Gray Dudek

As usual Aleksandr Orlov is extremely endearing as a character and complains about everyone getting Meerkats confused with Markets (note: I must say I blame him for that as before his advertising campaign started I have never confused the two…)

Regardless, it’s the usual slick execution and has become more polished as the time has gone by. I think this is nice as the client is clearly seeing the results and therefore investing more but the traditional style of the Meerkat videos was to me much more compelling and ‘believable’ (if I can use that word about a stuffed puppet) than the beautifully recreated sets we see in the ad’s now.

Check out the latest video:

…and now check out an original video:

But my opinion to one side how has the interest in the whole Compare the Meerkat / Market campaign been performing from a social perspective?

Is it still in our favour? Are we still talking/blogging/tweeting/etc about it? Or has is become just part of the ‘funky’ (sometimes irritating) insurance sector advertising campaigns?

I checked it out on Social Radar and here’s what I found:

So from the above trend chart we can see a huge embrace of the Aleksandr Orlov character and his stories starting back in July 2009 and since then a slow decline in the number of mentions that either he or Compare the Meerkat and indeed Compare the Market are getting across the social sphere. The query used was pretty basic I admit so I’ve probably missed a few posts and Tweets here and there but the trend still remains representative I would suggest.

However, from a shakey beginning (where pretty everybody misunderstood WTF the ad was about and for that simple reason hated) the sentiment towards the campaign has grown over time and maintains a positive feeling towards it. However with declining volumes of conversations I wonder if the latest ad will hit the mark.

Well I suppose in one way it matters not really as it’s the final installment of Aleksandr, Sergei and all the Muskats…for now at least…

Starting a new business is a positive action, and in my experience most entrepreneurs are positive people. But sometimes that positivity can mask harsh realities that many entrepreneurs would rather ignore, and can lead them to buy into ideas that are detrimental to success.

Here are ten dangerous ideas that many startup entrepreneurs buy into that they shouldn’t.

Raising money from VCs is crucial to success. While having a flush bank account can give a startup entrepreneur the opportunity to execute on a vision, money alone doesn’t guarantee success — the majority of companies that receive VC funding still fail, just like all businesses.

Bootstrapping is wonderful. Some believe that startups should raise as much money as they can, but there’s another camp that advocates for bootstrapping. Unfortunately, extreme bootstrapping is problematic because not having enough money is just as detrimental as having too much of it. In fact, undercapitalization is one of the leading causes of new venture failure.

We can figure the business model out later. While there are more than a few high-profile examples of successful entrepreneurs that didn’t know how their startups were going to make money, the reality is that launching a new company without a business model (or some thoughts about business model) is, in most cases, more likely to produce failure than success.

There’s no competition. Even though focusing too much on the competition can be a distraction, entrepreneurs who believe that there is no competition are almost always completely out of touch with reality, and that’s a far worse thing.

The competition sucks. Many entrepreneurs who recognize that they have competition believe that the competition is so inferior as to be of marginal importance to their new business. In some instances, this might be the case, but most of the time, this type of denial can be harmful.

Experience is overrated. Just because a number of high-profile startups have been founded by entrepreneurs with little to no experience doesn’t mean that experience doesn’t matter. Experience is far more likely to provide for key industry insights that will boost the chances of success, and in some relationship-driven industries, having a track record is a prerequisite for getting deals done.

We don’t need a business plan. While a 40-page business plan might be an unnecessary formality, not planning is planning to fail, so it’s always good for entrepreneurs to put into writing a ‘business plan’ for personal use.

That’s going to happen — it’s in our business plan. Business plans, including those with financial projections, can be valuable planning tools, but far too often entrepreneurs conflate plans and projections with reality. They come to believe that certain things are real because it’s in the business plan. Business plans and projections should be thought of as a guidebook, not a map.

Somebody will want to buy us. A big exit is something many entrepreneurs dream about, but it’s not something they should count on. Unfortunately, when you’re building for an acquisition, chances are you’re not building for self-sustainability.

Failure is not an option. Negativity isn’t a desirable trait for an entrepreneur, but overconfidence isn’t one either. Opportunity cost is the greatest cost entrepreneurs pay and therefore, getting tied up pursuing a business that isn’t going anywhere can be very expensive. That’s why entrepreneurs should be prepared to recognize when a business has reasonably failed and be ready to move on, even if they’re going to fight as hard as they can for success.

Photo credit: chego101 via Flickr

Content credit: eConsultancy.com

This is actual proof and evidence that being a Geek is now uber cool.

It’s been a long time coming but I am officially now PROUD to be geeking out, having a geek sesh, being geeky, etc as it’s sub-zero cool…

Superb spoof by Grasshopper.comfor their virtual phone system for  Entrepreneurs.

Watch, enjoy and geek-out on the production quality!

So the Tories decided to aggrgate all the links to the sites where Gordon Brown had potential had ‘dealings’ that were supposed to be of a back-handed nature.

Nice idea, but not thought through.

Launched at the weekend on Facebook and Twitter, the site – claimed to have cost $15,000 – was intended to engage voters who could earn “points” for reading a speech by Michael Gove, the shadow education minister, or bombarding Charlie Whelan, the ex-Labour spin doctor now working for Unite, with hectoring tweets.

It worked, up to a point: it certainly engaged voters.

Unfortunately, many of them weren’t Conservative voters.

And it seems that the team behind the Tories’ site hadn’t learned the lesson of the Daily Telegraph, which last April saw its site peppered with swearing and insults aimed at its owners, the Barclay Brothers, when it automatically republished any tweet containing the text “#budget”. (”Telegraph wankers #budget Didn’t work” being one of the more polite.) So history repeated itself – for a change, both times as farce – after Twitter users quickly spotted that any tweet containing “#cashgordon” would be reused immediately on the site, regardless of whether it agreed with the Conservative view or not.

So what was the impact on the conversation volume surrounding this?

It’s clear to see from the above how quickly the trend kicked-up. Analysing the Tweets that were driving this spike using Social Radar we were able to see that the hockey-stick was not due to the kind of posts that the Tories were really after.

Porn, profanity and Rick Astley were the main contributors towards this!

So what was the sentiment towards the campaign?

Quite easy to see that although the volume of converation increased dramatically the negative conversation went up also.

The topics that were being ‘discussed’ were:

So what have the Conservatives said about the campaign? How did they spin this one?

“So it looks like some people took the fun a bit too far and hacked #CashGordon. Full service will resume very shortly …”

A bit of fun they say? Campaigning against their nearest rival using Digital is meant to be a bit of fun? I am pretty sure that if the site would have worked out how they wanted it to this ‘bit of fun’ would have turned into a ‘major triumph for the people’ or some such political spin-mastery…

And poor old  Gordon Thompson in Nova Scotia, @CashGordon – he had to change his Twitter bio as people were coming to his Twitter feed to find out what was going on…

2/10 Tory Party – must try harder…

Excellent listing of the Socialnomics stats from @PiSociaMedia

1. 1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers…96% of them have joined a social network

Source: Grunwald Associates National Study

1. 2. Social Media has become the #1 activity on the Web

Source: Huffington Post

1. 3. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest
   

Source: Facebook

1. 4. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum

Source:  Attempting to relocate

1. 5. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees – 80%

Source: Jobvite Social Recruitment Survey

1. 6. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama

Source: Twitter & World Population Data

1. 7. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices… people update anywhere, anytime… imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?

Source: Attempting to relocate

1. 8. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé… In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen

Source: Metro Newspaper

1. 9. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube

Source: TGDaily

1. 10. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles… some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica

Source: www.wikipedia.org

1. 11. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs

Source: China Internet Information Center, Technorati, Wikipedia

1. 12. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content

Source: Marketing Vox and Nielsen BuzzMetrics

1. 13. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands

Source: Universal McCann’s Social Media Research Wave 3

1. 14. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour

Calculated based of Wikipedia article data found at www.wikipedia.org

1. 15. 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations

Source: July 2009 Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey

1. 16. Only 14% trust advertisements

Source: “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber

1. 17. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI

Source: “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber

1. 18. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.

Source: Yahoo Finance

1. 19. In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media

Opinion from Socialnomics

1. 20. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook… daily.

Source: Facebook

Thanks to blog.pibusinessresearch.com/ for the stats compendium and Socialnomics for the original mashup.