Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Marketing

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
BlizzCon proves that awesome works

Food for thought:

BlizzCon, the annual conference held by Blizzard Software to discuss their products with their customers, is happening right now. Blizzard’s conference and convention attracts fans from all over the world to ask questions, try out beta software, and give feedback about their stuff.

If you’ve ever been at any company’s product launches and reviews, you’d expect this to be a small and rather boring affair. Quite the opposite. BlizzCon attracted 26,000 customers to its fourth annual event.

When was the last social media event that attracted 26,000 people in one setting?

Here’s another twist: every attendee paid $125 (plus travel and expenses) to be at BlizzCon. People who purchased the pay per view (yes, pay per view) stream paid$ 40 – and there were 50,000 of them. Blizzard, from what’s effectively a product review meeting, raised $5,250,000 from its customers.

When was the last – or any – social media event that brought in that kind of cash?

Here’s the real head exploder for you: not only did Blizzard get 26,000 fans to show up for a product review, not only did it get them to pay, not only did it get another 50,000 to pay for the video stream, but the tickets for BlizzCon, when they went on sale, sold out in 56 seconds.

56 seconds.

Probably faster than it’s taken you to get to this article and read it so far.

Has there ever been a social media event that’s done that? Or any event, besides headline rock star concerts?

How, you ask, does Blizzard do it? How do they put together an event that is the envy of anyone who’s ever planned any kind of meetup or event? How do they make tens of thousands of people pay to show up not even for a commercial, but a product review and beta test, and pull millions of dollars out of the air in less than a minute?

It comes down to the same essential qualities we’ve been talking about for so long: being awesome. Blizzard’s products are nothing short of awesome, and they always have been, ever since Diablo I and Warcraft: Humans and Orcs first rolled out over a decade ago. They consistently create and produce top notch products, products that are worth talking about, products that are unbelievably high quality compared to their competitors, and that reputation and attention to care for their customers has not only earned them customer loyalty, but earned them a mountain of cash as well.

If you’re in marketing, if you’re in advertising, if you’re in media, this is the high water mark, the bar, for all of us. This is the kind of devotion that we all seek to achieve, and the lesson from Blizzard is that there aren’t any shortcuts. There’s no magic bullet, no instant potion that confers awesomeness. If you can create a decade of excellence, of being best in class or nearly best in class for what you do, then you have the opportunity to create a legacy like Blizzard.

If you are not best in class with your products, services, and media, you will never achieve this level of success. Ever. For every Blizzard Entertainment, there are thousands of game publishers that come and go all the time. If you know that your company, your products, your services aren’t best in class and you’re not fighting to get them to that level of achievement, the best you’ll ever be able to do is muster up envy of what Blizzard has done.

First and foremost, focus on being awesome. I can’t beat this dead horse often enough. Besides, I play a Death Knight in World of Warcraft, so we’ll just raise the dead as an Acherus Deathcharger and beat it some more. Focus on being awesome, because Blizzard Entertainment and BlizzCon prove that awesome is one of the most fun places you can be.

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August 22, 2009
The easiest way to drive growth

What’s the secret formula, the special power, the magic bullet that will drive growth, especially in new media and social media?

It’s really simple.

It’s really easy.

It’s also very difficult for too many people and companies to ever bother doing.

Be helpful.

Here’s the thing about promotional efforts online, about marketing online. There are all kinds of different emotions and mindsets you can market to, but they all come with risks and niches that are difficult to hit accurately on a routine basis. Doing a video that you want to go viral? You can try for funny, but sense of humor is tricky. You can go for provocative or peddle sex, but you’re going to lose some people there and you’ll have to handle people who are seriously offended by your perceived lack of taste. You can aim for outrageous, but more often than not, your efforts will simply fall flat. Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff recently wrote a great perspective on why things do or don’t go viral and the reasons behind them – give his article a read.

It’s hard to hit sexy, stupid, funny, or outrageous. It’s hard to get the mix just right.

It’s easy, by contrast, to be helpful. Helpful is far more universal than sexy. Helpful is far less likely to engender outrage than badly formed humor that comes off as insulting or offensive. Helpful is something that is instinctively wired into many people as part of the culture.

Helpful is valuable, because we all need help with things. We all need advice or a solution to a problem, and if you’re helpful, if you behave in a manner that legitimately helps me whether or not you make a sale, you’ve created value. If your product or service is powerfully helpful, it will practically sell itself. Take a look at Trust Agents, Chris and Julien’s book. Look at the movement around it that’s been fed by the authors’ focus on being helpful long before the book was even created.

Helpful is self evident. If you’re debating whether something you’re doing is helpful for your customers, then it’s not. If there is a question in your mind about whether a product or service is helpful for your customers, the answer is no, it’s not helpful. If you ask someone else at your company whether a decision is helpful or not to your customers and the answer is longer than yes – particularly if it’s a long, convoluted justification, then the answer is no. Helpful is obvious.

You can spot a company that’s in its death spiral incredibly easily. Just look at their decisions on a spectrum of helpfulness. If a decision or action is authentically helpful to its customers, that business will grow. If a decision or action is designed to reduce helpfulness to customers, that business is eventually dead meat. Cut back on customer service or call center staff? Dead meat. Make it hard for a customer to talk to a human being? Dead meat. Increased marketing budget but decreased quality control budget? Dead meat. Increased prices but decreased store hours? Dead meat. Eliminate useful features of your service to cut costs but you’re flinging press releases around like crazy? Dead meat. Focused all your efforts on marketing instead of creating helpful content, products, or services? Dead meat.

Here’s a test to see if your own company is in trouble. Read your company’s web site and its newsletter. If you can’t find one thing in each outlet that isn’t legitimately helpful with no strings attached, you’re in serious trouble and you might want to think about polishing up your resume if you can’t incite change internally.

Helpful costs. It requires time, energy, money, and resources to focus on how you can help your customers, and very often it’s at odds with the beancounters demanding ROI on everything down to the spoon in your coffee cup. Helpful, however, is an investment that is becoming mandatory in the digitally social sphere, because real time search and real time reputation mean that your old marketing tricks are losing steam and fast. Google, Facebook, and Twitter are already demonstrating that. Only through creating authentic, real value can you remain competitive in the hyperspeed environment of the real time Web, and the fastest, easiest, and most convenient way to create value is to focus on being helpful.

How do you know when you’re succeeding at being helpful? Sales will go up, sure. More people will link to you, blog about you, Twitter about you, sure. But you’ll know when you’re truly being helpful when you receive gushing emails, notes, blog comments, and letters from your customers thanking you for your very existence. Those trophies are a great metric to determine if your efforts at being helpful are working.

How can you turn around your business or propel it to the next level? Refocus on being helpful.

You’ll sleep better at night, too.

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August 21, 2009
Marketing to stereotype or reality?

Here’s an interesting question. In marketing, especially mass, B2C marketing, we make a lot of assumptions based on “studies”. I’ll give you an example from the student loan world. When marketing student loans, a number of studies say that if you are going after the Hispanic market, you should use photographs and language that shows multiple generations of the family, as opposed to just parent/student or student by themselves. Some of this dates back to a 2005 study by Sallie Mae on decision factors for Hispanic students in borrowing for college which said that Hispanic students tend to make financial decisions in favor of borrowing with the advice and guidance of parents and grandparents.

The question is, is that accurate? Is using any kind of ethnosocial marketing effective, and if so, how do you determine which studies are reliable?

Do you risk giving offense to a targeted demographic if you’re marketing to a stereotype that came out of a study that might have been less than scientifically valid?

If you do any kind of demographic targeted marketing, I’d love to hear how you handle these kinds of things.

Full disclosure: I work for the Student Loan Network, a student loan company, and anything I say should be assumed to be biased towards my company because we’re awesome.

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August 3, 2009
5 tips for dominating local

Five basic tips for dominating local. If you’re a local business, local musician, local event planner, local anything, you need to try these methods.

1. Optimize your site or microsite for local. Buy a local domain name, like Boston Martial Arts. When people are searching for generics, they’ll Google for your locality and the generic term – and chances are generic terms are more likely to be available at the local level.

2. Register for local. Set up your Google Local Business Center. Get events into local calendars like Craigslist for your city.

3. Recruit local. Hit up local message boards, follow people locally on Twitter, find discussion groups and email lists that are local and introduce yourself to your community.

4. Be at local events. Attend things like PodCamp Boston (if you’re in Boston, obviously), or create your own PodCamp, BarCamp, TEDx, or other event for your area.

5. Go local offline. Got a business you’re promoting? Look at local delivery systems to enhance your business. One of my friends who is an avid local marketer promotes his business through an online and offline affiliate program, and gives affiliate coupons to other local businesses. His biggest success? A local florist shop includes his coupons in their deliveries. The florist gets affiliate fees if the customer signs up, he gets free marketing, and the customer gets his business if they want what he has to sell – and the sell is slightly easier because the arrival of flowers tend to brighten moods to begin with.

What are your local tips and tricks?

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July 27, 2009
What Warcraft's wool cloth should teach you about marketing

I’m an avid gold-maker in World of Warcraft. Like real life, the amount of gold you have in the game is a direct measure of how much value you bring. If you quest like mad and rack up thousands of gold, you’ve got the skills and the time to complete lots of quests. That’s value. If you farm materials like in-game consumables, you’re generating value for other players who don’t have to spend their time farming, and the gold pours in. If you play the Auction House, knowing your markets and trends, you can arbitrage items that are sold for unusually low prices by players that don’t know better and resell them at market prices – and the gold pours in.

What I want to highlight today, though, is an important aspect of the gold making game. Take a look at the top 5 items I’ve sold in game recently:

The first and fourth items are rare cloth that can be made only once every 4 days. Scarcity makes them incredibly valuable. The same is true for item 3, the Hat of Wintry Doom, because it’s made from rare items.

The second item is an in-game pet that can only be acquired in a little-loved backwater part of the world that takes ages to get to. People pay a price premium for it because they don’t want to burn up the time and effort it takes to get there.

What’s really important is item 5, wool cloth. For anyone who does not play World of Warcraft, wool cloth is a commodity. Not only is it a commodity, but it’s an especially plentiful commodity that most early players encounter by the bucket before moving onto more challenging parts of the game. If chess pieces wore clothing, pawns would be the ones sporting wool cloth – it’s common.

So why is such a mundane commodity the #5 seller? Two reasons: first, it’s used by several professions in game, which means there’s consistent demand for it. Second, most players run right past the stage of the game where they’d accumulate a significant amount of the cloth in their pursuit for better, shinier objects. Thus, while it’s plentiful, most players forget about it and move on rapidly, long before they accumulate any significant amount of it.

Consistent demand. High potential supply, low actual supply. This is a profit engine.

So what does this have to do with marketing? How many people are searching for the shiny object, the rare, the Ebonweave cloth of marketing? Social media currently holds this crown, though a few years ago it was SEO, and before that it was email. Everyone wants into the new, the shiny, the really glittery with the high potential payoff, and for those few that do succeed in making the Ebonweave of marketing, the payout is handsome.

But.

But there’s more than enough money in the marketing equivalents of wool cloth. In the rush to social media, people forgot search optimization. In the rush to search optimization, people forgot email marketing. All along the way, there are lots of valuable methods that generate real results and real income, and those rushing to reach Grand Master Social Media Marketer are leaving money and opportunity on the table.

Remember your wool cloth. Revisit the things that used to be hot and see, now that they’ve reached maturity, just how quietly profitable they can be. Some things won’t be any more, but some things perceived as a commodity could still be one of your best sellers if you’re good at it and the attention deficit crowd has moved onto whatever new shiny has appeared for the day.

Good luck farming your wool cloth.

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July 23, 2009
What the Tacoma Narrows Bridge should tell you about your marketing

Resonance:

Mechanical resonance is the tendency of a mechanical system to absorb more energy when the frequency of its oscillations matches the system’s natural frequency of vibration (its resonance frequency or resonant frequency) than it does at other frequencies. It may cause violent swaying motions and even catastrophic failure in improperly constructed structures including bridges, buildings, and airplanes a phenomenon known as resonance disaster. – Wikipedia

Resonance, demonstrated at the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington State, 1940:

Resonance disaster can occur in more places than the physics of bridges. Resonance disaster – and success – can occur in media.

Take an example like United Breaks Guitars. This video would have flopped miserably if the airline industry’s service was superb. No one would have spread the message. But the video and campaign resonated with people, deeply. People who had bad experiences with airlines and luggage spread the video like wildfire, and the mainstream media (many of whom are frequent travelers themselves) boosted the video even more.

Media resonance is when a message matches the pre-existing message within the audience and as a result the power of the message’s absorption is amplified, in the same way that an opera singer’s voice can match the resonant frequency of a crystal glass and shatter it, or the wind-induced vibrations can collapse a bridge.

Resonance is at the very heart of what messages are sticky, what messages spread, what messages will go “viral”. A message that resonates with its audience will be amplified by the conditions within the audience and rapidly escalate beyond anything the message creator anticipated.

How do you determine resonance as a marketer? Lots and lots of research and human life experience. Research using tools like Google Trends, Google Insight for Search, Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and any other mood or sentiment indication tool to determine not only what’s on people’s minds, but how they say it. Deeply examine your own life experiences for things that piss you off, things that delight you, things that resonate with you, and extrapolate your own experiences to larger human characteristics. Look at messages on Twitter that are retweeted and become trending topics for what resonates about them. Watch the long-standing hit movies that retain their hit quality decades after release. Immerse yourself in what resonates with people and you’ll have a very good idea over time of what messages will resonate and what messages will not.

Here’s the devil of resonance: most of what you market, your products, your services, the things you have for sale, probably will not resonate with people. Sorry. At best, a majority of people will be somewhat interested in what you have. Your job is not to make them care, because you can’t, any more than you can force a bridge’s resonant frequency to change (you can’t unless you tear it down and rebuild it). The best you can do is figure out what latent resonance is already in people and rethink how you present your products and services to more closely match an existing resonance, or build a new product on top of existing ones that does match the resonance of your audience.

Good luck finding your resonance.

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July 21, 2009
Watching footfalls

A tweet from Amber Naslund this morning reminded me of an interesting lesson.

@ambercadabra: Ah, o’Hare on a Monday AM. So many friendly people. Ahem.
@cspenn: Watch footfalls. It’s an easy way to pass time in crowds.

What did this mean?

Footfalls are, simply put, how people walk. Some people walk as if they’re gliding across the floor with grace; others look like they’ve just newly risen from the grave as zombies. All of the walks and footfalls are unique and are signatures of our past and present. Watching footfalls in a public space gives you great insight into the people around you.

What’s interesting about the footfall from a ninjutsu perspective comes from a lesson in the middle level material of the Koto family tradition. There’s a moment in someone’s walk, after their foot has been placed or committed but before their weight has been transferred, during which you can strike them with relatively little force and knock them back or on their butt. Strike them sufficiently hard enough at that moment and you might even put their lights out, because the body is wholly expecting the footfall to be completed as several million previous ones were – with transfer of weight and progress forward.

When something interrupts that deeply ingrained habit, the body has almost no idea what to do, and it’s in that moment of confusion through what should have been an orderly, predictable transition, that the ninja technique displays its power. You’re not going head to head with the person’s strength (after their weight has transferred) and you’re not attacking from too far away (before they’ve stepped) because they’ll react and adjust. Only in that moment of transition do you get an opportunity to truly take advantage of someone’s habit and knock them into next week.

We as a society, as a culture, as a world of business are going through a similar transition and disruption now, especially in media. Our media footfalls are used to the broadcast model, where media broadcasts the message and the consumer receives it passively, then goes out and buys things they don’t need. The transition and disruption of new media has thrown a ninja strike into traditional media’s footfall, and it’s falling on its butt as we take advantage of its confusion.

The lesson moving forward is simple (but not easy): as new media becomes mainstream, as new becomes mundane and habits form, look for the footfalls. Watch to see what traditions and rituals appear, watch their timing like you watch people in the airport, and you’ll know when to disrupt them, when their moment of transition becomes your moment of opportunity. More important, as you keep an eye towards the future, look for services, technologies, and ideas that will be the ninja strike to other present day footfalls in your industry or niche. Learn the ideas and you’ll have carte blanche to take over that niche while everyone else is catching their balance.

Keep your eyes open and your feet on the ground!

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July 20, 2009

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