Caren Explains... Four Mistakes that Sabotage a Cold Call

Whether you're looking for a deal, a job or a date, it can be very daunting to make your pitch, especially if you have to make a cold call to do so.

I receive 5-10 cold calls each day at Songkick and I find that the problem with most of them is not in what the person is asking for, but rather that the pitches are carelessly constructed. Sure, you may have an amazing resume, product or proposal, but if you don't pay attention to the little things you may be sabotaging yourself before you ask for anything.

Here are four things to avoid when making a cold call inquiry.

1) Don't be lazy. If you really want to do business with a company, take the time to figure out which person you should be speaking to. It immediately undermines your pitch if you write "To Whom It May Concern, I'd like to speak to your head of marketing about a great opportunity..."

There are plenty of places to find this kind of personnel information, including:

• Company website (check for links on the company, often titled "About" or "Team")
• LinkedIn (do a company search and see what employees are listed)
• CrunchBase (which lists founders, executives and investors of tech companies)
• News articles on the company (which often quote executives)
• Press releases (which also quote executives or else provide other contact information)

2) Look for a warm introduction. Your pitch will go much further if you are able to get an introduction to the team or person you want to speak to. The person on the receiving end of the inquiry will feel an obligation to reply -- not because of you, but because someone they know has put themselves behind the introduction.

If you know someone who used to work at the company or else someone who has done business with them, that's a great place to start. Otherwise, take a peak on LinkedIn and see what common connections you have to the company.

3) Get the company name right. I can't tell you the number of times I've received an email from someone who wants to work with Songkick where the company name is misspelled (Song Kick) or improperly capitalized (SongKick). This immediately shows sloppiness or indicates that you have not engaged with the product. Worse yet is when both mistakes are made within the same email.

I know I've personally made this mistake when I'm in a rush or typing from my phone, and let me tell you: it is incredibly embarrassing if you care about the person you are contacting. Before you send a pitch, take an extra minute to make sure you've dotted the 'i's and crossed all the 't's.

4) Personalize the inquiry. Too often I receive emails that say "We think we can do big things for your company." What kinds of things? How do I know you didn't just copy-and-paste that?

Show that you have real intent by referencing a recent accomplishment of the company or else citing ways you can really help them.

Did the company just win an award? Congratulate them.

Did the CEO tell stockholders what he or she wants to accomplish this year? Mention what you can do to help.

Don't let this part get buried in your email or run on too long. Instead, keep it short and position it in the opening sentences of your pitch to immediately standout from the crowd.

Get Smart at SXSW: Five tips for surviving the week

Last year I gave you three pieces of advice on SXSX Music before embarking on my first Platinum SXSW experience (Music, Film and Interactive conferences all). With that behind me and nine days of SXSW ahead of me, I give you five more pieces of advice on how to survive SXSW 2011.

1) Bring a phone charger or spare battery with you wherever you go. All of those tweets, check-ins, emails and texts are going to drain your phone so fast you will be running around looking for an electrical outlet before lunchtime. The Convention Center usually has cellphone charging lockers you can use on the upper levels, but also consider bringing a spare battery pack (sorry, iPhone users, that doesn't apply to you) or else carry an extra AC adapter in your bag.

2) Be diligent about your health. Not to sound too much like a mom, but take care of yourself, okay? Go for a run on the awesome Town Lake trails and take some vitamins. With all the beer-swiggin' and hand-shakin' that happens during the week, you are gonna pick up as many unwanted germs as unwanted tchotchkes. So instead of reaching for that mimosa, put some Emergen-C in your water and toast to your health.

3) Get to peddling. Austin is really not a very big town, so this year my friend Monica and I (who are staying a mile outside of downtown) are getting bikes. Cheap, quick and no need to fight for cabs. Plus there are added health benefits (see above) Uber, the private car service I love in SF, is also going to be down in Austin with pedicabs, so put them to work for charity.

4) Create your own parties on the fly. About 20% of your time at SXSW is spent waiting in line for something -- to catch a band, to get some food, to use the bathroom... but when the only reason you're queued up is to get in to a party hosted by a tech company, why not just grab some folks and spill in to the bar next door? Let's be honest, guys: will you really get to meet the founder if you don't know them already? Probably not. It seemed ridiculous last year that people were waiting to get in to a bar for a party when the bar next door was completely empty. Try using Hurricane Party's app to make your own on-the-fly party, or else to tell friends where you're relocating to. And if the Foursquare or Gowalla check-in matters that much to you, guess what? You'll be in close enough proximity to fool the app in to thinking you're there.

5) Create a mobile group to keep in touch. Before you get to Austin, decide which few people you really want to keep up with -- perhaps coworkers so you don't miss networking opportunities, or friends so you can use all the +1s you asked for in your RSVPs. Try Kik (great app which just rolled out group messaging) or GroupMe (uses SMS messages) and hit lots of people at once when issuing only one message.

Wanna meet up in Austin? Find me on Twitter at twitter.com/caren

2010 Indie Music Trends: Cats, Beaches, a Venn Diagram and a Playlist

Every year there seems to be one or two prevailing trends in the world of indie music naming and branding. It was my (assumed) job at Paste to document this all for an audience of hipsters who cared to argue about such things at the end of the year. Back then I discovered that...

• 2007 was the Year of the Deer/Dear bands (Deerhunter, Deer Tick, Loney Dear)
• 2008 brought the Year of the Bear bands (Care Bears on Fire, Grizzly Bear, Panda Bear)

As we look back on 2010, I'm ready to declare that it was "The Year of the Cat and the Beach (a Little Bit of Each)." Too bad Dr Seuss isn't around to write about this one for me.

Take a look at all the album art that featured furry felines, including releases by Best Coast, The Klaxons, MGMT and Two Door Cinema Club.

But there were just as many surf-and-sand-loving bands to be had, so let's venn diagram this and figure out who the real winner was in 2010.

Four magic bands in the center of the venn diagram?! Amazing!

That's because MGMT gave us...

• Cat-shaped-wave on the album art

The Klaxons offered...

• Cat album art
• An album called "Surfing the Void"

Best Coast provided...

• Cat (sitting on an ocean) album art
• A nearly beachy name

But the real winner is Wavves, with its...

• Cat (wearing a gold chain!) album art
• Surf-and-sand band name (with superfluous 'v'!)
• A song called "King of the Beach"

Well done, Wavves. The trinity of 2010 indie music branding.

Here's a playlist of all the bands. They are talented folks. Buy their music, please (... but maybe not the whole MGMT album... that was disappointing).

Caren Explains the Droid 2

I count myself among the 5% of women ages 25-39 who would choose an Android device over other smart phones. In fact, as of today I am on my second Android device. (You don't scare me, evil Android eye!)

I've only had it for a few hours, but I can see already that Droid 2 addresses some of the concerns I had with the first Motorola DROID after I bought last December.

Most notably it offers worldwide CDMA/GSM support which means I can now use it in London. Gone are the days of toggling between a GSM-supported Verizon phone (so I could receive calls to my US number), my DROID (so I could retrieve contacts) and a British-issued mobile phone (so I could make calls in London). Rejoice, rejoice!

Also, this Droid 2 has an immediate route to file management. I found it impossible to locate files once I had downloaded them to the DROID. Now you can easily see both local files and shared files from the application menu.

One cool innovation on Droid 2 is the ability to switch between multiple profiles. The default suggestions for profiles are "Home," "Work" and "Weekend." As someone who has a bad habit of reading work-related emails and messages while off-the-clock, I can really make good use of this feature. Being able to hide work-related accounts, applications and widgets in one swish of the finger is a welcomed feature.

It is also interesting to see which apps were pre-installed on the Droid 2. Blockbuster and "Need for Speed" apps are new to the menu, though they earlier appeared as "junkware" on the Motorola X, while non-standard/non-Google applications like Skype and Amazon mp3 return on this iteration.

There are also a lot more pre-populated desktop screens on Droid 2. While some -- like a desktop screen for quick-dial contacts -- are helpful, others (namely the news widgets) remind me of Windows Vista features I disliked.

So far so good, but there is one significant UX improvement I hope this Droid 2 will offer: a less-sensitive interface and/or smarter screen- locks during phone calls so I don't hang-up on as many people accidentally....because that's just rude.

Texts, Teens and a Tale of Two Twitters: a Second-Go at Group Messaging

In March 2008 the Paste team made its annual pilgrimage to SXSW. I was producing three days of concerts that year and was dreading the amount of coordination required. So when Paste's tech-savvy co-founder Tim Regan-Porter suggested we all sign-up for a service that would let us text each other in a group, I was intrigued.

The service was called Twitter.

I signed-up for Twitter that day and activated it so that I could send and receive "tweets" as texts. Everyone else on the Paste staff did the same. This would allow one of us to send out a tweet via text (ex: "I need help backstage! Anyone around the venue?") and quickly reach all 10 people on staff.

This is what I expected Twitter to become: a group texting service. Why else would anyone constrain a message to 140 characters, right?

We all know the rest of the story (and had understood how important brevity would be in the Twittersphere, I would not have picked a 15-character username).

But what about that group SMS function that got me to sign-up for Twitter in the first place? Why didn't that stick?

Well, a host of new start-ups are trying to resurrect that service... only they seem a few years late to a party that no one showed up to in the first place.

In 2006 Yahoo! tried its hand at group texting with Mixd, while Twitter, Dodgeball and Zemble were also identified as promising multi-purpose SMS services by Techcrunch. Those services were either shutdown or evolved past the group SMS piece of the business model.

So what makes this the time for companies like GroupMe and Rabbly to emerge?

There's the exclusivity piece of it. All friends and followers are not created equal, so as our social networks expand, something like selective group messaging could be a valuable way to post status-like updates to only a handful of people.

Then there are the teens. I'm no longer a teenage girl, but I could see how this would be helpful in keeping up with a clique. Nielsen reports that the average American teen sends nearly 3,400 text messages a month. This group of consumers also rely less on email than their 18 and over counterparts. Not a bad customer group to go after.

There's also international markets, where SMS usage is generally higher than it is in the US.

Still, with smartphone adoption growing, and phone plans becoming all encompassing (text, voice and data for one flat fee) it could be that the new Facebook Groups or good ol' email will serve the need for the group messaging just fine (at least amongst smartphone users).

Will group SMS be the next It Thing, or is it, like, so 2006?

Discuss below, my Blogosphere friends...