I think the most important thing I learned from this class was that to succeed to in social media you have to be unique. When you look at some of the most successful social media campaigns like Burger King’s Subservient Chicken or the Doritos’ Super Bowl Commercials, they succeeded because they were unique and interesting.
This class taught us that not just by having us read it in a book, but through assignments like the Post-it Note Challenge. We had to think creatively to with a new medium to achieve value, which is the way this class should be taught. We heard from some of the leading business-people in Gainesville lecture on how they have harnessed innovative ideas to for success. More or less, their message was the same – think big and think creative. I came into this class wanting to learn how to better utilize social media tools for my father’s business and I think I have done just that.
Popularity: 3% [?]
In his article “World Wide Mush,” Jarone Lanier makes the argument that the internet and Web 2.0 collectivized thinking drown out any truly creative ideas. People also make the argument that they only serve to further creativity. My argument is that they do exactly neither.
Lanier laments that Web 2.0 will reduce the middle class to only accepting only “kudos” for their truly great ideas. Where his logic falls apart, though, is that the great successes of group-think have very little to do with people giving away knowledge that they could other wise profit from. Wikipedia may put some encyclopedias out of business, but the information is rarely of any use to the individual contributors. If someone thinks an idea is profitable, they rarely submit it for peer evaluation. Take the iPad for example, like all of their new products, Apple chose to wait to unveil it until they had finished manufacturing it. Perhaps if they had created a blog for customers to submit their ideas and opinions, they may have created a better product (or at least had a better name), but they knew that if they did they would risk a competitor stealing their idea and potential profit.
It is this restriction of Web 2.0 to less-than-profitable subjects that also keeps it from furthering creativity to any great extent. Because people don’t share their best ideas, those who might have been able to improve upon it can’t.
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I think one of the more underrated challenges of college is choosing where, and with whom, you are going to live. In my four years attending college I have lived in on-campus dorms, off campus apartment complexes, and rental houses and have had roommates that have been randomly assigned and chosen from amongst my friends. Each of these options had their pros and cons, the extent of which I rarely realized until I actually lived in them for a while. The dorms were great for getting to know people my first year, but the shared room started to where on me. I never realized some of my friends’ most annoying traits until I was roommates with them, and how much more annoying a randomly chosen roommate could be until I had one. Most of all, I wish I knew that living in a cheap house that is walking distance to campus is worth sacrificing both air-conditioning and personal space. My solution to this is to create a social review site for all the different housing options for a specific college town.
The idea is that it would be a kind of RateMyProfessors.com of housing choices. Users would be able to submit and read reviews of dorms, apartments, condos, and rental houses. Unlike other review sites, this would allow you to compare not only apartments to other apartments or rental properties to other rental properties, but all styles of living that are available in the town. This would all be free of charge and profit would be earned through advertising. The beauty of this is that, because the vast majority of the content will be created by users, most of the costs will go into running the site.
I would also distinguish my from Google’s rating system by allowing users to blog about these various choices. Some examples are “is it better to live in the dorms or look for off campus housing your first year?” or “should you rent or buy a property that can be flipped once you graduate?” Because the main targets of this site will be college students, it will rely on a Facebook fan page to spread the word.
I think this site would provide a much needed resource to many college students.
Popularity: unranked [?]
The Internet
The internet is everything in today’s world. It provides us with any and all information we could want while we sit at home. Who hasn’t sat at Wikipedia for hours learning random information? The internet is where we shop on Amazon, talk to friends on Facebook, research on Wikipedia, watch our television on Hulu – it’s hard to imagine a single facet of life that isn’t in the process of or already engulfed by the internet. If I lost all access to the internet today, I would never be able to write a good research paper again, period. I would lose contact with almost all of my friends and acquaintances and I would be so bored that I would probably take up a second job just to pass the time, but I wouldn’t be able to because I wouldn’t have the internet to tell me who is hiring.
I think it is this dependence we have developed on the internet that makes any censorship of the internet seem that much more wrong. To censor the internet is to censor life. It’s the same idea as book banning, there will always be instances where it’s perfectly legal and necessary, but their will always be a stigma attached to it. We will never truly ‘police’ the internet or have a regulatory body that resides over it because it goes entirely against the nature of the internet. The internet will always be an open, mass of content. There will be those who abuse this, and their will have to be new innovations to stop them. But size alone would halt any effort to actually oversee the whole internet.
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User generated content platforms can be a very useful, and cheap, way to spread the word about your company. Because you a given company is using an already existing platform (Facebook, Twitter), the costs of creating and maintaining these pages are comparatively low to traditional add campaigns. Additionally these platforms can potentially reach many more people than other forms of advertisement. The drawback is that the same platform used to spread word about your company or product can be used to expose its problems or inadequacies. Unless your company acts on these criticisms quickly, these platforms can end up doing much more harm than good.
An example of a company effectively using user generated content is iTunes with its Facebook fan pages. With over 3 million fans in the US alone, iTunes has created a successful community around themselves, using the Facebook platform. The wall is used to give both positive and negative reviews and there are hundreds of discussions over various subjects relating to iTunes. Personally, I became a fan because they often have free song and video giveaways offered or announced through the page. This is effective way to get customers to use your service when they normally wouldn’t have. I know that once I’m actually on iTunes, whether its to redeem an free song offer or look up some other song I have been interested in, I end up listening to a couple other songs and will usually end up buying one or two. In fact, now that I have finished this blog post I might do just that.
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So, this week’s topic was conversion marketing. The idea behind conversion marketing is to turn hits on you website into some kind of value, which can be anything from sales and leads to something less tangible. A site can have millions of hits, but if they aren’t converting, they may as well have had none. A website would monitor this conversion using something like Google Analytics or Webtrends, which collect data on how viewers get to your site, what they do there, how long they stay, and other relevant data. You would then use this data to raise the ratio of views to sales, leads, or whatever your goal is.
Using the Citizens Co-op as an example, Google Analytics could be attached to the blog my group is going to build for them. They could use the data collected from this to determine what percentage of the viewers go on to become members of the co-op via the website. Also, Google Analytics would track how many repeat visitors there are and how frequently they return, which could be used as a measure of how popular the blog is amongst the members of the co-op, assuming they are the major users, that is. Conversion marketing is an important part of creating an online presence and should be considered by any company preparing to do so.
Popularity: 2% [?]
So my group met with the student coordinators of Citzens Co-op on Tuesday. The Co-op’s main goal is to reach 500 members before it opens, which they are only 25 shy of achieving. They hope to make up the difference with students, giving them an incentive in the form of a cheaper, $25 membership. They also hope to increase their numbers with a bike tour sometime around mid April.
As far as an online presence goes, the Co-op has a website and Facebook account, and that’s it. I found it a little funny that Adam called that the first thing they would ask us to do is make them a Twitter account (I could almost here “Internet, black magic” in the background). In regards to expanding membership on campus, my group thought it would be a good idea to reach out to like-minded clubs and student organizations, possibly even those who are majoring in Sustainability. We also thought it would be a good idea to start a blog where members could share thoughts and ideas about the Co-op with each other. To get the ball rolling, we thought we could recruit people from similar organizations, like Gainesvillefarmfresh.com, to start blogging on a regular basis and offering a free membership to the most active blogger. We’ll probably make them a twitter, too. You know, just so we can say we did.
The Co-op's website
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Small, family-owned businesses used to dominate the American shopping landscape. Typically, every town would have several small retail stores that would collectively serve the various needs of consumers. This was brought to an end in the early 1960s with the incorporation of Wal-Mart and other big chain stores. These stores grew in number, spreading throughout the country, so that now it’s hard to envision even the smallest town lacking a Wal-Mart. These stores also grew in breadth – I have been to a small town where it seemed like that the Super Wal-Mart covered everything from sporting goods to grocery shopping, to banking. These big chain stores used this size to bargain for reduced pricing from manufacturers, which allowed them to out-compete the local business, driving many out of businesses.
Colonial Photo & Hobby
One would assume that a similar process of small business culling would occur with the advent of online shopping via Amazon or Craigslist, because of further price decreases and the lack of sales tax. In this writer’s experience, though, this hasn’t been the case. I will use my family’s business, Colonial Photo & Hobby, as an example because it is what I have the greatest experience with. The store deals in amateur and professional camera equipment, photo processing, framing, RC vehicles, and model trains. This caters to several niche customer groups and can also run on the more expensive end of retail shopping. They tend to require a knowledgeable sales staff (knowledge that can be hard to find online without familiarity with their jargon) and the price tends to make customers want to hold the product in their hands before they actually commit to buying it. If not for these traits (and the 55 years of reputation in Central Florida), Colonial Photo & Hobby most likely would not have survived the spread of chain stores. If you were to look at other small businesses still around, I bet you would find similar circumstances.
In regards to online shopping, I believe that the same traits that made a shop survive the spread of chain stores will help it survive the online economy. In fact, it seems like the chain stores have the greater threat leveled against them by online shopping; the same customers who left the small business for the chain store is more likely to leave the chain store for online shopping. An example is Ritz Camera, a chain camera store you have probably seen in the mall and happens to be one of Colonial Photo & Hobby’s larger competitors, which declared bankruptcy last year having to close half of its stores.
Small businesses could also use online marketing to spread word to new customers, network with each other, and share customers in different regions. An example of this is the Promaster group, which is a group of small camera stores which use their collective buying power to get lower prices from accessory manufacturers. The Promaster group has expanded to an online community which shares information and answers questions via blog. It seems that the only marketplace can only help the small business.
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This week in class we were assigned the task of creating as much value as possible using post-it notes. My initial thought was, “Well, that’s a little silly.” This was followed immediately by “I have absolutely no idea what I want to do for this.”
People looking for potential friends
So we break off into groups and start brainstorming. I made some half-cocked suggestion about turning them into some kind of pseudo handout/business card, but that was seen for what it was and dismissed. Eventually someone (I can’t remember who, or else I would give props where props are due) came up with the idea of creating a “Friend Wall” where people could write down their name, contact info, and a hobby or interest that they wanted to share with someone else. The thought is that people would grab down the post-it or copy down the contact info of someone with similar interests. This would create value by enriching people’s lives through new friendships. Also, as a last minute idea we put the class name and put a couple post-its with the blog URL on their, adding some value in the form of free advertising.
Admittedly, I was a little skeptical at first about how many people would be willing to put their info up for anyone to grab, but the “Friend Wall” ended up being very successful. We split up, two of us setting up at the Hub and the other two going over to Hume. Both locations were met with a lot of enthusiasm and we ended up filling up both walls. It’s amazing how responsive people are to opportunities to make new friends. I think this was worth it if only one new friendship was formed as a result of our efforts.
The Final Product
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For my project I am working with Citizens Co-0p. I think I’m going to really enjoy this project. It’s rare that to have a class that uses the “lean by doing” approach, which happens to be my favorite type of learning. As an added bonus we get to work with a real company. The Citizens Co-op is concerned with supplying fresh, socially conscious food to the Gainesville community. I sympathize with these goals and hope I and my group’s efforts can help them towards greater success.
Proof I work at Subway
As a side note, I also think it’s a little ironic I was placed in the food Co-op group because I also happen to work at Subway, arguably, the fast-food, corporate opposite of the Co-op. Just a thought.
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