NEW: Impact! The Sudbury Marketing Report

After much deliberation, I've decided to take on a new online project. It's called Impact! The Sudbury Marketing Report. I hope you'll check it out.

"Outside school, students are totally wired. Inside, they 'power down.'"

That was the opening line to an excellent article from GuelphMercury.com, "Why make tech-smart kids step backwards to learn? boards ask."

"If their social lives are electronic, how can school life be paper and pencil? . . . We'll have trouble reaching them, and they'll have trouble learning," said Trustee Howard Goodman of the Toronto District School Board.

He pushed the association to examine the issue two years ago after seeing a newspaper ad for $500 laptops and realizing that, in a few years, it will be cheaper to give each student a computer than continually provide up-to-date textbooks.

"When that happens, the world changes," said Goodman.

Should we pay for social media?

A long-standing issue in the tech industry, specifically for those companies dubbed "Web 2.0", is the development of profitable business models.

The issue is coming to the forefront recently as more and more pundits note that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are all facing significant financial losses, even in the face of record-breaking global attention and site usage.  The problem is that if you can't figure out how to monetize your site at 20 thousand users, how are you going to make money when you're at 200 million?  In other words, if you're losing money when you're small, growing simply means you'll lose more money.

Some companies have been smart enough to not play this game.  37signals, for example, charge for their services.  There are free accounts as well, but those are limited and act as trial accounts with limited features.

For everyone else, though, the business model of choice seems to be advertising.  And it's just not working out so well.  Almost universally, ad models are failing to bring in sufficient income to even cover costs, much less turn a profit.  One major exception is Google's AdWords service, which continues to be the company's bread and butter.  But for those entrepreneurs looking to leverage AdSense (where site owners get paid when users click text ads on their site), the amount of traffic needed to generate significant income is phenomenally larger, and along with it comes increased bandwidth costs.

So what are we to do?  We've all fallen in love with social media its brethren, but if they can't make ends meet, they'll eventually disappear.  If advertising can't cover the costs, they'll either have to continue to be subsidized by their parent companies and investors (a terrible business idea) or start charging for services.

Are you willing to pay for Facebook?  Are you willing to contribute to footing the bill for YouTube?  At some point, someone needs to cough over some money, and its looking more and more like that's going to have to be us.  If you had to choose between paying for those services (even something nominal like $5 per month), or sacrificing your right to use them, which would you choose?

Loving and hating Google Sites

I made the decision recently to build up my professional site.  I also decided to try something different and use Google Sites for the whole thing, thereby foregoing the whole process of designing and coding a new website.

This has had it's advantages and disadvantages.

On the advantage side, I've been able to focus entirely on what (in my humble opinion) matters the most: the content.  I simply chose a template and went about writing what it is I wanted the site to say.  So that was rather nice.  No worrying about layouts and colors, no fretting about optimizing the code, no debating back and forth about a million little things that don't really matter.

On the disadvantage side, I have no friggin control over the design or code.  Seeing as how I'm not a designer, I can bite my tongue on esthetics.  But as a former HTML coder, it irks me to no end just how bad the code is.  The same seems to be true for all Google products, including blogger.  I also can't edit the footer, which guarentees that anyone who comes to the site will be able to discern that I am, indeed, using Google Sites, which in turn looks less professional.

Verdict: It's great for my purposes, because I can bite the bullet and deal with the tradeoffs, but I would never recommend it to a client.

About Mario Parise

I'm Mario, a fairly young dude at the ripe age of 24 25. I'm a marketing strategist, copywriter, and political philosopher. (One of these things doesn't belong...)

I'm a freelance consultant for hire (or, for the right company, possibly a future employee). For more such professional information, head on over to my website.

For all your marketing curiosities, check out my other blog, StrategicText, where I discuss marketing strategies and tactics for earning sales in a no-trust world.

I'm also the father of two awesome kids and partnered to their mother, a truly remarkable woman named Evelyne.