Mark Suster joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a general partner after selling his company to Salesforce.com. He focuses on early-stage technology companies. He blogs atwww.Bothsidesofthetable.com

One of the things I discuss the most with the portfolio companies I’m involved with is that “you manage what you measure.”

It’s a very important concept for me because startups are constantly under pressure and have way too many distractions. Having a set of metrics that you watch and that you feel are the key drivers of your success helps keep clarity.

And the more public you can make your goals for these key metrics the better. Make them widely available inside the company and share your most important goals with your board. Transparency of goals drives performance because it creates both a commitment and a sense of urgency.

Commitment & urgency are key drivers of success in startup businesses.

You already know it from your personal lives. The surest way to run a marathon is to tell everybody you’re going to do it (transparency). Even better is to tell them which race you’re going to run in the near future (urgency). The best yet is to raise money from them for a good cause – then you’re SURE to run it (commitment). Nobody likes to raise money then look like a loser.

I ran my first marathon in London this way in 2003 raising $3,000 for Parkinson’s disease (and finishing in under 4 hours – my publicly stated goal). For what it’s worth, my private goal was 3:45 but I missed that.

I know with the recent emphasis on measurement from Dave McClure and Eric Reis you’d think everybody is measuring. My experience has proven that even some well known companies are under-whelming in this department.

On measurement

I was recently talking with a startup that wanted me to try its product, a mobile app that crashed too much for my liking. In our next meeting I asked often it crashed. Only one guy in the room knew – the tech lead.

He told me in some combinations of device / OS / network they are crashing 4 times per 100. I’m a big believer in product stability & performance before adding too many features. Once you churn a user due to stability or performance problems it can be hard to get them back.

4 times / 100 means if a customer uses your app frequently (say 10-20 times / day) then they are crashing nearly every day. That’s not acceptable.

But what is industry standard? Is it 4/1,000? 1/1,000? And given your stage of development, you sure better at least know what your goal is. All applications crash and this is especially true in the nascent mobile world where dealing with device types, OS’s & networks adds one hell of a configuration management problem.

What I know for sure is that if you don’t have a stability goal stated for the company and if you don’t regularly measure how you’re doing against this goal you won’t have your resources focused on the right priorities in the company.

Most companies have some measurements, but I would argue that people often measure the wrong stuff, measure with the wrong precision (either too high-level or sometimes too detailed to draw conclusions). I see this more often than I see good practices.

The best way is to start by asking yourself at management team level: what are our company objectives and how do we best measure them? Because it can be hard to define or agree company objectives at an early stage I believe most people avoid them.

Don’t. If you change your company objectives or measurements later that’s fine. In fact, I would argue that if you’re producing charts that nobody is reading or acting on you’re probably measuring the wrong stuff.

And if you’re not meeting as a team to discuss these metrics and have a regular debate about how you’re doing and what needs to change then I can assure you that you’ll never reach your destination. You’ll have no idea when you’re off course.

You will likely have multiple sets of metrics you keep depending on the company’s stage, one’s function in the company and level. For example, I highly recommend a set of board metrics that the CEO communicates to board members at every meeting. With a set of metrics the board can keep know whether the company is tracking to its objectives.

Here are some measurements I think about. How you implement them will obviously depend on the type of company you are – there is no “one size fits all” approach but there are pretty universal measures.

1. Customer Acquisition
At the highest level you’ll obviously want to track how many customers your adding every month (and for some businesses that have hit scale this is measured on a daily basis). If you can break this down by channel that you’ve acquired them from this is obviously better.

How many adds came through organic SEO? How many through affiliate deals? How many through SEM? Do you have a customer referral program? If so, make sure you can track which leads come from this. Measuring viral adoption is obviously important.

Usually you have a catch-all bucket for “direct” or similar that often came through PR or word-of-mouth.

If you have multiple versions of your product, how many are web vs. mobile? How do the mobile customers break down by device type?

The next step after measuring the customers you’re adding is to add the “cost to acquire” by channel. This is important because it will later tell you whether you have a scalable business or not. In the early phases if you can’t acquire customers cost effectively enough you’ll need to diagnose why and how to fix it.

Make sure that you count the “true” cost to acquire customers. For example, if you have developers, content people or SEO folks working on SEO programs you’ll need to allocate their time / costs to this effort. SEO is seldom “free.”

It mind sound obvious but if you’re paying $1.50 per click on an SEM basis this is NOT your cost to acquire a customer – you need to add conversion rate. I see this mistake all the time, actually. So if you convert 12.5% of the people who click on Google paid links then your true cost to acquire is actually = $12 ($1.50 / 0.125).

Now you can two levels to get your cost-to-acquire down. You can find out how to more cost effectively buy search terms (i.e. lowering $1.50 to $1.10) and you can focus on improving conversion (i.e. increasing conversion from 12.5% to 18%). Those two things together would lower your acquisition costs nearly in half to $6.11.

Stating the obvious, but if you don’t have very clear metrics on how much you can make from a person who converts into a customer you sure better not be spending $6.11 per customer! That’s for people with very clear monetization results from customers.

Ironically, there are times where it may actually pay to INCREASE your customer acquisition costs. In a fast growing market where you have clear monetization that greatly exceeds your cost of acquisition then increasing your average acquisition costs can have two clear advantages: 1) you pick up a lot of additional customers that were falling off due to not buying enough ad inventory and 2) you make it harder for less optimized companies in the market to compete.

I suspect some of this is going on at Groupon and LivingSocial right now. Their monetization is so sick (LA-speak for good) right now that it’s hard to compete with them customers – you have to have more clever sources of customer acquisition.

I’m guessing this was also the case over the first few year’s of Zynga’s growth on Facebook. Once they knew how much money they could make with virtual goods / customer then they seemed to buy up much of the Facebook ad inventory.

2. Retention / Churn
Measuring customer acquisition is clearly not enough because not all customers stick around. This is especially true in the mobile space where apps are either free or cheap. At 99 cents they’re disposable.

Most people under estimate the challenge of winning “share of mind” the least understood concept with tech entrepreneurs. Everybody thinks if I build this cool app people will come and use it. Sure, but will they still be using it in a year? In 6 months? In 3 months?

The biggest limitation we tech consumers have is our time. How many social networks, picture sharing sites, new aggregators or blogs can we really spend time on? It has to come from somewhere. You need to win share of mind.

But there are other reasons people churn – low product quality, inability to understand the value of the product, costs, competitive products, etc.

You need to start by measuring your “churn” or attrition. I like to break this down into to buckets – immediate (think almost like a bounce rate on a website) and other churn. In the mobile world many apps are downloaded but never used or perhaps only used for one day.

This type of churn is likely different from garden-variety churn and therefore ought to be measured separately because the remedies are likely to be different. Fixing a problem with somebody who downloads your app uses it once and churns versus somebody who quits after 30 days are clearly very different resolutions.

Make sure to poll your users to find out why they’re churning. The majority of churn isn’t that your app gets deleted, just not used. If you could message to a subset of these users and ask them why they didn’t use your product you will probably learn a lot. One suggestion I give is to message them with a $5 Starbucks gift card. Many people will give you a small bit of time in exchange for a small gift

3. LTV
The other obvious measurement is the “lifetime value of a customer” or LTV. Clearly in the early stages of your company you’ll have to estimate this because you don’t know how long each customer will stick around for or how your monetization will change over time.

Many times of businesses can get away without measuring this in the earliest phases but nonetheless it’s good to have a goal. If you plan to spend any serious amount of money on customer acquisition you sure better have a handle on LTV (or estimated LTV).

4. Revenue Metrics
Revenue metrics are one of the first things I ask for from the startups in which I invest. I like to think of revenue drivers. If you’re an ad business, for example, you’ll want to measure things such as: impressions served, fill rate and eCPM (effective costs per 1,000 views).

Once you have a baseline then we can have a discussion every month about those three drivers: how are you doing at getting your impressions up, how are we doing on fill rate, and what is our eCPM? They are each independent components with different actions to improve performance.

And they are revenue drivers in that simplistically impressions x fill rate x eCPM equals revenue. At the highest level (and with a board) these are great metrics to keep focused on.

As you get more granular you’ll start to break down premium inventory vs. remnant and you’ll measure “custom buys” (sponsorships) versus standard. Once you “bucket” your revenue into different types you can have more intelligent conversations.

An example might be, for a mobile app company:

• 35% of our revenue is coming from home page take-overs, we allow 2 / day
• 40% of our revenue is coming from remnant banner ads served by ad networks
• 10% of our revenue is coming from direct sales of our banner inventory
• 15% is coming from in-app product sales (25% of these with cash, 75% with “incentivized offers.”)

Now we can have an intelligent discussion about the size & shape of your business.

• Should we increase home page take-overs to 4x / day? Or will that ruin the user experience? Or should we be lowering it to 1x?
• If we increase home page take-overs, can we reduce our total banner ad inventory to improve the user experience?
• If we’re getting $1 eCPMs on banners sold through ad networks, could we focus on getting our direct fill rate up in stead where we get $15 eCPMs?
• What would that take? How many people would we need to hire? How long would it take for us to recover their costs?

Metrics drive more intelligent conversations about your business amongst your management team, with investors and with knowledgeable advisors. No metrics = high level, more generalized advice.

5. Quality
Already stated above but know what you’re shooting for in terms of load times, crashes, known bugs, etc.

6. Salesman Metrics
I don’t want to go in depth here because it could take a whole blog post, but make sure to have performance metrics in place if you have direct sales teams.

It’s obvious stuff you’ll want to measure: revenue / sales person, leads, win/loss ratios, etc.

Just be careful because nowhere is it more true that “you manage what you measure” than in sales. If you start measuring calls / day, call length, meetings / week, etc. and especially if you make the results public then you’ll notice a change in salesperson behavior.

If you measure the above metrics and believe they are the right ones for your business – great. But in some businesses call volumes might incentivize your reps to get off the phone quickly, which in some businesses is the wrong strategy.

So start having the discussion with your teams and your boards what the right objectives of the company are and what are the best data to measure them. Don’t wait for others to give you the recipe – you’ll be waiting for a long time.

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/04/05/how-startups-can-use-metrics-to-drive-success/

Films don’t require nearly three hours of content in order to alter your world view, as evidenced by this little video, which clocks in at 27 “Whaa?”-inducing seconds.

Kind of makes you wonder whether the realm we inhabit does, in fact, exist, huh? I’m going to go rock back and forth in the corner for a while now.

[via Buzzfeed]

Article source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/pFpCL7XXtFQ/

Online book renter Chegg has given students at more than 6,400 college campuses an alternative to purchasing expensive text books. Now it also wants to help them study and schedule courses.

The company announced on Thursday that it is launching a new website that integrates two social learning services it recently acquired.

In August, Chegg acquired CourseRank, a service that lets students rate courses and view other students’ ratings. It also shows students which of their friends are enrolled in specific classes. CourseRank’s service will be available on the Chegg website at 600 participating schools starting Thursday, but the company says that it hopes to have 1,000 schools on board by the end of the year.

Cramster, which the company acquired in December, is an online study community. Members help one another answer homework questions and have access to textbook solutions, notes and other study materials.

Both of these services seem like a perfect fit for promoting textbook rentals. When users select a course using CourseRank, for instance, they can rent books for the course on the same page. Likewise, students looking for homework help might benefit from supplemental reading suggestions (though Chegg has yet to add this feature).

By integrating CourseRank and Cramster within Chegg’s main website, it’s also more likely that students will log on throughout the semester instead of only for textbook rentals at the beginning of courses.

Article source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/3LFWlSsENBI/

Boxee will soon release an iPad app that will enable wireless video streaming to any device running Boxee software, Pocket-lint has learned.

According to Boxee VP of Marketing Andrew Kippen, the app technically will not use Apple’s wireless technology, AirPlay, but the video streaming will work in a similar fashion.

Users will be able to stream video not only to a Boxee Box, but also to a Mac or a PC running Boxee’s desktop software.

The app, which will be compatible with iPad 1 and 2, is not ready yet, but should become available soon.

[via Pocket-lint]

Article source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/ejHNqIygYG8/

Brian Casel is a web designer and co-host of Freelance Jam, the live web show for independent professionals who build the web. Connect with Brian on Twitter @CasJam.

There’s no turning back now. The web has gone mobile. More users are accessing the web from more places on more devices than ever before. What does this mean for web designers and site owners? It means that in every project we do, we must address a mobile strategy.

Your strategy will differ depending on what type of project you’re working on, but make no mistake, you do need some kind of strategy for how your website (or your client’s website) functions in the mobile space. Whether you’re designing a site that is mostly static (is anything on the web really static anymore?), a content-driven news site, or an interactive web application, it’s best to pursue a well-rounded approach — one that includes a thoughtful look at your mobile website user experience.

In this article, I aim to highlight 10 crucial items that you, as the web designer, developer or site owner, need to consider at the outset of your mobile site design project. These ideas touch on all aspects of a process, from strategy to design and implementation. But it’s important to be accountable for these points up front to ensure the successful launch of your mobile site.

1. Define Your Need for a Mobile Site

Usually a mobile website design project comes about through one of the following circumstances:

• It’s a brand new website in need of both a desktop and mobile strategy.
• It’s a redesign of an existing website, which will include a new mobile site.
• It’s an addition of a mobile site to an existing desktop site, which won’t be changing.

Each of these circumstances brings a different set of requirements, which will help you determine the best way forward as you consider the items discussed below.

2. Consider the Business Objectives

In most cases, you, as the designer/developer are being hired by a client to design a mobile site for their business. What are the business objectives as they relate to the website, specifically the mobile site? As with any design, you’ll need to prioritize these objectives, then communicate that hierarchy in your design. When translating your design to mobile, you’ll need to take this a step further and focus on just a couple of top priority objectives for the business.

Take the website for Hyundai as an example. If you load hyundai.com in a desktop browser, the first thing you’ll see are big, bold images that evoke an emotional connection to their vehicles. In addition, you see a robust navigation, callouts to various benefits of owning a Hyundai, site search and social media links.

Now load hyundai.com in your mobile browser and you have a stripped-down version of the website. Yet the most prominent feature is still the same: a relatively big image of their latest vehicle model, followed by several other (mobile-optimized) images of vehicles. You don’t see the complex navigation and other callouts in the mobile version. They chose to focus their mobile site on their primary business objective, which is to evoke an emotional connection with their cars through bold imagery.

3. Study the Data of the Past Before Moving Forward

If this project is a redesign (most web design projects are these days), or an addition of a mobile site to an existing website, hopefully the site has been tracking traffic with Google Analytics (or another metrics tracking software). It is wise to study the data before diving into design and development.

Analyze things like which devices and browsers your users are accessing the site from. While you want to be sure the site is built with device support in mind, you can target these browsers as high priorities when you go from design, through development, testing and launch.

4. Practice Responsive Web Design

With so many new mobile devices being released every year, the days of checking your site in a few web browsers and launching are over. You’ll need to optimize your site for a vast landscape of desktop and mobile browsers, each bringing a different screen resolution, supported technologies, and user-base. As recommended in the well-known article Responsive Web Design, you can craft the desktop and mobile site experiences simultaneously. To quote from that article:

“Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience.”

Utilizing the latest and most forward-thinking web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and web fonts, you can design your site to scale and adapt to any device it’s viewed on. That’s what we call responsive web design.

5. Simplicity Is Golden, But …

As a general rule of thumb when converting a desktop site design to mobile format, you want to simplify things wherever possible. There are several reasons for this. Keeping file size and load times down is always a good idea for a mobile site. Wireless connections — while faster than years past — are still relatively slow, so the faster your mobile site loads, the better.

Usability considerations on the mobile web also call for a simplified approach to design, layout, and navigation. With less screen real estate at your disposal, you need to choose your placement of elements wisely. In short: Less is more.

However, we can still create beautiful designs that are optimized for mobile. CSS3 gives us an amazing set of tools for creating things like gradients, drop-shadows, and rounded corners, all without resorting to bulky images. That’s not to say you can’t use images at all.

Check out these examples of mobile sites that strike a great balance between simplicity and beauty.

6. Single-Column Layouts Usually Work Best

As you think about layout, a single-column structure tends to work best. Not only does this help with managing limited space on the smaller screen, it also helps you easily scale between different device resolutions and flipping between portrait and landscape mode.

Using responsive web design techniques, you can take a multi-column desktop site layout and adapt it to a single-column layout. The new Basecamp mobile website does a great job of this.

7. Vertical Hierarchy: Think in Collapsible Terms

Does your site have a lot of information that needs to be presented on the mobile site? A good way to organize things in a simple and digestible way is to set up a collapsible navigation. Taking your single-column structure a step further, you can stack chunks of large content in folding modules that allow the user to tap open the content that they’re interested in and hide the rest.

Check out the mobile site for Major League Baseball. At the top of the page is a button labeled “Teams.” Tapping this extends the page, listing the 30 teams vertically in the single-column page.

8. Go From “Clickable” to “Tappable”

On the mobile web, interaction is done via finger taps rather than mouse clicks. This creates a very different dynamic in terms of usability.

When converting from a desktop to mobile site design, you have to revisit your “clickable” elements — links, buttons, menus, etc. — and make them “tappable.” While the desktop web lends itself well to links with small and precise active (clickable) areas, the mobile web requires larger, chunkier buttons that can be easily pressed with a thumb.

In addition, on the mobile web there is no hover state. Most of the time, when something is set up to occur on hover (like a dropdown navigation menu), it actually occurs on the first tap when viewed on a mobile device. The second tap on the mobile site does what the first click does on the desktop site. This may cause confusion for mobile users, which means you’ll need to re-work hover states for mobile.

9. Provide Interaction Feedback

Speaking of interaction, you’ll need to make sure you provide obvious feedback for any actions that occur on the front-end of your mobile site.

For example, when the user taps a link or button, it’s good practice to have that button visually change states to indicate it has been tapped and the action has been initiated. It’s common to see a white-colored link turn fully blue on the iPhone when tapped. This visual feedback is familiar to most users and you’d be wise to take advantage of it.

Another good practice is to include loading states for actions which may take a bit longer to load. Use an animated loading image to indicate something is in progress. Basecamp Mobile does a great job of this by showing a spinning loading gif as it loads the next page.

Remember, the desktop browsers have various indicators built-in to show that something is in progress. Mobile browsers don’t make it as obvious, so it’s important to build visual feedback into your mobile site design.

10. Test Your Mobile Website

As with any project, you’ll need to test your mobile website on as many devices as possible. Without owning all these devices, it can be somewhat tricky to find ways to accurately test for each. It will involve a combination of installing the developer SDK for the platform (like the iPhone SDK and Android SDK) and using web-based emulators for viewing other mobile platforms.

This article provides a thorough breakdown of how to test a mobile website across the most popular platforms.

Off you go!

Hopefully this article provided some insight as you embark on a new mobile site design project. Be sure to leave any other tips you find useful when designing for the mobile web in the comments below.

Article source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/QKZEu5i06VE/

Years ago, the best prize kids could hope for in their cereal box was a plastic toy, but an international promotion from Nestle for the film Rio, which uses augmented reality, opens up some new possibilities.

The food giant is stocking more than 26 million cereal boxes in 53 countries (though not the U.S.) with augmented reality components. As shown in the video above, a hand card in the boxes can be recognized with a standard webcam to let kids interact with Blu, a character in the movie, in AR.

The campaign, handled by Dassault Systèmes, is the latest collaboration between the AR/design company and Nestle, which have offered two other similar campaigns over the last two years. The effort is just one of marketers’ recent attempts to take advantage of AR. Earlier this month, Unilever ran a well-received AR campaign in London’s Victoria railway station for its Lynx brand.

For U.S. residents who’d like to try the technology out, you can download a PDF of the hand card here.

Article source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/ROaOJZmomHw/

From luxury service providers to digital media giants, it seems like just about every online business is trying to carve out a slice of the multibillion-dollar pie that is the daily deals market, thanks to the relatively rapid success of startups like Groupon and LivingSocial.

The McClatchy Company is the latest to join the fray, announcing Thursday that it will begin hosting daily discount offers on its local newspaper websites using Second Street’s Deadline Deals platform. McClatchy is the third largest newspaper company in the U.S., publishing more than 30 daily newspapers, including The Miami Herald and The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and 43 non-dailies.

McClatchy joins several other publishers in the space, including The New York Times, which announced its first offer Thursday: a two-hour, $325 cooking class from Manhattan food market Eataly.

Image courtesy of Flickr, leoncillo sabino

Article source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/WwqJch46PmU/

Join Mashable and the Verizon Wireless New York Metro team at The Hard Bar at 230 Fifth on Thursday, March 31, for an evening of demos, networking and prizes. Verizon Wireless will be showcasing its latest lineup, including the HTC ThunderBolt, Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab and 4G LTE USB Aircards.

We’ll be raffling off select devices at the event. Space is limited to just 75 single tickets, which are only available through Eventbrite.

Update:: We have reached the maximum amount of ticket holders.

When: Thursday, March 31, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Where: 230 Fifth Hard Bar, 230 5th Avenue [Map], 20th floor, New York , N.Y.
What: Demos, prize raffles, appetizers, non-alcoholic beverages, cash bar
Who: Mashable, Verizon Wireless and mobile enthusiasts
RSVP: The event is 21+ and only 75 lucky Eventbrite ticket holders will be able to attend.
Socialize: Foursquare, Twitter (Hashtag: #VZWMash)

Article source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/OMlBO87SkyM/

International memecore sensation Rebecca Black got the Conan treatment Wednesday night, when the Internet-savvy comedian released his new song, “Thursday” — a cover of her unexpected hit, “Friday.”

Black shot to questionable stardom recently after her video for the (extremely mundane) song “Friday” blew up on the web last week.

Although the song went up in February, it built up traction just recently — due in part, it seems, to comedian Michael J. Nelson, who tweeted about the video.

The song then debuted on iTunes, beating out the Boy King Bieber when it came to downloads, and the video has more views on YouTube than Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” That’s close to 43 million, folks (although it has 539,736 dislikes).

Black even made an appearance on the Tonight Show, where she performed the song (maybe that’s why Conan chose the parody route — what with the late night wars and all).

Lest you go running to iTunes now to snatch up the jam — all this attention was not garnered because it’s good. No, the tune seems another addition to a genre of music — made popular via the web — that’s just too perplexing not to share. (Call it outsider art for the Internet age.)

Black isn’t without her supporters — Gaga herself even called the teen a “genius,” and the video below, featuring Conan lampooning the song’s rather random lyrics, isn’t all that mean-spirited.

Check it out as a means to tide yourself over until tomorrow, when you can spin “Friday” at top volume to your heart’s content (and your neighbor’s dis-).

Article source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/ZYRnNbiLf6I/

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

Peter Shankman is the founder of HARO and is generally regarded as one of the top social media consultants and marketing speakers working today. His clients include Saudi Aramco, NASA, The U.S. Government, Haworth, Disney, Foley Hoag LLP, American Express, and countless others. He blogs at shankman.com.

There’s a young woman — perhaps you’ve heard of her — currently climbing the YouTube charts with a song about the days of the week, specifically, “Friday.” There’s also another song on YouTube rocketing to the top with a bullet, this one about a pair of jeans.

When I was a kid, we listened to songs about days of the week and clothing, and it was called Sesame Street, not “mainstream entertainment.”

Welcome to the age of mediocrity, where anyone with a computer, a video camera, and a few thousand dollars for production can be considered the next big thing.

But as sad as that is, what does it say about us as a society?

Analyzing “Friday,” it’s not so much that Rebecca Black can’t sing. She’s about on par with some other pop stars, and — let’s face it — they’re not remaking The Marriage of Figaro here. The problem is the mundane, almost soul crushing lyrics, recounting a day in the life of someone we care nothing about.

Essentially, Ms. Black has become the musical version of a bad Twitter user, offering very little substance and value, but still feeling the need to overshare.

Ms. Black’s story, as it’s been told, involves her parents giving her a produced single as a “gift,” and depending on who you ask, the rapid ascent of her YouTube video is due either to morbid curiosity, or media attention brought on by morbid curiosity. It’s certainly not brought on by talent.

We used to be a society of content eaters fed by a very small kitchen run by music labels, TV stations, and movie stars. With the advent of the Internet, Flip cameras, and yes, even Justin Bieber, the paradigm has shifted. It’s no longer a world where the talent wins. It’s not even a world where the beauty wins. It’s a world where anyone can post, and in many cases, the worse the performance, the better it does. Call it the “William Hung” Effect.

With the power to broadcast comes great responsibility. And when people don’t take responsibility, and create videos about days of the week, we can’t be shocked and scream about the downfall of society. We’ve taken a typical 13-year-old teenager and given her parents an enormous return on their paltry investment. We did this. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

So that begs the question: How does someone get there? How does a talentless nobody wind up with 43 million YouTube views in a few weeks?

Step one: Content. A catchy autotune, a baby laughing, a cat being tickled. It doesn’t matter.

Step two: Send it out as the latest OMG thing in the world. Get a few views a minute. Let it grow, unchecked, like a fungus.

Here’s an example. After fighting with someone for six months while training for an Ironman, I simply took our words and put them into an Extranormal movie. The result? Over 750,000 views in a week. It’s not hard. I did it for fun, and it cost me nothing.

Media? Well, the media plays a part, no doubt. Five thousand views in a minute does a story make. So one media outlet covers it — perhaps for how bad, boring, and just plain ordinary it is — and perpetuates the cycle by including a link to the offending video.

Does that make it our fault? Absolutely. We’re a society that likes destruction. We like Sheen. We like Lohan. We like Jerry Springer. We like Maury. We’ve embraced mediocrity because we need some level of proof that we’re better than that — that we’re not the worst things out there. We’re not, because there’s Rebecca Black, with Friday, Friday, Friday!

She’s not the problem. We are.

The worst part? Perhaps it’s not a problem at all. Perhaps, if we didn’t have the Rebecca Blacks of the world to complain about, we’d be an even unhappier society. Perhaps we need people like Rebecca Black to balance our worldview, to take away the sadness of what’s going on in the news, and to distract us from our own mundane lives.

Perhaps we invented Rebecca Black, and others like her, because we simply had no other choice.

Article source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/6O9kPD-t2uo/