Tag: social

• #DeleteFacebook

  Earlier this week I deleted my Facebook account. If we were friends on the service and you can no longer find me, this is the reason why. 

  Part of why I did this certainly had to do with privacy. I read Brian Acton’s (WhatsApp cofounder) account in Forbes this week. And I have been following many of the discussions over the past year:

  Privacy legislation is perhaps the only thing that could pose an existential threat to a business that’s entirely powered by watching and recording what people do at vast scale. And relying on that scale (and its own dark pattern design) to manipulate consent flows to acquire the private data it needs to profit. –Natasha Lomas

  But at the same time, I’m still on and use Instagram and WhatsApp (both Facebook companies), and I use Twitter pretty much every day.

  So I am certainly not in a position to be smug about this decision. Hopefully this post does not come across that way.

  The simple truth is that I had more or less stopped using the service. I had long ago turned off mobile notifications and so it had become more of a hassle than anything else.

  Every now and then I would go on and find notifications and messages that I wasn’t responding to. 

  So it had finally reached a point where I thought to myself: Why keep my data here (by the way, you can download all of your data from the site) and why check it sporadically if I’m not really deriving any value out of it? Simplify.

  I enjoy Instagram because taking photos is one of my primary passions outside of real estate and design. And I enjoy Twitter as a source of news and mostly civil conversation. 

  I am easy to get ahold of. I don’t need Facebook for that. Any of the social links at the top of this page (if you’re reading this post on the web), will get you there.

  2018.09.29

• Value of distribution and reach for consumer facing products

  

  Forbes recently pegged social media influencer Kylie Jenner’s net worth at somewhere around $900 million. That makes her the youngest (she’s 20) person on Forbes’ annual ranking of “America’s Richest Self-Made Women.” 

  And if the trend line continues, she’ll be the youngest self-made billionaire, ever. Mark Zuckerberg apparently holds that title right now. But he was a classic underachiever and only became a billionaire at age 23.

  Most of Kylie’s net worth is derived from Kylie Cosmetics, which launched less than 3 years ago, but did an estimated $330 million in revenue last year. Forbes values the company at almost $800 million. And Kylie owns every bit of it. 

  The reason I am mentioning this today is because I was fascinated by the above Forbes article. It’s such a powerful example of social media leverage. Forbes put it differently: “Social media has weaponized fame.” 

  Kylie has 111 million followers on Instagram (plus many more on her other social channels) and that’s really the most important part of this equation. She has the distribution and reach to acquire boat loads of customers. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling if nobody knows you’re selling it.

  The rest of her business is pretty much outsourced. Seed Beauty (out of Oxnard, California and Nanjing, China) handles the manufacturing, packaging, and shipping fulfillment. Shopify (headquartered in Ottawa) is her e-commerce platform.

  We could of course have a debate about whether a celebrity-fueled business is really all that sustainable. And perhaps there’s risk in relying so heavily on social for customer acquisition. But youngest billionaire is youngest billionaire.

  Image: Forbes

  2018.07.17

• The social shift

  Those of you who know me or are regular readers of this blog, will know that I’m an avid social media user. 

  My favorites – judging by battery consumption on my phone – are Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat (donnelly_b). I think it’s incredible what these platforms are doing to branding, marketing, personal connectivity, city building, and the list goes on.

  To that end, the March issue of Harvard Business Review has an interesting article by Douglas Holt called, Branding in the Age of Social Media. Whether you’re running a company, a city, or a real estate development project, I think you’ll find the information relevant.

  The article starts by describing a shift, brought about by social, whereby big brands are now struggling to capture the attention of consumers. Instead, consumers are listening to individuals and more grassroots movements.

  “Or consider Red Bull, the most lauded branded-content success story. It has become a new-media hub producing extreme – and alternative – sports content. While Red Bull spends much of its $2 billion annual marketing budget on branded content, its YouTube channel (rank #184, 4.9 million subscribers) is lapped by dozens of crowdculture start-ups with production budgets under $100,000. Indeed, Dude Perfect (#81, 8 million subscribers), the brainchild of five college jocks from Texas who make videos of trick shots and goofy improvised athletic feats, does far better.”

  So what should brands be doing? Holt argues that they need to tap into these developing subcultures and emergent ideologies:

  “These three brands broke through in social media because they used cultural branding—a strategy that works differently from the conventional branded-content model. Each engaged a cultural discourse about gender and sexuality in wide circulation in social media—a crowdculture—which espoused a distinctive ideology. Each acted as a proselytizer, promoting this ideology to a mass audience. Such opportunities come into view only if we use the prism of cultural branding—doing research to identify ideologies that are relevant to the category and gaining traction in crowdcultures. Companies that rely on traditional segmentation models and trend reports will always have trouble identifying those opportunities.”

  For me, this ties into one of my favorite lines from Simon Sinek: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” And now, thanks to social, it has become a lot easier to figure out what people and communities care about. It has become easier to figure out your why.

  Do you see this as being relevant to your work? I am certainly thinking about it in the context of mine.

  2016.03.05

• A guide to digital marketplaces

  

  Version One Ventures – which is an early-stage venture capital fund based in Vancouver – recently published a free handbook called, A Guide to Marketplaces.

  Online marketplaces are really fascinating because they are perhaps broader in scope than you might initially think. For example, Uber is a marketplace. There’s a supply-side (drivers with cars) and a demand-side (people needing rides). Uber connects these two groups together and acts as a kind of digital middle person. Uber does not own any of the cars.

  This is an incredibly power business model and it can and is being applied in many different ways. Here are the top internet marketplaces (via the handbook):

  

  I have been interested in this space for years because I have been very curious as to why we haven’t seen more innovation when it comes to online real estate marketplaces. Yes, there are platforms like Zillow.com. But Zillow has not done to real estate what Uber is doing to urban mobility.

  My thinking is that it comes down to supply-side aggregation. Online marketplaces in general are hard to get started, which is why investors love them. They have defensibility. But real estate, in particular, is even harder to jumpstart compared to the incumbent models because of what I see as constraints on the supply-side.

  That’s why I am so excited about what BuzzBuzzHome.com is doing on the new construction side of the business. They are aggregating supply.

  If you’d like to download the guide to marketplaces in PDF, click here. It’s a great read and I’m glad that Boris and Angela took the time to assemble. Thank you 🙂

  2015.11.14

• Towards more publicness

  Back when the commercial internet first started to take off it was uncommon to use your real name online. Instead people relied on usernames and other pseudynoms to represent themselves. I honestly can’t remember what I used in those days, but I’m sure it was something ridiculous.

  Over time though that started to change. 

  Blogging started to take off in the late 1990s. And we started to become more comfortable sharing personal information online. Perhaps the biggest shift though, came with the introduction of Facebook in 2004 (over 10 years ago!). All of a sudden people – young college students initially – started sharing lots of personal information online, including photos of themsleves and their friends.

  But this wasn’t an overnight change. When Facebook first launched, privacy was an important component. It still is, but I would argue that it has become less central given how public a lot of other social media platforms are today. Twitter, for instance, is what it is today largely because of its publicness. 

  For my own social media accounts, I have made every single one of them completely public. From Twitter to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat, nothing I post to social media is restricted in any way. And I do that because I believe we are headed towards a world with more – not less – openness, transparency and publicness.

  Of course, I’m not just talking about social media and tech. I’m talking about open data in general.

  Earlier this year, the Toronto Real Estate Board clamped down on real estate brokers who were publishing historical sales data online. Citing privacy concerns, TREB ordered them to stop or lose their access to the MLS system. 

  For those of you not from familiar with the Toronto real estate market, historical sales data for homes is not open and published online. You generally need to go through a realtor to get access to this data. Some think this is the right approach. And others think it is antiquated.

  But as I explained above, our conception of what should be private can, and will, evolve over time.

  Here are the details on my home:

  I purchased it in September 2012 for exactly $400,000 (Canadian). It’s a 650 square foot condo in the St. Lawrence Market neighborhood of Toronto. It has one bedroom, a 400 square foot terrace, one parking spot, and 10′ ceilings.

  Sooner or later, I believe this information will be freely available online. But since that’s not the case today, I figured I would just tell you. Sharing this information is not a big deal for me.

  2015.03.25

• Pushing and pulling

  

  Venture capitalist Chris Dixon recently published an interesting post called, Two eras of the internet: pull and push. In it, he describes two patterns that have emerged within the internet over the past decade and a half.

  Pull (2000s):

  Pull is when you are seeking information, usually an answer to a question. You want to know the closing time of a restaurant, the description of a hotel where you are thinking about staying, the details of an historical event you heard about, etc. You go to your computer and pull the information. The killer app for pulling information was Google.

  Push (2010s):

  Push is when you are using the internet in a more passive way and content comes to you. The killer app for push is social networks, the most popular being Facebook. Information is pushed from user to user via likes, shares, tweets, etc. People tend to push things they find funny, interesting, moving, outrageous, etc.

  Now let’s think about this for a second, because it’s a pretty significant change.

  Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. And they have certainly made it easier for us to get the information we want. Instead of physically searching for something, you just type in a few keywords and it pops up. But, it still involves us deciding we want something and then pulling the information.

  What’s fascinating to me about push is the idea that content and information comes to you. And it’s one of the reasons that I’ve always found Foursquare more interesting than Yelp – even though Yelp is far more popular as a tool to help you find somewhere to eat, drink and so on.

  When I walk into a restaurant or bar now, oftentimes I’ll see a Foursquare notification popup on my phone showing me a tip that somebody has left: “Try the meatballs – they’re to die for”. I didn’t search for that. I didn’t ask for a recommendation. But Foursquare knew where I was and presented me with that information.

  Now, there are obviously potential downsides to constant interruption, but let’s focus here on the opportunities. How could these same principles to be applied to other industries such as, say, real estate?

  I think there’s a pull and push parallel.

  Today MLS operates in a way like a search engine for homes. You decide you might be interested in buying a home and so you go online and start pulling listings.

  Of course, the vast majority of people also work with a real estate agent. And in a way they’re kind of like your push. They get to know you, they figure out what you’re looking for, and then they push relevant listings and information to you.

  And maybe that’s why nobody has killed off real estate agents – despite the numerous attempts. Everybody has been focusing on new pull platforms (listing platforms) as opposed to a new push platform.

  Who knows.

  But I think it would be naive to think that these emerging push platforms won’t reach far beyond social media.

  2014.12.22
• [vimeo 61161274 w=500 h=375]

  davemorin:

  Introducing Path 3

  Big fan of Path.

  (Source: http://player.vimeo.com/)

  2013.03.09

• How does Dirt get the dirt?

  thedirtco:

  Last week we spoke about why the world needs a social real estate community and how we intend to use this community to get and share property information and activity.

  We’re about a week away from launching our first release (signup here and be the first to get notified) and so we thought…

  How does Dirt get the dirt?

  2012.12.17

• Why the world really needs a social real estate community

  thedirtco:

  If you read our first blog post from last week (What is Dirt?), you probably started thinking: do we really need a social community for real estate consumers? Why can’t we leverage existing social networks, and continue to rely on industry experts and existing resources to help us understand…

  Why the world really needs a social real estate community

  2012.12.11