Blog

After more than a month of intensive work, preparation, marketing, and craziness, Bum Rush the Charts is here. You know what you have to do.

John Wall and I did the second beta test episode of Marketing Over Coffee this morning at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Natick. Today’s topic was Bum Rush the Charts, and I thought I’d blog a little about the marketing efforts going on behind the scenes, plus some thoughts so far.

First, a huge thank you to everyone who’s participating. That’s awesome. That said, I’ve found so far that audio promos in podcasts are great for building awareness, but you need at least a month’s time ahead of a word of mouth campaign, because podcasting by nature is time-shifted. It’s a lousy medium for getting a message out in force in a small window of time.

Behind the scenes, Bum Rush the Charts has had the help of a bunch of different tools. We’ve issued two press releases, one through Black Lab and one through the Student Loan Network. We’ve also been using several distribution email lists. Despite the fact that email is pre Web-1.0, it’s still a major player, at least for this campaign; the bulletins we’ve published via email to folks have had very good open rates.

We’ve leveraged Feedburner not only for feed management, but also for site statistics. As we’ve seen in the past, Digg and Reddit bring in a lot of traffic, but the quality of traffic is relatively low – few people sign up for the email notices or subscribe to the RSS feed out of the thousands who stop by.

MySpace has been a major player in the campaign, at least for touching base with bloggers and podcasters. Every time I log into the BRTC profile, there’s betweeen 20 and 50 people requesting friendship, leaving comments, etc.

Most importantly, we’ve gotten a LOT of buy-in from fellow new media professionals, and even buy-in from more traditional media outlets, which is pretty incredible. The CBC, BBC, San Jose Mercury News, and even Billboard Magazine have picked up BRTC from various sources and leads, and have been promoting it as well. The real power of this campaign is that it’s brought together people from all the different groups in podcasting and new media.

Time will tell whether we can convert buzz into buy, conversation into conversion. I sincerely hope we can. Hopefully this time next week I’ll be writing more about how Bum Rush the Charts was a successful campaign and that we’re sending a bunch of kids to college for free.

Chris Brogan and I have been discussing the four rules of PodCamp and have agreed to expand this ruleset to include one more rule for current and future PodCamps, to insure continued trust from the new media community:

Rule 5: The financials of a PodCamp must be fully disclosed in an open ledger, except for any donor/sponsor who wishes to remain anonymous.

In recent discussions, we’ve talked about the value of transparency and trust, and having open books for all the world to see will continue to build on the trust the community places in PodCamp events. Except for anonymous donors, it’s expected that you’ll post a ledger detailing income and expenses down to a transactional level.

This doesn’t mean that you couldn’t make money off of PodCamp, but it does mean that you have to disclose it. If, as we did after PodCamp Boston, you have a balance of funds left over from a PodCamp, that’s fine – organizers are free to do with it as they wish, as long as it is disclosed. (For the record, the balance of funds from PodCamp Boston 1 are sitting in an ING Direct account awaiting use for PodCamp Boston 2.)

I’m going to PodCruise. Hell, I’m sponsoring. This is such an awesome idea – because after you factor in hotel and meals, attending a PodCamp usually costs a fair penny anyway.

At last count this evening, MySpace is about to overtake, in terms of “population” the nation of Pakistan. Now, some would argue that the raw number of MySpace profiles is not an accurate count of how many people actually use the service, but I’d argue that population census surveys aren’t all that accurate anyway – how do you account for the homeless and the illegal immigrant population in any given country?

At 163,740,888, MySpace, if it were a nation, will shortly be the world’s 6th largest population. Oops, 163,743,337. I just hit refresh in my browser.

With this many people on MySpace – even if only 1/3 of them are active users – social networking sites are a force to be reckoned with and a marketer’s dream or nightmare, depending on how you approach the services.

So, how do you approach MySpace? Here’s my thinking on the topic, which is admittedly influenced by a very tasty margarita. MySpace is a hub, in the sense that on the information superhighway, there are certain intersections that a large number of people pass through on the way to their final destinations. MySpace is one of them, like a city that springs up at the intersection of two major highways. Having a place to call home on MySpace establishes at least a token residence in that neighborhood, from which you can plant a sign in your front yard advertising your presence. This is the most basic use of MySpace, and vitally important at least as a defensive measure to prevent someone else from living at MySpace.com/YourNameHere.

Second, MySpace is a bridge. There are a lot of people on MySpace, including people who you might not get access to in your daily interactions offline or online. Some progressive CEOs have MySpace pages, as well as other top executives and leading edge marketing professionals. You might not necessarily reach, say, the CEO of Twist Image (a leading Canadian marketing firm) via conventional channels, but you might find him on MySpace or Facebook. MySpace can bridge the gaps set up in normal social interactions to people who are interesting.

More importantly, MySpace allows you to infiltrate the social space of people who have dissimilar social spheres from you. If you’re in marketing, this is critically important, because it allows you access to your audience, and your audience may well not be your peer group. Most of us tend to have friends that are relatively close in age, social class, income, etc. It’s just the nature of life that our friends tend to be people somewhat similar to ourselves. This is changing as the world becomes more digitally connected, but for now, it’s largely true. That means that if you want to understand what your customers in a different generation or area are thinking about, MySpace can give you access to them, to talk to them, to ask questions, and most important of all, to listen.

Listening and gathering information is the key to MySpace. Make friends with your customers and their friends, subscribe to their blogs and listen carefully to what’s on their minds. Through this, you can gain insights into their behaviors that under normal circumstances would be impossible. There’s a phrase – the perils of introspection – which Malcolm Gladwell talks about from time to time, in which the very act of asking the question skews the result. If you don’t have to ask the question at all – if you just have to listen, then you can get unadulterated answers.

Time to wrap up this blog post with this number: 163,776,951

36,000+ profiles since I started writing two hours ago. Are you listening?

Out sick today, but that’s okay. One thing that caught my admittedly drowsy eye was this – be aware of whitespace around words, especially links you create. Which will look better to a search robot, particularly one that isn’t terribly smart?

• Another post on the Financial Aid Podcast…
• Another post on the Financial Aid Podcast …

The answer is, the latter. Whitespace creates the distinct phrase with nothing interrupting it. Now, do I have definitive proof that this makes a difference? No. The one thing I do have proof of is that the whitespace makes it easier for me as a human to highlight that phrase and search on it.

Just a little something to think about. Please excuse me while I go back to bed …

I had an interesting experience on my way to PodCamp Toronto that I recorded as audio, but unfortunately, the quality of the audio was less than ideal, so I’m turning it into text. When I first entered Canada (thanks to the folks sitting at the table next to us at dinner for clarifying what Canada was, a former Dominion and now a federal constitutional monarchy – the US is a federal republic), I saw some brands that I completely did not recognize.

What was interesting though, was that other brands that I was familiar with conferred information about the unfamiliar brands. On the drive to Toronto, I first encountered a sign for Tim Hortons almost as soon as I entered the country. I had no idea what Tim Hortons was at all. However, what helped immediately was that it was next to a Wendy’s and McDonald’s logo on the road sign. That instantly communicated that Tim Hortons was a food source of some kind.

In this case, known brands established the function of another brand. While they didn’t necessarily convey any information about the quality of Tim Hortons, it told me enough to know what general function Tim Hortons played.

In another instance, driving along the QEW, I saw a store called Chapters. It was somewhat apparent that Chapters was a bookstore of some kind, but what really made it obvious was the positioning of a Starbucks coffeeshop in the corner of the Chapters. In this case, architecture and design of another brand indicated to me what the main brand was all about, much more so than the name or logo. Christopher Alexander, author of The Timeless Way of Building, calls this a pattern language of architecture – how we use a space defines the space. How bookstores use coffeeshops not only define the coffeeshops, but also define the bookstores.

The most interesting thing to me as a marketer, driving into Canada, was that purely Canadian brands had exactly zero brand equity with me, being an American who doesn’t get out much. As a result, I was being exposed to their brands for the first time, and I took note of what their brands conveyed and how quickly I “got it” with regard to their brands.

In an environment where brands have no equity, no mindshare, functionality is king – the brand name itself has to provide useful information so that I know what it does. On the top of the obvious charts: ScotiaBank (extra props for sponsoring PodCamp), Bank of Montreal, Maple Leaf Foods, Rogers Communications. On the list of brands whose names conveyed no useful information: Leon’s, Tim Hortons, Aviva, Country Style, and Domtar.

If you’re not a brand equity leader, or if you’re the leader with only a certain segment of the population, make sure your brand name conveys useful information in and of itself. Edvisors, Inc. is not as helpful as Student Loan Network or Financial Aid Podcast. Tim Hortons doesn’t say as much as Dunkin Donuts, but says about as much as Starbucks. If you’re in a niche market and looking to expand, think about what your brand says to someone with whom it has no equity – do they know enough to at least inquire about you if they need services in your vertical?

New post over at my work site, the Financial Aid Podcast. Let me know what you think in the comments over there.

There are an awful lot of URLs from friends that go by in Twitter. I’d like to not have to go through all my archives just to find them. This, then, is a Yahoo pipe that does a content analysis, permits only items with the https:// URL handler, and exports as RSS, which I then subscribe to in Google Reader.

Enjoy the pipe.

Audio, one of my Twitter friends, pointed out that my Twitter profile for work, financialaidpodcast, is #3 on Google for the term “financialaidpodcast”. This makes total sense – Twitter is perfect Google ambrosia – rapid, fresh, original content, the kind of food that Googlebots relish.

This, then, is something of a red alert – with Twitter being the belle of the ball at SXSW and its popularity skyrocketing, if you don’t make defensive moves to protect your brands by securing Twitter namespaces, you may suddenly find someone else Twittering using your brand name. While you could get lawyers involved as a countermeasure, that’s a heartache you can avoid right now by securing the remainder of your brand names and identities that are important to you on Twitter.

Photo by PowerbookTrance, Creative Commons license.