Social Traffic | Social Media Marketing

Sometimes you take long rocky journeys, but in the end the destination makes it all worth it. Social Traffic’s existence has been something like that – when transitioning into Phase 2. Defining structure and leadership is important, unless you want everyone to run around like chickens with their heads cut off.

Sure, it wasn’t completely futile… everyone involved can use the skills they have learned and the relationships established to improve their own business or passions. Associations with such a great community alone will help all our professional persona, it has, some of the people now have ardent followers listening to them. Contacts made may lead to bigger projects, partnerships and opportunities. Some people may have even secured a client or two from the journey, or the value gained may just be that you feel like you have come out a different person – someone who’s on the other side of the table now. On one side we have the millions of mainstream users of social networks, on the other side, its people like the ones who have just completed my training… who can look at a platform and be able to analyze it from a birds eye view. Who understand it and most importantly who can plan to harness it for their businesses.

I hope that’s true for every single shareholder, but for me. I knew all this stuff already. I was hoping to come out of this a shareholder in a new, stand alone Social Media marketing company that not only had its own cash flow, but could have taken over the marketing of my Events Listed event marketing and coaching platform that would have given me more time to focus on other aspects of the start up.

That’s business. We win some, we lose some. What I love most about business is that it’s often what appears on the surface to be a loss often turns out to become invaluable assets. Never jump the gun. Where one day you might see failure, another day you may see success through different eyes. Your outlook always changes but what cannot be re-written is how we react to what we see. You just need to know how to look for the opportunity in every outcome, how to see it. Because when ever we see opportunity our reaction is always positive. And that’s exactly what myself, Doug, Johnathon, Jeff Cole, Jason, Alexander and Anne amongst others saw at the end of the phase 1 journey. Social Traffic has turned out to be a bigger opportunity in Phase 2 than phase 1 ever was. Those who saw it have re-invested their time into turning it into a reality.

Those who couldn’t see it that way still didn’t just walk away empty handed. They too left with the great relationships held together by memories that will always be associated with what is fast becoming a strong Social Media community brand like Social Traffic. My book has been titled Social Traffic for over a year.  The relationships formed under the Social Traffic community brand should stay together and continue to work together. Nothing should change there. Sure, we have been exclusionary to date. That’s because we needed a core group of high performance contributors to become our foundation members.

The Social Traffic community will grow at many levels. People will be welcome to experience the same benefits all evangelists have enjoyed at any level that suits their needs. It starts with level 1. The last 12 weeks was all about filtering to find the group to be our level 1 members.  The community will  grow off this level and become much bigger than the business opportunity itself over time, remembering that nobody can own a social community. You can only lead one.

People follow those who add the most value. It’s not a tit for tat phenomena.

Reaping some returns on our investment:

All of our individual and community benefits aside. The real value in what we did over the 12 weeks of the EDBD campaign was in the teaching. The Events Listed Learning Center was offered to Social Traffic to give away as leverage. The idea was that if evangelists help launch and promote Social Traffic’s Earth day birthday campaign, Social Traffic would teach them cutting edge, Social Media marketing knowledge. Now that same course is being offered at a high rate of $2000 with over 1000 people of interested people already lined up to get it.

My motive for giving away 150+ FREE training courses ($200,000 in value) was obvious. Those who did it spread the word and gave others Social Proof the course is great value and with the success of the Social Traffic campaign I too got my social proof that my course is cutting edge, not just through it’s content but by being able to rank at the top of Google and Youtube for incredibly competitive terms. The results achieved by some newbies who dug in and gave it their best are phenomenal. The success of my course has been due to the value it represented to people doing it. The success of my training content was being enjoyed at the same time STi was failing to gain any traction as a Social media marketing organization for hire which confused some people. I received emails from people making comments that suggested they were going to become shareholders in the Intellectual property tied up in my training course content. As though through their time investment into the STi opportunity, they were entitled to a share in my training courses.

I am sure there is no more confusion… but for the sake of clarity: The STi Social Media marketing company opportunity was made possible through me giving the organization access to my training content for them to use it as leverage to entice people into promoting the STi Earthday campaign. All costs associated with the STi opportunity were also funded by EventsListed who was also STi’s first customer. The STi opportunity started without any physical assets, Intellectual property or license agreements. It started with 20 people prepared to work without wages to build an asset off the back of an idea that I lead and facilitated.

My personal contribution towards this opportunity was my time and my leadership. At no stage was it suggested that the STi opportunity included a stake in Simon U Fords existing company or any intellectual property associated with my personal brand. Why would I give a share in that away to 20 people who played no part in building these assets. What I did give these people was an amazing opportunity to come together and run with a vision that I presented and to turn that vision into another asset that I too would become shareholder of. This opportunity came with my personal time and support through leadership and the support of my other company who not only became Sti’s all important and very flexible first customer, it was STi’s financier who has to date invested not only it’s resources but money to fund all the costs associated with everything STi has achieved to date. What the 20 shareholders brought to the table was their willingness to invest human capital into the equation and it was hoped this combination would serve to deliver a new asset base under a new STi company.

To this point I think its clear the STi EDBD team has not managed to build an assets base and with the failure (in business terms) of our first social media marketing campaign we were not likely to attract a second customer who would pay us to fund any further pursuit of an asset base of our own. I think its fair to say that any future for STi to realize its well documented goal of becoming a social media marketing company in the short term will not be realized.

In saying that, Events Listed had never intended to promote hand holding services to customers buying access to our learning center training videos.  Our main business focus is on our event marketing platform itself, our video learning center was always designed for mid tier to advanced marketers to climb into after reading my book. People who would pay $400 to $500 for the initial video courses would continue to pay $50 odd per month continuity for a monthly video series their after. These videos were always planned to be sold as products in conjunction with a weekly Q&A webinar that were all geared towards helping EventsListed customers succeed in their marketing online. At no stage did we ever intend to provide  coaching and mentoring services as STi did throughout the EDBD campaign. Events Listed don’t want a newbie market not capable of being able to do the video’s and find support in the forums without hand holding. It’s not discriminating, its just that’s not in EventsListed’s business model to build in that direction.

Turning my training videos into a fully blown business in its own right is a very real opportunity that came to light when I realized how valuable my training content was throughout the STi EDBD campaign.  For all its failings in terms of its business goals a lot of positives came out of the STi EDBD campaign and seeing how well received my coaching videos were was one of those positives. I realized throughout the campaign that the content is too good for it to be sold as stand alone training videos for EventsListed customers. That they are in fact good enough to carry a global business opportunity in its own right. An opportunity that EventsListed would prefer Social Traffic take ownership of . I am already heavily invested into two start up companies so needed STi to stand on its own two feet if I was to be involved. I just don’t have the time to become key person in 3 start ups. I approached Doug and told him that if he was prepared to lead the business of Social Traffic, I was prepared to issue STi a license for them use my training content to offer a $2000 training, coaching and mentoring course for newbies (if paying a royalty percentage to me) for all courses sold of course. Doug could see the opportunities I saw and he quickly assembled a crack business team from the STi EDBD team and the rest shall we say is history.

Students of each course could promote the course as their course practicum over 8 weeks and past students could double over as mentors and progress into becoming trainers after being certified. This represented great synergy for me. My other start up (outside of EventsListed) is a state of the art community building platform that I built throughout my 10 years driving the “Sleeping With The Enemy” community. The system holds individual members of any community accountable for contributions towards community goals through a points and reward system similar to what I am doing to drive the STi community today. The big difference is that this platform allows anyone to do the exact same thing within their own communities. It connects all of the communities together across the enterprise where all members are motivated to add value through their efforts in doing so being recognized and rewarded for it.

More about these exciting plans will be revealed in time.

What kind of numbers are we looking at?

The same course we have just given away has been valued at a min $2000, Events Listed as the owner of not only the course content and the learning center would want 25% of all sales which is the same as the  $400 to $500 price tag we are selling the same raw video course for without any of the bells and whistles. Social Traffic would then have $1500 gross per seat as working capital to pay brokers, commissions, mentors and admin staff . If we sold 500 seats per course, that’s a 0.75 million dollar budget per course for STi.  Obviously when paying 35% to 50% commission and a 10% to 5% broker’s fee a large part of this budget will be eaten away by costs? But this is just what we turn over on every course.

So just by doing what evangelists learn in each course and applying it in teams of 100 to 500 people per course under each courses coach and their team of mentors, evangelists could effectively start earning $750 to $1000 per sale generated whilst they are doing the courses.  2 sales and their course is paid for giving us 500 to 1000 active sales reps across social media selling our next course and so on.

Who benefits from this new opportunity?

It’s a completely new opportunity. One, through lessons just learned over the past 3 months. I want to distance myself from it more than I did over the past 3 months. Events Listed will expect certain undertakings and assurances from this new STi entity as would be the case should it enter into any such licensing of It’s intellectual property. This license would become STi’s first considerable asset the basis of a product from which it could build a successful company. This is a golden opportunity for the same group of people who worked so hard to realized the initial opportunity of becoming a Social media marketing company.

One of the licensing considerations EventsListed has stipulated in granting this license to sell our courses is that Doug leads the new STi business team as it’s CEO. Another condition is that I’m working in an advisory capacity to help direct it with Doug and we will appoint a chair in the next 6 months. At the end of the day, the opportunity comes down to the people who have stood up and said they are prepared to invest more human capital into making this new opportunity happen.

Those people who have already put their hands down to investing any more time into the STi opportunity beyond Earthday has already resigned themselves to the reality that the time they invested into STi was not going to realize into a capital gain all be it they would be glad to have  participated the way they did.

Had the group of 5 people in the STi executive team who came from the initial 20 shareholders investing time into phase 1 also put their hands down to more time investment beyond Earthday the organization would be finished. Likewise they could have quit and started again as a new entity and approached EventsListed  for the license and proceeded under the same deal under this new entity. Don’t get me wrong, the first right of refusal to be given this license belongs to the STi EDBD shareholder group for time served. If  only five of them want to re-invest time into using this license to build a new company what becomes of the half hearted who initially joined STi to start a company but walked away from it after 3 months of trying.

Well the spirit in which myself and the new leadership team work is that we want their support. Everyone was brought together under a philosophy and mind set that we must add value to become valuable. This mind set extends beyond Social Media marketing campaigns. Doug’s leadership team have decided to continue their work as an extension of the STi EDBD group and include the 20 people we called shareholders who were a part of that team who are invited to continue reaping any rewards that come from this small team building out and hopefully realizing this new opportunity.

The way I see it we have 5 groups to consider when allotting tranche 1 shares in our new company.

1) Key people whom without this opportunity would not exist nor would it survive should they walk away rendering everyone else’s shares worthless anyway.  All shareholders should want this group to own as big a stake in the company as possible so they won’t ever walk away.

2) Members of the original shareholder group who contributed and added value to our phase 1 EDBD efforts. Took their shares in the spirit in which they were offered as shareholders in an opportunity they were responsible for realizing and who are still actively participating  in the STi VIP group today thus adding real value towards realizing the opportunity that’s still available to the STi team.

3) Members of the original shareholder group’s leadership team who did more work and took on more responsibility than other shareholders throughout the EDBD campaign.

4) Members of the current leadership team who stepped in 3 weeks from the end of the EDBD campaign to take ownership of leading the group to complete the campaign. Had it not been for this group the STi opportunity would have ended 3 weeks out from Earthday.

5) Members of the original shareholder group who contributed to our phase 1 EDBD campaign efforts  who decided further investment in the STi opportunity beyond EDBD was not a good investment of their time so have not continued to invest any time towards realizing this new opportunity or supporting the currents teams effort.

6) I think it appropriate that we allot a portion of bonus shares in the STi company to evangelists who worked just as hard if not harder than some shareholders throughout phase 1 of the STi EDBD campaign. People who were not on the register as shareholders but acted like them, who continue to work hard into phase 2 of the STi social media coaching course opportunity as leaders within the VIP group.

Our objective when ever allotting shares in a company is in working towards making the shares valuable. Our message throughout this and any subsequent allotments will always be that people who add value to the company will always earn bonus shares in it. Those people who don’t add value towards the companies goals are not valuable to the company. It really that simple!

I will leave the company’s CEO to announce the type  and allotment of shares we are willing to allocate the above groups of people in private. If you think you belong to one of the groups I have outlined above and you would like to receive your shares in the new STi company please fill out this form.

Doug will take it offline and respond in the coming days.

Important: Applicants for this share offer closes  Friday June 26th. You must belong in one of the 5 groups outlined above and have completed this form by June 26th to be eligible

(Image source: geekandpoke.typead.com)

Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)

Visit my “event line blogs”

Social Traffic – The book

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