You can’t say i didn’t warn you earlier in the week that this was slide week. I had way too much time while on holiday and just consumed so much content that I had to share. The other thing I was also doing a bunch of research on some stuff. The Lecture 7 presentation below on Branding is an interesting academic set of slides, which I hope are helpful.
Uploaded on authorSTREAM by Woodwork
Sharing the links for the day:
I was talking to some friends of mine the other day and pondering what I should do here on this blog, mainly for input, since I can’t seem to figure it out myself. Ultimately I find myself continuously in search of an original idea – not a whole lot of those out there these days, if any. It’s not so much the amount of available content, as it is the amount of non-original content centered on the modest number of content opportunities which exist. So I’ve been on this particular task for a couple of weeks since I realized that I want to participate online differently – specifically on a more personal level.
The main reason for the discussion in general, was my current ability to scale. I’m personally finding it difficult to scale with quality. In general, I think social media has a scale issue, not just from a technology framework perspective, but also as you focus on it as a topic theme. I think in general most topics/areas of focus have content scale issues, but the issue in social media is more acute.
A quick content analysis of key folks appears to validate that there are just a good deal on non-events and events which are leveraged to go back to the bag of tricks and highlight a key concept. Not a bad thing, in fact upon review some of the best writers in the social media space are effectively recycling content every 3-6 months in context of the latest Twitter outage or which new platform is where the cool kids should hang out at.
Back to the task…
Fundamentally how to scale a set of activities is always an interesting thought experiment and made for an interesting afternoon for the group. We circled the topic for a while and I paused to check twitter – glad I did. Wouldn’t ya know – the Gods of the Twitterverse presented a series of tweets by Amanda Chapel in the stream which addressed the scale issue. I have to paraphrase the tweet in question with over 140 characters, since the back function is disabled due to Twitter “stressing out”/service issues.
The cost of obtaining a customer/the profitability of the initial transaction is greatly diluted by the cost of service delivery over time. The delivery of customer service doesn’t scale.
True Enough! Sales transactions are the easy things for the most part of any initiative. We actually discussed this tweet for a while in and out of the context of blogging. A very productive exchange – each had their personal insights on the topic with a mix of varying industry experiences, company sizes and diverse set of current roles: operational, strategic and creative. So this one cat offers up the following:
Technology businesses are aren’t about the transactions, but the repeatable transactions and supportability of the revenue. Anyone can sell something to dozens, some folks can sell to hundreds, but the market leaders can sell AND support 1000’s.
So I’ve realized I’ve encountered a scale issue with how I’m participating online and I’ve seen a great number of businesses which have the same issues. Great ideas, great product, crazy transactional revenues, but no ability to scale the business. With the general realization/acceptance that blogging is no different, I’ll contiue my gedankenexperiment on focusing my content, but at least I have 3 questions I’m going to work:
Ideas?
I thought I would spend some time documenting the things I like, with a goal of identifying what I might want to write on in the future. Not unlike mind mapping, but more public – hopefully some of you will pick this up and use this exercise as well.
