Mark Faggiano

Website consultant who loves helping others build online companies. Sold @beelya & @filelater. Working on my next cash machine: @taxjar. Crazy about golf & sports. Connect with me on Google+

MLB Shows Why You Should Consider Crowdsourcing

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It’s probably because I’m a sports fan, but I’ve always been fascinated with the way pro sports leagues here in America package their content to fans. I love watching to see how the leagues adapt (or fail to adapt) to web and social media trends to make it easier for fans to follow their favorite players and teams. League websites have evolved over the years from team, roster, and schedule listings to, in some cases, a better alternative to watching the game on your TV.

What’s really interesting to me is that in today’s world where content is king, the leagues have the opposite problem of most brands. They actually have too much content. Instead of wracking their brain for new ideas of content to create, they have to instead figure out how to take the content being created with every game and package it in a way that fans want and want repeatedly.  They have to do it for a wide variety of fans. Diehards, casual fans, fantasy players, and people new to the sport. And, the leagues have to do it across all mediums – the web, TV, games, and mobile.

social media adviceOf the four major sports leagues, MLB (via MLB.com) has always been the best at the content game. I’m not going to list every reason why because that’s a topic for another day, but I wanted to point out something I noticed on their site recently. In my opinion it’s a great example of an established brand (MLB is over 120 years old) effectively integrating social media.

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Lessons From a Startup: Adapt to What the Market is Telling You

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This the latest installment of our Q&A Series – short interviews with talented, experienced, and successful entrepreneurs who are on the front lines of running online businesses. I’ve always believed that it’s a big mistake to not at least listen to those who have worn the same shoes that we are putting on every day. I hope these interviews prove to be as informative to you as they have been for me.

Today’s guest is Wray Rives, founder of NeedaCFO. I had a chance to chat with Wray recently. He had a lot of great insight’s about year one of his newest venture.

Here’s our discussion:

B5: Talk a little bit about what NeedaCFO is all about.
WR: For several years I have worked with medium-to-large companies providing C-Level management support, mostly in the financial (CFO/COO/Controller) type roles.  At the same time, I have had a few fairly small business clients that I mostly do tax compliance work for.  I saw the need with the small business owners to have a senior level business advisor like a CFO or COO, but most of them cannot afford a full time person. Even if they have in-house accounting and finance staff, many small business owners end up performing the CFO role themselves, because the in-house staff is focused on day to day accounting duties and is not really looking at the business in a “big picture” way.

In my experience, small business owners tend to fall into two groups a) really good at some technical skill or b) really good sales people.  Very few of them are really good CFO’s. I felt like they needed somewhere to go and get solid business advice.

need a cfo

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Ready to Quit Facebook? Mark Your Calendar for May 31.

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I just read Mike Melanson’s post about the surge building to get people to quit Facebook. Mike did a great job shedding light on how the distrust of Facebook’s privacy policy (haters would say the lack of a policy) is so prevalent that there’s an official movement with a website – QuitFacebookDay.com.

Wow.

I’m not surprised that a site like this exists. It’s simple to put up a site to support a cause. I guess that I am struck with the mounting hatred for the world’s most popular social network. It’s getting more serious. People are putting their money where their mouth is.

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Working to Live? Or Living to Work?

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entreprenuer vacationLast week my wife and I spent 7 days in Kauai. It was fantastic. Sun. Sand. Waves. Awesome golf. True relaxation. Delicious mai tais. It was the perfect, well-deserved break from the action that both of us needed.

While we were there I had plenty of chances to think about, well, nothing. And it was glorious!

For once my brain wasn’t preoccupied with things I needed to do, goals that I needed to meet, blog posts and tweets I had to write, and schedules of conference calls and meetings I needed to attend. Instead, if I allowed my brain to do any thinking at all it I thought about how important is is to get away from the every day grind of trying to run a business and do a total brain reset.

My wife and I travel a few times a year, but it’s usually to see family. This is the first time we had been away alone without anything to do since we got married almost three years ago. As we reclined at the beach or the pool (picture of the beach we stayed at in Poipu below) we kept telling ourselves, “We have got to do this more often!”.

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