The Economy Needs To Be Re-Branded

Although President Obama is trying his hardest to help our struggling economy, he is looking for advice from the wrong experts. Like most people, he is thinking, this is an economic problem so lets ask the economists. But this isn't a problem about money, its about dealing with human emotion and right now those emotions are fear and confidence.

Companies are scared of the recession and are laying off employees. The people who still have jobs fear losing their jobs so they spend less money. Because consumers spend less, companies fears are validated, and so they lay off more people. And Banks don't trust anyone with their money. Its a vicious cycle and unless we can restore confidence, we won't get out of it soon.

It won't matter how much money we pump into the economy if at the end of the day people's confidence isn't restored. Many surveys show that lots of people don't think the economic stimulus package (800 + Billion$) will have any effect on the economy. And if they don't think it will, then it won't. Its kind of like a reverse placebo effect where you don't think a drug will help you get better, so it doesn't.

And the media doesn't help at all. They continuously tell us how bad it is and give us minute to minute updates on the total jobs lost. I admit, its bad, but all the media does is scare us and make a bad situation worse. All in the name of better ratings, they are willing to help us into the hole and cover us with dirt. Sadly, the only way to get the media to stop spreading mass economic chaos is to get them to focus on something else that would bring them bigger ratings. I don't even want to think about what that would be.

We need something that inspires confidence, trust and optimism. The current stimulus plan does just the opposite. Its too big. Happened to quick. Its highly debated. People already don't trust the government with money. And all the fighting in Washington between the two parties only makes it worse.

So how do we fix it? We approach this from a marketing point of view and re-brand the economy. We start from scratch, get rid of the old, throw out the stimulus package and work on developing strategies to gain consumer confidence. A good marketing plan will go further than all the money in the world.

How to make real connections on Twitter

What's the secret to get a lot of people to legitimately follow you on Twitter? Common Interests.

Its the one link that ties together a bunch of people who don't know each other. For more on the importance of common interests in social media see my previous post "The Glue that Holds Social Media Together". I don't know a lot of people that I follow or that follow me on Twitter, but with many of them we share a common interest in Social Media and Internet Marketing. And this gives us a common ground that we can use to start a conversation. The truth is, most people on Twitter are looking to communicate, you just need to show them that you are worth talking to.

The best place to start is with your personal profile because if your profile isn't right, no one will follow you. When people look at your profile, to decide whether or not to follow you, there are two place they will look. The first place they look is at your bio, to see who you are and what you are interested in and to see if they would have any interest in following you. If you share a common interest or your bio seems particularly interesting, then you may get a follow. And you only have 160 characters, so get to the point and say something interesting.

The second place they may look is at your tweets themselves. Your tweets say a lot about you, so tweet about things that you are genuinely interested in.

Once your profile is taken care of, the next thing to do is go out and find people to follow. My rule of thumb when looking for people to follow is, "Could I have an intelligent conversation with this person?" Don't just follow everyone just for the sake of following.

Twitter has made it very easy to find people who are like you with whom you share a common interest. Search.twitter.com is a search tool that you can use to search for keywords in the public stream. Just type in something that you are interested in and see what others on Twitter are saying about it.

Another great way to use the search is to find an event that you are interested in that others may be tweeting about. Twitter users have developed a special way to track events in Twitter. They use hashtags to tag something that they are talking about, like an event. Hashtags start with the number symbol # and are followed by the tag. For example, last night was the world series and Twitterers watching were using the hashtag #worldseries in their tweets. To follow what people were tweeting about the world series last night as it happened you could have search #worldseries in the search, http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23worldseries.

So now you have a list of people who are tweeting real time about an event that you are interested in. Before you reach out to these people, make a comment about the event and tag it with the hashtag. There is a good chance that many of these people are also following the hashtag and will see your tweet. Once you have sent a tweet, go out and follow some of them. After receiving an invitation to follow, they will most likely see your last tweet with the hashtag about the event they are participating in, and because of the common interest, will follow you back. And will most likely follow you right away, as they are sitting in front of their computer just like you.

Twitter is a great way to communicate and find people like you.