One decade ago, all over again

Is anyone else's radar going off?

At the turn of the millenium, eyeballs were the metric that drove value -- not dollars -- which led to many companies to walk like zombies into the water, wishing upon a star, until they drown. Lots of money was made in the stock market, and then lots of money was lost.

Now we're seeing Twitter, Facebook, along with a gaggle of would-be's, with astronomical growth in subscribers/members/eyeballs and no clear path to profitability (ahem, one of my strong suits).

The latest to go down was www.tr.im, which like TinyURL and SnipURL, shortened long web addresses down to something easily typeable (also fit conveniently into Twitter Tweets where every character is almost 1% of your message!)

Lots of users but no revenue model...

Wake up, people -- that's an ingredient in your recipe not to forget!

[Contact me right away if you're experiencing this condition].

Getting on the Social Media Bandwagon

I gave a presentation Tuesday on the "state of the union" in Social Media to the Chamber of Commerce in Wilsonville, OR -- near Portland. (You can view the slides on my LinkedIn profile).

The conclusion? Get your toe in the water. Social Media is changing every day -- nothing has passed you by; you can still catch up.

As promised in the talk, here are the links I referenced so nobody has to burn out their favorite pen taking notes :)

• LinkedIn
• FaceBook
• Twitter
• Wikipedia
  
  
• TweetDeck
• Seesmic
• Twitter Karma
• FriendOrFollow
• Ping.FM
  
  
• WordPress
• Blogspot
  
  
• Mashable
• Go2Web20
• Inside Facebook for Retailers

Feel free to use the email link to the right to ping me f there was something I mentioned and forgot to include -- also please shoot me an email with success stories of "toe dipping"!

Another take on The Four P's

Wow... I had sensed that the new Seattle Sounders soccer team was getting traction in its first season -- but I had no clue just how well it's really doing.

Listening to Gary Wright (Sr. VP Bus. Ops. for the organization) give the lunchtime keynote at the NW Growth Financing Conference today was inspiring. He said that 67,000 people watched the game with Barcelona last night, and another recent international team drew 66,000.

They've sold 22,000 season tickets, which was a first-year target unheard of in the sport.

Gary said it is being called the most successful new franchise, not in soccer but in major league sports!

To what did he attribute this success -- a great logo, good funding, or another such secret?

He shared a completely different definition of "The Four P's" (not those that form the foundation of marketing).

1. People
2. Process
3. Product
4. Profit

Interestingly, most of the business world is headed in exactly the opposite direction, valuing profit above everything else.

In closing, Gary was quite candid that he had always dismissed soccer until getting wrapped up in it, and convinced me I have to go see what it's all about. No way will it displace my First Sport (hockey) but the Second is up for grabs :)