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Food is big business online. From video sites like Look and Taste and iFood.tv, to ubiquitous recipe sites and restaurant guides, to marketplaces like Foodzie - everyone wants a slice of the proverbial cake.
BookofCooks.com is the latest entry into the market and is described as:
“an online resource connecting culinary professionals and foodies in the world’s first prepared foods marketplace. Incorporating the latest social networking technology, the Web site serves as an online community to help people locally find professional chefs, caterers, specialty foods and more within a particular region …”
In practice the site acts like a directory of food professionals – primarily caterers – who can use the site to showcase their menus and images / videos of themselves in action. For existing catering professionals, it’s a simple way to attract some new business.
For gifted amateurs (or professionals looking to start out on their own) the site offers a simple, and free, opportunity to set up a ‘virtual’ bakery, home delivery restaurant or catering business. Presumably, even someone with just one ‘great dish’ could earn a few dollars sharing their food with people in their area.
Visitors can use the site to find cooks in their area to deliver prepared food, cater an event, cook for you in your home or even work with you to create a great meal. Users and listed cooks connect directly via the phone number or email address the cook lists in their profiles, so the actual agreement might be anything that the two parties come up with.
It’s a great idea. In particular, the chance for amateurs or part-time foodies to earn via the site could be a huge attraction.
That said, the challenge for Bookof Cooks is the same as for any directory or social network – scale. And, as usual, it’s a chicken and egg dilemma: you need chefs and caterers to create detailed profiles to encourage users to use the site, but you need users on the site to encourage chefs and caterers to create those profiles.
What’s more, as the site is free to join and use, the founders will need to find innovative revenues streams beyond simple advertising. A BookofCooks iPhone app could be one option, as could partnerships with cookery schools and corporate caterers.
It’ll be interesting to see how the site grows and responds to these challenges.
Site: www.bookofcooks.com
Tagged as:
book of cooks,
catering,
food,
restaurants
Don’t let the cutesy name fool you – there’s a movement of parent bloggers out there, with savvy marketing acumen and powerful influencing muscle, who are cultivating some pretty big networks.
Advertising Age’s recent report, ‘Inside the Mommy Blogger Business’ , uncovers how Mommy Blogging is increasingly becoming a powerful digital force revolutionising the marketing practices of the world’s largest companies.
Case in point: companies like Wal-Mart are embracing mommy bloggers as key influencers. The retail giant is now sponsoring 12 official mommy bloggers in a professional capacity to review products and publish feedback.
Elevenmoms is a subsidiary of the WalMart website, and there is a direct link from these mommy blogs to the WalMart shopping page. The site describes the genesis of the idea:
“For many months, we’ve been engaged in social media platforms that generate discussion about money saving products and services. Sites and services such as Walmart’s Checkout blog, Customer Ratings and Reviews, and MakeYourDollarStretch.com have given our customers a forum to learn about products and share ideas for saving money.
The question was, how do we support and build upon existing money saving communities? Soon it became clear that we should reach out to the many great writers who are already blogging about great money saving ideas.” (www.instoresnow.walmart.com)
Nobody has yet been able to tangibly measure the business impact these parents have created through their online efforts. What we can track is that a huge percentage of moms go online – to use social networking sites, visit shopping sites, and engage as both readers and creators of blogs.
Mums make up 40% of all females going online, according to a report from BlogHer, a community for women who blog. It also showed that 8m women publish blogs, and 27m women read blogs.
On an individual level these blogs provide a differentiated and trusting voice, enabling women to connect with someone like them on a personal basis. And indeed, this is how most Mommy Blogs are intended – as a way to communicate and share ideas with an extended network of friends and acquaintances.
Some Mommy Bloggers do go on to become high-profile bloggers in their niches – and become equally high-profile targets for brands to connect with. Others will never reach more than a few hundred people in their own personal network. Either way, from the corporate perspective Mommy Bloggers – individually or collectively – represent the voices of hundreds of thousands of mums providing invaluable feedback and influencing others in the market.
Advertisers have always struggled to connect effectively with the half of the market that controls the majority of household expenditure. The exciting thing about this movement is that Mommy Bloggers are not just talking about themselves – they’re also spending on behalf for their families – so are plugged into multiple product categories. In fact, it’s been such a force, marketing & PR agencies are even adding mommy blogging to their list of services.
So, should this approach inform every company’s social media strategy – engaging with specific influential individuals to get the word out about their products?
Tagged as:
advertising age,
blogher,
mommy bloggers,
walmart
Describe the business model of a typical ad agency, and you’d be hard-pushed to use the words ‘meritocratic’ and ‘pioneering’ in the same sentence. Well, one agency has bucked the status quo for fat fees and retainers, and (shock, horror!) has decided to let its customers pay-what-they-like.
Much in the same vein as name-your-price holidays and restaurants, AgencyNil have taken the brave step of letting their talents determine their worth, and let their clients decide what to pay.
The logic behind it is straight-forward enough. At the same time as clients are cutting advertising expenditure, there are also plenty of talented ad folk being made redundant and new grads making their way onto the market.
Here’s the founder’s take (via BBH Labs):
“ENTER: the young, hungry, talented, not-afraid-to-take-a-risk individuals coming out of portfolio schools, graduate programs, and those from agencies – recently laid off but not yet spoiled by a big paycheck.
We can do the work, have the confidence and skills to do it well, we’re complete digital natives, and we don’t mind taking the risk of saying “don’t pay anything up front, then. We’ll do the work and if you like it, then pay us whatever you think is fair.” We’ll prove it.
It works out nicely for both parties. The agencies can feel like they’re shaving big percentages off of their expenditures and we the workers wind up doing better in the long run than getting sporadic freelance at a high rate. And we’re learning as we go . . .”
How AgencyNil Works
Potential clients submit a request via email, and AgencyNil pull a team together from their bank of between-jobber advertising professionals and smart graduates. They complete the brief in the time specified, and the client then decides what it’s worth. Any further tweaks or revisions are agreed once the first tranche of work has been paid for.
Cheaper than using freelancers, and better than relying on interns to crack a creative challenge, AgencyNil have explicitly outlined their belief that; “Advertising has evolved..there is no more advertising.. it’s a conversation that changes every hour” , and are self-declared digital natives.
Is this a visionary model for struggling agencies in a floundering economic climate?
Although they’ve been nimble enough to see beyond the linear model most agencies use – and realise that freelancers aren’t in consistent enough demand – will the businesses they’re targeting be willing to adopt this way of working?
It’ll be an interesting sell, but if they can prove their worth …
Site: www.agencynil.com
Tagged as:
advertising,
agencynil,
pay what you want
For better or worse, much of the buzz around leveraging the wisdom of the crowds has been around open source efforts like Linux, customer-driven sites like MyStarbucksIdea, and incentivized commercial innovation efforts like InnoCentive, Idea Connection, and the Cisco iPrize.
Less noise has been made around crowdsourcing efforts for the greater good that seek to change our world for the better.
People may be well aware of efforts such as these:
- The Xprize Foundation, which has already awarded a $10 million prize to the first private team to launch a rocket into space. The first Xprize ignited a $1 Billion private space industry and the minds of millions of children in the process. The foundation now has four new public challenges – the Google Lunar Xprize, the Progressive Automotive Xprize (100 mpg cars), the Archon Xprize for Genomics (fast genome sequencing), and the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.
- The Freedom Prize Foundation will be awarding over $4 Million in Freedom Prizes to inspire Industry, Schools, Government, Military, and Communities to significantly reduce their use of oil, thereby promoting America’s national security, economic prosperity and health. The foundation is focused on inspiring what can be done today to start getting the United States off oil.
But there are also lesser-known organizations like these:
- Ashoka’s Changemakers is a community of action where people can collaborate on solutions to world problems. The community provides the platform for people to attack projects one idea at a time as they attempt to solve the world’s most pressing social problems.
- philOptima is a site focused on connecting researchers with grant makers. They work primarily in education, health, public safety, governmental oversight, and the environment.
- my health innovation is a newcomer similar to MyStarbucksIdea, but focused on collecting innovative health care ideas and getting hospitals, caregivers and patients to use them. They want to make the experience of health care as close to perfect as possible.
Does ‘For Good’ Crowdsourced Innovation Work?
Proof that it does has just arrived in the form of the renewal of a partnership between the Rockefeller Foundation and InnoCentive to link non-profit organizations to more than 175,000 world-class scientific thinkers to help develop solutions for their work on behalf of the world’s most poor and vulnerable populations. The partnership was launched in 2006, and so far the two organizations have run ten challenges, resulting in an astonishing 80 percent success rate.
Non-profits can apply, through the Rockefeller Foundation, to place their organization’s scientific or technological Challenges on InnoCentive’s Website. The Rockefeller Foundation will choose the proposal that best fits its needs and fund the award given to the Solver using a grant.
Will this proven success inspire more scientists, non-profits, and companies to participate in open innovation for the greater good?
One can only hope.
About the Author: Braden Kelley, Founder of Business Strategy Innovation and author of Blogging Innovation, has been advising companies on how to increase their revenue and cut their costs since 1996. He has maximized profits for companies in Japan, Germany, England, and the United States.
Tagged as:
ashoka,
braden kelley,
cisco iprize,
crowd sourced,
crowdsourced,
freedom prize,
idea connection,
innocentive,
my health innovation,
mystarbucksidea,
philoptima,
rockefeller foundation,
starbucks,
xprize
We all know that print media is suffering. Magazines and, in particular, newspapers are cutting jobs and shutting up shop due to declining ad revenues and the increasing importance of the web.
Needless to say this is making a lot of journalists more than a little worried. But it should also be worrying anyone (this site included) that sees unbiased, fact-based journalism as a vital part of a healthy society.
Journalism Needs New Business Models
In short, we need to start finding new ways to pay for journalism. And although many of the ‘traditional’ media’s woes can be traced back to the web, the web may also be part of the solution.
Not only are established media organisations investing more heavily in online media (both web-native content and online versions of print publications) and finding new ways to generate revenues from them, but new business models are also starting to emerge that may change the way journalism works.
We’ve picked out three new business models (some primarily online, some off) which we feel bring something interesting to the table:
Tagged as:
journalism,
magazines,
news,
newspapers,
propublica,
spot.us,
true/slant
