Making Money on Line

After the success the Arabnet event held earlier this year, the organizers have come back with a new ‘hands on’ approach to getting businesses launched in the region. They’re going on through Arab cities on a roadshow for entrepreneurs.

Not unlike your traditional roadshow, they plan on putting on some interesting performances for all those interested in attending. It appears what happens in Beirut doesn’t simply stay in Beirut after all.

A blog post they put up recently states that they’ll be on the road for 3 weeks during December on for a hunt for the region’s most promising talent in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Egypt.

It’s founder Omar Christidis said after the success they had with their Beirut Workshop on Entrepreneurship which attracted an audience from Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria attracting over 170 people.

We had a sit down with Christidis during the Celebration of Entrepreneurship last week to ask him about the roadshow. Here’s what he had to say:

TNW: Why are a roadshow?

Our moto is Find, Train, and Inspire (like that of Wamda‘s).

• Find: talented entrepreneurs wherever they might be


• Train: We want to train them by giving them a practical perspective on entrepreneurship through real stories and successes


• Inspire: By bringing role models in so people can see success stories first hand

So we’re talking about a lawyer giving some advice on corporation, an investor giving them advice on fund raising, an experienced entrepreneur who can talk to them about growing a business growing a product line and hiring employees, business consult structuring their ideas, and a business leader who can tell them what direction to put their startups in.

TNW: What’s in it for Arabnet?

We’re not going to be making much money off of this, we’re doing it to make to Arabnet better.

We found a lot of Entrepreneurs this year [during the event], but we can’t expect them all to come to us, so we’re going to go to them. We’re looking for local sponsors in each city to help get entrepreneurs to the event. It costs a lot to get to the event depending on where your from.

We want to find local partners in each city to help fly entrepreneurs in. If we can do that, we can help even more people launch.

We think it’s great to help entrepreneurs launch in the region, although a bit skeptical on how much they can accomplish going on a roadshow with all the resources that implies instead of say, launch the same workshop online.

Time will tell just how successful it’ll be by both the size of next year’s Arabnet and how many companies actually launch as a result of it. Either way, we’re excited to see energy levels reach a higher level next year. 2011 looks like its going to be the year of Entrepreneurs in the Middle East.

Pedro Sorrentino is the first international student to attend Boulder Digital Works, a graduate school based in Boulder, Colorado that exists to build the next generation of digital professionals. Prior to moving to the States, he was the head of marketing and PR for Mediamind (Nasdaq: MDMD) in São Paulo, Brazil, his homeland.

Although startups and Madison Avenue agencies are perceived to have little in common, coffee shop-hopping entrepreneurs and modern “Don Drapers” actually share more characteristics than you might think, and they can learn a lot from one another.

The most valuable assets for startups are time and team. When working on a big idea with little money and a short time to make it real, Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate mantra “move fast and break things” is particularly a propos. Getting user feedback and making (and then fixing) mistakes as quickly as possible can help startups avoid bigger problems and bring home the bacon in the long run.

It seems that now, more than ever, it’s time for “Mad Men” everywhere to heed the advice of the entrepreneurs setting up shop in basements and coffee shops around the world.

Here are five lessons Madison Avenue can learn from startups. Add your own thoughts in the comments below.

1. Be T-Shaped

Big multinational advertising behemoths that hit their stride before the rise of the web often struggle to deliver high-quality digital and interactive work. In many cases, a hesitance to move forward or a lack of technical knowledge within a company’s talent base are at the root of this.

“Startups are most likely to have a small team. Consider eight people and a situation where four or five of them are programmers. They are not just going to do technical stuff. There’s a demand to have a broader line of thought, since there’s no one else around to do the work,” says John Keehler, principal at ClickHere, the digital division for The Richards Group.

Marketers should strive to be T-shaped professionals. This concept was born inside the creative agency Ideo and is about professionals with versatility and the ability to think like a designer or a programmer, even if you work with marketing.

T-shaped professionals have a broad view of things. In startups, this is a reality, but when it comes to big agencies, people tend to be divided in silos.

Advice for Madison Avenue: It’s important to have a wide vision and understanding of everyone who’s involved with the campaign that you’re working on. This versatility saves time and brings more ideas to the table.

2. Test, Fail and Learn

Brent Daily is the COO and co-founder of RoundPegg, a Boulder-based TechStars startup that provides online HR solutions for discovering professional personalities. He thinks that a good startup culture is one that believes “it’s OK to make mistakes and be a spectacular failure.” On the other hand, he agrees that agencies can’t easily bring this acceptance of failure into their ecosystems — after all, if they fail, their clients also fail and that can represent a huge loss of money.

Agencies should consider testing marketing campaigns and products on the web as “beta tests.” Getting feedback from users via the web is a low cost way to get a feel for how the community will take to ideas. After optimizing based on user feedback, campaigns would then be better prepared to launch on other mediums, such as TV or print. When it comes to digital, users tend to enjoy sharing their opinions and giving solid feedback. “There are so many places to go and test advertising rather than doing expensive focus groups, that the result is usually a pretty low-cost test bid for them,” says Daily.

One good example of open innovation is the startup UserVoice. The service positions itself as “customer feedback 2.0″ and allows companies to ask for feedback on an organized web platform. Perhaps some day more companies will substitute the traditional focus groups for this lower cost web alternative.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Before starting a huge ad campaign and spending millions of dollars on media, use the web as your test arena and get quick feedback from your customers.

3. Leverage PR 2.0

PR 2.0 is the art of using social tools to reach and communicate with key stakeholders. There used to be a time when public relations was all about relationships with journalists and sending out press releases. Taking clients to lunch, picking up the check and smiling was the way to go. This method still exists, but is on its way out.

Public relations is now about the art of dealing with, well, the public. Journalists are still very important, but nothing beats the credibility of your customers, and they are probably already talking about your product. The question is: Are you listening?

Fortunately, there’s less and less space for companies with bad products to succeed by deploying exceptional marketing. We as consumers just don’t accept that anymore. Product quality is the true advantage — attaching that strength to a sound PR strategy enables companies to listen to what consumers are saying, engage them and build brand awareness.

Startups take advantage out of this. When a startup offers a great solution with its product, normally there’s an engaged early adopter community ready to give free feedback. Agencies should take advantage of it, too. What better way to improve your business and its product than getting direct feedback from your core users? Initiatives like Starbucks’s customer feedback and idea generation site mystarbucksidea.com are the right way to go.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that having a great product is key. But listen and allow your early adopters to influence the next meeting with your client’s R&D department.

4. Bootstrap It

If a startup can run for months (or years) without without getting funded, Mad Men can dabble in testing and running campaigns without buying media. Agencies could learn a lot by testing out the old startup method of bootstrapping; that is, getting by without external help and being cautious with expenses.

Startups, for example, use free social tools like Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter, Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook and YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube all the time to save money and still reach large, influential, highly-targeted audiences. Increasingly, agencies and large advertisers are beginning to catch on and test them out; the Old Spice guy campaign is a very good example of this.

As that campaign proved, a Twitter account and some YouTube videos can go a long way. What’s better is that using these tools is cost effective, even if you count time invested. We know that the Old Spice guy videos were not a simple production, but this campaign was comparatively inexpensive because starting with social media is much cheaper (and oftentimes more powerful) than a TV commercial.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that you can do more with less when you have a good idea and a strong plan for execution.

5. Open Up to Feedback

Good startups spend a lot of time crowdsourcing opinions and getting feedback from their communities and mentors in order to improve their products. Agencies, on the other hand, usually won’t share copy or ideas with one another or their communities until a campaign is ready to launch.

Some agencies though, are finding that it doesn’t hurt to ask others for creative or production input — that’s what Victor & Spoils is all about. Based in Boulder, Colorado, the ad agency calls itself “the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles.”

John Windsor, Victor & Spoils CEO and former VP of strategy and innovation at CP+B, understands how disruptive new technologies can be, especially when they relate to the ad world. “We’re moving from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. The rise of the curator class has a new generator of social creative/digital directors,” says Windsor.

This is a company that has tapped into the startup principles and made its business faster, global (it has people from all around the world giving input) and without the legacy issues that you see on Madison Avenue. As time passes, we can draw a line between businesses that embrace change and the ones that fear new ways of doing things.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Embrace change and don’t fear the unknown. Others can help your cause if you give them the right opportunity.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

- What’s the Value in a Brand Name?/> - HOW TO: Run Location-Based Google Ads/> - HOW TO: Get the Most From a Small Business Social Media Presence/> - Top 5 Qualities to Look for in Startup Job Candidates/> - Why the Best Online Marketing May Be Headed Offline

Images courtesy of MadMenYourself & class='blippr-nobr'>Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr, jolien_vallins

For more Startups coverage:

class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Startupsclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Startups channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

eric seiger

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.

Energy Drinks Linked to Alcohol Problems - Health <b>News</b> - Health.com

College students who consume nonalcoholic energy drinks such as Red Bull at least once a week are more than twice as likely as their peers to show signs of alcohol dependence, according to a new study.

eric seiger

After the success the Arabnet event held earlier this year, the organizers have come back with a new ‘hands on’ approach to getting businesses launched in the region. They’re going on through Arab cities on a roadshow for entrepreneurs.

Not unlike your traditional roadshow, they plan on putting on some interesting performances for all those interested in attending. It appears what happens in Beirut doesn’t simply stay in Beirut after all.

A blog post they put up recently states that they’ll be on the road for 3 weeks during December on for a hunt for the region’s most promising talent in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Egypt.

It’s founder Omar Christidis said after the success they had with their Beirut Workshop on Entrepreneurship which attracted an audience from Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria attracting over 170 people.

We had a sit down with Christidis during the Celebration of Entrepreneurship last week to ask him about the roadshow. Here’s what he had to say:

TNW: Why are a roadshow?

Our moto is Find, Train, and Inspire (like that of Wamda‘s).

• Find: talented entrepreneurs wherever they might be


• Train: We want to train them by giving them a practical perspective on entrepreneurship through real stories and successes


• Inspire: By bringing role models in so people can see success stories first hand

So we’re talking about a lawyer giving some advice on corporation, an investor giving them advice on fund raising, an experienced entrepreneur who can talk to them about growing a business growing a product line and hiring employees, business consult structuring their ideas, and a business leader who can tell them what direction to put their startups in.

TNW: What’s in it for Arabnet?

We’re not going to be making much money off of this, we’re doing it to make to Arabnet better.

We found a lot of Entrepreneurs this year [during the event], but we can’t expect them all to come to us, so we’re going to go to them. We’re looking for local sponsors in each city to help get entrepreneurs to the event. It costs a lot to get to the event depending on where your from.

We want to find local partners in each city to help fly entrepreneurs in. If we can do that, we can help even more people launch.

We think it’s great to help entrepreneurs launch in the region, although a bit skeptical on how much they can accomplish going on a roadshow with all the resources that implies instead of say, launch the same workshop online.

Time will tell just how successful it’ll be by both the size of next year’s Arabnet and how many companies actually launch as a result of it. Either way, we’re excited to see energy levels reach a higher level next year. 2011 looks like its going to be the year of Entrepreneurs in the Middle East.

Pedro Sorrentino is the first international student to attend Boulder Digital Works, a graduate school based in Boulder, Colorado that exists to build the next generation of digital professionals. Prior to moving to the States, he was the head of marketing and PR for Mediamind (Nasdaq: MDMD) in São Paulo, Brazil, his homeland.

Although startups and Madison Avenue agencies are perceived to have little in common, coffee shop-hopping entrepreneurs and modern “Don Drapers” actually share more characteristics than you might think, and they can learn a lot from one another.

The most valuable assets for startups are time and team. When working on a big idea with little money and a short time to make it real, Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate mantra “move fast and break things” is particularly a propos. Getting user feedback and making (and then fixing) mistakes as quickly as possible can help startups avoid bigger problems and bring home the bacon in the long run.

It seems that now, more than ever, it’s time for “Mad Men” everywhere to heed the advice of the entrepreneurs setting up shop in basements and coffee shops around the world.

Here are five lessons Madison Avenue can learn from startups. Add your own thoughts in the comments below.

1. Be T-Shaped

Big multinational advertising behemoths that hit their stride before the rise of the web often struggle to deliver high-quality digital and interactive work. In many cases, a hesitance to move forward or a lack of technical knowledge within a company’s talent base are at the root of this.

“Startups are most likely to have a small team. Consider eight people and a situation where four or five of them are programmers. They are not just going to do technical stuff. There’s a demand to have a broader line of thought, since there’s no one else around to do the work,” says John Keehler, principal at ClickHere, the digital division for The Richards Group.

Marketers should strive to be T-shaped professionals. This concept was born inside the creative agency Ideo and is about professionals with versatility and the ability to think like a designer or a programmer, even if you work with marketing.

T-shaped professionals have a broad view of things. In startups, this is a reality, but when it comes to big agencies, people tend to be divided in silos.

Advice for Madison Avenue: It’s important to have a wide vision and understanding of everyone who’s involved with the campaign that you’re working on. This versatility saves time and brings more ideas to the table.

2. Test, Fail and Learn

Brent Daily is the COO and co-founder of RoundPegg, a Boulder-based TechStars startup that provides online HR solutions for discovering professional personalities. He thinks that a good startup culture is one that believes “it’s OK to make mistakes and be a spectacular failure.” On the other hand, he agrees that agencies can’t easily bring this acceptance of failure into their ecosystems — after all, if they fail, their clients also fail and that can represent a huge loss of money.

Agencies should consider testing marketing campaigns and products on the web as “beta tests.” Getting feedback from users via the web is a low cost way to get a feel for how the community will take to ideas. After optimizing based on user feedback, campaigns would then be better prepared to launch on other mediums, such as TV or print. When it comes to digital, users tend to enjoy sharing their opinions and giving solid feedback. “There are so many places to go and test advertising rather than doing expensive focus groups, that the result is usually a pretty low-cost test bid for them,” says Daily.

One good example of open innovation is the startup UserVoice. The service positions itself as “customer feedback 2.0″ and allows companies to ask for feedback on an organized web platform. Perhaps some day more companies will substitute the traditional focus groups for this lower cost web alternative.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Before starting a huge ad campaign and spending millions of dollars on media, use the web as your test arena and get quick feedback from your customers.

3. Leverage PR 2.0

PR 2.0 is the art of using social tools to reach and communicate with key stakeholders. There used to be a time when public relations was all about relationships with journalists and sending out press releases. Taking clients to lunch, picking up the check and smiling was the way to go. This method still exists, but is on its way out.

Public relations is now about the art of dealing with, well, the public. Journalists are still very important, but nothing beats the credibility of your customers, and they are probably already talking about your product. The question is: Are you listening?

Fortunately, there’s less and less space for companies with bad products to succeed by deploying exceptional marketing. We as consumers just don’t accept that anymore. Product quality is the true advantage — attaching that strength to a sound PR strategy enables companies to listen to what consumers are saying, engage them and build brand awareness.

Startups take advantage out of this. When a startup offers a great solution with its product, normally there’s an engaged early adopter community ready to give free feedback. Agencies should take advantage of it, too. What better way to improve your business and its product than getting direct feedback from your core users? Initiatives like Starbucks’s customer feedback and idea generation site mystarbucksidea.com are the right way to go.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that having a great product is key. But listen and allow your early adopters to influence the next meeting with your client’s R&D department.

4. Bootstrap It

If a startup can run for months (or years) without without getting funded, Mad Men can dabble in testing and running campaigns without buying media. Agencies could learn a lot by testing out the old startup method of bootstrapping; that is, getting by without external help and being cautious with expenses.

Startups, for example, use free social tools like Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter, Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook and YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube all the time to save money and still reach large, influential, highly-targeted audiences. Increasingly, agencies and large advertisers are beginning to catch on and test them out; the Old Spice guy campaign is a very good example of this.

As that campaign proved, a Twitter account and some YouTube videos can go a long way. What’s better is that using these tools is cost effective, even if you count time invested. We know that the Old Spice guy videos were not a simple production, but this campaign was comparatively inexpensive because starting with social media is much cheaper (and oftentimes more powerful) than a TV commercial.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that you can do more with less when you have a good idea and a strong plan for execution.

5. Open Up to Feedback

Good startups spend a lot of time crowdsourcing opinions and getting feedback from their communities and mentors in order to improve their products. Agencies, on the other hand, usually won’t share copy or ideas with one another or their communities until a campaign is ready to launch.

Some agencies though, are finding that it doesn’t hurt to ask others for creative or production input — that’s what Victor & Spoils is all about. Based in Boulder, Colorado, the ad agency calls itself “the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles.”

John Windsor, Victor & Spoils CEO and former VP of strategy and innovation at CP+B, understands how disruptive new technologies can be, especially when they relate to the ad world. “We’re moving from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. The rise of the curator class has a new generator of social creative/digital directors,” says Windsor.

This is a company that has tapped into the startup principles and made its business faster, global (it has people from all around the world giving input) and without the legacy issues that you see on Madison Avenue. As time passes, we can draw a line between businesses that embrace change and the ones that fear new ways of doing things.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Embrace change and don’t fear the unknown. Others can help your cause if you give them the right opportunity.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

- What’s the Value in a Brand Name?/> - HOW TO: Run Location-Based Google Ads/> - HOW TO: Get the Most From a Small Business Social Media Presence/> - Top 5 Qualities to Look for in Startup Job Candidates/> - Why the Best Online Marketing May Be Headed Offline

Images courtesy of MadMenYourself & class='blippr-nobr'>Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr, jolien_vallins

For more Startups coverage:

class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Startupsclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Startups channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

eric seiger

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.

Energy Drinks Linked to Alcohol Problems - Health <b>News</b> - Health.com

College students who consume nonalcoholic energy drinks such as Red Bull at least once a week are more than twice as likely as their peers to show signs of alcohol dependence, according to a new study.

eric seiger

eric seiger

eric seiger

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.

Energy Drinks Linked to Alcohol Problems - Health <b>News</b> - Health.com

College students who consume nonalcoholic energy drinks such as Red Bull at least once a week are more than twice as likely as their peers to show signs of alcohol dependence, according to a new study.

eric seiger

After the success the Arabnet event held earlier this year, the organizers have come back with a new ‘hands on’ approach to getting businesses launched in the region. They’re going on through Arab cities on a roadshow for entrepreneurs.

Not unlike your traditional roadshow, they plan on putting on some interesting performances for all those interested in attending. It appears what happens in Beirut doesn’t simply stay in Beirut after all.

A blog post they put up recently states that they’ll be on the road for 3 weeks during December on for a hunt for the region’s most promising talent in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Egypt.

It’s founder Omar Christidis said after the success they had with their Beirut Workshop on Entrepreneurship which attracted an audience from Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria attracting over 170 people.

We had a sit down with Christidis during the Celebration of Entrepreneurship last week to ask him about the roadshow. Here’s what he had to say:

TNW: Why are a roadshow?

Our moto is Find, Train, and Inspire (like that of Wamda‘s).

• Find: talented entrepreneurs wherever they might be


• Train: We want to train them by giving them a practical perspective on entrepreneurship through real stories and successes


• Inspire: By bringing role models in so people can see success stories first hand

So we’re talking about a lawyer giving some advice on corporation, an investor giving them advice on fund raising, an experienced entrepreneur who can talk to them about growing a business growing a product line and hiring employees, business consult structuring their ideas, and a business leader who can tell them what direction to put their startups in.

TNW: What’s in it for Arabnet?

We’re not going to be making much money off of this, we’re doing it to make to Arabnet better.

We found a lot of Entrepreneurs this year [during the event], but we can’t expect them all to come to us, so we’re going to go to them. We’re looking for local sponsors in each city to help get entrepreneurs to the event. It costs a lot to get to the event depending on where your from.

We want to find local partners in each city to help fly entrepreneurs in. If we can do that, we can help even more people launch.

We think it’s great to help entrepreneurs launch in the region, although a bit skeptical on how much they can accomplish going on a roadshow with all the resources that implies instead of say, launch the same workshop online.

Time will tell just how successful it’ll be by both the size of next year’s Arabnet and how many companies actually launch as a result of it. Either way, we’re excited to see energy levels reach a higher level next year. 2011 looks like its going to be the year of Entrepreneurs in the Middle East.

Pedro Sorrentino is the first international student to attend Boulder Digital Works, a graduate school based in Boulder, Colorado that exists to build the next generation of digital professionals. Prior to moving to the States, he was the head of marketing and PR for Mediamind (Nasdaq: MDMD) in São Paulo, Brazil, his homeland.

Although startups and Madison Avenue agencies are perceived to have little in common, coffee shop-hopping entrepreneurs and modern “Don Drapers” actually share more characteristics than you might think, and they can learn a lot from one another.

The most valuable assets for startups are time and team. When working on a big idea with little money and a short time to make it real, Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate mantra “move fast and break things” is particularly a propos. Getting user feedback and making (and then fixing) mistakes as quickly as possible can help startups avoid bigger problems and bring home the bacon in the long run.

It seems that now, more than ever, it’s time for “Mad Men” everywhere to heed the advice of the entrepreneurs setting up shop in basements and coffee shops around the world.

Here are five lessons Madison Avenue can learn from startups. Add your own thoughts in the comments below.

1. Be T-Shaped

Big multinational advertising behemoths that hit their stride before the rise of the web often struggle to deliver high-quality digital and interactive work. In many cases, a hesitance to move forward or a lack of technical knowledge within a company’s talent base are at the root of this.

“Startups are most likely to have a small team. Consider eight people and a situation where four or five of them are programmers. They are not just going to do technical stuff. There’s a demand to have a broader line of thought, since there’s no one else around to do the work,” says John Keehler, principal at ClickHere, the digital division for The Richards Group.

Marketers should strive to be T-shaped professionals. This concept was born inside the creative agency Ideo and is about professionals with versatility and the ability to think like a designer or a programmer, even if you work with marketing.

T-shaped professionals have a broad view of things. In startups, this is a reality, but when it comes to big agencies, people tend to be divided in silos.

Advice for Madison Avenue: It’s important to have a wide vision and understanding of everyone who’s involved with the campaign that you’re working on. This versatility saves time and brings more ideas to the table.

2. Test, Fail and Learn

Brent Daily is the COO and co-founder of RoundPegg, a Boulder-based TechStars startup that provides online HR solutions for discovering professional personalities. He thinks that a good startup culture is one that believes “it’s OK to make mistakes and be a spectacular failure.” On the other hand, he agrees that agencies can’t easily bring this acceptance of failure into their ecosystems — after all, if they fail, their clients also fail and that can represent a huge loss of money.

Agencies should consider testing marketing campaigns and products on the web as “beta tests.” Getting feedback from users via the web is a low cost way to get a feel for how the community will take to ideas. After optimizing based on user feedback, campaigns would then be better prepared to launch on other mediums, such as TV or print. When it comes to digital, users tend to enjoy sharing their opinions and giving solid feedback. “There are so many places to go and test advertising rather than doing expensive focus groups, that the result is usually a pretty low-cost test bid for them,” says Daily.

One good example of open innovation is the startup UserVoice. The service positions itself as “customer feedback 2.0″ and allows companies to ask for feedback on an organized web platform. Perhaps some day more companies will substitute the traditional focus groups for this lower cost web alternative.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Before starting a huge ad campaign and spending millions of dollars on media, use the web as your test arena and get quick feedback from your customers.

3. Leverage PR 2.0

PR 2.0 is the art of using social tools to reach and communicate with key stakeholders. There used to be a time when public relations was all about relationships with journalists and sending out press releases. Taking clients to lunch, picking up the check and smiling was the way to go. This method still exists, but is on its way out.

Public relations is now about the art of dealing with, well, the public. Journalists are still very important, but nothing beats the credibility of your customers, and they are probably already talking about your product. The question is: Are you listening?

Fortunately, there’s less and less space for companies with bad products to succeed by deploying exceptional marketing. We as consumers just don’t accept that anymore. Product quality is the true advantage — attaching that strength to a sound PR strategy enables companies to listen to what consumers are saying, engage them and build brand awareness.

Startups take advantage out of this. When a startup offers a great solution with its product, normally there’s an engaged early adopter community ready to give free feedback. Agencies should take advantage of it, too. What better way to improve your business and its product than getting direct feedback from your core users? Initiatives like Starbucks’s customer feedback and idea generation site mystarbucksidea.com are the right way to go.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that having a great product is key. But listen and allow your early adopters to influence the next meeting with your client’s R&D department.

4. Bootstrap It

If a startup can run for months (or years) without without getting funded, Mad Men can dabble in testing and running campaigns without buying media. Agencies could learn a lot by testing out the old startup method of bootstrapping; that is, getting by without external help and being cautious with expenses.

Startups, for example, use free social tools like Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter, Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook and YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube all the time to save money and still reach large, influential, highly-targeted audiences. Increasingly, agencies and large advertisers are beginning to catch on and test them out; the Old Spice guy campaign is a very good example of this.

As that campaign proved, a Twitter account and some YouTube videos can go a long way. What’s better is that using these tools is cost effective, even if you count time invested. We know that the Old Spice guy videos were not a simple production, but this campaign was comparatively inexpensive because starting with social media is much cheaper (and oftentimes more powerful) than a TV commercial.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that you can do more with less when you have a good idea and a strong plan for execution.

5. Open Up to Feedback

Good startups spend a lot of time crowdsourcing opinions and getting feedback from their communities and mentors in order to improve their products. Agencies, on the other hand, usually won’t share copy or ideas with one another or their communities until a campaign is ready to launch.

Some agencies though, are finding that it doesn’t hurt to ask others for creative or production input — that’s what Victor & Spoils is all about. Based in Boulder, Colorado, the ad agency calls itself “the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles.”

John Windsor, Victor & Spoils CEO and former VP of strategy and innovation at CP+B, understands how disruptive new technologies can be, especially when they relate to the ad world. “We’re moving from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. The rise of the curator class has a new generator of social creative/digital directors,” says Windsor.

This is a company that has tapped into the startup principles and made its business faster, global (it has people from all around the world giving input) and without the legacy issues that you see on Madison Avenue. As time passes, we can draw a line between businesses that embrace change and the ones that fear new ways of doing things.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Embrace change and don’t fear the unknown. Others can help your cause if you give them the right opportunity.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

- What’s the Value in a Brand Name?/> - HOW TO: Run Location-Based Google Ads/> - HOW TO: Get the Most From a Small Business Social Media Presence/> - Top 5 Qualities to Look for in Startup Job Candidates/> - Why the Best Online Marketing May Be Headed Offline

Images courtesy of MadMenYourself & class='blippr-nobr'>Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr, jolien_vallins

For more Startups coverage:

class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Startupsclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Startups channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

eric seiger

eric seiger

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.

Energy Drinks Linked to Alcohol Problems - Health <b>News</b> - Health.com

College students who consume nonalcoholic energy drinks such as Red Bull at least once a week are more than twice as likely as their peers to show signs of alcohol dependence, according to a new study.

eric seiger

eric seiger

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.

Energy Drinks Linked to Alcohol Problems - Health <b>News</b> - Health.com

College students who consume nonalcoholic energy drinks such as Red Bull at least once a week are more than twice as likely as their peers to show signs of alcohol dependence, according to a new study.

eric seiger

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.

Energy Drinks Linked to Alcohol Problems - Health <b>News</b> - Health.com

College students who consume nonalcoholic energy drinks such as Red Bull at least once a week are more than twice as likely as their peers to show signs of alcohol dependence, according to a new study.

eric seiger

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.

Energy Drinks Linked to Alcohol Problems - Health <b>News</b> - Health.com

College students who consume nonalcoholic energy drinks such as Red Bull at least once a week are more than twice as likely as their peers to show signs of alcohol dependence, according to a new study.

eric seiger eric seiger
eric seiger

eric seiger
eric seiger

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.

Energy Drinks Linked to Alcohol Problems - Health <b>News</b> - Health.com

College students who consume nonalcoholic energy drinks such as Red Bull at least once a week are more than twice as likely as their peers to show signs of alcohol dependence, according to a new study.

eric seiger

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.

Energy Drinks Linked to Alcohol Problems - Health <b>News</b> - Health.com

College students who consume nonalcoholic energy drinks such as Red Bull at least once a week are more than twice as likely as their peers to show signs of alcohol dependence, according to a new study.

eric seiger

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.

Energy Drinks Linked to Alcohol Problems - Health <b>News</b> - Health.com

College students who consume nonalcoholic energy drinks such as Red Bull at least once a week are more than twice as likely as their peers to show signs of alcohol dependence, according to a new study.