Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

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The awakening of superhero powers and the salvation of conferences

Let me tell you a brief story about the day I learned about our superhero powers as human beings.

It’s nine o clock on a Saturday, regular crowd shuffles in…

In December of 1994, I went to a Billy Joel concert at Nassau Coliseum during one of the final legs of the River of Dreams tour. I’d been a fan for a while, all through high school, so attending the concert was the pinnacle of fandom for me. That night, Nassau Coliseum was packed to the rafters, 17,000 people and change all stuffed inside, nearly everyone a diehard fan as it was the end of the tour and all the casuals had long since attended. The diehards came out in force because, well, that’s what diehard fans do with their favorite musicians.

…well we’re all in the mood for a melody, and you got us feeling all right…

Like many musicians, BIlly Joel has his hit songs and crowd pleasers. He ends every show with his signature song, Piano Man, and the crowd always, always sings along.

The concert was a great one, but it was the ending that floored me. Because it was such a diehard crowd, people had been singing along in little bits and pieces all night long, but from the moment the first notes of Piano Man dropped out of the speakers, the crowd instantly unified into one.

…he knows that it’s me they’ve been coming to see, to forget about life for a while…

Hearing 17,000 people singing along in one massive chorus, nearly every single person in the crowd pouring their hearts and souls into their voices (myself included), was an astonishing moment. It felt like a massive tidal wave of energy as the building shook from that many people unified for one purpose, forgetting about life for a while and leaving their individual selves behind for just a few minutes.

If you’ve had a similar experience, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You leave your body for a little while. You forget that you, the individual exist, and for a few, brief, glorious minutes as you belt out the lyrics you’ve known by heart for years, you touch something far greater than yourself. You touch the spirit of everyone else in the room, hall, or stadium, you join them, and you feel an amazing unity with every person around you.

…sing us a song, you’re the piano man, sing us a song tonight…

It was that moment that woke me up to our awe-inspiring power and made me continue to question to this day just what we’re capable of as people, as human beings. What if we could tap into that kind of energy every day instead of just when our favorite musician was in town? What if we could bring that kind of power to everyday moments and not just reserve it for special occasions administered by Ticketmaster?

I think we can. I know we have the capacity, the capability, because I was there when it happened and felt it firsthand. When you touch a moment of unification like that, you feel nearly invincible, immune to all the ills of the world as you’re no longer your single, solitary self but something greater.

Three lessons. First, if you are any kind of performer, marketer, speaker, or entertainer, the more opportunities you have to gather your fans together in real life, when all of the energy we possess as living human beings can be pooled into one room, the greater the chances are that magic will happen. As wonderful as the Internet is, it simply cannot transmit the raw power of that experience. Nothing can. You can’t blog it. You can’t Twitter it. You can’t record it even in HD audio and video and transmit it to someone who wasn’t there any more than you can do so with a first kiss or a bite of the best pie you’ve ever tasted.

Second, no matter who you are, look for experiences that contain the potential for that magic. Even a small gathering can be powerful. The catch is that you have to be there. Over the summer at Matthew Ebel’s VIP Beer Bash, he played one of his signature songs, and the small group of us in that room, at that time, all singing along was no less magical. Sure, it didn’t have the scale of Nassau Coliseum, but there was still the sense of we rather than me, and when I listen to the recording, remembering and reliving that moment, it still brings a smile to my face more than any of his other recordings because of the magical direct experience we all shared.

Third, there is no substitute for being there. You can watch videos of conferences, you can listen to audio recordings of concerts, you can follow the live stream of an event on Twitter, but there simply is no substitute for being there. This above all else is why things like real life social events, conferences, and conventions will never go away, no matter how good our rebroadcast abilities get, because there are so many things that cannot be shared any other way than direct experience. If you’re a conference organizer or planner, the more you can do to facilitate the “you had to be there” moments, the more irreplaceable your conference will be. Having a bunch of talking heads on stage is easily replicated. Having a singalong in the lobby of the conference center (as Chris Brogan did at PodCamp Boston 3) is nearly impossible to replicate. Give people the freedom to create their own magic, and your event will be booked solid just for that alone.

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October 22, 2009
Solving Chunky Spaghetti Sauce with Social Media

Solving Chunky Spaghetti Sauce with Social Media

One of my favorite TED talks by Malcolm Gladwell is a brief lecture on the evolution of chunky spaghetti sauce. Watch the video below:

Get it? Chunky spaghetti sauce didn’t exist before Howard Moskowitz’s innovation not for lack of desire, but because customers had no vocabulary to even describe the desire deep inside their soul. Their worldview didn’t even have chunky spaghetti sauce in it, so there was no way for them to ask for it.

This is so important, and not just from a product marketing perspective. At Stephen K. Hayes’ Evocation event, one of the exercises we did was to envision and document our ideal day in our ideal life, assuming we had a magic wand to make true anything we wanted (with logical exceptions, of course, like not allowing someone to simply explode the planet). What was interesting to me as we shared our visions of a snapshot of ideal life was that for some of the participants, their lack of knowledge (through no fault of their own) created worldviews of an ideal life that were still limited – not for lack of desire for an ideal life, but because some of the things that would make their life truly ideal don’t even exist in their perspective of the world, so they had no idea that their vision could have been even more ideal.

For example, I was listening to one participant share a desire that in their ideal life, their home would be adjacent to a national park. The idea that you could be so financially self sufficient that you could buy the equivalent amount of land outright (on eBay no less) and own it yourself was outside their worldview, so it wasn’t in their plan of an ideal life.

So how do you solve for a problem that you aren’t even aware is a problem? How do you expand your vision to include the existence of things that haven’t been brought into existence yet? I don’t have a perfect answer for this, but I can say that things like social media have been part of the solution for me, at least in some areas.

Being an active participant in social media allows me to communicate with people far outside my areas of expertise and far senior to me in their own life journeys. Being able to see how Jeff Pulver runs a conference gave me a whole new perspective on running PodCamp. Meeting and talking to incredibly successful business folks gives me better ideas on how to make the Student Loan Network better at what we do. Chatting with multi-book best selling author David Meerman Scott gives me insights into how publishing works. Randomly experimenting with things like podcasting lets me interview experts that might otherwise have little interest in talking to me.

Talking about social media’s ROI is certainly a valid and important part of the growth of social media and what’s possible with it. That said, the conversational part that lets you learn more about how other people live and the worldviews they have – worldviews that can enlarge your own perspective on reality and what’s possible – is a vital part of social media not to be discounted.

Photo credit: jshj

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October 20, 2009
Lychees, Ohio, and Evocation

While a bunch of folks were at Blogworld in Vegas this past weekend, I and a few other intrepid seekers got on a plane at Logan Airport in Boston to head to… Dayton, Ohio! Instead of the Strip, we headed to the Dayton Quest Center for a seminar with Stephen K. Hayes called Evocation.

It’s nearly impossible for me to describe exactly what Evocation was or what happened in a general sense because Evocation was an intensely personal exploration of understanding our self-imposed limits and how to shatter the barriers of what’s holding us back from achieving true success in the world. Evocation was a completely different seminar for each person who attended because every person in the room faced different, unique challenges in their lives. The areas of exploration and growth that I needed to explore, the questions I needed answers to were very different than the ones of the person sitting next to me.

Evocation was exactly as it sounds – a seminar that evoked reactions, thoughts, and insights about our problems with our own minds, memories, emotions, and experiences acting as both student and teacher, both problem and solution. It was an esoteric seminar in the most powerful sense of the word esoteric – all the good stuff was all direct experience rather than textbook learning, which is another reason why it’s so hard to describe.

Here’s an example of esoteric. Let’s take something that a lot of people haven’t eaten: a lychee nut. If you’ve had lychees, all I have to do is say the word and it evokes the taste, scent, and experience of eating one. If you’ve never had a lychee, no amount of verbiage in this post will ever come close to granting you the whole, authentic experience of biting into one. The only way you can truly understand a lychee nut is to have the direct experience. I can tell you perhaps a local store near you that sells them, or another name under which it might be sold, but in the end, the experience of biting into one and the wonderful taste it imparts (if it’s fresh and ripe) is something you can only experience.

In fact, the more I might try to blog about a lychee, the less likely you might be to try it. I might stumble upon an explanation of a lychee that’s good enough for the casually curious, and once you’ve got that explanation, you’ll pass it by. Your mind will say, well, we have a general idea of what it’s probably like (even though you have no idea whatsoever), so it’s not worth running out to the store to get one.

So rather than write about Evocation any more or how life changing an experience it was for me – heck, I came away with an entirely new sense of identity and self, a better, more powerful version of the me that got on a plane in Boston last week – I’ll only suggest that the next time Stephen K. Hayes offers a seminar like Evocation in the future, screw Blogworld (or whatever else is happening then) and go to Dayton to train with him. The experience will be unlike anything else you’ve ever done, and the tools you’ll get to make your life better, make your business more successful, and make you happier as a human being will be worth it.

You will emerge with an astonishingly clear vision of who you are supposed to be in this life, the true, authentic, heroic self that is inside of you right now, silently screaming to be free.

I’ll close for now by extending my sincerest thanks to my teachers, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center, and Stephen K. Hayes, for an incredible Evocation experience that was infinitely more valuable than anything I might have won in Vegas, and a hearty “see you next time!” to my fellow Evocation participants.

There will be much more to come in the days ahead as the lessons of Evocation settle into my mind and begin to produce the results I want to create. I hope you’ll stick around as we explore together what’s possible.

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October 19, 2009
No, I'm not headed to Vegas and Blogworld

Just to clarify some confusion, I’m not headed to Vegas or Blogworld this week, though many of my friends are, and I wish them safe travels and good luck if they decide to hit the tables. I’m instead headed to Dayton, Ohio later this week for a transformative conference/seminar called Evocation, hosted by my teacher’s teacher, Stephen K. Hayes. Here’s the agenda – as far as I know, there’s still space if you’d like to attend and can get to Dayton, Ohio.

“Evocation” – Recalling Your True Face, Finding Your True Path

As a result of all we have encountered and experienced from the beginning of life, we each carry deep in our core a vision and voice of who we identify ourselves as being. For most of us this is usually a positive thing, but even in the most hardy, old scars and scoldings can block us from attaining our fullest potentials in life.

Japanese culture’s Bu Do “warrior paths”, and especially the martial way of To-Shin Do, provide a vehicle for exploring how to remove the obstacles to fullest power living. The path of the warrior takes us out into life to confront fear and weakness in a direct and purposeful way, and each step on the path has the potential for waking us up to all we were meant to be in life. By coming face to face with the root “ghosts” of where old personal hold-backs began, and learning how to let go of the limitations that have slowly crept in to define us, we can find our original face, return to authenticity, and re-pledge ourselves to our truest personal path.

This weekend seminar with Stephen K. Hayes will present you with a collection of significant exercises and practice models for evoking your truest inner greatness and redirecting yourself as a tatsujin master of life.

Featured exercises include:

1. “One Deep Breath” – How to get grounded and free of distraction in your body, your intellect, your feelings
2. “Accountability – Reclaiming abdicated responsibility”
3. “Appearances are not reality”
4. “Mistakes are opportunities to grow and develop your power”
5. “Coming from emptiness of practiced limitations” – Discover where personal reality and public reality meet and overlap
6. “Generating a circle of protection”
7. “Power of allies in overcoming binding obstacles”
8. “Your new vision, your new voice”
9. “Vows for future greatness”

Tuition is $249. Register by phone at 937 436-9990 or email [email protected].

For my money, I know I’ll get more out of Evocation than I will BlogWorld, but I wish the best to everyone headed out that way. See you on the other side!

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October 13, 2009
The power of not yet

There’s a little too much no out there.

No, you can’t.
No, you don’t have that.
No, that’s not affordable.
No, you’re not good enough.
No, you don’t know how to do that.
No, you can’t reach those customers.

The problem with no is in the finality of its tone. No cuts off possibility, especially inside your own head. Are you good enough to get this job? If your mind says no, then you move on – but chances are, you don’t come back, and that door of opportunity closes forever in your mind.

Not yet is the secret to coming back. It changes a definitive lack of possibility into a time-deferred possibility. It provides your own mind a way to acknowledge a realistic lack of resources, time, or knowledge without cutting yourself off from future potential.

No says cut down the plant, it’ll never flower and it’s a waste of time and energy.

Not yet says you’re too early, but the buds are there and the blossoms will appear if you’re willing to be patient and keep caring for the plant.

This is super important if you’re dealing with anyone trying to learn, be it a student, child, or friend. If you ask an adult if they’re good at math, chances are they’ve got a lot of emotional baggage with that question and more often than not, you get an ashamed no, bringing back all kinds of unpleasant memories from childhood when someone told them that they were bad at math. Help them to reframe that answer into not yet, because it’s entirely possible to relearn something as an adult and develop amazing proficiency – if your mind is open to the possibility.

With children, this is even more important. If they believe no about themselves on a topic or field of study, that part of their future is gone forever. If you can teach a child to say not yet, and to believe that it’s just a question of more time to study something, that door remains open for them, and that potential can be revisited later on in life, perhaps with a better teacher.

What are you currently saying no to right now that you could be saying not yet to?

What potential have you taken away from yourself in the past that you can now go back to, knowing that you didn’t really mean no, but instead meant not yet?

October 11, 2009
Inspiration is only a breath away

Ever notice how inspiration and air are connected?

Someone inspiring is a breath of fresh air.
We breathe new life into a project or brand.
You take a deep breath before you jump, leap, or dive.
Someone or something takes your breath away.
You might even hold your breath or await something with baited breath.

We instinctively know how powerful breath can be, so much so that in some religions, a deity created mankind by breathing a spirit into him. We know the power of the breath from other religions in which breath is the first thing to leave the body on death.

Even our word for inspiration – inspire – derives from Latin, to breathe into, to fill.

Think about this as you go through the day today. At different points in the day, maybe every hour, remind yourself to simply stop and take 3 deep breaths in a row. See what happens.

Photo credit: jjjohn

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October 10, 2009
Surrendering to Impossible Odds

Surrendering to Impossible Odds

We are an optimistic people as a whole. We believe in beating the odds, in luck, in winning against the improbably. Our culture is infused with these beliefs, from superheroes saving the day and defusing the bomb with seconds to go on the clock to sports teams that pull out amazing victories from nearly certain defeat. We’ve conditioned ourselves to believe that there is always a way to win, and that more often than not, luck or fate can swing our way, which explains why casinos are perpetually crowded.

What do you do, however, when you face a situation in which you cannot win? How do you deal with facing truly, legitimately impossible odds?

The answer, from a martial perspective, might surprise you. You surrender to the inevitable. In the martial arts, there are specific techniques for this, sutemi-waza, sacrifice techniques. Rather than fighting all out and wasting what resources you do have left on a fight you can’t win, you surrender and go with the flow – and sometimes, just sometimes an opportunity appears that was previously invisible, an opportunity perhaps not to win yourself, but to play a part in an ultimately successful outcome.

In truly unwinnable situations, this might be laying the groundwork for someone else to take up your fight, whether it’s sabotaging enemy supply lines or feeding your enemies bad information to make it easier for your allies to win after your capture and execution. This might be focusing all of your remaining time to raising money and championing the cause of an organization dedicated to defeating the disease that killed you. Ultimately, it’s about taking what resources you still have available and using them for maximum effect before your time is up, whether that’s a moment on a battlefield, a year until your corporation declares bankruptcy and locks the doors, or a decade until a disease claims you. Use what you have while you are able.

The ultimate unwinnable fight is against death itself. Not too far from my office, there’s a centuries-old graveyard that I walk through at lunch when it’s pleasant out. Walking by the headstones, I get brief glimpses of lives and people I’ve never known. I see headstones denoting deaths of people who, when their time came, were younger than I am today. It’s a stark reminder that we’re all only here for a little while, and to make use of what resources we have during that time for maximum impact.

As I walk, I wonder – in two centuries after my death, what will people be pondering as they stroll past my grave?

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October 8, 2009
A question of academic credentials

Blogging today over here about academic credentials and whether they matter or not. Your thoughts and comments welcomed!

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October 5, 2009
The most amazing moment of PodCamp Philly 3

You know what the most amazing moment of PodCamp Philly 3 was?

At the opening, I asked the crowd – 200+ folks – how many people had never been to a PodCamp before.

About 80% of the room raised their hands.

That’s huge. That’s amazing. I have to give huge props to the Philly organizing team for continuing to attract new members to our community. When Chris Brogan and I started PodCamp in 2006, we never imagined that years later, events in cities all over the world would continue to attract lots and lots of new people.

Another interesting curiosity from the weekend – the podcasting sessions were stuffed to the gills, standing room only for many of them. If you’ve read Seth Godin’s The Dip, I think podcasting is on the other side of its dip now. It came out strong in 2004 and 2005, was the shiny darling of the new media world, and then more or less went through massive growing pains. Based on the number of folks I talked to over the weekend, podcasting isn’t the sexy new thing any more – and that’s incredibly good news for people interested in learning about podcasting. The snake oil salesmen have moved on (they’re now selling Twitter expert guides) and the space has technologically matured.

Clay Shirky said best at TED @ State that something like podcasting becomes socially interesting after it becomes technologically uninteresting. The shiny has worn off and now people from all businesses and all areas of focus are looking at podcasting for what it truly is: a delivery mechanism for content that can, if used properly and selectively, give people the information they want in the method best suited to their needs.

Hats off again to the PodCamp Philly team for a great event and for continuing to show that podcasting, far from being dead, is only now starting its march out of the dip and into mainstream usages of all kinds.

Photo credit: Jakob Montrasio

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October 5, 2009
What Farmville should teach us about profitability

Profits! Profitability! The holy grail of business. Yet surprisingly, one of the most difficult things to calculate. Companies spend thousands of dollars a year in consulting, technology, software, systems, and accounting firms just to get a vague idea of their profitability. Why?

Here’s an example of how difficult profitability can be even in a very closed, contained, predictable system. Let’s take Farmville, the popular Facebook game. Of all the crops available to early players of the game, which is the most profitable?

A casual look says it should be cotton. That giant 207 coin payout for planting cotton is definitely the biggest number on the page. Of course, that’s only gross profit. Each crop also costs money to plant. Do some quick math to subtract the cost of seeds and suddenly artichokes become more profitable – that’s net profit per crop, profit after costs.

So, should you go plant artichokes willy-nilly? Not necessarily! You forgot tilling costs, which is a fixed, flat 15 coin fee for every plot of land. While this may not change the choices between artichokes and cotton, it drastically alters the profitability of cheaper items like soybeans, which at first glance look like a terrific investment – plant for 15 coins to reap 63 – but becomes plant for 30 coins to reap 63 after the tilling cost.

Finally, take the amount of time you’re willing to invest in Farmville. For me, it’s virtually none. I’ve got better games to play in my free time, like Warcraft, so Farmville is at best a curiosity. If you’ve got a lot of time to invest in the game, then you have to do one final calculation for profitability – how much income per hour each crop reaps. Divide each crop’s net profit after costs and tilling by the number of hours to maturity to get net profit per hour, and suddenly, inexpensive but time intensive raspberries yield the highest overall profit per hour – if you’re willing to babysit them every two hours.

What’s the lesson in all of this? Calculating return on investment and profitability can be very tricky. In the incredibly simple Farmville case, the tilling cost is one people leave out of their calculations more often than not. The example of raspberries also demonstrates that what looks like the biggest number at first (artichokes) isn’t – you might be better served cranking out a smaller margin with high frequency than a big margin very infrequently, particularly if you’re in a business where market conditions shift rapidly.

Now imagine how difficult this is to apply to real businesses, where prices, markets, and conditions change, where costs and profits are not fixed, and where time is not free, and you get a sense of how truly amorphous profitability can be.

This is also why it’s super important to get kids and adults playing games like Farmville and Warcraft, to teach them the powerful economics lessons in their games so that they can dig into understanding business without putting real money on the line.

Have fun farming!

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October 1, 2009

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