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?
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.
How to market your company with 5 simple videos
– Jon Hyatt is a 22-year-old producer/director based out of Boston, Massuchusetts. This article originally appeared on Under30CEO. The views expressed are his own. –
Regardless of what type of company you have, or what type of product you’re selling, there are always online videos that can be used to up your marketing and sales.
“Every company can affordably increase marketing and sales with the help of online videos,” said producer/director Jon Hyatt, who is most recently filmed a Boston-based reality show called “Making Moves“. “Nowadays more companies are starting to see the advantage to having online videos right on their website or Facebook pages.”
Now, of course each company would want certain style video(s) catered to what they sell or who they are, but there are certain style videos that can be used to help any company. Let’s take a look at Hyatt’s list of videos companies can use to raise marketing and or sales:
Commercial
Most companies, especially smaller ones think a commercial is too expensive for them. I mean, you first need to hire someone who will come in and do the commercial but then normally you’d need to buy up air time on all the local television networks and that all adds up. Now more and more companies are seeing the advantage of social media, and online presence. You can showcase your commercial right on your website, or even your Facebook page. If you don’t have a Facebook page yet, I suggest you get one.
Bio Video
Ex-Googlers seek traffic for how-to video startup
The Web is full of user-generated video, but for Sanjay Raman’s tastes most of it is too bland and poorly produced to actually watch.
That’s why Raman launched Howcast (http://www.howcast.com) – a high-quality, how-to video-sharing website – last year with former Google colleagues Jason Liebman and Dan Blackman.
While at Google the three Howcast co-founders noticed how popular do-it-yourself content was, but how little of it was in video format.
“How-to content is something that is really popular in terms of user search queries,” said Raman, who left his job as product manager for Google Apps to launch their startup nearly 18 months ago. “As video was really exploding online we saw the opportunity to marry those two concepts together.”
Unlike other DIY sites that predominate search engines, such as About, eHow, Expert Village, Videojug and 5min, Howcast utilizes a more entertaining and humorous approach. Some of its most-popular videos are less practical and more tongue-in-cheek in nature, such as “How to find out a girl’s name after you’ve slept with her” and “How to grow grass in someone’s keyboard.”
“We try to take the format of a how-to and make it more exciting and engaging than it would normally be,” said Raman.
In order to boost its video content, Howcast pays filmmakers, mostly students, between $50-100 to produce videos for them.
Assuming to begin with that the hunger for how-to videos is sufficient to be monetizable, I think its safe to say that the market will have to weed out a few of the players here. Thus success over the other video sites that can do the same thing seems to rest with their differentiation. It seems like this differentiation is the quality of videos and entertainment value of the videos–so they have to be able to establish some sort of loyalty from the most creative and talented video producers. Given the immense competition in this area, it seems like this is an exceptionally difficult goal. Furthermore, this seems like a differentiation that is more aligned with some sort of entertainment video site–say one focused exclusively on comedy or drama–than one that ostensibly has a practical “how-to” purpose. Perhaps a focus on making it easy to learn and teach through the site would be more strategically aligned than making the videos funny and in claymation.
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