Is Groupon the Biggest Ponzi Scheme the World Has Even Known?
After a few false starts, Groupon, which once shunned a $6 billion offer from Google is going for half the $25 billion with a $11.4 billion valuation. This valuation is still astronomical and a reminder of investors partying like it’s 1999 all over again. This company is bleeding cash – yet, it attempts to write off marketing to its customers as a “one time cost” and say that it’s profitable.
Here’s why Groupon looks like a Ponzi scheme
The suckers. The key to a Ponzi scheme is the people who come into the scheme in the end with more money to pay back the initial investors. Eventually the scheme collapses as you’d need an infinite amount of suckers to come in and eventually someone gets leery. In this case, EVERYONE is a sucker because for retailers, even if you did a Groupon early, you still got screwed. That’s because if you gave 50% off $20, not only are you discounting $10 to the consumer, but Groupon takes 50 of the discount as their fee, meaning the retailer gives a 75% off discount. In most cases, people come to an establishment for the first time because of a Groupon. They also never return. Groupon also has a pretty bad agreement with the retailers which you can see here.
It’s not because these businesses are bad, it’s, in many cases, consumers are willing to increase the radius that they’ll travel to go to an establishment in order to get a discount. I work in the wholesale human hair wig district of Manhattan at 29th and Broadway and live in Brooklyn. Hudson Terrace had a beer tasting at 50% off at 11th Avenue in the 50s. Totally out of the way, and on the way over, even the 50% discount didn’t seem worth it to my girlfriend and I. When we got there, it was a decent place, run by the same ownership that helped us throw Adholes parties at SideBar and the Village Pourhouse, but there’s no no no way I will ever go all the way over there to pay full price. Nor was the place so great that I would spread the ever priceless word of mouth marketing to my friends and family. Sure, if someone was nearby and said “hey, what do you think of Hudson Terrace?” I’d go “Hey, not so bad despite the kind of odd uniforms they make the women wear.” That’s about all they got for $40 worth of booze.
When the merchant sees that they just blew all this money on “marketing” to people who won’t come back, it’s highly unlikley they will run a Groupon again. Groupon depends too heavily on the irrational and poor decision making of small business owners who don’t know any better.
A merchant would be much better off appealing to its regulars to bring more people via a group discount than hoping the freeloaders who come in and get a huge one time deal are going to become repeat customers.
What happens when Groupon runs out of merchants? It’s pretty much over. You’ll see 10% off a hair cut instead of 90% off a meal. And people will stop caring. Groupon does not have an indefensible business model – it’s only got a huge advantage because of the sales force they have, but smaller players continue to nip at their heels and take a sometimes smarter piece of the fun coupon market.
But Groupon isn’t just a Ponzi Scheme, it’s a loansharking racket as well according to this TechCrunch article from last June. Merchants get cash up front for their Groupons, then slowly bleed cash over months by giving the discounts to their customers.
To everyone who is part of this next round, well, good luck with that!
Groupon Seeks $11.4 Billion Market Value in Initial Offering – Businessweek
Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) — Groupon Inc., the largest online- coupon site, is seeking a valuation of $11.4 billion in its U.S. initial public offering, less than half the $25 billion it considered earlier this year after internal missteps and stock- market swings left some investors leery of the stock.
A Brief Thought on Sign up and Sign In Buttons
Great post below from Bokardo about why you should bury your sign up button. It seems from an information hierarchy point of view, giving people reasons to sign up is far more important than having a huge button in their face. If someone isn’t ready to sign up, as this blog says, it doesn’t matter if it’s a giant red flashing light. It won’t work.
On another note, I’ve been finding some sites’ navigation for existing users to be rather difficult. Shouldn’t there be a cookie to tell them that I’m already a member, even if I’m signed out, so I’m not hit with the hard sell? MLB.tv does this particularly poorly with a very hard sell “buy now! buy now!” all over the screen and the tiniest of “existing customers” text links buried all the way at the bottom.
Good user experience is about users getting to where they want to go with as little friction as possible – yet so many sites are hyperfocused on getting the new user that they forget they have some already.
Why you Should Bury your Sign Up Button « Bokardo
A short while ago I was involved in a project redesigning a home page of a website. I dutifully designed the page in the common fashion, using a bold headline, some bullet points, and a juicy call-to-action button. It was very similar to many of the startup home pages that you might run across every day.
- YouTube Makes Some Changes To Improve User Experience [News]
- Are You Losing Visitors By Omitting This Key Page On Your Blog?
40 Stupendously Obvious and Boring Tips for Being a Self-Aggrandizing Social Media Narcissist
I’m riffing off of this blog today, “40 Tips On How To Be A Social Media Superstar” by Jeff Bullas which was brought to my attention from some new social media friends. First of all, as my friend Tom always asks me “How come rock stars are rock stars and ad stars are always rock stars?” I know it’s not the exact title of the article but it’s pretty much the same idea: since when is rock star ever a good term to apply to a business professional?
Last I checked, most rock stars are oversexed alcohol and drug abusers who don’t wake up before 4pm. But, if you’re looking for a social media person and you want a rock star, certainly the diva attitude is what you’ll get in most cases. I mean, rack up 50,000 followers via a bot program – put all those people in a room? That’s a stadium, filled to capacity! While I doubt any of my own Twitter followers will be flinging their bras onstage to me anytime soon, I’d like to think I could get at least 500 people nodding as if they’re interested but really wondering if there are any chocolate croissants left at the buffet table at a conference their boss paid for thinking there would be some valuable insights from a social media rock star. Instead, I will stroll onstage, fashionably late, complain that the microphone is giving me shocks, and try to mutter through my drunken stupor.
But I digress. What’s more irritating though is not the idiotic use of the word s”super star” but how incredibly milquetoast, obvious, repetitive and ultimately disappointing all of these responses are. Out of forty nuggets, I’d say thirty five of them were almost exactly the same advice said a different way. I’m not mathematician, but counting on each hand, I’d say 10 of these social media rock stars put so little thought into their response, the author would have been better off leaving them out. But hey, if Brian Solis is answering your queries, best not leave her out no matter how mundane the response is!
Because I’ve spend the last 5 days, including the weekend, relaunching a website of a retailer who has decided to abandon their e-commerce website in favor of a store locator and a map (we at Half Fiction call this the Brand Deescalation Model to Reduce Revenue and Alienate Consumers™), and I really don’t feel like working on my other 5 projects, I’m actually going to take the time to tear apart each of these forty tepid reponses individually. Unless of course, there’s one I like. Out of forty, I sure hope so?
Before I start, let me rant a bit on the type of person who looks for advice on being a Level 26 social media demigod elf. All of this advice doesn’t matter. It all says the same thing: Be original, be nice to people who are important who might promote you, and post often. Duh, duh, and duh. Also, spam the shit out of better blogs with links to your boring articles. Other bloggers LOVE this and they’ll link back to you!
The advice, if asked*, that I would have presented this author with is as follows:
*I expect to be asked once I follow this advice and become a Social Media Hall of Famer™
Be yourself. And I’m not being cliché here. Being yourself in social media is a great way to find out whether or not you’re a total shithead. Because if you are, them your blog is going to suck and no one is going to pay attention to you. If you’re yourself, and you’re awesome, then you probably don’t need to be reading articles on how to be a social rock star or obsessively using the Google Keyword Search Tool to optimize your incoming SEO search terms.
And you don’t need to follow these silly rules about how often to post. Post hourly. Post monthly. Post yearly. Do you think Seth Godin goes “Gee, I really wanted to take a day off but people might forget who I am and it could tarnish my personal brand if I don’t….” HELL NO. He goes weeks without posting. And then when he does post, it’s brilliant enough that every social media lemming in the world is RT @sethgodin 100,000 times. Now if you are a crappy person, and have no original thoughts (that would be according to statistics I just made up, 98.5% of you), and your blog has a readership lower than one of my refrigerator notes, then you can follow this advice, which I call “Marc’s 13 Ridiculously Clever Social Media Tips for Boring People With No Life Who Need the Approval of Strangers on Twitter.”
1) Write your really mediocre content
2) Write a really awesome headline that’s in list-form that totally overstates how awesome the article is. I suggest headlines like:
• 10 Unusual But Appropriate Uses for Vasoline During a Job Iinterview
• 7 Catty Responses That Will Keep Them Guessing!
• 14 New Mobile Technologies That Will Completely Change How You Cross the Street
People love lists. Even better, social media people are so lazy and busy looking for 15 Surefire Lists of The Best Retweetable Content Ever, they never bother to vet the content they retweet. Every retweet by a social media overlord goes through this strict process: Is the headline cool? Does this person have 400 followers? Will retweeting it make me look cool for another 5 minutes?
3) Kiss everyone’s ass
4) Retweet everyone else’s repetitive dreck.
5-13) Repeat, repeat and so on. Sorry for lying to you about how many there were, but we’re onto the fun part: Let’s skewer those 40 awesome social media rock star bullet points!
Please refer to the original article so you can see all the extra valuable insights and tips for each point – I’m just commenting on the headlines. The truly priceless content is on this guy’s blog, and what the hell, his Google Analytics deserve a little love for all the effort that went into this:
1) 1. Create valuable content that helps people solve their problems
Sage advice from David Meerman Scott, whose claim to fame seems to be that he gives “Business Lessons from the Grateful Dead.” So most of the content I see these days has to do with how to solve my problem of not being enough of a social media rock star. Not enough content goes to “what’s a better way to organize the keys on my keychain so I don’t confuse my girlfriend’s keys with mine and spend 15 minutes blaming her sticky lock rather than my own disorganization?” That would really help me and I’d totally follow any blogger who wrote about things like that. Instead, social media’s overhyped headlines and lack of content filtering means I see things like “4,000 Incredibly Ingenious Ways to Fly All Over the World Cheap” and skim the article as it says things like “Keep searching travel sites until you find a lower fare. Duhhh.
Duhhmeter™: 3/5
2. Be really transparent about everything that you’re doing,
says some guy I never heard of. I guess this falls under the category of “I should tweet what I ate for breakfast and how it came out later?” Trust me, you do not want anyone to be totally transparent about everything and just how does that make you a social media royalty? This goes back to my “be yourself” advice. If you’re not a shithead, you’ll naturally be transparent about the things that you need to be transparent about. If you are a shithead, then you probably need to read it in an article that you need to be. Which, by definition, kind of makes you a sociopath by my untrained and unprofessional diagnosis.
Duhhmeter™: 3/5
3. Be consistent
Says Michael Port of the michalport.com empire. Not bad advice, just surprisingly inconsistent for someone you’d think would have more to say. Unless, you need to subscribe to a seminar to get the real advice, then, I guess he’s consistent at making money.
Duhhmeter™: 5/5
4. Follow better people
Says Robert Scoble. I think what Robert is saying here is “If you are one of the 5 people who hasn’t followed me, follow me! I’m better.” And I’m not disagreeing, but usually Robert shows up in my “people you should like, follow, stalk, subscribe to” in every social network I join and I usually don’t just because the sheer volume of the content he puts out there is not only a bit overwhelming but everyone retweets it anyway and I really value content that comes from third hand sources so much higher. Keep up the good work, Robert, I wish there were people better than you for you to follow!
Duhhmeter™: 2/5
5. Create relationships with outstanding strategic partners
Says Carol Roth, who takes a tough, take-no-prisoners no-nonsense approach to telling business owners about the proverbial spinach in their teeth. Well, not to beat a dying horse, but duh, Carol. And partners, they’re strategic. No need to add strategic. If they weren’t strategic they wouldn’t be partner material, right? “Marc, why did Half Fiction partner with that media buying agency?” “Oh, no good reason really. We’ll never get any work from them – we just really like their office and there’s free coffee in the waiting area.”
This falls under the shady “ride other people’s coattails to success” advice that many of the other bullet points here fall under. If you’re not a shithead, then these people will come to you. No need to create the relationship, you disingenuous self promoter! There’s nothing more an A-list blogger who got there on sheer good content and good looks alone hates more than some upstart wanting to “partner up.” You either have something to offer, or not. Some partners will be bigger, and more strategic. In some cases you’ll be helping someone else out. Don’t keep score. Just be yourself (unless you’re a shithead, then again, follow all this advice.)
Duhhmeter™: 3/5
6. Make connections with people online, and then go and meet them in person in the real world offline
Surprisingly unfunny response from Scott Porad of the hillarious Cheezburger Network. So, for those of you reading this – feel free to use the handy links on this site to follow me on Twitter, add me on Facebook and Linked in, etc. to you heart’s content. But if you knock on my door in Bushwick, I will shoot you in the face. OK, maybe that’s drastic. But really – if you’re trying to climb the ladder to the upper echelons of social media, you don’t have time to mix-n-mingle “offline” with people. Unless there’s free food and drinks, then it might be worth it. But how low bandwidth is talking? Can’t I just send you an email?
Duhhmeter™: 3/5
7. Create content that stands for something, which is remarkable, divisive or inspirational
Great advice for the 1.5% of us who create original thoughts. For the rest of us, the ones who need to read 14,000 ways to get 14,000 Twitter followers in 14 days (follow, follow, follow, unfollow those who don’t follow back, repeat), should probably steal other people’s great ideas and pay an intern to change around the sentences a little bit.
Duhhmeter™: 3/5
8. Lead your customers with the latest trends in your industry
Says Laurel Touby. I’m sure the MediaBistro empire was founded on this – unfortunately from my view, my customers do not want the latest trends. They want shit that works cheaply and effectively with as little bells and whistles as possible as they carefully navigate the worst economy ever and try to save their job while managing 500,000 new digital media opportunities. If you’re a really smart person, I would change this to “charge your customers actual money to find out the latest trends in your industry, if they’re interested and find such information valuable.” If you have nothing better to do with your life than try to become a social media genius (the bar is set low here, don’t worry), then again, go copy the latest trends from someone smarter, like Robert Scoble. No one values you enough yet to pay you for your obvious opinions.
Duhhmeter™: 4/5
9. Develop and nurture multiple circles and multiple spheres of influence
All I’ll say here is: “CREEPY!” I’m sitting here in my apartment, playing hooky from the office just thinking about all my….spheres…muhahahah! I have my advertising sphere, my marketing sphere, startup people in NYC…oh wait, there’s more. Soon, I will be taking over the vegetarians who eat in restaurants downtown! Then, I will control all the spheres I need!
Duhhmeter™: 3/5
10. Start talking to people
Damn it! So simple, why the hell didn’t I think of that? I’m sitting here, all alone with my sad thoughts of sagging Twitter follower count, and how 499 of my 530 Facebook friends don’t regularly “like” my status updates. I just went outside and talked to the lady 2 apartments down who is always trying to get me to pay her money for her mediocre home cooked meals that she’s doing as a business and unfortunately not only did she not follow me on Twitter, but she doesn’t even own a computer. Now what?
Duhhmeter™: 10/5
11. Develop your storytelling skills
Michael Margolis is known for his “get storied’ series where he teaches entrepreneurs to tell their stories. Good advice, and from what he’s told me he’s quite successful at it. I think better advice for the wanna be social media rock star is to follow Michael’s formula of having one idea that you push over and over. For Michael, it’s stories, and it works for him. It’s, like the other advice givers in this article said, consistent. People know what to expect from you. And who can argue with storytelling? I’d much rather hear a good story than read an infographic with suspect data.
Duhhmeter™: 1/5
12. Co?create some products with people who have your audience already but are not selling them the kind of things you’re selling
This falls under the creepy riding on other people’s coattails advice category again, but it’s not bad advice as long as you’re bringing something to the table yourself.
Duhhmeter™: 1/5
13. Give your content wings and give it roots
Ann Handley, Red Bull called and it wants its slogan back. Ann, a Prof at MarketingProfs wants you to ground your content in yourself (be yourself, again again) and then give it wings by making it easily shareable on the Internets. Wow Ann, the first part started off good, but isn’t all content (unless you’re a NY Times Subscriber) sharable now? Does adding those little doohicky icons on every single post really make it that much easier to share things and let my content fly away with its other little fairy friends into social media never never land? Your content sinks or swims based on how good it (or its headline) is. Adding a like button to crappy content won’t make it go anywhere. Remember, the Internet is a Series of Tubes, and shit rolls downhill! Think about it.
Duhhmeter™: 4/5
HippyDippyMetaphorMeter™ 25/5
14. Get offline and meet people in real life
See, if people in social media weren’t so obsessed with lists (and round numbers like 40) this could have been a 10 paragraph article with things like “so and so says get offline and meet people.” and Joselin Mane at BostonTweetup.com totally agrees! Instead, we see the same advice here repeated over and over. Snore.
I’d also like to add that you combine this with the advice to only meet people whose coattails you want to ride, that way you can look over their shoulder at their iPhone to make sure they’ve started to retweet your new list of “11 Boston Cafés That Won’t Throw You Out After Your 5th Coffee Refill After Making Suggestive Comments to the Barista About Waiting Until Her Shift is Over.”
Duhhmeter™: 6/5
15. Get very, very good at filtering and aggregating content
That sounds like my advice earlier for shitheads who have no original thoughts. Filter other people’s content and then regurgitate that. No wonder there’s been an explosion in the amount of information in the past few years. It’s not like we’re discovering new planets and genomes every day. It’s Frank rewrote Bob’s 44 Clearly Genius Ways to Tweet About Marketing into 45 Awesome Tactics for Marketers to Tweet.
Duhhmeter™: 5/5
16. Be topical and early in the news cycle
Another “be yourself.” Agreed.
Duhhmeter™: 3/5
17. Use online video
I’m sorry, but no one wants to see your poorly-produced stuttering stumbling mess of a personality with bad lighting, your unmade bed in the background, and no makeup on GooTube anytime soon. Clearly a huge waste of your time – unless you have a fantastic personality and some good knowledge of videography and don’t live/work in a place that sounds like downtown Beirut (that’s my excuse)….
Duhhmeter™: 2/5 (At least original advice)
18. Be remarkable
Says Johnny B. Truant, as he glances up from Seth Godin’s latest book, “Be Remarkable – And tell everyone else to be too.”
Duhhmeter™: 27/5 (At least original advice)
19. Let your passion shine
Totally following that advice now, I am passionate about debunking social media fakery. I don’t hate social media, just the people who claim they have “secrets” to “success.” Expected more from Brains on Fire but I’m guessing it’s not the same without Spike Jones.
Duhhmeter™: 5/5 (At least original advice)
20. Learn how to talk more about other people
As said by Yaro Starak, one of the masters of being famous for writing about how to get rich on the Internet with Blogging by writing about how to get rich on the Internet with Blogging and having other people write about how to get rich on the Internet by Blogging on your blog about getting Rich on the Internet by Blogging.
Duhhmeter™: 5/5
21. Hang out where your audience hangs out and get to understand them
Looks like for the new client I’m doing social media for I should be hanging out at the girl’s changing room at the local high school, but I wasn’t planning on following the advice of this article anyway so, local authorities, go back to finding my friend Eric’s laptop and don’t worry about me.
If you “follow your passion” I’m not sure why you’d need to do something as disingenuous as “immersing yourself” in your audience. You’re either knowledgable, passionate and original about a topic and people get it, or you’re a shithead and you need to do amateurish and stalker-like things and “observe people” to understand how to fit in.
Duhhmeter™: 5/5
CreepyMeter™ 10/5
22. Find one specific niche and master that niche
Not bad advice but if you’re interesting to read, you could write about something completely uninteresting to me and I’ll still read it. I love for example, Slate.com, which can write on a diverse variety of topics that I’d never otherwise be into and frame it in a relevant way. This is only good advice if you’re a crap writer – then people who are really into your niche won’t care that you’re a crap writer. I’m a huge, huge Mets fan and I obsessively google news the Mets every day and read anything new on them. If you’re writing about the Mets, I don’t care that you’re a bad writer. I just want to know something new – that your cousin’s girlfriend’s step-brother overheard the wife of the Mets Scouting director say the Mets might actually resign Jose Reyes AND move the outfield fences in 200 feet so Jason Bay can hit homeruns again. Anyway on with the rest of this blog post so I can start my new blog on social media tactics for dry cleaners in the Lower East Side.
Duhhmeter™: 3/5
23. Integrate social media with other tactics online and offline.
That’s what my agency, Half Fiction specializes in. Give us a call sometime! Actually I prefer emails. Call me if you have a huge budget. I mean huge. Like your hand would cramp writing out our deposit check huge.
Duhhmeter™: 1/5
24. Change from thinking about changing other people’s mind to changing your mind
That made me dizzy. Time for more coffee.
Huhhmeter™: 5/5
25. Get active in other people’s communities
Just joined a stitch-n-bitch in Brooklyn. Anyone know where I can buy some yarn?
Duhhmeter™: 3/5
CreepyMeter™: 4/5
26. Build Multi Digital Dimensionality by Listening and Engaging on Multiple Networks
Oh, so you mean I should be on Twitter AND Facebook. And now GooglePlus, too? Anyone still on LiveJournal?
Duhhmeter™: 4/5
Jargonmeter™: 10/5
27. Get into other people’s heads and help them with their challenges
“Connect with people online and then meet with them offline to build a long term relationship that is real and authentic” says Chris Garrett of ChrisG.com, probable author of “Everything I learned about social media started with my online dating experience.”
Duhhmeter™: 3/5
28. Make your professional narrative personal
Somewhat good advice from Cathy Brooks, but some people will follow this advice too far. Remember, people want to do business with you, there might be room for a humorous lighthearted anecdote about missing a plane because your alarm didn’t go off, but go easy on the “it was 3am in Mexico City and I had a kilo of heroin in the trunk. Next to me, gagged, and beaten bloody, the man who I thought I could trust, with the antidote cleverly hidden in the one orifice the authorities didn’t check…”
Duhhmeter™: 2/5
29. Have an opinion, be remarkable, be passionate and have a permanent place (Your Blog)
First, a little rant on writing this blog. This has been a lot of fun. I am nearly 3/4 through this. How in the world someone made it through writing the original boring version, well, hat’s off to you, because I am slothlike-towards the finish line, wishing they would invent a waterproof laptop so I can finish this in the shower.
Second – this person took three of the other 40 points that were repeated and combined them into one single thought. So kudos to that! (Are Kudos still around? I used to love them as a kid.) Again, “Seth Godin” + “Tony Robbins” + “Duh.”
Duhhmeter™: 15/5 (Three duh points for 3 times the duh.)
30. Be a media and publishing company
Well sure, if you want to go out of business. Hey, I have an idea: let’s take yesterday’s news and print it out on paper. Then we’ll get a network of 13-year-old boys to distribute it to readers across America by paying them quarters so they can buy candy or crack cocaine or whatever 13-year-old boys like these days. Once we get the readership numbers up, we can pay for the whole thing with ADVERTISING! We can use as a real-life ad medium to drive people back online (not sure why the left in the first place?!) using cutting edge QR Codes.
Duhhmeter™: 3/5
31. Share ideas liberally and be accountable
OK, so I have an idea. I’m going to get a space in Wiliamsburg (Brooklyn, not Virginia) and I’m going to sell Croutons – toasted bready goodness with all sorts of toppings, and people can sit on Futons, which will also be for sale (we’ll vacuum the crumbs before final delivery.) I will call this Croutons and Futons.
If anyone is sharing their ideas liberally, it might just be a bad idea.
Duhhmeter™: 3/5
32. Focus on a specific micro niche
Hey, we’re nearly 10 spots down from #22: Find one specific niche. Let’s get a micro-planer and shave down that idea even further.
Duhhmeter™: 5/5
33. Build a community of readers
This reads exactly like those quotes you read after baseball games. You know the ones where the team just lost and they’re trying to explain to the local newspaper reporters that you know, hitting a 95 MPH cut fastball is friggin hard and sometimes your bat being a millimeter off while traveling at a speed that would crush your skull like a ripe melon is the difference between a soul crushing warning track fly ball to end the game and a game winning grand slam? And inevitably, the reporter asks “What are you going to do differently tomorrow” which illicits some form of response that, when you read between the lines says “Well ASSHOLE, in case you’ve never been to a baseball game before, we’re going to try to score more runs than the other team. If we do that, we will for sure win. We will try to do this by having our pitcher give up less runs than our offense scores. Our offense, conversely will try to score more runs than our pitching allows. And our defense? They’ll try to drop the ball a lot less, it was sunny today and they were hungover.”
If I ever asked someone how to get famous and they told me “by getting fans” I would hit them. That’s essentially what this response says.
Duhhmeter™: 1000/5
34. Hang Out With Other Successful People (Entrepreneurs)
This is true, I’ve been hanging out with a lot of unsuccessful people. I need to stop that. Consider you all dropped from Facebook. Like, if you’re homeless and you’re hanging out in a homeless shelter all day, that’s clearly not where you need to be. Enroll in the latest local social media conference ASAP (or try to get your Klout high enough that you get a free invite.)
Duhhmeter™: 4/5
35. Create A Tribe of Rabid Advocates
Enough with the tribes! We’re social media gurus, not Native Americans. We’re not all gathering around, smoking a peace pipe, acting all rabid about advocating a social media astronaut (I need to end this soon as I am running out of snarky ways to describe social media people.)
Duhhmeter™: 4/5
36. Become a Thought Leader Through Media
As opposed to a Thought Follower through Muttering To Myself?
Duhhmeter™: 5/5
37. Be Patient and Persistent
This is great advice for the 99.9999% of us who fail to become a social media guru. Follow all the advice on this page. If you succeed, good for you! If you don’t, read #37 again: Be Patient and Persistent. Because, if you’re failing, you’re just not failing HARD enough. And, it’s all your fault because you haven’t been patient or persistent enough. Be more persistent – like, instead of blogging every day, try every hour. Then every minute. Failing that, just be patient.
Duhhmeter™: 5/5
38. Discover and Develop Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
Since today is my first day working in marketing I am sure glad someone took the time to spell out what a USP is, otherwise I’d have no way of measuring the ROI on my WTF about this article. I think this one is talking about “having a niche” Again again again again.
Duhhmeter™: 5/5
39. Distill what it is that you feel you bring to the table in terms of value and expertise
Brian Solis continues (too good not to quote!) “Then identify the influential individuals that already in place, at varying levels, from the A list to the C list, and figure out how it is that you can connect with them, and how you can connect your insights to them directly.”
Right Brian, cause that’s how I rank all my friends and followers. OK, well not exactly. Since I am obsessed with Baseball I have separated my G+ and FB lists into a major and minor league roster system. Depending on how much I like you, you’re either on the Major League roster with a strict limit of 25 people (in order for someone to be added, I must first demote someone to AAA.) And then all the different minor leagues AAA, AA, A, A Rookie). Doing things like playing Farmville can get you sent way down.
Who but a sociopath sits there and ranks people like that? Besides, isn’t it just easier to check someone’s Klout score before you decide you want to talk to them? (Mine is 50, to save you the trouble. Please don’t talk to me unless yours is at least 27.6)
Duhhmeter™: 5/5
40. Build lots of Followers and Subscribers and Promote You Content by Retweeting and Emailing
Guy Kawasaki, I used to love your columns about Apple. And you sometimes have interesting to say. But there’s a reason why I’ve subscribed to you on Twitter: you say too much. And a lot of it just isn’t that interesting. Like this.
Duhhmeter™: 5/5
To wrap up, let me leave you with one last piece of advice. No, it’s not “be yourself” or “be passionate” or “consistent” or “remarkable.” Chances are, like 98.5% of you, you will only be remarkable about how inconsistent and irrelevant you are. So my final advice is simple:
“Give up.”
It’s ok to give up. Not everyone needs to be a social media titan. Not everyone can be. Not everyone who achieves it still wants to be. There’s a lot better things to do with your time than being popular on the Internet. Think of all the time I just saved you.