peHUB » Highway 12 Turns Onto The Information Superhighway

Mark Solon, a general partner at Highway 12 Ventures in Boise, Idaho, sums up his firm’s social networking strategy in one sentence.

“If you’re not on Facebook, Twitter and all the other social networking sites, communicating with your investors and entrepreneurs, then you’re going to be left behind,” he says.

Such was the reason why on April 5, Highway 12 launched a blog on its website for Solon and his fellow GPs to regularly post their musings. Solon partly attributes the firm’s start of a blog to the hiring last year of Tac Anderson as an EIR. Anderson previously led social media activities at Hewlett-Packard. Solon also says that the firm launched the site to communicate directly with the VC community, who he says have been showing increased interest in Highway 12’s coverage area of the Rocky Mountain region.

“A day doesn’t go by that I don’t get a resume from Silicon Valley, Seattle or other tech center as more people pay attention to the Rocky Mountains,” he says.

Highway 12 might be new to blogging, but it’s not new to VC. The firm was launched in 2001 and is currently investing from a $75 million fund raised in 2006.

In the first few days that the blog was live, Solon says that the website had more than 1,200 unique visitors, “which is more than we’ve had in the last few years.”