August « 2008 « Geoff Corey

Took the kids to see Maw-Maw (grandmom) in rural North Carolina. Driving there I was thinking of my own childhood on Signal Mountain, Tennesee. We use to go up to the corner gas station and Junior was there with his overalls and we would pick up a case of soda in bottles and return the empty case of bottles. Now I doubt anyone would argue that ice cold soda from a bottle is one of the best experiences.

Now that the big cola providers have all given up glass except around Christmas time for Coke, I was thinking it would be great to return back to those grand days. RC Cola is a Carolina product as much as moonshine and tobacco. They have always fought for shelf space at the grocery store even when they are cheaper better tasting product IMHO.

Maybe Royal Crown should pull a purple cow right out of Seth Godin’s playbook. If they can setup distribution with local businesses in rural North Carolina and start packaging their product with glass they may see growth against the big companies. It would be some time before they hit the cities with this strategy because the cities and suburbs are full of transitional people from other lands that just wouldn’t understand and honestly wouldn’t slow down to notice. But in rural North Carolina it could make a resurgance. Who knows, maybe we will be seeing more RC Colas, Moonpies and checkers.

So what do you think the goal of these websites are: Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Pownce, YouTube, etc? Wouldn’t you love to read the original business plan vision, mission and strategy statments? I bet it is full of B.S. and what they stated in there business plans was very specific and they became something else. Facebook prolly had something like, “To recreate the high school/college yearbook online”. Total crap, they became a lot more then that.

Why are some of these sites so successful and others not so successful? Look at Twitter ridiculous growth curve. Do you think they had some vision of becoming a tool for other companies/applications backbone?

I have been reading one my favorite authors, Seth Godin’s latest book. And it hit me that all these websites basically should have the same vision and mission statement. Why some are successfull and others are not is really a case of how close their statements are to the following or just dumb luck.

Vision – Create online community

Mission – To enable users to tell there story, connect with others, and promote discussion

Now you look at that and say, how do you get from that to Facebook? Well, that is a long story but you can look at your Facebook account and the applications you use and look at the ones you passed on. My bet is the ones you passed on add no value to your interaction with others or are just stupid marketing applications.

Speaking of marketing, look how bad companies are implementing it on social networks. I get at least an invite a day to some twitter user that is following 55,000 users. Like anyone is going to follow them and listen to their marketing BS. Definately old school and pretty much completely worthless today. I’m afaid Seth Godin is correct, old school marketing is dead. Move on and use the social web as it is intended. To tell a story, interact with others and garner discussion.

Geoff Corey

Business planning, software development, entrepreneurship and technology

August, 2008

Purple Cow for RC Cola

Geoff Corey

Business planning, software development, entrepreneurship and technology

August, 2008

Purple Cow for RC Cola

Social websites and their vision statements