To begin our story, a reenactment of a recent Marketing meeting in New York City.

Three Executives (COO, CTO & a VP) walk into a conference room and the table is flanked by the Marketing Department. The COO says “OK…you had your fun on Facebook, you got to Tweet whenever and whatever you wanted….now tell me, show me some names and numbers of who is buying what, when and where…” The marketing people look at each other in despair. After 30 seconds the Social Media Manager is the sacrificial lamb. “We have 160,000 fans on Facebook and web traffic is up 13%” Seems tangible, but the COO leans forward and asks “that’s great, but WHO are they and how much revenue was generated?” The Social Media guy could only look at is laptop and say: “We don’t have that information sir.”

Now, here is how that meeting would have gone if this company was using the Social Campaign application from Crowd Factory: The Social Media guy would have connected his laptop to the projector and displayed something that looks like this:

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Social Media Marketing is no longer “just for fun.” Now it gets tough. The voice of the consumers is louder than ever. There is no more “Easy Button.” It is not inconceivable that the aforementioned Social Media Manager will lose their job when they answer the ROI question with “this is how many Facebook fans we have….” Since the birth of “social media” the go to avenue of broadcasting was “the network” – MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc.. The evolution of business is unstoppable the and so are applications for this method of communication. Today we must go beyond the messages from friends and status updates. It is this growing stream of check-ins, deals, sweepstakes,and loyalty program that will drive what was once traditional marketing.

Unless you disconnect from society you are living in a world where Fans and Followers are great, but what pays the bills are influencers. According to my sources in Brazil, nobody outside the rain forest knew much about Havaiana flip flops until Gisele Bundchen put on a pair and took a picture. What once sold as $10 sandals in the grocery stores of São Paulo are now sold online at Bloomingdales for $38 (I’m not kidding, look here!). And most recently Gisele started working with the top selling Brazilian flip flop the world, Ipanema. Obviously one of my goals in writing here is to help potential customers of Crowd Factory understand the immense value our products. But this goes beyond that. If I was sitting on the other side of this screen and back in a Corporate Marketing group I would be excited that all functions of social media are now accessible in one product and at the end of the day my company controlled the data. And only then could I look at my CEO and report:

“We had over 10,000 entries to our online contest, an increase of 30% of new website visitors and the resulting revenue was $115,000 made up of men and women between the ages of 21-35, mainly East Coast United States, but let me show you the other demographics so you can better understand our customers…..”