocial on Twitter.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Johan Larsson
More About: evernote, Social CEO Series, social media, startupFor more Business & Marketing coverage:Follow Mashable Business & Marketing on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business & Marketing channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
Posted on Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:00:35 +0000 at http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/c7dWFDgI49k/
Comments: http://mashable.com/2011/08/11/evernote-phil-libin-interview/#comments
