Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Marketing

  • Why you need calls to action in your blog posts

    If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time, you’ve likely noticed these lovely buttons on the right:

    How to tell if you are a doomed marketer : Christopher S. Penn's Awaken Your Superhero

    You may also have noticed that there’s a deeply redundant piece at the bottom of every blog post:

    How to tell if you are a doomed marketer : Christopher S. Penn's Awaken Your Superhero

    I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself, Chris, that’s redundant. And it’s redundant, too. Why do that? Do you think people are so blind or stupid that they don’t notice the obvious, user-experience focused, carefully placed call to action widget at the top of the page?

    Not at all. Only very smart people read my blog. The stupid people are all at YouTube right now, watching endless selections of crotch kick videos and videos of kittens. No, the real reason I put that block of code at the end of every blog post despite its redundancy is simply this: my decor does not travel with my blog posts.

    Exhibit one: Google Reader.

    Google Reader (1000+)

    No part of my theme makes it into Google Reader. None of it. But that lovely block of redundant code makes it into Reader just fine. Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself, yes, but what’s the point? People are already subscribed to your blog if they’re reading it in Reader. That’s even more redundant!

    That would indeed be the case except for one thing: the Share button built into reader that automatically shares the post – with subscription buttons – to the friends and followers of others. When the calls to action go with the post, they go into the Shared Items, too, for others to see and act on.

    Exhibit two: Google Buzz.

    Gmail - Buzz - cspenn@gmail.com

    Now we’re really getting into the thick of it. When you Buzz a blog post (or share it in Reader, which likely auto-buzzes it), you’re stripping the post of ANY context. Someone in Reader might think, hey, I’m reading someone else’s Shared Items, and since this is mostly blogs, this is probably a blog I can subscribe to. When you’re using Google Buzz, you’re sharing all kinds of stuff in there from many different sources. There’s no intuitive leap whatsoever to subscribe to items people are Buzzing…

    … unless you embed the subscription calls to action right in your blog post, so they go with the Buzz, too.

    So how do I do this? It’s stupid simple but manual. Make some nice buttons for yourself. If you’re too lazy to make buttons, use some of the Crystal Clear icons from Wikimedia. They’re free. Then just code up some really simple HTML and store it in a text file on your computer. If you’re more sophisticated, use macro software like TextExpander for the Mac or Texter for the PC and wire in that block of code so that when you’re done with a blog post, you just hit your macro and it auto-pastes the code right in for you:

    TextExpander

    I just type çß?† into the blog post and bam! Instant block of code that’s ready to deliver calls to action wherever this post ends up.

    Do you have to do this? Not at all. But if your work is getting any distribution in things like Buzz, Google Reader, Feedburner, etc., then people are consuming your content without having any way to get back to you and sign up for more. That’s your loss and their loss, too. Putting together a simple block of HTML for every blog post with a few buttons takes just a few minutes, and it can help you build your audience every time someone shares your material. Try it!

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  • How to tell if you are a doomed marketer

    Once upon a time, marketing was just marketing. It was a fabulous era of big brands, big launches, big parties. Martinis were de rigueur, agencies ruled the world, and three piece suits (that looked MAHHH-velous) were the signs of the professional marketer.

    Once upon a time, technology was just technology. If you were in IT or development, you slung code all day, making the cool new thing (whether or not anyone wanted it). You plugged your earbuds in, cranked your music to 11, and reformatted servers, made objects and classes, hit up the LAN parties, and stared into the Matrix.

    Along the way to today, something funny happened. The very best technology became marketing. Social networks suddenly transformed from cool technologies to cool marketing tools, and the reach of marketers went from whatever the ad spend budget was to whatever they have that was worth paying attention to. The very best marketing became technology. Brand mindshare became followers, fans, and friends. Direct mail became email marketing, which in turn fueled social marketing.

    So here we are. Marketing is technology is marketing. It’s a crazy new world where someone like me with an MS in information systems who has never set foot in a marketing class is suddenly a professor of marketing at a reputable university because marketing is technology, technology is marketing. It’s a crazy world where the first ubernerd becomes the richest man on the planet and his successors start stupid picture-based web sites in college that turn into the largest communications platform in the world.

    What does this mean for you? Here’s how to tell if your company is going to thrive or be doomed in the next few years.

    • If marketing and technology aren’t having lunch together once a week, you’re doomed.
    • If marketing and technology aren’t working together all the time, you’re doomed.
    • If marketing has no technology capabilities and technology has no marketing focus, you’re doomed.
    • If you as a marketer don’t know at least a high-level explanation of these three marketing-related technology terms, you’re doomed: FQL, SEO, API. Bonus points if you know what federated identity is and what it means for the future.

    At my previous company, the Student Loan Network (the best student loan company) business thrived even in a hostile, highly competitive environment because marketing and technology were often one and the same. This gave an incredible competitive advantage over slower moving, slower thinking competitors.

    At my current company, Blue Sky Factory (the best email marketing company), marketing suddenly has more technology capabilities, and it shows. While the specific detailed numbers are under NDA, newly-aligned marketing and technology initiatives have boosted marketing’s lead generation results by over 3,000% year-to-date. (there may eventually be a case study on this, though!)

    Marketers, especially social media marketers, like to say that content is king, content is everything, and that’s partly true. Great products, great services, great content are vital to the long term success of your business. However, even the best content is useless if you don’t have the platforms and technologies in place to distribute them. Put another way, you might have the best pizza in the world, but if you have a drunk, highly unreliable delivery guy, your customers may never know about your pizza because it’ll never get to them.

    As I’ve said many times on Marketing Over Coffee (the best marketing podcast), the way to get started fixing things, regardless of where you are in the corporate hierarchy, is to find someone in technology – at your company, preferably – and start having lunch with them once a week. Find out what those technology terms mean. Find out what technology is capable of, because once you know, your ability to market using technology will give you an incredible advantage over everyone else in your vertical space.

    Plus, technology folks like lunch. Believe me, I know.

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  • How do you know where to pay per click?

    Pay per click (PPC) advertising is a great way to juice up a campaign in the short term. It’s also a really great way to lose a metric crapton of money in a hurry if you don’t know what you’re doing, especially if you’re a small, local business with a limited budget. Let’s look at one very small sliver of the PPC world and how to make more of the few advertising dollars you have.

    This is Google’s AdWords PPC manager. Virtually everyone who has dabbled in PPC has seen this.

    Campaign Management-1

    Look carefully in campaign settings, locations. You can edit this. Clicking edit brings up… Google Maps. Now here’s where it gets cool. You can draw right on the map the area you want your ads shown in.

    Campaign Management-2

    Nifty, eh? If you know, for example, what ZIP codes around you have the demographic you want, you don’t have to spend money elsewhere. You can just draw out exactly the audience segments you want to attract.

    How do you know what ZIP codes contain your demographics? Use the US Census Bureau Fact Finder. It’s free. What if you’re doing B2B instead of B2C? No problem! The Census Bureau also provides local business information in aggregate at its ZIP Business Patterns Index, also for free. Figure out who has your industries that you’re targeting.

    Now, let’s say you want to kick it up another notch. What if you knew where interest already was? What if you could tell where interested people already lived? Wouldn’t that make your hyperlocal PPC advertising even more potent?

    Lucky for you, you can do that, also for free. Sign up, register, and get plugged into Google’s Local Business Center. Once your listing is updated and is collecting data, you’ll get a nice dashboard of times your local business listing has appeared in Maps and local search. Even more powerful, though, is a nice map of where potential customers are requesting driving directions from:

    Google Local Business Center - Analytics

    Get it?

    Take your local business center driving directions map and draw a big ol’ irregular polygon over that area in Google AdWords. You’re now targeting the geographic areas that people have already expressed interest in! This is incredibly powerful and just requires you to get your local business center listing up to scratch.

    Maps. Local business center demographics. Census Bureau data. Adwords PPC. By binding all of these tools together, you can utterly crush your opponents or drive them out of business just on advertising costs alone. They’ll be spending like crazy in an unfocused way while you’ll be cherry-picking the best potential prospects. Try it!

    Pro tip: make sure you bind your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account so that PPC cost data is passed through. That’s a topic for another time, though.

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  • Three Nearly Guaranteed Moneymaking Twitter Words

    Ever notice the giant pile of social media “experts” who don’t have two nickels to rub together? Ever wonder why?

    They spend a hell of a lot more time talking than listening.

    They labor under the mistaken belief that the more you talk, the more money you’ll make as a social media expert, and I suppose as long as you’re good at duping the gullible, that’s true until the market is tapped out. Once the suckers have been skimmed, though, they have to move on to find the next big thing to latch onto. (just wait for the Google Buzz experts!)

    For the rest of us, for the folks who actually want to do a sustainable business in social media, the secret is listening. Not a big secret in and of itself, but the bigger, less-asked question is “What do you listen for?”

    A lot of companies are doing defensive listening. They listen for things like “XYZ Company SUCKS” and other brand mentions. This is a good start, a good entry point for retention and reputation protection. However, this is only a start.

    The second tier of folks, the community engagement folks, listen for things like industry jargon. In financial aid, for example, the word FAFSA is a buzzword of the industry. No one goes to a bar on Friday night and chats up the attractive person of their choice with, “Hey, have you seen my FAFSA results?”. That never happens. Community engagers build reputation and presence of mind by participating in conversations, honing in on the right conversations to participate in using the buzzwords and inside jargon of the industry.

    The third tier of folks, the folks who want to do business and make money in social media listen for intent.

    Sound familiar? That’s what made search marketing so revolutionary a decade ago. Search was a red flag of intent – when someone searches for, say, email marketing, they’re exhibiting at least a casual interest in the subject matter. Focused, targeted questions asked to search engines belie even more intent. Searching for email marketing is one thing. Searching for “what is the best email marketing company in Reno, Nevada” displays clear intent, and search marketers have learned to make the most of these long-tail, deep, obscure queries. (they convert like crazy, too)

    So how do you detect intent in social media? Let’s use Twitter as an example. What questions belie intent? Think about your own use of language and then start playing mix and match with these keywords:

    • recommend
    • suggest
    • anyone
    • [your keyword]

    Try it. Try it in Twitter search with your industry keywords and vertical.

    Look at a couple of results for “anyone recommend social media”:

    • ianrbruce: anyone recommend a good book on social media metrics & measurement?
    • splashrafting: anyone recommend free social media measuring tools? Looking at some at present need to start to use more
    • hellaPR: Can anyone recommend any good cases or articles on hotels using social media, on a large scale preferably.

    Each of these are home runs for a book publisher, a listening company like Radian6, and a socially-engaged hospitality chain. It would take mere seconds to respond and likely convert better than any cold call.

    How do you listen? Take your top SEO keyword list (you have one, right?) and combine your top keywords with recommend, suggest, and anyone in various combinations. You’ll be amazed at the number of people blatantly flagging intent to buy your products or services, if only someone were listening.

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  • Why Google Buzz is brilliant and deadly to social media 1.0

    From the moment it launched, Google Buzz generated buzz:

    • OMG another social network to manage
    • OMG there’s too much noise
    • OMG this is so redundant

    And for the early adopters, it’s exactly that and more. It’s noise. It’s clutter.

    It’s brilliant.

    Here’s why. Google wants the best of the best data. Remember this. They are a data company. They are a data quality company. They are algorithmic in their approaches to solving problems.

    For a lot of the social media crowd, the moment Buzz turned on, our valued inboxes became insanely cluttered as we linked up all our social media sites, networks, and properties. We discovered that frankly, we didn’t want the firehose of social media in our inboxes.

    We realized quickly, if we didn’t already know, that most of our “friends” are in fact valueless robots spewing garbage at us all day. On services like Twitter and Facebook, we don’t really notice because it’s bite size garbage that passed by quickly. When it piles up in the inbox, we notice. Fast.

    So for the early adopters, those who keep Buzz on, we’re pruning back hard. We’re not following back. We’re dropping auto-follows. We’re down to just a handful of people, close friends, that we REALLY want in our inboxes. How many of the self-proclaimed social media gurus are you actually allowing inside your inbox, in Buzz? Exactly.

    Buzz is working as intended. Google wants data quality. We immediately filter out completely all the noisemakers who bring no value to the table.

    Buzz also incentivizes us in a couple of ways. It tells us to prune back our own spewage lest our friends, the ones we care about truly, unfollow us and eliminate us. It tells us that redundancy of information is of no value to anyone using Buzz, since you can get blog posts and status updates already from FriendFaceTwitterFeedBookSquareWallReader service (now with more blatant self-promotion from social media experts!). So we share and discuss only the stuff that’s either super high quality that we just can’t afford to miss, even if it’s redundant, because of the quality, or we share stuff that’s not being shared elsewhere.

    Google figures out from our activity in Buzz that either there’s new stuff to be examined (remember in the initial presentation that Buzzed stuff gets indexed the moment it’s shared, and Google wants to find EVERYTHING to index) or there’s stuff that’s so important and so good that you’ll let it into your inbox even if you can get it elsewhere.

    By placing Buzz so close to the incredibly precious, valuable territory that is our inbox, Google is forcing users to reveal what we truly value, what we’re willing to let into a very private space. It’s the perfect walled garden, because instead of enforcing the walls on us, Google simply lets us build the walls for them.

    The lesson for marketers and content creators is this: social media 1.0 is drawing to a close. Social Media 2.0 is about relevance, value, and authentic connection, because you will never, as a marketer, get through the gates of the walled garden with a boring-as-crap press release or product announcement. No one cares about you. All of the services, but especially the big ones, are giving users more tools to screen out anything they don’t care about, anything that doesn’t engage them, anything that isn’t actually great quality.

    Buzz is just a very visible demonstration of how much crap our “friends” spew out that’s of no value, and why we were so annoyed by it. Now that it’s under control, now that we’re  isolating actual friends from “friends” and our networks are getting trimmed, we’re starting to get more value out of it.

    And you can bet Google is paying VERY close attention to us and what we do with our Buzz.

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  • The 3 Benefits We Care About

    Tony Corinda, the famous magician and mentalist, wrote in his classic textbook 13 Steps to Mentalism that there are three general topics which nearly everyone wants psychic predictions on. Knowing these makes the job of a mentalist on stage incredibly easy, as just providing the hook into any of the topics gets people talking about what they really want.

    The three things most people care about and want to know more about?

    • Love/Relationships/Sex
    • Health
    • Money

    You could have probably guessed that right off the bat. To no one’s surprise, business is no different. Decision-makers in business – including you, if for no other role than decision-maker of your career – want three general things, too.

    • How can I save more money?
    • How can I save more time?
    • How can I make more money?

    Again, no surprise, right?

    So why is it that legions of salesmen and saleswomen never actually answer these questions? Take a look at any product spec sheet, from industrial toilets to iPhone apps, and you’ll see features listed by the dozen. This toilet uses 1.4 gallons per flush. This iPhone app can switch between 3G and WiFi seamlessly. This CRM offers RDBMS support for 8 of the most modern RDBMS systems.

    So what?

    When I talk to vendors, I’m exceptionally blunt. Some appreciate it, some get derailed from their carefully crafted pitch. How will your product save me money? How will your product save me time? How will your product make me more money? If a vendor can answer those questions quickly and intelligently, I’m very likely to just pull the trigger right then and there, as long as their math is sound. If a vendor tries to defer those three questions until later so they can finish their pitch, the phone gets hung up with a polite but curt “not interested but thanks”.

    Classic sales books and training materials always advocate answering “What’s in it for me?” as the key question to answer in a sales presentation. Throw those books out, or at least put them back on the shelf. If you can prove a strong case for any one of the three questions – time, money saved, money earned – you’ve answered a core WIIFM question. If you can prove a strong case for more than one of the three questions, prospects will be buying YOU lunch. If you can prove a strong case for all three questions, you can pretty much retire your sales department and just replace them with order takers, because word of mouth alone will be flooding your call center.

    Take a look at your own sales and marketing materials today.

    Will you save me time?

    Will you save me money?

    Will you make me more money?

    Prove it, and I’m yours.

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  • What World of Warcraft can teach you about customer quality

    One of my favorite parts of World of Warcraft is the in-game marketplace known as the Auction House. Inside the AH, you can see relatively free markets at work with minimal regulation by the game’s owners. You can especially see how market forces create supply and demand, and if you’re good at understanding human nature, you can make a fair bit of virtual money.

    Right now, there’s an in-game Valentine’s Day event going on. Below is a picture of the Auction House and the price of a Buttermilk Cream chocolate. The current asking price in the marketplace is $54, and demand is so high that none are currently being sold – the marketplace is empty of this item.

    Buttermilk Cream for sale

    Yes, $54 for a single chocolate. Suddenly the real world holiday doesn’t look quite as expensive. My character here is about to sell 3 of them for $163.

    Here’s the funny part: the in-game quests needed to obtain this item take about 5 minutes, total. (dropping off a charm bracelet to another character and offering 10 characters some perfume samples) So why does the price of this chocolate seem so very high compared to the relative amount of work needed to create it? This marketplace item can teach us a lot about customer quality and behavior.

    Some players may not know how to obtain it besides the marketplace. They simply buy everything in the marketplace. These, however, are long-term poor customers, because the moment they get clued in, they will stop buying from marketers and start creating their own items. True, as the old gangster saying goes, you can’t wise up a chump, but that’s not the sort of customer you’d want to rely on or build a business on.

    Some players like the convenience of one-stop shopping, and will pay a premium just to be able to buy everything in one place. These are better customers because they have a persistent need (convenience). This makes them a better long-term prospective customer as they have a need that will always need to be met. The downside is that these folks are usually very price-sensitive, so a competitor who prices the same goods at even a penny less will beat you to the sale. If supply is a greater issue than demand, unless you’re always the lowest price, you won’t sell anything.

    Some players just don’t like questing, period. They pay a premium in the marketplace – sometimes a very high premium – to not spend a single minute in the game doing things that aren’t fun for them. If you can provide exactly what they need, when they need it, you’ll develop a reputation in-game for being a useful sort of marketer to have around, and the kind of person who they will approach directly whenever they need to buy something. These folks will even ignore marketplace prices and just pay you obscene premiums directly because they know you’re reliable and can get them exactly what they want. It almost goes without saying that these are your very best customers in the long-term.

    We have, in short, three kinds of customers – the sucker who may or may not even buy, the customer who wants convenience but is super-sensitive to price, and the premium buyer who wants to outsource everything they don’t want to do.

    Which do you want as a customer? Common sense should dictate that if it’s long-term maximum profitability you’re after, you want the premium buyer. It will require more work on your part to develop reputation in your community for being the go-to marketer that has exactly what someone needs, but if you put in the time and effort in your marketplace, you can escape the always-lowest-prices race and make a ton of money.

    Now, would anyone like to buy a Buttermilk Cream? Only three left…

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  • Your ACE in the hole: Energize!

    We talked last time about what marketing, sales, and product & service groups are supposed to manufacture. Let’s talk about the verbs that go with them, so that you have an idea if what you’re doing is in alignment with those verbs, and one verb in particular. Quick review:

    • Marketing takes audience and makes qualified leads
    • Sales takes qualified leads and makes customers
    • Product design and customer service takes customers and makes evangelists

    So let’s take a look at the verbs of this funnel. In short: ACE.

    • Attract.
    • Convert.
    • Energize.

    Attract is what marketing does. Create demand for your ideas. Attract attention to what you have to offer. Assuming it’s good, people will pursue a line of inquiry and become a qualified lead. Attract also helps filter out some stuff – is what you are doing likely to attract leads? Billboards attract eyes, but unless they’re hyperlocal (Eat at Joe’s Next Exit), their value is questionable. Are you attracting the right people? You may be getting all the buzz in the world for your event, but if no one can afford to attend it, those thousands of visitors and millions of pageviews are worthless.

    Convert is what sales does. Convert puts the emotional and rational values on the table with the qualified leads, the prospects, and helps them to convince themselves that your product or service meets or exceeds their needs. Again, convert is a useful verb. Is a sales practice converting? Do you know what converts and what doesn’t convert?

    Energize is what product design and customer service do. We used to call this retention, but when you think about it, retention kind of implies that your customers are fleeing your products and services. It implies they want to run away as fast as they can, and you have to pull out all the stops to keep them from doing so. No, if your product doesn’t suck and your customer service actually cares about its customers to any degree, then you’re not talking about retention as much as you are talking about energizing your customers.

    • Energizing them to use the product or service to its full potential.
    • Energizing them to give you unsolicited suggestions about what would make it even more rave-worthy.
    • Energizing them to tell everyone who will hold still long enough about your product or service as your unpaid word of mouth marketing department.

    Energize is where all your profit is, long-term. If your product sucks, it will not energize customers to do anything more than pay the bills – if that. If your service sucks, it will only energize customers to hate you, very publicly and very loudly. Energize is what will destroy the other two departments, marketing and sales, because marketing will not be able to attract audience due to your stigma in the community. Sales will not be able to overcome fear, uncertainty, and doubt in what few prospects you have. Eventually, you’ll either have to make even more ethically questionable marketing and sales choices just to keep the lights on or go out of business.

    The flip side is the fun part. Products that are raveworthy and service that is insanely great means that marketing just has to get people to the web form to sign up. Marketing can clock in at 10 and clock out at 2 with an hour martini break in the middle of the day because existing customers are raving about what you’ve got and forcibly dragging friends into your showroom. Sales has to triple its manpower just to process the paperwork, and prospects need little guidance except perhaps what color ink to sign on the contract. All of this comes from energizing your product design to be great and your customer service to be the best thing anyone has ever experienced.

    Unsurprisingly, energizing product design and customer service is really, really hard. You as a company must be committed at every level, in every way, to putting your customers first and foremost. Everyone from the janitor who answers the phone late at night while cleaning to the CEO must get it, must understand that the vast majority of your long-term focus must always be on doing right by the customer. The moment that you lose that focus, you lose your ACE in the hole, and until you get it back, you’re on the path of the corporate death spiral.

    Attract. Convert. Energize.

    Profit.

    Photo credit: DotBenjamin

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  • The only marketing metric that really matters

    I’ve said in the past that marketing is the art of creating demand for your ideas, but in terms of something measurable and impactful, what does this mean? What does marketing make? Yes, it creates things like ads, Twitter accounts, email, etc. – but those are the tools to execute the mission of marketing. What does marketing actually do that’s measurable and meaningful?

    Throw out all your other metrics. Followers on twitter, hits to your web site, mentions in the media. Toss them all.

    The only metric that matters is this: qualified leads.

    On the continuum of business, marketing (which includes marketing, advertising, and PR) takes media and audience as its raw materials and makes qualified leads.

    Sales takes those raw materials, those leads, and makes them into customers.

    Product design and customer service take those raw materials, those customers, and turns them into evangelists.

    Everyone and everything that’s doing marketing makes qualified leads. We may not call them as such – we might call them volunteers for the non-profit, new members to the congregation, new players in the Warcraft guild – but they are.

    I’m being a little facetious when I say toss out everything else – but not by much. Things like site traffic, media mentions, etc. are good diagnostic measures to tell you what’s happening with individual tools and processes, but at the end of the day, the only metric that shows you the results of your actions is the number of qualified leads that you pass on to sales to convert. For small businesses especially, marketing, sales, and service may be the same person, the same sole proprietor, but the count of qualified leads is an important number, not to be missed or glossed over.

    Finally, metrics that are really trendy and popular, like ROI, are built on qualified leads. You can’t compute Return on Investment if you have no idea what the Return is, and you can’t get a Return on your Investment until you have some leads for Sales to turn into business. Worry later about ROI and worry more now about how many leads Sales has to work with.

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  • The iPad will be legendary for sales and marketing

    Steve Jobs and gang did a phenomenal job introducing the iPad for consumers. Books! Movies! Music! Games!

    …but…

    The iPad has the potential to make sales and marketing people into legends. Take any sales demo you’ve ever done. Take any presentation you’ve ever done. Now take it on the road. Got a prospect you want to chat things over with in a coffee shop? Bring out your Keynote app (iWork for the iPad) and you’re showing your deck or demo on a glass 10 inch screen without all the hassle of keyboards, mice, remotes, or other crap. Just open your leather binder  and show the show.

    … and then …

    Remember: iPhone apps run on iPad out of the box.

    So you swap from your slide deck to your Salesforce.com iPhone app. You take the order right there. You’re done, and you’re on a device that looks as slick as your product or service hopefully is. No Salesforce? Use iWork’s Numbers app and fill in your order spreadsheets, or fire up Safari and complete the lead form on your web site because you’ve got 3G wherever you’ve got good mobile service.

    Professional speaker? The Keynote Remote app for the iPhone will run out of the box on the iPad. Instead of squinting at your iPhone while using it as a remote for your Keynote presentations (because your laptop is tethered to the projector), you have a gorgeous way to display your speaker notes and control the show from the podium. Just slap your iPad on the podium and swipe its screen to change slides, see your speaker notes, and not miss a beat. If you’ve ever presented professionally and wished that the venue could provide a speaker’s screen, the iPad is now that screen for you regardless of venue.

    The iPad will be legendary for sales and marketing 28
    Image: Engadget

    Yes, you’ll be able to handle all the mundane things that iWork and other iPhone apps can do, but the large, large screen will be perfect for when you’re at trade shows, conferences, and coffee shops as a way of showing your customers and prospects all the goods you have to offer without lugging an entire IT department around with you. Anyone who’s ever hung out with me at a conference knows that I lug a server farm with me – and I probably still will to some degree, but this device certainly will make life easier for the working professional. As a bonus for conference-goers, when the venue Wi-Fi implodes – as it always does – your iPad will feed your data addiction with its 3G connection.

    I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these.

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