Vinny Lingham’s Blog

Ok - hat’s off to Scott Jangro - this is hilarious!

Update: Not to be outdone by Scott - get your Chinpose T-Shirts at Zazzle!

One of the companies that I am involved in, (disclosure: as a non-executive director & shareholder) is Quirk, which is an eMarketing agency. Quirk has just launched an exciting new product called BrandsEye today, which plays in the realm of Online Reputation Management (ORM). BrandEye has been in development for a long time now and it competes with other services such as Trackur, which is headed up by Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim.

ORM deals with managing the huge flux of information, opinion and reviews about your company and your brand online, and both these services make it very easy to track what’s being said about your brand - good and bad. As a business owner, it’s extremely important to understand what’s in the public domain, as a poor online image can really impact your business negatively. The skills and resources to monitor what happens online are not usually available to the average business owner, and therefore it really makes sense to outsource it to a service that can really monitor what’s happening on the web.

The fact that both Andy & Rob (CEO of Quirk) - both of whom I highly respect - have launched similar services within a few weeks of each other, speaks for itself on the opportunity in this space to assist businesses in understanding how to control and manage their brand online. Companies such as Dell & Telkom have had some online PR nightmares with Dell Hell & Helkom - and perhaps these are extreme cases.

In the world of Web 2.0, where sharing is caring, you can expect users to offer more opinions about more companies online and sites like Yelp can make or break a local business if they do no know what people are saying about them. This part of social networking really allows the cream to rise to the top and businesses need to look inward to improve their products and services in order to remain competitive. I see a major marketing exploding in ORM, so I wish both Andy & Rob all the best!

Well, definitely not loyalty! Have a look at Facebook, they are still using Google Maps in the Facebook Events app (which is built by Facebook). When Microsoft paid $240m for less than 2% of Facebook, I’m pretty sure they missed that part in the fine print, or else Facebook would be using Live Maps!

Ok, so now that the word is out - let’s see how long it takes for Facebook to switch to Microsoft Live Maps! Remember, you heard it here first!

I often find that in the new Web 2.0 world of “social media” and “communities”, that there are some very flaky business models. I was quite impressed to come across Global Scholar today. Not only are they proposing a very valuable community offering, but they’re also finding a way to monetize it from the early stages - which sometimes isn’t always a good idea. However, what they’re doing is pushing the idea of actually paying for the experience - even if it’s just $1 for the first hour, in order to get people into the idea that not everything online will be free in the future (VC money does run out at some point, and sustainable business models need to be in place by then!).

Global Scholar offers:

* all tutoring occurs on online via chat/audio/whiteboard/curriculum sharing
* all tutoring sessions are recorded and archived with a “playback” option, for students/parents to review
* tutors set their own prices/courses/hours of operation
* GlobalScholar.com background checks every tutor (criminal + education) and trains them on the site
* All tutors need to have a minimum four-year degree
* Users can leave ratings/reviews for tutors

They’re creating a community that has value for all parties - and are charging for it, as it will most definitely have value for a lot of students and parents.

There was quite an interesting article on ReadWriteWeb recently on The Danger of Free, which I highly recommend reading - and which actually inspired this post as I was very comforted to see “Web 2.0″ companies trying to charge for their services. I know… it sounds rich from a guy that’s giving away free websites but at least we have a long term plan :-)

I’ve really been busy this past month so apologies for the light posting - from closing the recent SynthaSite deal to all the paperwork involved with moving to the US West Coast - it’s been one very busy month. I thought I’d just write a piece and give feedback on how SynthaSite has been doing and what our users are up to!

I’m actually thrilled by the level of interest that SynthaSite has been receiving (and thanks to all my fellow bloggers for their support!). We have signed up over 11,000 users this year, who have produced thousands of websites - with the most unique and unimaginable user generated content.

Here are some of the thousands of sites that our users have created so far :

SAT Bootcamp (Using 3rd party forms creatively to capture leads)
Team69Racing (Someone from my hometown )
Spay Pet (Using Google AdSense)
Parallels vs Bootcamp (Using some nifty HTML to create tables)
Amazon Webstore (using syndicated content from Amazon)
Carbo Rocket (E-Commerce enabled using PayPal)
African Dream Holidays (Microsite for African Dream Holidays, an incuBeta company)

We’re stunned by the ingenuity of our user base - we haven’t even gotten out the gates yet, relatively speaking, and people are really testing the depths of our platform! This is really great to see - and it makes all the hard work very much worth it!

User Generated Content (UGC) is a pivotal part of Web 2.0 in that it demonstrates how users are participating and having a voice on the web. I’m really excited about the year ahead, and I’m looking forward at demonstrating the power of SynthaSite as we open it up to a world of users that have a need for a website, but never wanted to pay for hosting, domains, etc.

Interestingly enough - 5 out of the top 10 countries that we have users in, are from emerging markets (BRICS - Brazil, Russia, India, China & South Africa) - which points to how starved these countries are for free Internet services such as hosting (in South Africa - bandwidth and hosting is frighteningly expensive). If you think of the volumes of users from these countries, and couple that with the fact that high costs of Internet is actually holding back UGC on platforms such as YouTube, etc - over time, as prices drop, the Internet is going to explode - what you’re seeing today is just the beginning!