The web is a grand ocean of mil­lions of cur­rents. Your mes­sage can eas­ily become just another drop in that ocean, or your mes­sage can use the pow­er­ful cur­rents of that ocean to sud­denly be seen and heard everywhere.

There are secrets to suc­cess on the web. What works on the web changes every sin­gle day. We are con­stantly sift­ing the envi­ron­ment to dis­cover what may be valu­able for you.

Our social media insights are our stock in trade, and if we give them away, we wouldn’t be in busi­ness. We wouldn’t be able to give our clients a com­pet­i­tive advantage.

At Agency for Social Media, we do indeed have our secrets.

In 2008 Prince­ton econ­o­mist and N.Y.Times colum­nist Paul Krug­man wrote that Esther Dyson’s predici­tion from way back in 1994 was prob­a­bly going to come true:

“In 1994, one of those gurus, Esther Dyson, made a strik­ing pre­dic­tion: that the ease with which dig­i­tal con­tent can be copied and dis­sem­i­nated would even­tu­ally force busi­nesses to sell the results of cre­ative activ­ity cheaply, or even give it away. What­ever the prod­uct — soft­ware, books, music, movies — the cost of cre­ation would have to be recouped indi­rectly: busi­nesses would have to “dis­trib­ute intel­lec­tual prop­erty free in order to sell ser­vices and relationships.”

Ger­ald Sin­dell thinks there’s another way, and that intel­lec­tual prop­erty can be pro­tected. Here’s what he wrote then:

“Today’s Krug­man opin­ion piece in the N.Y. Times finds the dis­tin­guished econ­o­mist pon­der­ing the impli­ca­tions of the Kin­dle, Amazon’s book reader. Krug­man sug­gests that the arrival of the Kin­dle means that book authors will need to fol­low the path blazed by the Grate­ful Dead: give away your core intel­lec­tual prop­erty (your music, your mind) and make money on T-shirts and other ancil­lary licens­ing. What a fab­u­lous idea! Next will come lawyers doing their lawyer­ing for free and mak­ing it up with a car wash and shoeshine. Doc­tors will of course fol­low, see­ing the bril­liance of the logic. Surgery: FREE!!! Post-op lol­lipops, $25,000. Makes sense to me.

“Krug­man has fallen into a value trap that says because repro­duc­tion costs are going down, the under­ly­ing intel­lec­tual prop­erty value also goes down. Part of that think­ing leads to the idea that music or books all have the same value. Actu­ally, the value of every­thing is deter­mined not by what it costs to make or repro­duce. Real value comes from how much some­one (the prospec­tive con­sumer)  wants something.

“I’ll bet that there have already been a few times in your life when a book came along that changed your way of think­ing, or even changed your life. What is that book worth to you? Two dol­lars? Or more likely, many thou­sands. What’s a book worth that changes the way you raise your child? What’s a book worth that guides you in start­ing or turn­ing around your com­pany? The right book at the right time for the right per­son can be close to price­less. Why then would we price books as if they are inter­change­able com­modi­ties, as if all book are the same because they are called by the same name: books?

“Who­ever you are, and what­ever you do, fight to the death to keep your­self or your work from being com­modi­tized. It might make the econ­o­mists happy to treat every­thing that is inher­ently unique and the result of spe­cial skills as if they were inter­change­able, since it makes their mod­els work bet­ter, but the real­ity is, most of what we value most highly is likely to be pro­foundly unique. Think about the mem­bers of our fam­ily, or our own great­est gifts, our favorite places, our most cher­ished art. For every­thing that counts, the value can­not be set by a com­mod­ity mar­ket­place. Value comes from the buyer’s per­cep­tion. We should price accord­ingly, or we’re giv­ing it away.”