How to Get Into the News Media and Pull Big Bloggers Like Guy Kawasaki With Strategic Public RelationsFor a Good Time, Follow Me: http://twitter.com/journik
LA 310 598 1606 | NYC 347 476 1267
How to Get Into the News Media and Pull Big Bloggers Like Guy Kawasaki With Strategic Public RelationsFor a Good Time, Follow Me: http://twitter.com/journik
LA 310 598 1606 | NYC 347 476 1267
How to Get Into the News Media and Pull Big Bloggers Like Guy Kawasaki With Strategic Public RelationsFor a Good Time, Follow Me: http://twitter.com/journik
LA 310 598 1606 | NYC 347 476 1267
Never met the man but that won't stop me from being helpful and useful. The world is smaller than ever. Even if you do nothing more than make someone smile, you've built good will.
2/2
Start Here: "Why you SHOULD NOT start with the end in mind for 1/2"
Above 5 min Video Edited and Revised into Blog Post HERE.
To comment or ReTweet, copy: RT @journik "# 1 top rule to making sure your startup business succeeds is..." http://bit.ly/journik and tweet it on out. And if you follow me I'll give you stuff like this all day long, so click http://twitter.com/journik
"Tell me of the conquest oh Arjuna, and not of the battle."
Yeah, I couldn't decide which title would get more attention so I used both. (When you come to the fork in the road, take it! - Yogi)
Anyways, So how do you get an investor to pay you? Simple. You differentiate yourself from everyone else who is grubbing at my money.
I'll tell you what I hear, "Blah, blah, I have no idea how I'm going to pay you back, blah, blah, in fact, I'm not even worried about it cause, blah, you're rich, blah."
Now comes the hard part. You thought everyone else was also differentiating. You think everyone who wants venture capital finds a way to differentiate. And yes, from your perspective, this is 100% true. Each competitor wrestling for the same dollar you need has a different approach than you do. But not so from my perspective.
Writing a business plan that needs external venture capital is like setting out on a one month journey with only one day's water - Ancient Master of the Obvious
"We simplify communication through advanced networking."
"We accelerate complex negotiations with experience."
"Confident selling through knowledge ownership."
Now imagine you are the guy that the above five companies are trying to squeeze money from whom the above companies are trying to squeeze money. Don't they suddenly all sound like they are saying the same thing?
I'll tell you what I hear, "Blah, blah, I have no idea how I'm going to pay you back, blah, blah, in fact, I'm not even worried about it cause, blah, you're rich, blah."
Venture capital funding is just like sex. I'm not gunna put out unless you can get some elsewhere! - Ancient Master of the Obvious
None of the above value statements tell me what I am most interest in. They all them me what YOU are going to do. Let me explain this more directly, I don't give a flying fuck what YOU are going to do! (It's ok. I'm sure that's from a movie.)
So how do you craft a five word value statement? This is the hard part. Identify all of the main people you are trying to squeeze money from and tell each of the different groups exactly how THEY are going to get paid using the same five words in each case.
In kung fu, let's say you're going against a monkey style master, a snake style master, and a tiger style master. Sadly, you can only pick one style to overcome all three. Which style can defeat all three? Monkey style is high, snake style is low, tiger style is medium. So use dragon or crane style! Dragon flys above them all and crane can do all three levels! DUH! (To any real kung-fu masters, I know this is pure bullshit. It just fits so well!)
http://edufire.com's "live video learning" sm is perfect for students. But it doesn't tell me, an educator that I want to join because I can actually "get paid bitch!" To survive and thrive, edufire must do both. Edufire must bring students and teachers together the way eHarmony brings xenophobic, antisocial, balding men and (balding) women together.
Any idea why everyone including Time Magazine thought Twitter was nonsense for years (which actually turned out to be a good thing since they are still having infrastructure issues)? "What are you doing?" Sucks! I mean why do I care what you are doing? (See above "flying fuck" movie reference). If Twitter changed their SM to, "Doing something different?" or "Doing something confidential?" or even just "Doing something naughty?" The world wide masses who have all had their imaginations slurped out by watching five hours of TV a day (and now hulu) would actually be able to make the chasm-like cognitive jump in reasoning, "Oh!, I get it!, I'd be able to get the highlights of what's going on with everybody!" Ding! Ding! Ding! "Wait, that means that I would know what's actually happening in my field/industry/keyswappingring"
Finally, @Whiteboardsell seems to have a powerful message and product. But based on a 2 second glance at their website or mocked SM, I couldn't make it out. I'll tell you why. Let's imagine i'm a client. "Confident selling..." tells me that the Whiteboard guys are going to help me sell confidently. 1. THAT already makes me defensive. "I AM confident!" I'd say as I cross my arms and take a step back. The "selling" part tells me I may not make a penny. It tells me that I'll sell confidently but no guarantees as to whether I'll actually get the SALE.
You see? You MUST talk to my own personal interest. All I want is the SALE. The selling part is the worst part of it all. Selling is my nemesis. Selling is where I fail most often. Selling is just a necessary evil. "Tell me of the conquest oh Arjuna, and not of the battle."
I was going to go to town on the second half, "through knowledge ownership." But I'll leave it here. Suffice it to say that I don't give a (insert movie reference here) HOW YOU do it. I just want to know HOW I get paid, bitch!
Now, the trick is, crafting a message in such a way that your investor, your employees, and your clients all see how, "I'm gunna get paid!"
Ask for help. Ask Shanna or Kevin to point you in the right direction. They are professional writers
How to know if your Twitter PR and marketing is going to kill you (in a David Caradine kinda way)
@howardlindzon, an investor and no stranger to VC startups sent out another sharp, stinging, though probably right-on tweet a few seconds ago. It led to a more politically correct, not nearly as scathing article to
.As you can imagine, creating these pages by hand wasn’t cheap. Even by paying people only $10 an hour, it cost about $15 to assemble each page, now numbering 100,000. “It was taking too long and costing too much to build these pages,” says Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis.
The article goes on to explain the CEO's change in strategy,
Mahalo will assign people pages they volunteer to create and give them half the ad revenue the page generates. That’s still not a lot, generally—about $10 to $25 per page per month, though some pages, such as “2009 stimulus package,” are earning several thousand dollars a month. But Calacanis is betting—literally betting half the company’s revenue—that it will be enough to spur many more people to create pages.
What this means is that Jason is betting 1/2 of all the advertising revenues on the hopes that < 200% more content will be created per dollar. Makes sense right? Simple math.
And Jason is incentivizing with just that -- $1.
Sure. For us business types, if you offer me a buck for less than a buck's worth of work on my part, I'll take it (unless someone else offers me more than a buck for much less work than a buck's worth (think 8 minute abs)). But IMHO, ok, so it's not humble, and yes, it's not even an opinion. It's much closer to Gosphel, Jason SHOULD incentivise with much more than fair wage for fair work. He SHOULD promise the world to every one of Mahalo's users.
Let me explain how this is done. It's called the "lottery effect," aka "American Idol Effect."
Join Mahalo! Be a celebrity!
I'm constantly amazed by how this works. Billions of people would rather have a one in a trillion chance of winning one million dollars than a 100% chance at winning (spanish and french word for earning) $100 in exchange for $100 worth of labor. In fact, people spend money buying that lottery ticket. People spend money driving to an American Idol tryouts tent. Hell, I think people may even pay an entrance fee to have a 1/1000000000000000000 chance at being Adam Lambert.
What I'm saying is that offering 50% profit share has been done and played out by the shadiest likes of digitalassholes-or-something-similar.com. 50% just doesn't play into the rediculously pie-in-the-sky pitiful human instinct called hope. What this means is that Jason SHOULD keep taking VC funding and Jason SHOULD charge me money for me to answer my own question. This makes me think that there is a premium on establishing my own subject matter expertise. Then, the wimpy-phlemy colored, mucusy-needy emotion called "hope" kicks in. Couple that with megamaniacal entitlement and I begin to see that book deal, tour bus, and quite possibly a chance at seeing Bruno's bung hole and ball sack in one angelic fell swoop.
Rebuttal to MediaPost: Three rounds deep, $25million dollars in the hole, and projectile bleeding users every time you institute a new monetization strategy? Yep. You're going to have to dim your screen before your peers notice you noticing the handwriting on the wall.
I was there in the March1st complex in the late 90's. We were all about putting the brick and mortars out of business. And we were going to do it by giving everything away for free.
Short answer: We all agree to make all our sites PPL (pay per login) and charge all the self-entitled freeloaders (and the nice guys too) on Sept 15. It'll be so hot and muggy that day that everyone will be locked indoors - with no access to their favorite websites, unless they pay to play on that day. Om did it. So did BlogTalkRadio
Free phone calls, free movies, free mp3's, free business data, hell, even free medical diagnosis online. How were we planning to finance all this? Well, we all knew someone who had a lot of old money earned the hard way - in brick and mortars. And it was going to be their responsibility to recoup their money from the markets.
We were 20 something idealists. All we wanted to do was change the world. To do so, we were willing to bite the old-money-hand that was feeding us.
Yep, I even had "buddies" who'd seduce an investor's grand daughter just to keep the "flow" going.
I remember dot com parties where we'd rent out entire night clubs and floors of suites in the adjacent 4 star hotel just because we finished an incremental milestone (five months late). Oh, and since none of us were cool, we hired out the entire book of that one modeling agency that promised us a lot of "value."
Yep, I even had "buddies" who'd seduce an investor's grand daughter just to keep the "flow" going.
Seasoned, war-torn, and wiser, each of us are now the ceo's of our own websites. Having lost most of our idealism, dreams of instant oppulence, and our tollerance for PBR, now, we want to monetize.
Venture funding is like sex. I won't put out unless you can get some elsewhere
Now, we want to monetize.
Well, I must say, If we did anything correctly and impactually, we succeeded in creating a modern third millenium culture of freeloaders.
Ofcourse we succeeded, we were the best and the brightest from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, and beyond. But the truth is, while we blame the public for having a misplaced sense of entitlement, What we really SHOULD do is make the blame come full circle.
It was the sense of entitlement of the architects of the internets back in the mid 90's that has rippled throughout time and across into financial industries and even added to international distaste for America.
Ironically, taking full responsibility for our 20's arrogance is also the Panacea for monetizing our websites. What you SHOULD do with all that venture funding you got from the guy that plays golf all day long is treat it like a blood money loan. What you should do is personally take responsibility for paying it back. What you should do is treat IPO money as gravy money that will never get poured onto your meat and potatoes. What you should do is personally take responsibility for rewarding your investors' faith in you in spades. Yes, I still have "investors" I'm paying back. Slowly.
Now, how you SHOULD go about monetizing a website that projectile hemorrhages every time you institute a monetization scheme is simple. All of you, us, pick a date, say Sept 15, when it's so hot outside that everyone will be indoors. Everyone will be indoors, airconditioned, and online. We pick this moment in time to all unanimously go hard core porno. Yep. "No cash, no Casandra."
HBO went porno. WSJ is still porno. Harvard Business School Press has always been porno.
If you can't flip the bitch on Sept 15, 2009, it's simply because you don't believe your website is worth paying for. And you disgust me because you did think it is "good enough" to get funded. You thought it SHOULD be good enough to get funded by some old money person who has faith in you but isn't as savvy as the prime internet user demographic.
And to think that you criticized your free loving, bell bottom sporting, one time idealist hippy parents for selling out to corporate America?! I'm not even going to tell you what you SHOULD do.
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