Free startup idea

Web 2.0 startups of all shapes and sizes are springing up by the handful. The ones that seem to take off are those that have cornered a niche market with a disruptive service. It was after shortly after emailing my sister about her wedding that I skimmed over the TechCrunch and Webware posting on kyte.tv's new service when the idea for a wedding web 2.0 wedding startup came to me.

I got to thinking about how cumbersome the coordinating process has been for gathering input and pieces of sentiment from related parties and how a prominent feature of web 2.0 functionality is the automatic synchronization of uploading/posting/publishing content to a given web page. Commence hovering light bulb.

What if future bride and grooms could create wedding accounts at some personalized media mashup that would give you either a direct url or a widget that others could plant on their blogs or social site of choice, which enables friends and family to send past sentiment/romantic/childhood/how they met/stories/etc… via drag and drop through the widget or direct sends to the url for content coming via cellphone cameras, web-cams or even services similar to Twitter. All of which would auto-populate a wedding template to create a rolling blog/web-site, which not only documents but presents the wedding content for onlookers in an interactive manner. You should also be able to upload traditional wedding footage for an ultimate online scrapbook experience.

Whether or not this startup is feasible is certainly up for debate since it requires a degree of web/tech savvy-ness by those who would adopt the service but I envision it as something future brides or grooms could appoint to their Maids of Honor or Best Man as a project they’re responsible for driving (the generation of those getting married now is the one that grew up with computers). I realize there's hundreds of other things that could go wrong and hurdles to be overcome out but I'll leave that for the entrepreneurs.

I won't go into the business model of selling ad space and injecting "My Perfect Dream Wedding" promotions throughout the user experience or if this service should or should not evolve into a network based social site but I will end this post with the following. There's definitely money in weddings and the processes of this niche market are virtually untouched by the world of web 2.0.

Social Sites and Online Marketing

Last week we sent out 1,089 quick and dirty email surveys to JibJabbers hoping to uncover some insight about the potential value/efficacy of marketing within various social sites. From this - 606 of the emails were opened and 94 actually completed the survey. This leaves us with a response rate of about 15-16%, something any internet marketer can smile about.

Results for the first question: "Excluding JibJab, what social website(s) do you frequent?"
I had a feeling that a large percentage of our users were on MySpace but what's really interesting was the behavior or lack there of, which followed the very next day. Anyhow, as I reviewed the web analytics report the next morning for JibJab.com I noticed increases within certain metrics, which I logically attributed to the survey as it probably acted on some level as a reminder to come back and visit the site. However, what was a little surprising was to find virtually no change in MySpace traffic and no recognizable increase in "friend requests" despite the mention at the end of the survey asking our users to befriend us. Of course, it was only a text link at the end of the survey (the survey software didn't allow us to include a hyperlink) and only ~90 got to the end, with ~40 being MySpace users, so it's hard to draw major conclusions.

-Ways I could interpret that:

1. MySpace users are unreachable, jaded, lazy or all of the above! Marketing efforts here are a waste of time! But realistically...they're probably just engaged, which means don't give up - the allure of MySpace's fanatical user base just has to be reachable! So...
2. How do we connect with our users via MySpace and other social networking sites? Where is the value? How do we begin to measure ROI? What are the best practices for this? How do we enrich the experience for the end user? How do we capitalize?

Questions that have undoubtedly been echoed by thousands upon thousands of marketers alike. Not too sure where to go from here but my first instinct is to take a serious look at leveraging the excitement around widgets and brainstorm how JibJab might contribute in a meaningful way for the community. I like what Chikita Owna has done with their MySpace and I think their widget is a step in the right direction.