Roundtable Recap: January 13 – Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade
We started this week’s One Million by One Million roundtable with a discussion of online advertising trends, looking at them from the perspective of cost-effective customer acquisition and brand building, as well as entrepreneurial opportunities. You can find more on the topic on my blog at Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade.
While on this topic, I want to particularly emphasize the social media advertising trend, and my observation that the infrastructure to measure, analyze, optimize, and target is really wide open, and I’d like to hear from entrepreneurs working on the various nuances of that particular problem. My Facebook’s Strategy In Perspective piece has more on the issue.
Next, we had two very interesting entrepreneurs.
Meeting Wave
First up today was John Boyd with MeetingWave, a social media platform that caters to university alumni associations and addresses the challenge of helping them create walled garden professional and social networking groups under their own brand, as opposed to groups within Facebook or LinkedIn.
John’s idea completely resonated with me, having run the MIT Club of Northern California’s Entrepreneurship program for many years, and being intimately involved with the inner workings of that alumni association (10,000 members).
We discussed various segments for John’s go-to-market strategy and pricing model options. In particular, I saw a number of different strategies that John has been nibbling on – different segments, different delivery models (white label vs. MeetingWave branded domains), different pricing strategies. In my opinion, the strategy is too broad, and needs to be reined in, focused, and tighter. While I like the idea, I don’t as much like all the various options at this stage, because each has implications on the execution side, and leaving so many options open would mean the complexity of the business will simply be exponential, and thus the risk of failure will also be high.
For example, instead of pursuing universities, trade show organizers, hotels, resorts, corporations, I am of the opinion that John should focus squarely on colleges and universities and their alumni associations for now. The rest can be on the back burner for the moment.
RDimensio
Then Umashankar Balasubramanian of RDimensio pitched an SMS-based classified service. Uma is a member of the 1M/1M premium program, and has already started validating his idea with several online classified players in India.
He is using natural language processing to translate free text SMS queries to classified queries, and then translating the responses back to SMS format.
Uma too has too many segments, and I asked him to focus 100% of his energy on online classified vendors, and forget newspapers (unless they also already have online classified offerings) and so forth. Instead, he should broaden his geographical scope to include international classified vendors.
Also, I think Uma’s offering is underpriced, and I asked him to do some homework on pricing which I will review next week to advise him better on the pricing strategy.
Interesting technology, and I will be working with him to build a comprehensive go-to-market strategy as part of the premium program.
I have thought a lot about how to make an entrepreneurship education and eco-system scalable and accessible to a vastly larger number of people. The answer to that question, I believe, is the 1M/1M Premium Lounge. In fact, at a time when we’re facing severe youth unemployment in America and Europe, and the emerging markets are just starting to build their entrepreneurship eco-systems, we really need to think deeply on how more and more young people can be efficiently, rapidly and cost-effectively be trained in entrepreneurship.
Yesterday, I posed two questions on my blog: one, to high school and college students as well as recent grads, asking how they were viewing this deep recession, and whether they are taking destiny in their own hands, starting companies, becoming entrepreneurs.
And a second, to educators, teachers, and mentors in various schools, colleges, and universities who are preparing the youth to face a depressing job market, asking whether they are steering them towards entrepreneurship, and how.
If any of you would like to participate in these discussions and help me with the research, please feel to comment on the issues. I will be writing more on the topics here and elsewhere.
You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.
This segment is a part in the series : Roundtable Recap
. March 25 – A Mixed Bag Of Advice . April 1 – Bootstrapping Tips . April 8 – A Focus On E-Commerce . April 15 – Small Is OK; The Goal Is Profitability . April 22 – The Original Runners . April 29 – Finding The Right Direction . May 6 – Defining Value Proposition . May 20 – Validation, Validation, Validation . May 27 – Is The Venture Worth Your Time? . June 3 – Defining Market Segments . June 10 – Efficient Targeting . June 17 – Online Education Startups . June 24 – Three Startups That Can Hit One Million Dollars . July 1 - Get Your Pricing Model Validated . July 8 - The EJ Methodology . July 15 - A Market Of Late Adopters . July 22 - Bootstrap Using Services . July 29 - Startups In Malaysia . August 5 - Paying Customers =>Validation =>Valuation . August 19 - Niche E-Commerce Is Great For Bootstrapping . August 26 - 85%-90% Of Search Traffic Comes From Organic Search . September 2 - Find High Velocity Channels . September 9 - Open Opportunities In Cloud Computing And Rural BPO . September 16 – 5 Cloud Computing Opportunities for Entrepreneurs . September 23 - Do Not Spray And Pray . September 30 - Investors Don't Fund Broad Ideas . October 7 - Try To Get At Least $2M Pre-Money In Seed Round Valuation . October 14 - Professional Investors Do Not Invest In $20 Million Markets . October 21 - Bootstrapping Comes In Many Flavors . October 28 – Convert Potential Competitors To Partners . November 4 - Premium Lounge Sneak Preview . November 11 - African Tech Entrepreneurs Emerging . November 18 - Not Coming To The Rescue Of Victory . December 2 - Niche Marketplace Businesses Can Be Interesting . December 9 - Where Should You Raise Money? . December 16 - Top 10 Tech Trends To Watch . January 6 - Top 10 Vertical and Social Web Trends For The Decade . January 13 - Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade . January 20 - Personalization Remains An Open Problem . January 27 - Non-Dilutive Financing Through Revenue Sharing . February 3 - Indian Entrepreneurs Are Maturing . February 10 - When Keywords Are Competitive . February 17 - Indian Company Plugs Gap In Google’s Enterprise Solution . February 24 - VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators – What Are You Doing With Your Rejects? . March 3 - Spotlight On The Northwest . March 10 - Spotlight On India . March 17 - Spotlight On Latin And Central America . March 24 - 75th Session Spotlights The Midwest . March 31 - Microsoft’s $100,000 India Startup Challenge Grant . April 6 - 1M/1M Announces Important Partnership With MAD Incubator, Malaysia . April 9 - 1M/1M Announces Partnership With TiE Chennai . April 16 - 1M/1M Partners With Indian Angel Network Incubator . April 17 - High-Octane Energy In Pune . April 21- Incubators Are Reaching Out To 1M/1M . April 28 - Guerrilla P.R. & SEO Most Profitable Customer Acquisition Strategies . May 5 - Ownership Matters . May 12 - Two Really Cool Companies . May 19, Making Money From Blogs . May 26 - Twitter, LinkedIn - Why Not Affiliates? . June 2 - 1M/1M And Incubators - What We Have Learned . June 9 - Silicon Valley . June 16 - Exciting Companies Lined Up For Microsoft Startup Grant Finals . June 23 - New Assessment Tool For Entrepreneurs . June 30 - Continued International Participation . July 21 - Crowd Sourced Funding Exchanges - An Emerging Trend . July 28 - Investors And Incubators Need To Look At Pre-Incubation . August 4 - How Do You Bootstrap Freemium Ventures? . August 11 - Menlo Park And The Silicon Valley Renaissance . August 25 - How To Use Twitter For Lead Generation . September 1 - Fall Call To Action . September 8 - A View Into Israeli Start-ups . September 15 - Do Your Homework First . September 22 - How Do You Catalyze A Region’s Entrepreneurship? . September 29 - From Poland To Argentina . October 6 - Dedicated To Steve Jobs, Reinforcing Mission To Restructure Capitalism . October 13 - FREE Is Not A Business Model . October 20 - Non-profits And For-profits . October 27 - Check Out Stanzr . November 3 - VCs Are Not Always Right . November 17 - Business Schools And Early Stage Entrepreneurship . December 1 - 1M/1M Premium Company Freshdesk Wins Funding From Accel Partners . December 8 - Three Open Opportunities For 2012 . December 15 - Web 3.0 And Social Dancing; Romania Emerging . December 22 - Free Apps, Ad-Supported Business Models => Dangerous! . January 5 - ERP Galore . January 12-13 - Spotlight On IIT Kharagpur, India . January 19 - Are Media Sites Fundable? . January 26th - Spotlight On Jacksonville, Florida . February 2 - YCombinator vs. 1M/1M . February 9 - Are You Fundable? . February 16 - What’s Happening In Turkey? . February 23 - Microsoft Israel To Offer 1M/1M Scholarships . March 1 - Strategy Gaps Need To Be Plugged . March 12 - Winners Of Microsoft Israel Scholarships . March 15 - Spotlight On 3 Day Startup Tel-Aviv . April 3 - Rendezvous In Bangalore . April 12 - More From Indian Entrepreneurs . April 19 - Tyranny Of The TAM . April 26 - A Rare Women-Only Session . May 3 - Some Wonderful Opportunities With Corporate Partners . May 10 - BlueSnap-Elance Contest Applications Deadline This Weekend . May 22 - Winners Of TechHub-A&N Media Battle Of The Startups Contest In London Win 1M/1M Scholarships