Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Marketing

Optimize your LinkedIn Profile for SEO

LinkedIn. Love it or hate it, it’s prominent, it’s a social network, and it lets you post URLs to your profile… except that they’re naked URLs, with no link text to help you in your search efforts, right?

Nope.

Now you can. Go to LinkedIn, make sure you have a public profile set up with a good URL, and then instead of choosing My Blog or My Company, choose Other.

Cha-ching! Link text in your profile from a prominent, trusted domain.

Speaking of which, are we connected on LinkedIn? If not, connect here:

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March 4, 2008
Dan Kennedy on Audio

For those thinking about audio podcasting as an effective sales mechanism, master sales trainer Dan Kennedy has an interesting perspective on audio as a marketing tool. Granted, in his blog post, he’s talking about CDs and not digital delivery, but the points about why sales folks should be delivering audio as a sales mechanism are just as applicable.

Read Dan Kennedy’s list here.

If you’re looking for a sales podcast, check out the Sales Roundup Podcast, another one of our fellow New England Podcasters.

I’ve been following a lot of Dan Kennedy’s stuff since I was introduced to it by one of my teachers, Dennis Mahoney. Dan costs a LOT for any kind of materials, but he delivers a lot of useful, out-of-the-box templates that work incredibly well. I use his sales letter template an awful lot when I send out promotional emails for the Financial Aid Podcast or Matthew Ebel.

Combine it with systems like neurolinguistic programming and new media, and you’ve got a terrific combination.

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February 28, 2008
Don't be that guy… or gal… doing blogger outreach.

I got a promotional email from Big Machine Media today cc’ed to a list of 340 podcasters and bloggers, promoting their musicians.

Good try, gang.

Look, a lot has already been said about blogger outreach by better minds than mine.

Here’s where this campaign really fell flat.

First, please, please, please if you’re going to do outreach, at least BCC your list. I’d actually prefer that you “go pro” and use a mailing list service like Blue Sky Factory to manage your mailings, so that you have comprehensive blacklist and other filtering at your fingertips. On those occasions when I need to do outreach, I set up a segmentation that says, “Never, ever send this email to the same address twice”.

Second, put an obvious, functional opt-out in the email.

Third, if you’re going to pitch me, PITCH me. Show me why you deserve an ounce of my time or attention. The email I got had a relatively decent subject line, but a really poor payload. This company wants to promote their musicians to me. Fine and good, I love promoting musicians (like Rich Palmer, Matthew Ebel, Anji Bee, Rebecca Loebe, Black Lab, Natalie Gelman, Rayko KRB, and countless others) and I love hearing new, independent music, but the pitch in this message was about as exciting as getting my grocery bill via email, which is to say not at all. (perhaps you have exciting groceries? I do not)

What would make an effective pitch to me? Well, you could send me a link to an MP3 ( <= free MP3! ) so that I could hear what you have to offer – that’d be a start. Tell me WHY your musicians are so good, and whether or not musicians like to be compared to others, tell me at least who they kind of sound like – for example, Matthew Ebel sounds like the love child of Billy Joel and Ben Folds with a dash of William Shatner from time to time, and an ounce or two of John Mayer.

Marketing music is difficult under the best circumstances, and lord knows I’ve made more than my share of missteps. At least maybe this list of basics will help music marketers who WANT to do outreach be a little more effective.

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February 22, 2008
What metrics matter to podcasters?

A recent question sent into Marketing Over Coffee – what metrics matter for podcasters to measure their success, a la the ADM?

Ultimately, traffic metrics are only the top of the funnel – they’re the raw number of eyeballs in, and that in itself isn’t worth much except for general trends.

No matter what statistic you use – file downloads, Feedburner numbers, etc. the main value of basic traffic statistics is trend growth – does your show have more audience this month than last month? Does your show have more audience this year than last year, and what kind of growth are you looking at – 1%? 5%? 50%?

It’s more important to use a consistent growth metric than a standardized one – if you consistently measure on Feedburner numbers, then you have a baseline to measure growth. If you consistently use files downloaded with status code 200 from Apache, you can measure based on that.

Having two statistics – Feedburner + Apache – is good for ensuring that trends are consistent. If Apache completed downloads are radically different than Feedburner numbers, you need to investigate why. Is it a spambot scraping your content? Is it people listening straight off the web site without a download? If metrics matter, your chosen benchmarks should move in tandem – 10% growth in Apache is 10% growth in Feedburner.

I think it’s vitally important for podcasters to also chart out their funnels, even for shows with nothing to sell. For example, Marketing Over Coffee right now doesn’t have a revenue model per se, at least in the sense of a widget for sale. But we do have conversion metrics we want to examine – blog comments, subscribers to the feed, etc. and rolling forward, we’re almost certainly going to put out a newsletter. We may even be able to measure our success by speaking gigs, etc., but unless you’re living in a CPM advertising world, eyeballs and ears don’t count for much.

The Student Loan Network measures the Financial Aid Podcast by both growth of the house list and loan volume – two very clear, revenue-generating sales metrics. Those count for a lot more than eyeballs and ears.

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February 21, 2008
Join the Conversation Book Review
Joseph Jaffe was kind enough to send me a review copy of his latest book, Join the Conversation. It’s a really, really LONG book, weighing in at 300 pages. I managed to get through it in about two weeks of sporadic reading.

The Good
- The book has plenty of case studies and examples of conversational marketing. Everything from Fedex Furniture to Virtual Thirst.
- Jaffe writes in a similar style to Seth Godin – short sentences in second person voice, so it’s easy reading.
- Standalone text units mean you can pick up and put down the book easily.
The Bad
- If you like books to flow, this isn’t it. Each unit of text practically stands alone. If you’re accustomed to more of a story, this book is, as Mitch Joel put it, like a series of blog posts.
- There are almost too many case reviews and not enough actionable plans.
- Whoever did the font typesetting needs to be slapped around. There are WAY too many fonts, so many that it’s distracting.
Overall

It’s hard to actually review this book because it’s in sort of a grey zone for me. Is it a good introduction to conversational marketing? Not really, at least not for the beginner, because there are very few clear takeaways or plans to begin implementation. For the advanced new media marketer, the book doesn’t break a lot of new ground in ways you can disrupt the marketplace with marketing – it’s more of a series of case studies than it is a blueprint for your next marketing Death Star.

Join the Conversation is probably best suited as an idea book – the kind of book you pick up from time to time when you need to leaf through a few examples to generate ideas. Get inspiration from how people have done things or glean lessons from how NOT to do things based on missteps of the past.

Would I recommend it? If you’re at the journeyman stage of new media marketing, I think Join the Conversation is a worthy addition to your bookshelf. For those who haven’t played Sid Meier’s Pirates!, that’s the second of four stages:
- Apprentice (and not Donald Trump’s kind)
- Journeyman
- Adventurer
- Swashbuckler
Join the Conversation fits for those no longer new to new media marketing, but haven’t developed an arsenal of their own yet. It’s also probably too long for most executives to plow through, except maybe in audiobook format, but it’s still a good resource if you’re needing inspiration for your new media marketing campaign.

Join the Conversation is available for sale here on Amazon. (disclosure: 5% commission goes to my employer, the Student Loan Network)
February 18, 2008
18-1, Super Choke, and more
The latest Marketing Over Coffee is now available, in which we discuss how you can make millions of dollars with useless sports slogans.

I nominate for the latest from Super Bowl XLII:
- 18-1
- Super Choke
- Nobody’s Perfect
February 7, 2008
Metcalfe's Law and Network Promotion

Metcalfe’s Law and Network Promotion

I’ve had a couple of conversations recently involving social network marketing. One of the things that has been on my mind lately is network size. With social networks and social media, once your network reaches a certain size or focus, it has value in and of itself. Ask Chris Brogan to mention something to his network on Twitter and a lot of people mobilize. Ask Mitch Joel about public speaking in your area and chances are he knows someone. Ask Bryan Person about social media breakfasts.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s guerrilla marketing, using all kinds of interesting tricks to build audience using the pre-gathered crowds common to the most popular social networks.

The catch is this: the tools that you use to get your network off the ground – MySpace tools, LinkedIn clubs, etc. – are the very same tools that can be detrimental to your network as it matures. The risks of having an account closed due to skirting terms of service (ask Scoble about Facebook) rise proportionally to network size and value. The larger, more mature network you have, the less risk you want to take.

The big question is: when is it enough? When do you know that a network has matured to the point where loss of it due to guerrilla marketing would be counterproductive? Sure, a few thousand friends on MySpace takes time to replace, but when is the network really an asset you can’t afford to lose?

I would argue that it’s Metcalfe’s Law that will guide us. Metcalfe’s Law operates in a network such that every new entrant to the network proportionally increases the value for all participants. The classic example is the fax machine. One fax machine in the world is an expensive doorstop. A thousand fax machines has value. A million has significant value, and every person who buys a fax machine increases the value of fax machines everywhere.

When do you know when to hang up your guerrilla hat? When your network becomes self-sustaining. When people are joining your network for the value of the network itself, in the form of unsolicited friend requests in a steady stream, when advertisers start coming to you to ask for your help in promoting something to your network. When Metcalfe’s Law kicks in and people invite others to your network because the value of the network increases with their presence. Hang up the guerrilla hat on that network and start a new one that lets you continue to experiment with bleeding edge tools.

January 9, 2008
Jared Spool has an awesome job ad

Jared Spool over at UIE posted this incredible job ad. I love it because it’s innovative in its approach, clearly sets expectations, and conveys accurately not only a sense of what’s expected of the candidate, but also where the company is going or could be going with the right person.

Kudos to Jared and the UIE team for such a great ad. Read more after the break. (more…)

January 7, 2008
Viral is not word of mouth

Viral is not word of mouth

A bone to pick with my marketing colleagues. Viral marketing is distinct and separate from word of mouth marketing. Viral and word of mouth marketing are NOT interchangeable. Let me give you two examples of marketing.

I really like Matthew Ebel‘s new album, Goodbye Planet Earth. I think it’s a fantastic album, half radio drama, half space opera, and I gladly tell anyone and everyone I know about it. A certain percentage of people who trust my recommendations and have similar music tastes will probably go out and buy it and tell their friends about it, and so on. Ideally everyone in the world who likes Matthew’s style – whether they know it or not – will buy his album.

Word of mouth or viral?

Second example. I really like Matthew Ebel‘s new album, Goodbye Planet Earth. I think it’s a fantastic album, half radio drama, half space opera, and I’m going to write a Facebook application that will, when you add it to your profile, message every friend you have on Facebook. Permission? Well, clearly if you added the application you’ve given me permission to do whatever I want, so I won’t bother asking. As soon as any of those friends add the application to their profile, it will message all their friends, and so on.

Word of mouth or viral?

Word of mouth marketing to me requires consent. Yes, I can tell you all about what I’m interested in, but for it to go beyond just me requires your implicit consent and assistance in spreading the message.

Viral marketing does NOT require consent. The classic example used to explain viral marketing is Hotmail. Hotmail appended (and still does) a marketing message to every email you send, with or without your permission. You cannot opt out of it, you cannot change or suppress the message. It’s there and it spreads to everyone you message, and if they sign up, it “infects” their outbound communications.

These are more than semantic terms as well. To someone in pure marketing, they may be semantic, but to me, someone who is both a marketer and a technologist, they are different because the software development process has different outcomes. To develop a word of mouth application simply requires invitation capabilities in the software to allow you to spread the word. To develop a viral application, the software development process has to incorporate tools and functions to automatically pull and message all your contacts, ideally in as low profile a manner as possible so that by the time you notice, it’s too late. The virus has spread and moved on past you and you’re powerless to stop it.

If viral marketing as I’ve described it makes you feel uncomfortable, good. It should. Viral marketing is non-consentual marketing. Word of mouth marketing is consentual marketing. To the marketers who claim that viral and word of mouth are the same, ask this simple question: in any other context, especially the context of intimate relations, would you rather have the choice of consent or not?

December 7, 2007
One Laptop Per Child

The One Laptop Per Child project is opening its doors on November 12 to purchasing. For $199, you can donate a laptop to a child in a developing nation.$

For399, you can get one yourself and donate one under their Give 1 Get 1 program beginning November 12.

I’m buying one for myself, but not for charitable reasons.

Think carefully. Thousands, if not millions, of brand new Internet users will be signing on for the first time on these machines. If you don’t have one, you have no idea what their experience will be like, especially with your brand and your products.

Frankly, if you’re in marketing and you don’t buy one of these, you’re missing a boat that will be sailing very soon.

November 8, 2007

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