The social space online changes rapidly. Feedback stays on top of emerging media news so you don’t have to. Here are the top must-read social media articles of the week for July 24, 2011.
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Anna’s Social Media Picks of the Week (03/18/11)
My top picks for social media news this week include the buzz around SXSW products, Facebook Deal subscriptions, March Madness, Twitter’s Birthday, and an article on how to get paid news free with a “social loophole.” Read More
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The Young and the Restless: Who Are These People?
In the same year that a major motion picture chronicled (or lampooned, depending on your point-of-view) his college exploits, Time Magazine named Facebook founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg the 2010 Person of the Year. Meanwhile, having just rejected a reported $6 billion purchase offer from Google, Groupon founder Andrew Mason blithely deflects questions from the Today Show’s Matt Lauer with an aloof mix of nonsense and non sequitur. Neither is yet 30 years old. Both are presumed billionaires. Who ARE these people? Are they the same or total opposite?
Facebook's Zuckerberg
In the run-up to The Social Network, I devoured just about every piece of information I could regarding Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, as a means of checking the film from a fact-or-fiction, a Hollywood vs. Reality standpoint.
Likewise, as Groupon entered the local market, uncoincidentally at the same time as major competitor, LivingSocial, I dug into the background of Mason to see if there was another genius college dropout turned visionary CEO story afoot. I can tell you this much with certainty: Mason is no Mark Zuckerberg. Andrew Mason, for his part, does demonstrate clarity of vision, an underrated if unheralded virtue among the young CEO set.
But if you read the biographical profile found in the August 2010 issue of Chicago Magazine, you get the impression it’s Mason’s mentor, local serial entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky, who is the real visionary. According to the feature, the roots of the whole Groupon idea came from a difficult divorce with a cell phone provider. Believing the angst generated by everyone who’s ever been through such a process could be focused into collective action and, hopefully, community remedy, Mason set to developing a non-profit organizing site called The Point. And while the site attracted a following, it wasn’t attracting investors. When it came to combine collective action with a money-making proposition, Groupon was born.
The rest, as they say, is history.
In tech years, Facebook is no spring chicken, as demonstrated by the fact that your mom, your dad and your grandparents have all figured it out. At a certain point, we’ve gotten to watch Mark Zuckerberg grow, not just as CEO of an indomitable Internet giant, but as a person, as an adolescent into an adult. Only 20 when he co-founded Facebook in 2004, we’ve seen or heard of him for so long, it’s hard to believe that the world’s youngest billionaire would barely be out of grad school had he taken the more traditional path.
A reluctant interviewee early on, Zuckerberg was considered arrogant and standoffish when defending both Facebook’s success and increasingly public missteps. But even as the slings and arrows of privacy concerns and backlash against site changes intensified, nothing has slowed the Facebook train as it cruised past the half-billion user milestone.
Meanwhile, the boy CEO has grown as well, recently appearing on 60 Minutes, ostensibly to announce yet another iteration of the Facebook interface. But what was really on display was a grown up Mark Zuckerberg, ready to put a real public face, not just for his company as they attempt to change and dominate the Internet, but for himself as well.
Groupon's Mason
On the other hand, as a public persona, Andrew Mason seems to be regressing. A Nightline piece a few months ago showed the Groupon CEO as the easygoing boy-next-door his company profile describes, casually tossing out the accolades and reminding everyone that they’ve thrived as new and well-backed imitators spring up around the world on what seems like an hourly basis. Fast-forward to a more recent Today Show interview, where relevant questions were dodged like bullets and Mason’s squirmy, awkward responses indicated a discomfort with the trappings of sudden fame and riches.
For all the perceived arrogance, Zuckerberg has never seemed to shrink from the challenge of running the Internet’s biggest company. It would do Mason well to develop some semblance of that fortitude, or the CEO with the “fastest growing company ever” (according to Forbes magazine) may prove to be too great a mantle to bear.
Naturally, only time will tell the fates of both companies and their suddenly super-rich young CEOs. In a final comparison, it’s worth mentioning that some of Zuckerberg’s most awkward moments with the press were in deflecting buyout and lawsuit talks. Maybe when the conversation about Groupon turns away from Google’s offer and more to the company’s future, Andrew Mason will rebound and find the confidence and grace that Zuckerberg has shown. We shall see. And answer the question from the outset: Who are these people? They’re not like you and me, that seems clear. But while they don’t appear to be on the same plane at this point, it’s possible that they may find more common ground in the future.
Who knows, maybe it’ll be Facebook’s money that is ultimately too much for Groupon to turn down.
-Thomas (@thomasmcdonald)
20
A Look At The Inc. 1
by FeedbackThe vacations are over. Back-to-school sales have come and gone, while big yellow buses rejoin the fray that is my morning commute. Talk of football fills the airwaves and Facebook feeds, letting us know that fall is (almost) here.
For me, the annual September release of Inc. magazine’s top 500 private companies (stretched to 5000 online) has been an autumn rite for as long as I can remember.
For the uninitiated, Inc.’s list is ranked by the percentage of revenue growth over a three-and-a-half year period by privately held, for-profit independent companies that meet some qualifying financial requirements. Some companies appear on the list briefly before going public. Other companies are stalwarts, like North Carolina software maker SAS, which has appeared on the list each year since 1981.
At Feedback, we’re frequently charged with surveying the social media landscape of entire industries, clients and competitors alike, to evaluate the overall usage and uncover best practices. For the purpose of this post, I thought I might do a quick audit of this year’s Inc. 500 No. 1 fastest growing company, ideeli.
If by chance you haven’t heard of ideeli, you’re certainly familiar with the concept: a members-only online retailer, a “Flash-shopping” site, with regular-if-not-daily emails offering merchandise for greatly discounted prices. While ideeli counts sites like Gilt Groupe, Rue La La and HauteLook among its main competitors, it’s a short leap to their much-ballyhooed geo-specific daily deal siblings, Groupon and LivingSocial. Most of ideeli’s thousand brand partners are in the fashion world, though offers for such things as travel present growth opportunities they are just beginning to explore.
So how is a company of this size and potential using social? At first glance, the answer is quite well.
On Facebook, multiple daily posts reflect their assets via pictures, as well as their sponsors and items of general interest to their more than 170,000 fans. Likes by the hundred and comments by the dozen are common within hours of posting.
The effort on Twitter is strong as well. Having cultivated a base of almost 26,000 followers with over 20,000 tweets since September 2008, the content and interactions really flow here. Chances are if you direct your message to @ideeli, you’ll get a personal response. At the time of this writing, there were twenty direct responses to individuals tweeting their questions or affections for this shopaholic’s dream.
In addition to their regular offerings, they also do what they call “Flash Friday” giveaways for an unspecified and far briefer time period that you can only participate in by following on Twitter and using the appropriate hashtag in your messages. Clearly, there is some serious social media savvy within the company’s Manhattan headquarters.
As a business that contacts its consumers regularly via email, you could give ideeli a pass if they failed to make use of a blog along side their other efforts. However, the clean design and presentation of information, as well as the availability of multiple RSS feeds at blog.ideeli.com provide a strong complement to the other promotional efforts, though it would seem with less traffic and far fewer interactions. I am somewhat surprised – given the adoption of Tumblr within the fashion community – that ideeli has not embraced that site and its potential to further engage with its clientele. A presumptive search for ideeli.tumblr.com gets forwarded back to the main site, where an unformatted page lies begging for completion and content (I know some who would be willing to help them out with that).
I’m somewhat obsessed with deal websites, so I was surprised to see a site that I had never heard of (though competitors Gilt & Rue were on my radar) top the Inc. 500. Who knows where they will place on next year’s list: Maybe they’ll go public or be bought out and no longer qualify. Or maybe they’ll find a goldmine in other retail sectors and continue to grow at this torrid pace.
Either way, I’m sure they’ll be keeping up with their strong efforts in social. If you’re looking for an example of a private company doing it right, look no further: ideeli’s the real deal.
-Thomas (@thomasmcdonald)