Having just signed up to the fast growing super-popular Pinterest it was interesting to see my initial email from the team included a neat summary of their community guidelines, what they call their ‘etiquette’. It takes a lot of hard work to boil it down to a list of 3 simple bullet points, but it obviously works. When community guidelines are so important to help manage a community, and create… Continue reading
To complete the marketing challenge of coming up with a June-December launch plan for a music community with a target of 500K users I would need access to customer segmentation data, and the current customer personas. But let’s just have some fun without that standard data and have a look at comparing Facebook vs Extole, following yesterday’s blog post on the social referral platform.
Given the challenge of… Continue reading
By a neat coincidence as I was looking at ways to market a new music app I came across the news that leading social referral tool Extole has just raised $10m in funding. That doesn’t surprise me as their product makes a lot of sense, as underlined in VentureBeat’s report:
“Nearly every company has a social presence these days, but personal recommendations are often a more powerful way… Continue reading
On Monday evening I took the bull by the horns and jumped into the debate over how best to deal with building a successful corporate community at Cass Business School, organised by BrightLemon. And to give it some zip, some urgency, I based the story that was narrated with the help of some simple PowerPoint slides on my failure to create a successful online community at Shopping.com.
If there’s on thing I understand the value of it’s learning from failure, with experience of working on a start-up which failed to deliver on it’s initial promise to exiting from Shopping.com after a change in strategy. The good news is that failure is an important part of what being part of a lean start-up, when you go out and test customer assumptions through validation and… Continue reading
I had a great time at Lean Startup Machine London this weekend, learning about using lean startup ideas and practice from a social networking perspective to build a business. It helped that I’d already been to hear Eric Ries talk, thanks to a tip off from Andy at Crocodile Clips (currently looking for investment himself I believe, and I picked up a good contact for him… Continue reading
It seems a lot of people have got it wrong about Mark Zuckerberg.They scoff at his suggestion that with the impending $5bn Facebook IPO that he’s not in it for the money:
“We don’t build services in order to… Continue reading
The “Archaeological Park: Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun” is claiming “a major victory” in its bid to uncover the “potential remains of a lost civilisation beneath the rocks and soil of the hill of Visocica”, according to the organisation behind the endeavour:
The organisation has been attempting to win permission to excavate the site, which it believes hides a major pyramidal structure, since 2005 when explorer Dr Semir Osmanagic… Continue reading
This is the question I asked other community managers on the yahoo e-mint forum today – ‘How useful is an entrepreneurial approach to building online communities?’ And the reason why is because I’ve been working on a start-up idea since leaving a community management position at eBay, so it seemed a good opportunity to put together a presentation on how lean start-up methods can help build community, based on the… Continue reading
So what’s the Name That Place all about? The elevator pitch is this – a simple game of ‘i-spy’ but brought u to date by playing with your mobile or computer. Looking at i-spy from the online p.o.v., it came with a ready made container – a car or a room; and a ready made community of players, passengers or fiends. And with mobile phones, mobile apps, and geo-tagging the… Continue reading
