The smarter way of doing social media
I don’t know about you, but I get mildly irritated by all those “humorous” emails that clog up my email: pictures of cats doing cute things, photos of defaced billboards, accounts of comical misunderstandings, and all the rest.
Then again, I quite like the idea of putting them all in one website, particularly if it means they’re not chewing up my bandwidth or taking up space on my hard disk. Alex Tew thinks so too, which is why he has created Popjam, a site for sharing what he calls “the web’s funniest content”. Tew is the young man who made himself a dollar millionaire, by creating the Million Dollar Homepage, which sold a million single pixels to companies at a dollar a time.
Essentially, Popjam is just another social media site, like YouTube, Flickr or Twitter. You share videos, links and photographs, the only criterion being that they have to be funny. Like the million dollar homepage, it’s an incredibly simple idea, though whether it will be popular enough to draw enough advertising revenue to make Tew’s next million dollars, it’s too early to say.
Still, as business blogger Nick Saalfeld points out, Tew also created the highly successful Sock and Awe game, inviting people to throw a virtual shoe at a virtual George Bush. The game has so far received 90 million hits. So it seems the man has a genius for apparently simple ideas that spread like wildfire – the kind of thing that makes every business trying to harness the power of social media exclaim: “If only I’d thought of that!”
Let’s face it, you probably won’t think of the next million dollar idea. But if you do, tell us first.
