Do you know what Social Media is?

Everyone’s buzzing, Social Media this, Social Media that. What is social media and what’s the deal? Can you be using it in your business? Should you be using it in your business?

I will answer all of these questions by the end of this article, and while I can’t tell you whether or not it’s for your business, certainly I can help you get a pretty good idea.

To understand exactly how Social Media came to be such a driving force in the business industry, you must understand how it started changing over time, both how Social Media adapted to people and people to Social Media.

What Is Social Media?

Social Media in its simplest form, refers to a platform for people to discuss and participate socially with one another. In fact when Social Media started it had almost no business applications at all. Social Media sites mainly started up in order to allow friends to better communicate with friends over the Internet.

Websites like MySpace and Facebook quickly became popular among friends and social groups alike and started setting the pace for what is social media as we know it today. At first it was just friends and people talking with friends and people online. But eventually businesses and other organizations realized that they could get some of the action and greatly benefit from it.

As a result companies started building Facebook pages. This was (and is) brilliant, because it gave companies a lot of flexibility and options when it came to getting customer feedback and adapting their business strategy to better meet customer needs. For example NBC could create a Facebook page for some popular sitcom, and then leave a post saying “Did you like last night’s episode of such and such?” Instant feedback.

Some companies are able to take it a step further than that, not only getting feedback but using that feedback to craft perfectly matched marketing messages. For example a pizza parlor could easily set up a Facebook page, and then make a post saying “What is your favorite pizza?” and then using the results (say people voted that pepperoni was their favorite) make the following post “Use this coupon code in order to get a %10 discount on your next pepperoni pizza.” Instant cashflow.

Some companies are able to take it even another step further. Say you’re in the golf market; you could make a post asking “What is the one thing about Golf that frustrates you the most?” Say a majority of people come back saying “developing a consistent swing” you could then go and create an information product that serves that need, perhaps a video course or an EBook about developing a consistent golf swing and sell it online from your website.

When it comes to Social Media the possibilities are nearly endless, if your company could benefit from being able to better communicate with your prospects (and what company wouldn’t?) as well as being able to gather quick and useful data in order to make educated decisions, then your company can be benefiting from Social Media.

By now you should have a good idea of what is social media, so go sign up and make an account on Twitter and Facebook. If you are nervous when it comes to actually using these platforms, then watch and see how some other organizations use it and then try to follow in their footsteps and emulate their success.


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Marketing Inspiration From a 3M Post-it Note

You’re familiar with the 3M Post-It Note right? Have you ever heard how they came to be? When I heard the story I found a lot of inspiration from a 3M Post-It Note.

How I was inspired by a little piece of paper with glue that doesn’t stick that good.

Spencer Silver, a chemist that was working in the 3M lab, was trying to create a new glue; a glue that was exceptionally strong that would fuse two parts together and never come apart.

Well, after mixing simple organic molecules in an odd proportion during an experiment in 1968, he ended up with a glue that did the exact opposite of what he was trying to create. The glue he created didn’t fuse anything together at all. It was definitely tacky, but it would also easily let go.

He created a glue that wouldn’t stick.

But instead of saying “Well, this didn’t work. Let’s scrap it and start over,” Silver looked at the situation and asked himself, “What COULD we use this glue for?”

Silver started holding seminars within 3M sharing his discovery and appealing to the audience for alternative applications for his glue. He knew that many heads were better than just one. One of the people that was in attendance was a fellow scientist named Art Fry. At the time, he couldn’t think of an application for the glue, but that would all change…

An event sparks an idea…

In 1974, six years after Silver first discovered the glue, Fry suddenly had an idea for the glue. While singing one day in his church choir, he fumbled with his hymnal, lost his bookmarks and lost the pages to the songs they were singing. he thought to himself, “If only there was some way that I could glue my bookmarks in place without damaging my hymnal…”

Fry began taking advantage of a 3M policy known as the “bootlegging policy” which encourages technical staff to spend up to 15 percent of their working hours on projects of their own choosing. By 1977 the Post-It note was officially launched. By 1981, Post-It notes were being sold throughout the US, Canada and Europe.

Today, there are more than 600 Post-it Products including flags, labels, pockets, easels, bulletin boards and notes in 8 different sizes, 25 shapes, and 62 colors. Post-It notes are now a multi-million dollar revenue stream for 3M.

Inspiration from a 3M Post-It Note – Two Lessons To Take Away

The first lesson here is that you must have a level of commitment and determination in order to be successful. Spencer Silver, the chemist that invented the glue, basically spent six years promoting his glue that didn’t stick before some other scientist within the company discovered an application for it. They then spent another three years after that developing the product. That’s nine years since he first discovered the glue. Now that’s commitment.

Secondly, there is a certain level of inspiration here in regards to thinking outside the box to come up with different uses or applications for your products or services.

Think about Arm & Hammer Baking Soda. Sure, you can use it to bake with. But did you know about all of the other uses of baking soda around your home? Arm & Hammer certainly does, and they take every opportunity to tell you about them. You can use it to clean with, deodorize your fridge or freezer, clean your swimming pool water, extinguish kitchen fires, use it in your laundry, unclog drains, as an antacid, even brush your teeth with it. So why does Arm & Hammer spend so much on advertising all the different uses for their Baking Soda? To increase the consumption of their customers.

If you only used baking soda to cook with, you’d probably be hard pressed to use more than a single box every year, unless you did a LOT of baking. But now that you’re using it to remove stains and odors in your carpets, unclog your drains, and you’ve got open boxes in your fridge, freezer and your laundry room, well now you’re probably consuming 6-10 boxes a year. That a 600-1000% increase in revenue!

Take a look at your products and services and ask yourself what some alternative uses are. If you can even find one other use for your product or service, you could easily increase increase your revenue by 10-20%, maybe even more than that!

Opportunities are all around us, we just need to be more creative and open-minded. Ask your self “What would happen if…?”

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