tribeofone

*edit, these days you get 5M just for saying its beautiful so maybe the valuation is not THAT far off.

I think projection, with a contact lens with some sort of polarizing effect so that you have to be looking right at it to see what is being projected is the ticket. However, who knows if that is even possible.

Good article, but it's a little over the top at the end here. Most people are going to pick up a new beverage the first time based on marketing and packaging. The second time they are going to pick it up because they like the taste, pure and simple.

I've always been bothered with this whole 'lifestyle' brand concept. Pepsi says it's a lifestyle brand, but what does sugared water have to do with the way you live your life? Alot, but not in the manner Pepsi would wan't it. It makes you fat, not perceived as some sort of alternative thinker.

What Red Bull did right in all this, is that they NAILED the lifestyle brand marketing strategy. They hit it out of the park. Its not a strategy aimed at keeping people drinking it through their life, but convincing new customers they need to try it. The Lifetime Value of a Coke customer is probably 100x-1000x more then the LTV of a Red Bull customer.

So to wrap this up, just because you succeeded in your marketing strategy, does not make it a truth. Was it "that it ‘gives you wings…’ which means that it provides skills, abilities, power, etc., to achieve whatever you want to" that triggered people to try and, I concede, maybe like the beverage more then they normally would? Yes. Do they keep drinking it just to signal their allegiance to the Red Bull tribe, not so sure.

"Getting scale in mobile is really hard" - It really seams like it, there's no cloud computing, distribution platforms, billions of mobile users... oh right. All that exists. You mean getting the share of hype in mobile is really hard, I agree with that statement.

"Snapchat is doing a really awesome job of creating new behaviors that you wouldn't expect" - Like what exactly? Sexting? Oh that's right, your messages disappear... UNLESS someone takes a screen shot.

"Snap a photo or a video, add a caption, and send it to a friend (or maybe a few). They'll view it, laugh, and then the snap disappears from the screen - unless your friend takes a screenshot!"

So they kinda have this 'idea' that works but really doesn't.

"I definitely think it can happen within an organizations," Systrom said. "Risk-taking, if done well, can be done within organizations in a way that is much safer than having to drop out of school to do a startup."

Pearls of wisdom from a seasoned vetrean of the industry. The guy is clearly smart, and I don't want to take anything away from what he's done but he has exactly 0 experience managing innovation inside a large organization. He has no clue how this works or how this is done. I'd prefer he would give some concrete insight to exactly WHY he thinks snapchat is worth the 800M (beside pure VC speculation or a gut feeling) which he is in a unique position to do, then wax philosophical about innovation in organizations. Maybe if the author did some 'journalism' and pressed him for some real answers instead of half formed opinions we'd have something worth reading.

Edit: People asking for their money back in the forums! Priceless! I'm sure they'll start issuing refunds immediately with all that cash they have on hand.

This is not entirely true, if you have enough traffic, even the slightest change can make a difference. HOWEVER, for 99% of sites what you say is true. A/B testing should be used last, to squeeze out the last few percents of optimization, once you've done everything else. Not as a 'first step'.

One cool thing that can come of these tests, as an anecdote, is to see what is really working on a page, as opposed to what needs to be optimized.

We ran a Multivariate Test once for a signup form. The results were all similar, except for 1 which was much, much worse then the others. We could not understand why because there were no big differences between the elements, but this one particular combination set was having a bad time at it. Turns out, the headline was longer for one of the variations. This wrapped the text and pushed the call to action down below the fold, resulting in a ~30% (negative) difference in the conversion from the ones that were above the fold.

Many people treat data as the Oracle of Delphi hoping to just make an offering (investment) and wait for knowledge to be dropped. This idea that you can just shift through endless data and pull out insights is just plain wrong. Frist start with the decisions you can or have to make, then look at the data to see if it gives you insight into the best choice.

The link from here is a little disappointing, this would have been a perfect opportunity to showcase the technology instead of just a blog post.

I remember this article a few months ago: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/cyborg-professor-claim...

I sided with the guy with the glasses, after reading this article, not so much.

*Note, when I first read this article, there was no freaky picture with it.

fduran has some great points. I would shorten the Who are you? part to just the basics. You don't have to tell me your a marketing guru, once you get 100K followers and can charge the appropriate CPM well know you are.

You'll also eventually need some Demo information about your followers, average Klout score, average followers, etc (just throwing some stuff out there) to sell what I assume will be a premium CMP because of the 'curated' bit, and to do some quality control as you gain followers.

It would be cool to get some 'celebrity endorsements' showing off (with their permission) some big names that are following this account. Star power never hurts.