The Next Economic Paradigm

Tag: affinity

OWN Your Travel Game

Social Flight is unique in its purpose of organizing communities of people into powerful collectives who can influence markets, vendors, and especially prices. This opportunity arises because of extraordinary inefficiencies in the airlines, but also in advertising, communications, marketing and every industry where a broker stands between your intentions and a market for goods and services.

Why Google Plus?

It may take a while for most people to catch on to what Google already knows: nothing economic can happen until people get together to build something.

Suppose you set up Google Circles by Geographic location.  Essentially, collect your home town friends, your college friends, your family branches, your company headquarters, etc., by geographic location.

Of course, each place where you have been has it’s own set of circles for things to do, places to go, and events to attend.  Each place that you go is a market of goods and services that is willing to accept your patronage as well as the patronage of people in your circles.

Now suppose you overlay your data on your personal “interests” data: 

This data set can include National Parks, affinity conferences, your Alma Mater “away” games, and seasonal recreation, for example.  This affinity data may also include concert tours of your favorite bands, speaker tours of your favorite authors, sibling birthdays, or promotional campaigns for your company, etc.

These form your intentions:

By far the most powerful business intelligence data is for the product that you will buy next, the person who you will talk to next, the place you will go next, and the impression that you will receive next.  This data belongs to you – like physical property – and YOU should be able to determine who sees.

YOU OWN your intentions data. 

Now overlay your intentions over a map of services and vendors such as hotels, or NASCAR races any other Goods and services that someone may want to sell to you.  Today, these vendors are paying a great deal of money to advertise their message to people who may never buy the product or create an unnecessary, and possibly negative, impression on those  who would not use the product in the first place.

$400 Billion dollar yearly advertising spend

These vendors pay and extraordinary amount of money on business intelligence, Groupons, and social media campaigns trying to discover YOUR intentions data.

They want to know where you are, but NOW, you know who THEY are.  You have every bit of information that you need about them to sell them YOUR product: your intentions.

Now you can simply ask them to bid for your intentions data and bid for your business – this is exactly what a print ad or TV commercial hopes to accomplish. 

Who is ready to build these applications with us?

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Social Isolation Funnel

You don’t stand a chance.

Social Influence Marketing (SIM) is becoming more sophisticated at finding you in your social space than you are in avoiding Social Influence Marketing (Advertising).   A new set of theories and systems have been deployed on how to engage you in conversation, grab your response data, funnel you into the pitch, induce credit card labor, and draw out your social broadcast.  Guess what, your social media sites are helping them….

Flirting with the enemy

The greatest problem that social media created for advertisers was to disperse the crowd from the once treasured “captive audience” of the radio/TV days to millions of individual affinity outlets.  Blasting the message home is no longer a function of Ad spend.    However, marketers are smart and social media sites are corporations too – now these forces are converging with unimaginable voracity.

They have you figured out.

In a quest for monetization, popular sites now provide “data services” to the brands. Such data empowers, once again, the advertiser over the viewer.  Why not provide “data service” to the users about what the brands pay for and what information they are mining about users?  If Brands are not comfortable with disclosing such information – should we be comfortable about teaching our “human nature” to them?

As social sites increasingly develop stickiness applications to retain the audience, new innovations are directed to that old business TV/Radio model rather than reinforcing the reason why social media emerged in the first place.    At some point, it becomes the best interest of the social site to meet the Wall Street expectation of “tangible output” over the user expectation of increased productivity. In other words, keep people glued to the LCD and don’t empower them to enter their communities to innovate social change.

Once users lose the ability to reject a brand message, we’re all right back where we started from.

People need to meet each other in real life to do real things. The best way to retain the original power of social media is to disperse once again.  Micro-social networks reflecting communities of interest need to form in proximity to each member.  Each community of interest must combine with other highly local social networks to share ideas, create local innovation, and enforce social priorities.

Hide your data in your own data:

Each time a different affinity group meets with another affinity group, the demographic data changes – it becomes renewed, refreshed and remains in the possession of the community.  This is where the value is, people can own it of they knew it’s theirs – and Brands can access far more value by supporting communities rather than by isolating communities.

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Making A Mess on Madison Ave

Wall Street talks about a Basket of Goods. The UN talks about a basket of Currencies.  What would Madison Avenue say when Main Street coverts your baskets of goods with their basket of social currencies?

Here is a simple business plan that will screw everything up.

Suppose that a pool of advertisers in a single industry (yup, competitors) all throw 10% of their advertising budget into a basket.  Now, suppose that money is distributed among a basket of the top 10% most active social media mavens (bloggers) based on their rankings related to the affinity segment.

For example, all teen fashion designers and outlets would toss 10% of their ad budget into a basket.  The money would be distributed to the top 10% of teen fashion bloggers for doing exactly what they are going to do anyway – communicate their lifestyle experiences in their galaxy of communities.

What does this achieve?

1. If your product sucks, you’ll know why.

2. If your competitor rocks, you’ll know why.

3. Your brand is disseminated more efficiently than advertising

4. You are supporting the community that serves you.

5. People who are good at community organizing can earn a living doing it – that’s good for communities and your brand image.

6. Beats the Payola Laws because the payer can only pull their money from the basket – not any single payee.  Pulling out would not send a good message oh, no, no, no

7. Bogus Bloggers can’t beat the rankings

8. a 300 Billion dollar per year advertising industry with a 95% failure rate can be bypassed by GOOD products – profit center anyone?

9. Designers create products in response to Social Priorities not Wall Street priorities.

10. You’ll create a Millions of young, proactive, innovative entrepreneurs too busy to watch traditional media anyway.

Oh sure, you’ll hear a desperate whine from Madison Avenue – That’s all free advertising – as a bulldozer moves the wrong way down a ONE WAY street.

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Change You Can Bank on

The Earth changes – it always has and it always will.  The most interesting thing about Earth is not rock, it is rate of change of rock. Yet it is this rate of change in rock that created oceans, continents and geographical features.  The rate of change in the landscape is what created and affects all humanity; global warming not withstanding.

In fact, the rate at which things change is the root of all financial deals, social interactions, creative discovery, intellectual pursuit, even criminal activity.  All value is created and destroyed in response to the rate at which something changes.  Since change is relative to time, the rate of change is something, like death, and taxes, that you can bank on.

Money, Knowledge, and Power

As a corollary; the ability to measure rates of change in things is the ability to measure value.  The ability to cause rates of change is the ability to create or destroy value.  It is therefore in our interest to try and express our world in terms of rates of change.  For example:

1    Money, interest, and stock price are deeply related.  Therefore, the rate of change of money is related to interest.  The rate of change of interest is related to growth rate.  The change in growth is monetized through a public market for its stock.  Stock price affects money and the cycle continues.

2    Information, knowledge and innovation are deeply related.  Therefore, the rate of change of information is related to knowledge.  The rate of change of knowledge is related to innovation.  Innovation creates new information.  And, the cycle continues

3    Attention, attraction, affinity, audience, and action are deeply related to each other.  Therefore the rate of change of attention is related to attraction.  The rate of change of attraction is related to affinity, etc., until finally, the rate of change in action gets everyone’s attention.  And the cycle continues.

Achilles’ Octopus

There are a few problems however.  If you remove, corrupt, or disengage any of the components, the cycle fails.  To complicate matters further, our three examples are also related: money, knowledge, and audience; stock price, information, and action; etc.

Points of failure can occur at any part of the cycle and it is often difficult to identify which failure caused what effect.   Does a stock price fail because the public lost affinity or because information was corrupted?  Does an economy fail because there is no money to invest in innovation or because our society outsources its knowledge economy?  Does a school system fail to deliver the right knowledge to society because the stock market failed or because there is no public action?

Social Media and the next paradigm of economic development

Social media allows us to express the dynamics of our world in real time and at great speed.  Feedback loops are shorter and cause and effect can be more easily differentiated.  The data that will be generated through the integration of social media will allow entrepreneurs to identify rates of change of the rates of change! Armed with computer enabled search and analysis algorithms, they can mange these complex new relationships to create value for themselves and their community in a new era of social capitalism.  Social media is a higher order calculus.

It will take everyone to accomplish this together but we can create a new landscape for our Earth, ourselves, and our children’s future.   This is change we must bank on.

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