Time for a Break from Social Media. A {growtoon}.
Jul 6th
Join the growtoonists each Friday for a humorous take on marketing, social media, and current business events.
Kacy Maxwell is a guy who loves his work, family and a good challenge. See more of his cartoons at EverythingIsMedia.com.
Marketing – The biggest hurdle to start-up success?
Jul 5th
Living in a town that has a large university, a vibrant entrepreneurial community, and one of America’s national laboratories, I have lots of opportunities to meet people with big ideas. Here is how the conversation usually goes:
ME: I love your idea but it is really going to depend on an ability to scale quickly.
NEW BUSINESS HOPEFUL (NBH): Oh, that’s easy. We’ll just add more servers.
ME: No … I mean how are you going to get lots of people from all across the country to use your service?
NBH: Oh that won’t be a problem. This is such a cool idea that everybody will want it.
… And it usually goes downhill from there.
I am absolutely amazed at how many great entrepreneurs have no marketing plan, no budget for marketing, not even a clue that they NEED marketing.
And it’s a shame because I LOVE helping people with a good idea, a vision, and passion. But all the passion in the world is not going to make you a dime without some notion of how you are going to market your product.
This is not a problem contained to my local community. I find it everywhere I go. Last year at SXSW I did not meet one single start-up with a decent marketing plan. With a few notable exceptions, most economic development organizations and chambers struggle to provide meaningful, consistent marketing support for new business owners.
My friend, mentor, and teacher Peter Drucker famously said that a company is only marketing and innovation … everything else is overhead. That is an extreme way to make an important point. Without customers, you are nothing.
I spend a lot of time mentoring new business owners because I firmly believe this is what makes the economy tick. There is no shortage of ideas. Capital is tight but not impossible to find. But how do these companies access the marketing expertise they need to be successful?
Chronic marketing problems for entrepreneurs:
- They often don’t even know they have a problem.
- They know they have a marketing problem but don’t have the budget to address it because it has all been spent on prototypes
- They are bootstrapping and working two jobs so even if they know they have a problem they are too tired to do anything about it.
- They’re not too tired to learn, but some people just naturally do not “get” marketing.
- There are few reliable, inexpensive methods to get targeted, quality advice … at 2 a.m. when they need it!
It seems to me that a national foundation for entrepreneurial marketing could go a long way toward helping worthy start-ups along and the economy right with them. Maybe there is something like this now?
What do you think? Are you helping small businesses succeed? What are some exceptional resources that you recommend?
Why Crowdsourcing is the Future of Content Marketing
Jul 3rd
By {grow} Community Member David Bratvold
The reason I enjoy crowdsourcing so much is because it’s about solving some of the world’s toughest challenges.
One of the most famous applications of this concept is how Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites launched SpaceShip One into orbit to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize. The aim was to build and launch a spacecraft with three people into space twice in two weeks.
So if an online community can help build and launch a rocket, couldn’t it also solve your content marketing challenges?
Crowdsourcing doesn’t just focus on solving problems in the fastest, cheapest way possible. Done right, it drills through the heart of complexity to find the absolute most effective solution.
Imagine a traditional scenario of putting out an RFQ for a new web video or commercial. You interview a handful of agencies, find the one that promises you the right metrics, pay your $200,000 and watch your video air on TV or the web. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t.
Now, here’s the same scenario going through a crowdsourced production company like GeniusRocket, for example. You tell your community the goals you’re trying to achieve and then dozens, maybe hundreds, of workers provide their insights and ideas. Multiple finished products are delivered in steps along the way, for probably $50,000.
While the obvious difference between these processes is cost, that’s not the part that excites me. You are going to get a radically more effective product because literally crowds of engaged people are getting involved, providing feedback, and producing finished content for you.
Think about that difference. Would you rather produce a video that you (or an agency) envisioned? Or would you rather create a video that your target audience told you they wanted and then produced with passion and creative energy? I’ve found that it is quite amazing to see the results you get when you engage your audience during the development of a video, book, blog article, or nearly any form of content.
The irony is that results are generally not only better, but it can be easier to roll out, too. In the case study of Audio-Technica, they received more than 30 unique crowd-sourced concepts before they produced this sharable piece. Watch the crowd-sourced Audio-Technica video here. (Note: you will go deaf):
GeniusRocket’s President Peter LaMotte sums it up well: “It used to be that crowdsourcing was only an alternative for production – a great way to get affordable productions. What’s happening now is companies are merging crowdsourcing with traditional processes. There’s a creative director, validation models to make sure we have input prior to production, and TV & online distribution services.”
Although LaMotte speaks specifically towards video production, the exact same attributes apply to blog creation, book development, or any other forms of content marketing (Want to let the crowd translate your blog? You can!).
What opportunities do you see for crowd-sourcing marketing content?
David Bratvold is a leading expert on the topic of crowdsourcing. David’s company is producing Crowdopolis, scheduled July 19 in Los Angeles, California. Crowdopolis will teach the future of crowdsourcing as it’s impacting content marketing, advertising, and technology.
Has a Facebook Rebellion begun?
Jul 1st
I am amazed at how much Facebook can get away with. And yet, their self-inflicted problems and arrogance have not made a dent in their seemingly inexorbale march toward world social media dominance. Until now.
I often get asked, ”What competitor will unseat Facebook,” and my answer is “Facebook.”
The answer is not so puzzling as it may seem. Facebook is the most pervasive social networking platform, with a whopping 80 percent of the U.S. young folks aged 13-24 owning a profile. And the fastest-growth is occuring internationally and with the demographic over 50!
More important, there is an incredibly high emotional switching cost that a competitor would have to overcome to beat Facebook down. A competitor would not only have to get somebody to switch, it would have to get all their friends and family members to switch too. I recently wrote that it would be easier to change your house than to change your social network!
But are there cracks forming in the Facebook master plan? What can “defeat” Facebook? Only two things, in my opinion, and they are both controlled by Facebook itself — privacy and relevance.
PRIVACY
Facebook has been arrogantly toying with our privacy on an almost weekly basis with nary a peep from the masses. The company has been the subject of a U.S. Congressional investigation, numerous FTC probes, international regulation and regular hack attacks and it has not made a ripple in its growth rate. In fact, the amount of time people spent on Facebook accelerated in 2011.
RELEVANCE
About 15 years ago, I owned stock in Nike. Every teen I knew coveted Nike tennis shoes and the brand expertly nurtured their cool factor. Then one day my son came home from high school wearing leather boots. ”Where are your tennis shoes?” I asked. “Oh, nobody is wearing them any more,” he said. “All my friends are wearing leather shoes.” I immediately sold the stock, which was a very good move at that time.
The point is that the business plan of any brand that depends on the youth movement is this: “Be cool and stay cool.” This is an extraodinarily difficult task. I recently discussed the fact the fact that one of the reasons Google + was flailing around is because it is not on the radar screens of teens. They are a “Tom Hanks” brand when they need to be a “Jay Z” brand. If the cool kids find something hipper than Facebook, a migration will certainly occur.
IS IT TIPPING?
My Spidey Senses are starting to tingle. New research by Reuters showed that a third of Facebook users are bored with the network. In the past few weeks, some of my graduate students have reported that their teens are starting to use Google+. I have never heard that feedback before.
The IPO debacle and subsequent stock price plummet pierced the Facebook shield of invincibility.
And the Internet was warring against Facebook again this week after new features were released that included a “Find Friends Nearby” option to find people around you, and a new requirement making Facebook email addresses a mandatory default setting, another in a long line of changes the company has made without informing users.
MAINSTREAM ATTENTION
And here’s another hint that a Facebook rebellion might be brewing. Mainstream media, which usually covers fluffy stuff like Facebook etiquette and YouTube memes came out with guns blazing after some of these recent incidents. Here are highlights from a segment on NBC’s top-rated “Today Show,” featuring commentators Donny Deutsch, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, and Star Jones.
Deutsch: The whole nature of Facebook is all about connecting and social intimacy. It’s all of a sudden become Big Brother. The whole IPO thing was also damaging. This brand is in trouble for a lot of reasons and is going to come crashing down.
Snyderman: I was in a meeting with several Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists a few weeks ago and they have all stopped using Facebook because they were “spoofed” and their identities were pushed out to other people. They think the privacy issues are so egregious that they have stopped using it. So they no longer will participate and these people are the heart and soul of Silicon Valley. I think it is a very damaged brand.
Jones: Young people signed on to Facebook for connectivity. Now that young people are thinking that their businesss is out on the street, it’s just not cool any more and then that’s it — it’s over if Facebook is not cool any more.
Snyderman: Yes, that’s the issue. Facebook is NOT cool any more.
Deutsch — It’s not even the privacy issue. It’s a tarnished brand. It’s not the privacy issue any more, it’s the “not cool issue.”
Now, these 50-year-old business executives are not necessarily Facebook’s core audience but I thought this exchange was pretty bold.
DOES ANY OF THIS MATTER?
These are anecdotes and data points but does it really represent a shift in momentum away from Facebook? Or, is Facebook so powerful and popular that these issues will just slide off of them like a fried egg on a Teflon skillet?
What are you hearing out there? Are you seeing signs of a meaningful backlash against Facebook?
Illustration: The original source of this is a Getty photograph. I pasted the Zuckerberg picture on there. It is not a real protest sign.
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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