Sunday, November 14, 2010

Could Facebook be leading to it's own undoing?

This could lead to a lesson in customer service.

I only add those I've personally met both on Facebook and LinkedInand get those little messages that say I'm blocked from adding people. I didn't realize this was why this was happening and several months ago, I posted a query on Facebook's Help Page.

Several comments have come in, but the following rant speaks very loudly, on many levels.

Enjoy...

Look, Facebook has a rude message that it sends you when it thinks you have too many unanswered friend requests. Because Facebook cannot check with everyone of your potential friends it has no idea why they have not answered. Their Help message give you the impression that Facebook is ACCUSING YOU of doing something that got someone to report you. If you add the "Pending Friend Requests" app it will help you find out exactly who has not responded. Unfortunately Facebook has become so corporate and uncaring about their members that they couldn't care less if they blocked you unfairly. I would like them to at least apologize when they are wrong. In my case I have NEVER sent a request to anyone I didn't legitimately know in the REAL world. When I viewed my pending requests I saw many people who I guess just barely use their accounts.

It doesn't take a computer science major to know that you can coordinate who has been logged onto their page lately with who has responded to friend requests...Come on, Facebook, this is a no brainer. It is also not good policy to accuse innocent users of your site of wrongdoing. If I have a permanent "mark" on my record from you for sending out too many requests for friends (which Facebook openly encourages and even provides the Friend Finder App for) then I will make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that everyone I know in the REAL WORLD understands that Facebook is NO LONGER COOL. -Yeah, I saw "The Social Network" and I know that the only reason anyone is on Facebook is because they thought (at least at one time) it was cool.

Fix your rude message, Facebook, and consider no blocking someone until you have at least let them know they have an unusual number of pending friend requests ahead of time. Couldn't the same automated forces that generated the BLOCK against me using my account to make friends online simply warn me first? Or is that just not the corporate Facebook way?!


Upsetting customers is certainly not the way to go, even if you're seemingly the only game in town.

Appreciating your customers and adjusting your business to serve, is perhaps the highest form of cooperation in the business world. Probably more than Joint Ventures.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Brand Names - Where did some of them come from?

Have you ever heard the name of a company and wondered, "What hit them on the head before they came up with that?" Like to wonder, what could possibly convince awhere-company-names-come-from person to name their industrial lubricant company Fuchs? It's safe to say that after reading Wikipedia's List of Company Etymologies, that the stereotypical business leader has a bit of an underestimated humor. Extracted straight from Wikipedia's own, here's a list of a few interesting company name derivations:



* 7-Eleven - this chain of convenience stores started in 1927 as U-Tote'm (so called because customers "toted" away their purchases). In 1946, U-Tote'm became 7-Eleven to reflect the stores' new, extended hours: 7am until 11pm, seven days a week.

* Adobe - came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the
house of founder John Warnock

* Amazon.com - founder Jeff Bezos renamed the company Amazon (from the earlier name of Cadabra.com) after the world's most voluminous river, the Amazon. He saw the potential for a larger volume of sales in an online (as opposed to a bricks and mortar) bookstore.

* Apache - according to the project's 1997 FAQ: "The Apache group was formed around a number of people who provided patch files that had been written for NCSA httpd 1.3. The result after combining them was A PAtCHy server."

* Apple Computers - favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 o'clock

* Arby's - the enunciation of the initials of its founders, the Raffel Brothers

* Arm & Hammer - the founder's name was Armand Maccabee. The word maccabee is a biblical Hebrew name that translates to the English - hammer.

* eBay - Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay Technology Group. "Echo Bay" didn't refer to the town in Nevada, "It just sounded cool," Omidyar reportedly said. Echo Bay Mines Limited, a gold mining company, had already taken EchoBay.com, so Omidyar registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name: eBay.com...

* Google - the name started as a jokey boast about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders - Stanford grad students Sergey Brin and Larry Page resented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'

* Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters "html" - the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.

* HP - Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

* Intel - Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics

* LEGO: combination of the Danish "leg godt", which means to "play well." Lego also means "I put together" in Latin, but LEGO Group claims this is only a coincidence and the etymology of the word is entirely Danish. Years before the little plastic brick was invented, LEGO manufactured wooden toys.

* Microsoft - coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed later on.

* Motorola - Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola

* Nero - Nero Burning ROM named after Nero burning Rome.

* Nintendo - Nintendo is composed of three Japanese Kanji characters, Nin-ten-do. The first two can be translated to “Heaven blesses hard work”; do is a common ending for any store.

* ORACLE - Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such). Acronym for: One Real A**hole Called Larry Ellison ??

* Pepsi - named from the digestive enzyme pepsin.

* Red Hat - Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. He lost it and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone!

* Sony - from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.

* Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say dry' (as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root `xer' means dry.

* Yahoo! - the word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book 'Gulliver's Travels'. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Why Shark Tank was a FLOP.

RIP SHARK TANK


Not many people even know what Shark Tank is.

That's because not too many people watched the trainwreck on ABC Television.
Here, we'll uncover the truth behind the actual ratings.
Sure, it had a twitter following, though even the majority who followed it on twitter didn't have much of a following.

It's major problems?

It was mean spirited.
It was competitive
The sharks took advantage of entrepreneurs
The show didn't do a good job of education
People don't want to see that

By mean spirited there were some awful personal attacks by the Sharks, who actually weren't as business savvy as the show built them up to be.

The show could have been collaborative, but instead, they chose the competitive model. The same model that Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale, W. Edwards Demming, Alan Dohrmann, Buckminster Fuller and Walt Disney stated would eventually cripple the United States. (It's now crippled the global economy). The solution: a business model akin to the days when an entire community would raise a barn, sink a well and build the fences and homes.

The sharks would take advantage of desparate and uneducated Entrepreneurs. They would strike deals such as taking 51% of a company for $40,000 or 60% for 90k. They would then snicker and congratulate each other for "what a steal" they got the company for.

At CEO Space, I see deals like 20% for 5,000,000 or 2 million, or 3. 5% for 100k, etc., on a consistent basis. It is the norm at CEO Space. In 2009, CEO Space has generated over $3 Billion Dollars in funding for its members, while all the banks and venture capital firms were sitting on their hands. That was in just 5 meetings. In a full season of Shark Tank, I don't think the entrepreneurs spent more than $3 Millon total.

The only education happening on Shark Tank was how to get screwed. There was no drill down on language, there was no conversation about, what one needs to do to become successful. If you watch SharkTankTVshow.com, you will watch an investment banker do an excellent job of educating entrepreneurs.

American's don't like to see quasi-rich people taking advantage of people trying to get ahead. We're big-hearted & soft. A brilliant example of that is the overwhelming outpouring of acceptance of Under Cover Boss which came on after the Super Bowl, on CBS.

RATINGS TRUTH


The sharks are bragging that the viewership for the Season Finale on Feb. 5th, were the highest ever with 4.7 million viewers. The lemmings that shill for the show are quick to put that out there as well. That's very clever manipulation of the truth.
The fact of the matter is that the ratings were still under a 1.4 and was second to last in the time slot, as shown on TVbyTheNumbers.com.

The history of the show is that it began on a Sunday and failed there so they moved it to Tuesdays, but it flopped there too and ABC tried to bury it on a Friday evening and tried to revive it against other weak shows at other networks. #FAIL.

Wikipedia showed the shows fate in the summer time. If you are able to read between lines, it was easy to see that the show canceled. I reported as much in the Fall but was attacked by the Twitteratti. Still am, by some. Meh~

Two of the Sharks were on twitter begging for folks to write into ABC to continue the show. They were @BarbaraCorcoran & @TheSharkDaymond. They must not be doing too well. On Monday, after the Finale, One of the Sharks twittered the following: "@robertherjavec: Shark Tank finale tonight on ABC. What will I do on Friday nights now ??" Later, it was discovered on http://www.abc.go.com/schedule that the show had been removed from the roster.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: Some would argue it's not cancelled, "it just didn't get renewed". Same thing in my eyes.

The unfortunate part is that CEO Space member April Morris could have benefited from the additional publicity. Her show was to air on Feb. 5 but got pushed out a week due to the tragedy that was the Haiti Earthquake. The network was smart enough that even earthquake releif would outdraw the BUST of a show they had with Shark Tank.

April, who is @ThinGloss on Twitter, was told that her segment would air on February 12th. The network then said that they postponed her show until further notice
which means they won't have a second season because the season finale was on Friday.

"But wait a minute Dave, people on the show have benefited from TV."

Of course they did. It's TV. But just think what it would have done if people actually watched the show! The past participants aren't bragging how much they made from the show, they just bragged that the traffic crashed their servers.

Consider that StickySheets.com made over $60,000 when Whoopie Goldberg held their product up on the show and said how great it was for 30 seconds, and then was off to the races. Consider that Dr. Dawn Bain, another CEO Space member, and CEO of Azura Dawn made over $16,000 per minute her first time on QVC and has then been invited back several times. That is what the power of TV can do for you when people watch.

GOOD NEWS:
CEO Space may be bringing about a great replacement that will teach entrepreneurs.
Kevin Harrington is now a CEO Space member, who - while having quite a bit to learn, does have quite a bit to give and mentor all the while he's being mentored.

Membership had been extended to all sharks back in the Summer. None stepped forward until Kevin Harringon did at the Super Bowl event where CEO Space was tutoring Executives, Agents, Sponsor ececs, athletes and their families. Former Shark Kevin Harrington is becomming a member of CEO Space. You can hear an interview with Kevin by CLICKING HERE.


Canada has the Dragon's Den which is essentially the same show. Is it worth going after? It's on Hulu after the fact. You can also tune into SharkTankTVshow.com for some excellent entrepreneurial education.

Don't get me wrong, I would have loved to have seen Shark Tank succeed if it were done a bit differently. Did you know that ABC even asked for 2% of profits, in perpetuity? That was before the Entrepreneur got paid. I don't like that. Nobody likes the smell of bad fish.



ABOUT CEO SPACE:




CEO Space is the world's oldest and largest network for CEOs, Entrepreneurs and Visionary investors.

CEO Space is an entrepreneurial training and world class business networking organization, providing MBA-level training and development and an immersion experience of cooperation that results in income acceleration through exponential business growth.

CEO Space was founded by BJ Dohrmann, whose father was a mentor to Walt Disney, Napoleon Hill, Buckminster Fuller, JFK, Earl Nightingale and many others.

For the last thirty years, BJ has been known as "Coach of the Coaches" ...Anthony Robbins, Mark Victor Hansen, Jack Cannfield, Lisa Nichols, John Assaraf, Loral Langmier, T. Harv Ecker, John Gray, Bob Proctor, Robert Kiyosaki, Les Brown and just about any other big name you can think of, as well as head execs at companies like Starbucks, HSN, 3M, AT&T, ConocoPhillips, and many more. He is now counseling the United Nations and many foreign nations with regard to turning around the global economic crisis via Cooperative Capitalism.

Berny Dohrmann – Top Business Strategist and Founder of CEOSpace – demonstrates a financial GPS for you to navigate through the years ahead:

Bestselling author, multi-billionaire business investor and business specialist Berny Dohrmann shows you:

• How to recognise opportunities in this economic climate.
• Why it’s better to ask for a seat on the board – AND how to do this.
• The secrets to cooperative business-building.
• New ways to create wealth you’ve never even thought of.
• Powerful ways to network your way to business growth and success – and WHY this skill will be more important than ever on the economic road ahead.

Berny Dohrmann is the founder of CEO Space, a new model for executive training. Mr. Dohrmann is also the author of Money Magic, Growing Rich with Diamonds, Living Life as a Super Achiever, and Perfection CAN BE Had (now being made into a motion picture).

Mr. Dohrmann has operated billion dollar investment companies worldwide with offices in fourteen countries and his materials have been distributed in seven languages. Today, Berny Dohrmann teaches others how to enrich their own lives through his books, as well as his live events.

About a third of the members are investors, including millionaires & billionaires. In just 5 meetings in the last year, CEO Space has generated over $3 Billion Dollars in funding for its members, while all the banks and venture capital firms were sitting on their hands.

Investors love CEO Space for three main reasons, among many....
1) Anonymity & Ability to get to know the principles intimately.
2) More quality deal flow in one place than anywhere on earth.
3) The opportunity to mentor and be mentored, no matter what level of one's stature.

If you would like to see Dohrmann Live at any in any of the following cities, inquire within:



REMAINING SCHEDULE PENDING - Inquire Within