Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Marketing

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
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
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
Marketing with iTunes 9, iTunes LP, and iTunes Extras

No linkbait in that blog title, no sir.

Anyway, yesterday Apple released iTunes 9, along with two new formats of media, iTunes LP (enhanced albums with art, interviews, text, interactive, etc.) and iTunes Extras for Movies (think DVD extra content and features). Some off the cuff thoughts about how these tools, when made available to content creators, will impact marketing.

iTunes LP will obviously help musicians a great deal in selling albums vs. tracks. The idea of being able to buy an album with a concert video embedded in it, or an interview, or whatever appeals most to fans will make selling the whole album as a package a draw over the individual track. That’s a good thing.

iTunes Extras will obviously port existing DVDs into iTunes, helping out movie studios, etc.

What I’m really interested in is how these tools will be made available to content creators, because I could easily see releasing a super-enhanced podcast that contained photos (say if the show were an interview at a conference or something), a book excerpt, transcript, or other enhanced features. Being able to create your own enhanced iTunes LP collection – whether or not your “album” is in the iTunes store, would be a huge benefit to marketers wanting to offer more goods to consumers.

Where I think the juice will really flow is in iTunes Extras. For anyone who does public speaking, imagine being able to take video of your presentation at a conference and embed your speaker notes, photos, handouts, or even a transcript of your remarks in one slick package. You could include bonus footage like Q&A, media interviews, or other pieces of media in the exact same manner as you would on a full DVD – without the DVD.

I look forward to hearing from Apple and independent publishing houses like CD Baby to see how accessible these features will be to folks not affiliated with a big publisher or label.

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September 10, 2009
One pixel away…

… is the Marketing Over Coffee extra interview with Mitch Joel and his new book, Six Pixels of Separation. Go give it a listen and buy Mitch’s book.

Disclosure: goes to Amazon, affiliate fee paid to Marketing Over Coffee.

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September 8, 2009
What World of Warcraft can teach you about gear and skill

If you’ve ever played any character in World of Warcraft, you know about the diminishing returns of gear. If you’ve never played Warcraft, it works something like this: once you’ve reached the top level of growth for your character (currently level 80, soon to be 85), any gains you get to make your character better come not from “leveling up” but from getting better gear, better armor, weapons, etc.

In the beginning of your gear quest, vast improvements in your character’s capabilities are easy. Going from a green “uncommon quality” item to a blue “rare” item can add more power, more strength, more valued attributes to your character in great leaps. Your character can perform far better in the game in these early jumps in equipment.

However, as you keep gearing up, going from blue “rare” items to purple “epic” items, the items get more costly (or more difficult to obtain) for statistical improvements that are orders of magnitude smaller.

After a certain point, you reach diminishing returns, where the gear’s improvements are so small that the comparatively large efforts to get the gear simply isn’t worth it for the average player. Where a blue “rare” item might take half an hour’s worth of work, a top, best-in-game item might take weeks. Granted, it’s a game, so as long as you’re having fun there’s no penalty towards getting that gear, but it’s still significant diminishing returns.

After you reach the point of diminishing returns on gear, the best thing you can do as a Warcraft player is to spend time learning how to play your character’s skills with the gear you’ve got. Gear, after all, merely magnifies your skills. Learning the various ways your character can behave in combat, learning to fine tune your use of the right skill at exactly the right time – these are the things that will not only make the most of the gear you’ve got, but in some cases will negate any gear disadvantages you have. Anyone on a team in the game knows that it’s better to have a slightly undergeared, excellent player leading your team than a highly geared, incompetent buffoon running the team.

So what does all this have to do with anything? Well, life is exactly the same. Take photography – after a certain point, you’re just spending money on lenses and other gadgets with fewer and fewer returns. That first zoom lens makes a big difference in your photography. The jump from a 55-200mm to an 18-200mm isn’t earth shattering, just convenient. Photography gets to diminishing returns VERY quickly – better to learn how to compose and shoot with the gear you have after the entry level improvements. Better pictures come from better skills – gear magnifies skill, but doesn’t improve it. Only learning and practice improves skill. I’ve got a Nikon D90 with a few lenses, and when talking to Marko Kulik (a photography expert), he basically said I’ve got all the gear I could possibly need for years – now I need to learn how to use it well.

Look at marketing. The first analytics software you start using is an incredible leap from no analytics at all, or guesswork based on server logs. After that, you get diminishing returns on the quantity of information you get from web analytics – and the real juice to be had in web analytics is not learning what numbers you have, but what they mean and how you can change your business practices to serve your customers better.

Accounting? Lots of businesses run quite well on Microsoft Excel, not because they don’t want to buy an accounting package, but because their accounting staff is sufficiently skilled enough in Excel that the gear upgrade won’t make a difference in their performance – and might even diminish it.

In the end, gearing up is important only to the point of diminishing returns, whether it’s marketing or Warcraft. The lesson is the same across nearly all professions, trades, and hobbies: gear magnifies skill. Gear up to get past entry level limitations, then focus your time and energy on the skills you need to tap the potential of that gear.

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September 5, 2009
How much did that ad just cost you?

The following post is rated PG-13 for adult language.

I went looking for some decent affiliate marketing blogs to read and subscribe to this morning. Being the Googling sort, I searched for affiliate marketing blogs and popped open the top 20 results in a series of tabs to see what I’d found.

Of the top 20 sites that came back in my search, 2 didn’t load, one was flagged by Google as containing malware harmful to my computer, and 11 of the sites, before any content could load, popped up a whole-page, content-obscuring ad. Some of the ads were for newsletters, blogs, or other “freebies”, while others promoted the author’s latest books, DVDs, webinars, seminars, and other swill.

The very thing that would convince me to buy your book, CD, DVD, etc. is your content. How helpful is your blog? After all, if I quickly scan the first five posts of your blog and I learn something just from a quick scan, you can bet that I’ll think you’ve got even more stuff to offer. You taught me something in 30 seconds, and I’ll stick around much longer to see what else I can learn. I’ll bookmark your site. I’ll tag it and store it for future reference. I’ll subscribe and opt-in, because I love learning, and I love any site, blog, or outlet that helps me learn more.

However, when you obscure your content with piles and piles of ads, guess what? The value you present to me is absolutely zero, and you get put in the bin of perpetual ignorage. I don’t care how well ranked your book is on Amazon or that your book is on the Peoria TImes Bestseller List for the 213th week in a row. Endorsements don’t mean anything to me. Reputation matters very little to me. What does matter is the content, the goods, and if you block my ability to read your content with your ads, then you’ve effectively decided I don’t need to get any sense of your value.

Here’s the ultimate irony, you Internet marketing masters. (yes, one pompous jackass billed himself as such) One of the areas we cover less well in our Marketing Over Coffee podcast is affiliate marketing (with the quality of the blogs I surfed this morning, there’s little wonder why), so I was doing some homework, putting together a list of actually useful affiliate marketing blogs for our master blog list that we’ll be distributing in the next Marketing Over Coffee newsletter.

If you hadn’t blocked your entire site with tons of useless shit, you might have made the cut and had your blog included in a list that will be distributed and subscribed to by thousands and thousands of marketing professionals. Instead, you lose out on me, you lose out on someone willing to voluntarily endorse your writing, and you lose out on a ton of exposure, all in the hope that you could scrape up a buck with your ineffective ads.

We’ve all been beating this meme to death recently, but for good reason: be helpful. Be helpful in what you do and your work will practically market for you. Be helpful and useful in your writing, in your blogging, in your content production, and you’ll have won me over immediately, made me subscribe, and made me mention you to the folks who enjoy seeing what’s on my nightstand and in my blog reader.

Go take a look at your top five blog posts right now on your personal or professional site. If at least one of your blog posts doesn’t contain something helpful, something actionable, something useful, fix that. If you do have something that I can learn, take away, and make useful right away, then I congratulate and salute you, and know that your audience deeply appreciates what you do.

Updated: I posted the counterpoint perspective with data over on Marketing Over Coffee.

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August 30, 2009
How Batman will help you beat social media narcissism

Mitch Joel and Mashable both are raising red flags about social media being focal points for insane quantities of narcissistic behavior. Mitch asks:

So, the question is this: how do people build and develop their personal brands, if all we really want is content that is valuable to us and not self-promotional in any way, shape or form?

This is the essence of empowering a personal brand. It’s not about you, but what you do.

“It’s not who I am underneath, but what I *do* that defines me.” – Batman (2005)

Want to take your products, services, brands, and company to the next level? Forget about reinforcing brand and focus on what you’re doing to make things better for your customers. Want to see a great example at a small business level? Look at how Matthew Ebel is working his subscription service. Ask his VIPs if he’s all about himself or all about them, and you’ll find nearly universal agreement that he’s making the music FOR the customers, not just trying to sell them whatever he can for a buck.

Look at some of the powerhouses in new media, like Beth Kanter and Beth Dunn, movements like Twestival and Free Iran – all of these folks are less about them and more about their work, about promoting their efforts to help others. Look at Facebook’s applications – one of the most powerful and popular applications? Causes.

It’s not who you are, it’s what you do that will turn your brand up to 11.

Photo credit: Chan Chan

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August 28, 2009
It's how you make me feel that matters

Here’s another obvious but overlooked aspect of communication: you’re selling emotion.

We are emotional creatures. We feel first, then think – and this is wholly right and as it should be, because to feel primal fear is to ensure survival. You don’t analyze how many claws the lion has, you feel the fear and run like hell.

Knowing this, knowing that we are emotional creatures first, think very careful about your work in marketing, advertising, and media. In all of your work, in all of your campaigns, you want to target an emotion as the hook that attracts attention, convinces the prospect, and converts the customer. In all of your media, you have to decide what end emotion you want someone else to feel, and plan your work accordingly.

I’ll give you a few examples.

In the Financial Aid Podcast and my work on FAFSAonline.com, the free FAFSA application prep site, I focus on the emotion of reassurance. When you’re done, I want your fears to be mitigated, I want you to feel a little more confident that the financial aid process is manageable, that you can do and accomplish everything in the process, and that it’s not the mind-boggling maze that others market to your fears in order to get you to buy, sign on the dotted line, and hope everything will be all right. Quite the opposite. I want you to feel reassured, a little more secure, and resolute in your ability to navigate the process.

In Marketing Over Coffee, the emotion John Wall and I go after most often is conspiracy. Not tin foil hat stuff, but the sense that you’re in on the secret. You’re a part of the secret club of Marketing Over Coffee, you’re there with us in the coffee shop as we talk over stuff that’s of interest to us. You know the special handshake, the secret sign, and all the privileges that come with being on the inside, with the “in” crowd.

Look at a product like the Pet Rock from the 1970s. Who in their right mind would have predicted that this phenomenon would have taken off? Actually, looking back, there’s absolutely no surprise that it did, as it markets to the dual emotions of convenience and guilt. You know someone who’s endured the childhood trauma of losing a pet. You also know people who are so absent minded they’d lose their own reproductive organs if they weren’t integrated in them. Pet rock’s marketing to the emotions of knowing you can’t possibly hurt your pet rock, nor do you have to be responsible in any sense.

Examine the feelings generated by many of the well known folks in social media. How does Chris Brogan make you feel? How does Gary Vaynerchuk make you feel? How about Ann Handley, Pete Cashmore, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Perez Hilton, or Justine Ezarik? I guarantee you that if you know of any of these folks, the answer is never “nothing”. They all create emotions in you that make the sale.

Heck, how do I make you feel?

Look at your own products, services, and communications. Ask yourself what your audience is currently feeling. If the answer is nothing, you’re in a heap of trouble. (this, by the way, is what most of us feel when reading press releases) If you don’t have a core emotion as part of your marketing, advertising, and communications strategies, stop everything else and go think that through.

You’ll feel better for it.

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August 24, 2009

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