My pal Joe Gebbia’s got a really cool site called AirBed & Breakfast… it’s sort of like an up-market version of Couchsurfing. It lets users rent their apartment to people traveling to their city, and travelers get a cheaper stay than a hotel, and some local flavor.
Their marketing strategy for the site, by the way, is spot-on. Instead of trying to attack the entire world at once (and spreading themselves too thin, with cities upon cities with no listings) or concentrating on one city at a time (slow), they’re latching onto popular events and conferences.
By creating campaigns around design and political conferences and major events, they make it temporal, and relevant. In one stroke, the site is worth talking about and blogging about for anyone who’s talking or blogging about that event. Smart.
I’m fearful that it will start ridiculously early. (But glad that Piers took my suggestion and booked the Swedish American Hall, which is only a block away from my apt!)
I have a post up on Rohit Bhargava’s site, The Personality Project, about how we messed up last Mother’s Day. I’ve gotten good feedback on it, but reading it still gives me the chills.
My pal and Jelly-er Jamie Wilkinson has been teaching an awesome class at Parson’s on how to achieve Internet fame. It’s tailored towards art students for whom these skills are extra important in getting their work out there.
I didn’t know this before, but apparently the final grades are dependent on each students internet fame at the end of the semester. (Or, I assume, change/improvement in their frame.) Beautiful.
Here’s a choice quote:
Durtsche [a student] says the class has helped him to look differently at the Internet, at how quickly famo comes and goes… “You have to be creative, especially in this class to get an A. Why do you think I’m talking to you? This story is going online with my name, isn’t it? That’s more famo, right there.”
Christine and Justin are a couple in NYC. They’ve made paintings of things they want, and they’re selling each painting for the amount of money it’d cost to buy that item. Simple genius. This is a story built to spread.
Thanks times 60 million to everyone who’s spread the word and checked out he site. We love you, and we’re working on a lot of awesome new stuff for CS3 for you. Stay tuned.
I’ve been experimenting with Facebook ads. Like Fred Wilson, I found I was getting very few pageviews and no clicks at all until I created this ad that started last night, and bumped my CPC bid from $0.10 to $0.15. Within a few minutes, it had 1000s of views and started seeing clicks.
In a couple hours, I’d reached reached 138 clicks ($10 worth). Then Facebook banished my ad, and I have no idea why.
Today the ad page updated to tell me my ad was in violation of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines, sections 4, 5, and 6. It’s strange… you can see my ad in this screenshot, and I can’t really see how it’s in violation.
Here are sections 4, 5, and 6 of Facebook’s Ad Guidelines:
4. Grammar, spelling, and capitalization
Ad text must be in logical sentence form and contain grammatically correct spacing.
Ads must use correct spelling.
Ads may not include unnecessary capitalization (such as ‘FREE’). Acronyms may be capitalized.
Ads may not include excessive repetition.
5. Punctuation and symbols
The use of all symbols, numbers, or letters must adhere to the true meaning of the symbol.
Repeated and unnecessary punctuation or symbols is not permitted.
Symbols may not be used to substitute for letters (e.g., “$ave” instead of “save”).
6. Language and image content
Provocative images will not be accepted.
Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote adult content, including nudity, sexual terms and/or images of people in positions or activities that are excessively suggestive or sexual.
Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote offensive, profane, vulgar, obscene, or inappropriate language.
Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote defamatory, libelous, slanderous and/or unlawful content.
With all the attention on 2.0 tech and RSS and the like, people tend to forget that for most people, even the leading-edge, email is still the killer app for the Internet.
I wanted to share this example of well-thought email usage on Meetup.com
Meetup already makes heavy use of email once you join a group (sometimes too heavy) but I love what they’re doing to encourage you to join and create groups that don’t even exist yet. This is such a smart way to increase engagement among the users they already have.
You indicate topical interest, and when a meetup starts within X miles of your location, they tell you about it. Even better, their “Pledges” increases your commitment to the group and the likelihood that you’ll attend the meetings and help promote and grow the group. Beautiful.
Facebook viral application growth continues to astound me. Amazin’ Giftbox, which Gil and released about two and a half weeks ago, has been seeing consistent total userbase growth between 15-20%, DAILY.
And it’s on autopilot right now–we’re doing nothing to make it grow. Wow.
A few things worth noting: (1) Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays seem to be “slow” days on Facebook. (See top chart.) (2) # of app installs per hour still correlates well to daytime hours in North America. (3) To increase the total userbase by 15% everyday, the raw number of people who add the application each day has to be dramatically greater than the day before. From the top chart here, you can see that’s exactly what’s happening (minus the slow weekend.)
FWIW, among apps with between 10k and 100k users, Amazin’ Giftbox is the 5th most viral app on facebook right now, according to Appsaholic. (It’s tied at 20% daily growth with the 4th place “Harry Potter Magic Spells”)
New subscriber growth at Photojojo continues to accelerate. It’s taken us 1 year and 3 months to get to this point, and we’ve spent $0 on advertising and marketing. It’s all thanks to really enthusiastic readers who blog about us, tell their friends about us, and help spread the word. Thank you!
As an aside, when Daily Candy was acquired by Bob Pittman, they were about 3 years in and had 100,000 subscribers to their daily email list (we’re twice a week.)
Another aside: Two friends have started their own email newsletters in the past couple months, and I’m a fan of both: Nicole Davis’ startup Brooklyn Based for all your Brooklyn-dwelling friends, and Scott Hurff’s excellent Fuego for the classy men in your life.
When was the last time you got an email that was this simple and sweet from a company?
I don’t think I ever have. I have no idea who these guys are or when I signed up for their list. I kind of suspect I never did. But their email made me visit the site right away anyway.
His latest project is Photojojo. If you like photography, you will like Photojojo.
Before Photojojo, he was a founder of The Daily Jolt, an online community on 100 college campuses, helped create a non-profit called ChangeThis with Seth Godin, and brought the technology un-conference BarCamp to NYC. He also started a weekly casual coworking session called Jelly.
And he's consulted for companies such as Pearson, Apple, and Creative Good and co-authored The Big Moo, a WSJ best-seller, with Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Peters, and others.
My pal Joe Gebbia’s got a really cool site called AirBed & Breakfast… it’s sort of like an up-market version of Couchsurfing. It lets users rent their apartment to people traveling to their city, and travelers get a cheaper stay than a hotel, and some local flavor.
Just a quick note — I’ll be 
Heather just posted a super-nice interview with me on Photojojo, Jelly, and marketing to 
A quick update from 
Facebook viral application growth continues to astound me. 
advertising and marketing. It’s all thanks to really enthusiastic readers who blog about us, tell their friends about us, and help spread the word. Thank you!
