I still struggle with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and the current concept of social media. Before it was called social media, it was called micro-blogging and that is actually the true context of current social media, people are micro-blogging small things throughout their day. Several weeks ago, I developed an in-house web service to allow the 3rd Strategic Institute to globally collaborate on our products and initiatives and I stumbled upon a what I believe is not only a better model for social media, but a more profitable and lower TCO social media business model.
The Problem
The problem I have with social media is first and foremost, the focus on drudging up people from my past as if I didn’t have them in the past for a reason. I don’t want to connect with these past lifetime people and I don’t like seeing their name come back up and saying these are recommended connections. The other problem is what many people say is that you see people lying and fronting on these social networks bragging and showing photos and trying to show out. I’m sitting here in Atlanta messing with women who have 40-inch measures and then I go on Facebook or Instagram and see some lame Chicago chick with a 31-inch measure acting like she queen of something.
But the biggest problem and this is what the younger generation running from Facebook and Twitter is the whole repository problem of social media operations saving pictures, saving statuses that can be used against a person. Hearing about employers snooping Facebook profiles during an interview or parents want to check a kid Facebook profile so the younger teens are not even trying to feel that and that appear to be a contributing factor to both Facebook and Twitter recent reports of slow growth and lower activity. You see the news always trying to attack someone for saying the wrong thing on Twitter or use someone Facebook photo to report something bad about a person.
The Epiphany
One of the projects me and the 3rd Strategic Institute is working on is DBEXX and it is probably the hardest because it is a future options trading platform and the user interface need to show charts, graphs, calculations and roll up data and also use triggers and alerts and notifications and perform trades and settlement. DBEXX was hard work and it was getting hot and it was suggested we give up on DBEXX due to the amount of work. I took a step back from DBEXX and realize I was even losing focus and interest in DBEXX because of all the programming.
But what I decided to do was look at the bigger picture and that is I simply did not have the productivity software to measure our goals and the mission to analyze how much we putting work into DBEXX and if we should focus on other ongoing projects. To be honest, I looked for team project web sites but they are too linear and rigid, especially for a fluid international team like the 3rd Strategic Institute. I also looked at a lot of goal management web sites and found them kind of quirky. So I used the same platform DBEXX was on, used the same code base and created a productivity software that allowed the 3rd Strategic Institute to track our goals and let me tell yall what came out of this.
I created the productivity application to manage our work/life balance due to the fact the 3rd Strategic Institute crew has so many things going on in our personal lives and professional lives. I always wanted in my house to be able to pull up on the big flat-screen TV a dashboard application of how I’m handling my business and reaching towards my goal. I designed the app so everything in my crew can use it from their innovation lab. So we all started using it and then we realize I created a powerful product that actually solves a problem for everybody out there.
The application I created basically manage our goals and under each goal are objectives that are defined. Objectives are met by completing tasks and by keeping track of the tasks to an objective, we can quickly tell if we are reaching our goal. I had business goals which is Swagg-Scientific and objectives like DBEXX and specific tasks that need to be completed. I had personal goals like optimize my grocery shopping and I created tasks around it. But guess what, I can make some of my goals and task list public for other 3rd Strategic Institute members to incorporate into their lives. Then my people in Korea shared with me a goal and task list that I put into my personal goal section and what we started doing was sharing our ambitions and our goals.
This is the moment I realized why I struggled with current social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn because they focused on promoting a status instead of promoting ambition and a path towards something meaningful and purposeful. People on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn care about how many connections, followers or friends they have and these are meaningless metrics only used to brag a worthless point. What matters is being around people moving in the same direction as you and providing you with information to get you there and you providing information. The application I created was not about status, it was about a journey towards personal fulfillment of goals.
The 3rd Strategic Institute has been using our goal management application and we are seriously organized but what is most important is I have created a social media that help give me a sense of direction and drive towards my goal. After realizing this, we believe we created a better and more promising solution for social media that we can deliver to a global audience the same way the 3rd Strategic Institute use this service globally.
The Solution
Our solution is to transform social media from being about a person seeking status to being about a person striving towards a goal. The only people I care to know about is those who can help me get to where I looking to go. If someone want to post up their goal of moving to Africa and they create a task list, I want that task list and I want to follow the steps and modify that task list to work for me. When I connect with people, I want to know if they are about something and I want to know if they got goals, especially women. People around me need to have goals and if they ain’t got goals and direction, that’s all I need to know about them.
In addition, there is no need to be a repository of old archival data and this is where Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are having a high cost of operation holding and maintaining this information. Our social media use streaming where someone post a picture and it is basically gone and deleted. If you didn’t catch it hours ago when it was posted, then it ain’t there no more. And I’m not saving any data for the Department of Homeland Security to subpoena or employers or stalkers to view because we all have a right to freedom of speech and right to privacy here in America and other places in this world. In fact, we may do away with email-based logins.
In terms of a revenue model and profitability, there is no better qualified indicator than understanding someone ambitions and direction. Our social media model will have better conversion than contextual-based marketing currently used in social media. Current social media focus on what a person is interested in or the assumption. But if a person says their goal is to lose weight, then a cross-fit gym knows that person would be a qualified lead to target for membership and send them a 7-day pass to tour and use their cross-fit gym. And the customer would be more receptive because the offer is aligned with their goals and ambition. So when someone says they looking to quit smoking, an e-cig company has someone they can talk to about their product as a “sponsored task item” and that changes the revenue model landscape versus current social media.
In summary, we discovered our proposed social media follow the Tim Berners-Lee original goal of the Internet to share information to help enrich our personal lives as a tool towards our destination. Not seeking 5,000 friends on Facebook and 1 million Twitter followers as a bragging point but to have a personal goal or ambition and use information and people around us to help get us to that destination. This goal management solution is working well for my crew and we are looking forward to releasing this as a social media product soon to help others manage their goals and associate with people who will help them reach their dreams and destination.