Social Media Tips

Online entrepreneur Bob Young tells the story of how, after the business success of RedHat, he went on to create Lulu.com:

We started Lulu after I left Red Hat in order to serve what we felt was an unmet need which was simply that the unique element of the internet is that it connects every single person on the planet to every other person on the planet. So sites like Ebay were doing a brilliant job of helping people sell things to each other. But what didn’t exist at the time was the ability to sell your creations to each other. So books and music and videos are very different from physical objects, because I sell you my video I still have my video to sell to the next person. If I sell you my car I no longer have a car. So they are very fundamentally different concepts and Lulu was set up to create a marketplace for digital content.

To a certain extent we set this up without any clue as to what our customers were actually going to use it for. Because it’s up to them to figure out how to use our tool to serve their customers. So whether it is Accounting in Austria or whether it is Rolex watch accountants or whether it is bad poetry, we have to Lulu in that half a million published titles. We have a lot of poetry books because there are a lot of aspiring poets who can’t get publishing contracts, as you might expect. So with a perfectly straight face without exaggerating at all I can safely say that Lulu owns the biggest suppository of bad poetry anywhere in the planet, but again my definition of bad poetry might not be yours or some other reader.

We cover religious books, we cover accountant books, we cover bad poetry and we cover adventure stories. It is whatever either the business or the individual. And here’s the other interesting piece is Lulu doesn’t differentiate between the individual author and the corporation because at the end of the day they are both authors. So Disney Corporation has all sorts of content that they want to sell to their audience. Or lets pick another one, the NBA wants to reach out to their fans so they have content that they spend millions of dollars producing and they have millions of users, how do they connect the two. They can publish their content on Lulu, they keep 80 percent of their profit of publishing that content and Lulu makes that content available to NBA fans around the world.

Business TV

Business networking expert Penny Power, who has recently published Know Me, Like Me, Follow Me: What Online Social Networking Means for You and Your Business, explains what our kids can teach us about marketing strategy:

When I look at my three children, who are now teenagers or approaching teen years, and I look at the way that they’re using social networks, it is so inspiring and it gives me so much hope for the future. Because they’re using social networks as fun, as connecting randomly with people, as embracing strangers that they meet on holidays and tennis camps, staying in touch with them. They don’t have to consider alumni networks. They’re just building social capital by building friends. And they’re not trying to achieve something from it. It’s all unconditional giving, support. So when Hannah or Ross or TJ get updates on their Blackberry because a friend has passed an exam or is nervous about an exam or has lost something or is selling an iPod off their Facebook status or whatever it is, it’s just a friend doing it. And that friend has already built trust.

And so I think that we can learn a lot from the younger generation. I’m very empowered by the younger generation, because they know that being liked and being trusted is more important than just being great at what they do. And they’re not broadcasting stuff. They’re sharing their vulnerabilities and their weaknesses with one another. They’re just building real friends. They’re just being open with one another, randomly embracing people and supporting each other. So when they go into the business world, they might have 2,000 contacts by the time they go into business who know their values, know what they stand for, know what they like, know their history. And those 2,000 people are going to get 2,000 jobs. And there is no way that they’re going to be looking up the yellow pages or even googling for a skill set. They’ll be getting into their network and asking who can I trust to do something for me, anywhere in the world. And we can learn a lot from that about how to build our networks.

Business TV