Twitter

Is Social Media All About the Numbers?

Posted by Mike McLaughlin on Dec 17, 2010, in Thoughts , tagged with , , ,

As he took down a mole poblano chicken drumstick over lunch, I posed the following question to Anu:

If Twitter let us hide the number of people who follow Naissance, would you want to do it?

The genesis of the question was a social media project for a client and the discussions we’ve had around measuring the success of such efforts.  I thought about the Naissance Twitter account and LinkedIn profile, and that people encountering them probably:

  1. Focus immediately on the number of followers we have, and
  2. Make some sort of judgment based on that number

What if the 19 was 1,900?

At first I felt frustration.  Yes, we have 19 followers, but we’re a new company and have never made an explicit ask/push to get people to pay attention to our social media presence.  How dare anyone judge the Naissance book by its cover!  This “reasoning” led to my question for Anu.

Then, of course, I realized that people DO judge books by their covers.  At least in part.  That’s the real world.

So since social media “ROI” is a fantasy for most firms, the easiest proxy for how well social media efforts are going is the number of friends/followers you have.  And so the real world for social media means promotion is as important as content.  Maybe more. Getting people over the initial hurdle of engaging you is the first and most important challenge.

As unappealing as it may sound, being shamelessly self-promoting is probably a good idea.

How Much is a Domain Worth? Nope, Less.

Posted by Mike McLaughlin on Oct 17, 2010, in Thoughts , tagged with , ,

When we launched Naissance, we tried to get the domain naissance.com.  We got in touch with the owner of the domain and received an e-mail response that stuns me to this day.

As a Sunday diversion, here’s that response, along with my thoughts as I read it.

Hi Michael,

Thank you for your enquiry.

A search for “naissance” shows approximately over 27,300,000 results from Google.

I’m pretty sure I’ll only care about one of those.  And isn’t more results actually a bad thing?  Less competition sounds much better.

Names such as naissance.com are very much in demand especially as there are more than 60 MILLION domain names currently registered.

60 million.  100 million.  2 billion.  Who cares?  I get that this is supposed to make me think “Wow!  I really need to buy this domain!”  But logically I can’t quite figure out how.

If you consider that just recently Fish.com sold for $1,020,000, MyPremierCard.com for $135,250, JMM.com for $55,000 and HorseSupplies.com $52,500 etc there have been many other 5 figure sales – I’m sure that our asking price could be considered an investment for a domain of this quality.

This is my favorite part of the e-mail.  I laughed out loud when I read it.  Fish.com?  I’m not sure there’s a less similar domain or business.  And take a minute to check out HorseSupplies.com, I think it’s fair to say the buyer got ripped off.

The price of this domain is £16,500 Great British Pounds or US$27,820 (close offers may be considered).   This is a one off payment for the rights to the domain, however you will be responsible for paying the yearly registration (approx $30).

$27,820.  Seriously.  Our counteroffer?  $200.  It was not considered “close”.

The thing that puzzled me most is that shifts in technology continue to make the actual domain you have less and less important.  Browsers and search engines will find you, if you deserve it, without a perfect domain.  In fact, after a few weeks our site and Twitter feed both sit in the top 35 of 31.8 million search results for naissance. Not bad at all.

Oh, and if you’re interested, naissance.com is still available for purchase.

Why Naissance Isn’t on Facebook (For Now)

Posted by Mike McLaughlin on Sep 25, 2010, in Thoughts , tagged with , , ,

It’s somehow become generally accepted that every business needs a Facebook page.  So, in preparing for the Naissance launch, Googling for arguments why a company shouldn’t be on Facebook seemed like a fun exercise.

After 20 minutes I gave up.  I couldn’t find someone who says “here are 3 good reasons why your company doesn’t need to be on Facebook.”  And yet we arrived at that conclusion.  Here’s why:

  • We’re neither big nor retail. Coca Cola has hundreds of millions of customers, many of whom are actually on Facebook.  They need a page.  We’re a small company with a focused group of businesses as clients.  And from what I can tell, most of the people we meet with haven’t taken the Facebook plunge.
  • We know, already use, and prefer other tools. LinkedIn has become indispensible to us for business networking.  So we’re there (here and here).  Twitter is easy and has been fun for two years.  So we’re there, too.  But neither Anu nor I have found a reason to register for Facebook yet.
  • We need a better reason than “repetition”. We think a Facebook presence should bring something different to the table.  Something that people can’t get on a blog, a Web site, or via LinkedIn or Twitter.  Unfortunately, we don’t know what that should be for Naissance.  And judging by the pages of many companies, we’re not the only ones struggling for an answer.

We only have so many things to say.  And so contrary to the prevailing wisdom, we can live without a Facebook page for now.  We suspect many other companies can, too.