LinkedIn expands promotional features for businesses
The online networking site, which more than a year began ago letting companies create their own profiles, last week expanded features within Company Pages that allow businesses to build and sustain their own followings in the professional community.
“It’s some pretty good intelligence,” said Ryan Roslansky, who heads LinkedIn’s Content Products. “It really helps members to have deeper insight and richer business intelligence on these companies.”
Not unlike the microblogging site Twitter, LinkedIn’s Company Pages update individuals about specific businesses of interest. But the depth of content is richer, said Roslansky, noting that posts include company news, employee moves, videos and white papers, among other information. These status updates appear in a follower’s news feed.
“When people are on LinkedIn they’re really in the mode of… how do they become more professional, productive and successful in what they’re doing?” he said. “And in that context we want to give the companies the ability to disseminate information to members.”
Individuals can also get alerts when a company posts job listings, an enhancement that aids in individuals’ career advancement, Roslansky said, noting there are nearly 5 million LinkedIn members employed by small businesses. Businesses pay for that feature but other features in Company Pages are free.
Startup adds Hollywood flare to small business videos
Small businesses have been fast to tap social media platforms like Facebook, but their efforts to provide compelling video about their products and services have fallen short.
That’s the view of L.A.-based entrepreneur and media attorney Sam Rogoway, who is launching Near Networks, a national video service to improve those efforts, while keeping production within the budgets of many local companies.
“We saw this growth in local content and video had not caught up,” said Rogoway, 32. “Given how production costs have dropped, we thought there would be an opportunity to develop not commercials for local business, but real programming.”
Near Networks has developed a system of freelance videographers around the country who are available to shoot documentary-style video on location at restaurants (see video below of L.A.’s Tavern Restaurant), retailers, spas and other small businesses. The footage is then sent to L.A. for editing by a small staff production team.
“They shoot the video in the business after we’ve done a lot of pre-production work,” said Rogoway, noting that on the Internet documentary-style content is more compelling than traditional commercials. “(Businesses) know what to expect.”
Rogoway previously developed TripUp, the first online travel community to feature user-generated videos about destinations, which was sold to Sidestep in 2007.
Entrepreneur Peter Yared: Social is “so over”
– Connie Loizos is a contributor to PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This story originally appeared here. –
Entrepreneur Peter Yared doesn’t mince words. In April, after TechCrunch misreported some of the circumstances around a Facebook employee’s termination, Yared wrote a widely read post titled “Why TechCrunch is Over” in which he called its founder, Michael Arrington, “insane,” adding that it “must be hard to live amidst a rapidly declining site.”
In more recent posts, Yared has called Twitter “primarily a broadcasting platform with very few active users” and unusable for “normal people.” He has also suggested that if he were to start a company today with either entrepreneurs Mark Pincus, Evan Williams, or Mark Zuckerberg, he’d go with Pincus “given what we now know” about Williams and Zuckerberg. (Both have been accused of elbowing their early co-founders out of the picture.)
It’s no surprise then that Yared — who has founded and sold four companies, including to Sun Microsystems, VMWare, and Webtrends — is very fun to chat up. I caught up with Yared recently. Our conversation has been edited for length.
You recently wrote at length about how Twitter could improve the customer experience, as well as make money. The company seemed to only half-kiddingly offer you a job afterward.
(Laughs.) Yeah, they were (very nice to me) for a while there.
Your advice was fairly comprehensive. What did you leave out, if anything?
Google is building cars and a number of other things. However, they are also making a strong attempt to enter the social space…and aside from the rather poor launch of the Google+ I really think they’ve got their concept nailed this time. If this turns out to be true, they have a strong chance at being the next big social media company.
To get the details read this article http://bit.ly/lTJS3l
Shaquille O’Neal’s retirement assists startup
– Connie Loizos is a contributor to PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This story originally appeared here. –
When the manager of basketball star Shaquille O’Neal called Michael Downing one month ago out of the blue, the San Francisco entrepreneur was overcome with elation – and dread.
O’Neal is a savvy social media adopter with nearly 4 million Twitter followers and more than 2 million Facebook fans. He also reads tech press, and he’d noticed a short piece about Downing’s 10-month-old company, Tout. The maker of an iPhone application that will be available on Android phones next month, Tout allows users to film 15-second-long videos, then blast them over Facebook or Twitter accounts, email or SMS with the click of a button.
O’Neal wanted to announce his retirement from the NBA in as immediately impactful a way possible – without first alerting his Boston Celtics teammates. He thought Tout looked ideal, so a call was made. “His manager wanted to let us know he was going to announce his retirement using Tout so we wouldn’t get crushed by the traffic,” said Downing.
Downing quickly offered to make O’Neal an adviser, a role that provides O’Neal with a bit of equity. The six-person company also set about how to improve the service in a hurry. (O’Neal’s camp had reached out just two weeks after Tout’s beta launch.)
Fast forward four weeks and O’Neal’s announcement this week couldn’t have gone better for either party. Downing said 400,000 new visitors flocked to Tout in the hour-and-a-half after O’Neal’s Tout-hosted video was shot out to the social media ecosystem. Perhaps more meaningfully for the company, dozens of media outlets wrote stories in the immediate aftermath, asking: what’s Tout?
Invariably, the attention has also brought comparisons to Twitter, which had a big announcement of its own this week: that photo and videos will soon be directly connected to tweets.
As startups ponder the secondary market, more seem to make private info public
– Mark Boslet is a contributor for PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –
The secondary markets for private company stock may seem like the Wild West, with unstructured valuations and less than ideal information disclosure.
Yet several securities laws apply to transactions now taking place, and the onus falls on companies to follow rules meant to level the playing field, including making some confidential information about their businesses public.
This was the key takeaway of a National Venture Capital Association webcast discussing the recent phenomenon of secondary market trading. The bottom line is this: startups interested in permitting their shares to trade on a platform such as Second Market or SharesPost need to take steps to protect themselves from potential lawsuits.
“I think companies are saying, ‘I do want some information out there so there won’t be disparities of information,’” said Francis Currie, a partner at the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell.
They realize a lot of the selling and buying involves insiders who have the information, Currie said on the webcast. And they fear a sharp fall in the stock price could lead uninformed outsiders who purchased shares to file a lawsuit.
According to Currie, the information most appropriate for disclosure includes a list of material risks facing a company’s business and recent financials, but not projections. The Securities and Exchange Commission hasn’t yet weighed in on the topic, but it’s examining issues associated with secondary market trading, particularly the 500-shareholder threshold that forces private companies to disclose financials and other data. So more clarity could come from the SEC over time.
Tax incentives for moving into blighted areas
– Stephanie Rabiner is a contributor to FindLaw’s Free Enterprise blog. FindLaw is a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –
One of the bigger stories out of San Francisco of late is Twitter’s planned move into the Tenderloin — a blighted area riddled with shuttered restaurants, graffiti, and crumbling facades.
Considering a move into the suburbs, Twitter managed to brokerage a deal with the city wherein it promised to move into the Tenderloin if the city would provide tax breaks.
While the majority of the debate in San Francisco was about gentrification, the fact of the matter is that sometimes, if it cleans up an area and increases safety, gentrification is a good thing.
It can also be good for business.
Twitter is a large company with a decent amount of pull, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t benefit from moving into a blighted area as well.
Cities and states across the country are trying to figure out how to increase economic development in areas that have been hit hard, and many of them are turning to tax incentives.
Mcbride: if we decide on less government than we give less money to the rich! How’s that sound! Vote for those that will most likely give us less government!
PeopleDeals offers its spin on group buying
It appears there’s no end to the number of startups the group-buying space can contain. The latest entrant offering a better mousetrap is PeopleDeals, which allows small and medium-sized businesses to create deals that increase in value the more they’re shared across social networks.
Whereas Groupon-type deals are basically a two-for-one model that doesn’t change, PeopleDeals makes the price cheaper after a certain number of participants share the virtual coupon across social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. To illustrate, a pizza joint could offer an online deal for 50 cents off a slice, then as soon as it’s shared with another person it increases to 60 cents and then to 70 cents after it’s shared five more times, up to a maximum of $1 when 20 or more people share it.
“The key is the business owner decides. At any given time they can make it go from 50 cents to $5, or from 50 cents to 70 cents,” said Darin Myman, the CEO of Red Bank, New Jersey-based social network PeopleString Corporation (PLPE.OB), which launched PeopleDeals last week. “When they (customers) share it with their friends and their friends share it they’re becoming your new social media.”
PeopleString, which Myman said originally raised $500,000 from friends and family when it launched two years ago, began trading on the secondary market in January, which “allowed us to get into the market in a timely fashion.” He added the company now has 1,100 sales reps, a million users and is already profitable.
Myman said PeopleDeals is a more cost-effective way for small businesses to use social coupons, as it charges merchants a subscription fee of $80 a month or $649 a year that lets them run a maximum of 10 deals simultaneously (they are charged more for each additional deal above 10). A typical Groupon deal for a $25 coupon that nets them $50 worth of food, ends up costing the merchant $12.50. Should the deal explode in popularity, the business owner is able to stop it immediately or keep increasing the discount.
“One thing that we capitalize on is the loyal customers spreading your word. Hey look, I go here, help me save more, but you could save more also – it’s a team sport,” said Myman, noting PeopleDeals should be available on Android smartphones at some point this week and eventually on iPhone and BlackBerry devices. “I think we disrupt the industry for both the traditional Valpaks and clipper magazines out there and also the new guys like the Groupons and the Living Socials.”
Just found out about PeopleDeals moments ago, Groupon is not my favorite anymore http://www.peoplestringsignup.net
Dave McClure: SEO still relevant
Dave McClure, venture capitalist and founding partner of the Silicon Valley tech incubator 500 Startups, remains a staunch advocate of search engine optimization and its benefits. He shares some of his thoughts about SEO with Reuters.
Q: Do you think it’s harder for startups to gain traction with SEO now that Google and other browsers seem to be more quality focused? A: People can build a history in three to nine months. It’s not forever. There’s quite a bit of traffic being driven by search and quite a bit of monetization.
Q: Besides technology startups, is SEO important to other small businesses, including those without a deep understanding of tech? A: Absolutely. There’s still a huge amount of traffic that comes from people typing into a search box. The point is, even though social (media) is rising in ascendancy, it’s going to take a long time for (SEO) to become irrelevant. To suggest that SEO is somehow over is basically predicating a future that’s 10 to 20 years out.
Q: What should small companies be doing to help assure success with SEO? A: You should build a great product, no question. There’s plenty of best practices that use anchor texts for links relevant to your site and content. Reach out and link to other people that are relevant sites and ask them to link to you.
Q: What’s changing now in SEO? A: I think there is rising prominence for social signals. I don’t know if they’re more valuable than search; they’re probably equally valuable at least in terms of driving traffic.
Managing elephant-sized social media blunders
Global brand strategist Jonathan Salem Baskin can’t help but scratch his head over the rationale behind the controversial social media dispatch from GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons. The flamboyant CEO sparked a backlash recently when he posted a video link to his elephant shoot in Kenya Zimbabwe.
Baskin offers the following advice on how small businesses can prevent or manage social media blunders.
Q: Are social media posts pertaining to a business owner’s non-business doings relevant to consumers?
A: It is a sideshow. Just because there’s (social) media that helps blur those things doesn’t mean you have to fall for it. YouTube doesn’t care if your employees humiliate themselves. The stupider you are, the happier these platforms are because it creates buzz and traffic. You don’t make any money from that.
Q: What about the old argument that no press is bad press?
A: That’s a cliché quote from 50 years ago. If anything, it’s either at best neutral and at worst it turns people off. Aren’t half the people in America women? The last time I checked — so he’s already writing off half of America with his (prior) stupid shenanigans. Now he wants to write off anybody who loves animals. What is the attention good for?
1. This was not a social media blunder. This was actually a social media success. You need to look at the success of the results: http://wp.me/p1hiro-jn
2. This video was likely faked. You never, ever see an elephant in the whole video: http://wp.me/p1hiro-jt
Selling pickaxes during a gold rush
– Chris Dixon is co-founder of Hunch and founder of Founder Collective, and an investor in many early-stage companies like Skype and Foursquare. Previously he co-founded Siteadvisor, which was acquired by McAfee. This blog originally appeared on cdixon.org. The views expressed are his own. –
There is a saying in the startup world that “you can mine for gold or you can sell pickaxes.”
This is of course an allusion to the California Gold Rush where some of the most successful business people such as Levi Strauss and Samuel Brannan didn’t mine for gold themselves, but instead sold supplies to miners – wheelbarrows, tents, jeans, pickaxes etc. Mining for gold was the more glamorous path but actually turned out, in aggregate, to be a worse return on capital and labor than selling supplies.
When a major new technology trend emerges – say, the rise of online video or social media – entrepreneurs can try to capitalize on the trend by creating a consumer product (mining for gold), or by creating tools to enable consumer products (selling pickaxes).
For most technology trends, the number of successful companies created in gold mining and pickaxes are comparable, yet the gold mining businesses tend to get much more attention. In online video, YouTube is often thought of as the big winner; however, to date, more money has been made in online video by infrastructure suppliers like Akamai. Y-combinator is known for their high-profile B2C startups, but their biggest exits to date have been in infrastructure (most recently Heroku which rode the popularity of Ruby on Rails to an exit of more than $200 million*).
When you start a company, the most important consideration should be working on a product you love (a startup can be a five-plus year endeavor, so if you don’t love it you probably won’t be able to endure the ups and downs). A secondary consideration should be matching the skills of the founders to the market.
Tools companies tend to require stronger technical and sales skills, whereas B2C companies tend to be more about predicting consumer tastes and marketing skills. A final consideration should be the supply-and-demand of startups in the space. Because B2C companies tend to be “sexier” and get more press coverage, many entrepreneurs are drawn to them. This tends to lead to greater competition even though the market opportunities might not justify it.
