Nearly a year ago the blogosphere went wild about Blackbox Republic, a social media site that “focused on reinventing the online relationship market” or whatever that means. It’s a social network for “sex positive” individuals or people who are “open enough about sexuality that it’s not an issue” – yeah whatever…
It’s the sort of site that springs up, oh every day or two on Ning but that gets no attention – what surprised me about Black Box was the fact that the blogosphere was falling over itself in priapritic vehemence about how great this site was. Bizarrely bloggers who would normally concentrate on enterprise software were falling over themselves to talk about this – Dennis Howlett, Jeff Nolan, Marshall Kirkpatrick and Oliver Marks among others were effusive in their praise for the site. As I suggested at the time, this fact could have just a teeny tiny bit to do with the fact that Blackbox Republic was founded by Sam Lawrence, ex-marketing honcho at Jive software.
A friend sent me a message a few days ago asking me where Blackbox Republic was at – after all the hype was it, in fact, taking on the world? I’m always prepared to admit that I’m wrong – if I’d taken a wrong track with my criticism of Blackbox Republic I’d admit it. First stop the BBR blog – and that didn’t tell me much, the last time Sam posted was way back in November. So over to co-founder April Donato’s blog – oops – it seems that’s parked with GoDaddy. So fair enough, the BBR founders are modern people – maybe they’ve shifted to something more real-time than blogging – off to their Twitter streams – Sam’s here, and co-founder April’s here. Nothing of any real note there…
But maybe they’ve been so incredibly busy with the site that they’ve not had a chance to blog or Tweet so over to check the analytics between Blackbox Republic and a couple of their competitors, match and eharmony:
Yup – that bottom line is BBR – but what do the raw numbers look like?
So that’s not so good – all those superstar bloggers and the initial spike totaled 10k viewers? Just goes to show there’s not much sexy about enterprise IT (or at least those who read enterprise blogs are unlikely to take their sex cues from the bloggers who write them).
I thought I’d get more in-depth so asked my friends at ScoutLabs (more on them soon) social media monitoring company to give me some more analysis. Here’s a three month representation of sentiment relating to Blackbox Republic:
Yes – that indicates that over the past three months there have been 15 mentions of BBR across the blogosphere. I could have extracted a bunch more data from ScoutLabs monitoring functionality and done some comparison with BBR’s competitors but by any measure it would seem BBR is performing dismally. Of course the ScoutLabs application cannot go behind password protected accounts, so we can’t actually see what’s happening inside BBR, just that no one is talking about them publicly – and as we all know, public heat generally converts into the reality within a community.
Now I’m not being critical of Sam or April – they took a punt, tried to execute on their vision but, ultimately, failed. That’s the world of technology, for every success there’s dozens of failures behind it. But it does make me wonder, yet again, about a business that has a mention in a blog as any part of its go-to-market strategy – I’ll say it again folks – there’s no replacement for execution and showing real value to real users…
Update (April 13th):
Ben,
I wrote 7 paragraphs on this and only 2 dealt with Blackbox Republic, the bulk of my post explored how social networks are evolving for affinity groups and how location based services are converging on this opportunity. I wish you would stop writing things like “falling over themselves” when referencing my post because it is a misrepresentation of what I wrote.
We exchanged notes on this the last time you referenced my post and at that time you seemed to acknowledge the narrative of my post not being a puff piece for Blackbox. Clearly you have something against Sam and that is your prerogative but I must again ask that you stop misrepresenting what I wrote about Blackbox. Sam is a friend of mine and I wrote about his company one time because I found it interesting for a reason not at all related to the market they were addressing but I didn’t write about it again even when Sam asked if I would like to get an update, so please stop painting me as a shill for Sam.
I get why you wanted to put this post up, Ben. You got slapped around pretty hard from your first one. You’re obviously still upset.
FWIW, the timing you have is spot on, April and I left the company over two months ago. That’s why you can’t find us. The company is in new hands now. Feel free to continue to follow it.
As for what I’m doing now. Keep your eye out for the news.
@Jeff – I lumped you in with a bunch of other writers. While I wasn’t getting at you per se I was making a point that a number of people who one wouldn’t normally expect to cover a company like BBR did so. I have nothing at all against Sam – I think I’ve met him once but I have no issues whatsoever – it was merely a comment on bloggers and who and how they chose to cover companies. Sorry you feel that I’m getting at you with this post – that was not the intention…
@Sam – thanks for your comment. Actually I put up this post becuase
1) A friend pinged me and asked me for an update and
2) I like to follow up when I prognosticate pessimistically about a company.
I didn’t get “slapped around” and no, I’m not at all upset about whatever anyone may have said back then. Having traded blows with people like Dennis Howlett over a number of years, anything said when I made my original post is a nothing in the scheme of things.
Interesting that you and April left the company – and interested that you’re on to your next big thing. I’ll look out for it and keep a completely open mind about it – my neutrality is assured 😉
Oh and Sam, according to this page – http://www.blackboxrepublic.com/about – you’re still CEO of BBR