Entries Tagged 'marketing' ↓

The thread on Montreal Tech Watch’s Capazoo Update got increasingly surreal this week, first with their Director of Communications heralding their strategic partnership with the National Lampoon. To contact him, anyone in the press should just do so through the service he is promoting (!).

Capazoo is a multi-level marketing scheme. Like Amway and countless other MLM schemes, it turns people into money-grubbing zombies that erode our social capital.

Today one Jean-Christophe decided to comment as a satisfied customer, pleading for us to see for ourselves how fantastic and lucrative Capazoo can be. Naturally, he finishes by giving us his profile page. If we sign up after visiting it, he earns zoops. So far, he’s earned 806 zoops - or $8.06.

So I looked at the referral scheme:

For every friend you invite who upgrades to Privileged Membership, you’ll earn 100 Zoops!

For every friend you invite who upgrades to VIP Membership, you’ll earn 130 Zoops!

The Capazoo.com Referral Program lets you earn Zoops when your friends refer friends – up to four generations!

Ick. Capazoo will quickly fill up with amateur spammers looking to make a single dollar of each of their social connections. Maybe one day they’ll have Amway-style rallies and conferences. Unlike other MLM organizations that manage to stick around for years however, this socio-economic virus should peter out once they burn through their cash reserves and exhaust their possible partnerships.

I hope Capazoo goes out with a bang rather than a whimper, that it serve as a reminder to other idiots that would try similar ideas.

I have been a fan of Kiva since Jamais Cascio wrote about them on worldchanging. Kiva works on a simple idea: 20 people in rich countries can each lend $25 to a person somewhere half-way around the world. It’s small change for us, but that $500 can be enough for a borrower to build a decent livelihood.

99.7% of loans made through Kiva are repaid. It’s easy, cheap and changes lives; a lot of people love the idea.

They’ve had trouble keeping their servers up after receiving mainstream media attention, so when news came out that Oprah was to feature them I figured they might crash hard. They were only down for three 20 minute periods. 94,000 people visited the site that day, and 4388 new registered users lent $145,000 - more than triple their previous week’s total.

With two years of operation, Kiva has managed to get some solid data on repayment. Their knowledge and experience is paying off. What mainstream media recognition they are getting is richly deserved.

Because of the sudden influx of loaners, they have run out of businesses to fund. This is an excerpt from their site:

We’ve funded EVERY business on the site!!

[…]

With your help, one day we’ll run out of businesses forever. We at Kiva.org look forward to the day our website ceases to be a functioning microfinance site and instead becomes an online museum dedicated to showing future generations what we used to call “poverty.”

One blogger wrote that Michael Arrington of Techcrunch said “there’s little value in being “right” with a story if you can’t be “first””.

Arrington is a brilliant marketer and making lots of money. He is also consistently out in left-field when evaluating startups. I’ve unsubscribed from Techcrunch because of all the noise.

Mainstream media are also noisy, so you might as well shut them off. Some people watch an hour of news every day. Even a half hour a day is 180 hours, almost 5 weeks of full-time work. After years of watching all this, what difference does it make? It only made me depressed. To think of all the better things I could have done with that time…

I don’t need to hear about things that don’t affect me, or that I can’t affect. A coup in Thailand? An MP in the UK charged with breaking the law? Yet another softwood lumber accord that’s being disputed, or another cease-fire broken? Noise to me.

I’ll write more about this later, but locus of control and self-efficacy are important issues. The media make people feel less empowered and less able to change the world. They teach helplessness. To value constant data rather than correct information simply adds to that suffering.

Wanting to change the world, or merely being sane requires shutting off most media.

One more item on the todo list crossed off tonight: reading through the incredibly boring Google Adwords Learning Center Lessons.

You know it’s going to be painful when every “how-to” starts with:

1. Log in to your AdWords account at adwords.google.com.

I’ll spare you the details. There was much irrelevant material, although I did learn a lot, and ended up wishing I knew most of it before I started playing with the API. At best, trying to automate things that are not understood is a recipe for wasting time.

Now I have to spend $1,000 in the next three months, and pass a silly exam.

Before that, I’ll be spending some time looking at Freebase.

We had some problems when dispatching your cards, and we could not complete payment. This may have been due to a fault in our system. We then dispatched your cards free of charge, however this means the status has not been updated properly. Your cards were dispatched on the 15th May.

Wow, that’s impressive. No blame, BS, or corporate CYA lingo. Very refreshing.

Update: I got the cards today, May 22nd. I was amused by the “Yay! You’re our new best friend” card. Mentioning environmental performance also goes a long way to build a positive brand. The cards look great. Moo rocks.