UP CLOSE / BOB CRAMER, CEO, ThePort Network Inc.

ThePort helps clients, users interact on Web

By CAROLINE WILBERT

For the Journal-Constitution

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Bob Cramer’s first job out of college was at CNN. Though he liked his job, he decided that he’d rather be like Ted Turner than work for him. An entrepreneurial career was born.

Cramer went on to form A.D.A.M., now a publicly traded firm that provides companies with online health information and benefits management services for employees.

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ALISON CHURCH/Special

ThePort Network Inc., which Bob Cramer started in 1999, helps media companies and nonprofits interact with consumers much as Facebook and MySpace.

 

THE BOB CRAMER FILE

• Home: Chastain Park
• Age: 48
• Family: Wife, Sally; children: Ben, 17; Sara, 14; Jack, 11
• Education: B.A. political science, Tufts University, 1982
• Favorite movie (recent): "Iron Man"
• Last book read: "The Lay of the Land" by Richard Ford
• Favorite Quote: "Not to be served, but to serve," Taft School, Watertown, Conn., motto

 

 

While still running A.D.A.M., Cramer founded a second company called ThePort Network in 1999. The company, which survived what Cramer calls “the very dark days” of the dot-com bust, has evolved into a cousin of social media providers such as Facebook or MySpace. It helps nonprofits, associations and media companies use the Web to interact with consumers, members and others. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was a customer at one point, but no longer is.)

Two years ago, Cramer handed over the reins at A.D.A.M. and became full-time CEO of ThePort, which has 25 employees.

When he’s not starting and running companies, he spends a lot of time working on behalf of Atlanta’s homeless. He has been involved with the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless for more than 20 years and is board chairman.

Q: Tell us more about ThePort and what it offers customers.

A: ThePort has very quietly built one of the most powerful social media platforms in the industry today. What we do is we help brands bring social elements, social capabilities, by leveraging their existing Web assets. The future of the Internet will be moving from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, which is all about connecting people and engaging them and letting them participate in the discussion. This has very important business goals and opportunities to start to leverage the Internet in new ways that were never available before.

Q: Your customers are media companies and associations, including nonprofits. Why have you focused on these markets?

A: We think those are two very large markets where there is tremendous need to use the Web in all its capacity. People are generally in an association because they share a passion or a commitment to the subject matter or to the cause. We are letting them participate in the discussion and be part of a steady stream of information about whatever that cause or subject might be, to share and participate and use the knowledge that they have to create new content and new discussions and also to social network, to meet other members of that same organization. That can lead to all kinds of new stuff. Generally, an association will have an annual meeting once a year where a lot of networking takes place. Now they can use the Web to do this 365 days a year.

Q: What about the media? Why does that make sense?

A: In many respects, a newspaper or a magazine, a newspaper in particular, is sort of an association of people who live in a particular geography. We have also seen, as traditional media companies are moving more to the Web, particularly as newspapers struggle for circulation and people are getting their information online, to have the tools and technology to effectively compete online is of para-amount importance. … One product we are just introducing is called Social Market 2.0, and it really lets a traditional newspaper company or a broadcast television station or a radio station let local merchants get very engaged with a growing online user base. Social Market 2.0 is really a new form of advertising. It gives a business a presence, a socially enabled presence, in a traditional sort-of-business-directory mode, where they control a profile page very much like a person would control their own profile in a social network. By giving them that dynamic page, where all their prospective users are, the business can have a blog, can have video and photos, a map, times when they are open, specials, and people can “friend” the business just like they would “friend” a person.

Q: What are your goals for ThePort?

A: Our goal is to build a $100 million-plus company.

Q: Where are you now, in terms of reaching that goal?

A: We have laid the foundation for reaching that goal. Now it is really about sales and marketing and distribution. We spent an inordinate amount of time building our platform, building our client services team, deploying with marquee customers. In fact in Atlanta we have a number of high-profile nonprofits that are our customers. We work with CARE, with a community called CARE Connect, and we have built a dynamic community for the Arthritis Foundation. These are two large nonprofits based here in Atlanta. We also run a community for the Atlanta Business Chronicle. So we have very good reach here in Atlanta, but we are looking to take this company to all different levels.

Q: How much is revenue now?

A: Over $1 million, going toward $5 million to $6 million in 2009.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about your work with the homeless?

A: I’ve tried to be not only a technology entrepreneur; I’ve tried to be a social entrepreneur, too. I’ve been involved with the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless now for coming on 23 years. There are so many similarities between a technology startup and a nonprofit. People invest in a technology company for a return, and people contribute to a nonprofit for a different kind of return. I’ve learned a great deal by being in both worlds. I think there is a tremendous education there, and it is nice to give back to the community as well.

Q: What do you find most rewarding about this particular cause?

A: [W]e are helping thousands of people, and it is literally thousands over the years, really transform their lives, from going from the streets to going into a place where they receive care and services, and plenty of them come out the other end where they are living on their own. They get jobs and live lives just like the rest of us.

I got pulled over for going 50 in a 35-zone just outside the office on Thursday.  I was racing back from a meeting with Tom Bell, CEO of Cousins Properties, to discuss the Task Force and homelessness.  I was very pumped up and encouraged by the meeting and was paying absolutely no attention on a stretch of road that I know is a speed trap.

For the past month or so, I have been speeding through life, working my tail off to get ThePort properly positioned and funded and to keep the lights on literally at the Task Force.  Progress is being made on all fronts, but the perhaps the ticket is a good metaphor for slowing down a bit.  

I am having a hard time as I watch the Democratic convention wrestling rhetoric from reality.  As speaker after speaker talks about fairness, inclusiveness and opportunities for all, my thoughts go to the 500 or so men who each night sleep at the Task Force Peachtree Pine Center. 

We supposedly have a progressive Democratic Mayor here in Atlanta who has gone out of her way to cut off state funding to help these people and to interfere in additional local and federal funding.  It turns my stomach to hear the talk when I see the reality.  Who is looking out for these people and thousands like them? Is it just concerned citizens like me?  Where is John Lewis whose history should make him a champion for Peachtree-Pine's residents?  How are we to care, aid and empower thousands of people who sit homeless on our streets or in our shelters to be contributing members of an inclusive society if nobody acts or cares? 

ThePort is in the social media "infrastructure" space.  This means we provide the underlying technology to add social media elements to exist web sites and create an expanded web presence including online community functionality.

The question today is what should we do if one of our clients "designs" an implementation of our technology that we feel is not going to work effectively.  Do we walk away from the account?  Do we beg them to change it based on our experience?  What if they don't take our suggestions?

We have faced this issue repeatedly in the past where we get judged on how our deployed communities do when we have little or no say in the actual implementation design. This is an interesting paradox.  Our platform can work flawlessly but if the actual implementation, which at times is out of our hands, is not done correctly, often times we take the blame. 

The answer we have tried to implement over the past few months is to standardize our product offering and deployment methodology using best practices.  We also try to work with our clients upfront so we develop common metrics to judge success or failure.  We encourage them to start a little slower, get their user base comfortable with participating in a community and then expanding from there.   The "less is more" approach is really starting to work.

Some random quotes from Advertising 2.0:

Social media that connects strangers is more valuable than social media that connects friends.  Yelp, Trip Advisor CPM's much higher than Facebook

Type of Content: PSAA.  Professional content; Semi-professional content; Amateur content; Advertiser content.

"Enabling" has taken the place of "Sponsored" which took the place of "Advertising".

The vast majority of advertising dollars online or anywhere is spent by Fortune 500 companies.  Therefore, they need to be comfortable advertising on social networking sites and to date they are not.

Social Networks lack context, said Sue Decker of Yahoo!

Women's groups and healthcare sites are very popular subject matters.

BDX-Brand Duration Exposure

Social Media Metrics: Traffic, Ad Engagement, Sales Impact. 

It is not easy for Brands to step into a social space. 

Finishing up a great week here at ThePort.  We definitely have momentum at our back and numerous deployments in front of us.

Some newspaper companies are finally "getting" social media and now understand the transformative nature it can have on their industry.  Our good friends at Lee Enterprises fit that bill.  They were just in for a visit and we have some great stuff about to launch with them.  I am a firm believer that newspaper companies have many valuable assets that can be dramatically leveraged in the digital world.  At some point, the discussion will shift from a focus on the decline of print circulation and the loss of big print advertising revenues to the newly constructed digital business model with which many newspaper companies are reinventing themselves.  A key issue is figuring out when that shift will occur.  We are clearly not there yet, but maybe the time is not that far away.

Next week I head to NYC for Advertising 2.0 and a whole host of meeting with publishers and investors.  June is a great time to be in New York and I look forward to a fun, productive trip.

A continuous flurry of interesting articles on the divergence between company valuations and real money making performance in the social media arena.  I obviously follow this closely as CEO of a leading white-label social media company. 

The Financial Times kicked off this week's discussion with a story entitled, "Web 2.0 fails to produce cash".  Leading venture investors predict a shake-out , but many reserve judgement saying Silicon Valley is usually right and usually early.

Bernard Lunn over at Read/WriteWeb goes into more detail about proposed business models.  His interesting analysis of a walled garden model vs. a utility model gives many consumer facing social media sites and apps creators much to consider.

Being in the social media "infrastructure" or tools business, ThePort has a clearly defined business model that should produce significant cash, recurring revenues, "SaaS" margins and significant room for product innovation.  But a model like this doesn't have the same sex appeal to venture investors as some free models including Automattic, the parent of the free, open source blog publishing system Word Press which has gained huge market share, Ning, the free, self-service social networking platform which too has strong market share and consumer-facing social networking sites.  Now Word Press and Ning may very well be able to convert their millions of users into sustainable revenue streams and walled garden social networking sites may drive extremely high CPM rates at some point off of a large traffic base, but these are interesting home-run bets.  ThePort's business model is more conservative I guess, but very attractive especially at scale.

I plan to write more on this subject in the weeks' ahead and articulate some of the significant opportunities that we see. 

A note from Bob: it is coming on the two-year anniversary when I took my then 15-year old son, Ben, down to Florida to go deep sea fishing in the Gulf of Mexico with my dear friends Dan, Bill and David.  It was quite an experience for all of us and I had to write about it.  It took me almost a year (two sittings exactly) to finish my recollection of this Gilligan-type adventure.  While it might not be the most professional piece I have ever written, I had a good laugh with it and a few beers while waiting for a plane.  Here it is:

A Fish Tale

A faint warning was the only clue: “it might be a little rough when we get into the channel” said our captain, a 46-year Florida transplant well versed in the art of understatement.  His passengers, excluding his semi-seasoned first mate, were hunched together in the backseat, impaling their hands on the metal handrail, sinking deeper into their seat with every corresponding wave pounding, questioning what they were doing in a 24-foot World Cat fishing boat at 4:45 in the morning, pitch black, with 70 miles to go and no relief in sight.

Every once in a while a small grunt was heard from the passengers, like a female tennis player unloading on a forehand.  These grunts usually occurred when one’s spine was condensed because the seas provided little cushion when the twin Yamaha 225, four stroke engines launched our little ship airborne.  The inevitable, “what comes up must come down” applies here, and there were no soft landing, no sea of glass this fateful early morning as we ventured West in search of gold, no I mean goldfish, no, fish that we could turn into gold or gold plated memories or some of all of the above.

The passenger roster included two Cramers, two Gryboskis, and one captain named Howe who lived up to his name telling us the how’s and why’s of fishing strategy, technique and etiquette such as when peeing from the boat it doesn’t really matter if you get most of it outside the boat or on the rail or in the boat, nobody cares; drinking beer at 5am was actually in the sailor’s manual of the US Navy and cured motion sickness, frayed nerves and fear of touching fish or bait; no complaining of any kind was allowed and if evident, one would join to ranks of previous passengers (a particular lawyer and nephew come to mind) who had dared to wish they were home with their Mommas or anywhere else on earth but 76 miles out in the middle of the Gulf, puking their guts out, getting baked by the sun or simply wiped out from reeling in a 45-pound jump-in-the-boat Amberjack.

Our 13-hour pleasure cruise was just three hours old when our Captain throttled back on the controls thereby announcing we had arrived at our first fishing hole.  To this passenger, this water looked identical to the billions of gallons of water we had just passed, naively leading to the question why we were stopping here and not just over there, or for that matter, 25 miles back closer to shore.  But a stop was a stop and that meant no more pounding, and with the sun rising to the east, the water blue and clear, things were looking bright.   However, fisherman optimism quickly turned to cold hard reality: our first casts of the morning yielded a fish that had in fact eaten our bait but on the way up from the bottom of the 200-foot sea had transformed itself into bait and was eaten by a shark.  We caught a mangled, half-eaten fish!  Yippee!  And to make matter worse, for 20 minutes, that is all we caught.  We wondered aloud the words of the late great Doc Gryboski who once had a bad fishing start, “is this a bad omen for the rest of the day?”

The fishing gods however were smiling upon us this Sunday morning.  A few expert moves from our Captain properly positioned us to start reeling in fish the way we expected to.  As the seas calmed and the heat soured,  Captain Howe made sure the entire crew learned the proper reel-in technique.  This passenger learned the hard way, first putting the pole into his ribs instead under his arm.  A 40-pound Red Fish on the line helped correct the poor positioning otherwise I’m sure I would have punctured my anatomy.

The atmosphere on the boat improved dramatically.  Fish were flying into the boat: my son, Ben, hooked a tuna that was neck and neck to either pull Ben overboard or become prized sushi.  For awhile it was a draw, but Ben called for reinforcements and his muscle-bound Dad (me) with his new improved fishing technique backed by Bill, Dan and David and the full power of the boat’s twin, outboard engines were able to apprehend this Starkist can filler and deliver our Charlie the tuna squarely into our hands. 

Oh, by the way, one nearly fatal (slight overstatement) blunder in this exquisitely planned Giligan style, fishing tour was a discernable shortage of Nachos chips.  Can you believe our Captain only bought one stinking bag!   There we were, adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, the sun beating us down, beers, fish remains, probably even urine that didn’t quite make it overboard, hooks flying, an ice cooler of the finest assortment of  dead fish you have ever seen, and we had one stinking bag of chips for 5 tired, sunburnt, starving guys.  It is a good thing we didn’t have a mutiny right there and then.  We could have tied our illustrious captain to the side of the boat and hightailed it back to the closest 7-11 we could find.  There has to be some kind of convenience store somewhere out here in the Gulf, right?

In any event, finally after a dozen more fish—we’d get one on the line and no one wanted to bring it in--our relentless Captain Dan acquiesced and announce it was time to head on in.  No finer words were ever uttered, not the Gettysberg address, not “Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev”, not “one small step for man, one giant step for mankind”,  “Pack it up” was all we needed to hear; hatches were buttoned down (except for the one fishing rod that somehow got loose and flew into the water never to be seen again, but that was just bad luck and I wasn’t really looking and thank goodness it wasn’t MY fault),.  We quickly assume the travel position (that was Captain  Dan and first mate David in the plush, heavily padded drivers’ seats with all the fancy, shamsy equipment and us, the lowly crew, on this tiny bare bench in the back where all bumps were accentuated to drive your spine right into your brain).  Anyway, any physical pain could easily be tolerated with the knowledge we were headed back to dry land, with a cooler filled with fish, fish stories that could be told for years to come, and an experience to be remember. And, I kid you not, we were escorted back to land by a school of dolphins, swimming, jumping and I think just thanking us for coming out.

Good cover story this past Memorial Day weekend in BW on Social Media.  Basically, the BW reporters went back to their original 2005 reporting on this new phenononon, "Blogs", and expanded the scope to include all things social media.  The current article delves into somewhat newer areas like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Wikipedia, but even this is somewhat old thinking.  And, surprise, surprise, just like Fast Company and others, they even gave Ning a free two-page feature (ad) (Marc and Gina are definitely the social media couple of the year).

The article is good for ThePort in many ways,  It talks about how businesses are starting to see Social Media and the need for social media implementation.  Jeff Jarvis, a longtime blogger and former mainstream media member, predicts in three years BW's cover will not be about blogs or tools but about companies as communities.  An interesting concept, and hopefully ThePort will be "powering" many of these dynamic online communities.

   http://www.gpb.org/public/tv/gbr/shows.jsp

EQUAL TIME

Panhandling is a complicated issue. Nobody wants to be harassed or threatened while enjoying time out on the town. But the latest attempt by the Franklin administration for a new panhandling ordinance is unnecessary (we already have strong laws on the books prohibiting aggressive panhandling), unconstitutional and an attempt to divert attention from its failed policy on poverty and homelessness.

 

Despite all the press hype, the Franklin administration has done little to help or improve the lot of Atlanta's most vulnerable people. It has successfully created a sympathetic picture with articles about Mayor Shirley Franklin's father, who struggled with alcoholism and the like. But the administration's practices and policies, if it actually has a real strategy, are harsh, short-sighted and ineffective.

 

(ENLARGE)
Bob Cramer is chairman of the board of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless.
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Shelters such as the one on Milton Avenue are being closed, public housing is being gentrified and the $8 million to $10 million being spent on the highly trumpeted, hugely expensive Gateway project doesn't add nearly enough long-term bed capacity. New housing promised for people forced out of public housing often never materializes. Neither do the replacement beds from shelters closing.

 

Meanwhile, the cost of housing escalates out of reach for many of the 40 percent to 60 percent of Atlanta's homeless population who have full- or part-time jobs. This leads to greater numbers of homeless people using a shrinking pool of available resources, the same resources that are desperately needed by the remaining members of the homeless population who do not work and who face difficult challenges, mentally and physically.

 

In a twisted way, it seems that primary access to these dwindling services is reserved for homeless people who come through the legal system. The attitude seems to be that if you can find a reason to arrest homeless people, you can force a decision between jail or help. Just look at the increased arrests every time a big convention or sporting event comes to town. Look at the establishment of the "Community Court," a special court system just for "quality of life" infractions. Add this new proposed panhandling ordinance to the growing list.

 

The criminalization of poor people has been at work, just under the radar, for a long time in Atlanta. It is sad, morally bankrupt and expensive not only to the city for needless prosecution and jail housing, but more importantly for the people struggling to move forward who are saddled with an unnecessary criminal record. Ironically, most homeless people want help and don't need to be forced into getting it with a heavy hand. They just need to know where to find it and have access to it.

 

Services keep being reduced partially because we keep playing around with the actual number of people who are homeless. City officials seem to go to great lengths to accomplish this. They have conducted seriously flawed "one day" censuses that seriously undercount the homeless. The Pathways intake program that is designed to track homeless people is also a great tool for number manipulation. Like Enron, altering the numbers is the ultimate feel-good, quick-fix approach, but ultimately it prevents us from dealing with reality.

 

If we want to get serious about homelessness, let's make the same commitment to building affordable housing as we do to winning the Super Bowl. Let's be honest with the numbers and not use the court system as a social service agency. Let's impose a small tax when housing gets torn down or new condos go up to help provide services for those who need it. I don't think this will cause unbearable financial hardship on anyone affected, but it might just allow us to do the things necessary so people will not have to beg.

 My daughter, Sara, and I went on a great overnight canoeing trip down the Chestatee River this past weekend.  We camped out, had all of our stuff in the canoe and never stopped eating.  There were six father/daughters in all.  What a great time!!!!!!  More details to come later.

 Sara and Dad