Partnerships - Social Media, page 3.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Paris.  While there, I had the opportunity to talk to Ben Cahen, the founder of Green Republic.  Green Republic is a French e-commerce website dedicated to green products and to promoting a green and sustainable way of life.  They sell 700 products to 3,000 customers including products for around the house, cosmetics and products for babies.  Their most popular products include a green recycle bin and baby bottles.

Green Republic has a staff of four people.  The two founders previously worked for Venture Capitalist funds but were very interested in eco-innovation so they decided to leave the world of VCs to start their own company.  I asked Ben how he found startup life different from the VC life and he answered, "It's very, very different."  When he worked in the VC world he was rubbing shoulders with entrepreneurs all the time and now he has to hunt them out for help and funding.  However, Ben seems happy to be able to use Green Republic to spread the Green cause around France.  He told me that people in France are becoming more and more aware of the green movement.

Back in January, when I attended Seedcamp Tel Aviv, I wrote about some of the priceless tips that investors shared with the startups there.  In a similar panel discussion at Seedcamp Paris, Parisian investors and VCs shared more valuable tips.  Among the investors in the panel discussion, which was moderated by Index Ventures'  Saul Klein, were Anne Gousset of Paris Développement (an incubator), Chipper Boulas of Boulas Ventures, Luis Courtot of Courtot Ventures, Xavier Lazarus of Elaia Partners and Philippe Colombel of Partech VC.  It was interesting to hear what they all had to say.

The investors in Tel Aviv spoke a little bit about the current economic crisis.  However, in Paris last month this crisis seemed to be a focal point of the investors' discussion.  Xavier of Elaia Partners brought up the point, right of the bat, that many companies that would have easily been funded a couple of years ago are now dealing with a much higher hurdle.  Startups now not only need to show that they have a great product but also that it is sustainable, because nobody knows how much time it will take for the economy to improve.

The average site for a popular consumer product is:

A. Slick with a high level of ‘production values'.
B. Made in flash.
C. About as socially engaging as a log.

Skittles changes all that in one go by essentially giving up on having a site of its own.  If you go to skittles.com you see a realtime Twitter search for "skittles."  All that is left from the old corporate branded experience is a small widget-like navigator in the right hand corner.

If you click "videos" it goes to Skittles' Youtube page, if you click "images" it directs you to a Flickr search, "products" is the Skittles Wikipedia article and clicking "friends" will take you to the skittles fan page on Facebook. This breaks with the tradition of consumer products with boring mass sites that feel like generic dance clubs -I'm looking at you Pepsi. Skittles have decided that the best online experience is one created by its own customers.

Predictably the Twitterati went wild after discovering that any tweet mentioning "skittles" would make it the new Skittles front page and it was inundated with tweets like:

mobob: #skittles is doing a very nifty thing, but i’m still not going to eat them, they always tasted way too much like rocks.

I attended an interesting panel discussion at LeWeb, moderated by Scott Rafer CEO of Lookery, about the trends in social advertising.  The discussion, which was called "Social Advertising: Where's the Love?," focused on media proven revenue streams for social software and social networks in our current economic environment, primarily on the approaches of Brand Advertising vs. Performance Advertising.  Panelists included Philip J. Kaplan, Founder and Chairman of AdBrite; Travis Katz, International Managing Director for MySpace and Fox Interactive Media; Lorenz Bogaert, Co-Founder and CEO of Netlog.com; and Seth Sternberg, Co-Founder and CEO of Meebo.

On March 9th and 10th I will be attending the Social Networking World Forum in London, a two day conference dedicated to social networking.  At the conference representatives from leading social networks will be talking about everything from their revenue models to the future of social networking, global brands and corporations will be presenting case studies about how social media can be used to build a brand, advertisers will discuss their means of using social networking to create revenue streams and content providers will discuss their strategy and development when it comes to approaching social networks.  It seems like this conference is going to cover everything, from A to Z, on social networking.

Conference speakers include Anthony Lukom, Managing Director at Myspace UK; Kate Burns, Managing Director and VP at Europe for Bebo & People Networks; Gerrit Mueller, Senior Director of Mobile Products at Connected Life Yahoo! Europe; Mark Watts-Jones, Head of Development and Innovation at Orange UK; Sean Kane, Head of Mobile at Bebo; Henry Clifford-Jones, Director of Media Sales Europe at LinkedIn; and Natalie Johnson, Manager of Social Media Communications at General Motors.

In addition to speakers there will also be an exhibition hall at the conference where different social networks and social networking applications booths will be set up.  Exhibitors include BT Tradespace, Lithium, PlayJam, KickApps, Elemental, Ecademy,