What’s a fan worth?

Saw this come across my Twitter feed tonight from tech journalist/commentator/podcast mogul Leo Laporte:

Sony and ad.ly offered me $2000 for one ad tweet last week. I didn’t do it – but what do you think? Should I have taken the money?

The old way of thinking is to grab the money.  You’ve built the audience and you’ve earned it.  But, when you do the math…

@leolaporte that works out to $.0129 per subscriber? Sounds like a good deal for Sony. Glad you valued your followers more than that!

How quick would you sell out your fans?  The ones that searched you out and clicked “follow”, signed up for an email newsletter, or bought from your store?

Also, this is where you see the difference between a company like Apple and Sony.  Apple has rabid fan customers that are chomping at the bit for any morsel of new product info, while Sony has to try and buy random lists and push news to people that aren’t interested.  The shift continues…

Starting is Easy. Finishing is Hard.

I’m not sure if there’s a way to calculate the number of abandoned blogs/websites, but it must out number the maintained ones 5 to 1 (maybe 50 to 1?).  Ever come across a site with more “coming soon” pages than pages with content?  What’s really weird is when those pages are 3 years old.

Hey, who am I to say what “soon” is anyway?

Story time:  A guy in sales told me that the big trick to growing his numbers was, “just show up”.  Picking up the phone, returning calls, answering emails, seeing who needed help and where.  That kind of thing.  No race to accumulate 50,000 Twitter followers or an intricate network of anonymous names on LinkedIn.  He did the things the majority of folks skipped over.  He delivered, without fail, to his base.  His reputation grew.  So did his base.  So did his sales numbers.  He never stopped and he’s happy as hell.

Do you floor it when a new idea hits you and then slowly drift off and quit, or do you keep plowing through, growing your base everyday?