Introduction
In the Beginning, Man Created Intros …
Today is a beautiful spring day here in Atlanta, Georgia, and I am outside playing with my niece, Deva. She and I are having a ball with our new bottle of Super Bubble. I am the bubble manufacturer and she is the bubble destroyer, meaning that I blow them and she chases them and pops them. I will occasionally, however, grab one out of the air and catch it on my bubble wand. Each time I manage to catch one out of the air, my niece stares at me in fascination. (Yes, I know this is a business book, but trust me, this is going somewhere.)
She has the look of wonder when I catch the bubbles, like I am a master of bubbleology. Then the phone rings, so I quickly hand her the giant bottle of bubbles and the wand and make my way up on the porch. I sit down in the rocker on the porch to take the call. I watch Deva now both blowing and chasing her own self-made bubbles.
She dips the wand in the jar and blows. A stream of bubbles flows forth, but now comes the hard part for her. If she wants to be the bubble master like her uncle, she has to chase down the dispersed bubbles and navigate the wand under one so it will land perfectly. Unfortunately, at her age, it is a challenge, but she is very determined to make it happen.
Deva is blowing the bubbles just fine, but once the bubbles start to fly away, she begins to chase them and forgets that she is holding the bubble bottle. So she runs after the bubbles, letting the solution spill all over the yard. Then she begins the process over again: dip, blow, chase, spill. After four repetitions comes the realization that she’s now out of bubble solution. Now the wand doesn’t work, and she can’t make or attempt to catch bubbles. Game over! Before the tears can begin, I come to the rescue with a bottle of dishwashing soap. Uncle Johnny saves the day!
Sometimes people can act like Deva with their businesses, too. They get so focused on the new bubble, and they start to chase it. What they fail to realize is that the bubble is only the byproduct of soap, water, and a puff of air. Deva was unable to discern that what I did had very little chasing involved. I waited for the right bubble to come down and land on the wand. I waited for the best bubble that was close and coming my way before catching it. I basically never left my spot to catch all of my bubbles!
Social media is the new bubble. Blow hard, and you’ve got Facebook. Blow again, poof, Twitter. One more time, and you’ve got LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. You get my drift. We see these pretty bubbles, and we run to chase them. But the entire time we’re running, we are spilling the bubble solution all over the yard. We are chasing the new and shiny objects, giving little regard to what makes it all possible … the bubble solution!
This book is the key to the mystery of social media. I guarantee that after reading just a chapter or two, you will never think the same way about social marketing for social commerce. You will know not only how to catch the bubbles, but you will know the formula for making more bubble solution. So no matter what bubbles come out today or in the future, you will know the chemical makeup for success.
There are thirteen chapters in this book, and they are broken down into two distinct parts. Part One is “the Meat.” It’s the system, the “how it all works” for social commerce. Part Two is “the Gravy.” It is the application of the formula across the range of social networks. We wrote this book so you could move from theory to immediate action!
Do you know what the difference is between knowledge and wisdom? A real smart man once told me that to read a book is to gain knowledge, and to use what you learned in that book successfully is to gain wisdom: huge difference. I know lots of people who are much smarter than me in terms of book smarts. Matter of fact, most of them work with me as clients and some actually work for me as employees. They’ve got the book smarts. They have the knowledge. They can research a topic to death. They can write dissertations and speak in boardrooms or on stages. These guys and gals are smart as hell! But more often than not, when you tap them on the shoulder and ask, “So how much of that have you applied to your own work?” I hear crickets. They’ve done nothing. This is not a bad thing. It’s just not who they are or how they operate. I am the opposite. I was born an entrepreneur. I was not trained in the best schools, with the alphabet soup behind my name. Matter of fact, the only letters I actually qualify for are HSD (high school dropout).
Yeah, I’m the guy who dropped out of high school, but who today has 117,349 feedbacks on eBay, where I’ve achieved Platinum PowerSeller status and completed more than 267,000 online transactions on the web.
To put it plainly, I am not the smartest guy in the room, but I am full of the applied knowledge my coauthor and I will share in the following pages.
When I was beginning with social media and blogging, I wanted my own name, just like most people do. But when I did a search for John Lawson, more than 3.4 million people were listed on Google. I knew it would be way too hard for me to rank high enough to get noticed with that many folks sharing my name. So I came up with a handle. I went through a lot of names while trying to settle on the perfect one. Then one day an old story came back to me …
Back in the segregated South, African Americans were not allowed to shop in the stores downtown that were for “Whites Only.” So there was a vast black economy that consisted of black-owned shops and stores. When segregation was ended, many of these store owners suffered as blacks who were once banned from the stores in the city were now able to shop downtown. These black store owners would watch out of their storefronts and see the people walking past their shops to go and purchase the same items in town. From this there arose a saying among these retailers that “the White Man’s ice was colder,” and this was my inspiration for how I came up with ColderICE. I did a Google search on the phrase “ColderICE” back then, and there were fewer than three hundred results. I knew that with only three hundred results, I could be on the first page of Google search results in no time.
Well, that was it, I created my online presence by signing up for Twitter, and I used that handle instead of my name, which would have been JohnLawson34847 or some dumb name like that, and I just was not feeling it. So that is when ColderICE was born. Fast-forward to today and go to Google and type in “ ColderICE” (in quotes, one word, no spaces). I just got back 54,700 results … And guess what? They are all mine. But the twist gets even better. I have parlayed that social influence so much that now, if you look up John Lawson on Google, I show up on the first page of more than 85 million results! That was when I realized the power of social media for anything I wanted to do. I am a commerce guy, so I want that power for commerce … hence the subject matter of this book: social commerce. Let’s make this money!
Let’s discuss a couple of notes about how to read this book. Like I said, it is in two parts. Read all of Part One in its entirety— no cheating or skipping pages. All of the principles are laid out here. Once you do that, you can move to Part Two, where you can cherry-pick if you want to. No matter what, be sure to read the WordPress and Facebook chapters first.
There are a couple of reading aids we used to highlight some important stuff, too. We have ICE Breakers. They are there to shatter the myths you may have heard, so pay special attention to these features.
We also have our ICE Makers. These are action items. It’s time to convert knowledge to wisdom and apply it in your own life. That is what the ICE Makers are for.
We have some extra author bonus content that has been prepared for you, and it is available on the book’s website. You can access the bonus content at http://www.kickasssocialcommerce.com/bonus.
—John Lawson (Twitter: @ColderICE)
—Debra Schepp (Twitter: @DebSchepp)