Archive for October, 2008

Some Start-up's Die

It’s a shame that it had to end this way, but all start-ups are not created equal. Wil Schroter, in his book, discusses the concept of building backwards and looking at how your business and technology will generate profit in the very early planning stages. I agree with that 100 percent – it costs money to keep the lights on and stay fed. But so may start up’s with great ideas miss this boat. Some developers approach ideas under the guise of “We just want to see if we can develop something really cool. It’s not about money.” Unfortunately, all too often, that attitude results in those same words being inscribed on those same start up’s tombstone months later. Blog Rush’s Obituary My friend and fellow blogger Mike Figliuolo turned me on to Blogrush during a lunch meeting earlier this year. It was a neat concept that would crawl the classify and content of your blog and deliver your feed on other relevant blogs via a sidebar widget. The benefit to individual bloggers was automated exposure to other potentially interested readers, based on a point system rooted in viral spread of the widgets (thus Mike’s introduction of Blogrush to me). Sadly, I received this email message today: After careful consideration, we have decided to shutdown the BlogRush service. If you have the widget code on your blog you will need to remove it. When BlogRush launched in late-2007 it spread like wildfire all over the Web. Thousands of bloggers were talking about it and the service exploded to become one of the fastest growing free services in the history of the Web. During the first year of the service it successfully served 3.4 Billion blog post headlines and the BlogRush widget could be found on blogs all over the world; [...]

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Niche Networks Encourage Long Tail User Engagment

First – a sincere apology to all my readers for the silence in the past month. Some changes in my personal life and really fortunate times for my company have kept me pretty busy and away from delivering new content to ChasingChange. I’ll be working to keep updates as regular as possible. Thanks for your patience! And now for the fun stuff… How many of you have heard the buzz term “lurker” or “stalker”. Social media blogger, Shel Israel, has a very interesting perspective on this topic, offering his concept of “The Amplification Factor“. Rather than using the term lurker, Shel calls these users “listeners”. I dig that – it’s much friendlier. Whatever you choose to call them, these users tend to observe dialog, and rarely make the jump to participate. But wearing my agency hat, here’s my issue with this audience – if my objective as a marketer is to modify the behavior of target audiences, it seems that this lack of engagement from the listeners would result in my messages missing the mark or not resulting in any subsequent action. Right? But can MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn – all boasting millions of profiles – really provide metrics on user engagement? As a marketer, will reaching an audience of less engaged users on behemoth networks still get me the maximum return on my SMM budget dollars? Hmmm… Enter the Niche Networks In the past six months, I’ve been paying close attention to this evolving trend developing in the web 2.0 arena. While the market place is still heavily dominated by the giants, there has been an influx of smaller, more targeted networks that are gaining significant traction in terms of engagement. These networks deliver value in terms of specific functionality aligned with a robust social platform. For the purpose [...]

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