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.
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