Sunday, February 21, 2010

Entrepreneurial Principles: Your Community As Theater

The Age of Experience

Let's move back in time to when assembly lines were introduced to the market. This monumental event marks the beginning of the age of quality, where people focused on building products with standardized quality.

When the market is saturated with quality goods, we need services. We need part distributors, retailers, telephone, cable TV, and so on. The age of quality shifted to the age of services.

And now, with the Internet, we are shifting again from the age of service to the age of experience. For a long time, people experience things, good or bad, and they want to share their experience with others. It wasn't easy to do so in the old days.

The internet makes it easier, much easier, to share experience. People email, chat, and blog about their experience. Online recommenders will rate, review, and recommend products and services that they like and dislike based on their experience. In the age of experience, advertisement will no longer be convincing (as it was). The wisdom of crowd will.

Theater

Theater is a place, where directors, actors, actresses present their goods (e.g., their talent). If you think of your online community as a theater, you will be the director and your member will be the actors and actresses. Your job is to prepare a theater for the audience which will come and share experiences with your members.

Name

In the age of experience, names should reflect what experience the audience expect when entering the theater. Well, if you have a lot of money to advertise, you can choose a non-descriptive name such as LUX for soap. A non-descriptive name will catch people's attention. And, you can use advertisement to help explain what the name is, and people will always remember the non-descriptive name. But if you don't wanna do advertisement, pick a name that will inspires the audience to think what you want them to think.

Be Creative, When Designing Your Community

Artists and entrepreneurs are similar. They are creative, and they solve problems. Successful artists and entrepreneurs are those who are able to adapt quickly. The reason is simply because "Perfection is too costly". So start as soon as you can, and then adapt as you move. Try but do not expect to get it right at the first time. When stuck, reformulate the problem. Any problem can be solved if we change the problem into a related one to solve the real issue.

7 Rules for Entrepreneurial Success
  1. Рау attention to detail
  2. Get thongs done on time
  3. Delegate to others all that they can handle as well or better
  4. Use showmanship, imagination, dramatize what you are doing
  5. Take action. If you have the facts and a little common sense, and you move, you've got a better than 50 percent chance of being right
  6. Do your business homework
  7. Reinvest your profits - but always keep a liquid position


Source: Social Network Business Model by David Silver, Chapter 2.
For more details, get this book online @ books.google.com [Link]

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