Ben Paster

This is a great follow up to a recent Facebook related blog post, and now that Timeline is public its true potential is shining. What’s so great about it? That big, beautiful, cover photo is fantastic for marketing. I realize it’s only on your personal profile, but in that previous post you agreed that your personal Facebook profile is as powerful, if not more powerful than a fan page.

What’s so awesome about it? It’s a huge (851 x 315 pixels) advertisement for whatever you want. Mine, for example, is my personal blog. It’s non-intrusive, fits into the Facebook color scheme and is big, bold and traffic driving. When you use the personal marketing / networking methods I talked about in my previous post and you add some SVAPs (Silicon Valley Awesome Person) as friends they’ll immediately see a link to your website, blog, or whatever and you have yet another chance to impress them.

I went skiing for the first time over the weekend. It was a lot of fun. I fell, a lot. I ran into some other people and some other people ran into me. I got back up and fell again. After a while I nailed that V shape you’re supposed to make with the skis to stop, and I thought I could go faster, then I fell again. The last run I completed didn’t involve falling at all. Yep, I mastered the bunny hill, and next time I’m on to that ominous intermediate hill.

Is this an allegory to entrepreneurship? Yes!

Okay, I lied. You’ve heard of this social media marketing website, and you might have even read a lot about how to use it to market your startup for little or no money. There’s tons of tactics that may or may not work, but there’s one you’re completely overlooking. The secret website I’m talking about is Facebook, but before you stop reading consider that you might be missing the most fundamental part of social media marketing. What part is that? The social part. Not the faux million-member-page social part, but the truly social part.

You’re probably reading the Teens in Tech Blog because you’re a teen and you’re involved in tech. The good and bad news: you play in an adult world. It’s true, there’s awesome teens in tech entrepreneurship and you should go meet all of them, but the fact remains that business is designed for adults and between school and startup life, there’s not much time left for being ‘normal’. It’s been proven that teens need to be social to be healthy and the antisocial teen is more likely to be emotionally unstable. Here’s the part where I interject my opinion: your startup isn’t everything. Assuming you don’t need to feed your family or pay the rent, doing a little at a time is a good way to go. If you’re already proclaiming that I’m full of it and about to stop reading, as I would have done even just a few months ago, I beg of you, read on and let me explain.

Ouch, the title of this post sounds negative. This is actually a very recent realization for me. You see, I had this fantastic idea about how to make something much better and I won’t go into details, but I thought everyone in the business community would be interested. I got a good chunk of the software completed and began to figure out how I could market it. But then, disaster struck! I ran into a problem that I should have realized at he very beginning. I, the CEO, founder and developer, didn’t know how to pitch the software. I didn’t know how to market it. I didn’t even know how to find people to market it. I descended into entrepreneurial what-do-I-do-now mode for a couple of weeks.

CEOs, you’ve been occupied! The thing that started off as Occupy Wall Street has spread around the entire country, but in a way we’ve never seen before. The anti-war movement in the 1960s and 70s might be comparable to these ‘Occupy Movements’ but the means of reaching people is very different, and fascinating. On the internet, Occupy Wall Street is more commonly referred to as #OccupyWallStreet, Occupy Boston as #OccupyBoston, and so on. I know, I added a hashtag, big deal right? It is a big deal.

Editor’s Note: Ben Paster is the Founder of Strike Internet and loves to help businesses build community. You can follow him on twitter @BenPaster.

I have a favorite place in the world, I hope you do too. It’s not the beach, although I do love the beach, it’s not a little reading spot in my house, and it’s definitely not school! My favorite place, that gave me the start of my knowledge of technical things, is a small TV station in my town. The people who work there have always encouraged me, and ‘took me in’ when I was only eight years old. This TV station has been an invaluable asset for me in life, directly and indirectly shaped a lot of my views on technology, marketing, video production, and even life in general.

Ben Paster is the Founder of Strike Internet and loves to help businesses build community. You can follow him on twitter @BenPaster.
So this is a blog for entrepreneurial teens, but there’s an inherent problem with teens who run a business, they have these crazy things called classes! Yes, whether you want to believe it or not, your business will be going on and people will be buying while you’re sitting in math class. Sure, that’s great, I like to make money and learn math, but with the social internet, your customers expect near-instant support responses. If you have a well crafted value proposition, customers don’t care if you’re fifteen or fifty. That said, they also don’t expect your support to have math class conflicts and certainly won’t accept it as an excuse. Oh no! How could it possible for teens to run a business and finish high school or college?