twitter goes truly mainstream

As the mention of tweeting in the media grows louder by the day, here's two things that make me say that twitter is officially mainstream.

1) The first high profile relationship breakup. Jennifer Aniston allegedly dumps her boyfriend as he spends more time on twitter than he does communicating with her. Ouch!

2) The first twitter libel suit as Courtney Love's antics on the site land her with a lawsuit.

How long until twitter is cited in a divorce case? I give it until Christmas!

social networks are the new email

according to this article on the bbc website social networks are becoming email 2.0 with people using the status update facilities on sites such as facebook or twitter instead of emailing. Whilst I don't think these sites will ever be as useful as traditional email for business, I'm probably like many others who now rarely send an email to friends, tending to direct message through facebook or twitter.

As more & more micro blogging platforms appear it will be interesting to see what the dominant sites are in 3 years time.

and so it begins

The first significant newspaper group in britain to collapse into administration as advertising revenue drops sharply & online media is stealing more & more market share. I'm surprised at how slow some of the big media companies are at embracing web 2.0. Certainly in the equestrian industry IPC is lagging behind its smaller rivals. Perhaps today's news will jolt executives into action?

may you live in interesting times

is an old chinese curse that seems particularly relevant in 2009. But I'm afraid that if you are expecting doom & gloom this is the wrong blog. For me, web 2.0 is tearing down the traditional business model as we know it. The school tie old boys club, oxbridge degree & hot MBA don't seem so relevant anymore.

Instead it's all about the hustle - as GaryV so eloquently puts it in this video
You need a PC, an internet connection, a good idea, a lot of balls a a big dose of WORK!

That's it. So get going.

(P.S. See what I mean that the small guy can beat the big guy - twitter zooms ever bigger whilst ITV is trying to offload friendsreunited )

customer service is king

Whilst I firmly believe that social media has an important part to play in business success in 2009, it's not the bedrock. As always it's customer service, customer service, customer service.

I promised my baby brother (that's him in the pic above) that if he won a downhill race I'd sort out some sponsorship for him. Well, he went out there & killed it last weekend :-)

So as he's racing again this weekend I wanted to get the blacktype brand on him as quickly as possible! This is where local business can clean up in the way that internet businesses struggle. I phoned Linela, a local embroidery company yesterday morning who said they could sort me out, popped down at lunch time to finalise the order & by 11am this morning I had been contacted by phone & email to let me know the order was ready. Wow, that's what I call customer service & it's why I'll be using them again & I recommend them to anyone looking for printing or embroidery.

So in summary, social media will drive business your way, but customer service is what's going to keep that business for you.

Thanks guys, I really appreciate you sorting me out & watch out for Team Blacktype taking the downhill scene by storm in 2009.

back

Apologies for being a bit lame with posting lately, my excuse is Christmas, the spring trade show season & twitter, which I'm still very much in love with!

Any way quick update on the site I mentioned in my last post http://www.ridingresource.com/, which is created by the team at http://hustlewood.com/ (which is itself a pretty neat site) - cheers for the comments below guys.

It's up & running & looks like a great resource if you are a rider in the US so if you are, go check it out!

In other news from the social media coalface, virgin.com has announced plans for it's redevelopment, which includes some pretty cool features to allow people to interact more using the site - read all about it here http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10171231-26.html

My other business interest lie in retail so it's interesting to see that virgin is proposing to implement a rewards scheme for community users - encouraging interaction or overt commercialisation of the medium? - I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.