Scoreboard Media Group, Internet Audience Development

As I sat in the audience of the social media session at SES Chicago watching guys like Cameron speak, a few things occured to me. 

1. Of the 300 or 400 people in the audience, everyone but the three guys sitting with me were hanging on every word like Jesus was at the podium.  The promise of a successful social media endeavor has Madison Avenue and the Chicago Agencies hooked like they used to be hooked on cocaine in the Eighties.
2. Of those 300 to 400 people who were full of creativity, budget, and Ivy League education, exactly zero of them had a snowball’s chance in Baghdad of ever getting to the front page of Digg on their own.  A quick visit to Digg’s Upcoming pages and you will see how successful these guys are with their brand new accounts and generation gap descriptions.
3. Like SEO and competitive webmastering, in general, it was going to have to be the resources from guys like me and the three guys sitting next to me taking every new startup, Fortune 500, and Madison Avenue into social media success.  We “get it”, we own the assets and resources to get it done, and we’ve established a methodology to scale that activity efficiently.

I’m a capitalist pig.  We have already talked about how many times I have looked at my mother’s neck and wondered if there was a way I could slit that thing for some authority links.  As a capitalist pig, one of the guiding theories in my life is Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”.  From Wikipedia:

The invisible hand is a metaphor invented by Adam Smith to illustrate how those who seek wealth by following their individual self-interest, inadvertently stimulate the economy and assist society as a whole. In the general opinion, in The Wealth of Nations and other writings, Smith claims that, in capitalism, an individual pursuing his own good tends also to promote the good of his community, through principal that he called “the invisible hand” of the market, which ensures that those activities most beneficial and efficient will naturally be those most that are profitable.

Adam would have been a great audience baiter.  And that’s what we’re all chasing.  An audience.  Not just links.  Not just traffic.  Not just mindshare.  We are lining up the dominos so they fall in such a way that all of those things happen as we create a captive, recurring, defensible audience.

When I work with a client on Invisible Hand engagements, we are looking to create an Internet event that creates an inflection point in their business, not just something that creates some good links now and improved search results in 90 days.

Nope.  It should resonate.  Think about that for a second.  Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Netscape, Slashdot, the blogosphere, paid search, organic search, content syndication, offline promotion, offline connections, etc.  Each of those events creates a resonant frequency in a much larger earthquake that we are timing and deploying. 

Some firms have the assets and methodology to knock down one or two of those with regularity.  Some have the ability to convert each of those at a very high rate.  And that’s what the Invisible Hand does.

I am going to do no more than 10 of these a year, mostly for existing private clients.  There is no fixed cost as it is a holistic effort in which each specific case will have its own resource and competitive hurdles.  My guess is that the range goes between $6,000 and $50,000.