How do people use social media? from Forrester Research
Internships at FamilyLink – Utah’s fastest growing web company
It’s still a well-kept secret, but last month FamilyLink was the fastest growing web site in the US according to Comscore. But you wouldn’t know it from the (low) number of requests we get for part-time employment or internships.
If you are studying web development, marketing, multimedia or business at BYU or UVU, wouldn’t you be excited to find a part time job or internship with a company that is growing this fast? You can learn so much and meet so many great people working at a company that is growing so fast and providing value to so many millions of families.
I often refer local job hunters to SiliconSlopes.com to find Utah companies that have raise capital. That is usually a sign of a company that is growing. You will find FamilyLink listed there, but you can also find stats about FamilyLink on Quantcast.com, which shows FamilyLink ranks about #100 of all US web sites for monthly unique visitors.
Almost every time I lecture to college students and entrepreneurs, I talk about catching the next wave in technology or business. FamilyLink is riding the huge wave of social networking fueled by Facebook’s platform, and is going to be launching mobile applications for families on iPhone and other platforms as well. But we need more talented and passionate people to make these things happen!
I’m very surprised at how few potential employees and students are contacting us to tell us how much they want to work for us, or intern with us. Either everyone is already employed, or maybe everyone is just busy playing Farmville on Facebook or something – because they certainly aren’t knocking down our door. We had a popular booth at a recent BYU job fair, but the conversation always starts with us explaining what we do. It would be much nicer if everyone already knew about us and what we do — then we might have people with passion coming to us with ideas about what they want to do for us.
We’re about to launch our first billboard on I-15 – so hopefully awareness of FamilyLink will grow in the next few weeks. I’ve always wanted to do a billboard (See Recruiting with Billboards), and now Cydni Tetro (our CMO) is making it happen.
Some of the positions (or internships) that we could create for part time employees this spring or summer include:
- web analytics
- graphics design
- banner creation – dynamic, flash, social, targeting
- brand partnership project management
- agency and advertiser account management
- css / javascript coding
- twitter / facebook marketing
- mobile app development (android, blackberry, iphone)
- mobile marketing
- pay-per-click marketing
- seo
- content licensing / business development
- sales lead generation and “setting”
- viral video production and marketing
- localization / translation
If you know any students who are smart, passionate, and get things done, have them check us out and give us reasons to create a position for them this spring or summer. Last summer we hired 8 twitter interns, many of whom learned a lot about social marketing and have gone on to do great things.
Maybe this spring or summer, you will be the one to use FamilyLink as a launch pad for your next career move.
comScore Media Metrix Ranks Top-Growing Properties and Site Categories for December 2009
via ir.comscore.com
comScore Top 10 Gaining Properties by Percentage Change in
Unique Visitors* (U.S.)
----------------------------------------------------------
December 2009 vs. November 2009
-------------------------------
Total U.S. - Home, Work and University Locations
------------------------------------------------
Source: comScore Media Metrix
-----------------------------
Total Unique Visitors (000)
---------------------------
Rank by
Unique
Nov-09 Dec-09 % Change Visitors
------ ------ -------- --------
Total Internet : Total
Audience 201,139 205,709 2 N/A
---------------------- ------- ------- --- ---
FAMILYLINK.COM 2,590 6,273 142 222
-------------- ----- ----- --- ---
JibJab Media 4,686 10,892 132 129
------------ ----- ------ --- ---
Eastman Kodak 5,116 9,030 77 160
------------- ----- ----- --- ---
UPS Sites 13,091 19,715 51 63
--------- ------ ------ --- ---
GIFTS.COM 4,557 6,797 49 211
--------- ----- ----- --- ---
Ganz 4,822 7,047 46 207
---- ----- ----- --- ---
Nintendo Co. 3,935 5,750 46 241
------------ ----- ----- --- ---
Hallmark 3,881 5,649 46 248
-------- ----- ----- --- ---
Federated Media Publishing 17,642 25,432 44 45
-------------------------- ------ ------ --- ---
AccuWeather Sites 5,190 7,344 41 196
----------------- ----- ----- --- ---
*Ranking based on the top 250 properties in December 2009.
Excludes entities whose growth was primarily due to
implementation of Media Metrix 360 hybrid audience measurement.
It’s very exciting to see the number of people who are using FamilyLink.com to find relatives, build family trees, and share messages and photos with each other.
I’m curious to know how you stay in touch with your relatives, and what feature would make FamilyLink.com more interesting to you personally. (Mobile versions, better email list management, online genealogy databases, photo printing and photo book functionality, integration with family blogs, etc.)
We know what our customers want us to do next, since we run surveys every day, but we also need to know what would get new customers to adopt our site for finding and communicating with relatives.
Please speak out. We promise to listen carefully. Every family matters to us. We love doing what we are doing, and we want to address the needs of families worldwide – including yours.
CEOs who code
20 years ago when I started my first company, I wrote code. (Quickbasic and Turbo Pascal – nothing fancy.) In fact, my partner sold our products and I developed them, for about the first 4 years. As our company grew, we hired developers and I haven’t really written code since. (I did a little bit of HTML a few years back but in all my companies have relied on employees who were much better coders than I was.)
I’m feeling rusty. And today, for the first time in years, as I watch my team of engineers get really excited about all the things in the FamilyLink product roadmap, I also started feeling envious. I loved writing programs, testing them, and running them. There’s an amazing feeling of satisfaction when you build something that works – and better yet, something that is used by thousands of people.
Of all the hats I’ve ever worn, the only one where I ever felt “done” with work, was when I did accounting for Infobases, again back in the early days, using Quickbooks of course. When you closed out a month, your work was actually done, and that brought a nice feeling of satisfaction. But as CEO or VP Marketing, and in most other roles I’ve had, you are never done, because there are always a million more things you could be doing.
Writing code is kind of in-between. You know what is required, you write the code, you test it, it works, and you’re kind of done. You always know that there is another iteration or version just around the corner, but you do get a feeling of satisfaction when the program works as designed. Even if the next features are already on the drawing board.
Tonight I spent a half hour with some Javascript tutorials. Pretty fun stuff. Truth is, we are short on front-end coders at FamilyLink and short on QA engineers. Our backend development team is awesome, and we have another tremendous programmer starting in February. But we need a couple Javascript/CSS gurus badly. We have had enough talent to develop FamilyLink.com into a top 100 web site – design, front-end, and back-end – but we have way more plans and ideas than we have coders to pull it off.
For the next 30 days our development team is planning a pretty-continuous hackathon, since Facebook has announced changes that will have an impact on all their app developers, including us. We’ve reorganized the office so that all the devs and product team are working in 2 huge adjacent offices. I may join them if there is enough room. I may find myself doing a bit of QA in the next month. That won’t require learning Javascript as much as it will require understanding our customer experience and maybe getting up to speed on our development environment. But who knows, maybe I’ll have time to do some additional Javascript tutorials and find myself contributing to FamilyLink.com – if not by writing code, then by searching for Javascript libraries (I found a great one tonight that cartographers can use on top of Google Maps) that my team ought to be aware of.
I recently read that Mark Zuckerberg has always loved coding, but even he has given it up recently, according to VentureBeat, to focus on company culture and strategy. From what I have heard, the fact that he is a coder and hired coders created an amazing culture at Facebook.
I have always felt Bill Gates was an amazing CEO because he mastered both programming and business. And I think it is hard in a high-tech company, to be a successful CEO if you only master one of those two things. There will be things that a non-technical CEO will never understand.
Can you think of any CEOs who still code, and who claim that it helps them be a more effective CEO?
FamilyLink.com mentioned in The Hill Op-Ed (written by Facebook’s director of public policy)
Entrepreneurs have leveraged the power of platforms offered by companies like Facebook, Google and Apple to kick-start a phenomenon we call the “app economy.” In 2009, this revolution took significant strides in funding, acquisitions and job creation for an economic sector of educational and entertaining software that until several years ago did not exist.
Small companies have already created more than 500,000 active apps reached through Facebook alone that attract at least 70 percent of Facebook’s 350 million members each month. Apple’s App Store boasts 100,000 apps and recently celebrated its three-billionth download. These small-scale yet widely used widgets are enriching individuals’ digital lives — and at the same time have cultivated a booming new business model.
These are real companies with everything from accountants to janitors. Consider California-based app developer Playdom, which has grown to a staff of 210 full-time employees, most of whom joined last year. Or Where I’ve Been, a Chicago startup that helps users plan locally, travel globally and share their experiences.
There’s Seattle’s PopCap, creator of the wildly successful Bejeweled Blitz game; and Provo, Utah-based FamilyLink, whose We’re Related app is among our top five with more than 50 million users. Right here in Washington, Living Social lets users share insights about their favorite pastimes and Causes helps individuals organize into communities of action focused upon specific issues or nonprofit organizations.
The app economy is real. FamilyLink has more than 50 employees and is trying to hire more front end and back end developers, Flash/Flex architects, business development and ad sales people.
Platforms make it very easy for entrepreneurs or developers to get started in the app economy. They offer a huge potential audience that is easy to reach. When I lecture at business schools, I focus on “catching the next technology wave” and “building on the right platform” as some of the most important strategic decisions that high-tech entrepreneurs have to make. But don’t worry–if you missed a wave, there’s always another one coming right around the corner.
Enlightened Entrepreneurs
Posted via web from Paul’s posterous
“Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children”
Filed under: FamilyLink.com, History, Social Entrepreneurship
A couple of weeks ago my brother-in-law, who lives in Washington, DC, told me he was reading the multi-volume world history by Will & Ariel Durrant called “The Story of Civilization.” I was impressed. I have always wanted to read this series but haven’t yet done it. So I ordered a used set on Amazon and they arrived earlier this week. I started reading volume 1 last night.
The first chapter in volume 1 is titled, “The Conditions of Civilization.” Durrant defines civilization as “social order promoting cultural creation.” He lists factors that impact whether civilization exists, such as geologic conditions (”civilization is an interlude between ice ages”); geographical conditions, such as mineral wealth, fertile soil, and natural harbors; economic conditions (the sine qua non of culture is “a continuity of food”); and political conditions including “political order.”
There must be “some unity of language to serve as a medium of mental exchange.” There must be “a unifying moral code, some rules of the game of life” acknowledged by all. There may also be “some unity of basic faith” that “lifts morality from calculation to devotion, and gives life nobility and significance despite our mortal brevity.” And finally, he writes, “there must be education–some technique…for the transmission of culture. Whether through imitation, initiation or instruction, whether through father or mother, teacher or priest, the lore and heritage of the tribe–it’s language and knowledge, it’s morals and manners, its technology and arts–must be handed down to the young, as the very instrument through which they are turned from animals into men.”
How Civilizations Can Be Destroyed
Most interesting to me is Durant’s survey of how civilizations can come to an end; how even the disappearance of a single prerequisite may “destroy a civilization.” Here are some of the causes he lists which have led to the destruction of previously great civilizations:
- “A geological cataclysm or a profound climatic change” (he published this first volume in 1935)
- “an uncontrolled epidemic like that which wiped out half the population of the Roman Empire under the Antonines, or the Black Death that helped to end the Feudal Age” (he was 33 years old when the influenza of 1918 killed nearly 50 million people worldwide)
- “the exhaustion of the land, or the ruin of agriculture through the exploitation of the country by the town, resulting in a precarious dependence upon foreign food supplies” (the US became a “net importer” of food in 2005 for the first time in 50 years)
- “the failure of natural resources, either of fuels or of raw materials”
- “a change in trade routes, leaving a nation off the main line of the world’s commerce”
- “mental or moral decay from the strains, stimuli and contacts of urban life, from the breakdown of traditional sources of social discipline and the inability to replace them”
- “the weakening of the stock by a disorderly sexual life, or by an epicurean, pessimist, or quietest philosophy”
- “the decay of leadership through the infertility of the able, and the relative smallness of the families that might bequeath most fully the cultural inheritance of the race” (the total fertility rate in all European countries is below the population replenishment rate–NY Times article, 2002)
- “a pathological concentration of wealth, leading to class wars, disruptive revolutions, and financial exhaustion” (here’s a blog post about the concentration of wealth in the US)
Durant concludes that “civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or transmission may bring it to an end. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization.”
I am an optimist, not a pessimist
I realize that by even quoting Durant, and by adding comments or links in quotes, my position on world conditions may be completely misunderstood by my readers. I am not a pessimist. I do not believe the end of civilization is imminent. I do believe, however, that the dominant leadership role of the United States in world affairs may be coming to an end. It appears likely that in the 21st century the economies of China and India will pass that of the United States. It seems certain that the mounting US debt combined with the larger role of the federal government in the economy will stifle US economic growth in the next decade or two. However I do believe that is not pre-destined. I think it is a matter of choice and will. But the lessons of history seem to be largely unknown and/or unheeded.
If the spirit of technological innovation and entrepreneurship which made the United States the most productive economy in the past century can continue to thrive, we may indeed remain a leading world power indefinitely. Attending conferences with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs with their world-changing ideas gives one plenty to be optimistic about. The move towards transparent government, promoted by so many on the left and the right, and enabled by new technology, is a huge reason to be hopeful. The scanning of all the world’s books by Google makes the transmission of culture from past civilizations possible in ways that Durant could never have dreamed of.
And the power of social networks to bring people together as friends, families, and communities, may shape our relationships in the future more than industrialization, modern transportation, and even the telephone. The future of self-government may be connected to social networks and mobile networks in ways we can’t yet imagine.
In 1935 a religious leader I revere described his vision for a future civilization of peace and prosperity by referring to the power of mobile communication. “We must…improve the means of communication until with radio in our pockets we may communicate with friends and loved ones from any point at any given moment.”
Mark Pincus from Zynga described in a speech at Stanford how 100 years from now our generation may be described by people then as the generation that brought forth treasures to the world such as Amazon.com and Facebook. He feels his career has been or should be part of a great effort to create immortal internet treasures that will benefit the world for generations.
Having been involved in the founding of Ancestry.com, the leading site for discovering one’s heritage, and more recently, FamilyLink.com, the leading social site for families, Durant’s final words struck me:
As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.“
FamilyLink.com is now the top Facebook Connect site. We are helping millions of families connect with one another. We have more 16.7 million users that are connected to more than 10 relatives. We hope these families will transmit stories and memories and family values and heritage from one generation to another. Our demographic profile shows equal numbers of users from 18-30, 31-45, and 46-60, and half as many under 18 and over 60. There is clearly interest by family members of all ages to connect with other family members.
I am not suggesting that FamilyLink might become one of the “immortal internet treasures” that Pincus described, or that we are going to play a key role in preserving culture and civilization. In fact, we are a product of the civilized world’s focus on the family, not the cause of it. If we didn’t play the role we play, to paraphrase Durant, “given like…conditions…another [company] would beget like results.”
But I am suggesting that on this holiday weekend, you might want to get your own copy of “The Story of Civilization” and join with me and my brother-in-law in a conversation about what lessons can be learned from history and philosophy that might help all of us “preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own.”
Social Media Activities on Various Mobile Platforms
The newest member of our accounting department emailed this to me today. You gotta love it when even your G&A staff are adding value and joining in the strategy discussions.
Posted via web from Paul’s posterous
What Virtual Goods Buyers Buy
Virtual goods buyers
(Credit: Playspan)
I hadn’t seen this report from September. The most popular thing for online gamers to buy is virtual currency followed by weapons, wearables, subscription codes, power-ups, virtual gifts, and maps/levels.
Posted via web from Paul’s posterous
Ancestry subscribers stick around for 17 years — LOL — a big oops for MadMoney
Ancestry.com, which will trade under the ticker symbol ACOM, runs a subscription-based genealogy site. The company digs through billions of historical records to help subscribers name the branches on their respective family trees. While the venture may seem boring to the younger social-media set, a million people are willing to pay for the service.
And still more are signing up. Subscriptions are growing at a rate of 11%, with an average monthly fee of $16.50. Two-thirds of the subs are annual, though, and 38% of the site’s clients pay up for a premium package. Lifetime revenues per subscriber come in at $300, meaning that these people stick around for over 17 years. That explains the low 4% churn rate, which dwindles to 2% for Ancestry members who’ve stuck around for two or more years.
One of the worst pieces of financial journalism I have ever seen. Speaking of Ancestry subscribers:
“…these people stick around for over 17 years.”
LOL. Yes, Ancestry has had subscribers for 17 years — since 1992, years before the internet was even invented. That’s how a lifetime value of $300 is calculated. 
That’s what you get when you don’t realize that MONTHLY REVENUE is $16.50 per person — not ANNUAL REVENUE.
Seriously, someone ought to QA this kind of stuff before people go out and buy or sell stock on weak analysis like this.
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