(found on remarkk! blog )
Bell Canada Associate Director of Media Relations Jason Laszlo made a real boner move, boasting on Facebook of his ability to snow journalists with his network management bafflegab, referring to journalists as “lemmings” in a recent status update. Clearly a super-fun guy in real life (note colourful hat and armband tattoo), he further demonstrated the Bell Media Relations department’s apparent unfamiliarity with modern web tools by leaving his Facebook profile wide-open to the public to see. Oops. (…)
What it means: In another unfortunate situation where the assumption was that “what happens in Facebook (or other social networks) stays in Facebook”, Laszlo clearly assumed he was writing to his Facebook friends and not broadcasting to the world. Clearly, it was not the case and his message ended up reaching people outside his inner circle of friends. This should definitely be lesson for anyone working in the public eye (especially in public relations). After all, we are all becoming media through those new social media tools.
Was reading this morning a great analysis by Mathew Ingram about a New York Times article describing the way “young people” get/read their political news. It’s clearly more and more about word of mouth and your social graph.
As Mathew says: “It’s not that there is anything earth-shatteringly new in the piece, mind you. But I think it does a great job of describing how digital “word of mouth” — in other words, social networking of all kinds including Twitter, IM, Facebook and so on — has become a dominant means of news delivery for young people in a way that I’m not sure old geezers like myself quite grasp, no matter how often people describe it”
The Times sums it up: “In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one. (…) In one sense, this social filter is simply a technological version of the oldest tool in politics: word of mouth.”
What it means: I remember when I joined Yellow Pages Group in 1999 (called Bell ActiMedia at the time), old-timers used to tell me that the biggest “competitor” to directory publishers wasn’t other directory publishers (or Google or other online directories), it was word of mouth. People have always asked their friends for recommendations and it has always represented a large volume of local search “queries”.
Admittedly, news and local search are not totally the same. Local search information is usually more of a pull (i.e. someone looking for a product/service) than a push (i.e. someone broadcasting information about a new merchant they found). It’s also more “evergreen” than news, i.e. unless you’re a total local merchant junkie, you don’t need to learn in a timely fashion about a new restaurant opening in your neighborhood. But there’s the seed out there of future consumer behavior which could create a great disruption effect on local search. Who knows? It might become valuable to broadcast information about your favorite local merchants. As I estimated in this blog post, there’s potentially 7 more times online local conversations than online directories searches currently. Anyone who successfully harness these conversations will create very valuable local search inventory.
Just received a notice that the second edition of Startup Camp Montreal has been announced for May 15th at the Societe des Arts Technologiques (SAT). I attended the first edition and it was very interesting. More than 180 people showed up (140 entrepreneurs, 30 VCs and industry experts, 5 students and 5 organizers). I don’t think I’ll be able to attend as I will be in California that week but I definitely invite everyone interested in startups to register.
More info from the e-mail announcement:
Following the success of the first Startup Camp Montreal, we are happy to announce the second edition of the event scheduled for May 15th, 2008.
The second edition will be similar in format to the first with the following changes:
1) The top five startups selected to present at the event will have the opportunity to participate in a one-day pre-event workshop session. The goal being to have “pitch” experts help the companies prepare ahead of the event. The workshop will be hosted by Austin Hill, John Stokes, Vincent Guyaux, and 2 other VC / marketing experts.
2) Presenting companies will have 8 minutes to present, with 10 minutes of follow-up questions from the event Gurus and the audience.
3) We will have ambassadors on hand prior to the event and during the event to help with match making and networking.
The complete details for the event are posted at www.startupcampmontreal.org, however the basics are:
Date: Thursday May 15th, 2008
Time: 6pm-10pm (or later)
Location: SAT (www.sat.qc.ca)
Registration is required, so please go to http://startupcampmontreal2.eventbrite.com to register.
Learning about the imminent end of Polaroid instant films in this morning’s Le Devoir, I was inspired to read more about what’s going on with the company. They’ve clearly faced important disruption with the emergence of digital cameras and I wanted to see what had happened recently to one of the most innovative technology companies in US history. “Its founder, Edwin Land, held 533 patents, second only to Thomas Alva Edison in US history.” says the Boston Globe. They were the champions of the “razor and blades” model, selling cameras at low-profit margins to sell high-margin films. According to this Time Magazine article, profit margins in 1965 were already “perhaps as high as 30%”. Sounds familiar? They also were famous for their very high dividends. Sounds familiar also?
(Flickr picture by amayzun)
But the company is now, according to another Boston Globe article, “a shell of its once-great self, now owned by Petters Group Worldwide of Minnesota. There’s no research and development activity to speak of. The company primarily licenses the Polaroid name to electronics makers in Asia (…)”. There is a glimmer of light but it’s not much. In the same article, I read about Zink, a Polaroid spin-off that’s producing a cool ink-less printer for digital pictures. “As Polaroid was sliding into bankruptcy in 2001, the company was trying to figure out what to do with a printing technology it had developed that doesn’t rely on ink, but instead uses a patented type of crystal that changes color in response to heat. Paper coated with Zink’s crystals can produce full-color photos when exposed to just the right pulses of heat. The project was nearly killed as Polaroid stumbled through its bankruptcy proceedings, but Zink got a reprieve and was spun out as an independent company in 2005.”
What it means: I couldn’t find Polaroid’s specific mission statement but I’m convinced it did not talk about medium-specific products. The Zink innovation was too late to change the course of history for the company, but it serves as a great reminder to never be married to a specific product or medium. By following the “connecting buyers and sellers” mission statement, directory publishers have the opportunity to avoid Polaroid’s fate. Leveraging their sales force to sell new online products like Google Adwords or Yahoo Search products for example is a very smart way of conducting their business in an online (and fragmented) media world. I remain convinced that the smartest directory publishers will launch their own local ad networks, thereby drastically increasing their online reach. They already have all the assets, they just need to execute.
Update: regarding Polaroid’s mission statement, Cheryl (via Linkedin Answers) points me to
