Editor's note: This post was written by Andrew Rose, a BLI thought leader in social media. Andrew makes the phone ring for Naden/Lean, CPAs, a Maryland-based firm that specializes in dental accounting.
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In a world where social media platforms pop up like new quantum particles in a high-energy collider, here is another one that has been around for a few years still seeking its stability and relevance.
In 2011, at the Association of Accounting Marketing (AAM) annual conference, Jessica Levin (the social media maven) told me about Empire Avenue, a stock exchange where you could earn returns (in the form of Eaves) from the social activity of people you do (or don’t personally) know.
Since I hold any words that pour forth from Jessica as marketing gospel, I signed up for Empire Avenue that night. I put the right keywords in my description, read some tutorials, downloaded a plugin for Google Chrome to help me manage my "investments" and had some fun.
It lost its charm after awhile since I wasn’t seeing much search engine lift from it, so I stopped using it.
Fast forward to last week.
One of our firm’s Facebook pages was stuck at 298 likes. I had asked as many of my friends as possible to like it and it seemed we had plateaued.
I thought back to Empire Avenue and remembered I could create a "mission." For a certain number of Eaves, I could pay other Empire Avenue users to like my page.
And it worked.
I got over the hurdle and am now in the low 300s of likes.
I am experimenting with how many Eaves to offer per mission to make it successful, but it appears that $10,000 is that magic number.
We haven’t spent a dime of real money on this, but I have all kinds of ideas on how to use it to drive traffic to our YouTube channel, follow our blogs, etc.
Stay tuned.