Social media is quickly becoming a way of life… and a way of business as more and more companies are realizing they need to integrate social media into their marketing strategies. We can’t, however, expect to do “business as usual” and succeed in building an eager audience around our brands.
If you want to continue to reach your market in this social media age, the marketing focus needs to be on building relationships, and metrics need to expand beyond ROI (Return on Investment) to include ROR: Return on Relationship.
Most measurements and empowerment stats that are used with regard to relationships (i.e. number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, retweets, site visits, video views, positive ratings and vibrant communities) are not financial assets, but that doesn’t mean they are worthless. Instead, these are leading indicators that a brand is doing something that is creating value that will be with you for the long term and will drive ROI if developed and used effectively.
Feeling a bit end-of-winter fuzzy? Awash with Wednesday ennui? Fed up with days filled with frustration, procrastination and possibilities that never quite manifest?
Then read this.
Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia—hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city. Each cell contains the entire human genome and traffics billions of molecules in intricate economies. Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the sum total would be blinding.
The cells are connected to one another in a network of such staggering complexity that it bankrupts human language and necessitates new kinds of mathematics. A typical neuron makes about 10,000 connections to neighboring neurons, which means that there are more connections in a few cubic centimeters of brain tissue than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
The three pound organ in your skull—with its pink consistency of jello—is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we’ve dreamt of building. So if you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you’re the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.
Now tell me you don’t feel a little more, well, special? It is from Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, the new book by neuroscientist David Eagleman, who delivered a fantastic lecture at the Southbank Centre this week and who is indisputably the Brian Cox of the brain (with added humour and a better haircut). Here he is talking about possibilianism at PopTech last year (possibly).
I – like anyone who has suffered from mental health issues, delusions and addictions (which is pretty much all of us, to differing degrees) – have had to engage at close quarters with the alien machinery inside my skull. The past decade has been a battle, sometimes a distinctly bloody one, to mediate the fractious rivals inside this soggy pink parliament and channel its hungry, impulsive power into moderate and productive pathways. With each small, slow success I have moved a little further from fear to fascination, until now, with the help of people like Eagleman, I am in an almost obsessive state of grateful, curious wonder about how I act out ‘I’ every day.
What compels us to believe in something even when we know deep down it is inherently flawed? What emotional need does it fulfill in us that we are willing to set aside our reason and embrace a vision of who we are that is not true or, at the very least, is a murky reflection of real life.
The current drive to measure influence reminds me very much of Plato’s Theory of Forms from The Republic in which he uses the “Allegory of The Cave”. Through “The Cave” Plato theorizes the world we believe to be real is in fact illusion. Rather than subjecting you to Plato’s actual works (although I thoroughly encourage it on your own time), I will draw from that information wonder Wikipedia to help provide an understanding of the Allegory of the Cave…
Influence: The capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself.
Digital influence is a controversial topic. At the heart of the matter is this idea of influence and it raises questions and doubts as to whether or not the ability to cause effect or change behavior is truly measurable. Regardless of the answer, we are introduced to a new reality of social networking, an era where our actions and words in Facebook, Twitter et al. are used for and against us.
One day we awoke to find a number attached to our digital persona. And in this new awakening is a fascinating new twist in social media, the association between scores and avatars and the new digital socioeconomic factors that are introduced. We are now ranked and what was once a peer-to-peer network is now tiered, creating a social hierarchy where a score defines your place within it.
We didn’t opt in, we can’t opt out, but we can shape it.
Social media is quickly becoming a way of life… and a way of business as more and more companies are realizing they need to integrate social media into their marketing strategies. We can’t, however, expect to do “business as usual” and succeed in building an eager audience around our brands.