Let’s try an experiment!  OK, its not really an experiment because I know the outcome… But play along here folks:

Let’s put the digital world and social media aside and think about your friends.  The real in-the-flesh human beings who you have given the metaphorical badge of “Friend”.  Take a moment and think of a few of them.  Not just your closest friends, but maybe people you only interact with from time to time but who have still managed to maintain that status in your mind.

Now let’s ask ourselves a question:  Why are my friends my “friends”?  Visualize the people you just thought of and answer that question.  Some Possible answers:

-They are so much fun!

-They are great to talk to.

-They get me in to great social circles

-They love me

-They are a great dancer

-They teach me things

-etc etc etc.

What do any of these reasons have in common?  Well at the risk of being called blunt, it really all boils down to one word:  VALUE

Every one of your friends brings some sort of value to your life.  After all if they didn’t, why would they be your friend right?  You’d spend your valuable time on someone else.

So VALUE is it.

Now, have you ever had one of those friends who is always trying to sell you something?  Every-Single-Time you see them!?  They will lose that badge of friendship pretty quickly won’t they?

OK,so lets bring back the digital world.  Everything in it runs on metaphors:  Your desktop, Folders, Trash Can/Rectcling Bin, Mail, CC (stands for Carbon Copy), and of course your “FRIENDS” and “FOLLOWERS”.

So why treat them any different?!

If your business or brand has been granted the provisional seal of approval from a Facebook user for example. You have been “liked”.  THATS JUST THE BEGINNING.  It is not a license to pitch your heart out.  Unless of course, you want to lose a friend…

Rather, its safer to think of it as a provisional seal of approval.  An opportunity to take a real person and build a friendship with them.  How do you do it?  Bring VALUE to their life.  Build up that holy marketing capital of Trust.

Entertain.  Inspire. Educate.  Create EMOTION.  You want to be in their mind.  In their subconscious. And you want to be there with some positive associations.  That’s why emotions are the key.  The brain chooses what to remember and to forget by the intensity of the emotion of the moment.  Create emotion and you earn a place in their memory banks that’s associated with the emotion you just gave them.  But beware. It’s a double-edged sword.  Do it right and you’ll reap the rewards.  Make a boo boo and… it could hurt you and your brand for years to come.

Our Formula:  Entertainment + Education + Psychology = Tru$t.

Care to share a story or experience?  We can’t wait to hear it.

You just have to love Comscore and all the other great research groups out there.  Its an exciting time to be studying consumer behavior, thats for sure.  Things are changing so rapidly and today is a perfect example of that.  In just a few short years the use of mobile apps has surpassed that of the web!  And mobile web browsing apps aren’t included!   Check out this article. And this graphic.

This says so much about us as a civilization.  The speed of progress continues to accelerate and if you’re not keeping up, you’re falling further and further behind.  The biggest thing we are considering is how the power of marketing can directly influence the behavior of an entire civilization.

Nothing short of billions of dollars have been spent on the promotion of smart phones and mobile apps and people are converting in droves.  Last quarter the sale of smartphones in the US reached 50% and it’s still growing.

I called my Dad today to give him the news (He runs an IT support company in NYC) and to make one more push for him to get an iPhone.  It’s still a no go.  But maybe he has good reason?  Is a lot of this wave about hype?  My dad says that he just can’t draw a direct ROI from making the upgrade from a flip phone.  He calculates that owning a smart phone will cost him 3 times as much as his flip phone with no data plan (He doesn’t even text).  Since he’s in the office most of the day and is rarely out and about perhaps he is one of the few who might not be the best smartphone candidate?   Anyone want to take a stab at calculating the ROI for a 67 year old man?

On the flip side are those of us who live on the go.  People who travel and are out of the office a lot.  Or the 75 million direct sellers who are always on the go, or working their direct selling business around their full time job.   For someone who needs to make the most of little pockets of time, a smartphone (and the right app) is worth ten times it’s weight in gold.

Where are you on the scale.  How do you feel about the effect these devices are having on our lives?  Is it kind of like this Windows Mobile commercial?

What about the power of marketing on human behavior?  Are we really that pliable?

Share your muses here.

Recently our CEO, Michel Bayan wrote an article for the cover story of Direct Selling News’ May 2011 Issue. We thought you’d like to see it here.  It’s all about the massive shifts that

Or here for a pdf download and let us know what you think.

Google has put together some really powerful research to come up with answers to some of the most burning questions in marketers’ minds about how mobile smartphones are effecting consumer behavior.

What you see here may shock many of you.  Smartphones are having an enormous influence on the buying habits of consumers.  In fact, they are changing the landscape forever.

If you have consumer facing products or services and you don’t have a mobile website and a solid social media strategy in place, you are simply falling behind.  The world is a-changin friends, and that change is accelerating faster and faster. As information age takes a deeper hold on our society, it becomes more and more about what we’ve been chanting all along:  Innovation.  Collaboration.  Trust.

Love to hear your thoughts…

Maybe I just don’t get it but I’m trying to wrap my head around all the buzz about social entrepreneurs.  I think I understand the idea that a social entrepreneur is one who is starting businesses that are designed to do good for people.  To help people somehow.  Make their lives better in some way.  Happier.  More Productive.  More Green.

Here is what I don’t get:  Isn’t that what any good business is supposed to do?  As Richard Branson says in his book Business Stripped Bare, a good business makes things better by making better things.  That’s what any good business does.  So why do we need this new classification of the “social” entrepreneur.  To me that implies that entrepreneurs that are not labeled “social” are somehow bad people.  It may even imply that business in general is somehow bad or evil.  I think that kind of thinking is just plain dangerous.

I’m reading Branson’s book now so its fresh in my mind.  I love what he says about business not being anything separate from life.  Anything you want to go out and create, do or accomplish is a business.  Sure we want to make profits, but all the profits in the world won’t make us happy unless we got them from making something.  And we won’t sell any of that something unless people actually want to buy it right?  Even if we manage to pull off a ruse, it can only last for so long.  Someone will come along and expose us sooner rather than later.

I’ve been thinking about all this lately because all of our internal projects are productivity applications.  Tools that make people’s lives more efficient and productive.  Better.  I sat down with a friend of mine who wanted to connect us to an investor who is a “social entrepreneur”.  This investor is looking for projects and people with that label to invest in.  I had to sit with it for a moment.

What do you think?  Should I just conform and give my self that label?  What we are doing could certainly fall in to that category.  It would be really easy to just give ourselves that label and fall right in to line wouldn’t it?  No harm done…?

Our products stand for integrity.  They are tools that help people go out and do what they said they would.  To achieve their dreams and goals.  Almost all of these people are in business.  All of them if you want to use the Branson form of the word.

Well I hesitate.  Not for myself or for Mingling Media, but for us as a society that so easily likes to vilify business.  A few bad apples really can spoil the whole bunch can’t they?   No.  I think we should go the other way.  Don’t call us social entrepreneurs.  Don’t label us as the few, and the bad apples as the many.  Let’s flip it on its head.  Call us simply “entrepreneurs” and call them __________.  What do you think we should call them?  The James Taggarts of the world (had to slip Atlas Shrugged in to this somewhere ) ?  Rottrepreneurs?  Here’s to holding on to the fact that most people out there are good.  Even those of us in “business”.

Its no surprise to anyone at this point that mobile technology and specifically, mobile apps are growing at an explosive pace.  The fastest growing market segment in economic history is seeing no signs of slowing down.  Billions of dollars in marketing have and are being invested in moving more and more people around the world to smart phones and it’s working.  The question is: Are you riding the mobile wave?

Despite its massive popularity however, the possibilities that are out there for your business are still a mystery to many business people who are leery of spending their hard-earned cash on something they don’t completely understand.  There is no doubt that it can be confusing out there and confused minds take no action.  So here are some basics to think about which might prove a good initiation in to the exciting world of mobile.

1. Your phone is not a phone: Before you give me a “What you talkin ’bout Willis?” how can my phone not be a phone?  Well what it really is is a computer, and in the case of smart phones, a very powerful computer.  One of the things your little computer does is make phone calls.  If you shift your perspective from “phone” to “computer” you’ll begin to see the possibilities of what these devices can achieve.

2. What is an “App”?:  Apps are basically another word for software.  Mobile apps are software specifically built for mobile devices.  Just like your computer has either a Windows or Mac opperating system (OS), your phone has an OS too.  Iphone’s is called “iOS” and Google’s is called “Android”.

3. Learning Curves are WAY down: This is a big hurdle, especially for some more mature clients of ours.  They remember the painful process they went through to learn computers in the 90s and 2000′s and the idea of going through that again (and understandably so) is just way too painful.  So they turn their back on it.  Then one day someone comes along with an iPhone, they spend 10 minutes learning the basics and POW, they are off and running!  If you are holding on to the pain of the past it’s time to let go.  Technology has come a long way in terms of usability and the rate of growth is so fast that unless you plan on kicking the bucket in the next year or two, you simply wont be able to do business effectively unless you jump on this bandwagon.  Sorry for the harsh words here but ask yourself this:  We all know that old guy who just refused to get a computer or a website.  How is their business doing now?  Was that a smart move?  Technology was moving along at a crawl back then compared to today so roll up your sleeves and take a trip to the Apple store.  They are amazing and passionate people who would love nothing more than to teach you everything they know.  While your there you’ll learn what the power of a powerful brand can do and you’ll be wishing the people who work for you would be half as in love with your products as Apple employees are with theirs.  Its truly amazing to see.

3. What about mobile websites? Right now there are over a billion internet enabled phones in the world.  By 2014 Morgan Stanley predicts that mobile internet traffic will actually surpass desktop.  Chances are that trying to view your current website from a mobile phone is far from a pleasurable experience.  Many sites take ages to load and often don’t work at all on many phones, especially the iPhone with its complete aversion to Flash.  If you don’t have a mobile site then its pretty much guaranteed that you are missing out on traffic to your site.  The good news:  This is a relatively cheap problem to fix.

Well I certainly hope we haven’t overwhelmed you.  The facts are simple: If you don’t have a mobile presence in most cases, you are probably hurting your business or, at the very least stunting some serious potential growth.  We live in the information age.  People want information at their fingertips and they want it fast.  People want to be engaged.  They want efficiency.  Give the people what they want and they will do the same for you.

Please submit your questions here or privately on the contact page of our site.   Thanks for reading and please share.

So I’m watching CNN to see whats up in Egypt and I see Wolf Blitzer ask protestor Wael Ghonim “First Tunisia, now Egypt, what’s next?”. His reply: “Ask Facebook.”
Wolf Blitzer had to ask him to repeat that. This guy is just so eloquent and thoughtful and no matter how many leading and incendiary questions he was asked by various CNN anchors, he just kept his cool and never went for the drama, all the while refusing to accept any special credit for what is happening.  Bravo.  By the way, he works for Google in the Middle East.    (His twitter tag: @ghonim)

So what does this say about what is happening in our world? The fact that a website can help inspire and organize two peaceful revolutions in a matter of weeks!?

Please share your thoughts here. Love to know what you are thinking and feeling.

Have we found a peaceful alternative to violent revolutions?   If this is where social media and technology are today, where will they be in just a few more years?

Share your thoughts here and/or on our facebook discussion here.  http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=215&uid=100729723305400

Maybe its just me but I love Volksvagen lately. They are really stepping up with their cars, which I already love and drive (any GTI lovers out there?), but this new ad is incredible!

Our formula at Mingling Media is “Entertainment + Education + Psychology = TRU$T” (read more about it on the website) and VW is pulling out all the stops on this one.

WARNING: You may want to watch the video before reading on.

Your brain chooses what to remember based on the intensity of the emotion of that experience. Once you have cemented that emotion in your mind, all you need is a trigger to bring it right back. The triggers work with your senses. Here they are using sight and sound to bring you back to what we at first think is Star Wars. But wait. Not exactly.

Now that you need to take a half a second to realize that it’s not what you were immediately triggered (by the Darth Vader Mask and his signature music) to think it was, you are hooked! Then the comedy kicks in with this cute little kid and his amazing body language.
Now at the moment when your curiosity is peaked (no hint of any product thus far) Daddy comes home in his VW Passat, and with the push of a button on his remote control, gives his kid (and us) quite a start.
Now they ad some mystery. Wait a second…what does that button do?!

Surprise, humor, visual and auditory emotional triggers come together to create a fabulous ad. What are your thoughts on the Passat ad?

Watch the Ad

www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0

A few weeks ago we had the opportunity to take a VIP tour of USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies.  We saw a lot of interesting work in 3D graphics, Artificial Intelligence and virtual worlds, but the research that struck us most (being the psychology nerds that we are) was the the work on Human Multi-Modal Behavior Understanding. I know, its a mouthful, but the presentation by research scientist Dr. Louis-Philippe Morency simply blew us away.  What Dr. Morency and the team at ICT are working on is using technology to do something that we should all be doing more of ourselves:  Listening.  With cameras and microphones they are developing a listening system that is more or less reading people’s minds. Many of you will be familiar with previous research which has shown that a person’s body language, facial expressions, gestures and voice can give us an incredibly accurate impression of what they are thinking and feeling in a given moment.  This research has even spawned television shows like the  popular “Lie to Me” on Fox.  The show’s main character, Cal Lightman (played daftly by Tim Roth) is a master listener, able to read the thoughts and emotions of people, effectively reading their minds.

How does ICT do it?  Well its still in the developmental stages but basically they set up a camera and microphone and listen for various indicators such as facial expression, gesture, body postion, vocal pitch and tempo and other factors.  Their program will then interpret all of this data and deliver a breakdown of the subject’s state of mind in real time.  The main purpose of this development is to make their “virtual humans” more intelligent and realistic.  One of their characters for examples is Bill Ford, a virtual human designed to speak and empathize with veteran soldiers, aiding them to find the right kind of help they may need for PTSD and other post-war veterans’ issues.

What was our first question? “What about using it for poker or sales and marketing?”   But here is the funny thing.  Nothing that the computer is doing is something that we can’t do ourselves.  In effect its just listening for indicators.  Something we are more than capable of doing.  The only issue is that most of the time we are too focussed on how we must be looking to the other person instead of remaining focussed on them.  Nonetheless its an incredibly fascinating tool and we look forward to staying in touch with USC’s ICT.

What do you think about this kind of listening software?  How can you imagine it effecting the world we live in?  Keeping people honest?  Invasion of Privacy?   Share your thoughts here and/or on our Facebook page.  And a special thanks to Hanna Dershowitz for inviting us on the tour.

Last week after a true team effort and about 150-200 hours of work, we launched our new website.  It’s always an exciting process to go through for us (this being our 3rd site now), but it’s also a lot of work and there are a few key factors to keep in mind in order to avoid the many pitfalls that businesses too often find themselves in.  This article will help you clarify your thinking about a new site.  It will help you avoid the pitfalls, understand the basic ins and outs, and hopefully, emerge excited about the possibilities.

Your site is your company’s window to the world.  Many of your potential customers will use your site as tool by which to judge you.  In many cases your website can even be the first exposure than many people have to you.   Start by asking yourself these questions:

1. Does our current site represent who we are today?

2. How easy and intuitive is it to navigate the site? Can we do better?

3. Is it easy for us to keep our site up to date?

4. Are there any features we could add to the site to engage our visitors such as videos, interactive maps, a blog or other experience?

Once you’ve made the decision to upgrade it’s time to find the right development partner.  Look for referrals from trusted friends and colleagues and take some time to get to know the developers you are considering.

1. Are they a team that you actually like?  Can you see yourself collaborating with them for an extended period of time?

2. Are they bringing good ideas to the table?

3 Will they be there for you after the site is complete for support and upgrades along the way?  Do they have relationships with quality hosting companies that you can trust to keep your site up and running smoothly?

4. Do you like their design aesthetic?  Take a look at their portfolio and spend some time on their client’s websites.  Don’t worry about the industries they’ve worked for, but rather focus on the experience you have on the sites they have built.  Do they meet some of the criteria you are looking for in your own.

You are going to have your site for at least a few years, so taking the time to bring in a trusted team is essential.  If all of this is overwhelming to you then you can just contact us for a free consultation.  We’ll help you ask the right questions and make the process a lot more enjoyable.   Enjoy!