This article was very misleading about why not to buy the Faceobok Ipo. The title should have been “Why Forbes Writers Don’t Understand Social Media”
“Facebook: 0.051%
Google: 0.4%
Average: 0.1%”
These numbers are really misleading. When you buy an ad on Facebook you are getting people to like your page in the process. This creates a two way conversation and a relationship with the user where you can send them messages and even interact with them for as long as they like your page. Also when the user likes your page it is posted in their public timeline for their friends to discover your page.
With Google you get one click, one shot and that’s it.
Regarding GM pulling their ads. This just shows that if you have an inferior product people won’t engage with you. Also I don’t recall a new media campaign by GM, they were all standard display ads like their print and marketing.
They don’t have any viral videos on their page and they don’t have any interactive campaigns like a sweepstakes or contest on their page. You couldn’t run a only audio commercial on television and expect to get the results of a national TV campaign. you can’t just post your TV commercials on Facebook and expect the results of a viral campaign.
a few weeks ago i received a letter from nielson asking me to participate in their “set top box” program. the letter was interesting and i thought it would be cool to have my viewing habits tracked. the letter said that they would call me in a few weeks to discuss the proposition with me. i have been traveling a bunch and working late so the odds weren’t in favor of me answering when they call.
as luck would have it the night that nielson called i was home. i was excited to discuss the program with the gentleman on the phone. when he asked if i knew his company i stated that i had been eagerly awaiting their call. then it all unraveled:
“so how does this work? do i plug your box into my cable box and that’s it?” me
“no, our set top box isn’t really a box. we mail it to you in a box but it is a journal. you fill it out once a week and then mail it back to us.” him
“wat?” me
“yes we mail you a box with instructions on how to fill out the journal, you write down what you watch and then mail it back to us.” him
in 2012 tv ratings which dictate advertising rates, show popularity and a ton of other metrics are based on someone writing down what they watch and mailing it into nielson.
i am guessing that someone could write a simple script that scraped twitter to determine which shows people are talking and have a higher level of accuracy than relying on people to write something down and mail it in.
i will be 34 this year. i can’t remember the last time i wrote something down and mailed it. i am guessing someone who is 24 (a more desirable demographic than i am) would be even less likely than i am to write something down and mail it.
i guess companies like get glue and into now are attempting to approach this a different way but i can’t believe that this is a real thing in 2012.
these people are effing brilliant. there are a lot of reasons why this is true but i noticed something in particular. we took clara there for her birthday. we had a $10 off gift card. at checkout they offered us 2 more $10 gift cards for $10.
this would be about the same deal that they would do on groupon or living social. the brilliance of this that they are insuring that the customer who already purchased their hyper marked up products comes back and they don’t have to pay the commission to groupon or living social. the commission a daily deal site takes is generally 40% so build a bear would only get $6 from $20 worth of purchases, this way they get $10 and their average purchase has to be around $30.
i just had a ah ha moment and it felt pretty good:
it’s pretty funny actually. i was watching a show a while back and found a product that we could easily replace with our smart phones. there is a real need for it and it was a project that i thought could be pretty successful.
i sat down with rob and yo to bounce the idea off of them. they both agreed that it was a good idea. the invention took the phone and eliminated something that people use all of the time but there had to be another piece that was created to interact with the smart phone.
i was sitting on my swing tonight staring off in to the sky and it hit me. a smart device could handle the other end of the communication and the piece that had to be invented didn’t need to be invented, we could do it all programmatically. this is super encouraging because with our current workload i didn’t see us having the time to invent/design a new electronic device any time soon.
the surprising thing is that we didn’t deduce that while we talked about the idea. some times it is just a good idea to step back and think about things from a different perspective.
quora:
pretty much stopped playing call of duty to spend time on quora.
where to start. things have been pretty absurd as far as how much stuff is going on.
rob just signed the operating agreement on a new project called fan shout. i really can’t say tons about what it does but the person who brought the deal/is rob’s partner is a super guy. of all the projects we looked at it fan shout and one other deal were the ones i wanted to do the most.
the other deal was a tough one to get done. we decided that it was too tough/bad timing back in august. in a strange turn of events the owner of that project reached out to us last week and on my trip back to toledo last weekend rob made an offer. exactly the perfect offer and it was accepted while i was on a plane coming back to vegas on monday. i couldn’t be happier about the projects that i get to work on.
tomorrow morning i am getting on a plane for a two week trip. the first leg is to toy fair in nyc. i don’t do much with the actual products but it will be neat to see how it works. rob has been working hard and has made some pretty cool products since sillybandz. the most impressive in my opinion is “hanger buddiez“. they are hangers for children that have shapes in the middle. so an incredible concept, i really can’t believe that they haven’t been made yet.
next up at toy fair is a project that was brought to rob by mat taylor and his friends called lazer shirts. it is a ink technology that when you put uv light on the ink, the ink will glow in the dark for a period of time and then return to normal.
there are other things that we are showcasing but like i said i don’t know a ton about the product side.
after toy fair we are driving to niagara falls for the inaugural deepstacks poker tour televised event. the event runs from the 15th-19th. the main event begins on 2/16 with a $1500 buy in and $200k guaranteed prize pool. it will be great to catch up with my poker friends and i can’t wait to see the deepstacks tv set!
one of my poker friends is doing something similar to what paul carr did in “the upgrade” but instead of being a free lance writer he is going to play poker. he said he is going to blog about it and it should be a interesting story. check out his blog at jayhouston.com.
after deepstacks i am back in toledo for a bit to work on some of the projects we have in the pipeline and then back to vegas. i couldn’t be happier with the way things are going. it looks like 2012 is shaping up to be a great year.
First let me say I get it. When someone pirates your videos you can see it coming directly out of your pocket. What I don’t get is why you would support a bill that changes the internet so drastically. All of the social media sites that you utilize so well will be destroyed by bills like SOPA or PIPA.
You guys are innovators in tech. First the Facebook fights and now the Xbox & ROKU apps. You use Twitter and Facebook better than any company I can think of. Your fights are trending topics without being paid every time and that is amazing. Why would you support legislation that would shut down the sites that spread information about your fights and gives the big media companies (like ESPN lol) the ability to censor the internet?
We, the internet, need companies like yours with balls to stand up and protect our rights as well as your interests. Lets find a way to protect your intellectual property and protect the internet at the same time.
Instead of being sheep and following the big media companies who have not kept up with the times we need you and the UFC to back legislation that doesn’t destroy the Internet that you depend on for the free exposure the UFC gets for every event. Could you imagine trying to promote a fight without Twitter/Facebook and Youtube? The bills your company backs will essentially destroy them.
at one point and time aol was basically the internet. people paid by the minute to access it. now they are just a media company? i guess they have their hands in a bunch of stuff but the only thing i can think of them doing well is not letting old dial up customers cancel subscriptions.
my point being is that i dont think my opinion on this subject is permanent.
i keep hearing people tell me that html5 apps are the end all be all of apps and that you really shouldn’t bother building native apps. i understand the frustration of trying to build for devices, the new versions of operating systems and of course the ridiculous fees like apples 30%. one thing i am not clear on is of the apple fee is charged on in app purchases. if this is the case then it will be tough to get brick and mortar stores to transition to in app sales for real life goods.
do you have an iphone? do you have a google music account? most people who answer yes to having an iphone answer no to having a google music account. with google music you get to store 20,000 songs for free in the cloud, you can then access your songs over 3g and play them as if they were stored on your device. this changes the answer to “should i get a 8, 16 or 32 gig iphone?”. since it is clear competitor to itunes google is not allowed to have an ios app but they have a html5 app.
now if google offers such a great product that everyone should use, i think storing 20k songs for free in the cloud is a service everyone should use and most people haven’t heard of it then what makes you think your app would be found?
while a company with a active user base may be able to get users to adopt an html5 app i doubt a app like angry birds would have ever got the momentum without showing up in the app store, namely at the top of the itunes store.
retail has always been about location, location, location and visibility in a app store is the location of this day and age. if the current app store situation isnt bad for the consumer i dont see them leaving the current system for a html5 system.
this year has been very interesting. the company i work for was brought in to the spotlight as a company that invests in start ups when my boss made it on “how i made my millions”. i am fortunate enough to be able to look at some of the deals. actually i have been able to look at a lot of deals.
one thing i have seen is people mimicking recent success like “facebook for grandparents” or “linked in for nurses” or “groupon for groupon” etc. it is easy to be super critical about any start up. the fact of the matter is the model will probably change multiple times before it gets to market. i have learned that the problem that they solve is what is important.
as fault finding as i can be when i look at deals one thing i need to remember is the people are doing it. they are putting it on the line and going for the american dream. that is very important and even though some things seem absurd, you will be surprised at some innovations.
i have recently been obsessed with what things will be like when my daughter is 18. i set up a email address for her and i email her occasionally (not an original idea). i intend to give this to her for her 18th birthday and hopefully it documents her life. i hope we still use email so it isn’t a waste but that’s what got me thinking about what life was like 12 years ago and what it will be like in 12 years.
the important thing about how technology is progressing is that there is a lot of opportunity to come in and completely dominate an industry. a few examples of looking at something a different way have been brought to my attention and they are making me think about the way i think about things.
a quick search of amazon yields a bunch of colored or padded hangers that aren’t all that cool. the price point is much more than the price point of the plain white hangers. my boss, robert croak, changed that. he patented an actual shaped hanger and somehow was able to put them in stores at a price point that competes wth standard hangers. pretty amazing.
data centers:
i was lucky enough to visit switch las vegas which is the worlds most powerful data center yesterday. i signed a nda so i really dont know what i am allowed to say but they changed the way the air flowed using pretty logical steps and were able to beat industry standards many times over in a lot of different ways, they didnt do just one thing better, the did a lot better. rather than breaking the nda i will let you watch the video.
in my lifetime just about everything has changed, remember rotary phones or putting tin foil to extend the range of the rabbit ears on top of your tv set? i do and i imagine just about everything will change again. it is neat to be able to witness it.
i guess i like to blog more when i am traveling or a lot is going on. a lot is going on no but it is all fairly consistent, lots of hours in the office.
i have been spending most of my time doing research and working on some legal stuff. i would probably put you to sleep with the details but it is pretty exciting to see progress on stuff that we have been working on for over a year. i mean it could take a few more years but it is always nice to see progress.
about a month ago a friend of mine that i haven’t spoke with in years messaged me on facebook and told me he was fighting for strikeforce and he was on the card for a fight at the palms. i picked up tickets but i got them kind of late so we ended up with tickets in the back. i was pleasantly surprised when i found out there isn’t a bad seat in pearl at the palms. our view was amazing and it was only $40 for 9 fights which was an amazing value. probably the best value for a night out in vegas.
please take an hour and watch gold rush on discovery. these guys took $275k and 5 months and turned it in to gold. $400k to build a game for an iphone? this bubble is gonna hurt when it bursts.
so my neighbors dog has a habit of barking and waking me up at 5:30 in the morning. one morning i thought to myself “i wish that dog would die”. well it must have worked because he stopped barking and hasn’t woke me up since. cool to know i have that power.
sooooooooooooooo skype has different statuses. online, away, do not disturb, in visible and skype me. skype me looks really cool because not only do you get the green online icon, there is a little smiley face with your icon.
anyway one day i was feeling very cheerful and changed my status to skype me! i didnt think much about it. i started getting spam bots and i thought they had figured out a new way to spam skype. i made a game of finding news ways to wish them death, like die in a grease fire was one of the more civil ways i wished it to them.
come to find out…… when you set your status to skype me! it puts your name in a directory as someone who is looking for new friends and contacts and you are basically inviting people to chat with you.
i hope my wish things dead powers only works on dogs, otherwise i would feel pretty bad about all the people i invited to chat on skype and then killed by wishing them death.
