Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What emerged as the positioning of Brand Networks? I understand you’re helping with word-of-mouth brand networks. What was the service that they were buying?

Jamie Tedford: In the early days, they were buying more of traditional marketing services agency roles. Eventually as I brought on my partner and CTO Mike Garsin, we determined that we weren’t looking to create an agency. If I was going to do that, I had all the resources. I needed a partner to find a way to scale this offering through technology. We all know that technology scales a lot faster than people.

We made a commitment that whenever we started to see common requests from customers, we would start the process, engage a lawyer, and make sure we had an IP that we could then resell. That was the foundation for us that set us in motion for us to be a technology company with marketing services rather than a marketing services company who can deliver technology. We began establishing that in the first year. What we did originally was somewhat parallel but certainly evolved over time. Our evolution was really to follow the needs and evolution of social networking in and of itself.

Our first real chance at business and where we made a reputation was in building applications on a Facebook platform. If you remember back when Facebook launched, they made a strategic decision to launch an open developer ecosystem. In other words, if you can build an application, you could basically put it into the Facebook ecosystem for no charges. We were able to grow businesses around the Facebook platform. This was very different from how Myspace was behaving. They were actually shutting down outside developers. It’s a tale of two open and closed environments. The open environment flourished not just for us but also for a broad number of companies.

We were one of the first 35 companies at that time that was named as Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Consultant. That was their first attempt at saying, “These are companies who are doing good for brands on our platform. If your brand is looking for this kind of a service, we recommend you consider these guys.” You probably know and have probably interviewed the likes of Buddy Media and Wildfire.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I know Victoria really well.

Jamie Tedford: At that time, we were doing the same thing because it was the only game in town – build apps on the platform and try to get users for it. This is before pages were launched. There were no publishing opportunities. This was before there was an open ads API or even frankly, before Facebook was focused on advertising revenue. We were their strategic partner because we helped brands get on the platform and get committed to the platform.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford
1 2 3 4 5 6