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.

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

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.

Google to Take Over the World by 2015!

Google is clearly on a path of world dominance, not just online dominance. Their ability to collect data and produce relevant information for the entire world is somewhat scary. There is no such thing as privacy anymore, unless you don't go online, but who would do that?

Is Google conspiring with the United States Government...or the CIA? Some think so...



Some of the key factors related to the early success of Google include:

* PageRank algorithm - this ground breaking technology favors pages with a multitude of inbound links and ensures relevance as opposed to spam results.

* Online Advertising - with its PageRank algorithm, in-house advertising intellect, focus on technological innovation and acquisition of DoubleClick, Google dominates the online advertising space

* Management Vision - "any kind of information will be accessible to anybody, controlled by Google itself"

* Innovation - new products, all the time; 20% of employees time dedicated to "pet projects"