Category: Journal – Opinion

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Journal - Opinion

The Hipther Journal by Zoltán – episode 3 (don’t let anyone tell you that it can’t be done)

As we slowly approach the end of 2021 and do the leap into the new year, I would like to share some of the things I’ve learned in the past year.

First up, I want to tell you that those motivational quotes that you can find out are 100% true. You should never let anyone tell you that it can’t be done. Oh, actually you can let them spell out the words, but the sounds enter one ear and leave on the other, without leaving any trace in your conscious brain and thoughts.

In 2021, I challenged myself to do more exercise. I think this is some sort of popular idea in which many engage when the calendar is reset to a new year. The idea was to run more often and include some cycling sessions.

As you may know or not know, I only talk about things when they are done. I don’t like making new years resolutions, instead, I try to focus on achievements and improvements while planning ahead.

I am wired to never stop and pursue the impossible, so I’ve entered the European Duathlon Championship for 2 sessions, Standard and Sprint, to make the year more interesting. I say, make the year more interesting, as 2021 was going to be a year in which we planned to host 22 virtual conferences and work on several new projects.

Today, on 30 December, I am pleased to say that we managed to host all 22 virtual conferences and have managed to launch HIPTHER TV, the HIPTHER Android App, and worked on improving our social networking platform, WireUp (Android App is in testing, you can help us by giving feedback here). 

Overall, it was one of our best years at HIPTHER and we have also managed to further grow the number of the #hipthers working in our team. In 2022 we celebrate 15 years of the company’s activities and I am pleased to say that we have huge plans for further growth and we will bring many ideas to life.

Alright, so back to the not giving up part. You can imagine what it’s like to juggle so many projects and give 110% to all of them while trying to maintain your mental health. Now comes the fun part, the training. I decided to train on my own and created a training plan based on information pulled out from different running articles and happy to say that I’ve seen the results of vigorous training.

The reason I’m sharing this with you is that I found an interesting parallel between training for a Duathlon and running a business in such periods. The hard work you put in day by day can go a long way and there is no reason to stop and turn back. Once you go enter grind mode, you only exit when you are done. And, you are never the done.

If you are working in online media and doing conferences, this is the perfect way to put it. You always have to be in the game, be in your best shape and even if things get really really hard, you must never stop and you need to keep going.

This is similar to my experience this year with the European Duathlon Championship. Even if I was considered an underdog in my category or overall in the contest, I’ve still fought hard and finished both races. All I can say is that I’ve applied some of the things I’ve learned in 2020 about running a business and projected it to my struggle during the race.

I’ve deliberately used the featured image from the finish list in the Standard Duathlon as this was one hell of a fight. During the race, I’ve been to the depths of hell and came back much stronger than ever. You can see it on my face, it’s been a hard fight for me, and ready for more action. It’s similar to the end of 2021. A hard year where we learned a lot and put in a lot of work to fight our way up among the large international brands who always have an advantage over us. One thing is certain, we will never stop and there is no giving up.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I don’t like making new years resolutions, but I can reveal that in 2022 we are adding a weekly podcast to our activities and slowly relaunching our in-person conferences in Prague, the Baltics, Budapest, and Milan while adding more features such as virtual conference viewing in the metaverse. The #hipthers will have even more surprises by Q2.

On a personal level, I am now training for the 2022 World Duathlon Championships in the Standard, Sprint, and Cross sessions.

So, whenever you are reading this, I wish you all an awesome 2022, and don’t forget this one thing, never let anyone tell you that it can’t be done!

In the end, here is a great quote I’ve found which embed both doing sports and running a business:

It’s very hard at the beginning to understand that the whole idea is not to beat the other runners. Eventually, you learn that the competition is against the little voice inside you that wants you to quit.” — George Sheehan, M.D., author of Going the Distance

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Journal - Opinion

The Hipther Journal by Zoltán – episode 2 (It’s your content, be careful)

Image by René Schindler from Pixabay

If you read my first post, you have also read that we are now fully living that scene from that never-ending wake-up scene in the movie Groundhog Day.

This hasn’t changed, but some things have definitely surfaced and we observe some happenings that now feel surreal.

I am writing this episode as I think that some are not aware of what is happening on social media channels such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and so on.

A few might know this about me but in my teenage and even later years, I was always labeled as a rebel. In some cases even know I consider myself a rebel, by not fitting in any of the groups and always choosing freedom.

In high schools I was going late classes, sometimes with roller blades, green hair, but also set up CD burning (back in 1999) activities that involved illegally downloaded music or movies. Well, those were really interesting days and I can say, I took full advantage of them. My first jobs straight out of high school were contract designer for notary public and were followed by becoming a sex shop store manager, a sales assistant at a mobile communications store, and so on.

It took me some time to realize that these all have contributed to the current state in which I am currently and have contributed tons of experiences that some might never experience.

Getting back to our subject, which is directly impacting your business’s future…

Whenever we find some characters disturbing or not, we need to take a look into the background of the situation. Pages with millions of followers, videos of millions of views are taken by owners of these social media channels.

How does this affect you? Well, we are all creating content for social media and in the past 5 or so years, companies have been relying on social media to host all their content and having company websites just for the sake of creating and about and contact page.

While our company has not done this due to the nature of our activity (news sharing), the service descriptions that you only list to social media or the video that you created in order to describe what you do, could be at the risk of vanishing forever. With this vanishing, your financial investment and time invested in these projects are now also down the drain.

Why? Because of certain community “guidelines” that are now being implemented by the large social media companies. It goes without saying that the first step has been taken to ensure “misinformation” is not seen by the free audience, but in many cases, these filters are judged by AI.

I can only say my examples and some of the connections that have reported such errors. I like posting funny and sarcastic memes on my personal Instagram and Facebook timeline. Among which the following:

Funny, right?

Well, this image was flagged as misinformation on both my Instagram and Facebook accounts and has been taken down.

I wish I could express the fear that I’ve felt when this happened as it is not funny at all. A humorous, sarcastic content has been taken down because it is affecting the community standards of the two social media channels that I’ve mentioned above.

If this is the case, what is next? This is a new level of censorship and believe me, this is the new normal. We can talk about it in a few years and hopefully, I am wrong with this statement.

OK, so how does this affect you?

We have the David Icke, Dan Erickson, and Artin Massihi cases. (bear with me)

Although some might find the posts and declarations of David Icke as delusional or not down to earth, we need to take a look at the essence of what happened.

His page had 91723 likes, 39264 talking about it and it’s been the “official Facebook page for ground-breaking Author & Public Speaker”. This still pops up in search results until it will vanish and only be found on the deep web.

We all know a thing or two about how much financial effort it takes to build up a social media page that has almost one million likes/followers. That effort was done by the individual or company which certainly involved several paid advertisement campaigns from which Facebook benefited directly. Those efforts are now lost due to the fact that “Governments and social media sites alike grapple with the fine balance between stemming harmful narratives and allowing freedom of expression. But experts point out that they can do both with effective moderation and collaboration.

What does this mean, it means that if they find your content harmful based on their current agenda, they can remover it or ask you to remove. See my example of the funny meme!

Overall, this would be fine, but removing a page in which financial investments are now lost is another thing.

An almost similar case is with the video by Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, who’s video was taken down by YouTube for not encouraging tight lockdowns which are in the guidelines of WHO and serve as the Bible for YouTube moderators.

If we dig deeper into this, this wasn’t harmful information in any case as 7-8 days later, WHO representative Dr. Mike Ryan, has highlighted Sweden’s strategy in fighting Covid-19 as representing a possible ‘future model’ for countries to follow in adapting society to the virus.

A video with +9 million views which has been in the interest of the public has been censored for the reason that it has not fitted the guidelines of the particular moment in time.

It could happen to you

While you might not find this relevant, you need to ensure that your investments are protected and you are not losing content that you have maybe built in the past 10 years.

This is why, in my opinion, it’s best to not rely on social media channels to host your content, videos, etc. Always have the back up on your company site. Not embedded from a social media channel (I know it’s easier and more advanced for sharing content), but you need to have this as a backup.

You don’t need to be against draconian lockdowns or be a conspiracy theorist to be subject to this ever-growing in numbers policies that we now see being implemented. Remember, these might be the new normal and it will continue until the social media giant realize they’ve gone too far and this is not why they started in the first place.

This also brings me to another idea I have been telling people for years. If you are building a company website, buy a domain, hosting, build it, and synchronize it later to newly built social media accounts. Not the other way around. Believe me, when I say, there are hundreds of thousands of companies that don’t own a company website, just have social media pages. We must not rely 100% on these social media channels as this is not there true purpose (even if now they make you think there are).

This is why all these episodes are written first on our website and afterward uploaded to LinkedIn Articles.

Join me again next week when we will talk about brand reputation management (personal and company level)

Until then, I would like to thank you for your time and wishing you a great Sunday!

All the best to you!

Zoltán

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Journal - Opinion

The Hipther Journal by Zoltán – episode 1 (Demand attention)

The Hipther Journal by Zoltán – episode 1 (Demand attention)

The beginnings

There are so many things going on at the world right now and even if we are flooded with information it feels like that never-ending wake-up scene in the movie Groundhog Day which was released in 1993, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.

While at our company are buried deep in many projects and personally working on most of them, I just realized that we are in 2020 and it’s about time, I start a series of articles about some of the things we discover through our entrepreneur journey, give tips and bring the latest information from several trending industries.

Introduction

Why now? Well, I feel so motivated right now and have so many ideas I want to share with you all. All I ask is you check back here sometime to see what are the new things I am writing about on a weekly base.

The current crisis has taken us by surprise and I feel like it was just yesterday when we were hosting our conference in Prague and our delegates were getting used to the extra hygiene measurements which were place by the hotel.

This was on the 6th of March and was just a few days away from the date on which the Czech government banned gathering of all types. I guess I can say we were lucky and managed to host our conference just in time.

I have to tell you that on the 6th of March, I was telling everyone that asked about our next two events in Tallinn, that there is nothing that can stop us from hosting those conferences. Unfortunately, nobody could have predicted that these lockdowns and travel restrictions would last until May, so we had to adapt to a new phase.

We quickly took measures and surveyed our connections, from which we got the feedback that we should postpone our events and the new dates should be at least in Q3. So, on the 18th of March, we announced the launch of our virtual conferences.

By this time, you might think that this piece is about our conferences, but please bear with me, there is information coming.

Just a week after we announced our conference, one of our competitors has also launched a digital conference and surprisingly, it is a week before ours is scheduled. Not to mention that we have seen most of the topics from our agenda being placed on their agenda. I guess, that sometimes, being first at something, doesn’t really mean much these days, but at least we feel good inside and know that we are doing things that are adopted by many.

As it happens, we have many projects that are on hold and have been planned to be implemented by 2025, so we decided to start work on some of them and launch early in order to cope with such demanding times. This is how our expansion has started into new regions and we are soon announcing more developments.

Getting back to my earlier questions (why now?), above is a description of the past 2-3 weeks during which we planned 2 live conferences for August, 3 virtual conferences, launched 3 websites, redesigned 4 websites and also hosted a first webinar (which felt pretty good, actually). In the meantime, I also enjoy time with my wife, 2 dogs, 3 cats, and also run every second day.

Many of you know me from starting out in the gaming industry and if you connected with me or started following my LinkedIn profile, you have found out that now myself and the team are involved in several other industries.

As we are getting to the subject of the first episode of the weekly journal, I would like to point out that idea came to me this morning, while washing the dishes and I will not add this description in the next episode 🙂

Demand attention

A few years ago I have discovered that each industry has its groups that are well tied together in helping each other. I mostly refer to the media and events sector which are the driving force of all industries.

So, here are some things you as an entrepreneur, startup founder, or marketing manager in the media/events industry should know when starting out.

1. Be unique and never forget to remain unique

It’s not hard to be unique when starting your business! Just think about it! We are all unique in a way and you should add that personal touch to your business. Whenever you are starting out a blog, news site, or start hosting conferences, add your personal touch to it. That touch that makes you unique.

Once you start getting noticed and you start meeting like-minded peers, do not let yourself be influenced. This is the easiest path to destroying every idea you have ever had and start doubting yourself. This is why I stressed on adding this part, never forget to remain unique! You will be tented to copy your “competitors” methods, but keep in my what I’ve said above, they might be part of the small group and they may have never dealt with the problems you encounter when building your brand.

2. Keep doing your thing 

I’ve had days when I wanted to quit and if I reconstruct those days, they were mostly about seeing “competitors” being praised and not being noticed, but I always kept going. I assure you that if you get this feeling, you should not feel disappointed, you should use that feeling to help you fuel your motivation.

You also need to know that you can be the most popular person among your connections and still have at least 40% of them wanting to see you fail. Not to mention your “competitors”.

There is saying that goes like this: “I thought about quitting, but then I noticed who was watching.

And if this doesn’t fuel your motivation, then think about why you got started in the first place. What was your motivation?

This is the main point of my subject, demand attention. If some media outlets don’t want to mention you, build more traffic and reach a bigger audience. If you focus on this, you will outgrow the “competitors” and soon, you will realize that you never needed them to help you spread the word.

3. Build with the possibility of reinventing

The current times we are living are teaching us a very important lesson, those who can reinvent and adapt are always safe.

In the next period or even now, we are seeing the collapse of several businesses. This is sad news, but don’t think that everybody is like you (feeling sorry about others). Some might enjoy this and use it as leverage to get ahead. It’s a wild jungle out there and you need to know that nobody is protecting you.

So, when facing such a crisis (not saying that this is the last one), just go back to the drawing board and see how you can reinvent and adapt your business to the current needs).

A couple of weeks ago, I’ve asked a financial advisor about a problem, and believe me the only concern now for everyone is saving money. But, there are two ways in which you can do that. Adapting your budget to the minimal needs but don’t cut back on expansions and reducing staff costs.

We are going with the first choice and trying to develop more services in order to keep at the float and keep the team intact. Which reminds me, always build a team, even if it’s a small one with people that think alike. This is no secret and of course, you can read this in tens of thousands of articles, but I think that having a team which dedicates more then they are asked, are the ones that you should start working closer.

While this first article is based mostly on my own experiences which I’ve encountered, I would like to invite you to subscribe to my journal and keep your eyes open for my next article where we will talk about owning your company’s online content. (you will see why with lots of examples)

Until then, I would like to thank you for your time and wishing you a great weekend!

All the best to you!

Zoltán

 

Subscribe to my Journal and Posts here