A recent study proves that we are all seeking that chance to be our own boss these days.
The Foundation commissioned Harris Interactive to conduct an online survey of 2,438 youth ages 8 to 21 about entrepreneurship. It shows that four in 10 young people would like to start their own business in the future, while another 37 percent believe starting their own business is a possibility. Those who want to have their own business say their top reasons are to use their skills and abilities (92 percent), build something for their future (89 percent), be their own boss (87 percent), see their ideas realized (81 percent) and earn lots of money (85 percent). In the United States, 63 percent of respondents in the Harris survey already believe that, if they work hard, they can be entrepreneurs.
The possibilities excite me because a larger number of young entrepreneurs means greater risks and great advancements in the world of business and tech. The study also shows that a large number of young adults are looking to specialize and make use of their unique skills rather than becoming another one of the drones–see the 92 percent that want to start their own business to use “their skills and abilities.”
Good luck to us all. You know where to find the tips for your trade–right here at wannabeMogul.com, the home of the future of business.
Go for the heart of the city. New hires for start ups are there already and want to be there.
Scope out the food joints nearby. You’ll need some carbo-loading location open and close no matter what time of day so that you can keep your project on track. Nearby stores are also a plus.
Don’t go all Donald Trump. You don’t need fancy marble accents to impress clients–just do good work. Get an office that will serve its purpose and make you look good without going over-priced and extravagant.
Use your space well. Don’t cram people together in too small of a space, or they won’t get anything done. Room teams together and leave plenty of extra space for break rooms and nice luxuries like nap rooms.
Get creative. Let your employees express themselves with decorations in their workspace and make the office your own by putting a little money into paint and company memorabilia.
Last, add comfort as much as you can with the desks, computers and chairs. In tech/programming start ups especially, employees will spend a majority of their day on the property at all times so nice furniture and extra monitors go a long way to boosting morale and preventing employees from noticing how long they have been concentrating on a project.
I love ARGs–or alternate reality games–as a marketing tool. I personally find them fascinating when used effectively. Two of my recent favorites have been the ILoveBees campaign from 42 Entertainment for Microsoft’s Halo 2 release, and the “Ethan Haas was Right” mystery currently marketing J.J. Abrams’ new movie codenamed “Cloverfield” online. If you haven’t seen either one, read about ILoveBees and Ethan Haas was Right on Wikipedia.
Part of the reason they are even more successful these days is the socialization of the Web. With an online ARG, one person who becomes fascinated with the hooks and mystery of the game end up sharing links virally through social networks and outlets like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. The viral movement makes the scope of the campaign much larger than if you had to personally find and attract each person to the campaign.
The ARGs are also a great way to educate consumers and interest them in your product. The ILoveBees campaign leaked parts a side story of the Halo saga, and the Ethan Haas was Right campaign had a huge pull already because of the mystery surrounding J.J. Abrams new film and his background from Lost, the television series. ILoveBees ended up creating one of the largest media launches in history–until Halo 3 was released.
The Escapist highlighted an even more intricate campaign done by Lance Weiler to promote his film Head Trauma with a blog called Hope is Missing. The blog follows a storyline similar to the movie with the sole author logging his efforts to find the missing “Hope.” According to Weiler, with these types of games, the site feeds his creativity for the film and vice versa.
“They’re wild times right now in terms of storytelling,” says Weiler. “I’m approaching all my work in a new way – I’m creating a world. It’s not just enough to create a script anymore.”
The world is what end users and consumers cry out for these days.
The ARG isn’t Weiler’s first effort in the space. He experimented with promoting his films by integrating them with Web sites back in 1998 with his first film The Last Broadcast. His experience shows as he is smart enough to provide various levels of involvement for the passive observer or for the conspiracy theory junkie.
“Sometimes ARGs are dense and take a quite a bit of time to get into,” says Weiler. “With this we were doing media-integrated gameplay. You can enjoy it at multiple levels. You could dig as deep as you want, but you can just look at the web videos if you want. You don’t have to play the game.”
ARGs are one of my marketing passions, and while they take a great deal of effort and planning to execute, their effectiveness with the young, Internet generation has to be noted. Weiler is one of the bold few experimenting with ARGs and involving fans in the presentation of his films by interacting through cell phone text messages and remixing music and scenes live while the movie plays.
“We live in a remix culture, an on-demand culture,” says Weiler. “Media consumption is changing, and because of that media creation is changing. Everything now has become decentralized, controlled by the end user. When that happens it’s about discoverability. It’s all about empowering that user and finding ways to interact with them, and the language of that storytelling has changed.”
While Weiler focuses on the storytelling aspect of involving the fans in the ARG, the marketing aspect is visible in all parts of his site’s presentation.
ARGs can be as simple as a YouTube video or as complicated as a full-fledged puzzle site and email campaign like Ethan Haas was Right. In grassroots marketing, ARGs are cost-effective despite the effort required because of their large scope and conversational/viral value.
Be sure to consider an ARG next time you have a marketing story to tell, but make sure it’s properly introduced so as not to make a bad or scary first impression.
Branding is one of if not THE most critical part of starting a small business beyond having the original business idea. For big companies, branding is what makes them a household name, but smaller businesses can overlook how important it is to form a brand before you can begin to generate any kind of marketing movement.
I like Jantsch’s definition because he puts branding directly in the preparation to be marketable. You must be likable and trustable with a clear message to give the consumers you hope to win over.
With this definition in mind marketing then becomes the act of taking the elements of that personality and exposing them to the ideal customer at the ideal time in the ideal setting. Elements like a company name, logo, images, metaphors, colors, words, look and feel, dress, attitude, networks, consistency and vision.
If marketing is doing then branding is being. Often the two are so integrated strategically and tactically that it’s hard to say one comes before or is more important than the other.
In all my projects, the first step is define a clear branding message before you even begin to think about your marketing plan. As you form your brand, you should have your target audience and market in mind. You want your brand to be likable by anyone who might use or view your product. With consideration to consistency throughout the timeline of a campaign, it’s best to also revisit your branding messages and symbols periodically to make sure that they still define the company and message moving forward. A solid brand can tell a customer more about your company than a sales pitch if you establish it, and it is best to have a strong branding platform in place with your business idea or name.
Without a solid brand, people will not know who you are, or even worse, they might make one up for you with which you don’t agree. Losing the chance to brand yourself is devastating to a new company in winning over you target market. It’s hard enough to change an established brand once it is out in the open, but it is even harder to establish one over a pre-existing negative brand label.
Make sure you brand yourself before someone else does it for you.
I haven’t played around with Facebook pages just yet. Basically, they provide a free profile/page for any company/brand that wants one. In putting up Facebook ads, I have noticed the Facebook boys and girls are pushing hard to have advertisers all make one. One fellow blogger over at Leveraging Ideas recently posted a possibly business to be made in creating pages for big brands before they get to them.
However, ANYONE can sign up a Page for brand or company if that name is not already claimed. This is exactly what I have been doing. So far I have registered Harvard University, 24 and the Sopranos (TV shows), Kleiner Perkins, Patagonia, Lacoste, Ralph Lauren, Blackberry and others.
In his theory, if you register a page for a specific brand or company, you could operate this page in hopes that said company would contact you and possibly nicely ask you for control of the page with a fat check–sort of the way that domain owners go about hunting down hot domains before companies register them.
I’d encourage people to sign-up their favorite brands. Apparently that is what Facebook wanted since they currently have no authentication system. The best-case scenario is you get paid off. The worst case is you become a temporary marketing company working with the best brands worldwide.
Facebook couldn’t possibly have built this big of a flaw into the page system. One commenter on the post already posted that, unlike domain names, the Facebook pages aren’t unique.
However, there can be any number of Facebook pages that have the name Kleiner Perkins, such like there can be any number of people named Carl Perkins. It is up to the user to sort out which is the “real” Kleiner Perkins or Carl Perkins among all the others.
If that is the case, it seems to defeat the purpose of the pages in my mind–one location for fans of the company to unite and connect with the messages from that brand. A single page would give control to the company and give them an official presence on Facebook. If there are multiple instances, it will just turn into a big mess like all those groups were with “The Official [Brand] Fan Group.” Is Facebook making now requirement for authetication because they want to demand that businesses sponsor a page and pay in order to make it offical? I don’t want to mess with joining three groups to champion brands I am not fully connected with like my cell phone or favorite podcast.
If Facebook doesn’t already have some authentication method in place, it is in their best interest to get one. Otherwise, I don’t see these pages becoming useful. Messages and cool company pages will only get muddled in a sea of fanboys and spammers.
This space will not become the next big domain mogul gold mine either because it is proprietary and Facebook has shown they are too smart to let that happen. Unlike the domain space, Facebook is in control all the pages and registers all of them. They want advertisers to create them so that they can take advantage of Facebook’s ad system and features. If some big corporation wanted to create a Facebook page, and a lone individual already owned and operated that page for them, Facebook would intervene to settle the problem for their advertiser.
If pages are this messy, I’ll just wait until Facebook starts the Facebook News Network so I can sponsor this program. (below)
Update 2: Despite the lack of explanation, it seems Facebook deleted one of the pages he created and may do the same in the future, but his 24 and Ralph Lauren pages are still going strong.
If you have never heard of One Week Job, the blog/video series follows Sean Aiken as he travels from job to job in search of his passion. The ultimate goal of the project is to work 52 jobs in 52 weeks and possibly find his dream job.
SnorgTees is a web-run t-shirt company out of Georgia. Founded in 2004 by brothers and run along with a few friends, the company has grown profitable after a few months of struggle. Matt Walls is the president and definer of the word snorg–a “replacement word” that can be whatever you want. His brother Bryan Walls takes the title of “Creative Director” probably for creating the “snorg” in the first place. Really, if they did nothing else besides invent the word, they probably could have been considered pretty creative people in some circles. Instead, they defined a word that defined a company. SnorgTees positions themselves well outside of the “faceless corporate entity” stereotype in their own description, and it’s definitely not a category they have danger of becoming.
Part of their innovation depends upon customers who appreciate their designs and company enough to submit awesome designs to them on a regular basis. They pay anyone who submits a “thumbs up” idea $100 and give them a free shirt! What does that mean to consumers? They are approachable and involve their consumers. It’s the closest thing to a social network running a t-shirt company in existence today–if you are into that sort of Web 2.0 business hot topic these days.
Sean of One Week Job is also quick to point out that it’s not all fun and games running your own company. These guys may look like they are having the greatest time ever–and they should–but Sean notes that “If you want to run a successful company, you can’t forget all the details and long hours that go into it.”
“After the first six months of doing this full-time, I was pretty nervous. Then, every month it gets better and better and more comfortable and more fun,” Bryan Walls, president of SnorgTees, said. “Having a taste of owning my own business and working for myself, I definitely think that’s what I want to do the rest of my life.”
Overall, they seem to have found a pretty laid back company and discovered the dream we all have: managing your own fun company and making your own paychecks. Oh, and they also get to hang out with beautiful, young models half the time when they do ad and design shots for their site. I offer them up as inspiration, and in jealousy, shake my fist.
If your job depends on your ability to follow the “cool” or keep in touch with the latest obsessions–probably true of all entrepreneurs–then it would benefit you to follow new Web start ups. Two sites have emerged on the scene to spread the word on the latest trends.
Trend Hunter – Trend Hunters create portfolios, the best of which are published in online magazines
Chictini.com – The more digg-like phenom that let’s users vote on what hits the A-list
Trend Hunter creates a sort of competition between its hunters to see who can find the hottest new developments. Many of the top hunters are involved in the marketing/ad industry or journalists. KillerStartups.com–which isn’t a bad pulse on new business trends either–highlighted Trend Hunter, sourced in media quite often for its data collection on cool.
Trend Hunters add cool trends to their portfolios, and the site publishes the best stuff in over a dozen online magazines. These magazines generate 1.2 million views per month. They leverage this information and group the hottest trends into clusters of inspiration in the Annual Trend Report.
Chictini is more for the hipsters and social darlings who want to spread their choice selection to all their friends and fellow cool cats. In contrast to Trend Hunter, it seems to emphasize the trend posted more than the user who put it there. They integrate this social network with the digg-like voting system to create a community and society for trend hunting.
KillerStartups also posted on the many features of their site.
They want to show what’s hot before it even knows it’s hot. You can vote whether you think a posted item is “chic” or “weak”, and these votes determine whether the posted items make it to the A-list or the C-list. Unlike Digg, you can actually purchase items from the site. Chictini also has a social network set up where you can create a pretty detailed profile page. You can list all of the basic personal details, see the last ten posted items by that person, leave them comments, create a detailed bio, include contact info, and have people join your “clique.” You can even post a song to your profile.
Keep an eye on them both, and you just might land yourself a choice find in the world of trends or come up with that great idea that will make you millions.
