With great pride and excitement, my first post.  Week 1 here at Crowd Factory has been an incredibly eye opening experience. While well versed in social media, I am learning a great deal about the value of social media by connecting social activity to conversion events.  It’s true, Social ROI made simple.

I recently logged into Facebook from Sao Paulo, Brazil to find that a friend of mine, who is the CEO of a large non-profit in San Francisco, was mourning the loss of his mother.  What I found striking was not it was his Facebook status, but that there are essentially websites that not only provide comfort for mourning one’s loss, but now you can so far as to broadcast the funeral online for those that cannot attend the service in-person.  A child born today can have his or her entire life documented, viewed and reviewed online – from birth to burial.    This provides an almost dream like blueprint for a marketing group – we would know exactly how and when to introduce the ideas for lifecycle events.

Everyone knows that social media tools like Facebook and Twitter have redefined our communication refresh life on life – text messages, status updates and photo tags galore.  What started out as a cool idea has grown into an embedded form of life monitoring.   Almost everyone can account for at least one friend that met a friend of a friend on Facebook, went on a date, got married wedding and now you can watch the video of their child’s first steps.  Refresh.  Your cousin sends you an Evite for his parent’s 50^th wedding anniversary which was shared on Facebook.  And sadly a year later your grandfather’s college friend passed – pictures of your trip home and of surviving members of 82^nd Airborne that survived Operation Market Garden in 1944.

At times the profession of marketing could be viewed as “someone wants to sell me something.”  Social Media changed all that – now you sell marketing your response, comments and emotions.    There is a constant evolving platform to help you decide how to plan your next life cycle event including online communities for parents, pet owners and how to deal with aging baby boomers.  So we know that the consumer will be need to make decisions but what it the best way to present the options that will craft the decision making process?  It is hard to argue that the brands will have a difficult time delivering these options if they have one solid and steady stream of one thing: data.

Companies like HBO and Universal Studios need to help you make decisions online so that you have an easier time making decisions offline.   The world of statistics might seem daunting to the most typical consumer of social media but when you have data to go on, you have decision points to create a better strategy.  As of just a few years ago one can watch an entire life online , companies like Crowd Factory are support the platforms that do not want to necessarily make you want to buy something, but in all sincerity want to help consumers make better decisions.    Traditional marketing has developed into something different, without understanding the return on time, money and energy into social campaigns brands will have an extremely difficult time developing their own marketing lifecycle.  Talk to our team here at Crowd Factory about your company’s online development.