After completing a previous business development project just a few days ago, I immediately “ventured” onto my next challenge, writing a business proposal for the first stage of the New Venture competition. To those that don’t know it, it is one of the largest of such competitions in Europe, builds on top of a methodology developed by McKinsey, and exposes your plan to a number of experts (financial or otherwise) that provide you with feedback and coach you through the next two stages: the feasibility study and the final business-plan.

The requirements for this first stage were to present a 2-page max document, which includes:

• The name
• Describing the idea
• Describing its innovativeness
• Describing the market
• Describing how you will make money

I actually started collecting data on the market and how to build the product about a month ago, as the market was similar to my previous project (though there is no conflict!). These last two days, I spent writing this thing full-time, minus some blogging here and twittering there, of course (in retrospect, I should’ve written something about it before the current deadline passed—it ends sometime today. Sorry about that!).

I went a little overboard, I think, splitting the idea into three components: the product, the underlying technology, and the organisation; translating “innovativeness” into competitive advantage; splitting market into target audience and competitive landscape; and proposing a number of parallel trajectories towards making money. I really maxed out those two pages and hope it wasn’t all too wordy.

What did I learn? Nothing on its effectiveness yet! But that it is a. very difficult to put an idea into simple words that everyone would understand it—my father doesn’t get it at all, for instance. And b. it really forces you to rationalise your thinking into concrete steps. “Does the idea make sense?” was a question that I constantly kept asking myself.

I don’t expect to win this competition, but as with all things, if you don’t try, you certainly don’t fail, and you most certainly don’t succeed. Wish me luck! More when I get the feedback!

Vincent

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Some time ago, I promised to stop writing about social networking, except if there is some tangible data involved. Well, I’ve been using Twitter for over a year now, FriendFeed for a few months, and a new service, called Qwitter, for a few weeks. Qwitter’s raison d’être is the topic of the day today.

What Qwitter does is tell you when people stop following you on Twitter. I fear that many people won’t be interested in using it, as there is a natural bias towards the positive. And Qwitter’s core-business is providing you with negative news.

Still, I saw my follower-numbers (currently at ca. 120) going up and down regularly, and I was curious about why this is happening. And the answer is pretty simple:

What Qwitter does is send you a mail-message with the name of the person “qwitting” you, as well as the message that may (or may not) have been the instigator. So far, I received 8 of these, with one person unsubscribing from me three times (!), and one celebrity unsubscribing from me, Guy Kawasaki.

The one that “got away”

Why do I say that people unfollow me, because I don’t follow them? I think the data says a lot.

• Subject 1, let’s call him J., follows 2,447 and is followed by 2,393. He unsubscribed from me, when I said: “@ksilvennoinen welcome back to the internet!“
• Subject 2, let’s call him G. (has been trying to subscribe to my LinkedIN and Facebook as well, btw. He follows 1,868 and is followed by 1,132. The Twitter-message: “P.S. to my blogpost: 2nd Antarctic explorer turned public speaker that I’ve heard. Superb motivational speakers. Living life 2 Xtreme rocks!”
• Subject 3, let’s call him R., follows 2,225 and is followed by 2,106. The Twitter-message: same as above.
• Subject 4, let’s call him J3. (the guy who unsubscribed 3 times), follows 219 and is followed by 331. The Twitter message: “sipping Bacardi and writing a presentation for tomorrow.“
• Subject 5, let’s call him M., follows 1,611 and is followed by 1,482. The Twitter message: “Today, German shepherds with machine guns on their backs killed me 34 times. Guess what game I played?“
• And, the cream of the crop, the Alltop-guy, Guy Kawasaki……… follows 24,104 and is followed by 24,058. The Twitter-message: “I long for the day where the letters PeeCee stand for P**sEasy (no joke).“

Now, you may notice three things. One, that my Twitter-messages are pretty entertaining… Two, that most of these guys follow a lot of people. And three, that there is nearly perfect parity between their followers and who they follow.

What is your problem?

“What is your problem?” you might ask. “Following back is only polite.” I agree to an extent, and I appreciate if people follow me back. But I don’t expect it! For one, why do I use Twitter? To keep track of things, like my friends and news-items. Some pretty interesting links come across my screen every once in a while. If I need to talk to people, I’ll say stuff, but those people I want to talk to, I have their email-address. Talking on Twitter is not my motivation.

The other side of the coin is that if someone follows 24,000 people and you are 24,001, you get a very tiny portion of the attention that you deserve as an individual. It’s nearly the same as saying as “I don’t really follow you at all.” Imagine what that person’s screen must look like? 3-4-10 messages per second? So, I don’t, on principle, follow anyone that is following more than let’s say 200 people… Unless they actually say something meaningful as well.

Many people who follow 1000s though are a. in social media/marketing, which automatically makes them less interesting to me (because there are just so many of them), and b. respond to so many people that I find it very hard to judge the quality of their “original thinking” by looking at their Twitter-feed.

Why do I write this post?

Because I want to make people aware that if you do follow me, please don’t expect me to follow back automatically. And if you want to get my attention, a good start is to *talk to me,* you know, use the @-symbol!? And third, if possible, make the content original. There’s so many social media marketeers out there, it’s not even funny. Be original, be fun, talk to me, I’ll be there.

The irony of it is, do I really expect someone that treats their Twitter-follows & followers with so little respect to read my blogpost?

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