Social Media

People always want to know how to make money with social media.

The problem is that social media doesn’t make money FOR you. Social media ENABLES YOU to make money…. maybe.

Everybody wants to know how their sales are going to increase once they hire you to create a website or set them up with a presence on Facebook or Twitter.

In Fact… Your sales are NOT going to increase unless a) YOU know what to do with your own internet presence, or b) you HIRE SOMEONE ELSE that knows what they’re doing to handle that aspect of your business for you.

Buying Trophies

In contemplating social media strategies, you have to see yourself as the owner of a race car team and your goal is to win races, thus receiving trophies.

As the owner, you have to decide where you’re going to allocate your budget (money) so you achieve your desired outcome.

If you’re racing in a legitimate organization, you can’t BUY TROPHIES. If you could buy trophies, your competition would be able to buy them too and there would be no reason to run any of the actual races.

Similarly, in social media, you can’t BUY SUCCESS. If you could, everybody would pay some money, receive a positive ROI and there would be no need for professionals at any point of the process.

Unfortunately, this is how a lot of people sell social media to you. They know you know less than they do, so they give you useless tidbits of information and charge you handsomely for “consulting” with them. This is usually the best thing for them to do because if they told you what you REALLY needed to do to be successful with social media, THEY wouldn’t get very much of your money because most of them don’t’ have any of the technical skills necessary to actually DO any of that process for you.

Winning Races

In reality, you have to actually WIN RACES to receive trophies.

What’s the process involved in doing that? o_O

1. You get the trophy by winning the race
2. You win the race by finishing in first place
3. You finish the race by starting the race (driving)
4. You enter the race by having something to drive (a car)
5. You have a car and a driver because you spent MONEY on them

As you can see, you spend your money ENABLING yourself to potentially win. You don’t spend money directly on the WIN.

What does this look like in social media strategy?

The part that people TELL YOU is that you need a website and a Facebook account and a Twitter account. The part that they TELL YOU is that you want people to follow you and the more the merrier.

Budgeting Maintenance

The part that they DON’T TELL YOU is that they’re selling you a car, not a trophy. They’re selling you the ability to MAYBE win.. POSSIBLY…

They also don’t tell you that this isn’t a car show, it’s a race. If it were a car show, you could bring your car to the venue and potentially win a prize for “prettiest car”, or “best paint job”, or “best-built engine”… Being that this is a RACE, it means that you need a DRIVER. o_O

If you’ve already spent money on the car (website), someone has to drive it (maintain your presence). That’s either going to be YOU or someone you hire to maintain your online presence for you.

If you’re going to do it yourself, you’re going to have to spend HOURS each week interacting with customers and potential clients, reading blog posts, writing blog posts, updating your inventory on your site, searching the internet for positive and negative references to your company, checking your statistics to see which items and pages are the most popular and which aren’t doing well, reading and replying to emails, paying attention to the endless flow of twitter posts from the thousands of people you “followed” because some idiot told you to, fielding phone calls and returning voicemails from people that got your number from your website, reading and intelligently replying to comments you receive on your blog, keeping spam and other dumb comments out of your comment section, reading up on the latest technologies for maintaining your presence, spending time on trial & error with new and potentially exciting products…

Thanks For The Money

THIS is what they don’t tell you. They’re’ just like “Give me your money. Here’s your website. Peacebeyotch! :D”. This is why so many people have garbage internet presences, because nobody told them that after you make a blog, you have to populate it and constantly update it. Nobody told them that if you make a site where you’re selling products on the internet, you THEN have to spend your time advertising your product or you need to hire someone else to do that for you.

Nobody told them that if you make a Facebook page and then you don’t actively participate in conversations, you don’t build any rapport and you don’t make any sales. Nobody told them that they needed to participate in conversations that are important to OTHER PEOPLE and not just those that revolve around your being able to sell something and get some money.

Nobody told them that if you follow 3,000 people on Twitter, you’re going to have so many updates that you can’t possibly read all of them, much less contemplate them and reply to them. Guess what? :D .. If you can’t read everything from the 3,000 people you’re following, the people that are following 60,000 people don’t see what YOU WROTE either. o_O

Are You Qualified?

Even if you tried to maintain your own internet presence, how good are you at doing that? How good are you at socializing? How good are you at holding conversations with people? How good are you at SPELLING and GRAMMAR? HAHAHA How good are you at knowing which posts to weigh in on and which to leave alone? How good are you at finding out where people are talking about you or your company, what they’re saying and how you can respond to them? How much time do you have to monitor the internet and respond quickly, giving yourself the appearance of caring as opposed to the appearance of someone that built a car that they don’t know how to drive or built a store that they don’t have time to stock and maintain?

So.. Next time you’re thinking about incorporating social media into your business strategy, recognize that you have to budget not only to BUILD your site, but also to MAINTAIN it.

If you don’t have money to pay someone to maintain your site, either it’s not going to get done or you’re going to have to pay yourself to do it during time that you could have spent billing clients and making your money back.

Either way, nobody’s going to hand you a trophy because you got a website built or because you made a Facebook Fan Page or a Twitter account. That’s not where the work ends. That’s where the work starts.

Related Posts

• Budgeting For Internet Video (You Get What You Pay For)
• Social Media Smoke & Mirrors
• Google Plus Circles – How To Use Them
• Thoughts about the “Fast Company Influence Project”
• Famous For Nothing [Fame, Part 3]

Fellaz: It’s All Over! :O

The Game as we know it is about to be turned on its ear! It’s all over. Get ready for the big Going-Out-Of-Business sale. What’s on sale, you ask?

YOU! You’re going out of business! :D

Systematically, male leverage in the dating game has been eroding, or perhaps has been purposely erodED.

Back in the day, it was easy to pull chicks, because they couldn’t do anything on their own. I mean, they were always intelligent enough to, they just weren’t allowed to.

According to the Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S.
Timeline of Key Events in the A…, before August 26, 1920, women didn’t even have the right to vote. There was a bunch of other stuff women were dissuaded from, like having jobs, having their own money, owning land, starting a business…. Add that to the brainwashing girls receive to this very day when they receive baby dolls and toy ovens for Christmas to prepare them for their role as child-bearer, child-raiser, cook, maid, etc and it was a veritable buyer’s market. Oh… don’t forget the Scarlet Letter treatment women still receive to this day if they express themselves sexually and ‘get around’ in the same way that guys do. So… Basically, what you had was a bunch of chicks, sitting around with nothing to do, no money, probably no cars (? horses and buggies? hahaha) hoping that their lives would eventually *BEGIN* when some guy wanted to marry them.

Meanwhile, The Fellaz were living large because they were completely unrestricted in getting money, houses, land, voting, playing the field, etc. All you had to do was be better than the next man who comes a-knocking on a lady’s door as a suitor, and you were guaranteed to bag the chick. Of course, people like Fonzie had multiple chicks, either in parallel or serial, but that’s a different topic. :D

So anyway, in the 1920s, women got the vote. No big deal. However, around the 1940s, World War II kicked off, and all The Fellaz were sent to fight (read: die). In order to maintain American industry, there was no choice except to replace the guys with the chicks that had previously been sitting around at home. *THIS* was a big deal, :D because all of a sudden, “Sistahs were doin’ it for them-SELVES!!!”… Ya HEARD? :D Now, there’s no more sitting at home waiting for you to show up with your money and car, because she has HER money and HER car! :O No waiting for you to take her to Paris or Disney World, because she’s going to go if she wants to, AND hang out with her co-working female friends to boot! hahaha ROAD-TRIIIIP!!! :D

Guys’ leverage down the drain.

Fortunately, not all chicks took advantage of this opportunity to be prosperous. There were still a bunch of lazy chicks left over that wanted to get by on their looks and become “kept women”. There was also the mainstream media who recognized the problem of women doing EXACTLY what they wanted, when they wanted, and did their damnedest to keep images of how women are ‘supposed’ to act all over the newspapers, film reels and televisions.

At some point in the 1960s, “Women’s Lib” popped up to combat myriad injustices towards American females. This movement has done a lot of good for women, however, some chicks got completely carried away with it! :D

In 1968, Valerie Solanas wrote the SCUM Manifesto. I was lucky enough to have been handed a copy of this SCUM Manifesto by a good friend while we were in High School, and found it to be a rather interesting read. Quoting from the wikipedia entry:

“Sex is not part of a relationship: on the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time. The female can easily — far more easily than she may think — condition away her sex drive, leaving her completely cool and cerebral and free to pursue truly worthy relationships and activities; but the male, who seems to dig women sexually and who seeks out constantly to arouse them, stimulates the highly sexed female to frenzies of lust, throwing her into a sex bag from which few women ever escape.”

[Side Note: Now you see how it's come to the point in 2008 when bookstore technique is a perfectly valid gameplan. Act like you've evolved as she has instead of "digging her sexually" and "constantly trying to arouse her", and you're "In like Flynn"! :D]
So, SCUM Manifesto advocated taking guys out of the loop, entirely. This brings us to February, 2008 and this article discussing British scientists trying to figure out how to turn women’s bone marrow into sperm. :O

What this means is that the last stronghold of The Fellaz is going down the tubes, and *YOU* are about to be OUT. OF. BUSINESS! :D

Once they figure this out, women will not need you for AN-NY*THING*! :D

Nothing.

This is partially what the movie “Fight Club” was about. Women do not need you to provide:

The only thing she needs *YOU* for is your MIT-graduate genes, complete with orangeish-brown complexion and naturally curly hair, and if they figure out how to extract that from the bone marrow of some chick that has those same features…

It’s A Wrap! :(

DatingGenius

Related Posts

• Life Isn’t Fair
• Context / Locker-Room Conversation
• The Lab – Episode 02: Response To Randolfe
• Take her to the Book Store!
• Does it matter what women think?

Tomorrow night, (Friday, July 13th, 7pm EST) Cruxy will host a one-of-a-kind event as Suzanne Vega returns to her avatar form for a special virtual listening party in Second Life. Vega will be celebrating the upcoming release of her new album BEAUTY & CRIME, out July 17 on Blue Note. I caught up with Jon Oakes to get the inside story. :)

What is Cruxy?

Cruxy is a media platform that allows any digital content creator (mostly emerging filmmakers and musicians) to promote and sell their works. Here’s a simple example: You’ve shot a short film. You put it in Mp4 format and upload it to Cruxy. We create all of the thumbnails, previews and promotional widgets for you. You set a price of $1 for others to buy a download of the film. We handle taking the money from the buyers and delivering cash to you (less a small fee that we charge).

Here’s a real world example of Cruxy in action. Some folks in the Midwest have a company called ShortTrackWorld. They go (in their cool van) to lots of small car races all over the Midwest where regular folks race their super modified race cars around… you guessed it, short tracks. ShortTrackWorld films the car races and then uses a satellite link to upload the videos from the event to their Cruxy page. They sell the videos of the race event to the drivers and fans and the videos are available just hours after the race. It’s pretty cool in action. You can check out the ShortTrackWorld page on Cruxy here: www.cruxy.com/stw

Recently we’ve been more focused on helping creators get their work into virtual world environments like Second Life. We see that as the next phase and our main focus moving forward.

What is the status of Cruxy as a startup, and who is team?

We are two full timers with a coterie of supporters, contractors, advisors and well-wishers. We are financed by our personal savings accounts, some paying engagements, anxiety and sweat.

Nathan Freitas and myself, Jon Oakes, have been working together for over eight years through three different (successful!) startups. We have built a ton of different technology, products, and solutions for people ranging from the government, to major corporations, and other technology businesses, but are most excited now to be applying our skills and inspiration towards creating new economic and marketing models for creative people, as well as the entertainment industry. Through Cruxy.com, we get to work with true indie talent and give them access to our entire platform. Working with a major artist and label such as Blue Note allows us to customize aspects of our platform, and create unique solutions, which also happen to help pay the bills. Its a good setup, and allows us to see the radical changes that are happening in this business from multiple standpoints.

What’s some of the interesting technology behind Cruxy.com?

As a startup, we need to be smart about how we spend our money so we use Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services for all of our server and data delivery needs. We pay on a variable basis (we did not have to go plunk down $25k for a bunch of servers and commit to a high monthly data service fee). This is really “on demand” computing and it allows us to scale in a pay that is precisely correlated ith our traffic and demand… rather than investing everything in infrastructure and hoping to fill up the pipe.

We’ve built a pretty robust system for syndicating media content. We built our syndication system to use the XSPF format which gives us unlimited dynamic playlisting capabilities.

We’ve also built a “virtual world widget” which allows people to distribute their music to their avatar in Second Life. They can then stream their music into their land or venue in Second Life so others can experience their music in a totally new and social way. Rather than just have a bunch of people anonymously visit a web page and listen to your stuff, with the virtual world widgets, you can hang out in your virtual environment in Second Life while a group of people check out and discuss your work.

Besides Second Life, are there other places where creators can syndicate their media?

Cruxy supports a variety of technologies that allow any media upload to our system to be republished and indexed by almost any standards-based service on the web. We’ve got flash widgets, RSS feeds, XSPF feeds, and even some microformats support. We also recently announced our deep integration with FaceBook so creators can get their work out to their FaceBook network more easily. We expect to launch this feature in August.

Looking towards the future, we see the growth of gaming and virtual worlds as online social environments to be a huge opportunity for creative artists to gain exposure and income. We fully intend to extend the Cruxy platform into these types of spaces and economic models.

What’s the story behind tomorrow’s Second Life event with Suzanne Vega?

We have built a virtual lower east side “Ludlow Street” circa 1990 environment to promote Suzanne Vega’s new album “Beauty and Crime”, which is full of songs about various aspects of New York. Suzanne will join us (in avatar form) for a live interview and take questions from her fans. Avatars who attend will also be able to watch video of some of her recent live performances and sample her new album.

Each attendee to the event will receive a Virtual World Widget that allows them to host their own listening parties and share the music with friends in their own land or club within Second Life.

What makes this event with Suzanne Vega different from her first appearance in Second Life?

We used the new Second Life voice beta software for this event. We also built the lower east side environment where avatars can come to hang out, drive taxi cabs, talk on pay phones and spray paint on walls long after the event. This event is about more than just the event… it’s about the environment where people can come whenever they want and sample the album while experiencing the New York that so inspires the album. We’ve got graffiti by Zephyr, the prolific graffiti artist of that era and guitars by Robbie Dingo, the renowwnded Second Life designer, at a LES guitar shop.

One other thing to note is that the MTV virtual lower east side is designed for the 18 to 25 crowd that might not remember New York pre-Guiliani. We wanted to recreate more of the grunge aesthetic that we so enjoyed in our 20′s in NYC.

How big is the market for what you are doing? Breakdancers and indie musicians don’t really make much money, right?

What everyone is realizing is that there is a growing appetite for independently created media content.

Cruxy is also one of those UGC filter sites. The higher end of the UGC market puts their stuff in Cruxy. We don’t get much of the teenage car surfing or flatulence type stuff (nothing against it as a… social… expression, but it’s not what Cruxy is about)

Thanks Jon. Good luck with Cruxy and Suzanne Vega’s event tomorrow! :D

“Graf art building on Virtual Ludlow Street New York”
Photo Credit: Nathan Freitas

Jonathan Oakes founded and managed his first start-up, a systems integration consultancy, at 24 years old. In 1998 Oakes co-founded ThinAirApps, where he served as CEO and Chairman leading the company to a successful acquisition by Palm Inc. in 2001. Oakes spent over two years at Palm, as Senior Director managing corporate and product strategy. Oakes earned a BA in American Studies from Skidmore College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Over the last ten years, Nathan Freitas’ career has spanned the academic, corporate, and non-profit worlds, solving difficult problems through the thoughtful application of technology. His work has been built into Palm handhelds, on display at JavaONE and SIGGRAPH, included in Wikipedia, and covered in media ranging from Boing Boing and Slashdot, to the New York Times and Howard Rheingold’s book “Smart Mobs”. He also plays a mean double bass.

Bill Cammack • New York City • Freelance Video Editor • alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack