Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Author: Christopher S Penn

  • A Ninja Perspective on Racism

    A Ninja Perspective on Racism

    I had an amusing experience on Friday as I was bringing my lunch – Chinese food from the place on the first floor – back up to my office. On the elevator ride up, the guy in the elevator commented, “Man, that smells good. Where ya delivering to?”

    He had mistaken me for a delivery service, simply because I was an Asian guy carrying Chinese food.

    What I found more interesting was the reaction of folks on Twitter when I made mention of the incident. Seems they were a lot more offended than I was.

    Racism, whether explicit or implicit, is harmful, but from my perspective, it’s an important insight into a person, and a very public display of their weakness. Racism is a weakness, a character flaw that a skillful practitioner of ninjutsu can take advantage of. We have an expression – kyojitsu tenkan ho – which roughly translates as “truth as a lie, lie as truth”. Any character weakness can be turned against you, any preconceived notion about a person can be used to distract and divert your mind away from the reality of a situation, ultimately to your detriment.

    In the case of this guy, his remarks told me that if I ever needed to infiltrate his office, say as a competitor to steal some confidential information off his computer network, I could show up with a bag of Chinese food and if I ran into him, he’d make a false assumption that I was working as a delivery boy.

    If you find yourself the subject of false assumptions – blondes are airheads, blacks are criminals, Jews are stingy, anyone Muslim is a terrorist – ask how you can turn those assumptions to your advantage.

  • The funniest antivirus software ad you'll see this year

    I have to hand it to Symantec for perfectly cloning Japanese kids’ shows with this ad series for Norton Antivirus.

    Part 1:

    [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XLPZSHkFjA[/youtube]

    Part 2:

    [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXWGDS3hoNM[/youtube]

    More cheese than all of Paris. Hat tip to Erik Carlsson for these absolute gems.

  • Viral is not word of mouth

    Viral is not word of mouth

    A bone to pick with my marketing colleagues. Viral marketing is distinct and separate from word of mouth marketing. Viral and word of mouth marketing are NOT interchangeable. Let me give you two examples of marketing.

    I really like Matthew Ebel‘s new album, Goodbye Planet Earth. I think it’s a fantastic album, half radio drama, half space opera, and I gladly tell anyone and everyone I know about it. A certain percentage of people who trust my recommendations and have similar music tastes will probably go out and buy it and tell their friends about it, and so on. Ideally everyone in the world who likes Matthew’s style – whether they know it or not – will buy his album.

    Word of mouth or viral?

    Second example. I really like Matthew Ebel‘s new album, Goodbye Planet Earth. I think it’s a fantastic album, half radio drama, half space opera, and I’m going to write a Facebook application that will, when you add it to your profile, message every friend you have on Facebook. Permission? Well, clearly if you added the application you’ve given me permission to do whatever I want, so I won’t bother asking. As soon as any of those friends add the application to their profile, it will message all their friends, and so on.

    Word of mouth or viral?

    Word of mouth marketing to me requires consent. Yes, I can tell you all about what I’m interested in, but for it to go beyond just me requires your implicit consent and assistance in spreading the message.

    Viral marketing does NOT require consent. The classic example used to explain viral marketing is Hotmail. Hotmail appended (and still does) a marketing message to every email you send, with or without your permission. You cannot opt out of it, you cannot change or suppress the message. It’s there and it spreads to everyone you message, and if they sign up, it “infects” their outbound communications.

    These are more than semantic terms as well. To someone in pure marketing, they may be semantic, but to me, someone who is both a marketer and a technologist, they are different because the software development process has different outcomes. To develop a word of mouth application simply requires invitation capabilities in the software to allow you to spread the word. To develop a viral application, the software development process has to incorporate tools and functions to automatically pull and message all your contacts, ideally in as low profile a manner as possible so that by the time you notice, it’s too late. The virus has spread and moved on past you and you’re powerless to stop it.

    If viral marketing as I’ve described it makes you feel uncomfortable, good. It should. Viral marketing is non-consentual marketing. Word of mouth marketing is consentual marketing. To the marketers who claim that viral and word of mouth are the same, ask this simple question: in any other context, especially the context of intimate relations, would you rather have the choice of consent or not?

  • How I Organize My Mornings

    someone asked me how I organize myself in the mornings and manage to get a podcast out the door every day plus two on Wednesdays (the Financial Aid Podcast and Marketing Over Coffee, the best marketing podcast ever made at a doughnut shop).

    The answer is that I use a Mac. I’m not being a pimp or being facetious. I use Spaces in Mac OS X Leopard (virtual desktops) like crazy, which helps me stay organized. Here’s a snapshot of my desktops – all 8 of them, which is my layout for the morning. Jeff Pulver calls this his social media sunrise.

    My Mac Desktops

    In desktops 1 and 2 (top left), you have the browser, Google reader, a text editor, and Garageband. I do my research in this pane for the show and document show notes here, plus surf blogs and GMail. No office software as I usually do most of my workday stuff in Google Docs.

    In desktops 3 and 4 (top right) is my social network window. Here I run Twitterific, Adium connected to 12 different IM accounts on 5 services, and Spyder, my MySpace data manager. I’ll check profiles, answer messages, leave comments, and respond to Twitter here.

    Desktops 5 and 6 (lower left) contain a terminal window and iTunes. Once the podcast is done, I convert it from AIFF to MP3 using LAME 3.98.1 on the Mac – the encoder is much better than iTunes, but it requires you to compile your own source code – and then dump it into iTunes for branding (ID3, lyrics, cover art). During the rest of my workday, I also manage processes in this window, such as renicing (changing priority) of running programs on the command line. Of course, I also control music in this space. If I’m ding an interview, Skype runs in this space as well.

    Desktops 7 and 8 control blogging and server stuff. When the podcast is ready to upload, I’ll use Cyberduck here; I also use Cyberduck to manage any on the fly redirects, etc. In the bottom half of this space I run Ecto, which lets me control and edit all of the Student Loan Network blogs at once, making adjustments as needed.

    In the menu bar I also run Google Notifier, which keeps me apprised of emails and calendar appointments, Spanning Sync, which syncs my Google calendar with iCal (which then syncs to my iPods), iSync, which syncs Google Calendar and iCal to my Nokia N91, Growl, which displays Skype and Twitter notices, and SMC Fan Control, so I can alter the speed at which the CPU fan runs in case the MacBook clearly shows signs of warming up.

    In non-space I run QuickSilver as an application launcher and general utility, so I never have to actually find application icons to launch them.

    This may seem like a lot of stuff to run, and it may be, but it’s how I accomplish a lot in a short amount of time.

  • How to disappear like a ninja (video)

    Some silly fun for International Day of the Ninja.

    [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPm3VQgZs4g[/youtube]

    If you’re in the metro Boston area, come celebrate International Day of the Ninja at the Boston Martial Arts Center tonight at 6 PM (event on Facebook) with a free class! If you’re outside of Boston, check out Stephen K. Hayes’ web site, SKHQuest.com, for training opportunities near you.

  • Pachelbel's Rant

    If you’ve never seen this before, it’s worth 5 minutes and 14 seconds of entertainment.

    [youtube]https://youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM[/youtube]

    Does anyone know WHY Pachelbel’s Canon in D recurs so much in pop music?

  • How to find an honest realtor

    Simple. Ask these two questions:

    Is now a good time to sell?

    Is now a good time to buy?

    If they answer yes to either of those questions and you’re in the United States of America, walk away.

    If a realtor says, “The party line is that it’s always a good time to buy, but honestly, I’d wait a year” take that person’s business card and don’t lose it.

  • Binary Star Music Debuts the Future of the Record Label : Record Label 2.0

    Binary Star Music Debuts the Future of the Record Label : Record Label 2.0I’m not a fan of record labels, especially mainstream, RIAA-supporting labels. They’ve done more to inhibit the economic growth of musicians than all the music pirates in the world combined, and I honestly believe the music industry would be better off without 90% of the labels out there.

    That said, one label consistently catches my eye – Binary Star Music in Florida. They’re a small, independent label promoting artists like Rayko KRB, Takis, and a few other acts, but they recently announced something that, to me, appears to be the future of the music label.

    Why does an artist sign with a label? Increased resources. Distribution. Promotion. Access to pooled assets like studios. All of these things at major labels are an all-or-nothing deal that comes with a hefty fee, a major percentage of profits from album sales, and a requirement that artists sign over any and all intellectual property rights. This, for obvious reasons, is NOT the best deal for the artists.

    Binary Star is going a different route – they’re offering a la carte services, from MySpace management to list management to promotion. It’s exciting because artists don’t need to sign with the label, nor do they need to sign over any intellectual property rights. I think Binary Star has a winner here and as their portfolio and rolodex expands, it will only serve to increase the value of their offering. This is the future of the music label – not a behemot bureaucracy out to screw artists, but a service bureau offering competitively priced services that let you choose what you need for your music career without the overhead of a label contract.

    Congratulations to the Binary Star team for innovating yet again. If you’re an independent musician, keep an eye on their service bureau model!

    Binary Star VR Promotions now open here.

  • What matters most in social media

    What matters most in social media is the exercise of vital powers. Chris Wilson from Answers for Freelancers twittered and blogged his family’s search for 16 year old Manessa Donovan, his sister-in-law, in the hopes that his social media network could aid his family in their search for Manessa.

    I did a few small things here and there on MySpace to aid in the search, but what I thought was most interesting was the contrast between the “Dig a Tech Girl/Guy” debate yesterday and finding a lost person today.

    How many people who ardently twittered about the hot guy/hot gal of social media equally ardently twittered to help make a real impact in the life of someone in our new media community? How many people brought the discussion of ways and ideas to help Chris Wilson out in the forefront of conversation?

    Which mattered more – who’s a hottie, or who’s in need of help?

    To those of you who embraced Chris Wilson’s plea for help as a cause worth promoting, thank you from a fellow new media professional who also cares, and from someone who believes that the power we wield in new media MUST be used to make a difference. Your support, great or small, ALWAYS makes a difference.

    If you want to continue helping, Chris Wilson has a blog with updates at SaveManessa.wordpress.com. I’ve got a MySpace page at MySpace.com/savemanessa – please contribute what assistance you can, be it awareness or feet on the ground.

    To those of you who embraced the hot guy/hot girl contest promotion but not the help-a-friend-in-need…

  • More of what you want, Julien Smith and the Attention Economy

    More of what you want, Julien Smith and the Attention Economy

    This afternoon, there was a healthy discussion on Twitter about the perception of women in technology and whether lowest-common-denominator entertainment, be it Dig a Tech Girl or Clash of the Choirs, demeaned women by focusing on physical attributes as the key measurement of their worth. This is not a debate for this blog post, and plenty of others can argue the merits far better than me.

    What this is a blog post about is a reflection of something Julien Smith said at our PodCamp Boston 2 session: we live in the age of the attention economy. With so many channels of media, with so many things competing for the same 24 hours, anything you want to promote has to be marketed for the attention economy.

    Whether a woman’s appearance is a factor at all in her worth is not the heart of the debate. The true heart is the attention economy, and the reality is that appearances garner attention very quickly, if fleetingly. That’s human nature, the way we’re wired and the way societies build on top of those fundamentals. If you want to capture attention, market with any strong emotion. It just so happens that physical attractiveness is the easiest, lowest cost, and lowest mental processing load factor on which you can compete for attention.

    If there can be a solution to the issue of using attractiveness and surface traits for marketing purposes, it has to be that the stakeholders who want to foment change MUST deliver competing content that is more compelling, more powerful, more engaging, more attention-grabbing and attention-holding than lowest common denominator content. If you want lofty social values to eclipse boobies, then you’d better package and market those values in a way that makes them highly desirable content to consume.

    I had this discussion recently with a teacher of mine, discussing how to combat negative comments and slander on the internet. My final point was that if you don’t like some of the content online, you can either struggle in vain to have it removed or changed, or you can flood the internet with the content that YOU want to have distributed, making it more compelling than the garbage, and let the garbage just wither from lack of attention.

    Nature abhors a vacuum. If you want to displace lowest common denominator entertainment, have something ready to take its place. The beauty of new media is that to get more of what YOU want, all you have to do is create it.

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