Tom Meloche

Tom Meloche wants Procuit to be known as the knowledge transfer (training) company on Facebook (download 6 minute iPod compatible video, 30MB). In a year, he would like to have thousands of curricula up and be cash flow positive even though they may be giving away 80% of their material for free. These goals are achievable if Procuit focuses its marketing on vertical segments and sells content that it knows already sells.

But Tom has a larger goal. He wants to put content up in a way that makes it possible for every child to master the basics of a K12 education no matter where they live. If MIT's ambition is to provide one laptop per child, Tom's ambition is to make sure those children are actually learning something from the laptop. He believes the system he has developed at Procuit better matches the brain's learning architecture better than any other.

Tom Meloche thinks of himself as off-shoring to Michigan. In this five minute segment (download iPod compatible, 27MB), Tom describes how he tries to use Procuit's Michigan location to advantage while competing in a "Web 2.0" space that has its epicenter in Silicon Valley. The advantage of doing development in Michigan is that it lowers the cost of doing business.

However, there are also disadvantages. The capital markets are not as developed and there is less critical mass for idea flow. Oddly, this too may be an advantage because Michigan companies are required to find a business model early to fund themselves while not imposing an additional burden of cross-cultural communication.

In this 9 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 48MB), Tom Meloche lays out three components of the training equation: credibility, network effects, and privacy. Tom has positioned his training ventures at the cutting edge of application. In that situation, customers look for you to establish credibility through articles and books and less through formal certification.

Further, referrals play an important role. Tom uses mastery frameworks to establish the knowledge that needs to be acquired through training and then to ensure that the knowledge is actually acquired.

Tom views Facebook as an amplified referral network. Much as Lou Rosenfeld uses blogs to establish focal points for his publications, Tom wants the visibility of people using his training application on Facebook to draw in additional customers. Of course, this approach raises the question of privacy. By default on Facebook, your activities, like installing one of Tom's training applications, are visible in a "newsfeed". However users can set privacy levels to control the visibility. It is unclear how changing privacy patterns will affect Facebook's networking potential.

In this 9 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 46MB), Tom Meloche, Senior Partner at Procuit describes his company's product offering as an enterprise ready Web 2.0 knowledge transfer solution. Essentially, Procuit is looking to upend the delivery of corporate training over the Web. To do so, it will utilize its own web site and social utilities such as Facebook which over a year ago opened its doors to corporate as well as educational communities.

There are a few reasons to consider Facebook as an enterprise delivery platform:

• Since opening its doors to corporate customers, membership has been growing at the phenomenal rate of 3% per week.
• Facebook membership currently stands at 45 million but is expected to grow to 200 million by the end of 2008.
• Unlike other enterprise platforms that require active searching to uncover information, Facebook provides a river or stream for each user to simply observe what is happening in his or her network.
• In sum, the size of the platform and the ease of observing the activities of your own network within it should greatly enhance the impact of viral marketing effort.

Readers of this site may recall that Lou Rosenfeld is using a similar viral marketing approach with his own network that is not based in Facebook.

[n.b., Pure Visibility kindly provided the physical location for this interview.]