The amazing FALL of MySpace! Who's next?

MySpace, do you remember it yet? MySpace has invented Social networking when it was launched.
So many artists, entertainers, businesses have used it and even made a starting career thanks to MySpace.
In 2005, MySpace had almost 100 millions subscribers, FaceBook was nothing then.
Sold for more than 500 MUSD only 6 years ago. This week it did not exceed the 50 (fifty) MUSD!!

What a fall! What happened? Business analysts can argue with several strategy mistakes,
but I personally think that in this business nothing is taken for granted. Nothing can last for ever...
If a company does not disrupt itself, it will be definitely disrupted by someone else.
That is the rule of fast Internet business. And it should be written in stone!

So my question, who do you think will be the next one to fall? FaceBook, Google, others?

see also my post on Facebook vs. Google

What are the personality traits of Top Sales people?

Steve W. Martin presents in his recent HBR blog interesting findings from the results of personality tests he presented to high technology and business services salespeople as part of sales strategy workshops he has conducted. Below, I have summarized and copied the main key personality attributes of top salespeople and the impact of the trait on their selling style.

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1. Modesty. 91% of top salespeople had medium to high scores of modesty and humility.
Selling Style Impact: Team Orientation. top salespeople position the team. You dont have to be arrogant and selfish to be a top sales person

2. Conscientiousness. 85% percent of top salespeople had high levels of conscientiousness. Have a strong sense of duty.
Selling Style Impact: Account Control. Top salespeople take command of the sales cycle process.

3. Achievement Orientation. 84% of the top performers are fixated on achieving goals.
Selling Style Impact: Political Orientation.They strategize about the people they are selling to and how the products they're selling fit into the organization instead of focusing on the functionality of the products themselves.

4. Curiosity. 82% of top salespeople scored extremely high curiosity levels.
Selling Style Impact: Inquisitiveness. An active presence drives the salesperson to ask customers difficult questions.

5. Lack of Gregariousness. Top performers averaged 30% lower gregariousness than below average performers.

Selling Style Impact: Dominance. Dominance is the ability to gain the willing obedience of customers such that the salesperson's recommendations and advice are followed.

6. Lack of Discouragement. Less than 10% of top salespeople were classified as having high levels of discouragement.

Selling Style Impact: Competitiveness. Top performers are able to handle emotional disappointments, bounce back from losses.

7. Lack of Self-Consciousness. Less than 5% of top performers had high levels of self-consciousness.

Selling Style Impact: Aggressiveness. Top salespeople are comfortable fighting for their cause, action-oriented and unafraid.

Reference: Steve W. Martin teaches sales strategy at the USC Marshall School of Business. His latest book on sales linguistics is Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology: How to Penetrate the C-level Executive Suite and Convince Company Leaders to Buy.

How To Make your message Stick and How to create a buzz?

Here are some tips to use in order to make your message stick.
You may be a corporate executive manager or an individual.
Make your message Simple. Make it Unexpected. Make it Concrete. Provide Credentials. Make it Emotional. Use Stories.
Make it S.U.C.C.E.S.S !!!

Below are seven principle to make a buzz in your organization or around you.

Simple - The first princile is simplicity. One of the most basic principles of cognitive psychology is that the channel capacity of human attention is somewhere around 7 +/- 2 bits of information.
Keep your ideas fairly simple!

Unexpected - The second principle is unexpected. Announcing that the end of the world is on May 13th. That’s unexpected.

Concrete - The third principle is concrete. “We only use ten percent of our brain”. That's concrete.

Credentialed - The forth principle is credentialed. All ideas, all stories, all legends, come with informational credentials. It may be in the form of specific details.

Emotional - Next principle is emotional.What makes legends successful? they have an emotional component.

Story - Next principle is story. We all remember every story that we have been told.
That's why storytelling is one of the most efficient tool component in marketing & Communication strategy.

That Sticks - The final principle is to use what sticks. Make your message simple. Make it unexpected. Make it concrete. Provide credentials. Make it emotional. Use stories.


Founder & CEO goRaiseFund.com

Who will win the battle: Google or Facebook?

The battle between the two giants of the Web has accelerated and is about to reveal a bloody fight.

Battle: Facebook vs. Google

At first glance, Facebook and Google look very similar: both created by students from a prestigious American university,  keeping a start-up spirit, leading the same battles for transparency and free internet, generating revenues by selling advertising.

Their model is however very different: To know the behavior of people, 

Google claims to help people in their professional, academic or private search, phone calls, web navigation, etc...

Facebook wants to help everyone to engage with others and for that, trying to become the standard system login, sharing links, comments from other sites as well.

Today, Google seems to prevail: The firm is valued $190 billion, that is 5 times more than Facebook.
But the dynamic is rather on the side of Facebook, peoples spend more time on Facebook than Google (average of 41 million minutes per month as against 40).

Data mining and qualitative superior data
A major difference appears to be though, in the quality of the data available to Facebook and Google
Facebook’s data allows it to do more than just guess what its customers might be interested in; the company’s data can help it know with greater certainty what its customers are really interested in.
If Google’s business has been built on choosing which Web pages are most likely to appeal to any given anonymous query, Facebook already knows, for the most part, which pages appeal to whom.
And this key difference could potentially give Facebook a tremendous advantage in search function.

So guess what could be the Facebook "killer app"...

Will Facebook go in this direction?
Will the developers community provide this to Facebook?