Martin Crumlish's Emperor Social?

Reasons why I pulled out of ES:

1. It's too expensive. As mentioned above, there are other services that offer almost the same thing for a fraction of the price.

2. You get locked in to paying ad infinitum. If you build a number of pages for clients, you can't kill your membership without killing their pages. If you do an FB page with monthly management for a client - you could find yourself bound to maintaining that page at the risk of deleting their content and opening yourself up to legal action. I would rather not have a 3rd party calling the shots between my business and my clients content. I suspect this is part of the ES vendors business model.

3. There has been loads of hoopla about Facebook marketing from the co-creators and affiliates of ES over the past 6 months or so. I was involved in some serious market research for a tech startup in 2012 that had govt funding and the results from that study showed that FB marketing results were disappointing. This is evidenced in the number of big brands who have pulled their big FB marketing budgets and put them into other online channels. It works for some but not for the vast majority.

4. I would be very worried about Facebook making changes that could interfere with ES (eg the SSL cert issue etc). Different niche, but this has happened with Bandpage who had over 18M monthly users and about $18M in venture capital behind them. FB decided it looked like a good idea so they did it for themselves instead. They basically tweaked their system slightly and killed Bandpage over night.

5. The management fees that are being thrown around by ES camp for managing FB pages as being realistic are over the top in my opinion. For a business owner to pay $350pm recurring for management of their page they would want to be making a significant ROI. It takes a very specific type of business and a near perfect storm scenario to go viral and become accepted by people in their timeline without having them hit the 'hide' or unlike buttons. People use Facebook for light hearted banter among friends and family - not to interact with brands. Not saying that FB marketing doesn't work - it's just not as easy as claimed. To get big fees you need LOTS of credibility, in my experience that kind of credibility comes from being a real marketing agency with a physical address, lots of staff and a list of high level brands as clients. It's nice to think that you can have a high chance of bagging big clients with nothing more than a wordpress site and an FB page but that's just not very realistic for the average person.

Anyway, it is a well built product - nice interface etc, but low on really "amazing features" in my opinion. You would want to be turning over a huge number of paid pages to justify not spending the extra hours building the pages yourself or using one of the other builders out there.

The real success story behind ES is the marketing campaign behind it - if you analyse that, the relationships that were made and the ecosystem of supporting products that were released before and during the launch you could learn a thing or two. Excellent marketing from Martin, he basically got the service built, primed and pre-sold a massive audience to a very high ticket price, organised the entire drip feed of add ons to keep users happy through the 30 day guarantee period adding value and driving momentum and effectively designed a business model for users (it remains to be seen how successful the average user will be though). Hats of to the ES crew for a very successful and ingenius marketing campaign.

Lot's of people won't agree with me but that's just by 2c's!

Hi Marty

You can always upgrade from the monthly to the yearly, but it will be at whatever is the current price is for the yearly license at that time. So when we raise the yearly price and you upgrade from monthly then, you will pay the current price, whereas if you lock in now, you lock in for life at the price you start with

Does that answer your questions?

-Greg