That one big client you wanted to land just turned you down; that star employee you wanted to hire left you hanging; and, the thousands of dollars you spent on marketing are having little effect. Meanwhile, your competitors seem to be getting everything right.
When was the last time you wrote on somebody’s wall? We’re not talking about when you were five years old and you took crayons to your mother’s gleaming white living room walls. We’re talking about on Facebook, the Palo Alto-based online networking site that is taking the world by storm. If you’re an entrepreneur and you don’t have an answer to that question, or if you don’t even know what that question means then your business is in trouble.
Love them or hate them, these days it seems as if everybody has one. No, we’re not talking about mothers-in-law or Blackberries. We’re talking about blogs, those online hubs that often seem to find themselves at the centre of so much controversy. But what used to be platforms used by tech-savvy teenagers to rant and rave about social woes are now becoming sophisticated tools in a company’s arsenal of weapons.
Yahoo! eagerly snatched up the photo-sharing site Flickr, media mogul Rupert Murdoch hedged his bets on MySpace, and Google recently agreed to purchase the video entertainment site YouTube for $1.65 billion. Wherever you look, entrepreneurs who were once struggling to make a presence for their fledgling companies in the vast maze of the Internet are now seeing their hard work pay off, quite literally.