About Social Media Today
An occasional series in which a review of recent posts on MyVenturePad reveals the following nuggets:
It’s you they want
The reality is ideas don’t matter that much. First of all, in almost all startups, the idea changes – often dramatically – over time. Secondly, ideas are relatively abundant. For every decent idea there are very likely other people who’ve also thought of it, and, surprisingly often, are also actively pitching investors. At an early stage, ideas matter less for their own sake and more insofar as they reflect the creativity and thoughtfulness of the team.
—Chris Dixon: Pitch yourself, not your idea
Forget the banks
Banks aren't in the business of taking risk. Which means that they make boring loans to boring companies for boring purposes. They do everything they can to be riskless. Which means you need to guarantee the loan with your house or with assets worth far more than the loan. Which means that a good idea is not a sufficiently good reason for a loan.
Watch for cultural drift
Your culture will be shaped by everyone you hire, your market, your customers, and even investors. If you don't continue to pay very close attention to your culture, it will begin to drift away from what you had intended. Just like our old lab Jazzmyn, you can never take your eye off your culture.
—Jeff Cornwall: Culture and Labs
Tapping into technology and connectivity
Small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) are taking a larger share of the business pie and increasingly driving economic growth. This is one of the most important trends in business today, and one that will shape the next decade of business, work and society. This powerful trend is driven largely by technology and connectivity, creating a world in which smaller, more nimble, better connected companies can outsmart their monolithic larger brethren, competing globally and tapping opportunities as they arise.
—Ross Dawson: Six ways technology is transforming small business
Seize the moment
Most of us hesitate to face a crisis. We are afraid of an adverse decision. That is largely why some people oversell their prospects. But no matter how diffident you feel about it, and no matter how great your hesitation, the secret of success lies in driving in and bearing down for the order just the second you feel the time is ripe.
—Alen Majer: Mistake of Overselling
Even the small can thrive
The trends driving the need for leads are diverse and strong. Increased competition is a key driver, as is the growing consumer and B2B customer immunity to traditional advertising. Enabling and driving this trend is the increasing power of analytical software and the growing reach and data intensiveness of the Internet. These tools and data are making it easier for even small businesses to run sophisticated lead generation programs.
Can you see the trees?
But it seems to me that we are beginning to swim (or is it drown?) in data. Because our social media interactions are digital, we can measure plenty of things – the time you spend on our sites, the things you click on, where you have come from, where you are going to, how much you spend, what you liked, rated and searched for and so on. And if you happen to have created a social network profile then we know even more about you – age, work history, relationships, preferences for products, brands, music, movies and so on. But I have to ask – in amongst all this data, are we missing the trees for the forest?
—Gavin Heaton: Seeing the Trees in the Social Media Forest
