By Kyle Austin
By Kyle Austin
Remember when the Wall Street Journal ran a story on beer pong on page one, shortly after Rupert took over? I do, I chuckled at the expense of a few friendly Journal contacts.
Remember it was that ridiculous piece that looked at the entrepreneurs looking to make money off of my favorite “Beer Olympics” event.
“These guys aren’t exactly Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. But Messrs. Wright and Johnson, both 22 years old, are part of a new wave of young people trying to make money tapping into their peers’ devotion to beer pong, a cross between ping-pong and beer chugging. As beer-pong season hits a peak with the start of the school year, these beer-pong entrepreneurs are running tournaments and peddling customized beer-pong tables, balls and apparel.”
Well the Valleywag has stolen the Journal’s beat on beer pong and reports that even entrepreneurs with slightly bigger ventures have interest in the old college pastime:
“We hear a contest of beer pong — the drinking game involving ping pong balls, Solo cups and Milwaukee’s Best — has been scheduled between Mark Zuckerberg’s finest and the New York-based, IAC-backed CollegeHumor.”
CollegeHumor and Connected Ventures cofounder Ricky Van Veen is starting the smack talk early for Thursday’s match and he wasn’t afraid to take a low blow and hit Facebook where it really hurts – Its inability to affectively leverage advertisers and create click-throughs.
“Dear Facebook, Looking forward to Thursday. Your winning percentage will be even lower than your click-through rates. Love, CollegeHumor.”
Here’s hoping they get Barry Diller and Sheryl Sandberg on the field for this. Maybe they can discuss ways to target demographics that actually have disposable income.
Did I mention Van Veen does a mean John Mayer impression in the often linked-to parody of a Steve Jobs’ speech.
May 13th, 2008
By Guest Author
By George
One of the first questions we get from clients interested in starting a corporate blog is:
“Who is going to write it?”
Good question. Blogs are like baby birds – constantly hungry. But rather than worms, it is necessary to feed them content. As anyone who has ever been responsible for a corporate blog will tell you – keeping the content new and exciting can be a challenging endeavor.
The first step in creating a corporate blog is to decide what kind of blog to publish. Racepoint has identified seven types of corporate blogs to consider. Deciding on what kind of blog to publish depends on many factors, including:
- The corporate culture of the company
- The primary goal of blogging
- Lead generation
- Reputation enhancement
- Customer communication
- Advocacy
- The time and monetary budgets
- Who will be in charge of writing the blog
Here are the seven types of blog to consider and examples of each.
CEO/Senior Executive Blog
Nutshell: A blog written by the top dog is extremely effective in communicating strategy and overall corporate philosophy. It also can attract media and analyst attention. However, as we noted above, blogging is time consuming and not many CEOs and senior executives have the time to devote to blogging.
Example: Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and president of Sun Microsystems, has been an active blogger for many years. His blog is called Jonathan’s Blog. Schwartz uses his blog as a direct communication to his constituency groups to great effect.
Corporate Voice Blogs
Nutshell: This blog is written by several people in an organization in the voice of the corporation – so there are no individual bylines or personalities. There aren’t too many of these blogs in existence as they often lack the personality, point of view and strong voice necessary to sustain a viable audience.
Example: An excellent corporate blog is maintained by Marathon Technologies (full disclosure: they are a Racepoint client). Marathon uses their blog to showcase issues, share news and announcements, and point readers to ongoing trends.
Company Group Blogs
Nutshell: A corporation has a series of blogs by different executives, consultants and employees on different topics. This approach is very effective for companies that provide a wide-range of products and services. The company selects experts in each area and empowers them to blog about it.
Example: Consulting firm Accenture has a strong group of individual bloggers writing on various topics – from high performance business to convergence insights.
Worker Blogs
Nutshell: There are two types of worker blogs – those run by individual employees of a corporation or groups of employees by a corporations. Many companies don’t like this approach as the average employee doesn’t technically speak for the company – so official communications can be confused with information found on the worker blog.
Example: Southwest Airlines has a successful worker blog because it doesn’t touch on corporate communications – but more on the lives and jobs of the employees who doing the blogging.
Advocacy Blogs
Nutshell: Advocacy blogs are used more by organizations and non-profits than by corporations. These blogs are focused on advocating for a specific issue – like handgun control or tax relief. They can be controversial, but often draw a lot of media attention.
Example: The Democratic Party has a blog called “Kicking Ass” which advocates for the positions of the Democratic Party – to get effect.
Promotional Blog
Nutshell: A promotional blog is just that – a blog designed to promote an event or a product. These blogs generally have a limited lifespan – running a few months to serve as a marketing and publicity tool for the event or product.
Example: The Media Bistro event in New York City next week has been using a blog as a way to attract attention and participants.
Advice Blog
An advice blog is one that a corporation uses to dispense ideas, news, and advice about issues where it feels it has expertise. It has little focus on the corporation and is used as a service to customers – and to build leadership around a certain market segment.
Example: The company Stacks and Stacks runs a successful advice blog called “Clutter Control Freak Blog,” which offers up ideas about organizing living spaces – from homes to offices (its also an excellent example of a group blog).
May 13th, 2008
By Ben Haber
By Ben
Web site owners now have a new way to draw traffic and engage visitors.
With last night’s announcement that Google Friend Connect is now in beta, small Web sites can now add social features to their sites, such as allowing visitors to leave comments and pictures, in order to capture more visitors and engage their audiences more then ever before.
Google outlined the key benefits to Friend Connect:
- Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.
- Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.
- No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.
A limited number of sites can preview Google Friend Connect, but it won’t be completely rolled out for a another couple of months. In the meantime, you can check out some cool sample sites here.
May 13th, 2008
