Micro-contracting – a creative and cheap concept – Sign-up for Gigyit.com

I think it’s best to start this article with a simple explanation on what exactly micro-contracting means. I had the surprise to find out that not many people heard of this at Start-up Weekend in Bucharest. So here it is, Micro-contracts: small tasks that people are willing to do for a fixed amount of money. The best way to understand is to show you, so you can find below a print-screen from the leading web-site of this sort, Fiverr.com.

The idea is simple, people post gigs (the name of the jobs that they are willing to do) and people pay 5$ to hire them. The vendor gets 4$ and Fiverr gets 1$. Pretty easy and simple and very easy to copy it.  So this sounds like a familiar story, GroupOn anyone, and pretty soon many copies were launched and the business model was replicated not only locally in the USA, but also in Brazil, Italy, The UK, Romania and others as well.

The range of things that you can buy on these sites, is huge, Fiverr alone has over 500.000 gigs (as they say), and they range from Advertising gigs to weird and funny ones. I for one strongly believe in this type of business model, not only because it’s easy, but because it puts a fair price on many gigs, that otherwise would cost you greatly. For example, if you are the bakery from the corner, you can have your own logo for a decent 5$, instead of 50$ or even 100$.In my opinion if you have a little patience to look for the great gigs you can find very good ones that will surely help a start-up that is counting every penny.

As part of the Start-up Weekend Romania, we started developing a great aggregator for all of these types of sites, so that the person that wants to buy a gig can take the best possible decision by comparing gigs from all the platforms. If you want stay updated, or just find out when we’ll launch leave us your email address @ gigyit.com

Creative Monkeyz – RObotzi – To Ad or not to Ad

Well i had to write about this. I admit i waited a little before doing so, not because i doubted the quality of the show, but because i wanted to see if the guys could keep up the pace. It must admit this one of the most successful Romanian social media project ever. The numbers speak for them selves, almost 150k fans, millions of views, and the records just keep on adding up. So this is for the stats, and the things that everybody knows.

Now let’s talk about the problems, the site has. Well it’s gorgeous, it’s fresh and it’s constantly updated but it has blank ad banners, why that might be? Normally this would be an advertisers dream ad space. I can only think of one reason and that is the bad language of the robotzi. It’s true they censor some part, but what brand would want to associate their image with this kind of language? Certainly not the scared Romanian brands, that only discovered Social Media only after the rest of the world did.

Market advice? Yahoo.ro, Internet Corp, Intact, Media Pro, or other big money companies, should really start listening to what these guys are saying, and should maybe try to buy it cheap right now. Just imagine RObotzi.yahoo.ro, or RObotzi.intact.ro. This should really be looked into.

Further more i don’t understand why the big boys from telecom especially the one named after a color, did not jump to the occasion to advertise or buy it. This would certainly be a great flag ship for the internet race. But who knows maybe all of these things will happen sooner rather than later.

How do you think should advertise on this site, or how should try to take a swing at buying it?

How not to get caught in the bragging trap

Well this subject that I have previously treated is basically a simple one. Chances are that if you are a bragger in real life you will most likely be a bragger in Social Media (used as SM from now on) as well. But as they say, all is not lost, fortunately for you, Twitter, Facebook does not have (yet) the dynamic of a real life conversation so you might wanna take a second a read back what you are going to write, and also ask yourself sincerely, if you would slap yourself.

The secret to any SM interaction is being the most human possible; the same rules that apply in real face2face conversations apply to SM as well. You can’t expect to be arrogant, or to brag, or to try to sound familiar and people not pick up on that. Maybe they will let one- two slip, but in the end they will unfollow or unfriend you.