Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Author: Christopher S Penn

  • Scaling the Clear Walls

    Getting out of the fishbowl that Chris Brogan mentions is essential if you want to reach new audiences, no matter what form of media you participate in. The fishbowl is a comfortable place to be, and may even be a refuge for you when you need to recharge, but spend too much time in the fishbowl, and you’re just as likely to pick fights over minutiae as you are to make friends. In the end, staying in the fishbowl means you eat, sleep, and shit all in the same place.

    So how do you get out of the fishbowl? Simple. (remember, simple != easy) Find well connected people in other fishbowls, and tie yours to theirs. Think about this for a moment – you are the hub of your personal network. You are the center, the focal point to which all spokes connect. Others are the hubs of theirs. To broaden your horizons, extend down a spoke to a different hub, and then another a step removed from that one. Get further and further away from your network center and the centers of those you know and you’ll find that you’re bridging new networks to yours.

    That’s the theory part. How do you do it practically? Take a look at any social network – MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever. Find someone who’s connected to you, and explore their connections. Take careful inventory to see who they are connected to that you AND your network do not connect to, then reach out to those people. Send them a note, a friend request, an invitation to an event you’re attending or hosting, whatever. Use your relationship with your friend to make a relevant point of contact. “Hey, I saw that you’re friends with Chris Brogan, and I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Chris Penn, and Chris & I do this gig called PodCamp. Have you been to many yet?”

    If you’re looking to target a certain demographic, then escape the networks of the people you know entirely. Google is a powerful tool, and can be used on open networks (MySpace, LinkedIn) to find people who are supremely relevant to you and vice versa. What word or words in your industry, in your focus, in your life are unique to what you’re looking for? What terms do you use and your desired contacts use that aren’t conversational? For example, in financial aid, there’s a form called the FAFSA. You don’t talk about the FAFSA unless you’re talking about financial aid. You don’t bring it up in casual conversation or use it in a pickup line (if you do, please post examples in the comments). Searching for FAFSA in blog posts and profiles, therefore, will reveal to you the people who are likely involved in your field of interest. Reach out to them.

    Use the serious power tools – Technorati, Google, alerts, RSS – to continually find new people in your field of interest to connect to. Upload your contacts from GMail to see who you know that’s on any given social network, befriend them there, and then see who they know.

    Ultimately, at some point you’ll stumble across what Malcolm Gladwell calls a Connector (from The Tipping Point) – someone who has the rolodex of power in your field of interest. Connect to them, befriend them, help provide value to them, and your network will REALLY take off then. You can spot these people fairly easily in social networks – they’re connected to everyone you want to be connected with. In the old days, this was a fairly opaque thing, but today, you can use open data sources like Google and MySpace profiles to identify the major connectors quickly, then reach out to them.

    What do you do if you can’t find a connector? There may not be one for your specific field of interest, and that’s where you have the greatest amount of work and opportunity. If there’s no obvious connector, BECOME the connector. Start the time and labor intensive process of uniting everyone in your niche together on your social network profiles, becoming the hub for that niche. Provide as much value, give as much as you can to your network, and over time, you will become the hub to which everyone else in your niche reaches out to. No longer do you need to scale the walls of the fishbowl at that point – everyone else is dropping ladders into your bowl, and all you need do is grant them permission to come on in.

    Go fish!

  • Virtual Thirst Entry #2

    Entered in world 4/30/07.

    Virtual Thirst entry graphicWhat is the promise of Second Life? What is its core appeal? A world that’s better than reality, a world that approaches the limits of human imagination, a world where we can create that which we might not necessarily have in first life. I spoke recently with a higher education official at the PESC conference who told me a touching story about a girl with severe autism. For the sake of narrative, let’s call her Kimberly. She could not speak to other people or even make eye contact, and for years believed she was condemned to a miserable, secluded life.

    A miracle of sorts happened. Put Kimberly in front of a computer, and she’s indistinguishable online from the millions of others online – she can chat, hold conversations, and now, explore Second Life better than her first life. She can converse, make eye contact with avatars, and feel like a “normal” person. What a marvelous gift technology is for her to be able to interact outside the boundaries of her illness.

    Refreshment. Joy. Unity. Experience. These words thankfully are broad enough to leave behind soft drinks and water, beverages and brand, and convey something larger – the human experience, the human life worth living well.

    What are all the experiences Kimberly probably would not be able to have in first life that are worth having? Will she be able to easily travel to the Grand Canyon and get a feel for its majesty? Will she be able to easily go scuba diving off the Na’Pali coastline of Kaua’i? Probably not easily, at least not with today’s current understanding of autism.

    What gift could the Virtual Thirst give Kimberly? The experiences that we so treasure – that we spend thousands of tourism dollars on each year – in the only realm in which she can explore and interact with great ease. Attend a Matthew Ebel concert to hear fantastic music. Sightsee the world’s top 10 greatest attractions, built with loving detail to capture as much of the experience of being there as possible. Present beautiful art, sculpture, and dance in a world free of restrictions of conventionality, in a world where disability doesn’t exist.

    Refreshment. Joy. Unity. Experience. Could it come in a vending machine? Sure, as a teleporter to entire islands which are experiences unto themselves. Think outside the box? Think inside the box, and satisfy the thirst for a life well lived.

    Kimberly is waiting.

  • Be An Asshole Today

    Chris Brogan blogged this morning about today being a day to be nice to someone, so I figured I’d take the contrarian view (sort of) and recommend that today, you be an asshole.

    Specifically:

    – commit today to no longer communicate or work with people who are poisonous to your well being. You know who they are – rumor mongers, gossips, backstabbers, energy vampires, and generally not nice people. No matter how may debts, markers, favors, or chits they owe you or you owe them, declare your entire relationship null and void, and get away from them. They’ll probably call you an asshole, but that’s life.

    – commit today to defining what you will and will not stand for, in relationships, in life, in work. When someone or something tries to push that line, push back. Be firm and resolute about your choices, knowing that you’ve committed to your values. Some people will probably call you an asshole for no longer letting them walk all over you.

    – commit today to no longer follow those persons and ideals who lead you nowhere. If your goal is success, why emulate the non-successful? Emulate, follow, and deeply study those people, ideals, and creeds who have achieved what you want to achieve in life. You may find yourself at odds, then, with those around you who have grown comfortable with who you are today, and not who you want to be – and yes, they’ll probably say you’ve become an asshole.

    Obviously, you don’t have to be as blunt or direct as I’ve posted here, but if your goal is accomplishment – be it social good, profit, fame, fortune, salvation, whatever – make today the day you reaffirm your commitment to your goal of accomplishment, and begin to leave behind all the obstacles to that accomplishment.

  • Superhero Powers You Have Right Now

    Here’s a breakdown of some popular superhero powers – and the means by which you have them right now, with no additional work on your part.

    Clairvoyance/Remote Viewing:
    – Google Earth
    – Google Maps
    – YouTube
    – UStream.tv
    – Flickr

    Telepathy/Empathy:
    – Blogs
    – Twitter
    – RSS
    – Email
    – Server log files

    Telekinesis/Psychokinesis:
    – EatNow.com
    – Webcams
    – Stickam
    – Buying anything online

    Psychometry:
    – Google

    Precognition:
    – Google
    – RSS
    – Data Aggregators
    – SPSS

    Astral Projection:
    – Second Life

    Clairaudience:
    – Podcasts

    Omnilinguism:
    – Google Translate
    – Babelfish

    Mind Control:
    – Online marketing

    Encyclopedic Knowledge:
    – Internet access

  • Second Life, Superheroes, and The Greater Good

    Another fantastic seminar with master teacher Stephen K. Hayes has come to an end, and this one is even harder to put into words. Meditations, martial arts, and mind science all blended together for an eye-opening weekend. A few takeaways that I can put into words come to mind…

    Second Life. Was there Second Life at the seminar? No. Second Life is a technology that came along about 600 years after the period we were studying, but Second Life provides something to many people that has not been previously available – the ability to visualize and see visualized other people’s internal mind images on a grand scale. During the guided meditation, we were asked to construct some mental images in our heads about the topics at hand, and I found myself creating imagery with greater ease than ever before, and much of it looked like stuff you’d see in world. Second Life has given me more mental flexibility to do that kind of internal vision work than I thought possible, and that was really eye opening.

    Super powers. So many of the “deities” in Buddhism have ascribed attributes. This one on the mandala is the power of healing, this one over here is the power of compassion. In the Buddhist tradition, these things are archetypes – ideals, essences, distillations of the quality, as opposed to being an external entity. You wouldn’t ever go to a church to worship, say, Yoda or Superman, but you might in a time of crisis envision yourself having Yoda’s wisdom or Superman’s strength. The same is true of the Buddhist superheroes painted on these iconic images. One of the takeaways from the weekend for me was not just learning about a particular superhero power or quality, but making use of it, bringing it out of your head and into the world so you can generate results with it.

    Think about it this way – how selfish would it be, if you had X-Ray vision or could fly or bullets couldn’t harm you, to simply live a quiet life and not make use of those powers for good? We talked a lot this weekend about the state of the world, about how fast the world is changing, and not necessarily for the better. We in new media have super powers. We can talk to thousands, millions of people with the push of a button. We can gain “telephathic” insights into our friends’ inner thoughts with an RSS reader, know where they are via Twitter and other location-aware devices. We can see life through their eyes via Flickr, YouTube, Blip.tv, and more. In olden times, the ability to see from afar was called remote viewing, or clairvoyance. Now it’s called UStream.tv. The ability to foresee the future like a Jedi or Sith seemed magical 30 years ago when George Lucas put Star Wars on the big screen. Today, you only need aggregate multiple data sources, and patterns emerge that might as well be a map.

    YOU are the superhero, or have the potential to be and the tools to do it with, right now. You don’t have to become a black belt in a martial art, or spend decades meditating in a cave somewhere. Just turn on your computer, connect to the Internet, and you have tapped into your power source. You have activated your superpowers. You can save lives with your powers, you can make the world a better place, or you can advance its destruction. Choose wisely.

    Human technology. The Internet is the great leveler. It’s the great equalizer, if we let it be. The power of the Internet has made some careers and lives and broken others. Most importantly, it allows us to connect to each other, to organize, to share, to grow, and to be greater than the individual. The power of our network is spectacular when you step back, when you stop letting life’s mundane chores and daily grind blind you to your powers. The same technologies are available to everyone who connects (for the most part). Jewish? RSS works for you. Muslim? RSS works for you, too. American? A blog post by an American has the same technological foundation, broadly speaking, as a blog post by a Russian, Australian, or Kenyan. The Internet isn’t a group’s technology, it’s human technology. It’s all of ours.

    One thing that has always stood out to me was an experience I had in 1993, at a Billy Joel concert. The energy of that concert was unbelievable, at Nassau Colliseum, not far from where Joel grew up. At the end of the night, he sang his signature piece, Piano Man, for a crowd of 30,000, and nearly everyone in the audience sang along. 30,000 people unified their thoughts, words, and actions together to sing this one song and the energy and power of that moment was awe-inspiring. I thought to myself afterwards, imagine the potential that humanity has if we could unify like that for longer, on a bigger scale. What would we be capable of?

    The same thought repeats in my head now. What could we do together – what heights could we achieve, if we stop thinking of ourselves as small little individuals in a hostile world, and take charge of our experiences of life? What could we BE if we are all together working for good, fully awakened to our powers, fully able to tap into them?

  • Have some toilet paper for your mouth…

    … because what’s coming out of it is a load of shit.

    From an MSNBC article:

    Oda said banning guns on campus might do more harm than good. He said people bent on violence might resort to other, perhaps bloodier methods, such as swords. “A person that’s got skill with a sword in a very big crowd could put a lot more people down with a sword than a gun,” he said. “They’re silent. You’ll have people screaming, but nobody knows what’s going on.”

    Please put your head back in your ass so that when you talk, no one can hear you. You, sir, have clearly never picked up a sword in your entire life. Here is what it is like to cut with a sword. Take a three foot stick and smack a radial tire swing with it. If you can get the tire swing to fly out of the way without transmitting a massive amount of vibration back into your arms, or without bouncing the stick back up in your face, then you may be competent with a sword.

    Sword cutting is HARD. It takes thousands of hours of practice to be able to cut effectively with a sword, no matter how sharp it is. It takes thousands of hours, too, with a gun on a range to be able to kill with pinpoint accuracy, but if you shoot wildly into a crowd, you’ll do some pretty serious damage, probably even fatally wound some people. If you swing a sword wildly into a crowd with no training, you will probably cut a few people. Depending on the time of year, they may need stitches. If it’s winter and they’re wearing leather coats, you’re just going to ruin their coat. Then they will beat you to a bloody pulp. Even a talented, skilled swordsman would have a hard time in a crowd. Think about this – which will get people wet faster, a super soaker that you just shoot randomly, or running around trying to tag people with a wet sponge?

    Last thing to think about. If you cook, you know how hard it is to use a knife skillfully on a raw chicken or fish. You’re cutting with a blade. Now multiply the difficulty of making good, clean cuts by a thousand, since you have a target that can and does move, and what would have been a clean cut a half second ago is now a complete miss.

    Hey, if you can actually get criminals to give up firearms for swords, the world will be a safer place.

  • Steve Garfield says it all.

    Do What You Love on Vimeo

  • Wasteland

    A followup to the previous post. I’m sitting in a courthouse jury pool in Marlborough, Massachusetts as I write this, and in the jury pool room is a TV with a daytime talk show playing, talking about digital tactics to spy on your significant other. A quick check of other channels by one of the jurors reveals more of the same on nearly every other channel.

    This is the wasteland of media on the other side of the digital divide, entertainment for the lowest common denominator – entertainment that is so crude and base that anyone can consume it. It’s mental fast food.

    How many people are sitting in living rooms, kitchens, even workplaces today being forced to consume only what’s on the mainstream media outlets? How many people have no other choices because they don’t know other choices are available?

    Our mission as new media producers has to strongly incorporate outreach. At each PodCamp I attend, I usually present on the topic of podcast marketing, and without fail at least one member of the audience wonders why I’m “giving away my secrets”. It’s a valid question, and the answer is simple: the more people who tune into podcasts of any kind, the more reach we ALL have. Once you tap into one podcast, it’s only natural to find other kinds of new media that fits your interests. If each podcast producer brings in 10 new people a month, with over 250,000 podcasts being produced, you’re talking millions of new listeners. That’s why I give away as much as I can – it benefits me, too.

    Mainstream media caters to the lowest common denominator of content because they can’t provide highly focused, highly targeted content. We as new media producers can. The Internet is an infinitely large radio dial, an infinitely large TV tuner. Instead of being forced to choose from a palette of bland, offensive, or pointless on the TV tuner, we can offer audiences content that is relevant, focused, targeted to their interests, and create conversations and communities around the content that will make life better for our audiences.

    The most important email I’ve ever received as a podcast producer was from a girl on MySpace who listened to my podcast and was inspired to go back to college to complete her degree. She’d dropped out a couple of years back. How many people has Jerry Springer encouraged to go back to college?

    I know lots of other new media producers who’ve reported similar experiences.

    Our superpowers:

    We can reach global audiences.
    We can provide our audiences with content that’s useful, relevant, and focused.
    We can engage our audiences in conversation and change lives for the better.

    Rip open the metaphorical shirt and reveal your superpowers to the world. Bring as many people into new media as you can. Serve your audiences as best as you can, and we can not only combat the wasteland of mainstream media, but also make the world a better place.

  • Superhero, reveal yourself!

    The Superheroes of tomorrow are at today's PodCampsI don’t know about you, but lately, from my perspective, there have been a lot of things going wrong with life in general around me. Not specifically in my own life, which has been blessedly good, but in the bigger picture. Whether it’s the overseas military campaigns, scandals in loan industries (take your pick), it seems some days like we’re barely staying afloat in a torrent of bad news.

    At the PESC conference this week, one of the key points I made about podcasting and new media was that it gives us our voice back, gives us the same power as multibillion dollar corporations to express ourselves and be heard. This is a superhero power that is unlike any other we’ve ever had the chance to use. We’ve pontificated long enough on the meaning of new media, the implications, and its myriad potential uses.

    The time has come to make use of our powers. If you believe, as I do, that everyone who picks up a microphone or camera, is a rockstar and superhero in waiting, now is the time for us to unleash our powers as fully as we can on the world. Produce media, gather audience, gain mindshare, and let new voices be heard. The PodCamp UnConference series is a good start to this, but there’s more to be done, more to share with the world.

    Take a look at our world. Look at the headlines on the news, in the papers, on the radio. The world desperately needs us – all of us – to share media that gives a truer, broader, and more authentic big picture than we currently get from mainstream media.

    Are you ready to show your superhero powers?

  • Numbers redux

    I talked to a fellow podcaster this evening, who was told by his network (the podcaster and network shall remain nameless) that in order to get sponsor deals, he needs to get his numbers up, hit certain metrics, etc. His network is missing the point because it’s still on the CPM model. CPM is an old media metric that makes little sense for most podcasters, because most podcasts have niche audiences. Even if you have a broad subject, like music, your slice of the overall audience will still be relatively niche compared to the broadcast media numbers advertisers were used to seeing in the 20th century. CPM is a loser for them because they’ll chew up an ad budget quickly, and it’s a loser for the podcaster because the numbers won’t be there to derive a huge income unless you literally have millions of listeners for every episode.

    No, where podcasting shines is in audience engagement. Again, if you sell Gulfstream aircraft, you need to sell one G5 every two years or so to live well. If your podcast has 2 listeners and they both buy airplanes, you’re golden. If your podcast has 2,000,000 listeners and none of them buy airplanes, then your audience is just chewing up your resources.

    Action is all that matters. So where as a podcaster do you get some action? (belay the snickering in the peanut gallery) If you don’t belong to a podcasting network that is managing sponsors for you, your best bet is existing affiliate network programs, like those at Linkshare, Commission Junction, etc. They pay for performance, usually per sales lead. Take a look at some of the top paying performance programs on Commission Junction:

    • Loans.co.uk – $852 EPC (earnings per click)
    • Capital One mortgages – $771 EPC
    • HSBC credit cards – $499 EPC

    Look at some of the payouts per sale:

    • Gay Date.com – $40 per sale
    • WebEx – $130 per sale
    • AN Hosting – $100 per sale

    If you have a specific niche you serve, there are products, services, and advertisers waiting for you to come help them out, and they’re willing to pay. An audience of just 100 people, if 50 bought AN Hosting Packages or WebEx packages, would pay the rent for a month with money left over.

    Leave CPM behind, leave raw audience numbers behind, and start actually making some money AND serving your audience with highly qualified, highly relevant sponsorships that you can get right now.

    Example: consolidate your student loans with the Student Loan Network, and my podcast gets $100 per signed, returned application. All I really need to make expenses for my podcast is 1 loan application a month (to pay for Libsyn). Anything on top of that is gravy.

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