There are just two things you just have to do to get the most out of a trip to a foreign land (be it a country or the world of social media).
- Learn how to speak the language.
- Always hire a good guide.
You might wonder why you need both. Wouldnʼt one or the other suffice? You can muddle through with one. But the experience is much better with both.
If you just learn to speak the language, you miss many of things that are off the beaten path and worth exploring that a guide can show you. If you just get the guide, itʼs hard to tell him exactly what your needs are, what parts you want to see, and the results youʼd like to get from the trip.
-Does Anyone Know How to Market? by Chris Houchens
decision.
“Back in the good ol’ days—I mean as far back as the late middle ages—people just did business with each other. As traveling got easier and people got access to new resources and markets, a middle class of merchants and small businesspeople started to get wealthy. So wealthy that they threatened the power of the aristocracy. Monarchs needed to come up with a way to stabilize their own wealth before the free market unseated them.
They invented the corporate charter. By granting an exclusive charter, a king could give one of his friends in the merchant class monopoly control over a region or sector. In exchange, he’d get shares in the company. So the businessperson no longer had to worry about competition—his position at the top of the business hierarchy was locked in place, by law. And the monarch never had to worry about losing his authority; businesses with crown-guaranteed charters tend to support the crown.
But this changed the shape of business fundamentally. Instead of thriving on innovation and progress, corporate monopolies simply sought to extract wealth from the regions they controlled. They didn’t need to compete, anymore, so they just sucked resources from places and people. Meanwhile, people living and working in the real world lost the ability to generate value by or for themselves.”
Rushkoff On The Economy: Let it Die
Itamar Rosenn conveyed how Facebook used data to answer two questions about new users: (i) which data points predict whether a user will stay? and (ii) if they stay, which data points predict how active they’ll be after three months?
For the first question two data points are significantly predictive of whether a user remains on Facebook:
(i) having more than one session as a new user
(ii) entering basic profile information.
For the second question, they found that activity at three months was predicted by variables related to three classes of behavior:
(i) how often a user was reached out to by others
(ii) frequency of third party application use
(iii) what Itamar termed “receptiveness” — related to how forthcoming a user was on the site.
In my opinion it is:
- sexyness to get people to first use
- socialness to get them addicted
- usefulness to keep them
Flo Pötscher on Fred Wilson’s Blog Post
“Barack Obama’s deputy field director Mike Moffo passed along guidelines and a sample script from the Consortium of Behavioral Scientists, a secret advisory group of 29 of the nation’s leading behaviorists.
The key guideline was a simple message: “A Record Turnout Is Expected.” That’s because studies by psychologist Robert Cialdini and other group members had found that the most powerful motivator for hotel guests to reuse towels, national-park visitors to stay on marked trails and citizens to vote is the suggestion that everyone is doing it. ‘People want to do what they think others will do,’ says Cialdini, author of the best seller Influence. ‘The Obama campaign really got that.’”
Our role should be letting that happen.
“Google’s ads were always plain blocks of text relevant to the search query. But at first, there were two kinds. Ads at the top of the page were sold the old-fashioned way, by a crew of human beings headquartered largely in New York City. Salespeople wooed big customers over dinner, explaining what keywords meant and what the prices were. Advertisers were then billed by the number of user views, or impressions, regardless of whether anyone clicked on the ad. Down the right side were other ads that smaller businesses could buy directly online. The first of these, forlive mail-order lobsters, was sold in 2000, just minutes after Google deployed a link reading SEE YOUR AD HERE.”