We can only beat the big guys with focus. It has to be so small the big guys don’t care. Big guys rarely buy big businesses anyway, especially not in the tech or web scene. They want it to fit tightly into their portfolio. We ought put all our eggs in a tiny basket. In this way we wont get short short of resources, both human and financial.
When we do this in startup land, we have a chance of winning.
The internet is a bit like dogs. Life moves a bit more quickly. Which is why I still laugh whenever I hear that the latest hit website is going to be the dominate force forever in that that category. As Facebook is currently being touted to be, then I love to remind the pundit just a little bit about the history of the internet.
Yahoo was search. it was game set and match, then came Google.
Myspace was social networking – it had won, apparently…
Blackbery had stitched up the hand held internet enabled smart phone market…
Geocites was the way we’d all have our own websites… then came blogging
All of which remind us how things can change ever so quickly on the intenert. This wont change, because the barriers to entry are so low. $5 an hour in India for a coder, $9.99 for a domain, $Free internet access and a wifi enabled laptop for a few hundred dollars and you’re an internet entrepreneur. Unlike TV and tradtional media outlets, anyone can play. Creativity wins, not financial resources.
The insight is that the forums people hang out in will always change, like disco’s and pubs (the web is social) – it’s also kinda Punk. Our job isn’t to predict which is the next big thing, but to learn how to use them quickly so that we can participate in a timely manner.
I’m currently working on a project with a social enterprise called Abbotsford Biscuits. Which I am proud to be involved with.
Abbotsford Biscuits is a social enterprise that had its genesis back in 2005. It exists to employ people who have been excluded from mainstream training and employment. Abbotsford Biscuits has an ambitious vision of becoming a self sustainable social business over a 3 year period. And I’ve been called in to help make it so. My part will be getting the company involved in digital media and getting people like you (those who care about stuff because it’s worth doing) involved.
First – how good is this tag line:
Second: I’m aiming on for some crowd sourced strategy ideas to supplement what I already have planned. So I’d love some input in the comments.
The current plan includes the following ideas:
But it’s an open book, which could make this project a lot of fun. I’d love some input.
Here’s a couple of pics I took while on premise recently, they look like twitter biscuits!
The word expert gets thrown around lot. Everyone’s an expert these days, especially in the technology and media arena. My view on expertise:
Without implementation expertise is just an idea, and ideas are omnipresent.
I was recently invited to Social Media Club Melbourne to appear on a panel with Scott Kilmartin of Haul and Sahil Merchant of Magnation. The topic was Building Brand Buzz.
The three of us were generally aligned on our thoughts, with varied executions using social media tools given the differences in our businesses. I’m a big fan of Magnation, but there was one area in which Sahil and I disagreed, and that was that he preferred to control the output of social media. His contention was that he wanted a single voice to represent the brand personality. On the surface this sounds reasonable, even rational, but even a week later I really think it goes against what it is all about and here’s why:
The voice of a brand is the collective actions of all of it’s representatives. Not the CEO, the marketing director or the advertising they put in the market. Just ask anyone about their opinion of banks in Australia. It has nothing to do with the voice banks project, and more to do with the customer interactions. The voice is what the people hear & experience on a personal level, not what the brand stewards say.
Social media can’t be controlled. So why try? There is nothing worse than limiting the voice of your people. They will talk anyway. They’ll share links, write about your brand and talk about it on line and off. They will have real interactions with customers, and if what the authorised voice says (Sahil in this case) doesn’t match the reality of the brand in action, then it all sounds contrived and is useless anyway. It’s more likely to have meaning and be authentic if its the word of the people, not the king. So let your people participate. Give them their own Magnation twitter account, a sub brand of sorts. Be a collective. Be real.
Create culture, don’t control output. It’s an errant assumption to believe you know better than your people do. It’s often not the case. What we need to do is educate our people on what we want to be as brand, the persona. Give them some guidance and let them represent us, make mistakes and be human. People love dealing with companies who have a human voice and mistakes are part of the human.
Trust creates value. I find it curious that companies trust their employees with the key’s to the building and the cash register and not their voices. It’s best to approach it like a parent does with a teenager. Give a bit, let them prove themselves and then loosen the lead a bit more. Trusted people usually over deliver to expectations. People who are shut out usually react in the opposite. In social media context we need to trust the average human outcome, rather than block all for fear of a single bad outcome.
The key point to me is, if you want a controlled voice, then social media isn’t the right vehicle for a brand. More traditional media would be more suitable. The word social is the giveaway here, because social implies conversation, not lecturing or monologue. All our people should be part of the conversation if we want to create real value.
Humans are compelled to count. We count everything. Days, weeks, months, years, birthdays, money in the bank, salary levels, years of experience. It’s part of the human condition, maybe it helped us evolve to a civilised existence .
As startup entrepreneurs we need to let our people count something. Whether it’s the savings they made or they friends they have, there needs to be a way for them to keep track. So our people know they have made progress. Commerce is an anthropological game of football. So we must keep score. But it must go beyond the corporate scoreboard of profit, share price, turnover, number of employees… it has to be an audience focused score. Like followers on twitter. It has to be about them, not us, it’s how humans roll.