Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’
The Merry Christmas Economy!
Here we are yet once again, Christmas time. Why is it that we are all shocked by the fact it’s upon us and we just aren’t ready for it? If you’re one of those people, and you are a business owner, I ask you, how do you stay in business? I’m mean really, you are the one who is supposed to have the house in order, making sure all is on schedule, and then you say you’re not ready for Christmas?
Ya I know I’m ranting a bit, it sounds silly doesn’t it, but yet many of us do just that, some credibility is lost when you admit you aren’t ready for Christmas. It’s the same date every year, it happens only once per year, you know what it means, and you know what you are supposed to do, so what’s the problem.
Now I’m generalizing here but, we tend to spend our time & money on what we believe is important to us, not being ready for Christmas speaks volumes about how you value the world, how you value the people around you, and especially your immediate family.
Those in Social Media circles claim they love their followers and so on, we are all very nice to each other here, we lift one another up, we help for free alot, and we say things we don’t really believe. That’s the truth really, but we want to move forward and move ahead, and in the Future of Business you won’t be able to do that without people helping one another. We are moving into a Merry Christmas Economy!
In a Merry Christmas Economy we help one another, we don’t expect anything back, we just want to be a part of something larger than ourselves. We will share openly, we will click on Like buttons and Re-Tweet icons to show how much we value others and their businesses. We value relationships, we value the world differently, and we all have the same basic needs (in general), this new economy is open to anyone, it’s to good to be true, it’s awesome! You will need to make your brand / product or service like-able if it isn’t already, that’s how your business will be judged.
Gary Vaynerchuk has written about the Thank You Economy, is he talking about the same thing, he wants you to care, to care about those around you, and mean it. He not only wants you to say it, he wants you to actually do something about it. But will you, why all of a sudden now, why in this Social Media ERA is that so important?
It’s gut check time now, look deep into who you are, why you’re in business, why you in Social Networks, are you practicing, are you participating in business for others or yourself? If you are honest, others are secondary, but they shouldn’t be, they pay your bills, they provide the roof over your head. They will determine if your business is liked! But yet, we make it difficult for customers to deal with us, we make them jump through hoops to get our help, we make them work to hard to do business with us, why is that?
The Future of Business will be very different, being social is the osmosis of being connected, being connected means the world will decide what is good and what is bad, not slick marketing. This connectedness means we are on the move at all times, we are mobile in such a way your business will have trouble tracking and understanding the consumer, unless your values match with there’s.
The Merry Christmas Economy has an underlying problem, it has to solve the problem of an entitlement mentality. In The Future of Business, we must provide access over pay-walls, and find seamless ways of qualifying the consumer. When we get past the entitlement thinking, we will get to the heart of the matter, where people matter, make doing business with our brand, product or service virtually painless, only then will we have insight into the future of business. Dealing with your business has to be like breathing, no thinking, no obstructions, no walls, wide open hospitality, an experience they won’t forget, something they do through osmosis. Just like in the movie A Field Of Dreams, they will come and they won’t even know why. Is that your kind of business, one that participates in the Field of dreams, if you build it, they will come. It could be like that, but it will boil down to how you value others in a Merry Christmas Economy?
One Of The 1st Technological Revolutions In History
Much of what we know in Technology is sometimes shocking, and even down right revolutionary, but we have had many of these startling events long before you & I were born.
One of the greatest leaders in history is credited with introducing one of the very 1st technological revolutions of mankind, King David. He ruled over Judah c. 1010 – 1003 BC, and Israel from c.1003 – 970 BC, and was considered one of the worlds premier leaders in his day, and is still referred to as such today.
The real story is some 200 years before King David ruled over Judah & Israel, there was a tribe called the Hittites, and they knew how to combine minerals to make iron. They had more advanced knowledge and education, better weaponry, cooking utensils, and tools long before anyone else, they also won more battles because of it.
King David is credited with introducing the Iron Age, and iron today is used in much of the worlds most cherished structures. So all the technological change you and I have been experiencing, is not early advancements, but merely a maturing of technology over thousands of years. Technology has become exponential in it’s growth, you & I double our knowledge every year, but technology is not linear, it’s exponential, 2,4,8,16,32… and we can’t keep up.
In the next few years you will be able to buy a computer that computes faster than the human brain! This computing speed will birth products unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetime. Superior robotics will emerge and be much more life like because of it, a chance to actually have Artificial Intelligence will present itself. Virtual Reality will be so advanced we won’t be able to distinguish between real life & virtual life. we will spend more hours in virtual reality than we ever will on FaceBook or any other Social Network. Handheld devices will be so powerful, they will be able to do things we haven’t even thought of yet. There is so much to consider as we move forward in this century, technology is just one spoke in the wheel, we have bigger issues to face that technology may or may not be able to solve. Like the water shortage the world is starting to experience, I live in one of the rainiest places on this planet, and we have a shortage!
In 1998, Billy Graham shared at a TED Talk, that there are 3 things Technology has yet to solve.
The Big Three:
1.) Human evil
2.) Human Suffering
3. Death
The first one most likely will never be solved, it comes from you & I, we make bad decisions alot and we end up hurting mankind in the process. Human suffering is a puzzling one, there are 403 Billionaires in the USA alone, 40 of those billionaires have decided to give away 50% of their estates. If that’s true, why do we still have hunger? We live in the richest part of the world and yet we still have hunger, I hope someday we’ll right this injustice.
The third is Death, this has the potential to be solved by Technology, Nanotechnology to be more specific.
Nanobots will some day make it possible for you & I to live forever, and in perfect health, but that’s another blog post. I have written about it in my book The New Technology – The End of Mankind? You can download for FREE here on this blog.
Everything about our world is going through an upsetting industrial change, a paradigm shift, and it’s very real and very painful. Much of what we are experience in the business world, is not peace, harmony and quiet. These new social media environments disrupt closed systems, and most big business and corporations are fighting it tooth and nail. We are in a constant state of change and revolutionary thinking, but it scares wall street, because they can’t control a connected audience or consumer.
I also hope this post makes you appreciate the introduction to iron, more importantly, I hope your paying attention to what is really going on around you.
One Mistake Corporations & Big Businesses Make
Something interesting has been happening since Social Media became a force to be reckoned with, it’s power and use has been grossly misunderstood. The big mistake most corporations and big businesses make, they try to understand communities rather than the users (generations) that build and make up these communities.
To understand a community is actually quite simple, if you spend enough time in any community you will discover a personality and a few trends. But that doesn’t mean you understand the people in that community, people influence people, and communities can influence other communities, but the characteristics vary. What these communities and people (generations) tolerate today, most likely won’t fly the next year or for that matter the next day. Another interesting characteristic about these generations, they group and regroup on the fly.
The Gen C and generations to come, group and regroup for the purposes of grouping and regrouping for a new purpose, they will no longer staying together for long periods of time. Making it virtually impossible to derive quantifiable data that can be used for marketing and or to merely understand any community. They social and very mobile.
Gen C are the under twenty somethings with very little patience for old industrial age thinking, or for that matter, systems developed by those old thinkers. They want a more Natural User Interface (NUI), they want their content to be relevant, useful and interesting. They move in packs, very tribal in behaviour, which means you need to be able to adapt to there moods swings. Gen C are at best chameleons, constantly changing and morphing their identities to simultaneously belong to as many tribes as possible.
Communities will come and go, but those jumping from community to community will be harder to attract unless certain criteria are in place. Connect Gen C members with each other, not just with a brand. Enable Gen C to participate in, play with or produce themselves and then share. Ask for a reaction and have a fun social interface. Enhance social status within tribes, and as I mentioned earlier, Keep it relevant, useful and entertaining.
Remember, pay-walls are not inviting, these generations will keep looking until they find what they want for free. Yes, those with money will pay upfront for some things, mostly just to save time, but the majority of the global population will spend the time to find what they want for free. The Future of Business will be an Open & Free Business Model, where FREE is the business model.
The businesses of the future should pay attention to the user not the communities, they don’t spend enough time in communities to provide enough reliable data. Whether you agree or disagree really doesn’t matter, the future generations will move in packs whether I say they will or not, they’ll group and regroup to meet their needs. Pay attention to what they get behind, not where they hang out.
If you’re in business today, don’t assume communities is where the valuable data is located, it’s in the users, the Gen C and beyond. The communities are a way to determine where they are at the time, that’s it, and it may not have anything to do with what the purpose or cause happens to be at the time.
Scott Stratten's UNMarketing Book
It took me two days to read this book, and what a joy it was to finish it so I could share with you. I was emotionally moved while reading this book, that doesn’t happen often, I’m not sure why yet but I’ll figure it out. It could be because he has son named Owen : ) Now I read alot, I like to learn, I like to read other perspectives, and I love to take what I’ve read and learned and then apply it. I’ll admit up front I have been a Scott Stratten fan upon learning he was in this space, he joined Twitter a month earlier than me and I’m proud to say he has made something of Twitter that most haven’t. The book is part of his overall plan I think, he didn’t expect to get asked to write the book but if you follow Scott, it was only a matter of time. The Title is his Twitter handle, @unmarketing. The Book is called, UNMarketing – Stop Marketing. Start Engaging.
Once you start reading, you get the impression he practices what he preaches. I was reading along around chapter 10 and I had this notion, this feeling that I have heard all this before. In fact, I did! I heard it from Scott since the day he joined Twitter, these 64,000 words he put together in this book are actually 457 Tweets on Twitter! If you do the math, 457 x 140 Characters = 63,980 words! I felt like I was reading bite sized chicken nuggets (Tweets) from Scott, bite sized stories, this book reads like a Twitter stream to me. I know, I’m weird, but when you read it, you’ll understand what I mean. I don’t know if he intended it that way, but that’s what it was like for me.
There are 56 Chapters, they are somewhat short, but all are packed with well thoughtout points, some you have to read twice. I found myself saying yes many times while sifting through the pages, because, everything, most things he was talking about, all were simply the use of common sense. Looking at a business in a new way, not using old Industrial Age thinking. I believe that anyone over the age of 35 is stuck, stuck in old thinking. It’s no ones fault, it’s everyone’s fault, from our parents who couldn’t see past what was in front of them. To our leaders in the school system that had to buy into a lie. And we believed the Government was going to look after us, another lie. I think we are seeing that the system is not humane and it merely serves itself.
The first two chapters didn’t really grab me, but the third one did, it’s called the Trust Gap. From that point on, I was giving Scott all of my attention, right through to the Index. The restaurant story is one of my favorites, I have actually lived and tried to get that one done, you’ll love it. If you can get a restaurant owner to do it, the fun they will have, and the money will be a by-product of their trust in the people formerly known as consumers.
There is one thing I don’t agree with Scott on, I hate Wal-Mart, he loves them! His reason’s for loving Wal-Mart are valid to him, he admits he is lazy, and that’s why he goes there. One stop shopping. What I really don’t like about Wal-Mart is this, it makes people think in a broke frame of mind, by cheap stuff 500 times when quality might only cost a few bucks more, and you buy it 5 times instead of 500. That’s just my view on stores that sell in that fashion, right down to Dollar Stores & the new $5 Store. I should talk, I used to work at a store equally as bad back in the 70’s, F.W. Woolworth! But that’s a whole lifetime ago and another Blog Post.
OK, let’s get back to the book…..Buy It! Don’t take my word alone, you will learn, you will get perspective you may not have had before, and you will see a much bigger picture when you get to the Index. There is much more I could cover, but let’s face it, I didn’t write the book, and I can’t possibly do it justice here. Thanks Scott, and good luck on the Book Tour.
Be sure to follow Scott in your Social networks, buy his book, there is much wisdom between the covers, and most definitely visit his UN-Marketing Blog.
A tease for you, you will love The UnEnding : )
This Is Amazing – Gary Hayes Social Media Count
I spend many hours doing research on many topics, and every once and I find something interesting like Gary’s Social Media Counter. I’m posting it here because he has graciously provided the code. The data is interesting in that how fast things are moving, one can only imagine what it will be like when the other 3 Billion people come online in the next 2 -3 years.
Take a few minutes to watch what’s happening, if you stare at it long enough you’ll see the elephant come at you : ) (Just Kidding)
Enjoy this and make sure you visit his site: http://www.personalizemedia.com/