Mickey Meece is a New York Times columnist that writes about strategies to help small-business owners overcome daily challenges.

I briefly spoke to Mickey for a piece she just published on new ways small business owners are leveraging social networking sites for business.  See the full NYT story to see how Froilan (StyleHop CTO) and I first met.

David

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David
follow on twitter:  http://twitter.com/dmreinke

Here is his latest post on Startup Karma:

Great Entrepreneurs Believe in Karma

I met with an entrepreneur yesterday that I hadn’t seen in a few years.  I originally met with her about five years ago when she was starting her company.  She’d been a very successful executive at a large company and had decided to jump into the entrepreneurial game and re-invent herself.  Her business has grown nicely – and profitably – without having raised very much money.

We mostly just caught up on how things have been going (we email back and forth periodically, but it had been a while since we had met in person.)  After about ten minutes, she asked if she could tell me a story about the first time we met.  Always game for a good story, I said sure.  It goes something like this.

I was introduced to you by someone I had met with who was a close friend of yours.  He suggested that I get together with you and made an introduction.  After I set up the meeting, I went online to learn more about you.  After poking around for a while, I suddenly got scared – I had no idea why I was going to meet with you or why you would bother meeting with me.  I didn’t want to blow my one meeting and waste your time.  I told this to the person that introduced us and he said “don’t worry about it – Brad will give you 20 minutes of his undivided attention and something good will come out of it.”  So I went ahead and met with you.

I was really nervous.  I was uncertain what to talk about and just starting telling you about my business idea.  You gave me some reactions and a few pieces of advice and as some point said “I bet you wonder why I am meeting with you.”  I had no clue, said so, and you responded, “I believe in karma.  When I was starting out as a first time entrepreneur a bunch of experienced people helped me, gave me advice, and just spent time with me with no particular expectations on their part, except to be helpful.  I’ve never forgotten that and want to pass it on.  I have no idea what will come of this conversation, but if I’m helpful to you, you can pay me back by being helpful to another first time entrepreneur after your become successful.” This has stuck with me from the very beginning of my business and I repeat it often.

This story made me smile a huge smile.  I remember all of the entrepreneurs that helped me early in my career, including guys like my dad, Gene Scott, Helena and Chris Aves, Stewart Forbes, and many others.  Whenever I help someone like the entrepreneur above, I’m paying others back for helping me.

Many of the great entrepreneurs I’ve met believe in this and practice it.  It’s not altruistic nor is it selfless as there are huge emotional returns from watching other people – who you’ve helped early in their entrepreneurial career – be successful.  If you are a multi-time entrepreneur, I encourage you to consider a daily (or weekly, or monthly – whatever works for you) karma break to help someone that is just getting started.

Jeffrey Grau is the retail e-commerce analyst at eMarketer.  Jeff and I have talked about how social shopping is going to help consumers understand local fashion trends.  While social shopping has pretty much been a disaster so far, I think he’s absolutely right that we are just getting started.  Check out the full article here.

In the next few weeks, we’ll extend the Memory Game onto Facebook and the J2Play platform, so stay tuned.  So give it a try and let us know your feedback here or on StyleHop Feedback Forum.

- Froilan Mendoza

Other exciting features on this platform include real-time chat with your friends across all networks, redeemable game credits, and a Fashion Cents game Friends list.  Upcoming version of Fashion Cents should allow you to earn game badges and send challenge your friends (any friend on any social network) to play along (or top) your Fashion Cents score.

Froilan

So what makes a great online game?

1. Delight - That intangible, magical something you feel when you first encounter a game.
2. Originality - There has to be something unique, right?  But it can’t be too different.  It needs to feel familiar yet fresh.  A tough balancing act for game producers.
3. Hook - There’s a rhythm created that keeps you playing….over and over and over again.
4. Click, Click - We are learning this one….the more you get that mouse moving, the more you keep the brain engaged.

Let’s crowd-source the last six.  What do you think makes a great online game?

The StyleHop API  allows developers to leverage existing community-driven fashion review, social shopping, and recommendation features on StyleHop in their casual games and applications.  Using any programming language that “talk” REST, developers using the API have access to hundreds of thousands of filterable style ranking output either as JSON or XML.

Concurrent with this new API release, we are holding a create-a-game contest for the developer community to develop lightweight, social fashion games.   Think poker, solitaire, and other lightweight games, only in fashion.  Think mashup of fashion ecommerce and casual gaming.  If you need inspiration, check out our vibrant college community and our Fashion Cents game on Facebook.

You can develop using any language and on any platform (mobile, Facebook, Open Social, etc.).  The only rules are as follows:

- return a 5-star style rating for every style you use in your game

- use StyleHop data via the API

- apply for an API key and submit game idea by February 12

If you want to join the contest, or you want to try out the API, signup for an API key here.  The top three winners will receive equity grants in StyleHop Corp and will also  have a chance to demo their application at a meetup scheduled early March.

- Froilan

*kudos to Andy Kung, Aditya Sureka, Ivan Wah, and Vipul Gupta

A good article in Business Week, Will Work for Praise, on motivating content creators with evidence that status is more powerful than cash for getting users to create content.
From my perspective there are a whole host of ways to encourage users to participate and engage in a site through content creation.  I met with Tim Chang, principal at Norwest Venture Partners a few weeks ago.  We were talking about game development and how effectively tapping into the seven deadly sins play a huge role in game engagement.   Community engagement is no different.  We need to give our users a reason to play games, write reviews and help create the StyleHop community.  For all these, tapping into base desire is critical.

What many startups miss is that while the promise of status is a powerful and important motivator, it’s not the only one.  We are developing our community with a mix of incentives that tap into desires for status, greed (read discounts) as well as positive influencers like contributing to our mission of democratizing fashion.

Focusing only on status and creating mavens is a natural mistake of many fashion sites…..the mavens and wannabe-mavens are the first ones to come to your site and they are the most enthusiastic.  However, this is a trap.  You can’t forget that big destination sites need to help everyday folks solve problems - that’s job one.  While mavens can help support this goal with original content, their deep interest in being heard can often times overwhelm broader goals.  Many social shopping sites are peaking out on traffic because they are leaning too much on helping the maven’s build status - There are too many sites where we go and feel like we are being bombarded by experts.  It’s like that great boutique you want to love but you don’t go in because the sales people are too pushy.

Fashion shopping destination sites need to make shopping for fashion easier if they want a mainstream audience.