FBI, Electronic billboards, Social Media & MORE “wisdom of the crowds”

The FBI is at the beginning phases of using social media and the “wisdom of the crowds” to solve crime.

I was working out today and watched as the FBI unveiled a new crime fighting strategy.  They unveiled on Time’s Square a massive electronic billboard that will list America’s most wanted!

NBC did a great job covering the story and providing additional background to show how their strategy emerged.  It appears they picked up on the Amber alert technique and started working with Clear Channel and other electronic billboard companies to post information about wanted criminals.   The program proved effective for them when they posted an image of a South Carolina bank robber that led to his identification.  They then posted his name and information which led to his arrest.

So let’s fast forward this and go “back to the future”

In my book, Engage Customers Online I shared a story how the car company - Mini Cooper used RFID to communicate with Mini Cooper owners through select billboards.  (They called Motorboards).  Mini owners that were interested completed an online profile and were then sent a “key fob”.   When the driver came within range of a Motorboard, the LED readout on the Motorboard displayed a customized, often humorous message that related to the owner’s profession, name, or roof design. Examples: “Nice roof graphic, Rocket!” to an owner with a car nicknamed Rocket, or “Moving at the speed of justice!” to a lawyer.  That was about 3 years ago!

Fast forward to today and imagine that you are driving past a billboard that is using Facebook Connect and RFID.  As you approach it, it instantly taps into your social network to see if you are in some way connected to one of America’s most wanted (or anyone wanted for that matter.  It might include child support payments, parking tickets outstanding - who knows where it will stop)

If it finds you are connected in some way, the billboard or an electronic dashboard system  instantly (says or posts)  “Don, George Lucas is wanted for making science fiction movies,  you are connected to him by Angie Dickinson.  We’re dropping an alert in your News Feed to let us know any tips you may have that will bring him in safely.”

This automated system would feed tips back to the control center where they are instantly validated and checked out.

All of us are trying to figure out how to play and use Social Media for our businesses.  There are good and bad signs we need to be paying attention to as we move along.  Those that are living “The Truman Show” on Facebook, need to rethink what they are doing.  And, those responsible for creating strategies, need to keep in mind basic civil liberties and privacy norms.

It’s an exciting time to be involved in Social Media.   You need to help shape it for the good of your organization and your customers.

H&R Block provides example college admissions can adopt!

 The headline of this blog today was inspired by an article in Advertising Age written by Beth Snyder Bulik.

H&R Block as you know, prepares tax statements for millions of customers.  It’s a very seasonal business - but its big business!  There are nearly 13,000 retail shops around the country and the company has 100,000 employees.

H&R started to notice that behaviors of consumers were changing last year when they recognized that out of the 95 million tax returns that were filed electronically, nearly 1/3 of them were from home computers.  They realized they needed to offer a home computer tax program to not only build their brand, but offer a bridge to their retail shops.

To market their program they decided to incorporate both traditional advertising and social media marketing.  Their goal was to use social media to educate customers, answer questions, build brand awareness and leverage the conversations that develop into visits to their corporate page where the visitor could select a retail shop to help them prepare their taxes or purchase their software.

To accomplish that, H&R built a 1,000 employees social media army!   They provided this team an overview of their strategy, what they wanted to accomplish, outlined their goals and offered basic training on social media.  According to Bulik:

The social-media strategy includes a Twitter account, widgets, blogs, a YouTube channel and a Facebook fan page and apps — a recent one in the form of a quiz asks, “How deductible are you?”

Why did they do that?

If the average person on Twitter has 100 friends, 1,000 employees have an opportunity to reach not only 1,000,000 people but their tweets have the ability to reach the 100 people that each of the people they know are connected to.   That’s a big number!   And they don’t have to pay a marketing, PR or advertising channel to reach them.

This army could be on any of their social networks and respond when:

• Someone mentions they have to do their taxes
• A tax question is asked
• Someone is interested in finding a place that provides loans based on taxes due to the person
• Someone is looking for a person to do their tax
• Someone shares an issue they have had with the IRS

While Social Media monitoring software catches this information, it’s people that respond.  Because even in this new online world, “people still do business with people”.

So how would your company unleash an army of Social Media?   Let’s take a look at this from the college recruitment angle.

Admissions offices could do the same thing.

Think about it, a college has thousands of students, tens of thousands of alumni (if not hundreds of thousands) and dozens of staff  that could form the core of the Social Media team.  This army of people could be create a variety of content in audio, video, text and or photographs to build the college brand, engage prospective students and maintain mindshare of prospective students.

• Students could be sharing information about events, activities and courses.
• Alumni could share experiences, career advice.
• Faculty could offer min courses, answer questions.
• Prospective students could be talking about their visits, sharing research and students, alumni and faculty they are meeting.

And of course all could be engaging prospective students in dialogue.

Why does this make sense? 

1. It’s cheap! It’s repeatable and once you’ve built the system it runs by itself.
2. Everyone I just mentioned has a vested interest in seeing the college succeed.
3. This Social Media team represents authentic voices that prospective students will believe.

Experts today remind us that you no longer have control of your brand. 

Your brand exists in the people we’ve listed above.  Prospective students no longer pay attention to the “slogans and phrases” colleges work so hard to create and market. Students today pay just as much or more attention to what people they know say about the college.

So what are the steps to implement a social media strategy within a college admissions office?

We’ll cover that in upcoming blog articles.  ? leave a comment or call 800-805-9413.

Twitter, Facebook and other social media will help you make decisions

Growing up in the 60’s was an incredible time and yet stressful time.  Everything was in flux.  The role of a father was changing from the master and ruler of his domain to one where he shared power with his wife, sex came out in the open, equality finally was put on the front burner and students learned how to collectively band together to change the world!

It was a decade that sought to give “Power to the People”.  A time in which people were actively exercising their right to be involved in decisions.

In the 40 some years since that movement started, I don’t think 16 year olds forgot about the values associated with power to the people.  As they grew up, they changed the world, made it more transparent, worked to provide equality in race, pay and ability, thought more about the environment rights and much more.

Now as we enter the next decade, technology is going to take “power to the people” to a whole NUTHER level.  Technology is giving individuals, corporations and non profits the ability to reach out and use the power of the people to accomplish things that would not have been achievable.  Today we call that “Crowd sourcing”  (…More…)

Crowd sourcing spells trouble for wedding photographers

You might have noticed that I’m writing more articles on crowd sourcing lately.  It’s because I’m beginning to see how fundamentally it will change the way our businesses are structured and our society if functioning.

Web 2.0 tools like Flickr and YouTube started to teach us how we could interact and engage with each other around photos and video.   As our behaviors changed and we understood the value the technology provided us, the next stage of innovation is using Web 2.0 thought processes to develop ways where people can share ideas, concepts and effectively get work done faster with less effort.

Today I ran across a site called Kedai, “smile, snap, share”.  (Would love to know what Kedai means)  Kedai and future incarnations of it creates enormous financial pressure on wedding photographers.

Now a wedding with 100 guests can have the power of 100 cameras snapping away capturing their unique view of the day/night/week for the wedding party, friends and family.  It’s a shared experience.

Here’s how it works. (…More…)

Who do you believe?

What’s social media, excessive content and entertainment news doing to us?

What is the proliferation of news and information doing to us?  What is all this content coming from all different sources, that has been repackaged, regurgitated and driven through wires, microwaves, satellites doing to us?

A new survey by the Pew Research Center show that trust in the news media has reach a new low, with record numbers of American saying it is inaccurate.   This year’s poll suggest 63 percent of the respondents said news articles were often inaccurate. Seventy four percent said news organizations favor one side or another in reporting political news.   News (entertainment) programs are starting to align with party lines.   If you are Republican, your news fix probably comes from Fox.

There’s something happening today that is making a growing majority of us skeptics and not sure what to believe.  The public is starting to lean toward the feelings John Lennon shared in his song “God”.  In it he says:

I don’t believe in magic,
I don’t believe in I-ching,
I don’t believe in bible,
I don’t believe in tarot,
I don’t believe in Hitler,
I don’t believe in Jesus,
I don’t believe in Kennedy,
I don’t believe in Buddha,
I don’t believe in mantra,
I don’t believe in Gita,
I don’t believe in yoga,
I don’t believe in kings,
I don’t believe in Elvis,
I don’t believe in Zimmerman,
I don’t believe in Beatles,
I just believe in me,

While John was working out a painful breakup of the Beatles and trying to move on with his life, my interpretation of the polls are this;  there is so much information available through so many different channels that ALL pose as credible news sources, that it’s hard for anyone to know what to believe. (…More…)

Find out what others are saying about your company or product!

Daily I see more products and services that automatically search the web for people talking about products, services, issues and then aggregates this information and delivers it back to me in a variety of methods to help me make decisions.

So what do you do with that information?

Well in the case of the stock market, you can take mentions of companies, analyze the mentions as positive or negative and then graphically display for others to interpret and use to make a better decision.

Interesting way this blog started.

I wrote a blog article about the “wisdom of the crowds” and the next day a tweet showed up in my Twitter account:

@Philabaum Check outhttp://www.piqqem.com for another example of wisdom of crowds.

Wow, pretty smart!  Did the system automatically find me and post that information, or is someone sitting at a computer somewhere in the world being delivered mentions of words, concepts and ideas who then puts a human spin to them and who then sends the message off?

In my case this really worked.

Not only was I intrigued, I followed the link to the product piqqem and signed up!

Think about how you could use Twitter to watch for mentions of terms and keywords that might identify who you are, what your customers like, attitudes and or locations.    You too could have a business process that would deliver frightenly  fast and relevant information to people who are out there talking about services they like or need.

I’m just starting to get a handle on this.  Would love to know your take!

Life is too complicated. No one person or group has the answers!

You know how-  from time to time - you get a song stuck in your head, and it just keeps playing over and over and over!  I’ve never looked at it too seriously, occasionally I have wondered if the content of the song was something my psyche or soul needed to help it adjust to a situation or to get an “attitude” adjustment.

If you’ve been following my blog, you’ve noticed that I’m stuck in a rut writing more and more about the “wisdom of the crowds” or as some refer to as “crowd sourcing”.

I’ve been greatly influenced by Don Tapscott’s book, Wikinomics, (not just because he’s also named Don) because it really awakened the reality of how the Internet has changed the way we run our lives, businesses and organizations.

In the past, the person at the top of the organization had a phone to the outside world, a very small group of advisors and his or her gut to make decisions.  Today, that same person at the top has a Twitter account,  Facebook account, etc,  which provides them a million points of view on a subject or feedback on a proposed idea or new product. (…More…)

Over the past year I’ve been watching the drama unfold in the  Netflix one million dollar contest.

Netflix spent millions writing software code that would analyze their customer interests and likes and then use that information to recommend movies they would like.  If I give a thumbs up to the movie The Terminator, along with a number of sci-fi movies, the program will present me with additional movies that match what I am interested in..

The Netflix philosophy is simple.  The more movies I see that I like, the more I will order.

In October of 2006, Netflix caught onto the “wisdom of the crowds” thing and developed a contest that offered a million dollar prize for the individual or group that could improve the inhouse software they had developed.  (called Cinematch).

The winner would design a software program that would be 10 percent more effective and take away a million dollar prize.

The three year event has kept many in suspense, received a great deal of publicity and attention and has gone a long way to help their customers understand their passion to better serve them.  As a Netflix user, it caught my attention!  And to the participants who put hundreds of hours into the project, they just couldn’t let go.

The program started out with individuals around the world working on the problem on their own.  Then an interesting thing happened.  Individuals’ realized they didn’t have the expertise in areas that others who were actively working toward the solution had.  They realized they needed to merge or they were out of the race.  And as time continued, after one or two people came together, groups started coming together.   A group that realized they were slightly behind another team, then merged with a team that had code that would give them another 2 percent advantage.   And so it went until on Monday a seven person team of statisticians, machine -learning experts and computer engineers which called themselves the BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos was announced the winner of the one million dollar prize. (…More…)

The first business I started while in college, I called Aardvark Studios.

I’ve never been very creative when it comes to naming a business so after days of searching for the right name, Aardvark stuck.   We took pictures of graduates when they received their diplomas on graduation day, and then mailed a free proof to each graduate, giving them an opportunity to order enlargements.  By the time I sold the business, 25 years later, we were photographing about 200,000 graduates each year.

So I had to laugh when I saw a story in the New York Times about a company founded in 2007 called Aardvark.    The firm was jumping into the online advice business, the same business that Microsoft’s new Bing has entered, Hunch and Yahoo’s Answers.  Aardvark’s twist however is it’s among the first that provides an intelligent way to reach out to authorities on subjects within your circle of friends.

The second thing that makes Aardvark different from others is the answers are created real time and specific to your question only.   When you pose a question like:

1. What wine goes good with chicken?
2. What’s the best grad school for someone interested in marketing?
3. What’s the best computer for my 15 year old daughter?
4. Where do I go when I visit Italy this year?
5. Which mower should I get to mow an acre of fairly flat land?
6. What do I have to look out for when I buy a new car?

Aardvark fires out the question through your Facebook friends and their friends and then delivers the response to you through your IM.

What it tries to do is target those with the best chance of answering the question.   Instead of blasting the question to everyone you know, it sends a limited number at a time so not to over burden the entire system.   It also utilizes information from other social networking profiles to match interests, demographics characteristics and other factors.

If no one answers a question, Aardvark continues to broaden the group of people until it gets an answer for you.  If you are like me a response usually invokes additional questions so Aardvark enables the person asking the question to respond to the person who answered it with additional questions.

Like any other tool, the more people that use it the more powerful it will become.  When you sign up,  you will be asked to share 3 areas you are knowledgeable  on.  This helps the system know which type of questions to send to you.

So how will this change your business?

This kind of tool will affect how your products and services are sold.  Consumers will still be influenced by advertising but they will learn to go to their network for advice on which product to buy.  It will help your staff find quick answers from others within your company.   The world is getting increasingly more complex.  A tool like this will help your staff reach out to others in and outside your business to gain quick answers to problems they are facing.

And if you are looking for a job, it will instantly put you in touch with the right people who can help you!

The end result is, decisions will be made faster, based on more experience.

So I have one question to ask Aardvark.   When I owned my photography business, nearly every week, someone asked me, “Why did you name your company Aardvark?”

So Aardvark, “Why did you name your business Aardvark?”

Speed Trap is beat by the “wisdom of the crowds”

My wife shared with me an article the other day that appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal that had gotten a great deal of comments.

Apparently a group of 8 motorcycle officers were dispatched from the Columbus State Highway patrol and assigned to conduct a massive ticketing campaign on a stretch of Interstate 77 near where I live in the Bath, Ohio.   While I’m not sure why they were assigned from Columbus, the fact that they were could become a problem for the state in making the tickets stick.

The four day campaign was very successful and resulted with over 800 tickets issued to motorists. (I’m glad I was working on a update to a new Webinar because I didn’t leave my office for nearly a week and if I had, I’m sure I would be one of the 800).

The comments to the article ranged from individuals chastising the state for creating a situation where 800 families in these hard economic times are now going to be forced to pay a $150 to $250 fine.   Other comments from the reporters indicated a near majority of the tickets were issued for going less than 10 miles over the speed limit. (…More…)