Lindsey’s Daily Deal

By Lindsey Campbell, Captains of Industry

Hey Captains’ Readers,

Here’s your Tuesday Deal:

1. Kick-start both sides of your brain

The line between creative rock star and business-minded executive is becoming more blurred everyday. Even the Captains use both their left and right brain on a daily basis–no one here is exempt from bringing their creative juices AND business sense to the table. And it’s not just us. According to David Meerman Scott’s recent post, Ryan Gielen, a NYC-based Indie film director and producer, explains that in the Indie film world, they don’t have access to major studios with bloated budgets to back their projects, so it’s the artists that have to hustle and find the funding they need.

For his upcoming film “Dorm,” Gielen is using Kickstarter, a site for crowdsourced funding, so he can create buzz for his latest flick. The cool thing about Kickstarter is that anyone can contribute donations of various levels, and your submission entitles you to FREE stuff (score!). Giveaways for bequests include anything from a DVD of the finished film to a producer credit on the movie. So if you’ve ever had the burning desire to become an Executive Producer, your moment’s arrived.

2. Title 1 for social networks

Some people are blog-obsessed. Some are proud Facebook stalkers. And some will Tweet until their heart’s content. Whatever your flavor, it’s companies that should be connecting with you on your network of choice, not the other way around.

Adam T. Sutton of MarketingSherpa explains that by linking your business to more than one or two networks, you’ll be able to reach out to all the different types of people who enjoy your products or company rather than sticking with just one group of loyal enthusiasts. For example, Sutton interviewed Justin Greis, the owner of Panna Dolce, who uses Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Flickr, YouTube and many other networks to connect with his target market. “We haven’t seen a lot of interaction on our blogs,” Greis said. “But when you link your blog to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Vimeo, you connect with people the way they want to be connected to.” The proof is in the pudding. Greis’s team estimates 35% of ecommerce sales come from referral traffic from social networks, and that number jumped to 50% during Valentine’s Day. Not too shabby for a 3-man bakery.

3. We’re just kids, what the heck do we know?

Loren Feldman of 1938 Media recently created a public plea to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong. In the video, Feldman more than urges Armstrong to purchase Facebook because of Zuckerberg’s recent privacy issues. Feldman asserts that AOL is known for simplicity and would better manage the network in terms of privacy. The fiery speech also goes on to say that Mark Zuckerberg is “just a kid” who’s “an asshole that can’t be trusted.”

Although I agree that Zuckerberg has gotten more than a little power-happy over the fact that he basically owns over 400 million Facebook users’ personal information, I don’t think that Feldman’s statement about Zuckerberg being “just a kid” has anything to do with his business decisions concerning privacy on Facebook. In fact, Feldman may have had some excellent points in his rant, but I didn’t hear him after he started hating on Zuckerberg. Why? Well, the people who were the initial users of Facebook were, you guessed it, my generation. And the coolest part of all? Someone our own age created the most powerful social network in the world with that “kid” sized brain of his. So before Feldman tries to plead his case about youngins like Zuckerberg on YouTube and Facebook, he should really consider his audience.

Until tomorrow,

Captain “The Kid” Lindsey