In case you did not get a chance to watch 60 minutes this evening, you can watch the interview of CEO Andrew Mason (31 same age as myself) below. It was quite a good broadcast, and thought I’d share some takeaways from tonight.

1. High tech start-up CEO’s are becoming younger, more transparent, authentic, and open compared to traditional CEO’s.

2. The explosive growth of Groupon is great- the question will be can they sustain and become profitable long-term.

3. For high tech start-ups in today’s low barrier to entry climate, competition and knock-offs such as Living Social and others make it easy for competition to enter the market. The real question is how will your start-up and Groupon create more complex barrier to entries and long term sustainable competitive advantage?

4. The key to marketing for Groupon and other high-tech start-ups will always be proper communication and relevant communication to the appropriate audience.

5. Whether your Groupon or any other high-tech start-up, you need to always be able to identify the cost per acquisition per customer.

6. BONUS- Be careful of accounting tricks that look good on paper but can cause back-lash especially when you have investors or IPO.

I have a great deal of respect for Andrew Mason among all the constant criticism to continue moving forward and expanding the company to further heights.  Hope you enjoyed my synoposis.  Until we meet again..

Justin Results French

p.s. sharing is caring

Related articles

• 60 Minutes To Profile Groupon CEO Andrew Mason (forbes.com)

The number one reason why most businesses used to fail in social media was education. I’ve taught online marketing and social media best practices at Mira Costa College now for 2 years to help solve this problem and give back to the business community. This has empowered and helped hundreds of local businesses which I am extremely passionate about. I think its safe to say that this education thing can no longer be an excuse. There are a ton of educational resources out there. The real problem I now see is people expecting immediate results. Social media does not happen overnight and could be a challenge especially for small businesses mostly due to the time involved, knowledge needed, and even a limited resources factor. But the benefits out weigh the downsides.

What being in the social media trenches for 2 years now shows us is a lot of people out there get started in social media and they expect immediate results or instant gratification. I’m here to tell you that this is a myth. There’s no such thing as instant gratification with social media. If your business decides to get in this social media space or get into this game, you need to play to win and you need to finish the race. Have some fun too. I see plenty of companies and business professionals getting into this space and expecting immediate results and they don’t finish the race. They create a few blog posts, they send out a few twitter messages and that’s it. It doesn’t work like that.

I would like to reveal the secret to social media success. If you want to be successful in social media when it relates to your business or your career the key takeaway here is daily actionable steps over a long period of time will lead to sustainable growth. It takes quite a long time to build momentum in social media but with a little bit of planning, execution, and time, you can start to see results fairly quickly compared to other online marketing tactics which are becoming less effective. Whether its traffic, leads, sales, or just awareness for your cause, social media can be some of the most powerful word of mouth and cost effective results for lead generation, revenue, product sales, etc. It’s also important to note that social media is now integrated with SEO or search engine optimization. We are seeing this because of the dynamic of user generated content combined with off-site social media tactics that seem to go hand in hand together as a successful integrated online business strategy. Think of it as a snowball marketing effect on your business. You get that analogy right? As the snowball starts at the top of the mountain, it gains momentum and gets larger as is makes it’s way down the mountain. We help businesses do exactly this and the results have been incredible!

I hope this post helped clear up some myths, so feel free to comment and share. Thanks

Justin ‘Results’ French

P.S. Wrote this entire post using dragon naturally speaking on my iPad pretty smooth

Any questions about optimizing your businesses social strategy? Feel free to comment below or connect with me on Google+ http://plus.justinrfrench.com

Cheers,

Justin Results French

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Now that we are in the year 2011 and social media continues to be a hot topic for people and businesses, I thought I would see where you are at in your social media journey.  In continuing to develop my own thought leadership in this space now for 2 plus years, one thing is for certain- the learning never stops.  And as you know, everyone has their own adoption curve when it comes to social media. Some more quickly than others. Some just talk theory. Some apply theory into action.  Some teach it. Some execute. Some sell.

Once you get involved and start engaging in social media for business or personal purposes, you will see these two worlds start to become blended together.  Some consider transparency in business and personal a separate thing.  Now with social media depending on how active you are no one is out of the limelight anymore.  Recruiters now use social media for hiring. News outlets are leveraging social media as a way to publish content for the changing landscape of media and charge premium subscriptions for premium content.

So my question for you in 2011 is how will you continue to adopt social media as part of your business strategy?  Is it fully integrated yet?  Are you still getting more educated first? Are you applying theories and testing with your business model? Have you been able to see the cost savings achieved from your efforts?

A funny yet ironic thing for me is that I used to run an IT consulting firm called Perfect Integration from 2002-2008. Now with our Social Marketing Agency, we are actually integrating social media as part of business strategies for firms to achieve much more cost effective marketing in ways they never dreamed while driving business results.  So I guess you could say the name “Perfect Integration” was a little early, and helped give form to  “Social Media Integration” which is what we do now.  We are living in exciting times my friends….

Continue your journey through the social media trenches and Godspeed ahead into 2011! Stay tuned because you won’t want to miss what we have in store for you 🙂

Happy New Year!

Justin Results French

The number one reason why most businesses used to fail in social media was education. I’ve taught online marketing and social media marketing best practices at Mira Costa College now for 2 years to help solve this problem and give back. This has empowered and helped hundreds of local businesses which I am extremely passionate about. I think its safe to say that this education thing can no longer be an excuse. There are a ton of educational resources out there. The real problem I now see is people expecting immediate results. Social media does not happen overnight and could be a challenge especially for small businesses mostly due to the time factor.

What being in the social media trenches for 2 years now shows us is a lot of people out there get started in social media and they expect immediate results or instant gratification. I’m here to tell you that this is a myth. There’s no such thing as instant gratification with social media. If your business decides to get in this social media space or get into this game, you need to play to win and you need to finish the race. Have some fun too. I see plenty of companies and business professionals getting into this space and expecting immediate results and they don’t finish the race. They create a few blog posts, they send out a few twitter messages and that’s it. It doesn’t work like that.

I would like to reveal the secret to social media success. If you want to be successful in social media when it relates to your business or your career the key takeaway here is daily actionable steps over a long period of time will lead to sustainable growth. It takes quite a long time to build momentum in social media but with a little bit of planning, execution, and time, you can start to see results fairly quickly compared to other online marketing tactics. Whether its traffic, leads, sales, or just awareness for your cause. It’s also important to note that social media is now integrated with SEO or search engine optimization. We are seeing this because of the dynamic of user generated content combined with off-site social media tactics that seem to go hand in hand together as a successful integrated online business strategy.

I hope this post helped clear up some myths, so feel free to comment, share, and r-tweet this post.  Thanks

Justin ‘Results’ French

P.S. Wrote this entire post using dragon naturally speaking on my iPad pretty smooth.

P.S.S. I’m excited to share 1 milestone for me- I just wrote my 7,00th tweet today!  What a journey it has been…