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…)

One video ad can be re purposed on many different websites

I spent a greater portion of my business career in the photography industry. In my letters and marketing materials I repeated the time worn phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Now that we are living in a video world, the common person has nearly as many ways to capture the moments of their lives as Jim Carrey’s Truman Bank character in The Truman Show. Today, a video is worth 10,000 words.

Online video advertising is giving marketers another opportunity to reach targeted audiences with their messages. According to Borrell Associates, streaming audio and video ads now account for 19 percent of local online revenue and will rise to 59% by 2013.

Most marketers are having hard time thinking about adding video to their marketing tool chest for one reason: because in their mind, it’s still a very expensive and time-consuming marketing tool. They also have little to no experience with it, so they avoid it.

Video Advertising is as easy as 1,2,3

However, the Internet is changing all of that. Not only can anyone with a webcam, video cell phone, or simple video camera create a video and upload it to a Web site, it can be done within a matter of an hour without a budget! Sure, you can spend a great deal more time and energy at it, but I’m trying to break down some walls here and get you thinking about keeping it simple stupid! (…More…)

Life before MySpace, Facebook, YouTube

I was reading a report produced by the Pew Internet and American Life Project called, “A Portrait of Early Internet Adopters. Why People First Went Online and Whey they Stayed”.  The report by Amy Tracy Wells is  a quick read and a fun reminder of where online social networking got started.

Surveys conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project since 2000 have shown that the majority of people went online for personal reasons (50%), followed by work (31%) and school (19%).

Amy reminds us that the early roots of social networking started in BBSs (electronic bulletin board systems) and Usenet, chat rooms and threaded discussion software.  To access these systems one had to fire up a modem and wait!  A really fast modem in those days crawled.  When I lived in Telluride, Colorado in 1995, I remember waiting about 8 hours to download a new version of AOL’s software! (…More…)

What would 580,000 advertising impressions do for your business?

Al Gore gets kidded for suggesting he invented the Internet.  Around my house I get teased for suggesting to my kids that I invented Facebook.

Back in 1996, I created an online community for students and called it StudentAccess.  We modeled the community around GeoCities and Tripod with a focus only on college students.  We provided a free home page, email address and photo upload.  We ran ads in student magazines around the country and anxiously waited for students to show up.  Nobody came!   Not only was it a total failure, but I ended up getting sued by Princeton Review for using the name Student Access! (They had a line of books called StudentAccess to Law, Medical, etc.)  Thirty thousand dollars later, we surrendered the URL studentaccess.com to Princeton Review and decided to focus in a different direction.

Fast forward 7 years and Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, which has become one of the largest - online communities in the world.    Enough old boy stories,  let’s get back to the reason you are reading this post. (…More…)

Stock brokers, real estate agents, sales people, physicians, service and retail industries can use twitter to reach and engage customers!

Many consultants, authors and individuals are using Twitter as a personal branding tool.   By following others and commenting on what is happening in their lives they hope to build their own following  hoping it will increase their social media stature and brand.

So how are businesses like yours using it?

I was developing a marketing strategy recently and ran across the website namethis.com It’s a tool that includes online community and social networking tools to access the wisdom of the crowds to help you name products and services.  Their motto is quite simple, “three world-validated names for your thingamajib in 48 hours.

When someone like you or I need help in naming a product, we simply pay 99 bucks and wait 48 for the top three names as determined by the participants in the online community. The creative community sits back and waits for you or someone else to throw out a naming opportunity.   It’s really an amazing process to watch as people from all over the world come forward to give you their input and suggestions.   (…More…)

The American image around the world has just about reached the lowest point we can get. The war in Iraq and now the incredible mismanagement of Wall Street, banks and ethic issues created by businesses like Enron has tarnished our reputation, respectability and trust.

In the midst of the mind numbing deficit numbers (now 11+ trillion debt) that we are being forced to absorb I was thrilled to run across a story on the Daily Camera, a newspaper in Boulder, Colorado. Apparently 10 years ago, residents of DUSHANBE, Tajikistan, a sister city of Boulder, gave the city the Dushanbe Teahouse as a gift from their city. (I’m assuming their town is known for tea!) After a decade of discussion and fundraising the city of Boulder reciprocated with funding ($1,000,000) to develop a Cyber café in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

The Café will feature food from both countries, books and information. If they do it right, it will become a powerful International relations tool. Kudo’s to the City of Boulder , it’s Mayor Shaun McGrath and it’s people for showing us how to use the Internet to bring people of different countries and cultures together!

Online Communities to bring Iraqi and American Families together

Reading their story, reminded me about an idea I floated to Congressman Dennis Kuncinich, from Ohio on April 8th 2003 soon after we started the war in Iraq. It was a concept I called, Adopt a War Effected Person or Family.    (…More…)

If a tire company benefits from having an online community, so would YOU!

I was talking to a friend the other day about his desire to create an online community.  He was hot on social media and wanted to get in on the game.   He was struggling with what kind of online community he should create.   He owns a game company and has an enormous amount of content that he gets from the gaming companies about upcoming releases.  I suggested that he offer a members only online community where he offers the inside information he is getting.  Now he’s trying to decide if he should charge or make it free!

Our discussion got me thinking about the many clients I’ve spoken with who had similar thoughts.

• Who would want to come to an online community for a cleaning company?
• Who would want to come to an online community for a manufacturing company?
• Who would want to come to an online community for a service company?

So what do I tell them?

My suggestion is to think out of the box.  Think about what your organization can do to make the world, your community or neighborhood a better place.   What are the burning issues that people who use your product are facing?   What can you do to give your clients and others a voice in solving those issues? (…More…)

The Internet is changing everything!

Businesses are having to learn on the fly how to play and do business in a world where the behavior of consumers are changing literally overnight. While many organizations saw the changes coming, most are still unaware that the Internet will fundamentally change the way they do business.

The statistics are easy to find everywhere. In just 4 years, social networking sites have exploded. Sites like YouTube grew to over 100 million users, MySpace to 180 million users, Facebook to 90 million users and even Linkedin (a business networking site) is growing by 1 million users a month!

When you compare that to the fact that the New York Times which was founded in 1851 has only 1,000,000 subscribers you begin to realize that there has been a fundamental shift in consumers behaviors.

What we are suggesting is that social networking, Web 2.0 and online community tools, techniques and strategies are introducing new ways for businesses to acquire, retain and engage their customers. The only problem is, few businesses know how to effectively use them. Worse companies don’t have the right staff to efficiently move their companies into these new areas. (…More…)

About 6 years ago I sent an overnight letter to Starbucks headquarters suggesting they consider offering their customers a private, password protected online community to continue to build their brand, engage customers and gather more data about their customers.

At the time my firm provided online communities to groups and organizations in the higher education space and we were looking for a way to leverage our product in the commercial market.  The company executive I sent my letter to was preoccupied with other issues at the time and my subsequent follow up phone call was met with a response,  well - similar to what you’ve heard from time to time in your  career – don’t call us, we’ll call you!

Fast forward to 2008 and we see Starbucks coming out with what they call their new customer online community called Mystarbucksidea.com.   The community offers customers an opportunity to help direct where the company is going and is modeled after a number of successful examples including Dell’s  Community Forum and Salesforce’s Ideastorm.   (…More…)