The WebPlay conference was held 19 November 2009 at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale (www.plugandplaytechcenter.com). The speakers and panelists mainly offered advice to startup companies seeking to exploit social media for their business, if not actually monetize it. Twitter was the hottest topic, in all its variations (and with the CTO of TwitVid on a panel). Here are a few choice pieces of advice:
- Have a destination (i.e., goal) in mind when you start out.
- Pay attention to your revenue model, not just the size of your community.
- Start a social media war with something bigger than you.
- Host a live event.
- Add value when you post.
- Become a “brandividual”; you can even mix business and personal so long as you are true to your own persona.
I also enjoyed a couple of memorable observations from Louis Gray (of FutureWorks):
- “The Internet was built to waste time.”
- “Everything your customer is doing is more interesting than what you are doing.”
What I liked about that last one is the primacy of the customer. I can’t tell you how many startup entrepreneurs I have talked to who are mostly into the phenomenon or the technology and cannot articulate a meaningful, customer-oriented value proposition. I think that if you don’t know who your customer is, you don’t have a company.
Overall, the chaos around social media is a constructive one. No one can predict what will settle out and be valuable to much of society, but for many entrepreneurs the price of admission to the effort is low. After all, it’s only a SMOP.
One Comment
I think that last point is quite important. Something that I’ve been telling young entrepreneurs is
“Don’t write a line of code until you have your first customer”
There’s no point sitting in a bunker writing code and setting things up for 6 months if you have no one to validate what you are doing.