Citizen Marketer 2.1

Aaron Strout

5 Reasons Why We Won’t Experience another Dotcom Bubble

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Thanks to friends Darin Kirshner and Joey McGirr for listening to me rant about this over coffee. I decided to collect my thoughts and put them down on digital paper.

While perusing my Twitter stream Sunday morning, I saw a tweet from long time blogger and Edelman SVP, Steve Rubel. For what it’s worth, Steve is one of a handful of people who I pay very close attention to so I couldn’t resist clicking through to the Newsweek article referenced in his update. The title of the article was Dotcom Bubble 2.0 and it focused on the recent speculation by venture capitalist, Fred Wilson that the current environment is looking a lot like the dotcom bust of the early 2000’s over again.

While I respect Mr. Wilson and won’t pretend to know 1/100th of what he knows about investing in companies, I did live through Web 1.0 and the first internet bubble. I was also a digital frontiersman meaning I know a little bit of which I speak. To that end, I couldn’t resist throwing out my $.02 about why the current social media and location-based landscape is nowhere close to the environment of 1997-2001 when irrational exuberance took the world by the throat and temporarily choked the life out of it.

Here are five reasons why we will not live through a “dotcom bubble 2.0:”

  1. Initial public offerings are at an all time low. As a result, the only people who will get burned by investing poorly in startups will be venture capitalists and wealthy folks who make poor investment decisions. NOT the stock market. This is a HUGE difference between 2010 and 2000 (see history of IPOs here).
  2. Because of the bubble, investors, entrepreneurs AND the public learned a thing or two. Ask an entrepreneur or two how easy it is to get VC money these days. Go ahead.
  3. In 1997, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to start a business. That’s because you needed a website, and infrastructure and lots of other stuff that cost a lot of money. Now, many of those services are free or incredibly inexpensive. That means good ideas are much easier to implement and get off the ground for a $50,000 tab on 3-4 credit cards.
  4. Many of the jackasses in 1997-2001 who got ridiculous sums of money from the VCs ran out and leased expensive real estate, went on wild hiring binges and then invested in things they had no business investing in like Superbowl ads. Think you’ll see Klout, Gowalla or Pandora buying a Superbowl ad anytime soon?
  5. 9/11. Yes, this had nothing and everything to do with bubble 1.0. While we’ll never know if we could have bounced back more quickly from the first Internet collapse, a catastrophic event that changed the world for ever happened and sent the US (along with many other wester countries) into a tail spin. Now I can’t predict that this won’t ever happen again but the odds aren’t good.
Am I off base? Maybe. But I don’t think so. I’ll agree that there are similarities between today’s business environment and ten years ago but many of the fundamental factors that created the bubble just aren’t here. But you know me… I love to be proven wrong.
Image credit: Doobybrain.com

Quick-n-dirty Podcast Recap 19: Live from BlogWorld Expo

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Wow! What an amazing last few days it’s been at Blog World Expo. It was tough to have to leave before the festivities were over but I enjoyed a whirlwind of great panels, content and podcasts while I was here in Vegas at one of the top 2-3 most important social conferences in the country.

As you can guess, one of the podcasts I got to do was with my pal and co-host of the Quick-n-Dirty show, Jennifer Leggio. The beauty of this episode was that Jennifer and I got to do the show live from the expo floor of Blog World. Even better, we were able to grab PR/social studs, Doug Haslam* of SHIFT and Steve Rubel, of Edelman and Micropersuasion blog fame.

*note: do I need to disclose that Doug works for my company, Powered Inc. in a PR capacity — after all, we’re paying him vs. the other way around? No? Good, I didn’t think so. Just checkin’.

Rather than doing our regular format of:

  1. Social network
  2. Guest/case study
  3. Featured twitterer of the week
  4. Point/counterpoint
we went freestyle and discussed Jen’s and my panels at the show. Highlights included:

  • A recap of the fact that we both agreed that her “sponsored content” panel could have been a seminal discussion but instead just ended up being really good (not a bad thing). Part of the problem was that Jeremiah Owyang, formerly of Forrester and now at Altimeter Group worked hard to *protect* the panelists. While this was likely the right thing to do, it did prevent some of the sparks from flying that the crowd really wanted to see. For what it’s worth, Jeremiah and I discussed this over drinks the night before so don’t think I’m talkin’ behind his back. 😉
  • Jen’s review of her featured morning session about not letting the bad guys “Jack your brand.” This connected more with Jen’s security roots (day job) vs. her ZDNet blog (spare time) focused on social business. I suspect that Jen will do a recap on her blog but what I really liked was that she allowed audience members to come up and co-present with her reinforcing her “social” side.
  • We also did a quick review of my morning panel on “Gaming Twitter” and why it’s not a good idea. To get details, head over to hashtag #twitgame as several of us in the room (myself included) live tweeted this event and caught a majority of the salient points on Twitter. For what it’s worth, I was blown away but the smarts of fellow co-panelists Reem Abeidoh, Lucretia Pruitt, Micah Baldwin and Jesse Stay.
As I mentioned earlier, we did stray from our normal show format. However, we were able to bring some fresh insight to the podcast via our special guests. The fun part was that due to our limit of two headsets, Jen interviewed Doug Haslam and I interviewed Steve Rubel. I strongly encourage you to listen to this part of the show [about 20-25 minutes in] but here is the gist of what we discussed:
  • Jennifer and Doug talked about the fact that PR wasn’t dead but *evolved*. PR firms that weren’t doing it right risked becoming irrelevant. As a client of SHIFT’s (there goes that disclosure again), I can tell you that he and his team definitely get it. There was one other topic that they covered but because I couldn’t hear them real-time, I’ll need to go back and listen to [FILL IN THE BLANK].
  • Steve and I rehashed his panel yesterday on life streaming [recap on my blog here]. In particular, I asked Steve how easy it was (knowing the answer was, “not very) to take clients form “you should be doing social” to focusing on his three pillars of “create spoke and hub content/destinations, become ubiquitous/ searchable and be sure to diversify.” We also touched on whether or not it was a good idea to turn off comments on Youtube.
All in all, Jen and I were probably a little less scripted and buttoned up than usual but it was a hell of a lot of fun. To that end, a great big hat tip to Deb Robison for being the sole active chat room attendee. She rocks!
For past recaps of the show, you can always bounce back and forth between Jen’s and my blogs. And of course, you can always catch an archived version of the show here or over on iTunes.

Lifestreaming with Steve Rubel at BlogWorldExpo

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Some “life-streamed” notes from Steve Rubel, SVP at Edelman. from the BlogWorld Expo. He’s talking about the evolution of the “inbox” e.g. e-mail, sms, IM, Twitter, FourSquare. [Note: you get a sense that this session is of high value given the fact that Louis Gray, David Armano, Shell Holtz, David Thomas and Jason Falls to name a few “big brains” are in the room taking copious notes.]

  • Steve’s off to a good start telling us to “avoid the shiny object syndrome” and focus on the big trends (vs. the individual tools).
  • Businesses need to think about how they can engage in real time
  • All sites in next 5 years need social capabilities or will become irrelevant
  • Web sites in general will become less relevant.
  • People are starting to practice “selective ignorance.” Screening out more and more news.
  • People are also becoming media agnostic. Just want the news that they want and many times will hear it from friends.
  • 111 is the average number of domains an average person in the U.S. visits in a month
  • On average, 2,500 web pages visited/month
  • We are becoming addicted to short-form content (this helped Twitter – centralized and short form)
  • Jakob Nielsen (usability guru) found the people read 20% of web pages
  • People need to hear things 3-5 times before they can actually digest them
Interesting because Steve has blogged for a long time and used to do 3-5 posts/day (every day for 3 1/2 years). Once Twitter came out, that evolved to 3-5 times/week. Then with FriendFeed, that continued to evolve. He got to the point where he felt like his blog was irrelevant. And then Posterous came along. The beauty is that everything is “e-mailable” and could put it content in a centralized place but could also get cross-posted in the respective places (like Twitter or Flickr) if he wants. [Note: I signed up for Posterous a few months ago but haven’t done a whole lot other than use it for inbound.]
Cool tip. Steve uses a tool called Simply Tweet and anything that he writes that is over 140 characters gets posted on Posterous with a link cross-posted on Twitter.
Big question? What does this mean for brands and how do they cope with all the streams. Steve’s three recommendations are:
  • You have to be ubiquitous
    • Steve uses Posterous to do this
    • Create “hub and spoke” strategy: build “embassies” everywhere blog, Facebook, Twitter
    • Ford has done a nice job of this. You can all their content in a centralized place OR you can get it out on the individual social networks
  • Muliplicity and diversity
    • Obama campaign uses different sites/formats to tell stories different ways at different times (Flickr, Youtube, blogs)
  • Discoverability and visibility
    • Traditional PR has been the process of creating “rain” and trying to get people “wet.”
    • Ironically, people have going to the beach to “get wet” (Google) for several years now
    • Goal is to get people to “pull” your content vs. always pushing content
    • Life stream is great because it’s highly discoverable
    • Creating “discoverable” content makes for great SEO juice
All in all, great content. It’s rare that I learn a whole lot at events like these (mainly because Twitter is such a great fountain of information) but this was a great session that now has me thinking. Thanks Steve!

post script: a few reasons why Steve loves Posterous:

  • content is all exportable (this is huge)
  • customer service is phenomenal
  • allow him to overlay it with his own domain – http://steverubel.com
  • because he e-mails everything in from gmail, he has a backup for everything on gmail.

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