Welcome to the home of Jesse Wilson. I'm a Master's candidate at USC, a Product & Marketing Specialist at Spark Networks, and a technology addict.
Josh Spector is Senior VP of Content and Marketing for Comedy.com. His start-up, whipitoutcomedy.com, was getting so much action that development executives began using his blog as a talent search site. Eventually Comedy.com bought the site and took Josh with it.
I asked how a start-up could afford such a premium one-word domain name, and I was surprised to hear that it may be more of a detriment to the site than a boon. Josh informed us that domain names should include the terms your target audience are searching for. “Funny videos” is searched for 75 times more than “comedy” so Josh’s advice about domain names is to think about the way people say things, be specific and niche, and don’t count on domains to save your site.
Curtis Jewell is President & CEO for MyCypher Inc. He just graduated from APOC in 2008 and created a global social media site dedicated to the Hip Hop community. The website is very clean and well set up, and I love the promo video on the front page. Curtis’s tip for start-ups is to stay niche (also Karen’s mantra) but think big, and to follow your passion and nurture the passion in others.
Ben Gigli is an APOC ’07 grad. He gets 300-500k viewers a month on his start-up 5secondfilms.com. His advice for start-ups is to go where the community already exists and figure out what they’re going to like. Connect with people where the dialogue already exists, and engage bloggers and social networks while abiding by their unspoken community rules. You can tap into games the natural community likes to play so they’ll start playing with you when you inspire them. According to Karen Ben is a genius with side projects and his web stats and advice certainly back up her claim.
Sean Stevens graduated with Ben in ’07. He’s a pro web developer and has created multiple niche websites, including wheresmytaco.com, hotgirlsandexplosions.com, and a local music website in North Carolina. He argues that it’s better to have a smaller community site than a giant site. His main position right now is with JDate, though I’m not fully clear on his role at that site.
Other notes I found interesting this class included: Don’t build your business on a platform you can’t ultimately control. Use simple customizable message board software. Karen thinks building a site just to flip it is a bad idea that’s probably going to fail, and the best way to get bought out is to build something that doesn’t need to get sold. Take advantage of an opportunity in which big companies are wasting money. We also briefly discussed namechk.com and getsatisfaction.com.
CouchSurfing is an international non-profit organization that has been connecting travelers with locals since 2004. Since then over a million people have met through the site, to share hospitality and cultural understanding.
The benefits of using the site are obvious for the “surfers,” or travelers. They get to stay for free while they travel and save a bundle of money they would have spent on hotels, probably more than $100 a night. They also get to experience much more of the local environment than your average tourist because the hosts show them the best attractions and nightlife. And the hosts usually have local friends who also help immerse the traveler in “the real Hollywood,” or whatever city they’re in.
The hosts’ benefits are a little harder to explain, so I’ll start with the obvious downsides. Most people would not want to be a host because it could put your home and personal safety at risk; after all, hosts usually let surfers into their home who they’ve never met in person. It is an inconvenience having a guest sleep over because you have to worry about door locking schedules, kitchen and common area messes, and quiet hours. The traveler has to use your shower and sometimes even eat your food. On top of all this the surfer doesn’t pay you a dime for your troubles.
Hosting, however, has been a rewarding experience for me. I love to host my local friends after a night of clubbing in Hollywood because I live within walking distance of the clubs, and I think I make a great host. I can’t explain why, but I feel great when I help my friends have a great night, make sure they’re fed and hydrated, and give them a safe and free place to crash. I don’t expect anything in return and don’t really receive anything in return.
Hosting travelers gives me a similar feeling. I know I’m helping the travelers maximize enjoyment and minimize expense, allowing them to travel longer and experience more than they would without my help. I also get to experience some culture they bring with them, view the same old Hollywood from the awe-struck eyes of the traveler, and, in my most recent experience, receive a fancy bottle of Scotch straight from the distillery.
Even to myself I find it difficult to explain my motivation for jeopardizing my property and safety on behalf of a stranger, but I find company in a quote by Adam Smith’s book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”
From January 22nd through the 24th, I had the pleasure of hosting Kim de Jong of Amsterdam. She has been a host before and had great reviews so I figured I could trust her in my home. She was traveling alone which made me feel a little more in control of the situation and less afraid for my property and safety. And just like on any review website, CS members don’t want to wreck their track record of positive reviews by doing something shady, so after a few email exchanges I figured I could trust her.
Kim flew from Europe to LAX and cabbed it to my apartment. Even after being up for more than 35 hours straight she had the energy to go clubbing with my friends and me on Friday night. We hit up My House and H.Wood with 4 of my friends, skipping lines and getting in free, saving us a combined $240 between the two clubs. She did return the favor by buying a couple rounds of drinks which are as much as $18 a piece.
Kim spent Saturday exploring Hollywood Blvd by herself, an easy walk from my apartment. Then Saturday night I introduced her to nine of my friends and we had a great time skipping the line and buying a table at Mi-6. None of us had been there before and we were all very impressed and had a great time.
Kim headed out Monday morning for San Diego and is still traveling in California today, almost a month later. We exchanged positive reviews on CS, which makes us both likely to get more activity on the site in the future. I learned as much as I could about life in Amsterdam and the differences in government and culture. Kim works as a Financial Analyst for a well known tech manufacturer, which, for some reason, allows her to travel a lot. In fact she has 24 countries listed in the Locations Traveled section on her CS profile.
I thoroughly enjoyed my experience and look forward to hosting travelers again in the near future. I also hope my positive reviews will earn me some credibility for the time I decide to travel and take advantage of CS host hospitality. I recommend making an account and exploring the site; and if you have it in you, I recommend hosting a traveler yourself.
http://www.couchsurfing.org/register.html
Research is the key ingredient in social media marketing. When deciding if and how to invest in social media marketing my company must first investigate where our consumers are conversing and participating. Out of thousands of thriving social platforms on the web, my job is to determine which ones my consumers are most engaged in and influenced by. This can be done effectively by searching for and reading posts, particularly by “influencers,” across multiple channels. For one, I can set up syndication on Google Reader to gather all recent blog and social news posts that mention my industry, brand or competitors, and then follow the discussion and gauge its influence. Similarly I can search Twitter and Facebook updates and follow their outbound links. It’s also important to study our competitors’ social media focus and speculate on their effectiveness.
I need to determine how to engage my consumers where they already converse. Bryan Wiener’s Playbook suggests that consumers will no longer tolerate being advertised at. Instead we must join the conversation where it already exists. He also demonstrates a big opportunity in harnessing consumer-generated media, where he says 20% of consumers’ time is spent and less than 3% of marketing budgets are spent. There seems to be a huge market opportunity there so I should seek out the influencers who generate media related to my industry and open a dialog with them about creating content for my company, mentioning my company in a subsequent video or app, and possibly consulting for or joining my company as an analyst or advertiser.
If my brand or industry is heavily conversation-worthy and a proper outlet does not already exist, I can consider creating the space for a new community within our own domain. I can install a forum for my core group of customers to publish valuable content for free. I can start a blog with useful information and resources my customers are after. Or I can provide a creative space for socializing and collaboration.
While Wiener argues that the greatest struggle in developing a successful online community is selecting the platform and method of engagement, Owyang suggests that growing the community is the real challenge. In his experience successful growth occurs when the members take leadership, then ownership, and eventually become caretakers. To do this the “host” of the community must involve the early members and treat them as special guests. The host should individually contact creators and influencers leading the charge at other social spaces and empower or reward them with special membership and public recognition. The community should be encouraged to share stories, problems or successes while I’m out recruiting new members with other marketing tools like email newsletters, newsfeeds, podcasts and blogs.
Ultimately, according to Mashable’s Brian Solis, the community will need to inspire transformation, improvement and adaptation from the inside out. Early on I can envision how my company might accomplish such outward influence and wireframe my site and social profiles to enable it. With the US social media audience reaching 122 million, I think the question is not whether to participate in online communities, but where and how to engage with our current and future customers.
In early 2009 a very large portion of my day was consumed by checking Facebook for wall posts, private messages, event invites, friend requests, and photo tags. I had a huge group of friends and frequently hosted parties with 100 people or more so I felt obligated to stay on top of it.
I went out searching for a desktop application to run Facebook so I didn’t have to constantly navigate my browser to the home page. I figured I’d probably save more than an hour a day if I could just be alerted when something happened instead.
The best I could find was the Facebook Toolbar. At the time it was very buggy and only gave me info that I didn’t care about, like how many group invitations and app recommendations I had. On top of that it only updated its numbers about once every 10 minutes, and that delay alone was a deal-breaker.
Soon Fishbowl was released, running on Microsoft’s Silverlight platform. I was thrilled at the thought that I no longer needed my browser to use Facebook and even more excited about an attractive new interface. I imagined the desktop app becoming a huge hit until I used it a bit and realized how much it was lacking. It used a ton of RAM, had very quirky window navigation and controls, and lacked much of what I needed from Facebook, like the ability to view and create events. It was fun to impress my friends with a Facebook toy they’d never seen but aside from that I abandoned it immedately.
Then in April Facebook developed its own desktop application called Facebook For Adobe Air (note that it requires Adobe Air to be installed first). I liked that this app was much less resource intensive than fishbowl and could sit beside my browser window as a tall slender bar on the side of my screen. At some point I changed my monitor resolution temporarily, which moved the Air window out of view. When I restored my resolution I could not get FB for Air to appear again. It was still running but there was no way to get it into view, even after uninstalling and reinstalling it and Adobe Air itself. So much for that.
Then just a week ago Microsoft released a beta development of the new Microsoft Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook (note it requires that Silverlight 4 Beta be installed first). The first thing you’ll notice is a brand new, dark and sexy interface. It doesn’t look like Facebook at all, and that’s exciting. It’s simple, fast and fun to explore. It finally lists upcoming events, though viewing the event still requires a browser window to be opened. When you’re reading a conversation in the inbox you can see the person’s lifestream in the right hand pane. It allows you to quickly scroll way back into wall post histories; actually I’m very impressed by this. It seems to be aggregating stories much faster than Facebook itself does in a browser. And it has a cool photo album explorer.
But it still lacks support for my mouse’s back button and keyboard shortcuts, its scrolling lags like it always has in IE, it doesn’t support apps, and its photo viewer doesn’t wow me as much as Cooliris. On top of that it’s using as much as 320 MB of RAM in Windows Vista.
While I do appreciate that MS is presenting the same old FB pictures and stories in a unique new way to bring some excitement back into the experience, I don’t think I’ll be using this desktop client for much other than novelty when showing it off to friends.
Fortunately the new Facebook App for the iPhone finally, as of a couple weeks ago, pushes notifications so I now know exactly when Facebook needs me.
Hi, I’m Jesse Wilson, a master’s candidate at USC studying online communities and entrepreneurship. I’m fascinated by technology, social media, and internet products. In this blog I discuss books, classes, websites and companies that I find interesting. I welcome you to contact me or comment on any of my posts. Thanks for your visit!
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