Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Author: Christopher S Penn

Why Twitter Matters : It's Your AP Newswire
Lots of debate lately about Twitter – what it is, why it matters, how to use it. I’ll throw this thought out there:

Twitter is my personal AP Newswire.

Here’s the thing. I can’t afford a Bloomberg terminal ($1,800/month) or an AP newsfeed in real time and I’m unwilling to even spend on real time stock quotes, since by and large I don’t trade in equities. However, there are LOTS of people on Twitter who either work at or have connections in the companies and industries that I follow and study.

A few examples:
- On the day of the Bear Stearns crash, a Twitterati told me about conditions at Merrill Lynch and what was the thinking there
- Jay Moonah tipped me off to Google AdWords Demographics before the post showed up in Reader
- Pick any major newsworthy crash/disaster recently, like crane collapses or aircraft issues. Twitter has it long before CNN.
- A Black Hat SEO recently disclosed a VERY cool trick for gaming Digg on Twitter. Never would have seen it otherwise.
Scoble‘s on track – it’s about who you follow that gives Twitter its value, and not who follows you. Being popular is fun, being informed is valuable.

For me, Twitter is my AP Newswire…

…I’d wager, in fact, that it’s faster than AP.

Names of some parties have been withheld for their protection, and in some cases, you won’t even find them in my public “people I follow” list.

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March 30, 2008
Snapple Antioxidant Water is a Soft Drink

A few folks have been mentioning Snapple’s new soft drink, Snapple Antioxidant Water.

“Wait, it’s water, it’s not a soft drink!” I can hear Marketing shouting.

I beg to differ.

Exhibit A: water.

Ingredients: Water.

Serving Size: 1 cup (240ml)
Servings per Container: About 2.5
Calories per serving: 0
Total calories per bottle: 0
Total Fat: 0g % Daily Value (Fat): 0%
Sodium: 0 mg
% Daily Value (Sodium): 0%
Total Carb: 0 g
% Daily Value (Total Carb): 0%
Sugars: 0 g
Protein: 0 g
% Daily Value (Protein): 0%
Niacin (B3): 0%
Vitamin B6: 0%
Vitamin B12: 0%
Pantothenic Acid (B5): 0%
Vitamin A: 0%
Calcium: 0%
Vitamin E: 0%
Magnesium: 0%
Zinc: 0%

Exhibit B: Snapple’s drink.

Ingredients: Purified water, sugar, potassium citrate (electrolyte), citric acid, natural flavors, fruit and vegetable juices (for color), modified corn starch, calcium lactate (electrolyte), calcium gluconate (electrolyte), magnesium lactate (electrolyte), vitamin E acetate, calcium disodium edta (to maintain freshness), grape seed extract, zinc gluconate (electrolyte), vitamin A palmitate, EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate), manganese gluconate (electrolyte).

Serving Size: 1 cup (240ml)
Servings per Container: About 2.5
Calories per serving: 50
Total calories per container: 125
Total Fat: 0g % Daily Value (Fat): 0%
Sodium: 0 mg
% Daily Value (Sodium): 0%
Total Carb: 12 g
% Daily Value (Total Carb): 4%
Sugars: 12 g
Protein: 0 g
% Daily Value (Protein): 0%
Niacin (B3): 20%
Vitamin B6: 20%
Vitamin B12: 20%
Pantothenic Acid (B5): 20%
Vitamin A: 10%
Calcium: 2%
Vitamin E: 10%
Magnesium: 2%
Zinc: 2%

Lots of stuff in Snapple’s drink that you won’t find in authentic water, including the 125 calories per bottle.

Is it a good drink? That’s opinion. I haven’t tried it, so I can’t say. Is it water? Hell no. It’s got as many calories per bottle as a 12 ounce Guinness, a small soda, a 12 ounce orange juice, and infinitely more calories than unsweetened coffee, tea, or water. If you drink 5 bottles of water, at the end of the day, you will have consumed 0 calories. If you drink 5 bottles of Snapple, at the end of the day, you will have consumed 625 calories, or a Burger King Whopper (no mayo).

What does this mean from a marketing perspective? By calling it water instead of a beverage, drink, etc. – pretty much anything that’s not water – it’s inherently misleading. People who drink it without reading the label and believe that it’s a substitute for water are in for a surprise, especially in their waistline. And Snapple’s not alone, not by any means. Sobe, I’m looking at you. Call it what it is – a soft drink. It may not be carbonated, and it may have more vitamins than a Diet Coke, but it’s still not a water substitute, and drinking it in lieu of water, if you’re thinking about health and weight control, will unpleasantly surprise you.

Updated:

I did some quick checking around. I found that another beverage, based on the marketing tactics above, can also be called antioxidant water!

Yes, it’s true – with only 160 calories per bottle, plus healthy doses of polyphenols, as many health benefits as red wine, and the antioxidant ferulic acid, here’s my antioxidant water!

Please consume antioxidant water responsibly.

Fun experiment: of all the people who drink antioxidant beverages, how many could even explain what antioxidants are?

Updated again:

Snapple’s marketing agent is going to send me some of their antioxidant water for a taste test and review. I plan on reviewing Snapple, tap water, bottled water, and beer.

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March 27, 2008
Learn to use the power of the Dark Side

Learn to use the power of the Dark Side of the Force. Listen to the best marketing podcast ever produced in a doughnut shop with my friend and co-host John Wall. In this week’s episode, it’s a Google showdown between for-profits and non-profits, and why it will make your keyword costs go through the roof.

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March 27, 2008
Scholarship Search eBook on WCVB Boston 5

Happy to say my Scholarship Search Secrets eBook was profiled on WCVB Boston 5 on the 6 o’clock news. That eBook, now in its fourth iteration, is one of the products of the Financial Aid Podcast – doing daily scholarship searches for 3 years makes you good at finding scholarships!

Original blog post and eBook download link is here.

And yes, that’s a Goodbye Planet Earth sticker on my MacBook Pro. That’s also Jacob Lewin, son of PodcastingNews.com’s Elisabeth Lewin and James Lewin.

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March 25, 2008
Easter Egg Hunt
Chris Brogan wrote:

Here’s what you do: find a “hidden gem” blog, someone who you think is writing good stuff, but who has only one or two comments per post. Write a blog post telling us just a little bit about that site, why you like it, who should become a regular reader, etc. Make sure there are TWO links in the post: one to that new site so we can find it, and one back to [chrisbrogan.com].

Actually, despite having published over 1,400 blog posts and 760+ audio podcast episodes, the vast majority of my posts on FinancialAidPodcast.com get zero – yes, zero – comments. I’ve debated for a long time why this might be. Comments are enabled, no registration required, etc. so it’s not necessarily barrier to entry. I think it might be the case that for my audience, it’s perceived as an “expert” blog and therefore audience members are reluctant to contribute, treating it more like an information source than a discussion.

The desired audience is fairly inclusive – students, parents, families, financial aid professionals, and anyone who likes:
- Free stuff
- Job hunting tips
- Personal finance
- and of course, help paying for college
So, Chris Brogan, send over the commenting hordes!

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March 23, 2008
Google out to bat for non-profits, hits home run

Google announced a slew of products specifically tailored to non-profits two days ago.

First, all their apps – Google Apps for Domains, etc. – are all free.

Google Checkout transaction processing is free to non-profits until 2009.

Here’s the game changer. Google Grants is an application process to qualify for free AdWords advertising. Where commercial organizations pay out the nose for top keywords, if your non-profit is a certified 501(c)(3) and is chosen as a Google Grants recipient, you can go head to head with corporate America for mission-critical keywords and spare your budget.

This is big – very big. It will give non-profits access to huge audiences and resources without needing huge budgets, and the smaller the non-profit, the more benefit they’ll be able to get if chosen for the grant.

Hats off to you, Google. You may be Big Brother, but at least you’re more or less benevolent.

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March 20, 2008
Starbucks is watching your every cup

Today, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced that they had acquired Coffee Equipment Company and its Clover system of coffee machines, single-serving cup makers that will let Starbucks customize your coffee for you.

So what?

The So What is this: Clover coffee machines are networked. They all speak to headquarters via CloverNet, and monitor EVERYTHING about your cup of coffee. From the web site:

Know with CloverNet™, a service that gives you web access to your Clovers. Find out what’s brewing on each of your Clovers right now, and visualize business trends through real-time charting. CloverNet also makes it easy to update brew parameters for all of your coffees, and to keep your Clovers in peak operation through system monitoring.

Starbucks doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the coffee – the machines are pure marketing wizardry, giving real time data flows to central command. This is what makes Clover and CEC a smart acquisition.

Starbucks: Because Google shouldn’t have a lock on Big Brother.

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March 20, 2008
End of the Line

End of the Line

Farewell, Bear Stearns. If it’s any consolation, a number of your colleagues will be joining you soon. Why? Simple: there isn’t enough money in America to save the financial system as we know it. It’s coming apart at the seams.

This is a good thing.

For sure, there will be lots of folks who will have to go through economic pain – heck, depending on the credit markets, there’s no telling how my current employer will fare, so I’m not at all exempt from this, either. It’s still a good thing overall, and here’s why. For the last 37 years, America has been living beyond its means. Our overall savings rate has dropped into the negative, and we’ve been spending like a drunken sailor.

Come to think of it, I’m fairly certain drunken sailors spend less. Because they typically don’t have access to leverage or derivative financial instruments, they can only spend what they have in port.

How much too much have we been spending? Warren Buffett warned in 2002 that derivatives – bets on bets, essentially – were financial weapons of mass destruction.

Charlie and I believe Berkshire should be a fortress of financial strength – for the sake of our owners, creditors, policyholders and employees. We try to be alert to any sort of megacatastrophe risk, and that posture may make us unduly apprehensive about the burgeoning quantities of long-term derivatives contracts and the massive amount of uncollateralized receivables that are growing alongside. In our view, however, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal. – Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report

According to the Bank for International Settlements, the total outstanding notional amount is $516 trillion (as of June 2007).$

The annual gross domestic product of the United States of America – the goods and services that back “the full faith and credit of the United States” on which all of our bonds and other promises are made is…15 trillion.

Think about that for a second. If 3% of the derivatives in existence go bad (about the same amount that touched off the subprime bonfire last year), an unravelling could occur that would exceed all the goods and services the country makes, period.

All of this massive leverage – which is a fancy word for gambling, really – is catching up to the financial system rapidly, and all of the money in the world can’t bail out the system. It’s my hope that things unwind in a relatively orderly fashion, like a building evacuation, so the building can be torn down and rebuilt more soundly, but one way or another, the house of cards is coming down, and needs to.

Americans need to start saving again. Yes, the entire financial system incentivizes us to spend, spend, spend, but if you can resist the temptations of mass media, marketing, and incentives and put some money aside, you’ll be far, far ahead of your peers and colleagues.

In a downturn, cash is king. Save, reduce expenses, and batten down the hatches.

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March 18, 2008
Apres moi, le deluge

“Apres moi, le deluge” – Louis XIV

MySpace applications are beginning to roll out.

If you thought vampires and pirates on Facebook was bad, just wait.

In the meantime, expect to get a whole bunch of MySpace friend requests from me and others in the near future.

Exciting things are happening with MySpace, more than ever.

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March 16, 2008
The Ever Watchful Eye of Google
I cannot emphasize strongly enough how important it is to be mindful of Google’s watchful eye online. It is literally everywhere, and it does not forget. Everything you do under Google’s watchful eye impacts your personal brand and reputation. That drunken Twitter late at night? Google remembers. That blog rant composed at a conference? Google stores it forever. Here are just a few of the ways Google is watching you.
- Google searches, indexes, and stores copies of every public web page, public forum, public discussion board, public email list it can find.
- Google Orion monitors not just what you search for, but how you behave when you search, how long it takes you to locate things, and what you do when you find something.
- Google News stores all of the news it can find in newspapers, radio, and television.
- Google Alerts constantly scans news, blogs, and other items for selected key words that you, your friends, and your enemies deem important.
- Google Feedburner stores all of the RSS feeds and other news feeds it can find – and who subscribes to them.
- Google Reader tracks and stores all of the blogs you subscribe to and what items you deem important enough to share.
- Google Maps provides geographic data and in return tracks exactly what you’re looking for and where on the earth it is.
- Google Blog Search stores and remembers what you blog about on your personal blog.
- Google AdWords watches what ads it shows and what ads you click on, how often, and when.
- Google 411 stores how you pronounce words and uses its speech recognition to analyze non-text data.
- Google YouTube tracks what videos you watch, share, promote, and enjoy.
- Google Talk stores and searches what you discuss in instant messaging.
- Google Desktop indexes and stores information about everything on your computer.
- Google Transit watches where you go and how you get there.
- Google Trends displays how information is monitored by end users over time.
- Google Docs takes your office documents and indexes them and their contents.
- Google personalized search stores every single question you ask Google, what answers you found important, and trends in your inquiries.
- Google Pagerank algorithm tracks who links to web pages of yours and who you link to, diagramming out important nodes.
- Google Android will bring these capabilities and monitoring powers to your phone.
- Google OpenSocial will bring these capabilities to social networks like MySpace and Facebook.
Mindfulness is absolutely imperative in the age of Google. Write, discuss, and share like the person you want to become, even if you aren’t that person today, because Google will remember you based on what you publicly create online. For forum moderators, mailing list managers, and community developers like myself, it is our obligation to create, manage, and moderate forums to be perceived by the general public in alignment with who we want to be, even if we as a community aren’t there just yet.

Remember this quote from Mitch Joel: Your personal brand isn’t what you say it is. Your personal brand is what Google says it is.

One good blog post lifts the entire community up in reputation, if only a little in Google’s massive knowledgebase. One bad post drags us all down. Everything matters – big or small.

We are now, more than ever, interdependent on each other.

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March 14, 2008

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