Is Hiring Obsolete?

I stumbled across this really great essay on Paul Graham’s website that is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA. The title is a bit of an exaggeration, but I find his method of “hacking” the corporate world to be great advice for any young, motivated 20 something who is feeling a bit hopeless due to today’s plummeting job market:

“The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?

Like everything else in technology, the cost of starting a startup has decreased dramatically. Now it’s so low that it has disappeared into the noise. The main cost of starting a Web-based startup is food and rent. Which means it doesn’t cost much more to start a company than to be a total slacker. You can probably start a startup on ten thousand dollars of seed funding, if you’re prepared to live on ramen.

The less it costs to start a company, the less you need the permission of investors to do it. So a lot of people will be able to start companies now who never could have before.

The most interesting subset may be those in their early twenties. I’m not so excited about founders who have everything investors want except intelligence, or everything except energy. The most promising group to be liberated by the new, lower threshold are those who have everything investors want except experience.

Market Rate

I once claimed that nerds were unpopular in secondary school mainly because they had better things to do than work full-time at being popular. Some said I was just telling people what they wanted to hear. Well, I’m now about to do that in a spectacular way: I think undergraduates are undervalued.

Or more precisely, I think few realize the huge spread in the value of 20 year olds. Some, it’s true, are not very capable. But others are more capable than all but a handful of 30 year olds. [1]

Till now the problem has always been that it’s difficult to pick them out. Every VC in the world, if they could go back in time, would try to invest in Microsoft. But which would have then? How many would have understood that this particular 19 year old was Bill Gates?

It’s hard to judge the young because (a) they change rapidly, (b) there is great variation between them, and (c) they’re individually inconsistent. That last one is a big problem. When you’re young, you occasionally say and do stupid things even when you’re smart. So if the algorithm is to filter out people who say stupid things, as many investors and employers unconsciously do, you’re going to get a lot of false positives.

Most organizations who hire people right out of college are only aware of the average value of 22 year olds, which is not that high. And so the idea for most of the twentieth century was that everyone had to begin as a trainee in some entry-level job. Organizations realized there was a lot of variation in the incoming stream, but instead of pursuing this thought they tended to suppress it, in the belief that it was good for even the most promising kids to start at the bottom, so they didn’t get swelled heads.

What Is Your Social Media Content Strategy?

The popularity of social media seems to have come out of nowhere for most business owners. This leaves many scratching their heads wondering how exactly they’re supposed to utilize sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Mashable gives us 5 great tips for a successful social media content strategy:

“1. Know Your Voice

Everything you say on the social web should “sound” like your brand. It’s something Skittles does well. Some of its status messages garner more than 1,000 comments, and many exceed 10,000 “Likes” on Facebook.

Why are these little content snippets so successful? The writing is just like the candy: colorful, playful and imaginative. The pithy, daily, flavor-packed observations are reliably surprising. You can relish today’s post and look forward to tomorrow’s — like candy in word form.

2. Time Your Content

Create a calendar that spells out what you’re going to say and when you’re going to say. Make sure it’s relevant to where people are in their lives and the season. Nobody cares about Santa Claus in January, but a whole lot of people care about sales after Christmas. A quick look at Google Trends will confirm that.

3. Know Your Audience

Why does somebody follow you? Why do they like you? It’s because your brand offers them something. Make sure you deliver. Here’s SKYY Vodka on Twitter with a message that’s relevant to most of its…” [Read more]

What is your social media content strategy? Leave a comment below!

Likester: Making Facebook “Like’s” Searchable!

Any tools that can help us spot trends is very welcome. If you spot trends early enough you can position yourself in a market before there is too much competition.

TechCrunch writes:

“With hundreds of thousands of websites integrating with Facebook Likes and 250 million people engaging with Likes just a little after a year after the Like button made its first appearance at F8, the space of Facebook Likes aggregation is about to get competitive. Facebook search engine Booshaka just released their own Facebook Likes categorization yesterday, for example. Likester just overhauled its platform, wanting to become the go-to Facebook Likes aggregator.

What Likester does differently from Booshaka is that it shows users realtime and popular Like trends, including what your friends are Liking, what everyone is Liking, what’s trending and a chronological log of all your friends Likes. A maps feature adds locality to what Likes are popular where.

As an example of the potential of this service, Likester is currently trying to predict the winner of American Idol by tracking how many people Like certain contestants during the show.

The best part about Likester is the drill down effects of item affinity when you hit the Details button on a specific Like. You can look into “Likesters who liked this also like” recommendations as well as suggest the content to friends and post it on your Facebook wall. Founder Kevin McCarthy says he is also experimenting with anti affinity, or figuring out what people…” [Read more]

10 Costly Internet Marketing Mistakes Small Business Owners Must Avoid

Here is a pretty decent list of Internet Marketing mistakes small business owners must avoid in order to thrive in the digital era. They leave out one important mistake to avoid, and that is not building a customer email list. Your customer list is your #1 asset because it allows you to market to your existing customer base in order to maximize your ROI. It is a well known fact among experienced marketers that it costs a business roughly 7 times more money to acquire a new customer than it does to get a past customer back in your.

Vertical Measures writes:

“1. Not having a self-hosted blog. No one is going to take you seriously if your blog is on a Blogger or WordPress.com domain. That’s like creating a Geocities website for your business back in the 90s. It’s just unprofessional, and it limits your opportunity for growth. Get your own domain (e.g. www.yourcompanyname.com), and host your blog on that domain.

2. Not having a professionally designed website. Website visitors start judging you the moment they land on your website. And while it’s nice to think that we don’t “judge a book by its cover”, that’s just not true. First impressions are everything, and if your website has a bad design and poor usability, it reflects badly on your brand. So, don’t let your nephew who “knows a little web design” build your website. Leave it to the pros.

3. After getting a website up, doing nothing else. The Field of Dreams approach of “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t work for websites. The internet has billions of websites, so the chances of yours receiving traffic just because it’s there are slim to none. You have to promote your website properly through SEO and other internet marketing techniques. That’s how you’ll start to attract traffic…and not just any traffic, targeted traffic consisting of interested customers.

4. Attempting to save money by going with the cheapest vendor. Look, small businesses don’t have a lot of money to spend. I get it. Your budget is tight, but trying to save money by going cheap almost never works out. Whether you’re hiring an SEO provider or a copywriter, you have to be willing to spend some money if you want quality service that gets results. Remember, there’s always some truth to the statement ‘You get what you pay for.’

5. Not having a clear call to action placed above the fold. This is a two-part tip. First, whenever someone visits your website, you need to have an action that you want them to take. Whether that action is to place an order now or to call you for a free consultation, there needs to be something that takes the visitor to the next step toward becoming a customer. And you need to clearly define that action on your website. Also, you should place your call to action above the fold so visitors instantly recognize what they should do.

6. Not seeking professional help. There are some tasks you may be able to do on your own, but more than likely, you’re not an expert in every facet of internet marketing. So, rather than trying to learn as you go, hire a professional to do the job right for you. You’ll have a stronger online presence, and you’ll be able to use that extra time for other important business tasks.

Is Dwolla The Future Of Online Payments?

This sounds great, how can you beat $0.25 per transaction?

Business Insider reports:

“There’s a tiny 12-person startup churning out of Des Moines, Iowa.

We interviewed Milne about how he is building a credit card killer and Square rival from the middle of the nation where VCs and press are scarce.” [read more]