There are people (mostly teenagers/early 20s) who set up catchy Twitter accounts with endless streams of funny photos or videos along various themes. They cross promote and cross retweet these accounts (often retweeting each other's posts for just 5 minutes, then unretweeting again to remove the trace) until they build up over 100K legitimate followers. They then sell "spots" on these accounts to (mostly) people running Shopify fashion stores or mobile app developers ($18 per 100K impressions is a typical rate right now). I've also seen a couple of musicians "come up" through this approach using Soundcloud. (What they do is have fake female accounts repost Vines, tweets, or screenshots of Tumblr raving about thing X, then get those retweeted on "decks" - people then impulse retweet, then they delete the original content to make it all look organic.)
This is the wild west of social right now, it's hard to find info about it, you gotta spend weeks digging around and warming up to the right people, especially since a lot of the trail is destroyed shortly after it's posted.
I'm not going to go into much more detail as I've spent months figuring out this space, but believe me, there are some amazingly savvy 15-25 year olds out there making things on social not look exactly what they seem(!) :)
Huh? What's the story there?
At least in Portland, I've never taken a taxi in my life, but have taken probably a dozen Ubers.
Which is one reason why Uber is winning. You do not even bother to check taxi fares.
I checked Uber rates to get to the airport. Not cheaper than taxi - about the same.
Did people stop tipping cabs?
Maybe you meant Ubers were 20% more expensive, or maybe people don't tip cabs anymore, I don't know.
Honestly I'd pay more than cabfare + tips just to have the price be explicit. Tips basically become a tax on nice people. I'd much rather everyone was paying the same price.
When I first got here, I used Uber all the time, but the government passed some anti-über laws and Uber withdrew from the market. Now I just use the public transport, which is pretty good, but less convenient than Uber. I felt bad for all the drivers that lost their jobs.
They are still losing billions a year.
Don’t assume your local shitty laws are an issue everywhere.
My understanding is that these cases are usually very hard to prove, unless you have 'smoking gun' evidence of some kind.
- Produce awesome content. Remember the Old Spice YouTube channel where they set up and produced videos for a few days in real-time response to people tweeting at them? That got lots of people looking at their product. Sure, it was an expensive stunt, but a stunt that worked. I bet it'd work again and again, as long as it's not done too frequently.
- Send out brand ambassadors into random communities. There are lots of brands present as specific people on places like Reddit, Imgur, etc. They are not customer service, they are not there as the official faces of the brand. They are just there to hang out, shoot the shit, and occasionally give out some free stuff or do something "awesome", "rad", or whatever.
- Provide comprehensive media kits to journalists. The dirty secret is that nowadays people who make money by writing articles need to write lots of them. Do 90% of the work, and they'll jump on the opportunity to customize it a bit, and post it immediately. They get to take a longer lunch break, you get free page views.
- For small or personal projects, go and do the "Show HN" equivalent on various communities. Even if they generally don't allow self-advertising, the rule is usually overlooked if you don't push too hard, and just present it as "I made a thing. Check it out."
- Start a KickStarter campaign for no reason. Ideally, if you can afford to not hinge your business on it, you can just use it as both a pre-order platform, and as an easy way to grab attention of lots of people.
- Sell $1 bills for $0.90. That worked really well for Uber. It can work for you too!