Life of an Internet Entrepreneur

Sometime around June this year, Social networking sites (such as Facebook.com and Myspace.com) experienced a huge boost in visitors. However, if you really look at when the social networking sites started spreading like wildfire, it was around 4 years ago, and mostly in the college-age segment. Now, four years later, there is some evidence America is tired of social networking, or at the very least, social networking with no particular end goal.

I believe Staples made an error of omission. Their old slogan “Staples, yeah, we’ve got that” seems to be missing a crucial last part and so does their new slogan “that was easy”. Today I ran into a Staples in Manhattan to buy some RAM for a computer, and had a very odd shopping experience.

You know the old saying, “being in the right place at the right time”? That is usually used as a sign of luck, rather than carefully planned action. But what if we could be at the right place at the right time more often than just by luck?

I have found over the years, that you can market anything a lot easier if you ask yourself one question:

What question does the customer have, but isn’t even consciously aware of?

I checked my mail today, and found a thick envelope with a candy cane attached.  I’m still excited by the surprise of actual mail (sometimes even junk mail), and rushed to open it, when I noticed it oddly was addressed to my apartment number - not me.  Only slightly disappointed, I pulled out a letter with illustrated Santas, reindeer, and Christmas trees.   After looking at the header, I recognized the letter was from my landlord.

TomTom and Google announced a partnership today, and it is a particularly interesting one.  Tom Tom, maker of the popular portable GPS systems many people use in their cars, plans to let users send addresses from Google to their devices.

While Tom Tom already has “Points of Interest” on its devices, Google Maps will soon be able to be transferred right over with one click. This should cause a lot of moving around in the young industry, and here are some thoughts on what might happen.

Analysis

Over the last few years there has been great buzz surrounding text messaging and how businesses can use it to market. Less emphasis has been put on how businesses can use it to actually carry out their business. However, Papa John’s, a popular national pizza chain, has found a way to use text messaging - to order your pizza.

Papa John’s already accepts online orders, and the neat thing about them and the text message orders is that they both appear on the same screen at the store - integrating methods of ordering. This integration technology is key, since the number one reason why most restaurants today don’t offer texting or online orders is because of the hassle to manage those orders, and the additional hardware that is generally needed.

Newspapers continued their slide in the third quarter of 2007, with 9% less advertising going to print.  While most newspapers added web properties to their portfolio in the last few years, that has not been enough to offset the losses in the print section.Newspaper classified ad sections suffered some of the worst losses, with that portion down 17%.  The three largest areas of the classifieds sections are:

Real Estate - The weak housing market has only added to the hurt of real estate companies shifting advertising to more interactive forms of advertising.

Market research has the power to make or break any business idea you have. You may be planning, for instance, a retail clothing store targeted at women ages 35-44. But, what if the location you chose has an abnormally low percentage of residents in that target market? The result most often would be a lack of business, potentially without your ever knowing why (and leaving you erroneously blaming your logo, for instance).

Luckily, the U.S. Census Bureau tracks just about every useful detail about our cities. Whereas it would normally be a major headache to sift through all of the data, I use a site that cuts down my research time to just a few minutes.

Coca-Cola, the world’s largest beverage company, has just won an award from Consumers International (an international consumer group with 220 member organizations) for its Dasani brand of water.  The award given is the “Bad Drinks Marketing’ award, for trying to sell off Dasani as anything other than the bottled municipal tap water that it is.

Dasani’s packaging includes marketing messages like:

‘Filtered for purity using state of the art processes’ and ‘enhanced with a special blend of minerals for a pure, crisp, fresh taste’

Apple announced today that it has sold 1 million iPhones in just 74 days, in a move that has the industry buzzing about the effect on software developers, cell phone manufacturers, and wireless service providers.

Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, stated that it took 2 years to sell the same amount of iPods. 

This development comes just a week after Apple shocked everyone and lowered the price of the iPhone to $399 ($200 off the original price).  That switch, while angering some past purchasers of the iPhone at the original price (who were eventually offered a $100 credit with Apple as appeasement), also allowed Apple to move more aggressively into the cell phone market.