"The Pool's Closed"

Topics: Internet, Marketing, Social Media

You have a day off in the summer time and decide it's too hot to do anything. You spend all day inside while you're at work, so you want to get outside. Off to the pool you go. As you drive up, the parking lot looks a little too empty. You park your car and start to get out, when a guy returning to his car tells you the pool's closed, nothing else, just that the pool's closed.

Now there are two options and most people will choose the first, which is to get back in their car and drive home. The other option is to go check for yourself, that in fact, the pool is closed.

Twitter, facebook, and all the other social media sites are a lot like "the pool's closed." It's called social proof. We do things because we see other people doing it or spread ideas because we trust the person that shared that idea with us. Sometimes we share an idea because we have heard it from several different people.

Another way of thinking about social proof, that I heard, is imagine coming to a street that has two restaurants. Each one looks extremely identical. The only difference is the number of people waiting outside to go in. The one on the left side of the street only has one person waiting. The restaurant on the right has ten people waiting. Because you see the ten people waiting at the business on the right, you feel more confident in choosing that restaurant because there are more of your peers doing the same thing. But instead of the message being that "the pool's closed", it's more like "the pool's open."

For social media, it's the same idea. Meaning people share things on twitter, facebook, and other social media sites, and we take in what they share as more authoritative because it comes from some one we know. Some one we trust. Or that it comes from several people we know.

Now what others share on social sites are website they like, companies they've used, businesses they 'like' or 'follow', or a multitude of other things they feel the need to share.

What to learn from this is if you want people using your product or service, reading your blog, whatever it is, you need to get them to tell others about you. You need to start spreading the word that "the pool's open."

Please share this post with your friends because, "The Pool's Open."