As an entrepreneur, one of the biggest challenges you will face will be building your brand. The ultimate goal is to set your company and your brand apart from the crowd. If you form a strategy without doing the research, your brand will barely float - and at the speed industries move at today, brands sink fast.
Ryan Holmes
By monitoring the activity taking place on social networks, retailers can amplify successful marketing and sales strategies and avoid weak tactics which can later be tied back to organizational objectives.
You can run a sprint or your can run a marathon, but you can't sprint a marathon.
Social media is the most disruptive form of communication humankind has seen since the last disruptive form of communications, email.
Landing a million-dollar investment for your startup is exhilarating. But as big as that number sounds, it doesn't go far. Many startups just getting off the ground won't have a CFO to monitor finances. It doesn't take much for spending to spiral out of control.
I don't know how many times I've turned to Twitter and Facebook to commiserate and celebrate, bounce ideas off of friends, colleagues and other entrepreneurs, and just connect with the wider world outside my office.
Hammer down product fundamentals first. Make sure you've got something that works before doubling down on promotion and marketing. Create a groundswell of organic support, and only then leverage PR and advertising to spread the word.
Although social media is a relatively new form of communication, it has become the primary way retailers and customers are interfacing.
From its humble origins in college dorm rooms, social media has quietly crept into the boardroom.
Sales teams use social media to generate leads and track clients as they move through the sales funnel. Operations and distribution teams forecast supply chains, while research and development squads brainstorm product ideas.
One of the ironies of a conference dedicated to all things digital and virtual is that the best ways to connect with people are surprisingly old-school. Social media tools can improve the odds of a serendipitous encounter at SXSW, but old-fashioned hustle, palm-pressing and - above all - creativity go a long way.
When you think of technology that gets people excited - long lines at stores, enthusiastic reviews in the blogosphere, passionate evangelists - the first thing to come to mind probably isn't thermostats. Then, along came Nest.
Amongst high unemployment rates, a competitive job market and a shrinking global economy, the emerging social media industry only continues to grow.
The growing role of enterprise social media, plus the growing budgets and authority of CMOs entrusted with choosing the best platforms, translates into an exciting future for apps that harness social potential for large companies.
Tech companies don't exist in a bubble; they draw from and feed into a larger community. Ideally, the relationship is symbiotic.
I often talk about the PayPal mafia out of San Francisco, people that were in PayPal and got out of PayPal and continue to reinvest in other start-ups and create a huge pay-it-forward type of network there.
It may be coincidence that the decline of newspapers has corresponded with the rise of social media. Or maybe not.
Early in my career, I was involved with engineer-led projects, where designers came in late in the game and were expected to put lipstick on an existing code base. This almost never works.
A swarm of new business tools coming to phones and desktops near you promise to boost efficiency and streamline collaboration by borrowing social features from the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
A critical question to ask when bringing in a new CEO to take the reins of a company you started is: Do you want someone who will maintain company culture or reinvent it?
Not using social media in the workplace, in fact, is starting to make about as much sense as not using the phone or email.
Anyone with an inbox knows what I'm talking about. A dozen emails to set up a meeting time. Documents attached and edited and reedited until no one knows which version is current. Urgent messages drowning in forwards and cc's and spam.
As technology has improved, our digital lives have only grown more tangled and cluttered.
Entrepreneurs, by disposition, are built to think big. When a role no longer affords those opportunities, it might be best to leave it in capable hands and move on.
As a child, I did what any normal kid who grew up without any electricity would do - I spent countless hours working on a computer wired to my parents' car battery... and learned how to code. This natural passion for computers lead me into the Internet market during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
We've all been inundated with so many ingenious, must-have, time-saving apps and tools that we really don't have a second left to spare.
The longer you're stuck in a position that doesn't truly challenge you, the less likely you'll be able to leave it. Inertia, in fact, is one of my worst fears.
At the most basic level, prioritizing design also represents a practical consideration. It's far easier to design first and engineer later.
Companies and managers that find a way to harness social media stand to gain.
South America's most populous country, Brazil, is also emerging as one of the region's most social-media savvy.
Pizza made me who I am. In the summer of 1998, I dropped out of college and started a pizza restaurant called Growlies in my hometown in rural Canada. My seed money: a credit card with a $20,000 limit.
Ultimately, I'd love to see a legacy company that has alumni that come out of it and go on to create other big things. A maple-syrup mafia, a HootSuite mafia.
Tech companies have a finite lifespan: For the successful ones, an IPO or exit is never more than a few years off. But by recruiting locally and developing homegrown talent, companies can build something that remains after they're gone. People, skills and a culture of innovation persist.
No surprise that, as companies have adopted social media en masse, demand for software and applications to manage and monitor social use has exploded.
Social media has shaken up the world of sales, with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offering new ways to hound leads and unprecedented insights into clients.
For resourceful tech founders, finding capital is rarely a problem; making the best use of it is another story. A few years slinging pepperoni pies and chicken wings - on tiny margins and with minimal investment - might not be the worst fiscal training.
Sales departments use social to nurture leads and close sales. HR posts job openings and vets applicants. Community and support squads mine networks, blogs and forums with deep listening tools.
Customer service teams at many companies have already embraced social media, often out of necessity.
LinkedIn and Flickr, among other sites, have already proven freemium can generate revenue in the social media context.
I grew up off the grid in Vernon, and I saw my parents work hard every day, as teachers but also while farming and building a log home. So from a young age I knew the value of hard work.
An exit is only a success if you set an exit as your primary goal. My primary goal was to build a globally influential tool, to build something from the ground up that could literally change how we communicated in business and individually.
Social media has given companies access to unprecedented amounts of information on client behavior and preferences - so-called Big Data. But making sense of it all and turning it into actionable policy has been elusive.
Payfirma has revolutionized the payment process, consolidating mobile, e-commerce and in-store payments under a single solution, much like HootSuite did for social media.
For everybody in their busy lives, you need to invest in sharpening your tools, and you need to invest in longevity.
The reality is that SXSW is packed with brilliant entrepreneurs, investors and partners. They're everywhere, zipping back and forth like thousands of atoms. Your chances of colliding with one actually improve just by standing still.
While social media skills were once a 'nice-to-have,' accreditation in the space is becoming a requirement for many of these job titles. Hiring managers and job seekers are realizing that printing stacks of resumes is turning passe, and social media is rising as the new way of generating real-time networking opportunities.
If you catch me lying, it's probably because I'm about to surprise someone for their birthday, or hide away the specific details about a company getaway to a strange but amazing place.
I think that Vancouver as well as Canada needs a boot camp for young entrepreneurs. We have already seen tens if not hundreds of people put their names forward to be involved in the program, and we just think this is an amazing way to accelerate what they're doing.
The basic idea of email has remained essentially unchanged since the first networked message was sent in 1971. And while email is great for one-on-one, formal correspondence, there are far better tools for collaboration.
It helps to look at branding as a challenge that entrepreneurs spend years perfecting.
