August 16th, 2012 § Comments Off on big exits are not for the common people § permalink
This article made me think, that as a young entrepreneur, one has to realize that the big exits that are presented as success, actually require a very specific state of mind, which most of normal people would never submit themselves to.
Yes, if you are a startup entrepreneur and you hope for a billion dollar exit, chances are it’s not going to be smooth like Instagram’s, but convoluted like Facebook‘s, and you’ll have to piss off and disappoint a lot of people on the way.
Was the Social Media Tech IPO Boom a Big Scam? Billion-dollar cash-outs at Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. Abysmal stock performance. Tweet Jake Rajs / Getty Images Over the last year-and-a-half, several of the most prominent social media companies in the country have sold shares to investors in high-profile initial public offerings.
via: business.time.com
Are you sure you want to do it? I’m not.
August 15th, 2012 § § permalink
Tim Berners-Lee: The World Wide Web
I was curious about the total pageviews of the web. It turns out they are not really tracked anywhere, and that they are easy to estimate, so I did a quick analysis.
First I found two sources for ‘global total pageviews’:
- Akamai Net Usage Index – amazing real time dashboard of part of this data. They say that every minute 3 million pageviews are spent on news sites, and 10 million on social sites. That’s friggin’ a lot of pageviews! But I wanted to know the grand total, and hopefully get some sense on where the blogs are in the picture.
- blog post about interpolating this data from Alexa. Nice approach, but a few years old data, so I decided to repeat the process.
Alexa publishes pageviews for every site for free as a % of global pageviews. First thing to do was estimate the grand total, as described in that blog post, by looking at the published data from Wikipedia.
11,600,000,000 / 0.5% = 2320,000,000,000 monthly total pageviews on the Web
… told you it was easy 🙂 but that just means we can dig deeper. Alexa publishes the list of top million sites in a downloadable text file, so I wrote a script to go trough it, scrape Alexa pages for top 10.000 sites and store their individual traffic shares.
» Read the rest of this entry «
May 18th, 2012 § Comments Off on Everything you need to know about digital marketing for your business § permalink
Dashboard 1 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Lot’s of entrepreneurs are struggling with marketing these days. in fact, I hear that marketing and user acquisition is the single largest bottleneck for new startups.
This is truly remarkable step-by-step how-to guide for kickstarting your online marketing. understanding this is bare minimum that every person should know and understand. if you hire a consultant, make sure you know all this, so that you can asses if (s)he knows more.
If I were a business person looking to understand how to use various digital channel making tools to build up my business, where would I start? What’s the right mix of tools to make this all make sense and work?
via: www.chrisbrogan.com
April 9th, 2012 § § permalink
Theme of Carmen's influence over Jose from Bizet's Carmen. Created in Lilypond using the G. Schirmer vocal score from 1895. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
interesting article, with one key point: “your klout score might not be accurate measure of pure influence, but it does show if you are socializing your influence” – and by focusing on it, klout is training us all to be more social online.
of course the real reason why ‘socializing influence’ is being popularized, is because it helps the brands and merchants sell more trough their evangelists.
but at the same time, as a collateral damage, i believe making us more social is a significant and positive contribution of several web services these days – they are making us into different, hopefully better, humans of the future.
It’s fashionable to feign indifference to your Klout score, which measures online influence. Some professionals think it’s uncool to seem too interested in their rankings; others believe all you need to worry about is creating good content.
via: www.forbes.com
April 7th, 2012 § Comments Off on time for “Push PR” § permalink
An Empire of Silly Statistics…A Fake War for Public Relations (Photo credit: Marquette University)
Ernest is entirely right – PR companies just don’t get the fact, that we don’t care what they think should interest us – that’s what it means being ‘independent’:
www.ernestbarbaric.com
At some point in the last year or so, someone pegged me as an influential blogger… and then it started. A constant and never-ceasing stream of daily e-mails from various PR companies mindlessly clogging up my inbox.
It does not, however, mean that PR is dead – there clearly is a need for ‘public relations’. the need is actually much larger than it ever was, on both sides –
corporate communications as much as on the receiving end – bloggers have to be current and informed, just like journalists had to be.
I believe the solution is in making PR more pushy.
As a writer, I expect the right content to come to me, I don’t want to seek it out. In that sense, I expect it to be pushy, but also highly targeted and personalized. Just like it used to be, back in the days when there was roughly as much PR professionals as there were journalists, and the two crowds well managed eachother.
as the new media grew, keeping up with targeting became impossible, and now they rely on ‘curated’ lists of thousands of bloggers, they never really looked at. I believe that’s where we at
Zemanta make a huge difference – I often link PR messages from my posts, because they are recommended to me exactly when I’m writing about the topics they adress, so they actually provide value to me – I would never go look for them otherwise.
Pushy is not spammy, if done right. But there is no way you can do PR right without help from algorithms these days.
April 6th, 2012 § Comments Off on multi-channel marketing and bad infographics § permalink
we all like infographics, because they make data and information value central, and then use visual storytelling rather than fancy words. in this act of replacing word compositions, with incredibly stronger visual compositions, we perform two actions:
- reduce the message to it’s core. this is always a combination of ‘extended puncline’ and ‘the context’.
- amplify the core
as infographics are becoming massively popular, the consequences of performing the first action badly are becoming a problem. it usually happens when the creator of the infographic is biased. here’s a very simple and benign case:
I find that a lot of people involved with social media tend to get into discussions about which platform is better with the ultimate goal of eliminating of one platforms they are discussing. This happens often with the Facebook and Google+ debate, with the goal of eliminating Facebook and totally defecting to Google+ or vice versa.
via: anisesmithmarketing.com
good marketing is always multi-channel, with the message adapted to specifics of each channel. yes, you should always do Facebook and Blogging, and probably a few others as well.
the original author of the infographic has noble goal though – to her the blog is the hub of your online life, a point I very much agree with, and a great argument to invest in it. but saying no to all other channels is just madness.
March 26th, 2012 § Comments Off on Is Social Media Strategy Required or Redundant? § permalink
Funny argument going on here:
I don’t have a problem with Guy Kawasaki. I enjoy his books. His track record in business is substantial. We have friends in common. But on the subject of social media strategy, we disagree in every possible way. Last month, Guy was interviewed (that happens a lot) in Inc.
via: www.convinceandconvert.com
I think ‘strategy’ here actually means “I am serious about my content marketing“, and nothing else. And yes, more people should accept that they have to be serious about their content, as it is the only thing that represents them out there these days.
March 12th, 2012 § Comments Off on The Internet: It’s like Real Life, Only With Buttons § permalink
Image via Wikipedia
the article is actually about SEO and designing buttons, so not really what i was hoping for, but i really love the title:
Every time I read about social media these days, I end up hearing about how social sharing metrics are becoming a bigger factor in everything from organic rankings to driving additional clicks from visitors already on your site. And it makes total sense.
via: searchengineland.com
… it expresses without hesitation the promise of the web, and what it actually is striving for – reinvent and emulate everything that makes us humans. just think of all the catchy buzzwords flying around past two decades: shopping, socializing, mobility, expression, gaming… it almost reads like titles of books on philosophical anthropology at the beginning of 20th century: homo faber, homo ludens, homo creator, homo socius… (full list)
if only we were more aware of the similarities and not reinvent the wheel all the time.
February 13th, 2012 § Comments Off on Blogging Trends for 2012: What You Need to Know § permalink
Image via Wikipedia
It’s great to hear Technorati sees the same trends as we do 🙂
brands’ interest continues to grow in the blogosphere, more bloggers are making their living by blogging than ever, and bloggers write more than ever.
In this video I interview Shani Higgins, CEO of Technorati. Shani shares information on the business of blogging and current blogging trends. Discover how much money bloggers make and learn more about the opportunities brands now offer bloggers. Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.
via: www.socialmediaexaminer.com
February 12th, 2012 § Comments Off on Why A Blogger Needs To Be Crazy § permalink
Image via Wikipedia
I would actually expand on this point, to claim that ‘to achieve anything, one has to be crazy’. i think we should all start fighting to redefine the word ‘crazy’, clean it of it’s bad connotations, more towards the proposed meaning from this article: ‘extremely enthusiastic’.
Are you a crazy blogger (do you think I am crazing for writing this blog post)? Before we start, let me ask you some questions: What comes to your mind when you think the word crazy? Why? Take a piece of paper and write it down. Do not, I repeat, Do not scroll down to read more. Just answer the question first. Are you done?
via: weblogbetter.com
now, historically, the word crazy comes from ‘cracking pot’, something that is about to fall apart. it’s fascinating how our generation is making ‘explosions’ a good thing. instead of thinking of solid objects, nicely polished, we prefer energy, as free and intertwining as possible. we are fascinated by Emergence of higher-order patterns.
we are becoming ants.
