Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

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Two literary pet peeves

I read quite a bit of feedback and writing on a daily basis, from moderating forums to emails to blogs, and there are two word misuses that top my list of minor annoyances:

1. Ironic.

2. Tragedy.

Just as quick review, in case your mom wasn’t as diligent about English as mine was…

1. Ironic is the opposite of what was intended. For some reason, folks use it as a synonym for coincidence. As George Carlin pointed out, a diabetic getting hit by a truck is an accident. A diabetic getting hit by a sugar truck is poetic coincidence. A diabetic getting hit by an insulin truck – now that’s irony!

2. Tragedy isn’t something sorrowful or disastrous. We have words for that – sorrowful and disastrous. In its original form, tragedy is a specific calamity that’s the direct result of a character flaw, usually hubris. A death isn’t tragic unless the person brought it on themselves through a character flaw that led them to die. An airplane crash isn’t tragic unless the pilot, in his hubris, was saying in the cockpit, “I’m such a good pilot I can fly blindfolded! See? ”

Does anyone care about the misuse of these terms? Besides standup comedians (we miss you, Mr. Carlin), probably not. However, when I’m reading (particularly blogs and web sites of prospective future employees or other folks who I’m asked to evaluate), you certainly accrue bonus points if you’re using the language well.

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September 29, 2009
Fighting museum syndrome

Ever heard of the marketing problem known as museum syndrome? Probably not since I just made that up. Museum syndrome is simply this: an individual masterpiece in an art museum is a wonder to behold. When you place a masterpiece against a wall with dozens of other masterpieces, your ability to appreciate that one piece becomes more difficult. Consumers have a finite amount of attention they can spend at any one time and place, and if you’re fortunate enough to be the recipient of that attention (fleeting thought it is), you need to help the consumer appreciate what’s in front of them.

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make – myself included – is the error of putting a buffet in front of someone who wants a snack. The sheer amount of choice can be staggering, but more importantly, every offering is diminished, no matter how good it is. Every offering is diminished because that finite amount of time and attention is divided among the number of offerings.

That’s why sites like Woot.com, for example, are incredibly popular. Instead of asking consumers for their attention at a million different products at once, Woot slaps one product up and says, here, pay attention to this only. It’s the equivalent of a museum curator locking the rest of the museum up and placing one masterpiece on a podium in the lobby with a spotlight on it only.

Marketers face this problem writ incredibly large in the digital age, when media is so available and abundant that the consumer’s attention is always being split. There’s the DVR in the living room, the iPod on your hip, the smart phone in your pocket, the endless depths of the Web on a browser near you, social media conversations flying by, books both analog and digital piled up on the nightstand – media everywhere, all begging for a slice of your attention. How, as a marketer, can you present what you’ve got in such a way that you beat museum syndrome? How, as a marketer, can you create that masterpiece experience for your product or service?

I’ve been thinking about this a great deal as I get ready to revamp the FAFSA application guide site I run, FAFSAonline.com. This topic, more than any other in the world of financial aid, is bewildering to consumers and especially to those who don’t have a good head for numbers. More students lose financial aid each year from issues and errors on the FAFSA than pretty much anything else except not bothering to apply for scholarships. So my challenge in the next few months as I get ready for the 2010 FAFSA season to start is to figure out how to beat museum syndrome in the world of financial aid.

Why? Here’s what’s at stake: if I can beat museum syndrome on this topic, it may mean that thousands of kids will go to college that in previous years would have been defeated by the FAFSA process. Big stakes, big chance to make a difference.

How will we make this happen? I’m looking around constantly for more examples of ways people have beaten museum syndrome. Woot.com is one. Another that’s been working is the way I have the homepage of the Financial Aid Podcast set up, with a single video that introduces the user to the site, focusing attention and eyeballs on the visually compelling cue of a video.

What ways are you beating museum syndrome in your marketing?

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September 26, 2009
Jonathan Zittrain's Random Acts of Kindness

A great TED talk that’s worth your 18 minutes. Let it inspire you and make you laugh!

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September 25, 2009
How to calculate your social media influencer value

“I would do this for free, but I make you pay so that you understand the value of what you are getting.” – Mike Lipkin via Mitch Joel

C.C. Chapman had a great podcast the other day about valuing yourself and your time as an influencer, particularly in social media. I wanted to build off his conversation by giving you a benchmark for how to calculate your value.

The monetary value of your social media influence starts with your current pay. After all, it’s the fairest price estimate of what the market is willing to pay for you. Here’s how to calculate that on an hourly basis. If you’re salaried, take the total sum of salary and benefits and divide by 2080. (52 weeks x 40 hours per week) This gives you your hourly rate. If you’re an independent contractor, self employed, or hourly worker, calculate the same way – use your 2008 taxes and expenses to judge the total cost of your self-provided health insurance, income, etc.

Once you know your hourly rate, whatever it is, you understand your current market value. If a company sends you a product for review on your blog and it takes you an hour to review it, its value had better exceed your hourly rate or you’re losing value. You’re giving away more value than you’re receiving, because theoretically, you could be working for your current employer at the same rate.

When a corporation approaches you about helping them with their campaign, you must know your hourly rate as a baseline to judge whether or not something is worth doing. As C.C. said in his show, sometimes you’ll work for no monetary compensation in lieu of exposure, reputation, or other non-monetary currencies. That’s fine. You don’t have to charge your friends, but you must know the value of what you are giving them, especially if they’re representing a company in their request. For example, if Scott Monty asked me to put up a blog post about an automobile, he may know me as a friend, but he’s asking on behalf of a commercial account, and whatever comes with the request had better be valued at my hourly rate or I’m losing value.

Think about what value your personal web site provides. Check out similar sites with similar PageRanks, traffic, and reputation, especially commercial sites, and determine what an ad costs to place on those sites. If a commercial entity comes to you and asks you to display a badge on your blog, know what they’d pay on other similar sites (use Google Ad Planner and Compete.com, for example) and judge whether you’re getting that value from the company in exchange for your efforts.

The reason we have so much trouble with social media ROI begins with not having any idea what our value is. Use some of the points in this post to start assessing your own value, and you’ll have the beginnings of understanding what the ROI of your social media influence is.

How much money are you leaving behind?

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September 23, 2009
The impossibility of bottling success

Ever see someone try to copy a successful person? Not in the literal copy/paste sense, but in the “I’m going to be just like him/her!” I can’t begin to enumerate the number of times that I’ve seen this, in business, in martial arts, in gaming, in everything. I read Twitter and see people aspiring to be just like Robert Scoble or Chris Brogan or Steve Rubel. I go to martial arts seminars and see people aspiring to be just like Masaaki Hatsumi or Stephen K. Hayes. I listen to chatter in World of Warcraft where hundreds of people daily talk about joining the top raiding guilds like Ensidia, Premonition, Halcyon, and so forth.

None of these people will succeed. Not one of them.

Why can’t you copy these people? Why can’t you achieve the same success they have if you do the same things they do, or use the same gear they do?

You’re not them. That’s why.

So what if you want to achieve their levels of success? How do you do that if you can’t be them? You have to decide instead to model their outcomes. Here’s an example. Instead of saying that I want to be just like Stephen K. Hayes in martial skill, it’s more productive for me to say that I want to achieve the same outcomes as him on both a macro and micro scale. I’ll look not necessarily just at what he does in a technique to make it work, but also at what the outcomes are on his training partner – loss of balance, inability to counterattack, a fall at a certain angle.

What’s the difference? By focusing on outcomes, I know what capabilities and skills I have that can generate those same or similar outcomes. See, I don’t have Stephen K. Hayes’ skills or abilities, so for me to just try to mimic and copy him will only result in failures for me, or sporadic successes at best. By focusing on the results I want to copy, I have a better chance of making them happen because I know what my capabilities are with my own skills and abilities, and I know what combinations of my skills and abilities can create those outcomes.

For example, Stephen K. Hayes may be able to unbalance someone simply by virtue of his position relative to them. My level of skill in positioning isn’t nearly as good, but I know I can achieve a similar effect by punching someone in the face in a certain way. The techniques and minutiae are different, but the outcome – a person falling backwards in a certain direction – is the same, and if the technique’s success is contingent on that person falling backwards just so, we’ll both achieve success. Mine requires more compensation for skills I don’t yet have, but the outcome is the same. The success is the same.

It’s important to keep in mind that some results I won’t be able to get to with my current skill set, no matter what, in the same way that my general understanding of physics will not, no matter how creative I am with my skills, get me to a point where I can create a particle accelerator in my backyard next week. I can, however, figure out what results are part of the pathway to that end result that are within reach now and start working on those.

Think about this in your own quest for success, and when you encounter a roadblock, rather than try to merely copy the person who has achieved the success you want, look at their outcomes and which outcomes you can achieve with your own tools, abilities, skills, networks, and power.

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September 22, 2009
Shattered perception

4:03 PM. Second story of the parking garage outside of Student Loan Network headquarters. Dark and stormy night… wait, no, wrong story. Anyway, it’s Friday, the weekend is here, I’m ready to relax and head to the Boston Martial Arts Center for an evening of training when I get to my car and notice…

Yep. My rear passenger window has been shattered, blown into a thousand pieces by some blunt force. My first reaction, of course, is more than a bit of profanity, followed by my checking out the car to see if anything inside is missing. I’m carrying my laptop, DSLR, video camera, lenses, iPods, etc. on my person so I know they can’t be missing. (yes, when I go to work, I look like a digital sherpa) The car’s GPS is built into the frame, so it’s not like you can just reach in and take it.

What in the world made someone want to bust into my car, when there was nothing obvious to take?

Then I notice something really odd. I’m standing in glass. A lot of glass.

This makes no sense to me. Why is there glass all over the concrete, when smashing in the window should put the glass all inside the car, or mostly inside the car?

I wait for a bit while building security investigate, records the incident, and notify the local police. Incidentally, the police dispatch said, “We’re really kind of busy now. We’ll take the information but we don’t have any officers to spare…”

So I look around a bit and then notice what is missing from my car. In fact, it’s missing from the car, but not by much. 10 feet away, next to another car, is my gym bag.

Suddenly it makes sense. Smash in the window, grab the bag, and as you pull it out, it pulls the rest of the window out, spewing glass all over the concrete like crystalline vomit.

By now I’m more intrigued than anything. Everything valuable is on me, and being the overly cautious financial sort (working in financial aid does that to you), I know insurance will cover everything with no deductible. So I wander over to my bag, noticing that my workout clothes are strewn about on the parking lot concrete.

Whoever broke the window and took the bag was looking for something in it. A Rolex? Jewelry? Drugs? Who knows? I have none of those things because again, I’m a nerd and all my valued possessions are devices which are usually on me.

After all is said and done, I end up laughing most of the way home, the mental image of a petty crook doing a furtive smash & grab, frantically crouched down between vehicles, rifling through workout clothes, possibly holding their nose the entire time, only to come away with lingering gym bag odor and not much else. Sucker!

There is an important lesson here, of course, and that is even the perception of valuables is enough to motivate a desperate thief. I’d guess he or she has had enough success in the past with the same tactic that it was a risk worth taking in our parking garage. For the future, I’ll keep my workout bag in the trunk, and if you find yourself in similar circumstances, you might want to do the same. The economy’s continued pressures on everyone means that desperation will only increase.

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September 19, 2009
Hitting the bullseye of success

What makes someone a success?

Is it luck?

Opportunity?

Hard work?

Maybe. Maybe to all of the above. Maybe to a little of this, a little of that. I envision success as a combination of factors. For example, there are some who argue that circumstances, the family you’re born into, even the generation you’re born into create an immoveable destiny from which you can never unlock yourself. You are born into a station in life, and that’s where you’ll live and die. That’s partially true.

There are others who argue that you can do anything, that the only thing holding you back is yourself, and that the world is your oyster, if only you’re willing to work hard and persevere. That’s partially true as well.

Imagine for a moment that you’re an archer standing in front of a gallery where the targets whip by incredibly fast. Every so often, a bulls eye sails by and you have to fire an arrow at it and nail the target. That’s our metaphor for success, nailing that target.

For the folks who argue that success is only about hard work and nothing else, that’s like saying you practice your archery relentlessly, perfecting your abilities. When that target cruises by, you nail it.

For the folks who argue that success is predetermined by your station in life that you’re born into, that’s like saying that because of luck, the gallery is filled with targets, and as long as you aim the arrow in the general direction of the gallery, you’re bound to hit something and achieve success.

Here’s why both are partly right and both are partly wrong:

Luck and opportunity are very real parts of success. It’s a lot easier to hit a target when you have a wall full of them slowly cruising by than it is when you have one target an hour zipping by at a hundred miles an hour. The skill you need to hit a barn full of targets is less than the skill you need to hit that one opportunity.

Skill and effort are very real parts of success. You could face an entire room full of targets that are stationary, but if you’re thoroughly incompetent with a bow and arrow, it doesn’t matter how much opportunity is in front of you, because you’ll never hit any of it.

For someone facing the disadvantage of fewer targets to hit, you have to compensate with greater skill. You might get fewer opportunities in life, and so when each opportunity comes by, you have to be a better shot than someone with more advantages. That said, if you have the skill, when opportunity arrives, as long as you’re ready, you only need one shot to win that round, and then each subsequent success makes more targets available to you.

So how do you increase your chances of success? Part of it is indeed to skill up, to become more proficient with that bow and arrow. You do that by becoming expert in whatever it is you do. Part of increasing your chances of success logically must also include finding more targets to shoot at – and that’s what things like the digital age, disruption, and social media can do for you. Right now, because of how fast the world is changing, a lot of people are wondering how to operate in this age, in these new rules. They’re holding up targets for you to shoot at, because they want and need help.

The arrow is your expertise in your specialty, the part that generates the actual results.

The bow is your knowledge of things like social media that amplify your ability to project your expertise.

If you have the skills, if you have put in the effort to become expert in your field in what you do and in the disruptive technologies, you – for the moment – have a lot more to shoot at. It won’t always be this way, so take your shot while you can. If you’re not sufficiently skilled with our metaphorical bow and arrow, skill up as fast as you can.

Take your shot!

Photo credit: B. Sandman.

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September 18, 2009
Samurai swords for home defense

Much has been made of a Johns Hopkins student protecting himself with a samurai sword against a home intruder in the local Maryland media (including this story at the Washington Post).

I’d like to take a few moments to say that while the student certainly made effective use of his katana that a katana isn’t exactly the ideal home defense weapon. Here’s why: it’s a really big weapon indoors. Outdoors (where, according to some accounts the confrontation took place, others putting it in the house or in a garage), a katana is a fine weapon. Its length, edge, and relatively lightness (compared to heavier European swords or even older Japanese tachi swords) make it a formidable amplifier, and against a skilled practitioner, it’s extremely hard to overcome.

Indoors…

You see the general problem. Unless you’ve had a great deal of practice using a sword indoors, chances are your home, apartment, or office will be working against you with a weapon designed for use on a battlefield.

Please accept these bits of unsolicited advice from a guy who’s practiced with swords a lot and studied self defense a lot:

1. If someone’s in your home and you have the option to do so, run like hell and call the police. No piece of property is worth risking your life for, and virtually everything except maybe sentimental items can be replaced.

2. If running like hell isn’t an option, get yourself and anyone else you care about together inside, lock and bar an interior room, and call the police.

3. If you have no other choice, meaning that either someone you love or you are directly in harm’s way with no other resort, then and only then should you attempt confrontation, and probably not with a sword unless you’ve got nothing else or you’ve got an awful lot of training under your belt. That can of fake lavender air freshener or toilet cleaner under your sink will probably work better to confuse and disorient a home invader long enough to let you escape, rather than a sword.

Other views will differ, of course, but at least in what we teach at the Boston Martial Arts Center, your very best bet is always self preservation, escape and evasion, then defensive tactics, then as a last resort, offensive tactics. Not only does this order of priorities give you the best chance of coming out of a self defense situation safely, but it also is most likely to protect you legally if the case goes to court. If, in your testimonial, you explain to the authorities, the judge and jury, and legal counsel that you made every effort to escape and evade, to defend, and only when you were given no other choice and you believed serious or mortal harm was imminent did you take a life, you are likely to be cleared of any charges of excessive force.

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September 17, 2009
Do you have any idea what you're marketing?

Do most marketers have any idea what it is they’re marketing?

Do you know what you’re marketing?

I mean this in all seriousness. Part of what should make marketing easy is when you have an awesome product or service. Awesome goes a long way towards a product making itself well known by word of mouth, but at least to get the ball rolling, you need someone – marketing – to tell your target audiences that your product or service even exists.

How many times have you been to a specialty store like a Best Buy or a Petsmart where the sales person you were talking to had absolutely no idea what it was that you were asking about, or were just plain making things up because they had no idea what they were marketing?

How much money is your company losing from lack of knowledge in marketing?

Here’s a sniff test, a gut check for you and everyone on your marketing staff. Pick one product or service your company offers and ask your team – and yourself – to explain 3 aspects of the product or service, like how it works, who’s eligible to use it, what role it’s best suited for, etc. If your company’s marketing team is outstanding, everyone will be able to knock this out in 30 seconds flat. If your company’s marketing team is not yet wholly awesome, you’ll get a lot of stuttering, downward glances, and shuffling feet.

If you can’t explain what you do as employees whose paychecks depend on your products or services, what hope do you have for your prospective customers understanding enough to buy from you?

There are two solutions for this problem. Neither solution costs much money, and both cost time that’s well invested.

First and foremost, and the one that we use where I work, at the Student Loan Network, is to make everyone work in customer service. From the CEO down to the coffee intern, everyone works in customer service, answering customer questions, researching financial aid issues, going to financial aid conferences, volunteering at events like College Goal Sunday. Everyone is in service whether they want to be or not, whether they personally think it’s beneath them or not, because that’s the best way to stay in touch with what customers are really asking for. I get tons of messages on Twitter and Facebook daily about financial aid, and I’m happy to answer them because it keeps me trained on what we can do.

Second, make sure marketing and production/manufacturing/creation have lunch together weekly. I’ve said this before about marketing and IT on Marketing Over Coffee, but it’s equally important here as well. Make sure the folks who make the stuff that you sell and marketing are dining together on a regular basis so that the creators can help the marketers understand what the heck it is they’re trying to sell. If your product or service is something that your marketing team can use, every single person on the team should have a free one issued to them in perpetuity, so that they always know what the thing is and what it does. On a recent trip to Hubspot, every employee has their own personal web site’s Website Grader score posted publicly on their desk, so that they know exactly what their public facing tools do and how it can help them.

Neither of these things are rocket science. Both are cheap and impactful. Please, I beg of you, do this at your company, so that the next time I want to buy from you, the person marketing stuff to me can actually answer my questions.

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September 15, 2009
What World of Warcraft can teach you about synergy and profits

How can you make as much gold as possible in World of Warcraft?

If you’re not familiar with the game, World of Warcraft has an in-game currency, gold, which you use to play and improve your character. There are a number of ways to make gold in the game, from speculating in the game’s in-world marketplace (the Auction House) to creating items to sell to others (tradeskills and professions) to selling raw materials to others, like fish, ore, and other resources.

One of the secrets of making a LOT of gold in Warcraft, however, is synergy – what happens when you start putting together players with different skills. For example, in my guild, I have a character that does in-game mining, pulling various ores and minerals out of the ground. The ore is sent to our guild’s jeweler, who prospects the ore for high quality magic gems that make a character better. He in turn gives those to our guild alchemist, who transmutes them into exceptionally high quality magic gems that I then sell on the marketplace, often at prices that are as much as 1500% higher than the raw materials. We then split the profits among us equally.

Here’s why this is interesting – to do this myself, I’d have to play the game three times as much, or surrender a giant percentage of profits to other players not in my guild, making my mining efforts far less profitable and worthy of my time. Instead, our synergies together – miner, alchemist, jewelcrafter – mean that we can take our respective skills and together make items that are far more profitable than any of our efforts alone.

So what does this have to do with you? Even if you don’t play Warcraft, figuring out your team’s synergies can yield huge profits. For example, at the Student Loan Network, I’m a good creator of content. I write some fairly decent stuff like the Scholarship Search Secrets eBook. On our team, I have a number of folks who are great at SEO who can help make my copy more easily found, access to our Scholarship Points members who can tell me if my writing reflects their reality as customers, and a CEO who has long range, strategic views on everything that can help make a good project great. When we pool our talents together, the end result is almost always better than going it alone.

Figure out who is or should be in your marketing guild. It doesn’t have to be coworkers – it can be friends online, on Twitter, casual social acquaintances – and then figure out which strengths each person specializes in. Get the right team, figure out your synergies together, and chances are what you’ll create will be of far higher value than your own efforts.

Oh, and if anyone’s looking for blue quality Wrath gems and you’re Alliance on Arathor US, hit us up. I’ll give you the social media discount rate of 1495% profit, 5% off our regular prices 🙂

Photo credit: cliff1066

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September 14, 2009

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