Category: Marketing

Here is what is wrong with Podshow (and maybe how to fix it)

I’ve been collecting Twitters from folks about Podshow’s campaign:

Mike Yusi: Is anyone else on Podshow getting emails complaining about the new openings?
P. W. Fenton: Better question: Is anyone not?
P_Dub: Some podcasters have avoided putting out podcasts until the one minute “suck less” goes away.
Mike Yusi: P Dub: I actually got someone that said they weren’t going to listen to any more of my shows until they change it.
C. C. Chapman: @UCRadio – I have already lost some listeners due to it.
Rob Usdin: Podshow needs to use the radio model – have 5-10 different spots ready to go at the get-go – rotate them. Less listener fatigue.
Rob Usdin: @P_Dub: See my comment to noebie re: having multiple spots ready at one time. Want me to listen? Make it so I have a reason to.
Ranslow: I listen to a lot of podcasts from Podshow. The new intro is annoying after awhile. How about some variation on the theme.
Matthew Ebel: Hey PodShow… the 60-second Suck Less crap is making me stop listening to your podcasts. CC and R&RG are all that remain on my iPod
Britney Mason: Wondering if i listen to too many, PodShow Podcasts…They can suckless by coming up withnew plug for Suckless, tired of hearing it already
Britney Mason: I do luv My PodShow friends, but not sure what knowing how much I make per year has to do with suckingless…
Britney Mason: PodShow should put together a podcast like bluberry does.. let people know whats going on..be open!
Britney Mason: Okay then not to turn this into a PodShow pick on session..where does the $25 mill VC go? equipment?

All of these comments were made publicly on Twitter. They indicate a serious problem in the marketing department and in many ways, in the corporate culture of Podshow. Here’s what is broken about Podshow: Podshow believes it is the most important part of its network.

It isn’t. Not by a long stretch. What is?

The podcasters. The people who are providing the content for the network. Podshow has some of the finest, best podcasts online – Lifespring, Managing the Gray, Digital Flotsam, UC Radio, the Jersey Todd Show, Pacific Coast Hellway, Accident Hash, Phedippidations, Geek Brief, the ReMARKable Palate, U Turn Cafe… I could go on for quite some time. The network derives its value from the content its members are providing it, and by extension, the audience that is attracted to that content.

What’s broken is that Podshow treats its content producers as commodities. What do I mean?

Example: the Super Panel. You don’t need a Super Panel to tell you what listeners want. Listeners do that already with each of the shows they listen to. Look at the comments on AccidentHash.com. Look at the sales of tracks in iTunes from podsafe artists. Look at the subscriber base, server statistics. Listeners are already telling your content producers what they want, and the most successful shows are listening and changing to fit their audiences’ needs.

Example: Suck Less. This may have been funny in a conference room somewhere, but hearing Suck anything in front of shows like Lifespring, which has a dedicated, super-family friend focus, or in front of Managing the Gray, a business show that has executives (like myself) listening, is just inappropriate. Asking your producers, “Hey, what do you think of this new campaign?” before you start putting it in front of their shows is not only a good idea, it’s also professional courtesy.

Example: Podshow Plus. I’ve asked many Podshow-contracted producers about the tools they receive when they sign onto the network or how it’s performing. I’ve been told that frankly, there really aren’t any. There’s no indicator of how large the network actually is (44,067 as of 1:50 PM ET 6/1/07) or how fast it’s growing. What’s more, Podshow controls the Podshow Plus platform – why do their content producers, especially the ones under contract, have to manually DIG people like any other user? Why wouldn’t you give them special tools to reach the entire 44,067 registered users to promote your premium shows?

Example: Contract. Keith and the Girl made quite a show about this, but fundamentally, why wouldn’t Podshow publish a standard contract for everyone to see? At the Student Loan Network, our affiliate contract is public, open, and a matter of record, so prospective affiliates can see what the terms are and whether it’s worth their time to sign up.

Example: Sirius. Did anyone ever explain to the podcasters WHY the Sirius contract vanished so suddenly?

How do you fix something like this that’s broken? Change focus. Your podcasters need Podshow for its ability to aggregate advertising dollars across a network, broker deals, do promotion, and provide tools. The function of the podcast network is a lot like a well-run, ethical record label like Binary Star Music. They take care of all the administrative functions for the artist so the artist can focus on making music. They even help the artist improve their music.

A podcast network needs to do exactly the same and more so. Provide podcasters with great marketing tools – MySpace data managers, mailing list software, podcast widgets, chicklets, blog themes, anything and everything you can use for guerrilla digital marketing. Heck, I give away most of my tools when I present podcast marketing at PodCamps – Podshow should be doing the same thing on a network-wide scale.

Treat your podcasters not as commodities, but as talent, as rockstars. Make them the rightful stars of their shows with tools like inexpensive press releases, search engine optimization for their show notes, webinars and seminars for them to learn how to improve their shows, and more.

I have no plans to start a podcast network. I don’t have enough free time as it is. If I were to, however, I’d invest the bulk of my time helping podcasters who joined the network with so many tools that any independent podcaster who wanted to grow their audience as fast and as large as possible would be insane NOT to join the network. Tools, metrics, advertisers, everything I could find to help them be insanely successful immediately, because the more listeners they gathered, the more advertising dollars I could raise.

Let me also be clear about this: I hold no animosity towards Podshow or any other network except for what it earns. I very, very much want Podshow and ALL podcasters to succeed, to grow, to be able to QYDJ if they so desire, or become new media rockstars. To that end, I want Podshow to suck less by helping their rockstars instead of focusing on the organization itself. The network is nothing without the people who produce for it.

Bottom line: help your podcasters become the very best they can be, and network growth will take care of itself.

THAT is how you suck less.

Some thoughts after reading a copy sent to me by superhero Whitney Hoffman. The Dip is an interesting book, but a lot of the ways it’s been marketed don’t really work with the subject matter, at least not for me. It’s marketed… well, poorly. Every review, every interview I’d heard prior to receiving the book had convinced me this was one to definitely skip, and buy something else instead.

Had the marketing said, “In addition to all the feel good motivational stuff, you’ll also learn how the Dip relates to the Long Tail, and which strategy makes sense for you” I think I would have been in line the day the book went on the market.

The Long Tail, if you haven’t read it, by Chris Anderson, is a book about power law curves. We know them primarily through cliches – 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers, 1% of the world’s population has 99% of the wealth, etc. The Long Tail proposes different thinking in a digital marketplace – in a realm where you have infinite shelf space, you can offer infinite products and do very well – better, in fact, than a brick and mortar shop that can only serve the short head. The Long Tail is about the power of aggregation.

The Dip is about the short head. It’s about the top of the powerlaw curve, because being #1, even if the tail is really long, is more profitable as an individual because you cannot aggregate some things. Can you be #34 – #447 in your job? Not really, unless you can clone yourself. The Dip is about scarcity, while the Long Tail is about abundance. Be #1, because #2 experiences drastically fewer benefits than #1, and #3 – #infinity are pretty much screwed.

The Dip is also a strategic warfare book. The phenomenon known as the Dip, the barrier between top performer and dabbler, between #1 and everything else, is a filter – it’s the barrier that ensures that whoever is #1 in any given niche is there for a reason. Because we’re talking an economoy of scarcity, it’s also zero sum – if you are #1, no one else can be, and vice versa. In the book are a number of tips which will allow you to make the Dip a deadly quagmire for your opponents and competitors – ways to distract them, divert them, so that while they’re tilting at windmills, you’re going to the bank. I’d recommend combining the strategic aspects of the Dip with a more warfare-oriented book like the Art of War for best results.

Finally, the Dip and the Long Tail plug into each other. Take the Long Tail of careers, for example, and figure out which careers pay the income you want to earn (red line on graph 1). Even the best, top of the food chain career in some fields will still not pay out like it will in other fields; for example, you may be the best poo pet crafter in the world, but if the #1 position in poo pet manufacturing doesn’t fall above the baseline income you want to make, then that’s not the niche for you. Ideally, pick a career or field in which there’s a decent amount of cushion between what you want to earn and what the #1 person in that niche earns.

Then, if you’re #2 or #3, you’re still making what you want to make while clawing your way to the top. That little slice of the short head is where you want to live.

Overall, I’d recommend The Dip. It’s a good read with marketing that didn’t touch me at all.

A lot of folks on the cutting edge have already written off MySpace and headed to different online communities. This is perfectly understandable – MySpace has been plagued with spyware, usability issues, and an image problem that Madison Avenue firms would cringe at. The cutting edge has left, and the hip crowd has left for greener pastures.

So, who’s left?

Everyone else. MySpace is over its Dip, if you’re a Seth Godin follower, and is gaining widespread, mainstream adoption. When the cashier at the supermarket, when the 47 year old account, when the woman on the street is talking about MySpace, it’s hit the mainstream, and the reality is that the bulk of your market – unless it’s cutting edge technologists – is in the mainstream.

Now is the time to refocus your MySpace marketing efforts. The bots and scripts are slowly coming back, the service is more aggressive about spam, and the numbers of mainstream users are swelling every day. As of this morning, approximately 4 profiles were being added PER SECOND.

Marketing to MySpace members now also needs to take a more mainstream-friendly approach. If you’re a podcaster, telling people to copy your RSS feed’s URL won’t fly with the mainstream crowd. One click is the limit – make it so easy for your new MySpace audience to get to what you have to offer.

If you follow powerlaw distributions, about 80% of your potential audience is in the mainstream, and they’re just arriving at the party now. Late to the party, perhaps, but they’re bringing spending money, and at the end of the day, that’s what counts most.

Two sets of people are selling their houses right now – my parents, and C.C. Chapman‘s family. Being the new media nerd I am, it got me thinking – how would we apply the tools of new media to real estate? I was going for a walk tonight with my wife, and we walked by a house that was for sale, as so many are these days. One thing that caught my eye was that instead of the traditional placard where a realtor’s name was, there was instead a domain name, which I thought was pretty clever.

Of course, one look at the web site and it looks like Flickr had an accident on the way to the toilet, but the branding of the property as the domain name was a good idea.

What tools do we have at our disposal for helping to sell a house when we really want to? Your average realtor, no slight on the profession, doesn’t have the time or history to be able to explore and understand a property beyond its most superficial characteristics, which is why the descriptions of real estate listings are repetitively bland and uninspiring.

So let’s play a bit with some new media tools and a house listing. Since I don’t know if C.C.’s house is listed, nor do I have his permission to reveal where he lives, we’ll work with my parents’ house. I went out to GoDaddy and bought 15CambridgeDrive.com (use code HASH3 for $2 off) and will repoint it to this blog post tomorrow when DNS finishes updating.

Suppose you want to know more about 15 Cambridge Drive, Annandale, NJ. A Google Map to get there might be nice. If you’re a Google Earth user, I might include a Google Earth KML bookmark.

Without an appointment, obviously you’re constrained to just drive by, but you can schedule an appointment with realtor Beverly Attinson.

Office: (908) 735-8140
Fax: (908) 735-8372
Mobile: (908) 578-3902
Email: Link here

To see the MLS listing, visit MLS Listing ID 2397426 in New Jersey.

The house is for sale at $619,900. A quick check on Zillow shows not enough data beyond a tax assessor’s estimate, but that price is definitely in the ballpark for the area.

Now, let’s get into some actual media. If I were still living there, I’d obviously go shoot some video, but we have to make do with the photos on the realtor web site. Where new media can shine is to tell the story behind the story. I’d probably create an MP3 that prospective buyers could listen to on an iPod as they walked through the house, but text will do for now. I’d also have key selections of podsafe music loaded up as interludes for people to listen to as well – probably a hefty dose of Rob Costlow, since it’s that kind of house.

The front of the property is a nice, well manicured lawn. Realtors will call it well cared for, and I will call it 45 minutes to an hour to mow with a push mower. The front lawn is fun to play on, and the street, Cambridge Drive, is really quiet, quiet enough that it’d be mostly safe for your kids to play on the lawn safely except maybe during rush hour. The house is located in suburbia, so most everyone commutes to other parts of New Jersey or New York City.

The living room. My parents have always kept this room as a more formal sitting room – there’s an equally large family room on the other side of the wall, just past the stairs, where we’ve always had the TV and sofa set that us kids were allowed to sit on. The living room is BRIGHT in the mornings – full southern sun, so if you want a warm place to sit and read, this is the place.

This picture of the kitchen kind of sucks. It shows the eat in kitchen, but it doesn’t show the tremendous amount of cabinet and countertop space. Growing up, we’d always sit on the counters and get yelled at for the same, but the kitchen food prep area itself is really fantastic. The table in the background there is where we had dinner every night without fail, for as long as I can remember living in the house until I left home for good. It was and still is the hub of the house, as it’s centrally located on the first floor and almost every room opens into the kitchen area. I truly believe that one of the reasons we had such a social family growing up was the fact that the kitchen made it easy for us to always run into each other, sometimes literally. (of course, when you were a teenager who was in trouble, trying to avoid your parents, it’s not so optimal…)

This is the sun porch, probably the crown jewel of the downstairs. This is a three season porch that is fully glassed in – if you wanted to make it four season, you could by opening the kitchen ducts to it, but we never saw the need to do that. The sun porch, which we always called the deck, looks out on the heavily wooded backyard, where we have several birdfeeders hanging from trees. My brother and I would have legos and Construx scattered across the floor from as soon as it was warm enough to open the room for good (usually April) until it got really cold (right after Halloween), and we’d play in there all the time. The deck is right off the kitchen, which also made it easy for my mom to keep tabs on us and make sure we weren’t getting into too much trouble. There’s a sliding glass door behind the camera’s point of view that opens to the rear of the house, so we could run outside if we wanted to.

Another less than perfect realtor picture of the master bedroom. I rarely spent time in there, since it was mom and dad’s bedroom, but it’s big. Really, really big. Cathedral ceilings with exposed beams, and room for just about anything. There’s also a walk in closet and full bath you can’t see behind the camera. When we got older, we always took showers in the bathroom in the master bedroom, because it was the nicest shower – glass with the massage showerhead and all that.

Another weird picture. This is above the garage. Used to be a walk in attic until I was… I think maybe 10 years old. I can’t remember. My parents had the walk in attic converted to a sort of home office, but this room was more than that. Two skylights and those oversize, overstuffed recliners meant the perfect place in the house to read, relax, and more often than not, fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon. The best time, actually, was when it was raining – the sound of rain on the glass skylights inevitably meant nap time. Even when I was home from college, visiting, I’d fall asleep in the attic room.

Where realty often falls short is that it doesn’t tell the story behind the house. Realtors try to make a house as generic as possible, to create as much broad appeal as possible, but when you think about it, that also makes it difficult to emotionally connect to it. As Ze Frank says, which has stronger appeal – Grandma’s cookies, or old people’s cookies?

I honestly look forward to seeing what C.C. Chapman does to sell his house, as he has so many new media tools at his disposal. This blog post is really a pale imitation of what you can do with new media, as it’s just words and static photos. Ultimately, I think new media has the potential to transform realty from just a mere transaction to an emotional experience, and that may help to sell houses in a tough market.

C.C., what do you think?

Entered in world 4/30/07.

What is the promise of Second Life? What is its core appeal? A world that’s better than reality, a world that approaches the limits of human imagination, a world where we can create that which we might not necessarily have in first life. I spoke recently with a higher education official at the PESC conference who told me a touching story about a girl with severe autism. For the sake of narrative, let’s call her Kimberly. She could not speak to other people or even make eye contact, and for years believed she was condemned to a miserable, secluded life.

A miracle of sorts happened. Put Kimberly in front of a computer, and she’s indistinguishable online from the millions of others online – she can chat, hold conversations, and now, explore Second Life better than her first life. She can converse, make eye contact with avatars, and feel like a “normal” person. What a marvelous gift technology is for her to be able to interact outside the boundaries of her illness.

Refreshment. Joy. Unity. Experience. These words thankfully are broad enough to leave behind soft drinks and water, beverages and brand, and convey something larger – the human experience, the human life worth living well.

What are all the experiences Kimberly probably would not be able to have in first life that are worth having? Will she be able to easily travel to the Grand Canyon and get a feel for its majesty? Will she be able to easily go scuba diving off the Na’Pali coastline of Kaua’i? Probably not easily, at least not with today’s current understanding of autism.

What gift could the Virtual Thirst give Kimberly? The experiences that we so treasure – that we spend thousands of tourism dollars on each year – in the only realm in which she can explore and interact with great ease. Attend a Matthew Ebel concert to hear fantastic music. Sightsee the world’s top 10 greatest attractions, built with loving detail to capture as much of the experience of being there as possible. Present beautiful art, sculpture, and dance in a world free of restrictions of conventionality, in a world where disability doesn’t exist.

Refreshment. Joy. Unity. Experience. Could it come in a vending machine? Sure, as a teleporter to entire islands which are experiences unto themselves. Think outside the box? Think inside the box, and satisfy the thirst for a life well lived.

Kimberly is waiting.

I talked to a fellow podcaster this evening, who was told by his network (the podcaster and network shall remain nameless) that in order to get sponsor deals, he needs to get his numbers up, hit certain metrics, etc. His network is missing the point because it’s still on the CPM model. CPM is an old media metric that makes little sense for most podcasters, because most podcasts have niche audiences. Even if you have a broad subject, like music, your slice of the overall audience will still be relatively niche compared to the broadcast media numbers advertisers were used to seeing in the 20th century. CPM is a loser for them because they’ll chew up an ad budget quickly, and it’s a loser for the podcaster because the numbers won’t be there to derive a huge income unless you literally have millions of listeners for every episode.

No, where podcasting shines is in audience engagement. Again, if you sell Gulfstream aircraft, you need to sell one G5 every two years or so to live well. If your podcast has 2 listeners and they both buy airplanes, you’re golden. If your podcast has 2,000,000 listeners and none of them buy airplanes, then your audience is just chewing up your resources.

Action is all that matters. So where as a podcaster do you get some action? (belay the snickering in the peanut gallery) If you don’t belong to a podcasting network that is managing sponsors for you, your best bet is existing affiliate network programs, like those at Linkshare, Commission Junction, etc. They pay for performance, usually per sales lead. Take a look at some of the top paying performance programs on Commission Junction:

• Loans.co.uk – $852 EPC (earnings per click)
• Capital One mortgages – $771 EPC
• HSBC credit cards – $499 EPC

Look at some of the payouts per sale:

• Gay Date.com – $40 per sale
• WebEx – $130 per sale
• AN Hosting – $100 per sale

If you have a specific niche you serve, there are products, services, and advertisers waiting for you to come help them out, and they’re willing to pay. An audience of just 100 people, if 50 bought AN Hosting Packages or WebEx packages, would pay the rent for a month with money left over.

Leave CPM behind, leave raw audience numbers behind, and start actually making some money AND serving your audience with highly qualified, highly relevant sponsorships that you can get right now.

Example: consolidate your student loans with the Student Loan Network, and my podcast gets $100 per signed, returned application. All I really need to make expenses for my podcast is 1 loan application a month (to pay for Libsyn). Anything on top of that is gravy.

C.C. Chapman sent out a message (okay, more than one) about a contest and promotion he’s heading up for Coca-Cola, called Virtual Thirst. Submit an idea to the contest for a virtual vending machine to be built in Second Life, and if you win, you get flown out to San Francisco to be featured in the video of the making of the vending machine. From the official web site:

Imagine a world in which a simple vending machine could dispense – not Coca-Cola – but the ESSENCE of Coca-Cola: refreshment, joy, unity, experience… So throw away the box, your expectations and interpretations of what a Coke machine is. Think expansively about the possibilities for having fun and being part of a great experience. Show us your best ideas – what do you wish you could do or see in Second Life? Do not limit yourself to your own abilities to create objects inside of Second Life – find any way to express your idea and get it to us. Let us and the developers of Millions of US help you make them real in Second Life.

Incidentally, I have to wonder about the following rules for entering:

You may submit your idea in any of the following ways: – gift an object to us in Second Life – teleport your avatar to https://www.virtualthirst.com/launch and use the drop-box to gift us your object
– share a video in YouTube – visit https://www.youtube.com/virtualthirst and use the “Connect with VirtualThirst” function to send us a message and attach your uploaded video
– share an image/description with us in MySpace – visit https://www.myspace.com/virtualthirst and use “Send Message” to post your idea as a message to us
– US residents only can also e-mail us your idea – send an email to [email protected] with the subject line, “Virtual Thirst Entry” and attach your idea to the email. Please do not use the body of the email to describe your idea.

Why isn’t blog post in there anywhere?

Here’s the problem I have with the contest – and I’ll be frank, because as much as I want C.C.’s first major public project to succeed wildly, I think he’d be more disappointed if I didn’t speak my mind.

Coke’s idea of its brand is not my idea of its brand.

The essence of Coca-Cola to the company is “refreshment, joy, unity, experience”. For me, as a consumer of its products, Coke products fit the first to a greater or lesser degree, and the other three don’t apply. Coke’s brand to me is essentially a source of cold caffeine, as is Pepsi, and virtually any other soda manufacturer out there. It’s what I drink (usually diet) when coffee does not fit the bill. If you were to sit me down in a focus group and ask me what the brand makes me feel, it makes me feel somewhat energized (or at least less lethargic, as I usually have it after lunch), carbonated, occasionally burpy, and less thirsty. I don’t have a particularly strong attachment to the Coke brand, even though I really enjoy reading about the company’s history and its original recipe.

And yes, if Classic Coke were truly Classic Coke, a la Pemberton’s recipe, it’d be illegal in the US. Ah, cocawine!

Can I create an idea around Coke’s idea of its brand? Sure. But it’s not my idea of their brand, and in the age of the empowered consumer, my idea of their brand is more important than theirs. Why? Because my idea and feeling about their brand ultimately dictates whether or not I buy it, whether or not I recommend it. A virtual vending machine dispensing their brand ideal in Second Life will not make me more likely to choose their product over another’s – whose product is most readily available at a good price point at 1:30 PM on weekdays will most likely influence my purchase. Happily for the Coca-Cola company, the Student Loan Network has a contract with a local distributor that provides employees free Coke products at work.

Ultimately, Coke has fairly little brand equity with me – they’re a provider of beverages, and if I need or want a beverage, they certainly are in the running as a potential source, but they haven’t secured enough brand loyalty with me to make me automatically choose them over another product. They have brand recognition with me, of course, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into sales. What would improve my loyalty to their products? Not sure. I do know that when Pepsi ran its iTunes promotion a while back, I grabbed an awful lot of Pepsi products during the promotion, and I remember it, but since the promotion ended, I’ve defaulted back to convenience and cost as drivers of my purchases.

So, all that said, here’s my idea for the Virtual Thirst contest. It’s automatically invalid, I guess, because it’s being submitted via a non-approved way, but since I probably will be booked whenever the contest winning time is announced anyway, (if you can’t travel on the dates specified by the contest, you forfeit your prize, and my Google Calendar looks like my defrag map on my hard drive) here’s my idea for Coke’s view of its brand:

Build a vending machine that you step into and it shows you various types of Creative Commons licensed new media that have been tagged with the same qualities as Coke’s brand – refreshment, joy, unity, experience. As you experience each media type, you vote on whether you think the media fits with its tag. After a while, you’ll have a pool of Creative Commons media – photos, audio, video, music – that the community has voted as the most refreshing, the most joyful, the most unifying, the greatest experience.

Good luck with the project, C.C., and I hope that you get some truly wild ideas for thing to build in Second Life!

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MySpace Marketing in the Post-Bot Era

Hat tip to Social Ham for documenting what everyone knew was coming: MySpace cracking down on the providers of MySpace automation software. For MySpace, it’s a big step towards cleaning things up a little. For independent marketers and promoters, it’s the tragedy of the commons – the spammers effectively destroyed their own tools, and took a lot of tools away from people who were using them in relatively ethical ways. (i.e. Friend requests from bands who sound like bands you like…)

Of course, some bots will continue to function for a little while longer, until the next major code shift at MySpace. Some bots are open-source, meaning that independent developers savvy in the language the bots are written in will be able to adapt. For the most part, for the bands, promoters, marketers, and podcasts that don’t have the technical firepower to keep up with MySpace, this is pretty much the end of the line for MySpace marketing 1.0.

The big question now is – what’s next? What comes after the era of MySpace bots? Three guesses: arbitrage, hub concentration, and whore trains.

Arbitrage. There are already some outsourcing firms that offer to manage your MySpace profile for you, including friend requests and messages. Workers in labor markets overseas handle all of the mundane work of managing your profile manually, and you get billed a service fee. These services will probably start to take off, since there’s really no way to stop them – at the end of the day, it’s a human at the keyboard instead of a bot. The arbitrage is taking advantage of exceptionally cheap labor overseas to be able to bill at a reasonable price.

Hub concentration. Your profile will take a lot more work to market now if you don’t have access to automation tools, which means that marketing on MySpace will likely take on a more LinkedIn-style, where you endeavor to attract and befriend as many major hubs as you can – people with gazillions of friends.

Whore trains. Expect this relatively pointless pastime to suddenly become relevant again. Without automation tools, you’ll have to rely on friend of a friend networks, and whore trains are the fastest way to bridge networks quickly, at the cost of a friend base that is less relevant and focused.

Where’s the smart money? Refocus your efforts on your own destination site first, and add links to the relevant social networks as appropriate. The window of opportunity to use social networks themselves as promotional vehicles is closing rapidly, so extract the last value out of them that you can, and then use them as brand extenders, but not as lead generators.

Where’s the next big thing? Remember the conversation we had on Marketing Over Coffee. In the beginning, there was word of mouth at the market fair. Mass media brought mass marketing – advertising. Google brought us the Third Age of Advertising – search. Now we enter the Fourth Age, characterized by community and prediction. Community and prediction are two sides of the same coin – your database. We as marketers will live or die, profit or lose, flourish or flounder on our database, because as permission marketing gets tougher and tougher, we’ll need to mine our databases more carefully and more thoroughly, more humanly and more accurately. We’ll need to predict the needs of the people in our database, as well as use the data to predict the needs of new customers, and do it in a way that invites them into our community, and not just another row in the customers table.

Marketing 2.1 just had a fatal error. Time for a service pack to Marketing 2.2. Are you ready?

Laura Allen, one of the organizers for PodCamp NYC, is famous for her 15-second pitch consultancy, in which she helps refine people’s personal branding statement to 15 seconds or less. Here’s a challenge for Laura and everyone else:

Can you fit your personal pitch, grammatically correct, inside one Twitter, 140 characters?

Should you be able to?