Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Marketing

Life after 80, or what World of Warcraft can teach you about marketing mastery

In World of Warcraft, there are 80 levels a character can reach. All characters start out at level 1, and progress via quests, killing creatures, and other activities through 80 levels, which can take anywhere from months to just a few weeks, depending on how dedicated a player you are.

But what happens at level 80? What happens when you reach the end, and there are no more levels to achieve?

It turns out the game changes quite a bit once you reach the top level. Instead of improving your character’s abilities through levels (and associated rewards) you change to getting better equipment for your character and improving your play skill.

See, in Warcraft, every character has dozens of abilities depending on their class. Mages can cast a whole bunch of spells. Priests can heal, shield, and resurrect other characters. Warriors can deliver a beatdown in more ways than you can count. But during the leveling process, you typically rely on a few of these skills as your bread and butter, and the rest are skills you pick up along the way but don’t really use.

Once you reach level 80, you start entering progressively harder dungeons, teaming up with a few or a few dozen other players to take down bigger and meaner creatures. This in turn requires you to dust off all those secondary skills you picked up along the way and figure out just when they’re the perfect solution to the problem at hand. Skills that you never really used on the way up to level 80, skills that you might have forgotten about completely, might make or break your ability to succeed after 80.

What does any of this have to do with marketing? Simple. Take an inventory of all the skills and abilities you have, especially skills you’ve built along your career that you don’t use a whole lot. Take an equal inventory of all the tools and technologies at your disposal that you’ve used, tried, and experimented with along your marketing journey. Now start to view them from the perspective of not just tools, but specific skills that you can use at the right time, for the right job – even if you didn’t give them a second glance as you became a marketing professional.

Last night on the Small Business Buzz Twitter chat, Question 8 was “Twitter vs. LinkedIn vs. Facebook?”. The answer is the right tool for the right job. Just as a frost mage needs to know when to pop Ice Block, Ice Barrier, and Cold Snap in Heroic Halls of Lightning to survive Loken’s Lightning Nova, so must a marketer know when Facebook is the right tool for a campaign, when Twitter makes the most sense, and when LinkedIn is exactly what’s called for. There are times when social media is exactly the wrong answer, and direct mail is the right one. As a marketing professional and as a Warcraft player, knowing which tool fits each situation best is the definition of mastery.

Many of us rushed past experimenting with a lot of our secondary skills on the way to level 80 in both Warcraft and marketing. Now that we’ve got the job, now that we’re practicing professionals, we need to see what else we’re capable of that’s sitting in our inventory, perfect solutions for the problems we have at hand.

This is what’s next for a lot of people – not another new, shiny object to play with, but mastering the tools you already have so that you can achieve exactly the results you want. One of the biggest ways you can set your own career back is to constantly chase after new tools and shiny objects rather than master the ones you’ve already got. Yes, absolutely, try new things, but devote more of your time towards perfecting the skills and tools you currently have, and you’ll find life after 80 – in Warcraft and in your career – to be incredibly rewarding.

May your marketing quests be as fruitful as your Warcraft ones.

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July 8, 2009
What's next

What’s next?

There has never been a more repeated question in all of marketing, and there has never been a time that question has been asked more frequently than now. Marketing, like so many other industries, has had its world turned upside down in the last decade. Marketing executives’ heads are spinning at such a rate that if you put magnets and wiring around them, they could generate enough electricity to power a company. Marketing professionals from the C suite down to the entry level college graduate are all wondering what’s next. What opportunities are there? What will imperil my career?

Here’s a couple of thoughts on what’s next. Disclaimer: this is speculation. I reserve the right to be wrong.

Decentralization is coming to social networks. Look at the specs very carefully for Google Wave and you’ll see that behind the flashy interface is a massive re-architecting of social networks, making them much more resistant to shock. The Wave protocol (separate from the product itself) specifies that a federated data store and server be available for Wave. Just like your company has its own email server, so it might have a Wave server if you jump on board that platform.

What does this mean for you? Services like Twitter, for example, are highly centralized. From fail whales to databases, everything Twitter does is centralized, which also means that if the company ever goes out of business, everything you’ve built on Twitter goes with it. Wave is Google’s answer to that – if the architecture plays out the way it reads, it will make local stores of all your social networking activity, meaning that if Twitter the company goes down or goes away, theoretically, Wave’s knowledge of how it works will let you keep on tweeting.

Takeaway: resilience for social networks is on the way, which means that the time and effort you spend now may someday soon have persistence. That will eventually make social networking an easier sell, as you’ll own your data. For now, make sure you keep backing up your social networks.

Your email list is more important than ever. Yes, social media is taking off like a rocket ship. Yes, new ways of communicating are appearing every day, it seems. The currency up until now of Web 2.0 has been the email address. Ask yourself how many times a social network wants to check your GMail or Yahoo account as soon as you sign up, so you can invite your friends. Some services are starting to migrate to OAuth, which means service to service communication is improving without the need for an email address, like Friendfeed and Twitter. That said, check out this tech spec, again from the Wave protocol documentation:

Wave users have wave addresses which consist of a user name and a wave provider domain in the same form as an email address, namely @. Wave addresses can also refer to groups, robots, gateways, and other services. A group address refers to a collection of wave addresses, much like an email mailing list. A robot can be a translation robot or a chess game robot. A gateway translates between waves and other communication and sharing protocols such as email and IM. In the remainder we ignore addressees that are services, including robots and gateways – they are treated largely the same as users with respect to federation.

Takeaway: The Wave protocol uses the same syntax as email. Many other services still use email addresses as their primary mode of identification. Build your house lists now like crazy, and protect your email lists at all costs! If you rent or sell lists, rethink your pricing on them, because as each big new service goes online with email as a primary identifier (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Wave, etc.), the value of that address to connect to your customers keeps going up, up, up.

Trust is becoming less abstract. Mitch Joel mentioned this on a recent episode of Media Hacks, his fear that social networks will become more private as tools allow people to maintain their private networks more easily. We see this already in Facebook, as its privacy settings have grown more granular over the years, and you can bet that as more distributed protocols become available, the tools for separating private from public will become more powerful. It wouldn’t surprise me to see spam filtering companies evolve to integrate with social networks in the near future, creating whitelists of people who are permitted to contact you through a variety of different means based on your friendships with them.

You have a very limited period of time right now when everything is in the open, when you can openly and plainly see influencers, when you can openly and plainly see how people are networked together. Study the networks now! As privacy continues to evolve, this period of Wild West openness will fade away, and suddenly the job of being a marketer will become a nightmare for anyone who relies on mass marketing, because the consumer simply will not let you in, not to their whitelist, not to their inner circle, not to their sphere of influence, unless the consumer actually wants what you have.

Takeaways: Spend time, invest time now in making connections with influencers, with superhubs in the social networks, because you’ll need their help later on to reach their trusted networks when you no longer can. Focus intensely on search, as that will be the one open mechanism for consumers to find you.

Above all else, maintain your focus on making products or services that don’t suck, because the tolerance for mediocrity will continue to decrease. No one wants mediocre in their social circles. They want awesome. They want to talk about awesome, share awesome, and be both consumer and purveyor of all things awesome. If you are not awesome, if your company’s products or services are not awesome, then the best advice I have is to keep your resume up to date.

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June 26, 2009
Marketing says unity is possible

We spend a lot of time focused on differences because we’re programmed to. That’s a crude survival mechanism. As Mitch, Hugh, and CC pointed out on the most recent episode of Media Hacks, the one silver lining in the current Iranian… situation?… is that our prejudices about what Iran and its people are like are rapidly shattering. Once you look past the subjects of the riots, you realize that the streets in Tehran don’t look all that different.

Here’s an even broader look, the marketing in Tehran, courtesy of a bunch of Flickr photos.

Are we so different? Our marketing says we’re remarkably similar. Any American in Tehran could easily figure out, not speaking a word of Persian, exactly what’s going on in most of those ads. I’d bet you 10,000 rials that if I went to any suburban Iranian family’s home, I could tell you exactly what each junk mail ad was advertising without reading a lick of Farsi.

This could be any street in America, Tehran, Jerusalem, or Tokyo:

In the end, we are so much more alike than we are different.

Our marketing departments agree.

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June 22, 2009
I was on a boat called PAB09

Podcasters Across Borders 2009 has wrapped up and the team of Mark Blevis and Bob Goyetche threw yet another impressive event. This year’s PAB theme was ostensibly bringing outside knowledge into the podcasting world, but the general subject of many of the presentations was on story more than anything – ways to more effectively communicate your story from Six String Nation to a Hollywood career. There were some spectacular new tools and techniques debuted which I look forward to integrating into my shows, the Financial Aid Podcast and Marketing Over Coffee, ideas that I think will, if they work well, bring things up a notch. Also picked up some great new photography techniques I’ll be trying out soon.

Along the way, I presented an 18 minute talk on monetization and why it’s vital to new media. Longtime readers of this blog will find many of the themes to be as familiar as old friends.

I also did my usual Sunday morning semi-improv presentation, My Top 20 Social Media Tools. Unlike the other presentation, I’m not publishing this presentation in any context, and here’s why: you had to be there and ready.

The Sunday morning presentation is always a tough one for people to make. It’s at 8 AM, which, after a night of partying, only the hardcore attendees can usually make. Delivering a super-tight, all-meat presentation that many have expressed a desire to see is my way of thanking them for making that extra effort to show up.

It’s also part of a martial arts lesson my teacher, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center, is constantly reinforcing with us. Very often in the black belt class, he’ll show a technique only once as a way of helping us train our minds to capture and catch as much information as possible, to be vigilant about paying attention.

Social media in some ways makes us reliant on the crowd, reliant on the tools, reliant on waiting for someone to retweet or blog or podcast an important event. That laziness – and it is mental laziness – softens our ability to capture vitally important things that happen which may never happen again. Think about your own life. Have you ever had the experience of missing a child’s first important event, missing a news story break on the street right in front of you, missing a key piece of information at a conference? I know I’ve missed information, especially in the dojo, because of a lack of focus. I know I’ve missed some terrific photos due to inattentiveness.

Thus, that presentation will never happen again, at least not like that. The slides won’t be posted, the video won’t be uploaded, the information never shown again. If you were there – fully and wholly there, meaning you were paying attention and not twittering, blogging, chatting, etc. – then you got some information I hope you find useful. If you weren’t there, then please make the effort to actually show up at events like Podcasters Across Borders or PodCamp rather than hoping someone will live stream/live tweet/live be there for you. You’ll find that there are many more gems from the weekend which will probably not be published from other presenters and attendees as well.

Also, big shout outs to all of the longtime friends and fabulous conversations from the weekend, from Marko Kulik’s photo advice to intense debates about the future of media with Whitney Hoffman, Tod Maffin, and Julien Smith, to the many other great conversations over the weekend.

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June 22, 2009
People I'm Wary Of

Financial coaches who aren’t fabulously wealthy.

Chefs who crusade against foods. There’s more than enough to advocate for that if you’re crusading against something, you’re probably not cooking delicious things.

Fitness personal trainers who are seriously overweight.

Black belt “masters” under the age of 13.

Social media experts.

Any (American) politician whose ads include the American flag. If you’re so patriotic, why do you need to stuff Old Glory in your ads?

Life coaches under the age of 70. If you’re claiming to coach life skills, shouldn’t you have lived most of it first?

All of these share the same common theme: the claim a person makes directly contradicts the apparent evidence.

When it comes to your personal brand, how out of sync is what you say with the results you’ve generated?

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June 15, 2009
Souvenirs from MarketingProfs B2B Forum

I had the pleasure and privilege of speaking on the Robust Online Content panel with Dr. Matthew Grant, Phil Juliano from Novell, Valeria Maltoni from Sungard, and Mike O’Toole from PJA on Monday at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum. One of my personal themes (that I didn’t articulate in the panel) for the conference has been souvenirs from conferences.

My friend Chris Brogan has an interesting quote – when times are good, people love strategy. When times are bad, people want tactics. I’ll take this a step further for conferences: people want something to take home. In this economy, people want a souvenir that they can take away that’s immediately usable, something that, when they sit down at their desk the day they get back, they can plug in and turn on right away and start making a difference, as well as show off to the folks who didn’t go.

Tony Robbins calls this sort of thing profound knowledge – information that once you have, changes everything. You can’t ever go back to the way you used to do things unless you try really hard. A good example of profound knowledge is the rule of thirds in photography. Put a tic tac toe grid mentally over your viewfinder in your camera. Put subjects at the intersections of horizontal and vertical lines, and instantly your photos are likely to become better. Now that you know that, you can’t ever go back to NOT knowing how to apply that rule.

I brought two souvenirs with me to give away at MarketingProfs, one of which I discussed in the panel, and one of which I discussed in the Twitter Therapy sessions. Whether or not you were at the conference (and you really should have been), you can have the souvenirs, too.

1. Customer service isn’t a burden. Customer service is a gold mine. If you’ve ever wanted for content to blog about, to podcast about, to share, to act on, you will never find a better source than the customers you already have and the problems they desperately want you to solve. I’ve recorded 900+ episodes of the Financial Aid Podcast and the customers of the Student Loan Network are my constant inspiration. I don’t need millions of dollars of research. I don’t need millions of dollars in marketing budgets. My customers tell me exactly what their problems are. Your customers are doing the same. The catch? You have to want to listen to them. Far too many people in executive suites are content to glance at their marketing dashboards and that’s as close to the customer as they’re willing to get. You have to be willing to dig – as you would in any gold mine – to get to the real treasure.

2. Try the 8 foot test. This is an easy test to do. Load up your web site on your computer. Maximize your browser. From 8 feet away, is there an immediate and obvious call to action that gets your visitors to do what you want them to do? Here’s an example I use in my demo – go to StaffordLoan.com and do the same. If you can’t tell what we want you to do (apply for a Stafford loan), then you need to see an eye doctor. If you don’t have a room big enough to walk 8 feet away, then load the sites up on your mobile device and hold it at arm’s length for a similar effect.

Hopefully, these two souvenirs are worth enough that they alone made it worth it for you to come to MarketingProfs. Hopefully, every other speaker and presenter gifted you with a souvenir or two as well, so that you went home with an armload full of stuff that will immediately make your business better.

My thanks as well to Ann Handley and the MarketingProfs team for putting on another great event and assembling a terrific panel.

Bonus: grab the eBooks I mentioned at the panel discussion here.

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June 10, 2009
Meet me at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum

I’ll be at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum today, speaking on a panel about creating compelling content with Matthew Grant, Mike O’Toole, Phil Juliano, and Valeria Maltoni. If you’re at the B2B Forum, say hi. If you have no idea what I look like, the photo at the top of the post should help a little, as it’s fairly accurate and very, very recent.

The Conference FAQ

So what do you do?

I’m the CMO of Edvisors, Inc., a college student marketing company based just south of Boston. We operate Edvisors, the Student Loan Network, and a few dozen sites, and offer federal student loans, private student loans, online degrees, and student credit cards to the higher education audience. We’re always looking to work with new partners, and our 1.5MM+ audience is a great audience to share your stuff with. Grab me at the Forum if you’d like to talk more, or shoot me an email.

I also run the Financial Aid Podcast and co-host the Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast with John Wall, the not-basketball marketing star. If you’re around Boston, I invite you to be a part of PodCamp Boston 4.

Do you have a business card?

You’re looking at it right now. If you’d like to contact me, there’s a handy form on this site. You can also email my GMail address, cspenn at gmail. I don’t carry a pile of paper cards because [a] they’re environmentally bad and [b] information changes so frequently, it’s easier just to give you my personal web site URL, www.ChristopherSPenn.com

Are you on Twitter?

Yes.

Are you on Facebook/LinkedIn?

Yes.
Yes.

I welcome all connections on all social networks.

Do you ever do other conferences, private speaking engagements, etc.?

Yes, through Edvisors. Feel free to contact me for more info on that.

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June 8, 2009
Social media's defining factor

I posed a question on Twitter that cuts to the heart of all of this stuff:

What is social media? Seriously, what defines social media from any other form of media?

Lots of folks responded.

bigguyd: @cspenn interactions. SM is a two way street where traditional media is one way, typically.
comedy4cast: @cspenn We all wear colorful hats!
discordia77: @cspenn other forms of media have “experts” telling the information, social media is interactive between all elements involved in the story.
seanrehder: @cspenn asks “define social media.” Social = peer and media = information. Social media = information gained from our peers vs. “the man.”
sizzlemaker: @cspenn Media–such as newspapers or broadcasts–is one way. Someone producing content to give you. Social media allows you to interact.
tommorris: @cspenn Nothing. ‘Social media’ is a term used by marketeers for just about everything. It’s lost all meaning. It’s a pointless buzzword.
keithbooe: @cspenn higher level of real time (or near) interaction and direct user involvement than traditional media?
mlseaton: @cspenn the amount of people claiming to be experts or gurus! That is pretty much what defines it.
Ed: Essentially @cspenn Built in sharing. Conducive both by design, and user intent
JoyHaynes: @cspenn For me, real time conversation and connections to other people.
theelusivefish: @cspenn imho, there are 2 things distinguishing social media from the rest – low barriers to entry and the ability for any to participate
kristenmchugh22: @cspenn SM is both expression & engagement. There are some ppl wielding infl for good&selfish int., but not engaging on meaningful scale.
heykeenan: @cspenn the connection makes social media different from other media.

Here’s what I think defines social media apart from any other form of media: Metcalfe’s Law.

From Wikipedia:

Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2). First formulated in this form by George Gilder in 1993, and attributed to Robert Metcalfe in regard to Ethernet, Metcalfe’s law was originally presented, circa 1980, not in term of users, but rather of “compatibly communicating devices” (for example, fax machines).

Something can be termed social media when its core value relies on the network effect – Metcalfe’s Law.

For example, is a blog post a form of social media? No. The value of the blog post is the same whether one person reads it or one million people read it. Its value is inherent in and of itself. The same is true for a podcast, a TV show, a commercial, a newspaper, etc.

Contrast that with a bulletin board, a call-in radio show, Twitter, discussion forums, comments on a blog post, Facebook, etc. The core value that these forms of media deliver relies on Metcalfe’s Law – the more people who use them, the more valuable they are. The more social they are. The core value diminishes with fewer people and ultimately, the product or service has no inherent value.

When you need to develop an understanding of whether something or not falls in the social sphere, examine careful what its value is, and how the impact of more people changes its value. If the value of the item, network, service, or thing is independent of participation, if Metcalfe’s Law does not drive its core value, it’s not social – and that’s perfectly okay. A well-made hammer’s value is not reliant on the number of people who buy and use it.

If the same product, service, etc. has its value completely unravel if Metcalfe’s Law were applied in reverse – taking away people from it – then it’s social, and requires people to generate its value; the more people who generate value, the more value it has.

This also means that some aspects of “traditional media” are inherently social – call-in radio shows, the classifieds in newspapers, even a corkboard in the employee breakroom.

Three things for marketers to think about: if something isn’t social by design, that’s fine. Don’t try to force it to be social, because it won’t fit. A bouquet of flowers and a perfect sunset can’t Twitter, and never should. Instead focus your efforts on using a different marketing model that works with whatever the core value of your product or service is.

If something “traditional” is social by design in your work already, bringing it online will vastly accelerate its growth and value thanks to how easily socially-powered things spread online.

When your boss, client, friend, neighbor, or kid asks you to make something social (because social media is the shiny object of the day) ask them this: do you want to create something which [a] has no value of its own and [b] is solely reliant on the temperament of the crowd for its value, knowing that one screw-up can destroy everything and leave you with nothing of value?

Personally, I’d ask them instead whether they want to create something that has so much value inherent to it that others can’t help but talk about it and promote it for you in a social context.

What defines social media for you?

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June 7, 2009
What your eye doctor can teach you about web design

One of the biggest problems with design, especially web design, is that we have a nearly impossible task of trying to use words to describe design. For example, if I say light blue, what color comes to mind?

Is it the light blue of an early morning sky? The light blue of a flower? The light blue from a popular corporate logo? All of these are contained in light blue, but none conveys the same light blue I’m probably thinking of.

It’s not that we’re unsure of how a design makes us feel. Quite the contrary, we know precisely and firmly how a design makes us feel. What’s imprecise are the words we use to describe it, and so we often end up with web site designs that leave us unfulfilled, like how you feel a half hour after a fast food meal. You know you ate, but it just doesn’t feel satisfying.

So how do you fix this?

Anyone who’s ever been fitted for any kind of corrective lenses – contacts, glasses, OMGlazerbeamsinureyes, etc. knows the process for assessing your vision. You sit in front of a fairly large pair of goggles and the opthamologist flips various lenses in front of your eyes as you look at the wall chart. Throughout the process he asks you which is better, 1 or 2, over and over again in rapid-fire sequence. (at least, my doctor only asked which was better, 1 or 2)

The eye doctor doesn’t ask you about the qualities of what you’re seeing – no questions about color reproduction or grain, sharpness or focus. He just asks which is better, 1 or 2, because very often a layman’s description would only muddy the waters. The speed at which he proceeds ensures that you don’t try to get verbal about what’s fundamentally a non-verbal issue.

The very binary question of which is better without any lengthy verbal judgements means that we don’t have to force words to describe what we’re seeing. We only need to pass judgement about general positivity or negativity. Yes, 1 is better. No, 2 is worse. The speed means we resort to trusting non-verbal, instinctive decisions, rather than laboring about how to describe something.

The next time you’re working on a web site, advertising creative, design or set of designs, try the eye doctor test. Print out the designs or stick them on Powerpoint slides, and show them to people rapidly. Which is better, 1 or 2? Don’t ask for anything that requires verbal analysis, just quick calls. Discourage discussion for this specific test (there will be plenty of time for deliberation later). Just cycle through your designs. Which is better, 1 or 2? For added sobering results, throw in designs from competitors and see how yours stack up in a rapid, first impression test.

You might be surprised at how easily people make good judgements in the blink of an eye.

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May 29, 2009
Marketing flowers

I’m amused by how often the term organic is used in marketing. Organic campaigns, organic link building, organic traffic growth. You’d think the eco/green movement moonlighted in marketing the way we overuse the word organic.

Here’s some food for thought – organic if you like. The difference between organic marketing and paid marketing is the difference between a real flower and a plastic one. If your goal is superficial (decorate the office quickly), plastic is as good as real, it’s faster, probably cheaper, and easier to manage and maintain.

If your goal, however, is for that flower to eventually grow, reproduce, and bear fruit, then the plastic version will not do. The trouble is, a real flower is a lot more work. It takes vastly more time, more energy, more maintenance than the plastic or cloth substitute, but if your goal is long term, lasting growth, only the naturally grown flower will do.

Is there a place for the plastic floral display? Of course – but it depends on your goals. Too much marketing focuses on the superficial, the fast hit, the quarterly or monthly numbers (which are vitally important, don’t get me wrong) at the expense of the long term growth. The investment you make in the plastic flower today will not diminish, but nor will it ever grow or bear fruit. The investment you make in the real flower will, assuming proper care and focus, not only grow, but increase until you hit a critical mass where your field of flowers are self-sustaining.

What are you growing in your marketing?

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May 27, 2009

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