Like many of you, I read so much nonsense these days about social media that I have a hard time filtering what makes a real difference to the discussion. Sometimes (more rare than not these days) you come across something that makes you go, “Ya, that is smart and moves the discussion along.”
I came across this exact thing today. Alan Wolk, a good friend of KickApps, wrote this today on his blog: http://tangerinetoad.blogspot.com/2009/07/dont-suck.html. It’s a great way of looking at social media for brands.
For KickApps, not sucking is a BIG deal for our brand. I think you’ll agree that we all take a lot of pride in our work, whether that’s on the technical side of things, customer service, sales, KickDeveloper, etc., and one of our differentiators is that we as a company, and a brand, are known for this. There are countless occasions that we can point to where we have gone the extra mile for our customers and treated them the way we wish we were treated. This makes all the difference in creating a brand in this era of the social web that doesn’t suck.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
The end of the Web 2.0 advertising myth
From @bmorrissey
For a long time, I was reminded of The Graduate whenever I met with an eager, undeniably smart and ambitious Silicon Valley founder. After he explained the consumer value the Web 2.0 service created, I’d ask the business model question. Instead of whispering “plastics,” it was “advertising.”
This unflinching belief in advertising as the catchall monetization tool came out of the strange Valley culture, which I’ve found just as inward-focused as the more-maligned East Coast media industry. The VCs, analysts and entrepreneurs all bought into this idea that if you build a large enough audience, you have a media business. Not quite. On one level, I understood this line of thought. Unless you have scale, you don’t have a business anyway, so focus on scale. But it led to a nearly comical belief that the process of actually making money was quite easy, like turning on a spigot. Dave Karnstadt, the Efficient Frontier CEO, spent six months as an executive in residence at Redpoint Ventures. He told me a disturbing number of companies he met with pointed to AdSense as their revenue model. What many companies are finding is even if they build to what they find what they think is scale, it’s not enough.
This is the great unraveling of this Web 2.0 advertising myth. As Wenda Harris Millard said, “There’s not enough advertising to go around.” The Times has a story about how iMeem and other music services have recognized the economics of ad-supported music aren’t there. News Corp's Jon Miller had some interesting things to say at All Things D about how even a behemoth like MySpace needs to diversify its revenues. On a much smaller scale, Om Malik rolled out a subscription service for his GigaOm network of content sites.
Like other unravellings (not a word), this is going to get messy. This is the year these venture-backed startups will have to figure out their business models, and it couldn’t come at a worse time. Web 2.0 companies will come to realize that building a media business is hard work, not just matter of amassing millions of eyeballs. Many services built are communications platforms that don’t perform well on a direct response basis. That means relying on scarce brand dollars. And the process of selling brand advertising is painful and requires a totally different skill set and culture than these tech companies possess. The upside is the next generation of startups will most likely focus on their business models earlier – and be a little more creative than using advertising as a cure-all.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
ClearSpring Now Sees What Half of the Internet is Doing (API Coming Soon)
ClearSpring Now Sees What Half of the Internet is Doing (API Coming Soon)
This article was picked up by The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/05/27/27readwriteweb-clearspring-now-sees-what-half-of-the-inter-13220.html
Shared via AddThis
This article was picked up by The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/05/27/27readwriteweb-clearspring-now-sees-what-half-of-the-inter-13220.html
Shared via AddThis
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
