What the blazes is that, a live webinar?
Webinar… an atrocious word in itself, means an online/web seminar.
As seminar is a fairly informal form of an academic lecture, and generally contains a component of interactivity – either there is an opportunity for questions at the end of presentations, or later in the hallway.
In context, so far so good. You can do that online. Fine.
So why do companies now need to put the adjective “live” in front… what does that mean?
At Upstarta meetings we’ve explored the concept of business plans.
In a “traditional” business, you need a business plan because a bank will require you to present one. Since an Upstarta doesn’t go to the bank for a loan or credit, we can re-assess what a business plan should look like to work for us, or even whether to have one at all.
What we concluded is that it’s useful to define your general direction, but the level of detail that a bank would require in certain aspects is not something you need to waste time on. You need to, as always, consider the possible consequences of decisions and structures you set up.
We also know that markets tend to find products, so an early plan (before entering the market) to market/sell a particular product will quickly be obsolete or look like total nonsense. So you plan to explore in a low-cost manner, maintaining flexibility. Make failing steps cheap and fast, to focus on avenues that are promising/viable.
Do you have examples of this from your own experience? We’d like to hear!
Swedish media production company Day4 recently conducted an experiment on Internet media and the Apple community. They drew a screw with a special-patterned head and posted it anonymously via Reddit. It spread like wildfire.
Just some odd sites, you reckon? No. Try a search on “apple screw” and see for yourself which big names picked this up like almost everybody else. Since no further information existed, all of the commentary in the articles is extrapolated from thin air, with presumptions based on Apple’s actual past actions.
A phrase like “Apple May Be Working On A Top Secret Asymmetric Screw To Lock You Out Of Your Devices Forever” doesn’t even hold up to very basic scrutiny. Disregarding the simplified misuse of the word asymmetrical, it’s not that hard to make/copy a tool for almost any screw head design, from scratch (either from plastic or a metal). Even if the whole thing were true, tools would have been produced very swiftly – regardless of any legalities (which would be a valid topic, considering the US DMCA legislation).
The group at Day4 created the following chart plotting the distance from the source versus the perceived level of truth. Nothing new there either from a psychological perspective, but it’s good to have these things pointed out every once in a while:
From http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-marketing-landscape-complicated-2012-5
We’re definitely saturated. From my own observation, I also think that most companies “don’t get it” and rather than interacting with their environment, treat all this tech like new media outlets. The title also goes this way, “social media marketing”. It is indeed marketing in the sense that “word of mouth” and “listening to your clients and in particular non-clients” are in the realm of marketing, but it’s much less controlled than most marketers operate. Think about it…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1361666/Del-Monte-packaging-Bananas-second-skin.html
The company has taken the view the yellow skin is not quite enough, and will sell individually-wrapped bananas at convenience stores, leisure centres and gyms.
The Germans have a word for this “umverpackung” (“package wrapping”).
Del Monte of course has even more wrapping on this, from the marketing department: the packaging increases the shelf life (they put the banana in when it’s green and it ripens more slowly) and my goodness, it’s recyclable!
That’s of course total greenwash marketing blah. Splitting up a bunch changes the pricing model from weight based to item based, and the price of the individual item is in fact qaudruple in the US where this product has already been available – yes, 4 times the price.
So it makes $ business sense for them, but it’s really, well, bananas. Do you buy it?