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What to expect from the Social Media Lounge?

Following on from my earlier post here, a few people have asked what to expect from the Social Media Lounge.

The Social Media Lounge is an introduction to Twitter, Facebook and Blogs and designed for those who are not familiar with these mediums, want to learn how to sign up to them and use them effectively.

While you’re there you can also:

- Charge your phone
- Charge your laptop
- Check emails
- Relax and have a cuppa

Also don’t forget to check out how you can win an iPad by clicking here.

Looking forward to seeing you all there

Praz

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UpNext 3D Cities – iPad App Demo

Cool…

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INSIDE JOB-the real story of the financial crisis

Riveting to say the least….looks like a thought-provoking winner! Ties in a lot with what both Raj Patel and Nassim Nicholas Taleb have said all along….

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Foundation elements for modern businesses

Seth Godin

When you sit down to dream up a new business, you can imagine a world without constraints. Or you can choose to build in fundamental pieces that will make it more likely your idea will pay off.

Here are some fundamental pieces of most new successful businesses. The goal is to build these elements into the very nature of the business itself, not just to tack them on. For example, the Scotch tape people at 3M can’t do #5, because of the structure of retail distribution and the way they mass produce and can’t track who is buying what.

You can live without some of these, but go in with your eyes open if you do:

1. Build in virality. Consider: Groupon.
2. Don’t sell a product that can be purchased cheaper at Amazon.
3. Subscriptions beat one-off sales.
4. Try to create an environment where your customers are happier when there are other customers doing business with you (see #1).
5. Treat different customers differently.
6. Generate joy, don’t just satisfy a need for a commodity.
7. Rely on unique individuals, not an easily copyable system.
8. Plan on remarkable experiences, not remarkable ads.
9. Don’t build a fortress of secrets, bet on open.
10. Unless there’s a differentiating business reason, use off the shelf software and cheap cloud storage.
11. The asset of the future is the embrace of a tribe, not a cheaper widget.
12. Match expenses to cash flow–don’t run out of money, because it’s no longer 1999.
13. Create scarcity but act with abundance. Free samples create demand for the valuable (but not unlimited) tier you offer.
14. Tell a story, erect a mythology, walk the walk.
15. Plan on obsolescence (of your products, not your customers).

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Where are you?

LINK

MARKETING, its veterans like to say, is all about the “three Rs”: reaching the right person in the right place at the right time. Hence the growing interest in marketing circles for mobile-phone-based social networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla that let users “check in” to shops or restaurants and instantly tell their friends where they are. Fans of such services gush that they will mint money by allowing ads to be targeted at folk who are about to make a purchase. But the networks must negotiate some important hurdles first if such lofty predictions are to come true.

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Facebook Overtakes Google’s Orkut On Net Users In India

Predicted this 6 months ago…

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Seth Godin Gives Up on Traditional Book Publishing

Awesome news and certainly the way the tides turning…

Mashable

Writer and marketing guru Seth Godin doesn’t plan to publish any more books — at least not in the traditional sense.

After writing 12 books, he doesn’t think the traditional publishing process is “worth the effort,” he revealed in an interview with Mediabistro. Godin, the author of bestsellers such as Purple Cow and The Dip, has quite a bleak view on the paper book and the way we consume it.

One bit from the interview is particularly revealing. “I like the people, but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread,” says Godin.