Business Power of Social Media cannot be overstated
I was watching a brief “internet marketing” bit suggesting how small businesses were spending too much money (! ?) on social media efforts when they should be focusing on their websites and using social media primarily to drive people to their sites. I winced at this, feeling that the opposite advice is probably better advice. I tell folks to focus on social media and use websites to drive potential customers to …. YOU…. or to Twitter or Facebook or email exchanges where they can interact with the business in the kinds of ways that don’t just make a customer – they make a LOYAL customer. Social media allows people to engage in the most virtuous business cycle – where customers and businesses develop a relationship based on mutual trust, respect, value, and quality.
The internet has always been more about PEOPLE than about TECHNOLOGY, but only recently has it allowed so much vibrant interactivity between many people in simple, fun venues.
Of course as with many pieces of bad advice, there’s is some truth to what the marketing consultant was saying about fretting over your website more than most small businesses do . Small Businesses should work hard to make sure their websites do a good job of serving their customers, converting to sales, and presenting their business in a very positive light.
However, social media is – at long last – the pure intersection of customers with the people at the business and for that reason you can’t overstate how important social media can be to a small business, especially because it’s an incredibly *efficient* way to do what most great and smart small businesses do a lot of – talking to customers.
Don’t agree? Cool, just Twitter me about it, leave a comment here, or email me. It’s an online social cornucopia and no business or idea needs to be left behind anymore.
Mark Cuban’s Stimulus Plan is a good idea
Always enjoy Mark Cuban’s kick-butt prescriptions for economic success. Sure he oversimplifies, but like most successful entrepreneurial folks Cuban understands what a remarkable number of people do NOT understand – innovation drives our economy forward in powerful ways and our current bureaucratic-heavy approaches to the economy too often stifle innovation in business while failing to inspire innovation in Government (which is almost an oxymoron).
I was especially interested in this comment, something I’ve believed for many years:
There are exceptions, but more often than not, the stupidest thing a business of this size can do is borrow money.
Cuban:
Like the administration before it, the current administration seems to have no concept of what it takes to start, run and grow a small business. None. Here is a hint. If you want to see more jobs created by Small Businesses and entrepreneurs REDUCE the amount of paperwork required. Dramatically simplify the tax code. In other words, if you REDUCE THE OVERHEAD of small business, you effectively create capital for them through reduced costs.
Not only do you improve their financial position, but you reduce that great big time suck known as dealing with your accountants and lawyers. The more time wasted with “professional services”, the less time spent doing your job. This seems to be a concept lost on government. One last thing. It appears to be a goal of the administration to free up loans to small businesses. For the sake of this comment, let me re-define Small Business as those companies with fewer than 20 employees. There are exceptions, but more often than not, the stupidest thing a business of this size can do is borrow money. Its stressful enough for a small business in these times to be profitable. Add to that stress the need to repay a loan and success becomes far more difficult. If we want to accelerate the formation and growth of these small businesses we need to first reduce the costs imposed on them by the government (at all levels) and then simplify and reduce the costs of raising capital. Forget government loan guarantees. Make capital gains on investments up to $1mm in small companies tax free. Make this process paperwork free for the small business and a 1 page form for the investor. Thats how we will see economic and job growth in this country..
I’m not convinced paperwork is the key thing to focus on but it is certainly a valid concern. One of the great ironies of our “pretty successful” American experience is the failure of so many to insist on better government accountability with respect to the massive spending. People very correctly are outraged when big business screws up, but often businesses often pay the penalty they should pay for major mistakes: the death penalty. Bailout issues aside for now one of the reasons for the vibrancy of the American economy over some 300+ years has been our somewhat ruthless reliance on the survival of the fittest businesses.
As we move into a new era of much great Government involvement in business, I sure hope we find ways to limit the damage to American’s engines of innovation – small businesseses.
Apple iPad Launches Today. Lowest priced model only $499
The new iPad tablet computer from Apple launched today and I’m going to try to summarize the reviews as they come in – which frankly is a better indication of the quality of the device than if I had one in my own hands…. which I don’t …. However at an iPad Price of only $499 this looks like an amazing device at a great price.
One of the big issues at CES 2010 was the fact that Apple’s Tablet would almost certainly raise the computing bar in terms of expectations for the “robustness” of something that is a cross between a full computer and an e-Reader. To my way of thinking (ie rational computing purchases) good tablets may wind up as e-Reader killers – or at least will force e-readers to become real computers and offer a lot more features than they currently offer.
Why buy a Kindle or Nook when you can have a full computer and internet at your fingertips for only marginally higher cost? At $499 the Apple Tablet “entry level” model is coming in much cheaper than the predicted $1000 price tag – perhaps as part of Apple’s normally brilliant quality and marketing approaches which generally lead to early widespread adoption of devices.
iPad from Apple
Changing the world, one PR firm at a time
The CES 2010 pitches are coming in strong now as John and I get ready to cover the year’s biggest technology event over at Technology Report.
I was so happy today to see one of them signing off saying they were a proud supporter of the Room to Read Project, which is a major effort to work towards world wide literacy and education. Readers of this blog know I’m a huge fan of that kind of project, and one of the reasons I’m very optimistic about the world’s future is that for I think the first time in history it’s become very, very “fashionable” to support global poverty reduction efforts in even the strongest bastions of capitalism (e.g. big time PR firms).
Now, cynics will suggest – correctly to some extent – that part of the motivation when capitalists support charity is to benefit from the positive buzz. However I’m fine with that, and furthermore I’m *glad* to see potential win-win economic relationships develop around charities like this.
Microsoft’s Vision of 2019
Thanks to Long Zheng for this post at his blog “istartedsomething.com” about a couple of Microsoft Videos showcasing the MS vision of gadgets and interactions in the future. The shorter video is neat but it was a sequence in the long one that really, REALLY got my attention. Using surface computing (which is already a robust application), on a transparent wall, two kids in classrooms thousands of miles away from each other were reacting in real time and in *different languages* as their voices were translated instantly for the other student. The technology driving this application is pretty much here now although I think there’d be some challenges making it work as fast as in the video, but this is the kind of stuff that is so provocative, powerful, and cool that it brings a technology teardrop to my eye.
In a world challenged so dramatically by a combination of ignorance and misunderstanding, how much progress could we make with technologies like this that cross connect people and cultures almost seamlessly? Obviously we have a long way to go and this is technology for the rich folks among those in our global family, but as these technologies penetrate into affluent or lucky schools the appeal and testing will continue until we can have much wider distribution.
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090228/microsoft-office-labs-vision-2019-video/
Live from CES Las Vegas CES09 CES 2009
I’m live from the very comfortable Press Lounge at CES Las Vegas where journalists from all over the world are streaming in to cover the world’s largest and most influential Technology Show as well as the largest event of the year here in Las Vegas. At 4pm at “CES Unveiled” several companies will be exhibiting and discussing their technology plans for 2009.
Most of my tech coverage will be over at Technology-Report.com where John will also be writing about CES and new gadgets though he won’t be here until Friday.
DIGG Losing Money Despite Huge Traffic
I was floored to see that DIGG, a key darling of Silicon Valley and arguably one of the key forces that has shaped online social media, is losing a lot of money on abysmal revenues.
These numbers are from Silicon Alley Insider quoting a BusinessWeek article:
- Last year the company lost $2.8 million on $4.8 million of revenue
- In the first three quarters of 2008, Digg lost $4 million on $6.4 million of revenue.
- Digg wanted to sell for $300 million last year, but took funding this fall to set its valuation at $167 million
All this when DIGG sees about 23 million unique visits per month according to QuantCast and some 30 million according to DIGG. Silicon Alley reports that DIGG’s expenses are some 14 million annually and wonders where all that goes. Me too because unlike, say, YouTube I do not think DIGG’s hosting infrastructure would have to be all that massive, and with content from users one has to wonder where the big money goes at DIGG.
More interesting however is that modest revenue number. $4.8 million in revenue on some 250-360 million visits. If we assume only 2.0 page views per visit and 250 million visits over the year DIGG is making about 5 million total on 500 million page views, or just about a penny per page view or $10 CPM.
This is probably overly generous (DIGG says they have 30 million uniques and they probably have more than 2 pageviews per unique). However if true that’s actually a fantastic CPM given that the DIGG audience trends very young and presumably is not the key demographic for most advertisers. Although many prestigious and highly targeted websites tend to charge $30 CPM and up I’m confident that number will decline as advertisers realize how unlikely they are to have positive ROI at that CPM. DIGG appears to be doing better than other youth focused gaming sites where advertising can often run below $1 CPM, in some cases even challenging sites to even break even on server and bandwidth costs.
How low can stocks go? DOW drops to 7997. Panic or just … Palindromic?
Answer: Very low, though I wildly speculate (putting me in the same expert category as any expert you can name) that DOW at 7000 and S&P at 700 will be the bottom of this megabear market, after which we’ll continue to see major trouble with the economy continue for at least 2 years during which many businesses will die, successful ones will consolidate and just keep in the game, and a handful of nimble and clever new businesses will thrive and lead the new “post recession” economy forward, probably based on impressive technological innovations now testing in a handful of big company R&D departments and literally *millions* of small business efforts around the globe.
Thanks to the internet, the rise of highly social media, and the plummeting cost of powerful computing I remain optimistic that technological innovation will pull us out of this crisis and remain for yet another century the key force behind most socioeconomic progress.
What’s pushing things down in stocks? I think the main factor is simply that the market, which is predictive rather than reactive, overvalued how fast technology would trump other considerations and continue to lift mediocre companies ever higher. It’s not as if many companies were doing profoundly brilliant stuff out there – on the contrary the auto companies were up to the same old stupid nonsene they’ve been doing for decades. Financial companies were gambling with Credit Default Swaps and fueling the mortgage crisis with fundamentally irresponsible and misguided profiteering. Even high tech companies, home to many of the globe’s best and brightest working for Yahoo, Intel, [Google?], and MSN found themselves in huge battles to protect market share and profitability while containing the onslaught of online spam. Google may be something of an exception here as their profitability and advertising brilliance has – until recently – kept them squarely above much of the fray and on the path to more innovation.
About eight years ago this foolishness led to the bubble of 1990 where the internet company valuations were out of line with their potential for innovation. The commercial internet revolution was an amazing thing in the 1990s and remains the most profound new development in history, but the companies were not all that inspired and most companies were destroyed by the very markets they had convinced to fund them in the first place.
So a far better question than “why are my stocks dropping?” is “Why were all these companies valued so highly in the first place?” We needed a contraction to square the values with the prices, and now we are watching that happen.
Why 7000 DOW and 700 S&P? At that point the markets will have dropped just over 50% from the highs of a few years ago. I see that as a significant practical and psychological milestone. “half off” is a very accessible notion as we know from retail, and we already know there’s a lot of money waiting on the sidelines to buy into a “market bottom”. It’s reasonable to assume that at least some, and probably many of the companies hammered by this have been penalized irrationally by the broader market downturn. As prices drop to 5 and 10 year lows some of these bargains will be irresistable to those with cash on hand, and this buying should stabilize the market.
Will it rise quickly from 7000? I say no – I think the globalized chickens have largely flown the coop and many of the unfair advantages we have enjoyed as Americans … will be no more. I see no major depression looming and I see the USA as the economic “safe harbor” and leader for at least the next decade, but the days of easy prosperity are probably gone for some time so … buddy …. can you spare …. a dime?
Bill Gates on Zakaria GPS
Fareed Zakaria continues his amazing series of interviews on his CNN GPS show with Bill Gates.
Like Warren Buffett, a close friend of Gates, Gates will give away almost all of his wealth over the next decades via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which focuses on global health and education initiatives.
Gates supports “some” inheritance taxes because we are all beneficiaries of the education and stability provided by the US infrastructure.
His preference for foreign development investment seems to be based on the idea that the need is much greater there, the return on the charity giving is much greater, reducing infant mortality wll *decrease* birth rates [this is a profoundly important observation that is well documented but poorly reported - many think helping the poor tends to increase births when this is false]. They talked about the book “The Bottom BIllion”.
On the future of computing and the Internet:
Shape of computers will change. VIrtual wallpapers, tablet computing.
The whole economy is using software simulation, which makes development less expensive.
China as largest broadband market – probably for the rest of the century. He seemed to think India was unlikely to catch up to China.
——–
He’s focusing more now on how to create visibility for issues like malaria prevention.
When asked how he’d be remembered – as a software pioneer or philanthropist – Gates didn’t answer but I think the answer is increasingly clear. Gates more than any other person has brought a new era of Innovative huge scale development work that could turn back the tidal wave of poverty in our generation. He’s helping to make it not only fashionable, but somewhat obligatory for the rich to pay a lot more attention to those in need.
Bailing out the Bailout?
Like most Americans I’m angry and confused about how suddenly a crisis of economically biblical proportions has suddently lept to the top of the political agenda. This is especially galling because only a month ago the Bush administration was – pretty much to a person – telling us that the economy was in good shape.
It strains my credulity to think they didn’t know the credit problem pot was about to boil over, and in my cynical moments I think they probably just hoped they could stave off the crisis until Jan 2009.
But hey, I’m to blame and so are you and so are the legions of people who watched real estate rise and fall and foolishly assumed that near-catastrophic devaluations in houses of trillions of dollars would not lead to the enormous problems we now face.
Solutions? As tempted as I am to agree with Ron Paul who is basically arguing for no bailout and letting market forces revalue the whole mess, I’m thinking we need to go ahead with a staged bailout where investment of our tax money is tied to measurable successes in terms of the credit markets. If the Paulson plan is the right answer we do not need to spend $700,000,000,000 before we know it’s working. I think Congress should approve some modest amount for Paulson and tie subsequent spending to *immediate* market improvements. I want the banks and others (including individual mortgate holders) who will benefit from the bailout to *make major changes* and *absorb major risks* that it seems the current plan simply passes along to future taxpayers aka “our children”. If I understand Paulson and Bernanke correctly they’d say this type of partial bailout plan won’t do enough to work – that we need to restore corporate confidence to the extent they loosen up credit and re-oil the engine of US economic prosperity. That may be true, but I’m not convinced anybody can reasonably predict how any of this will shake out. Clearly these clever boys totally and miserably failed to predict this problem would happen in the first place, so it’s tempting to apply the “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me” rule and ask for a whole new game with new players.
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