"Here Comes Everybody"

Hugh, The Maze Master

Hugh's Reviews

Each week Hugh reviews something, anything really, that has provoked a thoughtful insight.


In the book "Here Comes Everybody", Clay Shirky proposes that the social networking tools available today make "spontaneous group forming" easy and free.

These spontaneously formed groups are creating content, sharing ideas, and forming around subjects of a common interest. The key for business is to create the opportunity for these groups to form around your business.

The great experiment in using social media has begun at our farm. There are plenty of options but we are focusing on third-party reviews and facebook.com. Our facebook.com page.

A Facebook.com strategy is the focus of our efforts. Merely having the Facebook pages isn't enough, so we're developing a program by which our guests use our page to entertain each other.

Sound dangerous? It is. Mr. Shirky explains that groups will, and probably are already, communicating about your business on blogs and through email without your knowledge. To grow positive word of mouth, you need to purposely facilitate this conversation.

What's the mega-trend we're plugging our strategy into? We are going to encourage people to form a group around our business by rewarding them with fame.

Disclaimer: the plan is in its formative stages. We are targeting the Facebook crowd by connecting our TextPlay game to our Facebook page.

If you complete our TextPlay challenges, you earn the right to be officially posted with your group in a video on our site.

Our theory is that guests will go home to view and promote their Maize Quest/Facebook performance to friends and family in order to win a prize and gain local recognition.

Why are we working on this? Is this trend "ahead of its time"? Mr. Shirky would answer definitively, "No." The statistics are undeniable.

Facebook.com Size  
More than 175 million active users.

More than half of Facebook users are outside of college.

The fastest growing demographic is people 30 years old and older.

Applications
More than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month.

More than 5 million videos uploaded each month.

More than 24 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month.

More than 2 million events created each month.

More than 20 million active user groups exist on the site.

We, as an industry, need to try hard to figure out how to turn this powerful market to our advantage. As traditional media costs rise, we need to use our customer base as a marketing tool.

Shift some resources from your traditional media campaign to social media. The cost of one print ad would pay for a year of Facebook development.

Creating and managing the space for individuals to form a group around our businesses is nearly free, but requires focused effort to be done effectively.

Anyone out there doing it right? Have feedback for me?

Call Hugh anytime at:

1-866-935-6738 ext 102
hughmc@mazecatalog.com

PS We are working with one of our clever operators to create a starter Facebook marketing package for farms. If you have interest, please email me or stay tuned for more.