It’s so much nicer when people use avatar images

I’ve noticed that quite a lot of missioners are not loading images to represent themselves. I’m not sure if this is because they are in a hurry, can’t be bothered or are shy!

But it is so much nicer when people choose an image of some sort to represent themselves. This could be a photo or a cartoon character of some sort or even a customized image from a photo using a third party such as befunky.

It all just makes the site a bit more personalized, fun and interesting.

The chicken and the egg (PR)

Will PR agencies do some free (or very cheap) work for a startup that they believe in?

Obviously, the opportunity for them is to prove the value they can add so that when the startup gets its funding … well, you get the picture.

It’s all about investing in each other to build trusting relationships.

So where do the chicken and the egg come in?

Well, to secure series A funding it helps to have a considerable number of users and user generated content.

To attract a considerable number of users it helps to have some good PR … which costs money and therefore requires funding.

Is there a creative solution to this?

And if the PR agencies don’t want to get involved then the only option is to get stuck into free (or very cheap) viral marketing using guerilla tactics. If this works – which it might just do – then is the startup going to want to spend its precious dollars with typical PR agencies?

Hmm … 

To advertise or not to advertise?

We’ve also decided to include advertising from the very beginning. Our rationale for this decision is that we don’t want to upset our customers by adding it at a later stage.

With this in mind we are adding some placeholders and starting discussions with advertising partners to provide PPC advertising.

Please let me know if you have any opinions on this.

Facebook here we come

We’ve decided that we want to bring forward our plans to integrate with Facebook so we are working on this at the moment.

We’re going to get to know the Facebook API and design the best way for us to integrate with Facebook. For example, we’d love to integrate with the Facebook news feed so that people can see in Facebook whenever any of their friends create missions on mymyssion.

Please let us know if you have any ideas that we can consider.