Dime-A-Dozen
Dec 6, 2009 Blog General, Business & Marketing, Open Source, Search and SEO
I wish I had resources to develop ALL my ideas. Almost six years ago I jot down a few diagrams and notes for a service that would put the likes of foursquare, Gowalla, loopt, yelp, urban spoon, and others to shame. (Sidenote: I wrote about Dodgeball 5 1/5 years ago. They died as predicted, but not exactly how I thought it would.) MY concept would help increase foot traffic to local businesses, increase the loyalty of local patrons, and could be used in urban and remote towns the same. I just uncovered my notebook recently while I was moving around a few boxes and rediscovered a lot of ideas I scribbled down. This idea is just as solid today as it was six years ago. And it will still be viable 4 years in the future. So another multi-million dollar idea put back on the shelf until the timing is right for me. That’s okay, these ideas are “a-dime-a-dozen”.
Sometimes, you have to jump at opportunities even if it means you personally won’t reap the benefits. If you don’t you may never see your vision come to light. This year I lucked into such an opportunity. I had hired a very talented team of SEO’s and developers to build a network of websites for my employer. While we did pretty good at building the traditional sites that my company was familiar with, we were missing our killer app. We had nothing that set us apart from the many, many competitive sites in our industry. The main challenge we faced was that we didn’t have a core community website that we could use to leverage trust and authority from the search engines. This authority site had to be unique, and it couldn’t just be another blog, forum, or directory. Those are all done and dated already. We needed a different type of site. As I’ve faced this exact challenge in the past with many different clients, it’s no surprise I already had an idea for the type of site we’d need that would bring the power and authority to get the rankings we were after. Now was the time to build it, even if it means that I’d be giving my prized idea to my company as intellectual property. But, that’s part of why they hired me, to bring all my ideas that can benefit us directly and put them on the table.
I did some research and discovered it would cost us almost six figures to purchase the licensing and custom development for the type of site that I wanted to build. So I talked it over with my developers and did a quick feasibility analysis. This could be done! I told my team that this was a second priority to any other projects they were assigned. I have some brilliant developers. They were able to conquer all my projects ahead of schedule, beating my most unrealistic expectations for deadlines. They built facebook app after facebook app, all the top priority sites in queue, and a lot of single one-off projects from me and from corporate. I have worked with a lot of great developers in the past, but these two have truly shown me they are two of the best. So with a lot of projects cleared off the board, and an initiative to focus only on projects that would benefit us in SEO, I gave the guys a greenlight to work full-time on the project.
This week we are ready to launch the main project, and it’s supporting sister sites, to the public as beta. I’ll be posting about it soon as an official announcement. Stay tuned!
BTW – As much as I honor my development team in this post, I can’t say enough about the fantastic marketers that I have that make up the rest of my team! They too are brilliant, motivated, and bring a very unique set of skills and talents that contributes to the unique nature of the team. Some of our projects haven’t panned out exactly like planned, but it isn’t because of a lack of trying or lack of talent. The industry we are in is truly a bitch and very competitive. But, with the launch of our new project, I expect some great things from the result of an entire-team marketing effort in a very short amount of time. So, as before, stay tuned!
Blog Gone But Not Forgotten
Sep 3, 2009 Blog General, Business & Marketing, Florida
Don’t fret. I’m still around. On Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and a few other places. Mostly Facebook.
Scatterbrain random updates to hold you over:
- Summer in Florida was just another Summer In Florida. No storms yet, so it’s been a pretty calm and HOT year.
- I have a few queued posts that I’ve started that I hope to post soon. I also have a few queued up in my head that have yet to be written.
- Lately I’ve been focusing on Facebook marketing. This is a whole new world to me. Not only is it exciting because so much is possible, it is also a very large opportunity if done right. I started in Email. I went to Search. Dabbled in Social. But it’s Facebook that has the potential to be bigger then all the others combined. This is truly a new frontier.
- I’m not running nearly as much as I hoped. Busy being a dad, a husband, a co-worker, an employee, a manager, and a marketer. But I’ve scheduled some time for myself in the immediate future.
- I hope to write more about Facebook advertising. I’ll post what I can. But I’m not a guru. This is a learning experience for me too, so don’t expect anything earth shattering.
Tags: email, facebook marketing, Florida, search, updates
Losing My Witty
Mar 31, 2009 Blog General
Dear Blog,
I noticed that over the past few months we’ve been getting more serious in our relationship. I’ve been writing about soul-finding and reflections and goals and all that shit. I apologize profusely.
Looking back over the past 5 years since we’ve been courting, I realized that I went from a fun and energetic producer of semi-decent content, to a boring and dull lump of lazy who offers less excitement than a dose of Dramamine.
Call it an identity crisis or whatever. It is still no excuse for taking the fun out of our relationship. Hell, we started this journey together as a joke, so when the hell did we get all serious?
Blog, we had good times together, you and me. Remember the time poked fun at Facebook and all the people that took myspace too seriously? Or that we gave unsolicited professional advice to Mark Cuban, Kevin Rose, Google, and Dodgeball?
We talked about an awesome deerbell doorbell, we had a close encounter with the Deathstar, and almost voted Tootsie into the Whitehouse!
Remember our trip to Indiana-(what?)-polis? Or the time we hauled a christmas tree from the tree farm? And who can forget masquerading around town as Mr. Weekend Adventure?
We even dared the world to bare it all!
Yes Blog, there have been too many fun and exciting moments to give up on this life adventure. No more drama! I pledge to be a better blogger and give you more enjoyable content. I will also try to keep things interesting to keep your readership happy. Mr. Facebook and Miss Twitter will be thrilled to invite us to parties again, as will Sir Yahoo, Prince Google and Lord Microsoft. We’ll still be arriving in style in our sub-compact, but they will roll out the red carpet for us anyway.
So here’s to a new life together. One of a fun, savvy, and effortless witty style, doing things we once did best: writing for the love of writing.
Cheers,
Jason Murphy
PS – Sorry, this post was kinda gay. So is proofreading.