But don't even bother if your corporate culture doesn't support it. You can try as hard as you can, you can try to illustrate all of the benefits and do all of this in the funnest (yes, I know that's not a word) way possible, but if your company culture won't support it, then there's no point...
Monday, April 25, 2011
Company Predictive Markets - What's in it for me?
What's in it for me? That is the question that your employees will ask if you try to enforce the use of predictive markets...or quite frankly, any other new tool or resource that will affect their current job responsibilities. The company MUST display the benefits of such a tool. Not only do they need to illustrate the benefits, they must do so in an informative, yet innovative way. People don't like change. But if they can see how it's going to make their job easier and can have a little bit of fun along the way, then it might just work.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Threadless & GamedayPassion
Three years ago as I was sitting on a train reading Inc. magazine on the way to NYC, I came across an article that got my motor running. The article was about a company called Threadless - the article was titled "The Customer is the Company". Crowdsourcing, interesting concept.
Two years prior, a friend of mine started a company called mygamedaytshirt.com and it was focused on creating simple t-shirts with Virginia Tech-themed designs/slogans on them. I loved the idea. Unfortunately he shut the company down about a year after it started. The business model was wrong. He was having to come up with the designs himself. He was focused on selling direct to consumers at tailgates and football games. He didn't have a presence on Facebook or any social media outlets. He wasn't using the power of the internet.
As I sat there reading that article, I knew right then and there that the Threadless business model could and should be applied to his concept. I texted him right away. He replied w/in 5 minutes and said, "wow, what a concept!". That was June 2008. One year later, GamedayPassion was born!
Almost two years later, let's take a look at some of the key challenges that has confronted GamedayPassion as compared to Threadless.
Community
Threadless is a community of artists who want their work to be seen. They are passionate about seeing their designs on t-shirts and about receiving feedback on their artwork.
GamedayPassion is a community of sports fans who are passionate about a particular team. Most are not designers by trade, they simply love their sports team. This has been a challenge for GamedayPassion as the level of innovation and level of creativity has been hindered. To offset that, we have engaged some designers who have helped spark some of the creativity that has led to new designs.
Scalability
After being in business for two years (well almost - two full football seasons anyway), GamedayPassion is still targeted towards one target market, Virginia Tech. One of the key reasons is web scalability and web design. All web design/development has been accomplished in house to date, but I think we're at a point where we need to engage a user experience expert and need some help creating a design that will allow for scalability when adding new schools to the portfolio.
The other main reason we have been hindered by this issue is financial, see next point.
Constraints
My partner and I have been very conscientious about our investment and are both somewhat risk adverse so we have put limited funds into this venture to date. We do realize though that in order to grow, we'll have to put some additional investment into the company. All profits to date have been reinvested.
Other constraints have been time (thanks to this MBA program) and other business applications (we use that wonderful program called MS Excel to manage our finances and inventory). Because of the large volume of business that Threadless has been able to generate and because they have a community of over 500k, they haven't traditionally had any of these issues.
Seasonality
Threadless does not have any issues with seasonality cycles. GamedayPassion, on the other hand, does have some seasonality challenges based on the nature of the sales and marketing strategy. The current target market is on one particular university, but the vast majority of the business is generated is during the football season. We have also done a little bit of marketing during the basketball season as well, but the key focus has been the football season.
I think we have something excellent started at this point and I really enjoy owning this business, but there's a long, long way to go to make it a sustainable and worthwhile business for us!
Check out the site @ www.gamedaypassion.com and of course, make sure you become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
Two years prior, a friend of mine started a company called mygamedaytshirt.com and it was focused on creating simple t-shirts with Virginia Tech-themed designs/slogans on them. I loved the idea. Unfortunately he shut the company down about a year after it started. The business model was wrong. He was having to come up with the designs himself. He was focused on selling direct to consumers at tailgates and football games. He didn't have a presence on Facebook or any social media outlets. He wasn't using the power of the internet.
As I sat there reading that article, I knew right then and there that the Threadless business model could and should be applied to his concept. I texted him right away. He replied w/in 5 minutes and said, "wow, what a concept!". That was June 2008. One year later, GamedayPassion was born!
Almost two years later, let's take a look at some of the key challenges that has confronted GamedayPassion as compared to Threadless.
Community
Threadless is a community of artists who want their work to be seen. They are passionate about seeing their designs on t-shirts and about receiving feedback on their artwork.
GamedayPassion is a community of sports fans who are passionate about a particular team. Most are not designers by trade, they simply love their sports team. This has been a challenge for GamedayPassion as the level of innovation and level of creativity has been hindered. To offset that, we have engaged some designers who have helped spark some of the creativity that has led to new designs.
Scalability
After being in business for two years (well almost - two full football seasons anyway), GamedayPassion is still targeted towards one target market, Virginia Tech. One of the key reasons is web scalability and web design. All web design/development has been accomplished in house to date, but I think we're at a point where we need to engage a user experience expert and need some help creating a design that will allow for scalability when adding new schools to the portfolio.
The other main reason we have been hindered by this issue is financial, see next point.
Constraints
My partner and I have been very conscientious about our investment and are both somewhat risk adverse so we have put limited funds into this venture to date. We do realize though that in order to grow, we'll have to put some additional investment into the company. All profits to date have been reinvested.
Other constraints have been time (thanks to this MBA program) and other business applications (we use that wonderful program called MS Excel to manage our finances and inventory). Because of the large volume of business that Threadless has been able to generate and because they have a community of over 500k, they haven't traditionally had any of these issues.
Seasonality
Threadless does not have any issues with seasonality cycles. GamedayPassion, on the other hand, does have some seasonality challenges based on the nature of the sales and marketing strategy. The current target market is on one particular university, but the vast majority of the business is generated is during the football season. We have also done a little bit of marketing during the basketball season as well, but the key focus has been the football season.
I think we have something excellent started at this point and I really enjoy owning this business, but there's a long, long way to go to make it a sustainable and worthwhile business for us!
Check out the site @ www.gamedaypassion.com and of course, make sure you become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
LinkedIn Got Me a Job!
LinkedIn has done an exceptional job keeping its user base from switching to other Professional Networking Services (PNS). Switching costs from a users perspective has been one of the single most important reasons that users have not jumped ship. Users have built up a huge network of professional contacts and if he/she were to leave LinkedIn, they would be forced to build that network from scratch again.
What must LinkedIn continue to focus on in the future?
Quasi-open Platform
Keep the network closed from a user's perspective to capitalize on the high switching costs. Open up the platform to developers to further enable monetization of the site and allow developers to create innovative (but non-privacy threatening) features to keep the user base interested and plugged in to LinkedIn.
Stay w/in the Professional Networking Space, Don't Go Social
Personally, I have my personal life and I have my professional life. I like to keep them separate. I have Facebook for my personal life and I have LinkedIn for my professional networking, I'd like to keep it that way. There is no gray area for me. That being said, I do realize that the youthful trends are bringing these two areas closer and closer.
Global Expansion
I'm not sure LinkedIn has even scratched the surface here. China is a huge market - LinkedIn needs to identify a way to tailor the site to meet the needs of Chinese professionals and scale the site accordingly. A key focus on BRIC countries should be given considerable attention as well, but only after obtaining a full understanding of the marketplace and understanding how business professionals interact in those cultures.
Mobile
This is a no brainer. Life is consumed by our mobile devices and business professionals are busier than ever these days. Going mobile and making that a key focus area is a necessity in today's business.
Recruitment Enablement
Through the use of LinkedIn, I was able to secure a job offer simply by reaching out to the SVP of HR of the company that I was interested in. I "connected" to her, sent her a personal note asking for the name/contact info of who I needed to follow up with, and eventually landed a job offer because of my resourcefulness...thanks to the power of LinkedIn. LinkedIn should continue to seek out and develop innovative practices to forge very close relationships with corporate entities to understand their needs. Eventually, I could see companies using LinkedIn as an integrated source for company job postings on company websites.
What must LinkedIn continue to focus on in the future?
Quasi-open Platform
Keep the network closed from a user's perspective to capitalize on the high switching costs. Open up the platform to developers to further enable monetization of the site and allow developers to create innovative (but non-privacy threatening) features to keep the user base interested and plugged in to LinkedIn.
Stay w/in the Professional Networking Space, Don't Go Social
Personally, I have my personal life and I have my professional life. I like to keep them separate. I have Facebook for my personal life and I have LinkedIn for my professional networking, I'd like to keep it that way. There is no gray area for me. That being said, I do realize that the youthful trends are bringing these two areas closer and closer.
Global Expansion
I'm not sure LinkedIn has even scratched the surface here. China is a huge market - LinkedIn needs to identify a way to tailor the site to meet the needs of Chinese professionals and scale the site accordingly. A key focus on BRIC countries should be given considerable attention as well, but only after obtaining a full understanding of the marketplace and understanding how business professionals interact in those cultures.
Mobile
This is a no brainer. Life is consumed by our mobile devices and business professionals are busier than ever these days. Going mobile and making that a key focus area is a necessity in today's business.
Recruitment Enablement
Through the use of LinkedIn, I was able to secure a job offer simply by reaching out to the SVP of HR of the company that I was interested in. I "connected" to her, sent her a personal note asking for the name/contact info of who I needed to follow up with, and eventually landed a job offer because of my resourcefulness...thanks to the power of LinkedIn. LinkedIn should continue to seek out and develop innovative practices to forge very close relationships with corporate entities to understand their needs. Eventually, I could see companies using LinkedIn as an integrated source for company job postings on company websites.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Wikipedia - Keeping the Vandals Out
Sorry, I couldn't resist posting this picture. This is a great example of the difficulty of "keeping the vandals" out of Wikipedia. As with any user-generated platform, there are significant challenges with not only ensuring the content is accurate and relevant, but ensuring that the content is clean and in good taste as well.
As indicated in the caption of the picture, Wikipedia has processes and procedures in place to ensure that graphics and article in poor taste such as the one above never get posted to the site.
Accurate, relevant articles are posted to Wikipedia because those who post the articles are typically passionate about the subject they are posting about. Most users would not go out of their way to post an article about something they do not care for. Additionally, the more and more folks that are on the 'network', the more accurate the article will become because of Wikipedia's edit functionality. Because the site is open-source and anybody can edit the articles, there are of course going to be instances where inaccurate data/articles are posted; those that are inaccurate are definitely in the minority.
As indicated in the caption of the picture, Wikipedia has processes and procedures in place to ensure that graphics and article in poor taste such as the one above never get posted to the site.
Accurate, relevant articles are posted to Wikipedia because those who post the articles are typically passionate about the subject they are posting about. Most users would not go out of their way to post an article about something they do not care for. Additionally, the more and more folks that are on the 'network', the more accurate the article will become because of Wikipedia's edit functionality. Because the site is open-source and anybody can edit the articles, there are of course going to be instances where inaccurate data/articles are posted; those that are inaccurate are definitely in the minority.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Social Media...Embrace it, Don't Block It
United Airlines lost an estimated $100 million because of a customer service blunder.
Facebook's launch of the "News Feed" led to a customer protest which led to a group of student protesters creating a Facebook group of over 750,000 users in a week.
Sony lost billions of dollars in class-action suits when they decided to place copy protection (XCP) on its CDs to prevent pirating. They tried to deny and block bloggers from writing about it which led to a huge backlash among customers.
Motrin rec'd a huge backlash from moms on YouTube regarding their International Baby Wearing Week campaign.
Twitter user Astrospace deleted his/her account after flipping out on its Twitter base...the account was quickly snatched up by somebody else and the fan base was quickly lost.
The morale of the story...embrace social media, create a strategy around social media marketing efforts and show the world what your company is all about. If there are negative postings about your company, use that as a way to turn a negative into a positive.
Facebook's launch of the "News Feed" led to a customer protest which led to a group of student protesters creating a Facebook group of over 750,000 users in a week.
Sony lost billions of dollars in class-action suits when they decided to place copy protection (XCP) on its CDs to prevent pirating. They tried to deny and block bloggers from writing about it which led to a huge backlash among customers.
Motrin rec'd a huge backlash from moms on YouTube regarding their International Baby Wearing Week campaign.
Twitter user Astrospace deleted his/her account after flipping out on its Twitter base...the account was quickly snatched up by somebody else and the fan base was quickly lost.
The morale of the story...embrace social media, create a strategy around social media marketing efforts and show the world what your company is all about. If there are negative postings about your company, use that as a way to turn a negative into a positive.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Pop-up App Store in San Francisco
An interesting article considering our debate a couple of weeks ago re: bricks-and-mortar vs bricks-and-clicks.
http://www.inc.com/howard-greenstein/a-pop-up-app-store-in-san-francisco.html
http://www.inc.com/howard-greenstein/a-pop-up-app-store-in-san-francisco.html
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Will Hulu change the way we watch tv forever?
So here it is the year 2011 and I have only logged on to the Hulu website once before today. Why? For starters, this MBA thing has kind of consumed all of my time for the past 3 years (not to mention my day job and 3 kids). My problem is simple, that thing called time. The only thing I watch on TV these days is sports and an occasional tv show at 11pm or so...and I just watch whatever happens to be on at that time.
A stat that I thought was truly amazing from the case..."while the average American web user spent about ten minutes a day viewing online video, they watched live television for about 300 minutes."
300 minutes a day? Excuse my french, but who in the hell has time to watch 5 hours of tv a day?!?! I need their job.
But what is Hulu's value proposition and why should I care? Hulu's mission is to "help users find and enjoy the world's premium, professionally produced content when, where and how they want it." Let me add one point to that mission (even though price should not be a part of their mission)...they are doing all of this while making it FREE to the user. There is your value proposition to the user. All of this original, professionally produced content is being delivered to the user absolutely FREE of charge. Of course, Hulu has since added a "Hulu Plus" option to provide this content to you on a variety of devices for $7.95/month, but at some point in time, I wouldn't be surprised to see Hulu Plus become free as well.
How does Hulu differ from traditional broadcast and cable operators? Did I mention this content is delivered to the consumer FREE? There ya go, there is one of your differentiating factors. Hulu also provides mechanisms to increase personalization options to increase the user experience. Hulu allows users to "manage their viewing experience, for instance by maintaining a video queue and adding videos to it for future viewing, by participating in Hulu's discussion boards and rating and reviewing videos, and by sharing interests with other users."
In my opinion, this "TV Everywhere" creation developed by Comcast and Time Warner will compete somewhat with Hulu, but the difference...this service is not FREE. You must be a subscriber in order to get this content.
Here's an interesting debate...many households now forego land line service for telephones in favor of cell phones; will the same be said for households foregoing traditional tv's (and cable service for that matter) in favor of internet tv? Only time will tell, stay tuned...
Yes Dennis Leary, I'm adding this entertaining commercial to my bliggity blog, just for you.
A stat that I thought was truly amazing from the case..."while the average American web user spent about ten minutes a day viewing online video, they watched live television for about 300 minutes."
300 minutes a day? Excuse my french, but who in the hell has time to watch 5 hours of tv a day?!?! I need their job.
But what is Hulu's value proposition and why should I care? Hulu's mission is to "help users find and enjoy the world's premium, professionally produced content when, where and how they want it." Let me add one point to that mission (even though price should not be a part of their mission)...they are doing all of this while making it FREE to the user. There is your value proposition to the user. All of this original, professionally produced content is being delivered to the user absolutely FREE of charge. Of course, Hulu has since added a "Hulu Plus" option to provide this content to you on a variety of devices for $7.95/month, but at some point in time, I wouldn't be surprised to see Hulu Plus become free as well.
How does Hulu differ from traditional broadcast and cable operators? Did I mention this content is delivered to the consumer FREE? There ya go, there is one of your differentiating factors. Hulu also provides mechanisms to increase personalization options to increase the user experience. Hulu allows users to "manage their viewing experience, for instance by maintaining a video queue and adding videos to it for future viewing, by participating in Hulu's discussion boards and rating and reviewing videos, and by sharing interests with other users."
In my opinion, this "TV Everywhere" creation developed by Comcast and Time Warner will compete somewhat with Hulu, but the difference...this service is not FREE. You must be a subscriber in order to get this content.
Here's an interesting debate...many households now forego land line service for telephones in favor of cell phones; will the same be said for households foregoing traditional tv's (and cable service for that matter) in favor of internet tv? Only time will tell, stay tuned...
Yes Dennis Leary, I'm adding this entertaining commercial to my bliggity blog, just for you.
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