Mari Smith is a brilliant young marketer who has absolutely seized the reins of Facebook and Twitter and become a social media rock star. We had a conversation a couple of years ago when I was keynoting a conference she was attending, and she was the one who finally pushed me over the edge to get set up on Facebook. I’d already been on several other social networks without any visible results, but under Mari’s guidance, I found Facebook indeed quite useful.

Yesterday, Mari put up a great new blog post that I really like, jumping on the news that Oprah has begun Twittering and featured Twitter (and actor Ashton Kutcher, who is the first Twitterer to have a million people following his tweets–and in just a couple of days, has jumped to 1,201,192–that’s another 200,000 people! Most people have fewer than 500 total) on a recent episode.

Mari issued a call to become a “conscious twitterer.” That’s been my approach all along, and I’m delighted that Mari has given it a name.

Speaking of conscious social media: this blog is likely to be pretty quiet the next ten days. I’m leaving the country and made a “conscious” decision to leave my laptop behind. I do have one post queued up for later in the week, just to keep the search engines from thinking I’ve abandoned it.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

Someone on LinkedIn asked, “Is there an opportunity for a startup online business to become a successful brand when there are so many established players?” I think my answer is worth sharing here.

Think back to 1997. Where did you go for search? Probably Yahoo or AltaVista. Google came in and blew them out of the water *because the user experience was so much better.*

Think about Facebook jumping from academia to mainstream in the last couple of years, right after Rupert Murdoch spent an enormous fortune to buy MySpace–and made MySpace much less relevant.

Think about Amazon developing the affiliate model, so that any mom-and-pop website could add a bookstore with no work involved–and how that fueled explosive growth.

So the answer is clearly yes, if you have an attractive user experience that’s better than what else is out there.

I’d recommend reading the partnering strategies sections in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, https://www.principledprofit.com – it’s far easier to go where there’s already an existing audience than to create your own from scratch.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail