Social business as it should be
There is a lot of buzz in internet about social networks, ease of communication, ubiquitous media sharing, blogging, web 2.0, always-online capabilities, etc.
That’s cool. That opens new perspectives to users and businesses. But that’s just buzz in most cases.
How can I use these benefits to run modern business? What this business would look like? What it can give to existing business models?
I’ve run into two great examples of using internet and social networking principles in Russian part of world wide web. They are: studentochka.ru and cheaptrip.ru.
I won’t get deep into details. If you are interested and do not know Russian language, I can answer your questions. Here I present a brief description of both.
Studentochka.ru
This startup is dedicated to writing papers, reports, essay for students (of schools and universities). Yes, there are a lot of students who do not want to do it by themselves. In my opinion this project is remarkable for how business is organized. They have a big staff of good, intelligent, reliable writers, located in different cities and working mostly from their homes. They have backup writers. They have managers who accept orders remotely and support communication. They have delivery men who deliver papers to particular customers. And as far as I understand (at least understood a year ago, when I ran into this project) this all works as a big distributed system. And they do deliver very good results.
Cheaptrip.ru
This startup specializes in hot tours all over the world. As the tour is hot, it is very cheap. As it is cheap, many people want to get it and such tours are sold very fast. Great opportunity to earn a lot of money, isn’t it? But it will work only if you have a constant never ending flow of clients… So, they went online.
They sell tours by email reservation and you can buy a tour sitting at home and pay for it in the airport before the flight. They have professional tour hunters who work not just to get salary, but because they love tour hunting. They say that working in cheaptrip is a dream of professional tour hunter, and I’m not surprised. They have volunteers among regular clients who also help to find hot tours worldwide. They had 2 weeks tour to Antarctica on 2010 New Year’s Eve for about 3000 USD. As far as I know they are getting a lot of popularity and I really wish them good luck.
One more interesting fact
As far as I know both projects were initiated and originally run by young Russian women.