Power is yours

 viral social media

In latest social media a new phenomenon gives rise to a huge paradigm shift. It is about viral spread of news. Like in the ancient world of small villages and small indigenous cultures, where people were listening to the voices of other people and reacted to the news, we are now experiencing the same phenomenon on the global scale.

Usually in the past the word of mouth caused an action to be undertaken to punish the villain, to fix the problem, to abide to the laws of the community. Sometimes this news was true, sometimes it was a lie, and depending on what it was, the action was just or totally wrong.  Then we could call the word of mouth a micro effect. What we experience now in social media around the world is having a tremendous impact or macro effect because the village now is 7 billion people around the world or maybe  less because not everybody has a computer access, but anyways - the world becomes indeed a small village. The ancient word of mouth is now at work again. People finally found a way to connect. Before the age of social media nobody would even know about the struggle of John and his dog Shoep.
But now all of the sudden millions of people could see and reacted to one photo that   changed one lucky man and  his dog's life. Amazing photo put online causing a huge reaction from people around the world.

A touching story behind this picture, prompts many people to take action and help the owner of a sick, old dog to get the laser treatment he needs to prolong his dog's life. The money starts pouring in and a foundation is created for the dog owners who can't afford expensive treatments to save the pets. This is just one of the examples of power of social media. Here is this piece of news

There are of course many other examples of the news spreading across the media like fire. Take the latest story about a harassed bus driver. Some make a lot of good impact. So what if the bus driver who was miserable all her life becomes a millionaire. Good for her:))

Some stories are fake, produced to accomplish the desired effect. Those are primarily the attempts to capture general public attention for gain. The bottom line here is that it is now up to people to decide and sieve the truth from lies. People are picking up the right vibes, and general public is not easy to be fooled. One of the good things happening is that no violent act of the governments or organizations can go unnoticed. Corporations can no longer harm local communities without the world being spread about it. All that goes wrong around the world is now recorded by somebody in blogs, forums, or on Facebook or you tube, and the little ripple changes into a huge wave.



Knowledge is indeed power. You can try to google the keyword "police brutality forums" for example and you will find thousand of entries with stories about it. But what makes a huge impact is one story that goes viral. Oftentimes a story that is shocking to people can go viral. The psychological implications of this is used by companies in advertizement like the video about a blender that chopped an I-Pod to pieces. This phenomenon gave the companies a new power to influence people, and we can argue if this is a positive or negative impact of the news go viral. From the business point of view if you can use this power of media you are definitely a winner. The whole new "science" of social media marketing is based on this new phenomenon. 

Forget about big companies. The true power of Social Media lies in us, the people. So go ahead and use your power:))

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Don't talk about yourself

                                                         

   Building a community in social media helps your business grow

    Today’s culture is more connected than any time in history. The key to using the social media is participation. Social media are cluttered with irrelevant subject matters that nobody wants to hear about. What people are able to hear is a lot of irrelevant information which is creating a noise, instead of delivering the desired content.

                                                        

     So what is the golden rule here? For business it means not pushing the product. Building a community as we learned from our class reading is essential in brand marketing affords of any business. Brand marketing is not the same in social media today as it  used to be in traditional media. It is not any longer about the company and their product. It is more about noticing who the audience is and targeting the audience with the content they want to hear about.  In a way it makes the audience a center of attention, not your company or your product. When somebody talks too much about himself/herself at a social gathering of any sort, usually the reaction is that people get annoyed with this person and leave to listen to somebody else who is more funny and less self absorbed.

                                          

    Or say, when your date will start bragging about himself on the first date, not listening to a word you are saying, what would your reaction be? Would you stay to listen to  his boring self indulgent stories?

The same refers to companies and their products. Nobody wants to listen about  boring products on the groundswell, unless they are particularly looking for something to buy. So the companies who are able to recognize new social media marketing strategies are implementing new ways of getting customers interact with them, and by doing so, they are building loyalty to the company brand. 

   

  Look at the above you tube video of a successful tampon Procter & Gamble Company campaign that boosted the sales of tampons. If they talked about tampons to 13-14 year old girls, they would certainly not win this audience.

   Instead they created this very successful community talking about the problems of the girls in this age group. The site got to be a popular medium of interaction and as a result became an excellent advertizing tool.

                                            
 

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social media and African artists

West Africa, Togo, capital - Lome

I was in West Africa not too long time ago, and visited Togo. Togo is not exactly the digital culture hub, it is still a rural country where majority lives on $1 a day. 

 look at how colorful this world is and  how genuine are the smiles

Yes, no fake smiles:)))

If you want to learn about Togo you may check this link, but what I wanted to talk about is Togo artisans, women and men artists producing beautiful pieces of art being it jewellery or mahogany carvings or T-shirts with hand made paintings..Lome is also a capital of Voodoo -scary stuff ...

I had a driver, and guide who helped us get around, Anatol. Here he is. Anatol has his taxi and drives the tourists around, but he is so much more than a taxi driver..he knows everybody and everything.

  Anatol took me to the market, where I wanted to find few gifts for my daughters. What I found was amazing.The whole market consisted of several little shops with artisans' products, but nobody in the shops buying this stuff. No customers.. . I chose my gifts with care. Three dresses, few necklaces, a piece of designed cloth, a colorful bag, and a few carvings, All this for $30 and after the women came out of their way to sell me more and more stuff. Under the benches I saw their sleeping children. Anatol knew all of them. I really felt like this is a place that should have some more recognition.
I really felt those women deserved to get more for their beautiful work...I desperately felt I wanted to help them push their products to American markets.. they should definitely be connected with the customers who like me would love to buy these beautiful things they create...but how?
I found that there is a new open organization that does just that in East Africa. It connects women with the online markets. It is called SasaAfrica

Sasa Africa is an organization created to support women entrepreneurs operating in the emerging economies. It creates a platform for the artisans across Africa who do not have access to the internet to create their online presence with e-commerce stores and pictures of their products for everyone in the world to see, and sell them using mobile phones. I could not think about this myself, but somebody else did. What a wonderful social networking marketing tool for otherwise invisible artists in Africa.. I just hope Togo women artisans know about it. I have to call Anatol and ask him....

 

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