How Blue Jeans Network is profiting from the Bay Bridge closure, and why your startup should too

Krish Ramakrishnan, CEO of Blue Jeans Network, says that startups need to exploit the advantages that only startups have. One of those that's worked well for his company is the ability to be nimble and respond quickly with targeted marketing campaigns when things happen that could help him get his message out.

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The Bay Bridge closure is bad for a lot of people in Silicon Valley — it means an even more intolerable commute than normal as extra traffic floods every other route into San Francisco. Expect a lot of aggravation and blown productivity as people show up late to work.
Yet one savvy startup has found a way to profit from the Bay Bridge construction. Blue Jeans Network, a provider of cloud-based, hardware-neutral video conferencing and collaboration products, is taking the opportunity to up its marketing game. It's deploying extra billboards and teams demonstrating the company's products when the message is most likely to resonate.
That sort of thinking is par for the course for Blue Jeans, which has set itself apart in the often staid and unsexy realm of video conferencing by being really smart, and really quick, about jumping on big breaking news and using it as a vehicle to tell its story.
For example, when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer decided to ban working from home at her company, Blue Jeans responded the very next day with a billboard off 101 saying Mayer should call them, because their product could solve Yahoo's work-from-home problem. That billboard resulted in a write-up in all the major tech pubs, which made Blue Jeans into a national story and gave it noticeable bump in Web traffic.
I sat down with Blue Jeans CEO Krish Ramakrishnan recently about why this kind of guerilla marketing has been a real winner for the company, and why he thinks it's a tactic more startups should take advantage of.
Q: So why do this kind of marketing?
A: We think the market for video conferencing is huge, but our challenge is no one in the world knows we have solved this problem. If you think about it, you can innovate all you want but if nobody hears about it, it doesn't matter. As a venture-backed company, we just don't have the same resources as other companies in the video conferencing space have. We're up against some of the largest companies in the world.