Todays blogger is tomorrows business

Musical.ly, a video-based social network popular with teenagers in the United States and Europe, is being sold for between $800 million and $1 billion to Bytedance, the company that controls the Chinese news aggregator Toutiao, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Musical.ly is not something even my 20 and 25 year old daughters use, so I don’t pretend to be an expert on it, as I am not their target audience. But here is what I do know: 

Started by Chinese entrepreneurs Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang as an education social network, the pair quickly found instructional videos were not hot. What was: clips that combined music and social media.

They swiftly relaunched as a music video service and slowly started to sign up users. "Every Thursday evening, there was a spike in downloads," Zhu told FORBES last year. "We found out that Spike TV was airing Lip Sync Battle on Thursday evenings and after the show people used 'lip sync' to search on the app store, and found us."

The company doubled down on lip syncing with design tweaks that made the feature more prominent and quickly rose to the top of the app store.

Musical.ly users create short looping videos that are stamped with the Musical.ly logo and shared in the app and across social media sites including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Though the company declined to disclose active monthly users, it said over 13 million videos are uploaded daily. The number of registered users has more than tripled in the last year.

You might ask yourself sooo what!! How does this relate to me and my business?

Well, no matter at what level of the FMCG industry you play in, you need to understand that today’s bloggers are tomorrow’s business owners. 

Most of the businesses that I talk to when it comes to marketing their products or business is based on history and what is tried and true. What is working for you now, will not work for you in the future if we are to take what is happening here seriously. Attention is the asset that we are all chasing, because you cannot sell anything if you don’t have the attention first. 

Apart from a small percentage, most businesses are playing the short game, because that is where they can make the biggest impact, get the most wins and the biggest returns for their shareholders. But it is not sustainable and amounts to treading water, and in the long run it will be your undoing.

Take Toys ‘R’ Us in the US, who fundamentally failed to understand or appreciate the impact the internet would have on their end customers, when in the early 2000’s they outsourced their online business to Amazon. At the time I am sure pundits were spruiking the short term benefits to the bottom line, and 17 years later their stores have become irrelevant to the end consumer. 

Toys ‘R’ Us failed to innovate and turned their Toys ‘R’ Us customer into an online customers for Amazon. Fundamentally they failed to respect the market and where it was heading, and they thought they were the market until one day they were not.

The speed at which the market is moving will trip you up, and while you may think that all of this will be after your time in whatever you do, you couldn’t be further from the truth.

May I remind you that Facebook wasn’t around 14 years ago, Instagram is only 7 years old and Twitter has only been with us since 2006. The speed at which the market is moving is stunning, and while most businesses are making decisions based on historical data and the short term, what they should be looking at and understanding better, is the trends and where the market is going in the long term.

So if you think these trends are not going to have an impact in your business over the next 5 years you couldn’t be more wrong. And when it starts to impact what are you going to say? That you thought that all of this was just a fad, that traditional engagement strategies were the future, that all of these social platforms were of little consequence to our business? What will you say?

Time is the asset that we value the most, and the underlying appeal of all of these trends wether it be Musical.ly, or UBER or Netflix is time. I mean do you understand that we now pay more for a movie on Netflix than we used to pay at the Video store, so why is this the case and why did the video store die? It’s time.

If you can save your audience time, you will have their attention and if you have their attention you have a chance of connecting with them. If you take nothing else away from this article it should be this:

The way you are marketing your products or brand are not keeping pace with the way consumers are now being engaged. If your business or product gives me back time, you will have my attention and you will win!

Thanks for reading!

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