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PlanCast Failed For Not Catering To Its Power Users

Image via CrunchBaseMark Hendrickson, CEO, PlanCast: The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast

PlanCast is a liked service. And it is still going down. Why?

Robert Scoble's comments to the post are enlightening. Scoble is a power user. PlanCast needed to cater to his needs to take off.

PlanCast needed to engage people who create events, promote events.

PlanCast's Facebook, Twitter, EventBrite, MeetUp Integrations

Robert Scoble's Comment

Image via CrunchBaseI'm really sad that you are killing this. Unfortunately there were several other things you did wrong:

1. You didn't have ways to share a calendar of things for my readers that's SEPARATE of those that I'm actually attending.

2. You never improved it and you didn't listen to users.

3. It wasn't integrated with Facebook events. I would hear about things on Facebook and adding them to Plancast was a real pain.

4. Whenever I heard about events almost always I would be mobile. But the mobile version of Plancast sucked.

5. Searching for things or adding them was difficult.

6. You never really got to the business model. That should have set off red flags for me. Yet no one else knew about my travels. I'm in Europe right now, which meant I spent more than $4,000 on travel and you couldn't monetize that at all? Nope. Why? Because you never made deals with AirBNB or Kayak or Hipmunk or other travel sites.

7. I couldn't create calendars for specific kinds of events. For instance, I could never create a calendar of just Barcamps around the world.
It bums me out a service I actually liked using won't be improved and, even, will disappear. So sad.

The Solution Is Tech Heavy, Data Heavy

Hollywood Might Not Get Killed, Any More Than Silicon Valley Might
What Price A Movie?
MegaUpload, SOPA, PIPA
SOPA Went Down
SOPA Has Egg In The Face
SOPA Is So Going Down



TV ads are not as effective as Google ads. On TV you could be showing me beer ads and I don't even drink beer. But you are hoping many of the million people who got bombarded do.

When I search for beer on Google and you show me beer ads, that is way more effective. You already know I am interested in beer. TV ads not as effective. Search ads more effective. Social ads even more effective. You are more likely to buy something a friend bought and recommends. The engagement on Twitter for ads is more than on the Google platform.

Big Data ads should be 10 or more times more effective than even social ads. And at that point the freemium model really takes off. All you want as content people is people's attention. You don't want their money, at least not directly. I think that is the real solution to the piracy problem.

Fred Wilson: A Post PIPA Post
Clay Shirky: Pick up the pitchforks: David Pogue underestimates Hollywood
O'Reilly Radar: The week the web changed Washington