Stop Being Afraid of the Internet

Yes, there are risks to exposing yourself on the internet. But there are risks everywhere you go. To minimize your risk and privacy of personal information on the internet, you need to be careful, just as you would in the physical world.

There are certain sketchy areas of the internet that you should avoid for your own personal safety. For example it would be advisable to avoid low end pornography sites who may implant viruses into your computer or misuse your credit card information.

While you are not at threat to physical harm in the online digital world, going down the wrong alley on the way home late at night may produce similar, negative life consequences.

The internet and the physical world are both one and the same. They are alternate realities occurring simultaneously and cooperatively. The more we interact with each, the more we are able to understand its workings and how we can use it to our advantage. For example in this sudy the author states that:

“In our phone survey, we asked SNS users a variety of questions about their close friends on and offline, the kind of support they received from their friends, the level of diversity of their social circles, and their civic and political activity. We matched the answers to those survey questions to data in these users’ Facebook logs and then analyzed the relationship between certain activities on Facebook and the social lives of these users.

One key finding is that Facebook users who received more friend requests and those that accepted more of those friend requests tended to report that they received more social support/assistance from friends (on and offline). There was also a weak, but positive relationship between receiving and approving friendship requests, as well as posting status updates, and higher levels of emotional support, such as help with a personal problem.”

Findings from this study indicate that users who are more active in the online world receive more support from friends there as well as in the physical world. The study shows that as people willingly give more information about themselves to others, they receive more feedback and help from them.

Some other findings of this article include:

“Tagging Facebook friends in photos is associated with knowing more people

from diverse backgrounds and having more close relationships – off of Facebook”

“A wide range of activities on Facebook are associated with attending political meetings”

One of the greatest things about the Internet and social media is that it gives us the opportunity to make important connections with people we would otherwise not have been able to. The trouble with these online connections however is the hesitancy of trust in others that we experience due to a lack of face to face interaction.

This hesitancy can be overcome however with the sharing of enough personal, legitimate information. For trust to be made, the personal information you share must attempt to portray true self. Legitimacy comes from the interactions you make, and others make with you, on legitimate web platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

The reason why trust and interaction on the internet is so important is because of the “social currency” it grants a person. It is my prediction that as people become more connected on the internet, social authority and legitimacy for personalities will rise. In the near future, social currency will be the most legitimate way for people to determine whether they can trust one another over an internet transaction. Social currency and legitimacy is already a critical factor of sites like Ebay and Amazon which rank sellers based on customer reviews.

But they type of social currency I am talking about is more universal, not limited to one website, but can be used as authority for every site you visit on the internet.

Right now, Klout is the closest thing I have I have seen being used that can provide legitimate social currency on the net, even though it is only limited to a small number of social media sites and scores only on some types of interactions.

Whatever the next big tool for connection on the internet will be, it can be assured that the more interactions you have with people, either in the digital or physical world, the more response you will get back from them. The more response you get, the more you can learn and grow; the more we can all learn and grow.

Growth Hacks!

There is a resurfaced paradigm in marketing strategy these days, and no it isn’t a new technique for reaching people through social media or a revolutionary new way to use mobile apps, but it could be.

Growth hacking is just about what it sounds like. Growth.

The hacking part has to do with innovation. Growth hacks are just like life hacks. They are innovative solutions that drive productivity and user growth.

As Josh Elman says in this article on Mashable by Ryan Holiday, “Growth hacking recognizes that when you focus on understanding your users and how they discover and adopt your products, you can build features that help you acquire and retain more users, rather than just spending marketing dollars.”

As Twitter product manager Paul Rosania describes it, the job of a growth hacker is to “try a lot of ideas, ruthlessly optimizing successes and quickly discarding dead ends. There is no one thing they do to achieve growth.

The key is to always be prepared for the next step.”

As said by Andy Ginn, a growth hacker for Stumble Upon,

“A product goes viral through baking in growth mechanics, through testing and data-based creativity — it is hardly ever random,”

So Thats Growth hacking, now what’s a Growth hacker?

Growth hackers come in all shapes and sizes. In general, they are well rounded people who have skill in both technical and non technical areas of marketing and business but who most likely specialize in some field. This definition of a Growth hacker by Andrew Chen in his article highlights the importance of one having an eye for tech and analytics.

“Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries. If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. After product/market fit, they can help run up the score on what’s already working.”

Growth hackers innovate, test, analyze, tweak, repeat, as well as continue to push and develop successes. They are always thinking and collaborating with co-workers to figure out how they can drive more growth. Even with strategies that will be short lived or may not work out in the end, a growth hacker will consider and explore all possibilities of driving growth.

From The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking by Neil Patel and Bronson Taylor:

“Every decision that a growth hacker makes is informed by growth. Every strategy, every tactic, and every initiative, is attempted in the hopes of growing. Growth is the sun that a growth hacker revolves around. Of course, traditional marketers care about growth too, but not to the same extent. Remember, the power of a growth hacker is in their obsessive focus on a singular goal. By ignoring almost everything, they can achieve the one task that matters most early on.”

The difference between growth hacking and a more traditional inbound/content marketing lies in the ultimate goals of the practices. Growth hackers focus on one thing: growth. Inbound and Content marketers do focus on driving growth, but in a more hands off way. Inbound marketers focus on producing and effectively distributing good content to followers which will lead them to share the content, therefore driving growth. Growth hackers differ in that they use strategies that pull in people by the necks of their shirts rather than slowly luring them in with a piece of candy.

At the end of Andrews article he says, “Before this era, the discipline of marketing relied on the only communication channels that could reach 10s of millions of people – newspaper, TV, conferences, and channels like retail stores. To talk to these communication channels, you used people – advertising agencies, PR, keynote speeches, and business development. Today, the traditional communication channels are fragmented and passe. The fastest way to spread your product is by distributing it on a platform using APIs, not MBAs. Business development is now API-centric, not people-centric.”

This last point threw me for a time loop. I thought the new paradigm was currently “people-centric activities” and now you’re telling me that the new paradigm is actually “API-centric activities”?

This led me to naturally ask the question, what is API?

From Wikipedia: “An application programming interface (API) is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other. An API may include specifications for routines, data structures, object classes, and variables.”

What further cleared up API for me was reading this from net.tutsplus.com

“An API-Centric Web Application is a web application that basically executes most, if not, all its functionality through API calls. For example, if you were to log in a user, you would send his credentials to the API, and the API would return to you a result saying if the user provided the correct user-password combination.”

The line between what is a product and service seem to be blurring. Twitter, which may seem like a service provided for people to communicate, can also and maybe more rightfully so be seen as a product. When the definition of what a product is and how you are suppose to market it is thrown out the window, an unlimited amount of growth marketing strategies are presented.

From definitive guide to Growth hacking:

“Products used to only be things like cars, shampoo, couches, and guns. Now Twitter is a product. Your online accounting software is a product. Things you can’t hold, per se, are products. This transition is most responsible for the new age of growth hackers. The internet has given the world a new kind of product, and it demands a new kind of thinking…For the first time, because of this redefinition, a product can play a role in its own adoption. Sound crazy? It is. A product like Facebook allows you to share their product with other friends to make your own experience on their platform better. Shampoo can’t do that.”

Another such API-centric web app is Airbnb

What was so revolutionary about the AirBnB growth hack strategy?

As Andrew Chen said (link to article),”Let’s be honest, a traditional marketer would not even be close to imagining the integration above – there’s too many technical details needed for it to happen. As a result, it could only have come out of the mind of an engineer tasked with the problem of acquiring more users from Craigslist. Who knows how much value Airbnb is getting from this integration, but in my book, it’s damn impressive.”

From their website, Airbnb is, “a community marketplace where guests can book spaces from hosts, connecting people who have space to spare with those who are looking for a place to stay. Through their experiences on Airbnb, guests and hosts build real connections with real people from all over the globe.

When posting room availability to Airbnb, you are also asked if you would like to post to a specific region on Craigslist. What is so remarkable about the ability to do this is that for the Craigslist post to work, Airbnb had to:

• Backwards engineer the website. look at the screen shots mid way down the post from the most previous link, totally a “hack”

• Account for all of the different countries, cities, neighborhoods in which people post to craigslist.

• Make the postings to Craigslist look good while working under limited html constraints.

You can read more in depth about the challenges Airbnb had to overcome to create an effective API from the article.

It is apparent that the idea of growth hacking in an integral one for spreading product use and usability. Even though the basic strategy is ancient, our newly formed digital world has opened up a never ending amount of posibility for newly developed Growth hack strategies.

Why Edgerank Rocks and Mark Cuban is Wrong

Did you realize that not every post from your Facebook friends appears on your every updating newsfeed? Even though it makes sense that stories I interact with are highlighted on my news feed, I didn’t know that a majority of them didn’t even make it to the feed at all.

But now I know, and I have found that Facebook’s Edgerank is the reason why.

According to Facebook, Edgerank is an algorithm used by them to determine where and what posts appear on each individual user’s news feed so that they see the most relevant and wanted content.

There are three variables that make up the Edgerank post ranking algorithm: affinity, weight, and decay.

Affinity score is based on the relationship you have with the user who created the post. The more interconnected you are with that person, the more likely their story is to appear on your news feed.

Weight measures and ranks what type of engagement a post is getting. For example, shares and comments require more effort to post than a simple “like” and therefore are higher ranked interactions.

Decay factors in how long ago the post was posted and how much recent interaction it has had. A post will generally disappear from the newsfeed after a certain amount of time unless it has had recent engagement.

So if you want your posts to appear in your followers newsfeeds as often as possible, you need to consider it’s content and whether or not your followers will engage with it.

When it all comes down to it, Interactive, relevant content = quality content. Naturally, the way to build social authority on the internet is by sharing content. Naturally, posts that link to relevant, helpful content are of higher value than those that don’t. And while developing quality content is important, it is just as important what you do with that content that gives it a high Edgerank. To ensure your post are quality, check out These 7 Good practices from Social Backers to make your Edgerank soar!

1. QUALITY CONTENT – Since EdgeRank directly relates to your Engagement Rates, the more engaging your posts are, the more people will see it, and your affinity will continue to increase.

2. FOLLOW THE RULES – Breaking the rules has only short-term benefits. The more people report your Page, the more Facebook will penalize your Page which can result in a rapid drop in future reach and cost you the reputation of your brand.

3. POST FORMAT – Photos and videos have proven to engage most users, but a link to a great story or a clever status can do the job as well. Use Facebook savvy by not creating too long posts, take advantage of questions and call to actions, play with words and fill in blanks,…

4. POST FREQUENCY – More than 90% of Fans never come back to visit the Facebook Page again after Liking it. You want to post enough to maintain fan relationships, but not so much that they are overwhelmed.

5. POST TIMING – You need to find out when your audience generates the most activity. With Analytics PRO, you can easily track your most engaging days of the week and hours of the day to optimize your posting strategy based on previous results.

6. RESPONDING TO FANS – Do not forget that social media is a two-way channel. Avoid overwhelming them with advertisements, and create open communication. Every time you respond to a fan, not only are you investing in an actual brand-customer relation but you are also investing in the affinity of his/her Friends.

7. KEEP AN OPEN MIND! Measure, analyze, and optimize your strategy, analyze your competitors’, and try different techniques that work for others. Understand that Fans’ behavior will change just as frequently as the Facebook algorithm does.

These principles apply to businesses as well as individual users. However, businesses need to ensure that they are careful to represent themselves in as humanistic of a way as possible in order to be best connect with individuals. Social web sharing companies like Facebook and Google want the best experience possible for the core of their users, people. No one likes to be spammed. This why Facebook and Google focus on tailoring their algorithm towards showing users content they most care about, not what their followed businesses want them to care about. The key to giving people what they care about is authenticity. Companies will reach more people when their content is motivated by relevance and authenticity rather than profit.

This article  shows the idea of NFO and NFM (News Feed Optimization and News Feed Marketing). The ideas and strategies involved with these two fields are very similar to SEO and SEM as with Google’s algorithm. Both within Facebook and through Google, providing a high level of high quality, authentic content will give you the best chance of it being seen by your followers.

However, just sharing good content based on Edgerank score will not guarantee that a follower sees your post. Because Facebook only shows the most relevant content for each individual user, a lot of stories and posts get lost in the flow of the newsfeed or are never shown at all. This article states that “the average news feed story from a user profile reaches just 12 percent of their friends.” With this narrow reach of content towards friends, and most users having hundreds of “liked” businesses and organizations, it it hard for either type of user to reach a significant portion of their followers with their posts. Of course, the more you pay Facebook, the more reach you can have. But surely, if you want to ensure that every follower of your page sees your post, you are going to have to pay them a lot. Especially if you are a big company, like one represented by Mark Cuban.

Mark has recently recently criticized Facebook on Twitter and his blog for their extremely large costs of advertising to a wide audience. He doesn’t agree with the large amount of money a company has to pay to reach a significant portion of an audience. An article from Wired posts Cuban as saying, “Why would we invest in extending our Facebook audience size if we have to pay to reach them?” Cuban told ReadWrite. “That’s crazy.”

Ryan Tate from Wired goes on to say, “…the huge number of users Cuban wants to reach aren’t on Tumblr or MySpace, where posts are unfiltered; they’re on Facebook, where Cuban and his staff have to work harder – or pay more – to get in people’s faces. In his comments on Twitter and to ReadWrite, it doesn’t seem to occur to Cuban that Facebook users like that the social network quietly filters some Mavericks posts from their feeds. It’s not like unfiltered Mavericks promotional copy is particularly hard to find. If Cuban wants to get mad at someone for keeping his content obscure, he should blame the people who write it or the people who refuse to enthusiastically consume it – not Facebook for accurately labeling it as advertorial, and pricing its distribution accordingly.”

Mark doesn’t realize that people actually don’t care as much about clicking on sponsored posts as he thinks (orly?). The reason why people don’t want your posts, Mark, and why you have to pay to have them seen by your followers, is because they are mostly intrusive and unwanted (even if helpful. Think the light yellow sponsored posts at the top of a Google search result). If a company’s post was wanted to be seen by a user, then it would be, because that user has positively interacted with that company’s content in the past. The more they do, the more those posts will organically appear on a user’s newsfeed. Thanks Facebook algorithm.

“In response to this criticism (from Mark Cuban), Facebook explained–both in a post by one of its engineers and in comments to TechCrunch and Ars Technica–that the newsfeed filtering was designed to eliminate spam and noise and that it was constantly being tweaked to show users things they were actually interested in, not just things that brands wanted them to see. The message seemed pretty obvious: Don’t be spammy with your posts, and lots of your users will still see them for free. And if you want to spam them anyway, you will have to pay for sponsored posts to do that.” Good content is hard to develop. Edgerank gives the little guy a chance to be seen. As long as you have good content, not even money from the big guys can hide away your posts from your followers.

But not only does Mark have a problem with the way content is shown on Facebook, he is also critical of the content itself that is generated. He describes FB in his blog as “…a time waster. That’s not to say we don’t engage, we do. We click, share and comment because it’s mindless and easy.  But for some reason FB doesn’t seem to want to accept that it’s best purpose in life is as a huge time suck platform that we use to keep up with friends, interests and stuff.  I think that they are over thinking what their network is all about.”

The problem Mark, is not that Facebook doesn’t want to accept it’s role as “time waste central” of the internet, but it is that you, and the data you are sourcing, are trying to put them there as such. People spend all sorts of types of time on all sorts of types of content on Facebook. Some items on a person’s news feed may indeed be garble. But most importantly, the collective of information a user sees comes from their community in which is important to them regardless. Their content comes from people they have physically connected with, similar peers with similar friends, local, like-minded students, parents, siblings, local businesses. As Mark Cuban also says, “by default you are not going to use your newsfeed as a primary source of information. It’s more like the township newspaper .  You get the basic local stuff and updates , but it can’t be a comprehensive source.” Mark is right, Facebook is not a comprehensive news source. It is like a township newspaper, as he says.

Facebook is not meant to be a comprehensive source. It is not meant to be a go to stop to find out what great deal we can get from Coca Cola that day, or pressing issues of poverty in any given state or nation. We see those types of stories everywhere. From print ads, to radio, to tv and internet commercials. We get enough of that stuff from all types of different sources.

Facebook is about personal community and connection. So, if those large companies you represent, Mark, can’t afford to continue spamming every single user, every single day, who happened have liked one of those pages, boo hoo, get over it. Thanks again, Facebook Algorithm.

This is the beauty of Edgerank. No matter how a large a company is or many advertising dollars they have, they won’t be able to continue to reach followers who don’t like them. Mark also has a problem with this aspect of Edgerank because he believes that if a person really doesn’t want to see someone’s posts, they will simply hide them from their news feeds themselves. He says, “…Facebook is over complicating a simple issue.  A user can govern his/her newsfeed far better by hitting unlike than an algorithm like EdgeRank ever can.”

Yes, in theory, a person can decide better than an algorithm the type of content they want to see. However this simple “blocking” of a user is not as simple as he puts it. First of all, we don’t want to take the large amount of time that it does to  moderate every single person and business for good content.  Secondly, there is a deeper, unseen relationship between a Facebook user and their friends as he may realize. In a users township of friends, you may not always necessarily like everyone in it,  but you want and need them around because the content they share is an alternate, maybe sometimes extreme, but valuable, view of life that you think is important to consider once in a while in order to make effective and rational decisions in your own life. Some of what these people or businesses post is garble. But some is not. Some of it may be valuable to you. So naturally, you don’t want to see all of this person’s posts, but you want enough to be able to check in on them. And that is why Edgerank rocks. Person or business, only good content will be seen by those who want to see it most. And that is why the internet rocks and will continue to get better. Only good content will be seen by those who want to see it most

And that, my friends, is the point. Good content, that is relevant, personal, and authentic, will always win. And that’s awesome, because this is the type of content that is the best means for increasing the good of humanity, not profits. Sorry Mark.

Cocreation

I believe that in the future, everyone will be an entrepreneur. Very few people will stay working at one firm for their entire careers. People will instead be hired on a per project basis. Once their contract has ended, their availability will once again be available to be posted on a crowd sourced job hiring website such as InnoCentive.

All quotes from: http://markstaton.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/cocreation-journal-of-service-research.pdf

InnoCentive is one of the beginnings to the means of entrepreneurship. Instead of keep what’s ours a secret, we can open up and invite help from anyone anywhere to take part in our projects. Project contributors will be compensated and then released to move on to other work which pulls them.

The system that InnoCentive is facilitating is a form of New Product Development Cocreation in which people who are not employees of a given firm are asked to participate in the development of a new product before it comes to market. This system of cocreation has outstanding potential to further aid in the development of new products. However currently, there are drawbacks and legal issues that need to be considered and sorted out before the idea can flourish. The following are Stimulants and Impediments of the Consumer Cocreation process.

Stimulants of Consumer Cocreation	Impediments of Consumer Cocreation
Financial rewards – InnoCentive	Concerns about secrecy
Social benefits	Ownership of intellectual property
Technology (or product/service) knowledge	Information overload
Psychological reasons	Large amount of infeasable production ideas
Firm has proper tools and processes in place to stimulate cocreation process

Factors that Stimulate Consumer Cocreation

Financial Reward

“Some cocreation projects offer financial compensation, either directly in the form of money prizes or profit sharing from the firm that engages in cocreation with them, or indirectly, through the intellectual property that they might receive, or through the visibility that they might receive from engaging in (and especially winning) cocreation competitions.”

Cocreation activities are available all over the net. One website called InnoCentric provides a platform for companies to post questions or problems they are having to the site so that anyone on the web can offer a solution. For a large sum of money of course. Most rewards for solved problems come in at above $10,000.

Social Benefits

Many people participate in product cocreation because they receive recognition, feelings of self esteem, and “good citizenship” that they feel when participating. The recognition they gain can tie them to other important individuals.

Technological Knowledge

By participating in the cocreation process, contributors can gain valuable knowledge pertaining to the latest in technological development and theory. “For example, Blackberry, Lenovo Thinkpad, and many other brands have forums that attract consumers who participate in all stages of the cocreation process and gain technology knowledge themselves from exchanging ideas and inputs from others in the community.”

Psychological Reasons

Psychological reasons for participating in NPD cocreation are still poorly understood. It is most likely due to the generally positive feelings associated in interacting with others and creating things.

Firm Has Correct Tools to Stimulate Cocreation

Some firms are simply not structured to stimulate customer cocreation. Those that are by giving consumers the tools necessary to contribute will be able to cocreate. This must be the choice of the firm however to make the correct tools available to the public.

Factors that Impediate Consumer Co Creation

Concerns About Secrecy

For a firm to give consumers the necessary means for successful cocreation, they must share with them sensitive information that may have otherwise remained secret for a much longer time. By revealing proprietary information, it is possible that a consumer or competitor could take ideas from the company or other cocreators of the project and use them to profit for themselves.

Ownership of Intellectual Property

“Although some consumers might gladly hand over the fruits of their skills and labor to the cocreating firm without any acknowledgement, others might expect to retain full ownership over intellectual property…Firms that emphasize retaining ownership of intellectual propety rights for themselves are therefore less likely to engage in a high degree of cocreation.”3 Intellectual property policies are inconsistent and sometimes become entangled. The legal process of cocreation is uncertain.

Information Overload

Sometimes a company has millions of consumer generated ideas presented to them. It becomes difficult to identify the good ideas from the other mostly bad ones. Production time becomes an issue when companies want to be able to present the most relevant products to market.

Large Amount of Infeasible Product Ideas

While many consumer generated ideas are creative and interesting, most cannot be feasibly manufactured and sold in a way that will generate profit for the company.

So it seems that a company who is willing to share proprietary information while giving consumers the means to cocreate will achieve positive results. Cocreation will give a firms greater effectiveness and efficiency in NPD. By listening to and giving the customer what they want, a company can greatly reduce the chance of bringing a flop product to market.

It makes sense that when you develop a product for a consumer to buy, you would want feedback from that potential customer on whether they would even buy it at market in the first place.

Similarly, when developing a product, a company has access to an enormous pool of professionals with all types of skills in every niche market. This pool is called the internet, and surfing it is any type of employee or specialist a business could ask for. All they need to offer is the right level of compensation and visibility of the problem on the net for someone to take part. Cocreation has great potential. We just all need to find more effective ways to allow us humans to trust each other.

A Community Mobile Engagement

Mobile is about engagement. Our phones are so close to us at every moment of every day that it only makes sense that businesses should find a way to use them to engage with their customers. So how can they do this?

According to Nielsen, social networking is all about mobile, and what’s a better way to social network than through both the digital and analog life. See Neilson’s Social Media Report here.

Starbucks does a great job of connecting customers to their company by allowing them to pay for products using an in-phone Starbucks app. Customers are also awarded points for their money spent so that once they gain enough, they can come in for a free coffee or treat. The payment/reward system has been very successful thus far. From Mobile World Live, “…figures from the first quarter, which covers the holiday season, show more than $1 billion was loaded onto Starbucks cards, the highest amount ever. One in 10 US adults received one of the company’s cards as a gift during the quarter, an indication of its popularity. Nearly 20 percent of transactions on Starbucks cards now come through mobile payments.” These numbers are clear indications that their mobile payment/reward app is providing a lot of engagement. It also shows room for app use to grow.

Yet mobile interaction is most definitely not all about quick payments and easy rewards at hot coffee shops. Every business has the opportunity to be involved in mobile. They must only watch out for the next big app that will allow them to do so.

For example, what if every time a person walked by any shop anywhere, there was some type of notification, or an offer, or a status, pushed to the potential customer who was walking by on the street.

As a mobile phone user of this type of interaction, you would do anything you normally would on any normal day. If you are walking, driving, skateboarding, etc, while passing shops and stores, a message will be pushed by the store to your mobile phone.

It would be an idea set up similarly to Twitter, as an rss feed of notifications. One where the messages you receive would not be intrusive. Your phone would not beep every time you received a push notification from a business but rather when you chose to, you would open up the app on your phone to see if there are any good deals or offers available close by.

Messages pushed by businesses could be as simple as “Just want to say, hope your having a good day!” or something along the lines of “stop in and make a purchase in the next 20 minutes to receive a 20% discount!

I believe I have just invented content advertising, except for it already exists. But this type of content advertising engages people in a much more interactive and immediate way than the industry standard. The idea is that you give a user something interesting, informative, helpful, that immediately advertises your business and can invoke an immediate and direct purchase.

A business participating in the program could update their advertised content as often as they would like. Changing deals and messages as often as they would see fit, either according to the time of day or happenings of current events.

The app would have access to the entire network of businesses using the app. It would be be seamlessly able to be integrated among businesses and platforms.

This application would have the ability to not only promote an individual’s local business, but the community as a whole. Businesses could facilitate events together using the app that would encourage interaction among people who were participating.

For example, a city wide scavenger hunt could mobile interactively take place in say, downtown Bellingham, Washington, in which a business would push an interactive challenge to a hunter that would require them to go in store to find out. Participants in the hunt would travel from business to business, clue to clue to win the event.

In this way, the use of mobile can not only increase the profits of a business, but the well being and profits of a community as well. One of the overarching themes of greater technology has been greater connectedness among human beings. What a better way to connect people than with a messenger that never leaves our side.