Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Marketing

  • Google, OpenSocial, and Marketing

    Google, OpenSocial, and Marketing

    Google is announcing an open API for social networks. This has been widely reported on all the major tech news sites. It’s a strong, smart play by Google, as it lets them turn any participating site, effectively, into a Google App, and gives them access to index data that hasn’t been available in some cases.

    OpenSocial will allow data interchange among networks for three types of data:
    – Profile data
    – Friend data
    – Activity data

    Initial participating networks include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

    OpenSocial means something different to marketers, though. OpenSocial will immediately increase the value of each of the participating networks to marketers. Here’s an example.

    In context, I have very different friends and friend data on LinkedIn and Plaxo. My friends in turn have different friends and contexts on the various services. OpenSocial will let me aggregate all of my friend data across networks to a data store, and I can then get a better idea of what’s on my networks.

    More importantly – perhaps most important of all – I’ll be able to get common reference data across networks. This means, simply, that I will be able to cross reference data from one network to another. If a contact has a mailing address on LinkedIn, but is missing a ZIP code, and they have the ZIP on Plaxo, I will be able to aggregate the disparate pieces of data to develop a complete profile. Marketer’s dream? Heck yes.

    What’s your marketing strategy for OpenSocial? Mine is to continue building and growing my presence on individual networks, targeting them for their demographics, and as the first OpenSocial developer applications come out, I’ll aggregate all the data together.

    If you’re doing a targeted campaign, such as social network marketing, OpenSocial will make this process easier and faster. You’ll be able to amplify your marketing power across many networks, rather than just one, much in the same way TubeMogul lets you post your videos to 9 different video sharing sites at once.

    Are you ready for OpenSocial?

  • Please stop calling Bum Rush the Charts mine

    I’m thrilled to see so many people running with flash mob ideas, like Joseph Jaffe and his new book, Join the Conversation; Joseph’s campaign was called Bum Rush the Amazon Charts, inspired by Scott Sigler and the original Bum Rush the Charts. That said, I want to reiterate something – the inspiration behind, the creator of Bum Rush the Charts is not me. Never was, never will be. That honor, and the ideas that went along with it, belong to Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff and Michael Yusi, when they announced it on February 16, 2007.

    These two gentlemen did a fine job of creating and launching the idea, and bringing in lots of people to participate in it, making it one of the biggest flash mob events in podcasting. I was glad to help and be a part of that team, but please understand that it was not my creation, and any credit, praise, etc. belongs to them, not me.

  • Informal working group @ PodCamp Boston

    For those folks who – like me – aren’t pub crawlers (I am grossly incompetent at it AND genetically Asian, meaning that alcohol and I have a twisted relationship), I’d like to invite you to an INFORMAL working group session at or around 9 PM Saturday evening (after Jeff Pulver’s PodCamp Party) at the Westin Hotel next to the BCEC to discuss podcast marketing. The general topic for the evening will be, “Hey, how do we explain this stuff better, because we really suck at it”, and tackles a vitally important point Mignon Fogerty (Grammar Girl) raised on Twitter: “There are 100 million iPods out there. Aren’t they the low hanging fruit?”

    Bring your ideas, stuff that has worked for you, and stuff that hasn’t, plus anything else as we all have a group head shed to see if we can come up with some powerful new ideas. This is NOT an official PodCamp session at all.

  • If I were a true Dark Lord of the Sith…

    … I’d write a Facebook application that would silently download every scrap of data in the FQL accessible database silently, amassing it into a huge database and cross referencing it with other data collected from other sources. You know, stuff like all your photos (handy for blackmail!), your friends (handy for marketing!), your birthdate (handy for identity theft!), your groups (handy for marketing!), all that good stuff that marketers and evildoers normally have to pay out huge dollars for.

    Of course, I’d need to disguise my super-evil application as something cool, something that leverages innate human weaknesses, so that people wouldn’t think twice about installing my application and hitting OK without reading all of the terms of service.

    You know, like a Red Sox vs. Yankees application. Or a Patriots vs. Rams application. Or Zombies, Vampires, Werewolves, Ninjas, or Pirates.

    Sadly, I’m not a true Dark Sider like that. But I’ll bet you someone else is, and you’ll never know. Actually, you might. Look for news about Facebook applications being sold for massive dollar amounts. Bet your Red Saber that the app itself is secondary to a massive database included with the sale.

  • When Business and Charity Align – The Triple Win of Luck of Seven

    CC Chapman just pointed out an interesting project/book called On The Luck of Seven. The author is traveling around the world and pre-selling his book for 11.11. CC pointed out that it was a good cause and worthy of support.

    When I stopped by the site, I saw something else entirely – an opportunity for SEO – search engine optimization. See, the author is doing something smart – he’s letting donors provide link text and links in exchange for donating.

    Those of you in SEO know that quality inbound links cost money –250 or more per link per year.  This site is selling good links for $11.11. It’s a steal just on those merits.
    On examining the site further, it’s got an estimated PageRank of 5, which is great, and decent numbers with Compete, QuantCast, and Alexa (whose data by itself is suspect, but combined with other metrics gives a relative sense of worth).

    Now, it’s not just donation – buyers will also get a kid’s book of some kind. I don’t know what it is, but chances are I’ll flip it to a local charity and bingo – my inexpensive inbound link will transform into a charity writeoff, too.

    Helping a cause is nice, but helping a cause and helping your business AND getting a small tax break? It’s a triple win.

    Buy it up now!

  • Podsafe Musicians – Mobilize Your Fan Reviews!

    Podsafe Musicians – Mobilize Your Fan Reviews!

    Are you a podsafe musician with rabid fans? Getting your fans to review your albums in iTunes is now more important than ever with the release of My iTunes from Apple. My iTunes is an Apple-branded widget that provides one click access to albums and reviews and can be put on social networks, web pages, and any place that accepts Flash embedded content. Here’s my reviews in iTunes so far:

    My iTunes supports fan purchases, fan favorites, and fan reviews – and I would argue that fan reviews are probably going to be the strongest of the three in terms of converting visitors to buyers, so you may want to encourage your fans to review your albums and then put up the widgets on their sites.What does this mean for you? In addition to getting fans to review your albums, these widgets can potentially multiply the number of people who click on buy-ready links to your albums in iTunes, bringing extra buyers to the digital content. Because it’s Flash-based, there’s no search engine optimization benefit, but having a nice looking widget that’s ready to go and ties into the world’s largest online music store is a sure win for podsafe artists. Most importantly, because it’ll be displayed primarily by fans of your music (as opposed to you), there’s more credibility in recommendations from a third party, which goes a long way.

    What To Do Next

    1. Hit up your mailing lists and ask fans to write reviews of your album(s).
    2. Once you see reviews appearing, ping those fans who respond and ask them about widgetizing their reviews.
    3. Potentially offer them something in exchange for widget placement.

    If you’re not in iTunes, get there. Services like CD Baby and IODA Promonet will get you there, and while you’ll probably net between 59 and 79 cents on the dollar, it’s better than not getting those sales at all.

  • Describe the pattern of usage

    A few things came together in my mind on the way to work this morning. If you haven’t read Christopher Alexander’s A Timeless Way of Building, I strongly encourage you to go pick up a copy. It’s a book that’s nominally on architecture, but provides concepts that go far beyond how to build stuff. One of the concepts is the idea of a pattern language, the idea that how we use something defines it.

    This got me thinking about how we use language patterns long after the literal pattern is gone:

    • Dial a number. When was the last time you used a rotary phone? If you’re under the age of 30, do you even know what a rotary phone is?
    • Rewind/fast forward. Originally from the reel to reel player. You see these buttons on digital media players like flash applets and iPods, but the tape they originally applied to is long gone.
    • DVD. The DVD is still around, but more often than not, DVD refers to a certain length of video and a certain level of quality.
    • HD. Another term that’s used far beyond its original scope.
    • Taping a performance. When was the last time you used a magnetic tape cassette to record audio?

    This of course brought me back to podcasting. Podcast is a portmanteau, a neologism that combines two words. To people who don’t know what a podcast is, you have to explain it, and that can, as any podcaster knows, be a convoluted process. What I do is describe podcasting as internet radio that you download. Yes, there’s RSS and all that stuff, but the super fast elevator pitch is internet radio that you download.

    In there is the word radio. Radio doesn’t just describe a delivery mechanism or a device – radio describes a behavioral pattern, just like dial a number. Radio describes a way in which you enjoy audio delivered to you, and it describes the way you’d use that audio. TV describes a way of enjoying video content. You sit down in front of a video display device in your living room with a drink and a snack, and sit back and watch something on the device. Whether that device is a television set, a plasma display, or an iMac, TV is the general term for the behavioral pattern.

    If you have a difficult concept to explain, what behavioral patterns can you leverage to make it easier for someone to instantly grasp at least the rough idea?

  • Web 2.0 Domain Names doomed on iPhone

    Web 2.0 Domain Names doomed on iPhone

    Watching the iPhone keyboard video, I thought this snippet was interesting:

    “iPhone uses its built in dictionary to predict the next letter you might tap, and dynamically resizes the tap zones. It makes the next predicted keys larger in area, and the others smaller as it zeroes in on the particular word you’re typing. Let’s say you’re typing the word time in an email. I type tim. Since there are no common words spelled timr or timw, iPhone creates a larger target zone over the letter e and shrinks the target areas over r and w.”

    How well will these sites do, do you think?

    Flickr
    Zoomr
    Jaxtr
    Expensr
    Blubrry

    If you’re a domain name investor, might be time to find out if any of the common English spellings of these sites are available – they may suddenly be getting a lot of iPhone users whose phones are correcting brand names to the English dictionary.

  • A Missed Opportunity for Podcasting?

    A Missed Opportunity for Podcasting?

    Just got off the phone with a company representative that wants to do a regional sponsorship for a few grand here in New England. My show was very much not the right fit, so I talked the rep through navigating MySpace and Google to locate other podcasters in the area, as well as pointing them at the New England Podcasting home page for other great shows in New England that might be a better fit.

    Here’s the zinger – the rep was on every major podcast network site out there, and couldn’t search by locale. This is a local sponsor, and there was no way for them to say, “Show me all the podcasts in Massachusetts” that they could find. MySpace is one of the few sites that publishes that info.

    And Todd Cochrane – I stand very much corrected in my initial statement about demographics in the last post. This advertiser wants a specific area because their ad spend would be wasted if the target audience isn’t within an easy drive of the locale, so demographics very much do matter here. Crow ain’t bad with dijon mustard. A little feathery.

    To everyone out there running their own podcast or podcast network – if you want to take advertising, make sure you have a media kit. Want to see an awesome media kit? Check out the Mommycast media kit. It’s a thing of beauty. If you run a podcast network, please help make it easy for people like this potential sponsor to figure out which shows would be a good fit for them, right on your site.

    Maybe I’ll add how to create a nice media kit to PodCamp Europe.

  • I don't care about podcast demographics and neither should you

    Okay, that’s not strictly true, but it is true that podcast demographics aren’t terribly important to me for the purposes of audience building. Why? Because this is new media, not broadcast media. What’s the difference?

    In broadcast media, you send out a message to your target audience and hope there’s enough relevant people in that database that some of them take action and buy your product or service. Broadcast marketers tend not to give a rat’s ass about feedback unless it involves a lawsuit; the only feedback they want to hear is the ringing of the cash register.

    In new media, you send out a message to people who want to hear from you. Not only do they want to hear from you, they want to talk to you and each other, and if you do your job well as a new media creator, they’ll want to talk to lots of other people about your media. Here’s the thing. Except for the highest profile people like the Scobles and Pirillos of the world, it’s very hard to quickly make a judgement call on who is an influencer and who is not. Thus, either you spend a crapload of time researching everyone carefully in your database, or you treat everyone like an influencer.

    That’s the secret that broadcast marketers are missing. For example, with my show, the Financial Aid Podcast, a broadcast marketer would say, okay, the audience is students, so specifically market and target 18 – 21 year old American students. If a listener who is a 33 year old parent of an 8 year old and a 5 year old, broadcast marketing tactics would say completely ignore that person, because they have no sales potential.

    However, that broadcast marketer is going to miss the fact that said parent has their own podcast with thousands of listeners, and a positive mention of your show could instantly add 10% more audience to your own show. New media marketers understand this one fundamental tenet (which is also a Buddhist one):

    Everyone is connected.

    In your marketing efforts, step back and think about your audience, whether you’re a broadcast marketer or a new media marketer. Are you excluding a group of people from your market segmentations – and if you are, who do they know that you’re no longer able to reach? If you have advertising on your podcast – do your advertisers understand that demographics are less important than word of mouth and influence?

    Edit: I’m clarifying this post to mean demographics shouldn’t matter as much for your audience building efforts as a podcaster. The subsequent post will explain why they’re still relevant to advertisers.

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