Vidéo du succès signée Henri Kaufman. Morale de cette histoire : "c'est simple !"

It was a surreal moment for Mr. Westergren, who founded Pandora, the Internet radio station. For most of its 10 years, it has been on the verge of death, struggling to find investors and battling record labels over royalties.

Had Pandora died, it would have joined myriad music start-ups in the tech company graveyard, like SpiralFrog and the original Napster. Instead, with a successful iPhone app fueling interest, Pandora is attracting attention from investment bankers who think it could go public, the pinnacle of success for a start-up.

Pandora’s 48 million users tune in an average 11.6 hours a month. That could increase as Pandora strikes deals with the makers of cars, televisions and stereos that could one day, Pandora hopes, make it as ubiquitous as AM/FM radio.

“We were in a pretty deep dark hole for a long time,” said Mr. Westergren, who is now the company's chief strategy officer.. “But now it’s a pretty out-of-body experience.”

At the end of 2009, Pandora reported its first profitable quarter and $50 million in annual revenue — mostly from ads and the rest from subscriptions and payments from iTunes and Amazon.com when people buy music. Revenue will probably be $100 million this year, said Ralph Schackart, a digital media analyst at William Blair.

Pandora’s success can be credited to old-fashioned perseverance, its ability to harness intense loyalty from users and a willingness to shift directions — from business to consumer, from subscription to free, from computer to mobile — when its fortunes flagged.

Its library now has 700,000 songs, each categorized by an employee based on 400 musical attributes, like whether the voice is breathy, like Charlotte Gainsbourg, or gravelly like Tom Waits. Listeners pick a song or musician they like, and Pandora serves up songs with similar qualities — Charlotte Gainsbourg to Feist to Viva Voce to Belle and Sebastian. Unlike other music services like MySpace Music or Spotify, now available in parts of Europe, listeners cannot request specific songs.

Though Pandora’s executives say it is focusing on growth, not a public offering, the company is taking steps to make it possible. Last month, it hired a chief financial officer, Steve Cakebread, who had that job at Salesforce.com when it went public.

It is all a long way from January 2000, when Mr. Westergren founded the company. Trained as a jazz pianist, he spent a decade playing in rock bands before taking a job as a film composer. While analyzing the construction of music to figure out what film directors would like, he came up with an idea to create a music genome.

This being 1999, he turned the idea into a Web start-up and raised $1.5 million from angel investors. It was originally called Savage Beast Technologies and sold music recommendation services to businesses like Best Buy.

By the end of 2001, he had 50 employees and no money. Every two weeks, he held all-hands meetings to beg people to work, unpaid, for another two weeks. That went on for two years.

Meanwhile, he appealed to venture capitalists, charged up 11 credit cards and considered a company trip to Reno to gamble for more money. The dot-com bubble had burst, and shell-shocked investors were not interested in a company that relied on people, who required salaries and health insurance, instead of computers.

In March 2004, he made his 348th pitch seeking backers. Larry Marcus, a venture capitalist at Walden Venture Capital and a musician, decided to lead a $9 million investment.

“The pitch that he gave wasn’t that interesting,” Mr. Marcus said. “But what was incredibly interesting was Tim himself. We could tell he was an entrepreneur who wasn’t going to fail.”

Mr. Westergren took $2 million of it and called another all-hands meeting to pay everyone back. The next order of business: focus the service on consumers instead of businesses, change the name and replace Mr. Westergren as chief executive with Joe Kennedy, who had experience building consumer products at E-Loan and Saturn. Pandora’s listenership climbed, and in December 2005, it sold its first ad.

But in 2007, Pandora got news that threatened most of its revenue. A federal royalty board had raised the fee that online radio stations had to pay to record labels for each song. “Overnight our business was broken,” Mr. Westergren said. “We contemplated pulling the plug.”

Instead, Pandora hired a lobbyist in Washington and recruited its listeners to write to their representatives. “A lot of these users think they’re customers of the cause rather than users per se,” said Willy C. Shih, a professor at Harvard Business School who has written a case study on Pandora. “It’s a different spin on marketing.” The board agreed to negotiations and after two years settled on a lower rate.

Some music lovers dislike Pandora’s approach to choosing music based on its characteristics rather than cultural associations. Slacker Radio, a competitor with three times as many songs but less than a third of Pandora’s listeners, takes a different approach. A ’90s alternative station should be informed by Seattle grunge, said Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president for marketing at Slacker. “It’s not just that this has an 80-beat-a-minute guitar riff,” he said. “It’s that this band toured with Eddie Vedder.”

Yet in 2008, Pandora built an iPhone app that let people stream music. Almost immediately, 35,000 new users a day joined Pandora from their cellphones, doubling the number of daily signups.

For Pandora and its listeners, it was a revelation. Internet radio was not just for the computer. People could listen to their phone on the treadmill or plug it into their car or living room speakers.

In January, Pandora announced a deal with Ford to include Pandora in its voice-activated Sync system, so drivers will be able to say, “Launch my Lady Gaga station” to play their personalized station based on the music of that performer. Consumer electronics companies like Samsung, Vizio and Sonos are also integrating Pandora into their Blu-ray players, TVs and music systems.

“Think about what made AM/FM radio so accessible,” said Mr. Kennedy, Pandora’s chief. “You get into the car or buy a clock for your nightstand and push a button and radio comes out,” he said. “That’s what we’re hoping to match.”

Pandora (spéciliste de l'accès à la musique-lire l'article pour plus de précisions)a plusieurs fois été sur le fil du rasoir, au bord de mettre la clé sous la porte. Mais elle existe toujours, et est même haitement profitable aujourd'hui.
Et ce n'est pas grâce à un esprit d'innovation, mais grâce à une persévérance old school.
Une histoire instructive.

Patient Stories on Health Web Sites Can Not Always Be Trusted

by Gilles Frydman on March 15, 2010

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Guest post from Lisa Gualtieri, PhD, ScM, Adjunct Clinical Professor in the Health Communication Program at Tufts University School of Medicine. Lisa teaches Online Consumer Health and Web Strategies for Health Communication. A social media user herself, Lisa (Twitter, LinkedIn) blogs on health and is Editor-in-Chief of eLearn Magazine, where she blogs on education.

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” was the caption of the famous cartoon by Peter Steiner in the July 5, 1993 issue of The New Yorker. The same is true of patient stories on health Web sites: nobody knows who really wrote them. In the case of Lifestyle Lift, the company agreed to pay a $300,000 settlement last year to New York State because their patient stories were employee-generated.

Patient stories can provide information, support, reassurance, and practical advice, which is why 41% of e-patients read the commentaries and experiences of others online. The three primary types of patient stories are the unedited user-generated stories in online health communities and patient blogs; professionally edited or “as told to” support stories; and promotional stories.

 

User-generated stories in Weight Watchers’ Message Boards provide context to questions and responses and add a sense of reality and dimension to the person posting, making authors, and therefore the content, seem trustworthy. This is not isolated to weight loss sites but is true of cancer support sites like ACOR.org and countless other online health communities and patient blogs. Similarly, in the more carefully crafted and edited support stories, such as Livestrong.org’s Survivorship Stories and Weight Watchers’ Success Stories, the details in each story make the person the story is about seem trustworthy. Any inaccuracies in the user-generated or edited stories may not be intentional and do not necessarily detract from the helpful or supportive nature of the story.

Promotional stories are not always easily distinguishable from other types of stories on health Web sites. While Weight Watchers’ Success Stories focus on strategies, RediscoverYourGo uses stories to promote replacement surgery. The stories are about the debilitating pain and the process of finding a doctor, undergoing surgery, and engaging in an active post-recovery lifestyle. According to the developer, they are from “100% real patients.”

But not all stories are from 100% real patients. Lifestyle Lift’s employees fabricated testimonials; actual patients’ comments are now on their Web site, they claim. The Web site features before and after pictures, and, not surprisingly, the after pictures have better lighting and composition and the people are smiling, wearing flattering make up, have changed their hairstyles and clothing, and even put on jewelry. Well, no law against that.

A hotly debated solution to discerning the credibility and reliability of health Web site content is seals. HONCode and U.R.A.C. are the seals that are best known for health Web sites, but many sites don’t have them, most people don’t know to look for them, and they don’t have widespread recognition. While it was not a surprise that neither of those seals were on Lifestyle Lift, it was startling to find their own seal, “The Lifestyle Lift Code of Internet Conduct and Assurance”. It pledges that “comments and photographs are from actual clients” and that they are “proud to take a leadership role in establishing new standards of Internet conduct and communications”. Was this seal created in response to the settlement? It was larger and more prominently displayed than the HONCode and U.R.A.C. seals usually are.

No matter which side of the seal debate you are on, seals do not authenticate individual patient stories. Unless you know the author of a story, you never know for sure if it is true. As Trisha Torrey points out, patients want to believe stories because they are desperate for information. Ultimately, most stories are from real people sharing authentic experiences, and the best way to weed out the others is to use common sense, be skeptical, check with a trusted medical professional, and remember that there are Lifestyle Lifts that haven’t been caught.

Storytelling, vérité, confiance, espoir sont les mots clés de cet article très intéressant.

Here's a $20 bottle of soap. Functionally identical to a $3 bottle, so what's the $17 for?

Let's assume the people buying it aren't stupid. What are they paying $17 for? A story. A feeling. A souvenir of a shopping expedition or perhaps just a little bit of joy in the shower every morning. Let's dissect:

1. The hang tag. It's special because most soap doesn't have a hang tag. Hang tags come on things that are a little more special than soap. And hang tags beg to be read. This one says a lot (and nothing, at the same time.) It reminds us that it doesn't contain SLS. What's SLS? Is it as bad as SLES?

2. This isn't soap. It's mineral botanic. Both words are meaningless, which means the purchaser can attach whatever feelings they choose to them. In this case, the marketer is hoping for old-time, genuine, down-to-earth and real.

3. It's not made by a soap company. It's made in a Dead Sea Laboratory. Laboratories, of course, are where scientists work, and the Dead Sea is biblical, spiritual and really salty. The company has a name (Ahava) that is onomatopoeic and reminds you of breathing. Breathe deep and find calm. [Even better, I'm told it means 'love' in Hebrew].

4. My favorite part is that it's made from bamboo and pansy. At least a little. Bamboo because it's fast growing and Asian and gentle and wood and grass at the same time. And pansy... well... pansy is for girls.

5. Two really good things here. First, it's for very dry skin. This is brilliant. If your skin is dry, you don't want to hear that it's sort of dry, kind of dry, not as dry as that guy over there... No, you want to hear that it's extremely dry, really dry, so dry it's like sand. That kind of dry. This bottle understands how very dry your skin is, and it's here to help.

Also, it's in French! I love that there's the language of love and sophistication and diplomacy right here on the bottle. I can imagine that models for Chanel are using it on the Rive Gauche as we speak.

6. Did I mention the part about velvet?

It took guts to take this packaging so over the top. It doesn't match my worldview, but it might match yours. There's not a lot of room for slightly-out-of-the-ordinary.

Décryptage signé Seth Godin

story

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On y parle de storytelling, qui se fond dans des salles de cours qui devienennt de plus en plus cyber.