Capital One Takes Aim With Slingshot
This is a guest post by Barry Moltz, author of Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success
Capital One Takes Aim With Slingshot
What does social media mean to big business trying to connect with small business? A lot - since the statistics that I see are that billions of people are doing this social media thing daily. But what has major corporations taking notice is that what people learn and the opinions they find online are being given ever increasing credibility. Most importantly for corporate America, we are making purchasing decisions based on the opinions people express online.
Enter Capital One, who launched Slingshot in February to bridge the gap between small businesses. Capital One is not a pioneer in this area of course. American Express has OPEN and UPS has Pegboard. But what makes Slingshot different is that its not just about reading articles. It’s about connecting with other small business owners to create a community. Capital One decided to focus in two cities, Raleigh, NC and Denver, CO so they could truly get local critical mass. I was the key note speaker at both events (full disclosure- as a professional speaker, I was paid) so I was able to see the launch upfront and in person.
What I liked about the Slingshot network is that it does not have all the distractions for business people that other networks have. I am constantly inundated with people that have posted things on my wall in Facebook, or they “poke” me in Facebook, or people that are looking for jobs in Linkedin. All this becomes a huge waste of time to answer and maintain. Slingshot is just for small business people where you can find customers and suppliers through their network connections.
And this makes a lot of sense for Capital One who is one of the largest issuers of credit cards for small businesses. This is a good way to connect with them and sell to them just in case there are any business people out there that do not get Capital One’s direct mail!
Do large corporations have a role in setting up social media networks? Is it good that they use the power of their brand to bring people together? I believe this is exactly what big companies should be doing in the classy way Capital One has- what do you think?
Barry’s Book:
Barry Moltz is a nationally recognized expert on entrepreneurship who has given over 100 speeches to audiences ranging from 20 to 20,000. He was appointed by the Illinois Governor in 2005 to serve on the board of the Institute for Entrepreneurship Education (IIEE). As a member of the Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame, he also has taught entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Books to Check Out- Bounce by Barry Moltz
Barry Moltz starts off his book by explaining right up front that he is a rare breed of entrepreneur. He talks very candidly about failure (which should thrill my personal expert on blogging about failure, Becky McCray). Often. In fact, Barry’s made a profession out of it. So, right off the bat, Bounce takes a strange bounce and gets you thinking, “It’s easy to read about good times, but what will life be like if (when?) I suffer a failure in my business or my personal life?”
Countless stories and anecdotes are collected in this book, and the research is probably the best selling point of Bounce. Barry threads his own stories through it, but he backs everything he says up by three or four or five examples from other people’s lives.
In one way, this made the storytelling aspect of the book a little diffuse. Barry leads off the book with his story, goes into more of his story, and then uses his story as part of the backbone of the book, but there’s SO MUCH of other people’s experiences in the book, that I found myself a bit distracted by it all.
This isn’t really a knock, because this book is LOADED with things to think about, and his research assistant, who is thanked in the acknowledgments, deserves whatever he paid her and more. This book is chock full of stories on failure.
I recommend Bounce to budding entrepreneurs, especially those who maybe have their heads in the clouds and aren’t considering how to prepare for the dips in the road. It will certainly get your mind racing. In fact, maybe don’t read this just before bed. It might deliver a healthy dose of insomnia.
Check it out here: Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success
