Posts Tagged ‘web 2.0’

Permission is the key

Friday, October 30th, 2009

A viral campaign has a few necessary ingredients to get a viral social success.

One is that it needs to have some value in passing it to my friends. I don’t want to look like I am abusing my friends. I want to be the first one to post the new link and idea. So being cool, or for the social good (like cancer research), will probably get you there.

Then you need permission. Don’t spam or interrupt. Ask permission.

Some smart guy tweeted me this link about 3 successful viral campaigns in social media. 1 & 3 show that permission was important. They all had value to pass on.

I think the asking is an important part. “Please send this to your friends”. Value. Permission.

New Innovation leveraging web2 ideas

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Just listening to Aneesh Chopra (the CTO of US government). He talked about ‘know your farmer’ – so when you buy eggs, you know how local they are.

It made me think of an iphone app that reads bar codes, and helps manage your diet, or gives recipe ideas.

I thought about selling a spare table and chairs I have. I should go put it on the notice board. But what if there was a way I could list it socially, to people in the immediate area.

I am thinking more local, my friends is obvious, how about my building i live in, connect to local people and local businesses
Is there a geo capability in facebook/twitter ? I guess it could be abused though
I am thinking of something around local supply and demand, sort of like local barter. A matching system of local demand and supply.

Do you need a plan for revenue ?

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

After listening to a client of mine, she asserts a few common points :

1. If we build a community, and get traffic to the site, how are we going to make money from it ?

2. The younger people, gen Y, that will come, don’t have money.

I must say, the above are pretty common comments. I am not saying they are wrong, but they seem conservative, and perhaps short sighted. It is easy for corporates to be short sighted, given fiscal year and shareholder challenges.

After listening to Marc Andreessen, it was clear that the big guys, build the community and business model first. They stick to their guns and don’t sell out to revenue. I guess they are trying to tie up the market, and then build revenue once they are self sustainable and big enough barriers to competitors.

I have written other article talks about Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, Seth Godin idea’s about marketing, and web2. It talks about if you get it right, you get unlimited free marketing.

I think if you get the eye balls on your content, then the money follows. Its like if you could get free TV airtime – you don’t ask how do you make money out of free TV spots.

I also have another post about eyeballs.   I quoted Donald Trump:
He does make an interesting point :
“sustainable traffic is THE source of competitive advantage on the web.”

It seems planning for traffic and communites would be sufficient in most cases.

I believe Gen Y are more likely to be single, have more disposable income, and more likely to spend online. I’d say they might be the best target in a lot cases anyway.

path to web2 deployment

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Business won’t invest in something they don’t understand. So why would they invest in web2, if they are currently doing a poor job of web2.

There is a huge gap in understanding of web2 capabilities and tools.

There is really no use talking about web2, without making to relevent to business.

A current client and I are working together, to better understand relevance of web2 for their business.

So far our business strategy is going to use web2 to:
– leverage existing assets
– those assets are : your projects, your current users,  your volunteers, any marketing efforts, including offline and google adbuys
– web2 is going to be the big bucket to catch all the interest we generate. instead of catching individual drips in our hands, we are going to use a big bucket.

So a large part of the strategy is to engage more visitors, and do something with the warm leads. If they aren’t ready to buy, lets offer other avenues to stay in touch.

now what we do with the interest we collect in the web2 bucket
– think of it like having a big paddle to swirl the water in the bucket, to generate more activity in there
– the ideas are limitless in web2, as to what tools to use, and what can be achieved
– you need to first dream the dream

So bringing it back to leveraging existing business, and capturing more value, brings the relevance back to business.

web2 and relevance to current businesses

Friday, September 25th, 2009

Had dinner with a friend and her CEO.

The idea was to discuss web 2.0

Now the CEO was only vaguely interested, and she noted her board was less interested.

Their current site is a poor web 1 site , about 8 pages, most of the good content crammed onto 1 page (so poor SEO).

They do bi yearly PDF newsletter.

They aren’t a mega organisation.

The value of web2 to them, is difficult. I came down to a few reasons :

1. it needs to fit your company. web1 fits traditional business with large budgets for marketing and media buys

2. web2 fits better where you have time to grow, and community fits better

They keep asking on how they control the whole web2, and how they sell to the web2 people.

So I guess they want the web2 traffic, and just abuse them the old and traditional methods.

The marketing manager, my friend, started to get on board. I don’t think the CEO gives 2 hoots.

We also discussed how web2 dis intermediates a lot of groups , including:

– ad agencies
– media buys
– web site builders, and content maintainers
– marketers in general

the idea is you get closer to your customer, spend more of your focus on your customers, and less time/money/effort on marketing/advertising/interupting.

I guess long term, its about building trust, respect and value, as opposed to spending money and abusing.

This article has similar ideas acidlabs

getting ideas to spread – an intro to Seth Godin

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

Seth is someone you ought to listen to.

Here is an easy and fun to watch video as an intro to his ideas.

This video introduces you to:
– old companies sell average products to average people, and use a lot of TV advertising. Seth says this is dead
– we are in an economy of idea spreading, or idea diffusion. Make something remarkable, and get WOM (word of mouth) to spread the idea
– be remarkable. Good or very good isn’t enough – be remarkable

Seth is listed in the top 50 business thinkers, runs a blog, and authored a lot of books.

You will find Seth slowly moves you along in your ability to innovate.

He has a quality that slowly convinces you of news ways to think/look/understand Before you know it, you will be innovating too.

My Take

Idea Diffusion for me brings together a few concepts:
– Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point – talks about different sorts of people – connector/maven/salesman. Whilst Seth doesn’t differentiate between these types of people, he still makes the point – ‘telling the right person, and hopefully that person will tell/convince their friends’.
– word of mouth (WOM) advertising is a cheap and effective marketing strategy – when done well. Seth says – be remarkable – you will get WOM.
– web 2.0 and social networking on the internet has changed a lot of people’s lives. This can be explained similarly to WOM and idea diffusion.

I like the juncture between remarkable, WOM marketing, web 2.0 communities, and an ecommerce site. If you can get this happening, then you have unlimited free marketing. You have also dramaticly reduce your costs, as you no longer pay for advertising, or sales or channel commissions. You effectively disintermediate all sales/marketing costs from your business, and have unlimited scaling of your marketing for free.