How to make social media marketing

Almost every successful brand that’s gained traction, has either consciously, or perhaps coincidentally, operated with two target groups in mind. The first, the primary target group, is the aspirational group, who I refer to as "magnets." They're the ones attracting others to wherever they are. The second group I call "takers," and they're the ones being attracted. The important revenue stream comes from the takers, but with no magnets, there will be no takers. Let's define the terms more vividly. Say you drive past the newest, most happening nightclub in town. On any given evening you will see a line of people outside, all patiently waiting to be let in. You would naturally assume from this that the venue is packed. Those you see in the line are the takers. Surprisingly, if you look more closely at the venue, you’ll see that it’s not that full. There are, however, a number of groups sitting around tables, talking, drinking, tapping their toes, and swaying to the beat. These are the magnets--or at least that’s what the nightclub would have us believe. Talking not long ago with a high-rolling nightclub operator in New York City provided me with a keener insight into this idea. He explained that it’s a fine balance between magnets and takers that creates the right kind of buzz. Celebrities aside, clubs have other criteria by which they measure social cachet. There’s gender, height, personal networks, fashion, hairstyle, and even followers. The people on the door carefully control the particular milieu that the club aspires to. They are well schooled in the art of knowing who to admit, or not admit. These gatekeepers are offered significant bonuses to get the mix right. Too many magnets with not enough takers means too many complimentary drinks and not enough purchases. Too many takers, and the nightclub loses its allure, and the stream of guests being drawn in will have moved on to the next hot venue. Obviously the ins and outs of this are more complex. Companies of the future will not only work with magnets and takers; they’ll also have to operate with two distinct deadlines: official and unofficial. The first time I became aware of the importance of operating with two different campaign release dates was when I was working with the Morgensons family as part of a $3 million research study for my latest book Brandwashed. The experiment was inspired by the Hollywood movie The Joneses, in which a fake family was tasked with promoting products to friends and neighbors. We decided to create an identical scenario, with one important difference--this time it was for real. One of the key learnings that emerged from this experiment was the notion that a product needs to be "seeded" into the market long before the official release date. This allows magnets to spread the word and generate the hype, before the takers, well, take over. The experiment taught us that such seeding seems to create the momentum needed before the official release. We learned that seeding should often take place several months--typically nine--before the official release. Since social media has become a key ingredient in every marketing campaign, the importance of including aspirational target groups in every new brand release is likely to become the norm. The fact is that in future, no brand will be able to successfully operate with only one target group. Instead, there must be a conscious division of target groups into magnets and takers, in order to be strategically viable. This will encourage a new discipline among senior management--they will be forced to learn patience. Every executive expects (or should I say, hopes) that on the day their new brand is released, there’ll be thousands of customers waiting outside the doors, desperate to buy their product. A bit like what goes on at the Apple stores. Behind the scenes, brands will be carefully crafting a two-tier release plan many months ahead of the official release.

The most profitable tech company

The 100 companies on our annual list are all posting impressive results
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/b2fastestgrowing/2007/full_list/index.html

10 predictions for Web Trends 2012

10 predictions for 2012 from Roger McNamee and Mike Maples, two leading US VCs. You will see that they make this prediction with only 50% confidence, which I think was lower confidence than all bar one of their other predictions.
#1 HiperWeb
http://www.chimehosting.com/moonalice/TechInvestingHypotheses.pdf

Forrester CEO George Colony was perhaps the most interesting one I saw at Le Web last week. He had two big points to make:
Web service/application architectures will shift to more local processing and storage. This is a natural result of the fact that processor and storage technologies are improving faster than networks.
Social networks are so well penetrated now that there is little room to grow – that includes penetration into the population and hours spent per day by the active users.

I want to focus on the second of these today. Both have been bouncing round my mind since I saw the presentation on Thursday, but I think the second is more topical. Firstly it was the subject of debate on Fred Wilson’s Avc.com from yesterday, and secondly it is more pertinent to the activity of most of the readers of this blog – as entrepreneurs, investors and consumers.

My first reaction to the argument that social is close to saturation point made sense to me, and most of the people I spoke to about it at the conference afterwards agreed. The reasoning is logical and comes from research Forrester conducted research with over 1m US consumers which found that ‘social is running out of hours and people’. Taking the hours piece first – people are spending more time on social than they are volunteering, praying, emailing and using telephones, and more than they are exercising, and only a little bit less than shopping and childcare. His argument is that people simply don’t have much more time to give to social. The second piece of the argument is that at around 80% in the developed world social is already so well penetrated that growth can’t come from adding new users either.

Colony’s conclusion from this is not that social will go away, but that the next generation of social apps will be about doing things more efficiently and saving time. That contrasts with many of the current crop of social apps where the use case is often killing time.

Fred Wilson posted the video below yesterday and invited debate in the comments of his post. Many commenters were simply outright critical of Colony, but several drew the distinction between social as an app, which might be peaking, and social as a platform, which is only just getting started, and this I think probably hits the nail on the head. Applications are where people spend time, platforms are where things happen. There might not be much time left in the day for all of us to spend much more time in social apps, but we can all increase our engagement with social by using the platform components more – that means hitting more like buttons, sharing more generally, connecting more sites to Facebook and Twitter, and using social more to help discover online content and interact with the brands and companies we love.


Nic Brisbourne is a partner at DFJ Esprit view
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmtw7s_nic-brisbourne-defends-london-s-entrepreneurial-honor_tech

There is double dip predicted by John Connor

Slipping into a double-dip recession. Economic crisis seems to be like W, how it was predicted by

John Connor http://futurerating.blogspot.com/2011/01/forecast-on-second-decade-of-21-century.html


John Connor summarized the saga with rating agencies, which have been named the chief evil to the world economy. And he shows how will develop global economy in 2012

Bernard Lietaer. How to save the financial system

Conventional Approach to Fund a Social or Environmental Project
- designed by Bernard Lietaer

Conventional means includes among others paying all labor required at market rates for all the relevant work.
The purpose of the system is to encourage green and healthy activities, beautify the neighborhood, and generally improve the quality of life in the neighborhood. The starting point was a survey with the question: What would be most desirable to the local resident population. The answer, particularly for the inhabitants of the apartment buildings, was to have access to a few square meters of land for gardening, for growing vegetables and flowers. The city provides access to the land: An old factory site that had been demolished and the land was left untended, plots of land that are waiting for building permits, a back part of a park, even the center of a large traffic roundabout. The land is made available for rent on a month to month basis.

Local NGO's whose mission is in alignment with that intention would also be invited to get involved.

There are two types of national currency flows that would be necessary. The first one is direct: subsidies or city projects paid out from tax income (or through debt, but that would involve over time the same amount of tax income, plus interest, only in a delayed way). The second channel is through non-profits activities.

More detail about new idea of Bernard Lietaer (euros architect) see on
http://vsocial.livejournal.com/139198.html

Peter Thiel initiated technology fund

The Thiel Foundation will award 20 young people cash grants of $100,000 to further their innovative scientific and technical ideas.

http://futurerating.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-peter-thiel-initiative.html

Rating of disruptive technology ideas will be done by Future Europe Association.

TOP 10 of disruptive technology

1. Mobile in general (Geolocation in particular)
By 2012, smartphone shipments are expected to exceed the sum of desktop and notebook PCs, according to Morgan Stanley research. Mobile payment platform – the most important technology for future
2. Real-time data connectedness. This is secret weapon of Google and other company which take control over many sites, marketing platforms and social networks
3. Clean energy including water purification. Future scarcity of water makes a demand of water purification technology with simultaneous production of energy
4. Discount E-commerce
Members-only retail site offering collective discounts, like Groupon, which reached $1 billion in revenue in three years, versus six years for Google
5. SaaS and the ‘cloud’
6. Internet and mobile social network
7. 3d home video
8. Trading software
9. Online interactive games
10. 5G and LTE

Vision about early venture investment

Here's some highlights of the different strategies among these seed- to early-stage investors.

Dave McClure of 500 Startups: Strategy - "diversified." The fund looks to make up to 100 investments in a year, with the understanding that "most" companies will fail (as they typically do across the board). Not surprisingly, Dave has little time to spend with each company. Dave will look to invest about $50,000 to $100,000 to prove out a startup's thesis and reach milestones. He'll do follow-on rounds with companies that are hitting those miletsones. Dave focuses more on M&A exits, as opposed to big billion-dollar exits. To this end, he's not as worried about being diluted by later-stage funds getting in on the deals. He believes many founders will be inclined to sell their company for $25 million more often than not.

Jed Katz of Javelin Venture Partners: Strategy - "traditional." Javelin invests in about six deals a year, committing anywhere between $200,000 and $2 million. Javelin will only do seed investments if he and his partners are certain they will follow on with a Series A round. Unlike 500 Startups, Javelin's team spends "a lot" of time with their founders.

Manu Kumar of K-9 Ventures: Strategy - "selective." Manu makes four to five investments a year, and commits anywhere between $100,000 and $200,000. He's looking for home-runs. Because Manu is looking for big wins, he also doesn't invest in any company that's valued at $5 million.

Thomas Korte of AngelPad: Strategy - "incubator." The group invests in 40 companies a year and is always the first money in. Entrepreneurs spend three months with AngelPad. Those entering the program receive $20,000 from AngelPad and $100,000 from two un-named VCs who've backed AngelPad.
http://vator.tv/news/2011-11-02-which-early-stage-startup-strategy-is-the-best