How Conformity can Work with You or Against you in Social Media

What is conformity? Well, basically it is the word that denotes the way a phenomenon blends with its surroundings. In this blog post, conformity will denote the way we as humans tend to be influenced by our surroundings in making our decisions. Those of you who are business owners considering social media, user generated content and link building, you should continue reading.

Carles Puyol is Who You should turn to for Advice on Social Media

There is something many people don’t assume about me. I am a hard core football (soccer/european football) fan. Perhaps not in the sense that I stay loyal to one team over a life time, but in the sense that I love the game. I watch as much football as my work schedule allows me to do. Even when I work I watch football on a second screen, or listen to it whilst I am writing. Right now I have football on when writing this.

If you Meet Expectations, You are Not Doing a Good Job

There is a change about to take place. We as humans are somehow starting to make an attempt at understanding ourselves without simplifications. We might still limit our scope, but we have at least started to look at facts and situations rather than models. Yes, some models can still be created, but a model is always merely a depiction of a perspective given a set of circumstances. What then happens in reality is never very coherent, sometimes not even when all circumstances are met.

Behavioral economics are growing in influence. This makes me glad. I am an ex-econometrics student who has always been fond in looking to the individual rather than the model. Well, I love making models, but for me a model, a strategy or a tool set is always flawed if it doesn’t continuously change.

7 Next Step Advice when Thinking Traffic to Recurring Customer

I am sometimes talking about conversion and social media. I wrote a post that I called Online Marketing Matrix a couple of months ago where I posted this model. This model works well for ME. I suspect you can use it as a starting point in your discussion about where to go next. This post will explain in further detail how I think about this model and hopefully inspire to some discussion in the comments 🙂

75% Wants to Change, 27% Wants to Share

I am reading the Adobe Scene 7 Viewer Study. A very interesting piece of information about what people need when making a decision to purchase something online in a few given situations. The study is quite limited to apparel, at least from what I have been able to consume this far. However, there are some data interesting enough to put into some light.

75% wants to be able to alter looks, and customize their products before making a purchase. Or, they at least want the ability to do so. Also, 50% find it highly useful to have a live chat possibility with a customer support. Not surprising, 88% find customer ratings and reviews as important or helpful when making a buy online.

Playing the Social Commerce Game

I’ve spent the past few days reading some new books I got from Amazon. They are all about social psychology/psychology and economics. Most of you don’t know this, but economics is my true kick ass drug in life. The latest book I read on the topic is about irrational decisions, or moreover, decisions that we make based on norms.

So how is this in any way related to what we do in social media and the search engines? Well it has everything to do with what we do. When it all boils down to the core of what we’re trying to achieve, we have to deal with people. If we want to make money in the process we also have to engage in some kind of economic decision making process with our users, fans, searchers or followers.

Social Media ROI and when it makes sense

When I read posts such as the one by Thomas Baekdal I get seriously concerned. Especially when I look at how many shares it has got on Twitter and the lack of criticism in the comments of the post. The main problem is that most of these writers cannot determine the difference of consumption and investments.

The gain from an investment needs to be determined by the person making the investment. When you make your online marketing plan, or your online customer relations plan, or your online investor relations plan or your main online communications plan, then you need to set goals. Those goals need to be broken down into KPIs and measurable success events.

You need to think. What do you need to get the Gain you want? Then you need to look at what gives you that Gain. If you don’t know, hire a consultant that do. This differs between sectors and product. If you want this Gain to be the return of an investment you also need to have the ambition that it will grow over time.