I’m Jewish, there I said it.  A team trip to Portland was delayed next week because of Passover, a holiday that asks at least four questions.  So, it begs one question, what if Moses had Foursquare while wondering the desert for 40 years?  Would the public perceived him as lost?  That could have looked very bad.  Well, unfortunately a few very public companies have suffered PR blunders this month, all of which got amplified via social media.  We here at Crowd Factory are proud to say our customers use our powers for good!  Though.…all of this makes me wonder, do certain stories in the news make even the most devote atheist believe in some form of karma?

If I recall from my Morgan Freeman studies there are 7 deadly sins.  First question, should you get a badge for each sin you commit on your Facebook profile?  One sin is jealousy.  I have met a number of CEOs between the ages of 21-27. These folks have raised millions in funding for their ventures.  Let’s mix that with one other fact.  My great grandfather was asked in 1929 to invest a small amount of money into a new soda drink.  Grandpa Joe took one sip and said “yuck, this is gross, go away.”  It was 7-Up.

Does jealousy and my family’s lack of good business sense haunt my dreams? Not really because I have to believe that right now I am in the right place at the right time.    My team at Crowd Factory has the best solution for new customer acquisition in any industry.  I live and breathe a virtual world of 1’s and 0’s every day here and this all adds up to probably the most powerful data mechanism I have seen yet: the power to build a social database.  Second question, do you know how much I pay to use Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail, Twitter and Google -  $0.  I have yet to pay one cent, pound, yen, lira or euro (or did the Euro replace lira?).

Third question, whether or not I pay for any of those services, do you feel that the Executives of those companies which feed your social addiction are subject to a higher public standard than the rest of us that are the consumers of the content? If you followed the news (and this is truly just a journalists viewpoint) in the last few weeks you may have noticed the CEO of GoDaddy standing on top of an animal he just shot while on safari in Africa.  Within hours the social boards were lit up like the 4th of July with utter outrage and disgust.

Questions 4-7, Within a day of this incident hitting the RSS feeds there were numerous companies offering up free and significant discounts for GoDaddy customers to switch hosting companies.  Now, of course this begs the question in my mind: if GoDaddy was never created and you never heard of Bob Parsons, would you still be as outraged at his act?  Or were people outraged because he is the CEO of a company that people pay money to use and would rather not have any association to that person what so ever?  And if you did switch your hosting, do you feel that personally punishes Mr. Parsons?  Do you think Bob Parsons cares what is said about him in the news, media or within the social media vortex?

That’s more than four questions huh?  In full disclosure, I am extremely passionate about how animals are cared for and treated(and yes that is me on the right with two of my favorite dogs).  Morgan Freeman did say something else one time, “Strange country, this…England.”. No, no, that’s not it, hold on, let me look under here….ah yes here it is: “Get busy living…or get busy dying. That’s goddamn right.”

I do not want to convey judgment – that’s for my personal blog.  Social media outlets are powerful tools for any company or band – whether or not it is free is irrelevant. I believe that if you and your company has a product or service that people want, and if there is a genuine message that can be honored along with the willingness to communicate and listen to your customers, success is almost guaranteed.   But these social solutions I speak of come with risk.  If you’re not careful or manage them well, will you be perceived as committing a Deadly Sin of Social Media – if you need help determining what those might be, give me a call, happy to walk you through the motions.

What we do here at Crowd Factory is incredible. We are allowing companies, big and small, to understand what their customers are saying, because we believe that once you know your answers, you will find the questions – and hopefully there are more than 4.