Over a recent re-viewing of a movie trailer entitled “Her”, I began to wonder. The film centers around a man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with a women. Well the voice of one at least, a computer operating system that interacts with their user in a analytically designed manner.

This made me wonder, with all the conversation going on regarding a more personal and customized approach to online marketing and targeting of consumers is this where we are headed? At what point does are online world become more important than our real world? Consumers are putting more and more of their lives online and businesses are taking note. Never before have companies had the ability to create such effective targeting of consumers using this data. And we love it, I mean if you speak to most consumers they relish in the fact that they can find whatever they what online and are alerted to the fact that their favorite store is having a massive sale.

There are hundreds of thousands of stats that will describe how we are constantly connected, but more effective would be for you to just look around in a 5 foot radius and count the devices that are present. People can witness pictures of the greens of the Amazon or the colorful mosaic of fishes in the Great Barrier Reef from Twitter or Facebook, and all from the comfort of their favorite recliner.

If there is a point to be made her it is that I fear we would rather communicate through a technological medium. Why not, it’s safe, it’s comfortable, and most of all it’s easy; we do not have to experience anything now because some one else has. At what point do we have to create moderation, when I was a kid there were television ads to tell me to stop watching TV. Is this the business or government groups responsibility to help make a change?

In my final though I believe that changes need to be made, we have begun to view people on our social media profiles as faceless tiles. We have “learned” all we need to know about someone before we can truly discover a person. I don’t mean to bash social media, it does good, I mean it has allowed my mother to see her sister over 12000km away in Sydney, Australia. Social media has allowed us to connect with our World like never before in human history, but has it separated us from our neighbors?

Where we left off we were focused on the internal workings of the Make a Wish foundation’s transformation of San Francisco into a sunny Gotham city. There is another equally interesting and fascinating side to the story, that is the community of social media users who rallied around Miles, the 5 year old Batkid.

On Friday when Batkid sprung into action to protect Gotham, social media users instantly took to their respective platforms to share photos, videos, articles and even personas. By 4 p.m. Friday over  10,000 photos had been uploaded to Instagram under the #SFBatkid. Not to mention enough media posted on Facebook to make the 5 o’clock news irrelevant with any coverage of the story.

I would like to mention the aspect of community in all this, as one could infer the Make a Wish foundation is a community within itself, but in this instance it opened up to a larger population with open arms. People responded in any way they could, some went and participated first hand and those who couldn’t participated online join a much broader and expansive community, but a community non the less. All the significant figure in San Francisco took part, from the San Francisco Giants to the coach of the 49ers taking to twitter to cheer on Batkid. Others included previous Batman’s Christian Bale and Micheal Keaton declaring there support and praise for Batkid, Ben Affleck also tweet that Batkid was the best Batman ever! However the real show stopper was President Obama who released a Vine congratulating Miles for saving Gotham.

Amid the teary eyes who witnessed this first hand or followed along online, I was taken aback by the power of the social media community. The force of good and positivity it can provide within our worlds online, something that is often taken for granted in our modern society. Batkid, (and Miles), to me represent the goodness and purity of social media that is often shadowed by commercialism and negativity; one could only hope that we all can one day be as good as the real everyday superhero Miles.

President Obama’s Vine: https://vine.co/v/htbdjZAPrAX

Articles: http://mashable.com/2013/11/15/batkid-instagrams/

http://mashable.com/2013/11/15/batkid-department-of-justice/

http://mashable.com/2013/11/11/batkid-make-a-wish/

The San Francisco Bat Kid is a heart warming tale about a young boy named Miles, he is currently fighting leukemia. Miles has a strong interest, nah a passion for Batman, he adores the caped crusader.

It was his wish to be Batman, even for just a single day. This is where San Francisco Make a Wish stepped in, they had a plan to turn the Bay Area city into Gotham City for the day in order for Miles to serve and protect as Batkid, Batman’s partner.

On Friday, his dream came into fruition, San Francisco became Gotham and Miles became Batkid. His day of serving as the city’s protector led him to saving a women tied to the train tracks by the Riddler, stopping a bank robbery, rescued the Giants mascot from the clutches of the villainous Penguin and ended it all by being handed the keys to the city by the Mayor Ed Lee. All in all just another days work for Batkid.

Though there is much more to this great story, the planning, execution and promotion of the whole day was made possible due to social media.

First of all Make a Wish needed 10,000 volunteers to pull off this feat, so they took to their website and posted an RSVP to all Bay Area residents. Through Twitter and Facebook word spread, it was posted on Monday November 11th and by the Tuesday afternoon it had already reached its goal of 10,000. An interesting note to include is the reach of its message was not limited to the Bay Area, a couple from Ohio bought airline tickets to San Francisco the moment they read about this story in order to be a part of it. It is truly amazing that number of people who showed up did considering the short time frame they worked on. It is definitely an indication of just how strong social media is within our culture and the influence it has within our everyday lives. We have certainly have come a long way from the days of volunteers going door to door or on standing on street corners looking for volunteers.

Articles: http://mashable.com/2013/11/11/batkid-make-a-wish/

http://mashable.com/2013/11/15/batkid-instagrams/

Article: http://mashable.com/2013/11/07/mobile-advertising-wins/

Mashable recently listed four small businesses within the USA that are taking advantage of massive online advertising opportunities. According to 17.4% of web traffic this year is coming from mobile browsing, which is a 6% increase to last year. This leads to a massive audience that has the potential to be segmented into ultra specific categories for maximum targeting.

This is especially important for smaller businesses who lack the physical and financial means to indulge in a mass marketing campaign. Additionally an online campaign will generally work out to be a more cost effective solution.

Mashable listed four companies all using different social media platforms to target their audience.

On Twitter: Rock Creek, a outdoor sports store, used promoted tweets to ramp up their advertising campaign during the holiday season. Their smartest move was offering deals in time bound situation, for example making a sale price only available for 2 days. This give an incentive for users to act quickly and not delay actions.

On Facebook: Karaoke Heroes, a Karaoke Bar chain in the USA, used Facebook ads to target customers after their launch in 2012. Facebook ads was their most cost effective strategy as it allowed to only target the customers they wanted.

There are many options a small business can take to leverage online communities and for the most part these allow for cost saving which are crucial for small businesses.