VentureBeat reported today that Fab just closed a $40 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Fab is an oft talked about company in the halls of Half Off Depot. Before today I do not know about the company's pivot from a social network for gay men. Interesting.
(1) A laser-like focus on design. From the design aesthetic of Fab.com’s website and mobile applications, to the products that are featured for sale, to the end-to-end customer experience, Fab.com is all about good design. (2) Social commerce. More than 50% of Fab.com’s 1.2 million members have come from social sharing. (3) Innovation. Fab.com builds all of its own technology and is the world’s pioneer in integrating social and commerce features to enhance the product discovery process.
So one of my coworkers walked up to me the other day, evidently after perusing my social stream.
He: "Man you need a handler."
Me: "I think I can handle myself pretty well."
Which lead to a nice long discussion about the role of social and my role at Half Off Depot. The reality is, at the moment I am very much the voice of Half Off Depot. If I could only get DeShong to write something it would change things a little bit. Get the team to tweet and book more. We actually have some plans to extend our social activities and executive exposure beyond me to Patrick Best one of our cofounders and Brian Conley our CEO.
But somebody to handle me? I don't think so. I know enough about this stuff to stay between the guardrails.
So Half Off Depot is looking for a social media/community manager. I am the hiring manager for the position and have been having a bit of a struggle in finding the right person to fill the role.
Last night I took the matter into my own hands. I went into my Twitter account and started going through the list of people that I follow. There are about 300 or so of these folks. I follow folks that I think are interesting, fun, and smart. In some way we have a shared interest.
I started looking for people that I follow that have a shared interest in social media and fit the profile of what Half Off needs. I found five that I thought would be good candidates. I sent them direct messages.
The result. Two meetings setup for this weekend (I like people that are willing to meet on the weekend and set up such meetings via social messaging) and two more in the planning stage.
Twitter can be a pretty effective recruiting method.
Half Off Depot is an Atlanta based social commerce company. We enable merchants to harness the power of social media and the appeal of deal driven commerce to attract and retain customers. Half Off Depot currently operates in two markets. Atlanta and Knoxville. Our revenue run rate is more than $10 million annually. We just closed a $7 million Series A round led by Noro-Moseley Partners. I wrote the biggest check I have ever written as part of the deal.
I am running business development and sales. Employee 21. The short story is I am in charge of meeting some pretty aggressive revenue growth goals. We will get to the longer story later.
During my time at ATDC I have looked at thousands of startups. Since last Fall I have had conversations with a number of interesting Atlanta startups. Half Off Depot is one of the most promising. It's certainly the most promising that I can make go faster right now. Brian the CEO is a stand up guy. It is going to be great to work with Alan Taetle again.
I couldn't be more excited to be back in the game.
Nice top level summary of a really big and interesting space.
So big and interesting that Google, the company with the largest market cap, is the dog. Regardless I think Jim Crowley, the CEO of BuyWithMe, pretty much got it right when he told Crain's "There is room for six of seven large players as well as niche players."
But Google the underdog? How do you suppose they are going to change that? If I were Jim Crowley I know what my answer would be.
So back at the beginning of Lent I did something that I am prone to do. A little online experiment. I opened up my social networks.
At the time they looked something like this:
LinkedIn 892 contacts, 363 requests
Twitter 2,774 followers, 331 following
Facebook 386 friends, 83 requests
Foursquare 88 followers, 120 requests
So I opened things up. I essentially accepted all requests and followed back on everything that seemed like a real human.
Six weeks latter I have 1,273 LinkedIn connections, 2,908 Twitter followers while following 479, 475 Facebook friends, and 224 Foursquare followers. From a percentage basis the size of my social networks have grown as such; LinkedIn up 43%, Twitter up 9%, Facebook up 23%, and Foursquare up a whooping 155%. All in my social connections are up to nearly 5,400, a 20% growth rate in six weeks.
Here is how the growth impacted my user experience.
Facebook felt fundamentally the same.
Aside from a inane request from someone that I do not know asking me to do something that takes time with no apparent benefit to me, I noticed no change on LinkedIn, the network with one of the higher growth rates.
Twitter, with its measley 9% growth, became unusable. Without spending significant amount of time reading through updates of no interest or adopting a more sophisticated client to filter results Twitter literally lost its value. I stopped using it. At least for me, indiscriminately following back on Twitter is a bad strategy. So I am going to be cleaning up my following list and in the future be more selective about those who I follow.
This chart does a nice job of showing how local ad spending is expected to continue to shift online to move more in line with now people are spending their time.
The money quote was in the eMarketer Daily.
"The proliferation of online advertising channels over the past few years has made it easier for local businesses to transition ad dollars from pricier, traditional ad formats to cost-efficient interactive channels like social media, search and email marketing."
As online local marketing channels continue to grow and offline marketing channels contine to shrink it's a trend that is sure to continue.
Last week LinkedIn sent out a nice note to its early users promoting the fact that it had surpassed 100 million members.
I never really thought of myself as being part of the LinkedIn story and the fact is, it is my least used online network. I had no idea I was member number 21,276, which seems pretty early for a company that now has such a large user base. One of the more interesting things about the note is that started quite a few social conversations, mostly on Facebook and Twitter.
As a result of the chatter someone asked me when I joined LinkedIn. The answer is September 2, 2003. If you want to find out when you joined login to LinkedIn, hit the settings button in the drop down beneath your name in the upper right of any LinkedIn screen. You will see your member since info right below your name.
If you want to determine your LinkedIn member number merely go to Profile and click on View Profile.
That will take you to your profile page with a URL in this format; http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=21276&trk=tab_pro. The number after id= is your LinkedIn member number.
So when did you join LinkedIn and what is your member number?
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The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone (with the exception of comments by others of course). They do not represent the opinion or position of any other person or entity. All postings adhere to my personal values.
