The entrepreneur in us sees opportunities everywhere we look, but many people see only problems everywhere they look. The entrepreneur in us is more concerned with discriminating between opportunities than he or she is with failing to see the opportunities.
- Michael Gerber
Interesting conversation in Charleston SC about the actual impact of senior leaders in organizations. The popular mythology has it that “tone is set at the top.”
I would argue otherwise that the tone at the top becomes the glass ceiling for the rest of the organization. Low ceilings sustain pessimism and high ceilings sustain optimism. When tone ceilings are low, even people with great passion and optimism adjust downwards to the ceiling established at the top. The top becomes the organization’s “set point” of happiness.
The Yelp executives join Facebook Inc. investors Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. founder Elon Musk on a short list of ex-PayPal employees poised to generate big-time riches from pending IPOs. PayPal, which developed an online payment system, was purchased by EBay Inc. for $1.5 billion in 2002, making many of its early employees rich and eager to pursue new endeavors.
“PayPal did a great job of producing a very talented class of entrepreneurs,” said Eric Jackson, the company’s first marketing director and author of “The PayPal Wars.” “They’ve gone on to do amazing things in Silicon Valley and the tech industry.”
Stoppelman, 34, co-founded San Francisco-based Yelp in 2004, after serving as PayPal’s vice president of engineering from 2000 to 2003. Levchin, 36, has been chairman of Yelp since 2004. After working as PayPal’s chief technology officer, he founded Slide Inc., a Web application developer that was purchased by Google Inc. in 2010.
Both executives were among a group of colleagues who came to be known in Silicon Valley as the PayPal Mafia. The moniker was codified by an article in 2007 in Fortune magazine.
Commissions on sales for affiliate links vary widely, but they average around 5 percent. After SkimLinks cut, that'd be 3.75 percent (although SkimLinks says they can sometimes negotiate deals that would keep the percentage closer to the original number).So, Pinterest has 10 million users. Let's say that the average across all of them is that they buy items valued at $10 in a month through affiliate links on Pinterest. That's $100,000,000 of sales for which Pinterest would get credit. That's $3.75 million in monthly revenue, or $45 million of annual revenue.
Is that going to make you the next Facebook? It doesn't look like it when your user base is 10 million. But what about when the site has 100 million users? Assuming revenue scales linearly, affiliate revenue would stand at $450 million. And if the site had 800 million users like Facebook? That revenue would go to $3.6 billion, just $100 million less than Facebook's 2011 haul.
Some tips:
Create categories.
Take a cue from Warby Parker Inc. of New York, with its Pinterest profile showcasing the brand's eyewear, combined with other images that are intended to say something about its culture and mission. Notice how its profile is separated into categories, or "pin boards," with themes such as "Fresh New Frames" and "Sunglasses are a Must."
Use images with personality.
"The images that get shared the most are funny, inspiring or emotional," says Jason Keath, a social-media analyst in New York. You don't need to invest in professional photography. However, the images you post to Pinterest should be visually striking. "People share images that make them look good," Mr. Keath says.
Be selective.
Highlight only a few of your most popular or newest items so your profile doesn't look like an advertisement.
If you own a service-based business, use images that show what your brand is about. Balance Yoga Studio LLC of Woodinville, Wash., for instance, shows photos of magazines and books on healthy living, plus graphics with inspirational quotes like "Keep Calm and Carry Om."
"It's just creating more of a yoga community online for us," says owner Michelle Michael, whose 20-employee company launched in October and created its Pinterest profile last month.
Write breezy descriptions.
The images you pin to your profile from a Web page will automatically include an embedded link to that page—but not a caption. Use this space to give users updates on what's new with your business, as well as to describe product.
"Happy Valentine's Day! We added Coral to our colors! This is the Light Duty Fish Tail Bracelet," wrote, Survival Straps, a Jacksonville, Fla., maker of utility-cord bracelets that recently started using Pinterest, in a pin earlier this month.
Use the widgets.
Add a "Pin It" or "Follow" button to your company website by going to Pinterest's "Goodies" page and following the instructions provided. You can also download the Pinterest logo to your site from the same page.
Add many links.
By clicking "Settings" and filling in the prompts, you can include links to your company website, as well as your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles from your Pinterest profile. Then, add links to back to your Pinterest profile from each of those pages.
By creating these trails for consumers, you'll help lead them to your site. "It's like a breadcrumb strategy," says Larry Chiagouris, a professor of marketing at Pace University's Lubin School of Business.
If 2011 wasn't the year of Mobile, 2012 will. I'm excited to be part of the Mobile App Roadmap Report and Event with Barb Cagley to help organizations learn how to effectively launch mobile initiatives.
