Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

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Do you own your home city?

Do you own your home city?

What do I mean? Let’s say you’re a business. Wherever you’re based, somewhere you are a local business. You might be in Baltimore, Cedar Rapids, Topeka, Portland, San Francisco, Boston, Tokyo, Stockholm, or London. Somewhere, you’re local. Do you own that market?

If you’re jetting all over the country/world to speak at different conferences, you might want to take a few minutes to check out your own backyard as well. You’d be surprised at what’s available. What shows are at your local convention center? Most major venues even in small cities have a visitor’s bureau that knows what’s happening in town. Are you taking advantages of all those events for exhibiting, sponsoring, and speaking? They’d sure cut down on the wear and tear you subject yourself to on airplanes and hotels, wouldn’t it? (not to mention your wallet)

How about your customer base? Have you dominated your home city? If not, why not? Unlike your national and global competitors, your prospects are literally a walk, bus, or car ride away. You have the local, home-team advantage when you can show up in person to call on someone rather than rely on a webinar or email. If you’re lucky enough to have branches in multiple cities, do you own those cities? Are the people in those cities out and about visiting customers and prospects, since you don’t need to subject your staff to the TSA just to say hello?

We overlook the home-team, home-turf advantage precisely because it’s our backyard. We take it for granted. We don’t even see it, walking by the storefronts and offices every day on our shuffle to our own offices. We overlook the power of leaving the office for a few hours because it’s too convenient. “I’ll get around to it, it’s not far away” kills more local business opportunities than you think.

How many pots of gold are there in your home city that you haven’t found yet?

Try this. Go into your LinkedIn network right now and just browse – without any specific focus in mind for prospects or customers – your local geographic area. See what’s in there right now. Go to Twitter search, select Advanced Search, type in your ZIP code and see who’s tweeting within 5, 10, and 50 miles. Go to Facebook and see who’s in the area, who’s a member of the local geographic network. Reach out to those people. Reach out and say hello.

That’s the first step towards winning the game – recognizing and capitalizing on the home-team advantage.

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June 10, 2010
The almost-free ultimate DIY iPad case video review

Want to see the almost-free ultimate DIY iPad case? Check out my homemade one in a short three minute video:

Feel free to copy the idea for your own personal electronics.

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June 9, 2010
Work-related: SocialSync leaves the nest

I very rarely write about work-related stuff directly here because I figure you can get it on the company blog if you’re so inclined. That said, this is an announcement that’s been a long time in coming (more than two years!), well before I was even an employee at Blue Sky Factory. Today, we’re all very proud to kick our newest child out of the private beta nest and see how well it can fly.

Today, we announce SocialSync.

What is it? Short version: take your existing email database, turn on this service (part of the Publicaster service), and in a relatively short amount of time, see how social that database is. Who’s on Twitter? Who’s on LinkedIn? Who’s on Facebook?

Then we kick it up a notch by adding friend/fan/follower/connection numbers. Who’s influential? Who has audience? Who can, if communicated with in an intelligent manner, help you get your messaging way beyond the inbox?

The beauty of SocialSync is that no data processing is required on the customer’s part. Social segmentations “magically” appear alongside your regular email marketing segmentations, and sending socially-focused messages takes literally just a few clicks.

Why is this important? So many companies are sitting on gold mines. Treasure troves. Keys to the kingdom. Those jewels are their customer databases, but until now, there was no easy, simple way to mine that database for social information and get actionable knowledge from it. Now there is.

One of my lists

More important, from a strategic perspective (which is my specialty), SocialSync can do things that you can’t do right now. If you don’t have a social strategy at all as to even where you should be participating, SocialSync will tell you your customers are here or there, so go there and start listening. If you do have a social strategy, SocialSync will either confirm that you’re in the right place or show you where you need to be focusing more of your time.

It’s incredibly powerful for sales, marketing, and customer service. Customer service departments can learn where they should be listening for their customers. Marketing can learn where the influencers in their audience are and jump-start precisely targeted social campaigns using a tried and true asset, their email database. Sales can take existing prospect lists and understand where they should be prospecting socially.

I’m very proud and thrilled to see this service come to market at long last. It’s not the first of its kind – back in a previous career I was using similar data tools, but back then you had to be a database administrator and a developer with mad technical chops and willingness to code for hours and hours to make this work. I’d wager that no marketer on the planet could have used it in its raw form back then, because almost no marketers are programmers or database admins. SocialSync is the first of its kind that does NOT require you to have that expertise, and that’s what makes it so important.

If you’d like to learn more about how SocialSync can help your business, go hit up the info page on the Blue Sky Factory web site.

Stupidly obvious disclosure: I’m an employee of Blue Sky Factory. While I’m not specifically compensated to write about work on my personal blog, I still benefit personally from the success of the company. For a complete list of who else has paid me off, visit my disclosures page.

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June 8, 2010
iPhone 4 and iOS 4 for the sales and marketing nerd

A few quick takeaways from the WWDC keynote address, in which Steve Jobs asks you to spend more of your money on Apple products.

Image courtesy of Engadget

FaceTime video calls: very slick. The stealth winner in this is if you and your customer both have iPhone 4 units. Very few people are capable of screencasting, not because they lack the technology but just because it’s intimidating. Now imagine your customer service representatives being able to call a customer and if the customer has the capability, just tell them to turn on the video camera so that support can see what the customer sees. This won’t be a huge game-changer immediately as the iPhone 4 has zero market penetration, but start thinking down the road a few years when video calling is ubiquitous.

FaceTime has some potential as a sales tool as well, though I’d foresee greater use for sales managers and their remote sales teams than for salesperson to customer communications. For doing demos of products, however, there’s potential if the customer simply can’t make an appointment in person – or a sales person is trapped on the road in some forsaken airport.

iAds: another way to reach the consumer. I’d expect to see all App Store apps start running these ads very quickly as developers can find another way to monetize their work. Depending on how well Apple can segment audiences for applications, some verticals will be able to microtarget their audiences very quickly. Good stuff for advertisers and developers, but consumers are about to get a flood of more ads.

Image courtesy of Engadget

iBooks and PDF support: This is the dark horse of the day. Native, simple built in PDF support with synchronization from desktop to mobile units and back, all free. You know all those sales and marketing eBooks you’ve been writing in PDF format? You know all that work you’ve put into them? Get ready to make greater use of that content. The super-stealth play here is in email marketing of PDFs. iBooks will seize a PDF from email and load it into your bookshelf for viewing, bookmarking, and synchronization without the end user having to do very much at all. With permission of your subscribers, you can now ship PDFs that will get stored in a bookshelf for iOS users.

So what? For the mobile road warriors, especially in B2B, how many times have you been stuck in an airport/airplane/somewhere with limited signal and absolutely nothing to do? Now suppose you just jumped into your bookshelf on your iPhone or iPad to pass the time while waiting for the mass transit system of your choice to un-screw itself. What will be in your bookshelf? Probably a few books, probably some random manual… and someone’s sales or marketing eBook, if they did a good job of getting it to you. When the choices of reading are the ingredients on your airport meal or a marketing PDF, chances are you’ll take the marketing PDF.

There’s a small gotcha for content creators: with the newer screen technologies, you can’t make crappy, sub-standard PDFs and expect no one to notice. Near-print quality screens on the new devices will show glaring imperfections, especially in graphics and photos, so be ready to recut your existing PDFs to a notch higher in quality.

None of these features is completely revolutionary – Skype video and iChat video on the desktop have been around for years, PDF viewing capability has been on most of these devices via an app or two, and AdMob was doing mobile ads. The difference will be that these features will ship with the units themselves, requiring no additional user intervention – and thus drastically expanding their reach.

What were some of your sales and marketing takeaways from the new iPhone 4 and iOS announcements?

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June 7, 2010
Optimization demands exploration

Optimize, optimize, optimize. The creed of the day. Search engine optimization. Email marketing optimization. Social media optimization. With all this optimization, you’d think that organizations would be sales and marketing machines, banging out the profits faster than ever.

Strangely, most of the folks promoting their optimization services barely have two nickels to rub together. The companies who are unlucky enough to hire these folks end up out a lot of money and become bitter, disenchanted with the idea of optimizing anything.

Why does most optimization fail so hard?

Think about it this way. Let’s say you want to do the most basic optimization possible – you want to optimize your commute home. You want to shave a minute or a mile off that daily drive, that way you’ve always done it.

Now let’s say that you only know the way you’ve already been going for the last day/week/month/year/life. How successful will your optimization be?

Exactly. You will achieve nothing, no significant gains at all.

So how would you optimize that commute? Before you can find the best route home, you have to know more than one route. Explore. Learn. Listen. Drive on all the back roads and side roads in and around your commute. Talk to other people who drive that route or who live in the area, gas station attendants, waiters and waitresses. Learn everything there is to learn about all of the ways between your house and your office, and then test them. One day you take a southern road. One day you take the light before your usual light. Run all the variations that you practically run, learn, explore, and get to know all the places between home and the office.

The time it takes you to learn and explore is absolutely vital. There’s no substitute for that research. There’s no pre-drawn road map that will tell you in perfect, precise details how to get from your house to your office in exactly the right way. There’s no mentor you can seek who will tell you exactly how to get to your house from your office – though there are plenty of fellow travelers who can share tips about how they get home. In the end, only exploring and learning all the routes available will let you “optimize” and choose the best way home.

Now expand this analogy to everything you’re trying to do in your business. How much time, energy, and resources are you putting into research and exploration? How many questions are you asking each week, the equivalent of taking a different turn, knowing that a huge number of ideas will be dead ends? How often do you listen carefully to customers, prospects, and other fellow travelers to hear what they’re finding in their own exploration?

Most important: how much are you spending on “optimization” that’s ultimately going to be fruitless because you don’t know any different ways or worse, because your corporate culture is mired in “that’s the way we’ve always done it”?

Explore first. Optimize only after you’ve learned new ways to get home, or you’ll only repeat the mistakes of the past.

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June 7, 2010
The light you see

The light you see

Photography’s an interesting art form. At its core, it’s entirely about light. How much light reflected from the world around us dictates what our picture looks like. As a photographer, you have nearly total control over how much light you choose to see, what quality the light is, and what you choose to see with that light. In total darkness, photography is phenomenally uninteresting – but rarely are you ever photographing in total darkness, unless you leave the lens cap on. Even on the darkest of nights, there’s enough ambient light to take a photo.

Don’t believe it? If you have a camera that can hold open the shutter (like a DSLR) and a rock solid tripod, set it up facing out a window one night and press the shutter. It may be a minute or two before you hear the shutter close, but when you look at the result, you’ll see quite a bit. As long as the camera is undisturbed, you’ll have a photo that looks shockingly like the daytime, even when your own eyes struggle to see.

This makes for an interesting metaphor for your life, doesn’t it? It’s not that there isn’t enough light in your life so much as it is your eyes, heart, and spirit might not be open wide enough to pick it up. A camera set up to patiently wait in the middle of the darkest night can see as if it were day.

If there’s not enough light in your life, plunk yourself down like the camera on a tripod, stop the chaos around you, take a whole bunch of deep breaths, and open up your eyes. Don’t think – just wait, watch, breathe, and see if your mental and emotional lens can find the light that’s already there.

The light is there, waiting for you.

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June 3, 2010
Music to power your workday

I listen to a ton of music during the workday to help me power through stuff, especially when I need an extra boost of energy, creativity, or motivation. Since a number of people have asked, here are some of the albums I recommend. Most are either in foreign languages or lyric-free, because the language processing side of your brain is a serial processor. This means it can handle one language stream well, but can’t multiprocess well – so a song with lyrics that you understand is likely to slow you down and reduce your productivity, rather than boost it, if you’re doing anything else involving words (like email). As an added bonus, music without lyrics is guaranteed not to offend anyone in your workplace.

All of the albums are affiliate links that pay me a commission via Amazon.com. (come on, did you expect any less?) Most of the albums are in MP3 format for any player including iTunes/iPod and anything that will support an MP3. Some are physical CDs.

See a larger version here.

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June 2, 2010
There is no secret sauce
There is no secret sauce

If there’s one expression I’ve heard over the years that demonstrates an executive’s lack of understanding about how business works, it’s the idea of secret sauce, the concept that your company has some secret methodology or recipe that makes you incredibly successful and powerful. Everyone’s questing for this sauce. What’s the right mix? What are the ingredients? The truly paranoid obsess over the theoretical secret sauce of other companies.

There is no secret sauce.

None. The recipe for Coca Cola was derived using gas chromatography decades ago. The Colonel’s 11 herbs and spices have largely proven to be a myth, again thanks to food laboratories. Go read William Poundstone’s Big Secrets if you want the actual recipes.

Your business doesn’t have a secret sauce, either. Unless you’ve got a product that absolutely no one else has, your “secret sauce” is probably in use in some form or fashion at every one of your competitors. The only exception to this might be if you’re deeply incompetent, in which case there are probably ingredients in your sauce that no one wants.

In the grand scheme of things, how much does the secret sauce matter? Let’s take it literally:
- If your restaurant is open for business only on Tuesday nights from 1 AM to 2 AM, your secret sauce won’t save you.
- If your servers are surly and abusive to your patrons, your secret sauce won’t save you.
- If the food that the sauce is placed on is substandard or infected, your secret sauce won’t save you.
- If your financial management makes the entire restaurant a failed investment, your secret sauce won’t save you.
The secret sauce matters much less than having staff that can serve patrons well, having the restaurant open when people want to eat, having a chef that can cook competently, having prices that patrons are willing to pay, and having a product of good quality.

The reality is that if you or your management team are obsessing over a secret sauce, you’re basically asking for a magic wand to fix problems in your business that you’re in denial about. If you’re obsessed over your sauce and someone else’s sauce, you’re probably going out of business soon.

Stop obsessing over secret sauces and start making sure your business is performing the basics well. You’ll sleep better at night, your business will run better, and who knows? With all that stress relieved, you might feel creative enough in the kitchen to one day invent a new, secret sauce.

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June 1, 2010
10 free iPad Wallpapers

10 free iPad Wallpapers

Got one of the two million new iPads out in the wild? Grab yourself one (or all) of these free wallpapers derived from photos I’ve taken over the years. iPad wallpapers are 1024×1024 pixels (square to adapt for rotation). Click on any image to get the various versions and choose full size for the iPad specific image. If you’re on an iPad, just tap and hold for a Save Image box.

Enjoy, and if you like them, please throw a link back to this blog post.

iPad Wallpaper: Autumn

iPad Wallpaper: Billiards

iPad Wallpaper: Bird in flight

iPad Wallpaper: Patriotism

iPad Wallpaper: Violins

iPad Wallpaper: Hibiscus

iPad Wallpaper: Chris Brogan

iPad Wallpaper: Day lily

iPad Wallpaper: Rose

iPad Wallpaper: Otters

My images are released under the Creative Commons By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Sharealike License, US 3.0. You must provide a link back to www.ChristopherSPenn.com if you republish these images.

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May 31, 2010
On Memorial Day

“We are all the sum of our tears. Too little and the ground is not fertile, nothing can grow there; too much, and the best of us is washed away.”

“There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities; it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.”

– J. Michael Straczynski

May your Memorial Day be filled with the hope that so many have fought and died for.

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May 30, 2010

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