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Remember your first economics classes? Those were the ones that explained how systematically the price and production level of a product are set at that precise point where supply meets demand. Once students gain an understanding of that theory early in their economic studies, they spend the rest of their economics education learning the flaws and fallacies that keep the theory from working. I know. I majored in economics at Florida Southern College.

Knowledge in the Market Place

There are many factors that keep that theory from becoming reality. The primary fallacy in economic theory is the assumption that consumers have perfect knowledge in the market place.

Many of us have walked into a store and purchased a soft drink, then left the store, arrived at another location and found the same soft drink available for a lower price. And nearly everyone has purchased a product that they were incredibly disappointed with it once they used it. If they had known before the purchase what they knew after the purchase, they would have never made the purchase!

These mistakes are made constantly on a grander scale throughout the business world. We make these mistakes because of things we don’t know.

Social Media = Knowledge

Social media is moving us closer to having that “perfect knowledge”. It’s not hard to go to a search engine and type in the name of a product you are interested in and find some opinions written on it. Today, people set up blogs focused on venting their frustrations about products or companies they are unhappy with. And others are quick to post their praises for products they are very happy with. For a good example of both sides just go to Facebook, search “Walmart” and see the array of pages that are available.

Businesses Must Satisfy Their Customers

In the past businesses focused on how their products were perceived prior to purchase. Customers made the purchases based on what they expected to receive. Today businesses must focus on how their products are perceived after the purchase. If the customer isn’t happy then the customer will tell the world about it in great detail.

We still have a long way to go to reach that point of perfect knowledge in the market place. And I doubt we will ever get there. But, thanks to social media, we are able to avoid many of the mistakes we have made in the past. Customers know what they can expect. And businesses that use social media know what their customers want. Those that don’t, well, they will lag behind their competitors who do and some of them won’t be around much longer.

How has social media impacted your business decisions?

A Viral Video Story

One of the neatest stories on social media today is that of Matt Harding. He was born on September 27, 1976. He was a video game developer in Westport, Connecticut. Not enthused by his career prospects, Matt quit his job and started traveling. One of Matt’s trademarks was a dance that he was known for. So, while traveling in Vietnam, a friend suggested he do his dance and they put it on video to upload and show his friends at home. So they did it. His friends loved it when they saw it on the web.

YouTube Posting

He recorded the dance at many more locations on his trip and ended up creating a video that contained 15 of the dance scenes. The video was passed around the internet. Matt’s video was being viewed thousands of times a day, prior to YouTube. Once YouTube came into being, Matt uploaded it there.

Stride Gum Sees and Opportunity

After the YouTube upload, viewership exploded. Stride Gum approached Matt and offered to sponsor his trips. When they saw the viewership the videos were getting, they saw an opportunity. So, with Stride’s sponsorship, Matt was able to organize another trip and completed a second video. This consisted of Matt dancing alone in from of famous monuments around the world.

In the middle of the second trip, while Matt was in Rwanda, the idea of dancing with people from the area presented itself. So he decided to do a third video, this time dancing with people. The video took 14 months to create and involved travelling to 42 different countries. It contains shots from 70 different locations. This trip was far more complicated because it involved much more organization. But it was well worth it.

As I am writing this article, YouTube reports that the video has been viewed 32,110,083 times. It has a 5 star rating and has been rated 102,559 times.

The Subtleness of the Promotion

When you watch the video the first thing you see is a black screen and then the word “Dancing” appears. From there the cut goes to an alleyway in Mumbai, India. And Matt begins to dance. The video cuts from location to location with music and other audio from the scenes. At the 4 minute 25 second mark of a 4 minute 29 second video, a special thanks to Stride Gum appears with their web address. Five seconds of exposure! Matt didn’t even wear a Stride t-shirt!

The video has generated all kinds of spinoffs. Just google “Matt” and you will see several links related to his videos. Most of those take you to YouTube, where there are more spinoff videos.
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Click here to get to his website ( http://wherethehellismatt.com/ ) and view his latest video. Then Google “Matt” and see where it takes you.

I was leaving a ballroom dance class recently with a friend of mine that works for one of the big banks that survived our recent economic debacle. I asked her to go see the “Social Media Revolution” video that I have linked to on my home page. She told me she couldn’t respond to “blogs” and other social media from work. I thought she was joking!

Email is on the way out

One thing I pointed out to her was that email is soon to become a dinosaur. It has been a wonderful tool, but it has had its shortcomings. The main one being that anyone can send you any message at no cost to them. This allowed spammers to send 100 billion emails PER DAY in April of 2008 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_email). Internet users have become sick of this and they are starting to do something about it.

The YouTube video I was referring my friend to points out that in 2009, Boston College stopped distributing email addresses to incoming freshmen. So that means that students and professors are communicating another way. Things like blogs and other social media that can be closed to unwanted participants.

Services like facebook are going to take the place of email. To get a message to someone on facebook you must have their permission to send them one. And after you are allowed in, you can always be “black balled” if the receiver doesn’t like what she is receiving.

Promotion will have value

So, does this mean that a company can’t send out a blanket message anymore? Will they not be able to get access to contacts via social media services? No, it does not. But, they will need permission to send these messages. And before the facebook contact is going to allow the sender access to his time, he will need to see value in the contact.

Businesses must now offer an incentive to get the facebooker to allow them in as a “friend.” That could come in the form of a coupon for free goods or services. And once that business has gained access to the facebooker, they must be very careful about what they send. At any time the facebooker can terminate the contact.

Businesses can contact their clients, and potential clients, with messages that have value. And they work like never before to maintain trust. Otherwise, the receivers of their messages leave them in the dark.

I think there are some big bank managers out there that need to learn to deal with social media. They need to encourage their employees to use it. And they need to develop methods of using it as a tool for promotion and communication.

A new day is here!

The Mark Zuckerberg Story

I went to see “The Social Network” a couple of days ago and found it to be a very fascinating story. While there has been some debate on what is fact and what is fiction, the basic Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook story is presented in the movie.

Movie’s Impact On Facebook

There is speculation that the movie could have a negative impact on Facebook. But I don’t think that will be the case. I am a believer in the statement that “any publicity can be turned into good publicity”. Discussion surrounding the movie has certainly made Facebook a common subject lately.

In this movie Mark is made out to be a nerdy little squirt. But when you follow the story you see that it goes through the process that a brilliant entrepreneur takes to create a once in a generation venture. He took the ideas of several other people and created what is Facebook today. In the process he passed on around $100 million dollars, via lawsuit settlements, to many who he has been associated with. Everybody wins!

Building The Dream

Our story book mindsets have many believing that revolutionary ideas come from one person dreaming them up and then building the dream. That is hardly the case. The real catalyst is the individual who takes brilliant thoughts, whether their his or not, and makes things happen with them.

I am constantly reading books and articles on Social Media. But today you can’t find an updated book on Facebook. The reason is that by the time one gets printed it is outdated. Facebook is constantly making significant changes to their wares. And it is consistently improving. With it’s launch taking place in February of 2004 and it reaching over half a billion users by 2010, who’s to say where it will be in the next 10 years.

Einstein said: “The only way to escape the personal corruption of praise is to go on working.”  I think this movie is a major praise for Mark. He will escape the personal corruption.

Twitter Makes Major Improvements

Twitter has updated it’s look and updated it’s functions. Many tasks performed by third party services in the past are now provided by Twitter, or one of their partners, on their site. You can view videos, photos and other media content. You can discover related content. And you can access profiles without going to a separate page. Watch this video for more details:

Click here to learn more details about the new Twitter. Have you used it yet? What do you think?

Social Media Keeps Changing

WOW! What a time to be keeping up with social media. You almost need a full time staff. Twitter, Google and Facebook cannot stand still for a minute. So what’s going on?

Google – Facebook – YouTube

Google is doing its best to gain a dominate position in social media. Later this year Google Me is scheduled to be launched. It is an effort to compete with Facebook.

Facebook has been changing so regularly and so quickly that no one can get a book published and to market before it becomes outdated.

YouTube is experimenting with live video streaming. For the last two days they have been testing this format. This is just another step toward bringing live TV to the YouTube platform.

Twitter

The biggest change today is happening at Twitter. Over the next several weeks you are going to see a new look on Twitter. They are incorporating links, photos, videos and other content opening up in new panes to the right of the current timeline. This is eliminating the need for several of the apps that have been developed by third parties to enhance the Twitter experience. This is not a good thing for them but should make things easier for us.

Small Companies Using Social Media Every Day

Daryl Willcox Publishing found that 35% of small companies post updates on websites like Twitter and Facebook every day. This should tell you something. It is working for them!

Also in the survey, one third of the respondents do not have time to use social media. And close to that percentage said their customers do not use it. So if my math is right that’s 35% are using it, 33% don’t have time, leaving 32% claiming their customers don’t use the medium. Also of those questioned 25% said they don’t understand the medium. Something tells me that of the 32% claiming their customers don’t use the medium, a large portion of those respondents are just using that as an excuse not to get started in it.

Let Me Teach You Social Media

If you don’t have time to learn to use social media, but think you need to learn it, then contact me. I will set up a blog for you. I will help you set up a Facebook and Twitter account. And I will link your blog to post your entries on your Facebook and Twitter pages. And I can train someone on your staff to post information and monitor what is being said about you on the Internet. And I will do it all at a very reasonable price. This will save you a lot of time and I will be available to advise you in the future.

Give me a call at 704-438-2910

Increase E-mail Marketing Value

Many businesses are using e-mail marketing. But only 11.2% of those e-mails offer three or more sharing options. A study by GetResponse that monitored 500 million e-mails found that e-mails offering options to share on Facebook or Twitter had a 30% higher click through rate (CTR), while those with three or more sharing options generated a 55% higher CTR.

Sharing Tools Available

There are many means available for inviting the recipient of your email to share your messages. Offering a chance to join Facebook or Twitter should be automatic on any marketing email. An there should also be invitations to other sharing tools like delicious.com, YouTube.com, and digg.com. Which ones will depend on your target audience and what they are most likely to use.

What options do you put in your e-mail messages?

Social News Is Finding Us

We have moved from finding the news on traditional media to having it find us through social media. It is estimated that 75% of the news consumed online is shared through social networking sites or e-mail.

Readers can now actively search for the news sources they want, customize what they want to receive from them  and then have it delivered to them on the Internet through social media sources like Facebook news feeds and Twitter streams.

Facebook As Your News Source

National Public Radio has over 1 million Facebook fans. They asked them: Do people really use their social network to get news? From the over 40,000 responses received 74.6% said that Facebook was a major news source to them.

New Tools For Getting News

There is a new tool for iPad called “Flipboard“. It connects your social media accounts and puts the information coming from them in a digital magazine form. This and other tools like it will be some cool things to keep an eye on in the near future.

Can You Trust These Sources?

Sometimes the information you are receiving from your social media contacts is one sided. And often your are receiving that particular view because a “friend” wants to influence your opinion. It will be interesting to see how we determine the credibility of our sources in the future.

How do you get your news today?

Ford Motor Company set a new standard this year by introducing their 2011 Ford Explorer on Social Media. On June 26th, 2010 Ford posted twelve videos on YouTube and linked them to their Facebook “Reveal” page. One of the goals of this project was to get 30,000 people to ‘Like’ the Ford Facebook page. At about 3:00 pm on the 26th, Ford had 48,900 ‘Likes’. By 1:00 am on the 27th they had over 53,000.

Ford started their postings with a video that included Mike Rowe, the Ford spokesman, and Alan Mulally, Ford’s CEO.

Visit Ford on Facebook, go to their Reveal page, and look at the campaign they set up for July 26th.