Four Click Freedom

This is really where the ‘social’ part comes into the social shopping networking utility.  As much as you would like to use all the coupons that come to you via Clickboards.net and all the ones you save to your account using Clickboards, you are probably going to get more than you need.  They do expire, but why not make the most of them?  In this format you can forward on coupons to friends and people in your network, earning you points.  You can also get points from using the Clickboards around the Internet, and even each time you use the Clickcard when you purchase items.

So what do these points do for you and why should you take the time to manage them and share them?  Well you can use these points for special discounts.  It is like a store where you purchase coupons using your points.  The more points you hand over, the bigger and more special the discounts you can select.

Advertisers can give you points for using the Clickcard on their site and basically the more you get involved with Clickboards.net the more points you get.  So the more you control your account and the better the targeting and more sophisticated your filters and the more you open your privacy settings, the more benefit there is for you.

For instance if you sign up your phone with the account you could earn a designated number of points each month.  Imagine going grocery shopping and paying for half your items with preferred customer points.  With more people in your network and the more integrated you become with them, the more potential there is to acquire shared savings.

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Well the debate these days is often about privacy when advertisers want to gather information about you.  This comes into light especially with the new Google phone.  Now everything you do is categorized and kept for later use by retailers.  Well this is really where the fun stops.

As a user and customer, I don’t want everything I do stored in some database for the use by a third party or even Google for that matter.  Why? I have no authority over my own habits and what everyone else can know about me.  There really is no upside to me giving my information away, either knowingly or unknowingly.  Where is my privacy, where are my filters, where is my say over what I want to see?  Basically advertisers these days regurgitate exactly what I’m doing now.  Adwords, Ha!

What I really want is something that is intuitive.  And this is only possible through my own making.  Yes I actually want something to track my habits, but I want the ability to maintain and fine tune my own personal shopping history to my liking.  I may not buy a computer every day or even a phone, but I am really into them and I want to know what is on sale every week.  Who is going to know this through a shopping history.

The only thing the Google phone can do is tell you all about your perishable items.  Things you buy constantly or the places you go constantly.  Is there really a benefit to this? Not really.  How much information can you get out of me knowing that I buy deli meats every time I go to the grocery store.  What I really want to know is when the ready made pizza dough is on sale because I love to make pizza.  Or maybe I’m waiting to find a deal on a nice wallet from Banana Banana.  And online I may not look everyday but I need to know when JC Nickel is going to have a leather jacket at a discount.

Google is really coming to an end in terms of ad sales.  Have you ever looked into SEO?  It is pretty bogus.  If I design my site to have the best key words, I will get to the top of the list.  Am I talking about what is really important, probably not.

Shopping history is designed by a user.  Yes the Clickcard stats are important, but the profile must be tweaked by the user to add the most impact from the actual information gathered.

If anyone out there is starting to be dismayed by Social Networks, you are probably not the only one.  First of all, you have to have a different network for everyone you know.  Some people you don’t want on your MySpace for sure, some people you call friends and want them on your Facebook, and still others you only want to have a professional network with them on LinkedIn.  And then all those other networking sites like Twitter and Friend Feed can really seem like a joke to most people unless they are really close to you.

So what is a social network looking for? A bridge between all of these.  Although many of these allow you to cross reference your contacts along all these networks, that is not what people are looking for.  People don’t want to be pigeon holed by their boss about what they did on the Fourth of July, and they don’t want there friends to be out of their loop because their professor wants to keep in touch in a marginally sensitive way.

So what can people do to stay connected to everyone.  That is a very tough question.  People have to be rewarded for being in touch with one another.  If I am connected to someone on the fringe, well that should benefit me right?  Shouldn’t I be able to invite every single person in my gmail contacts to join some network of mine, one without boundaries?

The answer is yes.  How?  Well believe it or not we all have a lot in common.  I think the most important thing we do is purchase items.  This requires most of our concentration and effort when designing who we are.  The second most important thing we do is design our resume and profile.  I say resume because that used to be the old way of telling someone who you are.  Now you can have online resumes that link to all your other profiles, and if you really believe in your blog that too.

So what platform can bring these two together.  I believe it is Clickboards.net.  First and most important, you once again create a basic profile and that is it.  Second you use your Clickcard.  Like some credit cards, your shopping history will be cataloged.  You can then be rewarded for sharing the same interests as those in your network.  So the more people in your network the more likely it is you will be rewarded for having a common interest.

This could be the movie you go see, the theater you see movies, the restaurants you visit, the happy hour bar you go to, the office supplies you buy, the advertising you buy, the websites you visit, the clothes you buy, the ingredients for food you cook at home.

The more you interlink yourself with your community the more you save.  Thus you are rewarded for anyone that is in your network.  There fore even connecting to those strangers brings you rewards.  But remember it is up to you to set your privacy and filters.  But the rewards are yours.

When you think about advertising, you probably think that all the power lies in the hands of the advertisers.  These days when someone wants to advertise they can do a fundamental narrowing down of demographics and pay for click through or even purchase by the customer.

So what power was given to the customers?  Customers using the Internet can usually, in theory, be narrowed down by what they are looking at.  But is this really true? No.  If you want to target someone, you have to give the choice to them to tell you what they are interested in, not based by what site they are on or what keyword they searched for.

When most marketers market, their basic intentions are good and seem to be sound.  Whatever I’m looking at, well that must mean I’m interested in things related to that.  Or if I am looking at a site about a certain subject I must want to know everything about the subject and therefore all subject matter in this particular category.  But what marketers fail to understand is the relationship between products.  If I am looking at beer, that means I could be interested in a cooler, swimming trunks, sunglasses, and a volleyball.  How are AdWords going to help you here?  I’m not really interested in beer and all the exotic drinks that I could drink on a Saturday afternoon, I’m really interested in where I can go outdoors and get a tan while drinking beer.

So who has the power now?  If the power was given to the customer, then a simple description of what I am doing or planning to do can bring all the clients related to this activity right to my computer.  It doesn’t really matter what I am doing right now, it matters what I am going to do, the bigger picture.