Image source: http://www.2ne2.mn

Not so very long ago, it was a momentous event to log on to your favorite retailer’s website, say JCrew.com, and order that Confetti ruffle cami you eyed in the mall without ever having to leave the comfort of your bathrobe and living room. The convenience of it was mind-boggling!

Today, the virtual shopping experience has evolved past simple convenience and into the realm of social media. This evolution has taken the form of at least five completely different shopping animals and, while their names may sound similar, they each fill an important and unique niche in the social shopping sphere.

1. Group Shopping

What is it? Group Shopping websites offer retail discounts to subscribers who buy in large groups. Many offer a daily deal, for example 50% off a meal at a popular restaurant, and if enough people are willing to purchase the deal then the offer is available for 24 hours until the next daily deal is posted. This is beneficial to both the consumer and the retailer as the deep discounts typically draw in a large number of customers.

Examples: Groupon, Living Social, Buy With Me

2. Shopping Communities

What is it? These sites provide a space for users to aggregate their collective shopping knowledge in one place. From prices to products to deals to trends, customers take the reins and share an ever-growing compendium of shopping know-how.  These sites are just one example of how today’s consumer has more power than ever before.

Examples: Kaboodle, Veedow, Zebo

3. Recommendation Engines

What is it? This branch of social shopping is literally evolving in front of our very eyes. While originally on asking for and receiving advice about products from strangers across the web, the new generation of recommendation engines are encouraging users to connect with their friends (often via other social networks like Facebook) and share recommendations with them.

Examples: Amazon, Blippy, Shop Socially

4. Social Commerce

What is it? Social commerce sites like Etsy allow independent designers to showcase and sell their work to the world without actually having a brick-and-mortar storefront. It’s free to create an account at these sites, and users are able to peruse and buy from a myriad of talented designers. The designers themselves are able to network with each other and sell their wares for a very minimal fee.

Examples: Etsy, 1000 Markets, Dawanda

5. Email newsletters

What is it? There are probably hundreds of locally based email newsletters that promote the newest stores, restaurants, products, and events in the users’ city or cities of choice. While they don’t allow direct shopping, they often give subscribers insider discounts and encourage them to venture out and check out the newest local hotspots.

Examples: Daily Candy, Thrillist

Share with us your online shopping experiences and preferences. How have you wielded your power to influence social shopping?

The king (or should I say the mayor) of geo-location social networks, Foursquare hit a big milestone this week – 100 million check-ins and the company is only in its sophomore year. Not bad! For those of you who haven’t yet jumped on the bandwagon, you might be wondering just what the hype’s all about. Here’s a quick look at what Foursquare is, what’s good about it, what’s not so good, and what’s next!

What is it? Foursquare is a geo-location social network that connects over 2 million users to their friends and rewards them for checking in to businesses and events all over the globe with points, Badges, and other incentives. As a user you can see where your friends are on your phone, give them tips, ask questions, and download various Apps to further enhance the experience. As a business owner, you can use Foursquare to give people incentives to visit you.

What’s in it for users? Foursquare offers its users incentives on many levels. Most obviously, it’s a fun game! The more check-ins you have, the more points you get, the more elevated your status in the game becomes (you can become the Mayor of the places you frequent), and the more likely you are to win the mysterious Badges.  I have no idea how many Badges there are, but this list has almost 200 ranging from the Entourage badge (“Look at you, checking-in with 10 of your friends in tow! You’re so popular!”) to the All Right Now Badge (“Congratulations, you’ve discovered 5 of Stanford University’s most interesting places. BEAT CAL!”) to the Road Warrior Badge (“You’re making the world a mappier place one checkin at a time!”). Foursquare intentionally keeps Badges and their requirements top secret, making the acquisition of one all the more exciting.

Adding tangible prizes to the mix, sponsors are getting in on the action and offering users retail discounts and special deals. Domino’s recent UK promotion was a wild success. Barbie did a promotional scavenger hunt. The History Channel, VH-1, and Bravo all sponsor Badges.

So, who wouldn’t like Foursquare? Plenty of people, actually. Many are put off, and maybe even scared, by the idea of everyone knowing their whereabouts all the time. This is understandable as Foursquare users do sacrifice quite a bit of privacy in order to excel. Others see platforms like Foursquare and Facebook as a confluence of narcissists at their finest. You’ll hear these naysayers ask, “Who in the world cares that I went to the dentist this morning before meeting my friend at the falafel stand on the corner?” Others challenge the purpose of Foursquare. Yelp, a competing geo-location network, focuses on sharing detailed user reviews of businesses. Arguably this is more “useful.” More technical gripes include its draining effect on phone batteries and the fact that you can’t check in from your lap top.

What’s next for Foursquare? Some consider geo-location a passing trend, but I’m not convinced. I think Foursquare has bigger, better days ahead. Co-founder Dennis Crowley recently revealed that a potential partnership with a major search engine like Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo could be in the works. Explaining the significance of this, he said, “Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of places people are going to – and where is trending – not what.” Who knows if his dream of a where-based world will come true, but in the meantime I’ll try to get as many Badges as I can!

Blogging is not for everyone… it’s for those who are willing to connect, share and engage! If done well, a blog should help you establish yourself as a thought leader in your field and easily gather your crowd Cherie and I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with the fabulous women behind the renowned “Breakfast Blogging Club” last week at Phyllis Garland’s Women Entrepreneurs of the Bay Area. A wealth of information was shared on different subjects that included recommended tools to setup a blog, plugins to syndicate (or push) content out to social networks, tips on how to promote and expand your visibility, techniques on how to do a video blog not just to look good in front of the camera but also to engage your audience, etc. etc.

Here is just a handful of Gather Your Crowd’s tips shared that afternoon:

Make Search Engines take you seriously

• Buy your domain for more than a year
• Add Terms of Use and Privacy Policy to your blog
• Pay attention to keyword density. Think like your customers!

Brand Engagement

• Project the values of your company in your writing style
• Filter topics through your Mission Statement or Mantra
• Be Consistent to attract and retain a loyal following
• Leverage the power of color psychology

We also had the pleasure of interviewing Beth and Cheryl co-founders of the Breakfast Blogging Club, who generously shared their 6 top tips for blogging.

Join our YouTube channel, our Facebook Fan Page or follow us on Twitter! We are here to help you Gather Your Crowd!

To request a copy of this presentation please go to our Contact us form and send us a note with this in the title: Secrets of Blogging Power Point

I was excited to represent Gather Your Crowd last night as the best of the Bay’s social media mavens, masters, and –yes– mophos came out in full force at Mashable‘s SummerMash networking event at the Grand Hyatt San Francisco.

A hodgepodge of PR professionals, social media junkies, tech nerds, and hopefuls looking for employment mixed and mingled while grabbing swag bags from sponsors and vying for face time with Mashable’s top dogs like COO Adam Hirsch, Tech Reporter Jolie O’Dell, and Co-Editor Ben Parr. Many people wrote their Twitter handles on their name tags, most had business cards in hand, and some could be seen practicing their elevator pitches to themselves. I noticed a lot of unique business cards in terms of shape and size – creativity practically oozed from the socially savvy group.

CEO Pete Cashmore was in high demand, and many guests opted to snap a pic with a life size cutout of the social media mogul rather than jockey for a spot in the long, slow line to meet him. (We met cut-out Pete’s creator and watched her repeatedly fend off Cashmore groupies trying to steal her handsome cardboard creation!) I got lucky and managed to snag a minute of conversation as well as a few pictures with the real Pete. A soft-spoken, gracious host, he’s only 24 years old and his company already has 2 million Twitter followers and 10 million monthly readers. Don’t get too excited ladies – he appeared to be taken!

There was a great flow to the event as we meandered in laps around the room. The open bar served as the nucleus while the sponsor’s booths were placed strategically on the edges. Companies like Bing, Intel, Weber & Shandwick, Mopho, and Gotelo enticed attendees with tricked out booths, fun freebies, as well as opportunities to win big prizes in the raffle. For example, Mopho, a location-based photography site, brought in a panda mascot for people to take pictures with and gave out free shirts. Bing had a flashy, high-tech photo booth and provided bags. Weber & Shandwick had trays of delicious mini cupcakes and held a drawing for free airline tickets. Gotelo, a start-up networking company, lured in new customers by putting us in the running for a free iPad if we signed up for their website.  Yours truly was the lucky winner of a netbook from sponsor Intel – SO glad I threw my business card in the bowl at the last minute! I should note that some of the sponsors prominently displayed their QR codes at their booths, possibly a sign that the new networking trend is picking up speed?

Most people stayed for the entire three hours until the drawings for the prizes, then scampered off to the much-hyped after party. Unfortunately, we couldn’t risk missing BART so we skipped out on the karaoke, but no doubt the fun continued until the wee hours of the morning. Ultimately, it was a great event and I’d definitely attend a Mashable party again!

Guest Speakers Ann Evanston and Patrick Schwerdtfeger

Last week Gather Your Crowd proudly sponsored Phyllis Garland’s Women Entrepreneurs of the Bay Area event, “Harnessing the Power of Social Media Workshop – Part 2”, where Carla and I met many successful entrepreneurs and had the opportunity to interview guest speakers Ann Evanston and Patrick Schwerdtfeger. This blog post is a quick survey of what Ann and Patrick, two powerhouses on the topic, have to say about harnessing the power of social media.

Ann talked about “Facebookology: The Social Psychology of Doing Business with Facebook Pages, Groups and Profiles” and covered a lot of great relationship building tips, including her four objectives in using Facebook for business. She illustrated with examples how to (1) create raving fans, (2) why you want to go viral, (3) how to encourage referrals, and (4) finding potential customers that will buy from you. In order to do this, she stressed the importance of handling relationships on Facebook through 70% engagement and 30% influence. Asserting influence more that 30% of the time is the equivalent to spamming your friends. Ann says that people hire you because you have an opinion and they know where you stand.

Here is what Ann has to say when we asked her to talk about Facebookology and Twitterology:

Patrick shared with the WEBA group a host of “Social Media Victories – Real Businesses, Real Campaigns, Real Results” through his fresh perspective: it is not who you are but the content you share that will ultimately get you noticed. According to Patrick this is the Cultural Revolution taking place whereby it is not the SOURCE that is important; rather it is CONTENT that takes primacy on the social web, especially when it pushes this Cultural Revolution forward. While some may view places like Twitter a waste of time, Patrick finds only opportunity. Amidst the statistics that say, “40% of Tweets are pointless babble, 38% are conversational between users, 8.5% are self-promotion and/or spam,” Patrick enjoys the fact that “only 8.7% of Tweets have pass-along value,” such that with these odds, it is easier to be noticed when you have value to pass along.

Gather Your Crowd asked Patrick share with us his favorite social media platform and why. Here is what he has to say:

On July 22nd Gather Your Crowd will present to Phyllis Garland’s WEBA meetup the “Secrets of Blogging”.  Join our crowd on Facebook or Twitter to keep you posted on upcoming events!

Gather Your Crowd Meets other Women Entrepreneurs of the Bay Area

When clients ask us about using social media to attract their target market, we offer guidance by first asking them with whom do they want to build relationships. Their answers always vary because everyone’s business goals are of course different.  But when it comes to how to build relationships, the answers are ostensibly the same.  This blog post explores what it means to build relationships online through the lens of an influencer or trust agent and surfaces a range of perspectives on the topic.

One of my favorite online influencers, Chris Brogan with co-author Julien Smith, wrote the well known book, Trust Agents. Chris Catania, author of Live Fix, posted an online book review of Trust Agents where he highlights the “six defining characteristics and critical skill sets” of trust agents or influencers, which happen to be the titles of six chapters: ”Make Your Own Game; One of Us; The Archimedes Effect; Agent Zero; Human Artist; and Build An Army”. I won’t translate each of the titles into the qualities and skills of online influencers more than what they already say. But I will share with you the summary of Trust Agents which briefly exposes the main qualities:

Trust agents aren’t necessarily marketers or salespeople; they’re digitally savvy people who use the Web to humanize businesses using transparency, honesty, and genuine relationships. As a result, they wield enough online influence to build up or bring down a business’s reputation. This book will show you how to build profitable relationships with trust agents, or become one yourself.

Another interesting perspective I came across focuses on a set of characteristics derived from this author’s observations of influencers in the online world. Keren Dagan developed an acronym to solidify his findings, SWARM which stands for:

• S – Storyteller
• W – Well rounded
• A – Ahead
• R – Resist
• M – Motivating

Keren also lays out the skills, impact and tasks affiliated with each characteristic. I recommend stopping by his blog article to examine the rest of his thoughts and a few action items he envisions from the information he collected. It’s a quick, well informed read.

Lisa M. Russell, a contributor to eHow online points to our need for human touch. She says that trust agents (and influencers alike) create a personal touch online by being real for the purpose of starting a conversation. Lisa gives 5 steps on how to do this: Give it away. Share your expertise. Reconnect and make new friends online. Connect through LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter with the goal of building trust. Exchange business cards that contain all your social media info with other professionals. She warns, however: Do not try to be a trust agent to trick people into buying your product. Be honest and transparent. Honesty and humility are essential qualities of a trust agent. Keep in mind that practicing these skills is equally important offline as well.

Recently I attended Kent Pelz’ Self Marketing event where Patti Glick presented on a related topic titled, “It Pays to be Grateful – Appreciation Marketing”. Patti is the magic behind her online business, Hand to Hand Contact where she helps business owners build relationships with their customers through greeting cards, the kind you hold in your hand. There is an art to using greeting cards in business, much of which I found to be similar to the qualities of an influencer or trust agent. One such quality or practice goes by the acronym TOMATO, meaning top of mind awareness through others. It stood out to me because practicing it shows your humanity, your attentiveness and your appreciation of what’s important to another. Patti emphasized this concept throughout her presentation with statements like “All other things being equal, people will do business with you if they like you,” to which I will add, “especially if they trust you!”

As you can see, there is a range of qualities that can serve you to build your influence online. Survey them all to see which ones you naturally express and consider a few new ones to bring into your relationships both online and off!

Gather Your Crowd interviewed Patti Glick about her philosophy of success with using social media for business. Here is what she had to say:

Yes, on steroids!

I remember when the Firefox browser was first introduced in 2003.  It was a very low key event.  I’m sure Microsoft wasn’t the least bit concerned that their Internet Explorer would lose market share.  Today Mozilla’s Firefox has a 25% share of the browser market.  That’s word of mouth on steroids.

Today, the same thing is happening with Google’s Chrome.  When it first came out, I paid no attention.  A few months later, Carla Yashiro, co-founder of Gather Your Crowd and always a trusted early adopter, mentioned she was using it and liked it a lot.  That was all I needed.  I downloaded Chrome immediately and have been using it ever since.

There are many powerful benefits to word of mouth marketing, and yet it is by luck and grace that companies, products and services get lifted on the wave of this viral phenomenon .  Here are some of the ingredients that start the wave:

1. It must be spontaneous and freely offered
2. It must be the authentic opinion/advice of a trusted source
3. It works even better if multiple sources give the same recommendation
4. The product or service must live up to the recommendation, because the trusted source is putting their reputation on the line
5. The product or service must have been experienced by the trusted source, not second-hand hearsay

Companies that spend huge amounts of money on traditional advertising would die to receive word of mouth endorsement, because they know it’s worth its weight in gold!  Recently there has even been an attempt to kick-start a word of mouth ripple effect by hiring “buzz agents” to act as “unbiased sources” who recommend a product.  For instance: attractive, high energy young people are hired to hang around crowded areas like Times Square, using their employer’s product and trying to hook people into asking them about the product (cameras, videos, PDAs, laptops, etc.).  If done right, the endorsement does seem to carry the cache of unbiased word of mouth.

In October 2005, the advertising watchdog group Commercial Alert petitioned the United States FTC to issue guidelines requiring paid word-of-mouth marketers to disclose their relationship and related compensation with the company whose product they are marketing. The FTC stated that it would investigate situations in which the relationship between the word-of-mouth marketer of a product and the seller is not revealed and could influence the endorsement.

You know word of mouth works when the federal government has to regulate it!

Truth be told, good social networkers also use this buzz agent concept to add velocity to their Internet presence.  They may not pay these agents, but there is a tit for tat exchange.  It works like this: an agreement is reached that I will comment on your social post, if you’ll do the same for me.  I’ll put a link to your website on mine, if you’ll do the same for me.  I’ll take pictures and videos of you at events and post and tag them on my social network sites, if you do the same for me.  Why?  Because all this activity and cross linking is one of the ways the search engines determine which sites end up on the first page of the search results.

Word-of-mouth marketing encompasses a variety of subcategories, including buzz, blog, viral, grassroots, cause influencers and social media marketing, as well as ambassador programs.  Because of the personal nature of the communications between individuals, it is believed that product information communicated in this way has an added layer of credibility. Research points to individuals being more inclined to believe word of mouth endorsements over other advertising and promotion.

So whether you think you can intentionally generate a viral word of mouth campaign for your products and services, or feel it’s the luck of the draw, the phenomenon is here to stay.  Start noticing where you are contributing to the phenomenon, either as a seeker of or giver of an endorsement – both at a personal level and within your viral social network.  It is grassroots democracy at its finest.

Kent Pelz, Founder of  Self Marketing, a new thought business networking group.

Gather Your Crowd is proud to be working with Shastic.com: a young, fresh and fun web 2.0 startup that provides a platform for both

• performing artists to showcase their portfolio in a flashy kind of way that promises to make MySpace and ReverbNation jealous, and also for
• venues to promote performances and other events and specials virally through mobile technology and the most popular social networks!

Shastic was founded by Joseariel Gómez a young entrepreneur who is also a self-made IT architect and web developer and is responsible for the Company’s overall technology and direction. He is also a singer and a guitar player and has studied Bel Canto and contemporary singing in Italy, Mexico and the USA. Aside from his artistic background, Joseariel also polished his business and financial skills with Merrill Lynch in Washington, D.C.  His business knowledge and technical background combined with his passion for music and the arts lead him to develop an extraordinary social tool that is already attracting performers from every corner of the Bay Area and beyond.

Shastic is now running a Beta Program for venues. We are looking for volunteers to test drive Shastic.com! If you are interested please send us a message through our Contact Us form.

Find out more about Shastic by joining their Facebook and Twitter crowds or become a Shastician by publishing your portfolio on www.shastic.com

]]> http://gatheryourcrowd.com/1616/shastic-com/feed/ 2 http://gatheryourcrowd.com/1671/meaningful-conversations-in-the-social-web-happiness/ http://gatheryourcrowd.com/1671/meaningful-conversations-in-the-social-web-happiness/#comments Fri, 02 Apr 2010 22:31:34 +0000 Kent Pelz, Blog Contributor http://gatheryourcrowd.com/?p=1671

The March 17^th New York Times Well Blog has an interesting article by Roni Caryn Rabin, entitled “Talk Deeply, Be Happy?”  In it Rabin discusses a study done by a University of Arizona psychologist, Dr. Matthias Mehl which reveals that people who have deep, meaningful conversations are happier than people who engage in small talk all the time.  Apparently meaningful conversation imposes meaning on an otherwise pretty chaotic world.

Observing the content of mass media today, it would be pretty easy to come to the conclusion that the world is an insane asylum run by the inmates and that any hope for normalcy is a pipe dream.  You might think: “I might as well resign myself and join the unthinking, unengaged, unenlightened masses in the race toward self-indulgence.”  It kind of reminds me of the old story about the lab experiment involving frogs and hot water.  If a frog is plugged into hot water, it jumps out immediately.  However, if the frog is put in tepid water and the water is heated gradually, the frog remains unresponsive until it is boiled to death.

Which brings me to one of my favorite topics: social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to me is highly personal – not mass – media. Yet over 400 million people participate in Facebook alone.  Is this just another platform for small talk which adds very little to our happiness quotient?   Or is it possible to have meaningful conversations in 140 characters or linking your favorite YouTube video of the day?

As I observe my own use of social media to network with my friends and family, I find I am more drawn to posts that have some substance or reveal an uplifting aspect of human nature that makes my heart sing (e.g. “Britain’s Got Talent” winners Susan Boyle and Paul Potts’ Youtube videos).   At the same time, I try to post a mixture of meaningful and entertaining posts which seems to be a reasonable balance between “fast food media” and sharing my deeper thoughts.

Yes, there is a lot of small talk on the social networking sites, but I think it’s diminishing over time.  Maybe it’s just the people I network with, but whatever, I’m finding it rewarding and seductive.

Bottom line, I buy the results of Dr. Mehl’s research and intend to engage in and surround myself with the most meaningful conversations possible.  I don’t know if I could say it’s making me happier, but I do know I find it deeply satisfying – and it keeps my mind off all the cocka-pupu that permeates the commercial airwaves.  So, dear networking friends, keep your inspirational posts coming; I’m finding it meaningful and richly satisfying.

Kent Pelz, Founder of  Self Marketing, a new thought business networking group.

What is Influencer Marketing? According to Wikipedia, Influencer Marketing is a “form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.”

You might be asking yourself what this has to do with social media and the social Web. But before answering that question, I invite you to explore with me what a few people whom I consider to be experts on this topic have to say about Influencer Marketing.

Seth Godin talks about Tribes and the Leaders within those tribes that represent “…changes in the way ideas are created and spread and implemented.” He often brings up the notion of a movement that doesn’t require a lot of people, perhaps only a 1,000 people who are impassioned enough to bring about change. As a change management practitioner, my colleagues and I would seek out the influencers among various organizational groups to help us help them lead and bring about change. Borrowing from this practice and carrying these concepts into marketing is hardly a stretch, especially with the phenomenon of the social Web.

Chris Brogan talks about Trust Agents in his book of the same title, wherein “Trust agents are not necessarily marketers or sales people. They are the digitally savvy people who use the web to humanize businesses using transparency, honesty and build a genuine relationship. As a result they wield enough influence to build up or bring down a business.” I think Chris and his co-writer Julien Smith are right on with this view into Influencer Marketing. Pay attention to what these two have to say on the topic and watch how they do it. They are digitally savvy people who use the web well to influence their markets!

As an influencer in your business community, humanizing your business on the social web means, in our view, getting people to take action. How you get people to take action comes through when you practice authenticity and transparency in an effort to bring value to your clients. This new approach to marketing is much different than traditional marketing or simply promoting your product or service online.

Whether you are already an influencer on the social Web or are looking to influence the influencers, you need to be aware of how you market yourself, and that includes your brand and the psychology behind it. Next month Gather Your Crowd will be presenting on, “What does your BRAND’s visual experience say about you?” and we invite you to join us. For now, let’s look at how Influencers can be identified according to Wikipedia:

• Activists: influencers get involved, with their communities, political movements, charities and so on.
• Connected: influencers have large social networks
• Impact: influencers are looked up to and are trusted by others
• Active minds: influencers have multiple and diverse interests
• Trendsetters: influencers tend to be early adopters (or leavers) in markets

I just attended Kent Pelz’ Self Marketing event this past Saturday and heard Doug Jones talk about his “Five Ways People Influence Other People”.  Doug talked about 3 things that relate to Influencer Marketing: Connecting and relating to others through (1) sharing, (2)being authentic and  (3) practicing reciprocity. Gather Your Crowd asked Doug about how he promotes his personal brand online and this is what he shared with us: