Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: New media

How Batman will help you beat social media narcissism

Mitch Joel and Mashable both are raising red flags about social media being focal points for insane quantities of narcissistic behavior. Mitch asks:

So, the question is this: how do people build and develop their personal brands, if all we really want is content that is valuable to us and not self-promotional in any way, shape or form?

This is the essence of empowering a personal brand. It’s not about you, but what you do.

“It’s not who I am underneath, but what I *do* that defines me.” – Batman (2005)

Want to take your products, services, brands, and company to the next level? Forget about reinforcing brand and focus on what you’re doing to make things better for your customers. Want to see a great example at a small business level? Look at how Matthew Ebel is working his subscription service. Ask his VIPs if he’s all about himself or all about them, and you’ll find nearly universal agreement that he’s making the music FOR the customers, not just trying to sell them whatever he can for a buck.

Look at some of the powerhouses in new media, like Beth Kanter and Beth Dunn, movements like Twestival and Free Iran – all of these folks are less about them and more about their work, about promoting their efforts to help others. Look at Facebook’s applications – one of the most powerful and popular applications? Causes.

It’s not who you are, it’s what you do that will turn your brand up to 11.

Photo credit: Chan Chan

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August 28, 2009
BlizzCon proves that awesome works

Food for thought:

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

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

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

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

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

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

56 seconds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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August 22, 2009
The following daily

Simple and easy way to show some love for people who mention you:

1. Go to search.twitter.com and type in your Twitter handle with the @ sign.

2. For profiles you haven’t visited recently (blue links), control-click (on PCs) or command-click (on Macs) to open each profile in a new tab.

3. Swap through each tab (control-tab in Firefox) and click follow for everyone you’re not following.

Do this daily, every morning. This will ensure that folks who are kind enough to mention, reply, or retweet what you’ve got to share are paid attention to. Should take you a maximum of 5 minutes or so if you’re fast on the keyboard.

This is one of those things that you have to do daily. If you let it pile up, it will eat up a tremendous amount of time. If you manage it daily, it takes seconds, maybe minutes at most. Set an alarm on your calendar and do it without fail every day.

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August 19, 2009
The Esoteric Secrets of Pomegranate, Kisses, and Social Media

There are two basic kinds of secrets – secrets of information and secrets of experience.

Secrets of information are data points. The ingredients in Coca Cola. The Colonel’s 11 herbs and spices. These secrets are valuable until the information becomes commonplace or available enough that competitors can use them to their advantage and your disadvantage. In classical religious studies these are exoteric secrets, or surface secrets.

Secrets of experience are something else entirely. The taste of a pomegranate. Your true love’s kiss. Getting your black belt. These secrets aren’t informational but experiential, which means that everyone can know the data points about the secret but still have no idea what it is or how it works. In classical religious studies these are esoteric secrets, or deep secrets.

Most of the really good stuff in life, most of the really powerful, life changing secrets are the latter, the experiential, the esoteric. There is no way, no matter how much you try, to describe to someone who’s never had one, with great accuracy the taste of a pomegranate such that when they put it in their mouth, the experience is not new. There is no way, no matter how graphic you get, that you can ever relate that first kiss to someone you love with any level of precision.

Esoteric experiences are just that – experiences. Master teachers – true master teachers – don’t teach you these secrets. They can’t. What they can do is create conditions favorable for you to teach yourself the secrets.

So what does this have to do with social media?

Take your pick of folks selling you social media secrets. This eBook, that blog, this book tour, that DVD, this limited opportunity, that guide. The sad news is, about 99% of it is bullshit. Complete, utter, and total bullshit perpetrated by people looking to make a fast buck on the inexperienced.

Social media is inherently about relationships between humans. Yes, there’s a decent amount of technology involved. Yes, it scales to levels that are beyond what humans can naturally maintain. Yes, a lot of those relationships are frighteningly superficial.

At the end of the day, though, because humans are at the core of social media, the power and value you get out of it, the power and value you deliver to it – all of it is rooted in experience. How to ask someone for help promoting your charity on Twitter. How to offer help to someone who sounds like they’re in sincere need in your Facebook stream. How to enjoy the serendipity of communicating the same things – life – in new ways to lots of new friends, and even a few new enemies. No book, no guide, no guru can teach you these things. You can only learn them through experience.

If you want to learn social media, to become proficient at it, to be a veteran practitioner, seek out experiences. Instead of talking about the shape, size, weight, and best vendors of pomegranate, rating whose reviews of pomegranate are best or whether a certain celebrity eats pomegranate, get off your ass and go eat one. Instead of spinning endless circles about the right or wrong way to use Twitter, Facebook, Ning, or every other social channel, go accomplish something with it. Find a charity that needs some promotional help. Join a local meetup group and practice using the tools to bring in new members.

Do. Accomplish. Kiss the girl/guy/etc., eat the pomegranate, and have the experience. At the end of the day, while others are talking about their social media expertise, which sounds stirringly reminiscent of prepubescent boys in a locker room bragging about exploits they’ve never had, you’ll have the experience, the real deal, and the satisfaction of knowing the esoteric secrets of social media.

No surprise, the photo is of a pomegranate.

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August 4, 2009
Charles Jo gets it

I sent out a request for a recommendation/referral to my LinkedIn contacts this morning for a senior web app dev for Edvisors, knowing full well that there are some recruiters in the list, even though we explicitly state in the job ad that we don’t use recruiters or agencies. More than a few folks sent back pointless commercial pitches or argued about the necessity of their trade, but one guy stood out as someone doing it the right way.

Charles Jo wrote:

Christopher,

Thanks for sending. I forwarded to my network and requested that they contact you directly.

Please do keep me in mind as you start expanding your recruiting/sourcing efforts and when you start using consultants as well.

Best,

Charles

Charles gets it. He put in some upfront effort with no expectation of commercial gain, and for that, if I do need to retain a recruiter or agency in the future, guess whose card I’m going to pull first? Charles.

None of what we do in social media is all that complicated. None of it requires a degree in rocket science. Some of it is just this simple.

You can see what else Charles has available at his Scribd list. Thanks, Charles, for doing it right.

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August 3, 2009
The Passion Funnel

The passion funnel is much less dirty than it sounds.

For every discussion of monetization in new media, there’s an equal discussion about the amateur, the practitioner who does something for the pure love of it and not for money. However, amateurs can still take a great deal of knowledge from the professional world and apply it to their work to see how successful their efforts are.

Take an average new media sales funnel:

Audience
Prospects
Leads
Conversions
Evangelists

Audience is the potential number of people you can reach in any given medium.

Prospects are the subset of the audience that is likely to be interested in what you have for sale.

Leads are the people who have expressed interest in what you have for sale.

Conversions are the people who commit, who buy what you have for sale.

Evangelists are the people who are so in love with what you’ve got, with what you’ve sold them, that they incite others to become prospects as well.

You can measure each stage, use different tools and talents at each stage, to drive sales.

Audience tools are the channels themselves – Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.

Prospecting uses demographics and databases to figure out who your most likely customers are, based in part on the customers you already have. If I run a Financial Aid Podcast or a Marketing Podcast, I’d better be finding the portion of audience in each channel that’s interested in financial aid or marketing. Tools like Google’s Ad Planner and Facebook’s Media Planner can help with all this.

Leads uses your web site and associated persuasion tools – good copy, calls to action, etc. – to convince the prospects to buy. Analytics tools like Google Analytics, Clickheat, database analysis, and so forth can help you diagnose your lead generation process and figure out where you’re turning people away.

Conversions is your sales engine, your transaction engine.

Evangelism uses your media channels of choice to encourage your customers and fans to spread the word. Note that evangelism is driven by awesomeness. If you have an awesome product or service, if your customers are delighted, the word will spread. You might have to encourage them a little, but sufficient quantities of awesome easily convinces customers by itself to spread the word.

Now, what if you took the money out of this funnel? What’s left?

Pretty much everything except the transaction engine. This is a key point for any amateur: virtually every metric leading up to a sale is the same for amateur and professional. If there’s nothing to buy at the end of the funnel, there is something else that requires a level of commitment that’s non-casual. It might be showing up at a rally or volunteering your time, but it’s something that in a commercial interaction would be the equivalent of putting money on the table.

If you don’t know what is the commitment substitute for commerce in your amateur efforts, you’ll never be able to measure your new media efforts in any meaningful way beyond eyeballs and ears. Decide what’s at the end of your rainbow if not a pot of gold, and then take all the pieces and parts from commercial exchanges and make them work for your passion.

Photo credit: Dairy Cow

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July 18, 2009
Nothing in life is free

There is no such thing as free unless the thing in question is without value.

When you write a blog post you give away to the world on your blog, it is not free. You spent time, energy, effort, and knowledge writing it, time that could have been spent doing something else.

When you share a video of your session from a conference, it is not free. You are directly harming your ability to be hired as a speaker at future conferences because why should prospective attendees pay if they know the video will be available for free later?

When you interview someone for your podcast, it is not free. Both of you are giving up time and knowledge that might be better spent elsewhere.

The only time something is truly free is when it has no value, when the person who creates something believes it to be of no inherent value that it’s only worth throwing away. Your excrement is free. In fact, you pay people to take it away. Same for your garbage and your recycling.

Mitch Joel quotes Mike Lipkin often: “I would do this for free but I make you pay so that you understand the value of what you are getting.”

As a new media/social media creator of content – blogger, podcaster, Tweep, etc. – I want you to understand that what you make available without a financial transaction taking place is not free. You may indeed be rewarded in other non-financial benefits for what you give to others, in reputation, social currency, popularity, fame, etc., but don’t call it free unless it is of no value.

I appreciate what you create on a daily basis when I read your blog, listen to your podcast, watch your video, and I acknowledge gratefully that it is not free, that it has inherent value and worth. You spent hours of your time on what you’ve made, time you could have spent with your family or playing with other hobbies, and for that I thank you.

I will not demean your work by calling it “free” – valueless – and assuming that because you don’t charge me money for it that I am entitled to it with nothing ever given back.

Thank you for giving of yourself on your blog, on your podcast, in your Twitter stream, and beyond. I appreciate you all the more for it.

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July 11, 2009
Will social media burn conferences to the ground?

Every conference these days has a hashtag and attendees are (unless explicitly prohibited) tweeting, live-blogging, streaming audio and video. If you wanted to, from your desk, you could attend nearly every conference in the world, and for free as opposed to paying $50-$ 5000 to attend. In terms of content, you’d probably get anywhere from 80% – 99% of the content presented.

If you can attend 95% of the conference virtually and not pay, or attend 100% of the conference in person and pay, which will most people rationally choose? Which would you choose?

Right now, social media, for all its glamour and buzz, is still a relatively small space compared to the world of business as a whole. As it grows, how long will it be before conference organizers have to clamp down on usage to avoid completely devaluing their conferences?

Will social media, in other words, burn conferences to the ground? Yes – and it should.

My answer as co-founder of PodCamp and co-organizer of PodCamp Boston 4 is one we’ve been researching and looking at for years. Whether live or recorded, the talking head portion of the conference is something that is part of the old conference model.

While I love speaking publicly, I also recognize that it’s not terribly valuable in and of itself. I could convey the exact same information with a video camera and a YouTube account, and in fact I’ve done this to a degree. 60+ people saw my PAB 2009 presentation live. Over 300 have seen it virtually. Did the attendees of PAB 2009 get more out of the public speaking experience than the people at their desks? No, not really.

What we’ve been exploring with PodCamp year after year is how to take the other parts of conferences and amplify them, the parts you cannot get out of a talking head presentation. Side conversations in hallways. One to one interactions. Spontaneous group discussions. These are all things that you can’t bottle, and honestly, you can’t tweet, stream, or liveblog either. There’s simply no way for you, as a new media journalist, to be at 300 mini-sessions, or 3,000 micro-presentations, and if the conversations are valuable, you’ll be too busy participating to be archiving and broadcasting – and that’s as it should be.

What I think the conference model will evolve to, and where PodCamp is leading along with the other *Camp events, is the truly interactive community brainshare. Would I pay $500 to see Seth Godin speak? Sure. Would I pay more to sit down over beer with Seth and a few other folks at a roundtable and have him look at my marketing campaign, maybe sketch out some ideas on a napkin? Heck yeah. Multiply that times many tables over many hours and I’d walk away with a literal goldmine of useful information that’s tailored to me and my business. That’s what we want to bring more of to PodCamp – fewer talking heads and more sharing brainspaces.

When you walk away from a PodCamp, I don’t want you to say “that was a great conference!”. I want you to say, “I met and learned from some awesome people at PodCamp!” because in the end, your community is your strength. The conference is just a convenient place for the community to meet.

What do you think the future of conferences will be? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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July 2, 2009
A Week With A View: Canada

It’s Canada Day (or Dominion Day) so I thought I’d pick something Canadian for today’s A Week With A View. The trouble is, there’s too much to pick from. Here’s a selection.

Clouds in Quebec by Michel Fillon:

Victoria Glacier in Alberta by Laszlo:

Vancouver Island by Zedzap:

And new media friend Angela Misri, shot at Podcasters Across Borders 2009:

5 most recent Financial Aid News articles:

July 1, 2009
A Week With A View
A Week With A View

There’s an impressive amount of photography on Flickr. There are some amazing photos on there from amateur and professional photographers. Here’s a blogging exercise I’d like you to try this coming week. Find a beautiful photo licensed for Creative Commons use, a moving photo, a stunning, stirring photo each day this week. Tag it #wwav – Week With A View – and post it on your blog with a short description of why the photo is beautiful, then share the heck out of it so that we can all see some of the best, most beautiful photography available online.

General Guidelines & Suggestions
- Yes, absolutely they can be your own photos as long as they’re Creative Commons licensed.
- Post a photo a day from June 29, 2009 – July 4, 2009.
- Link and give full credit to the photographer!
- Ideally, they should be Creative Commons commercially licensed so that you can post them on a corporate blog, too.
- Search for keywords of things that YOU personally find beautiful. Everyone always seems to search for sunsets. What do YOU like?
- TAG YOUR BLOG POSTS! TAG YOUR TWEETS! The whole point is to see what OTHER people find beautiful.
Here’s a set of screenshots from Flickr’s Advanced Search.

Ready? Show the world.

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June 29, 2009

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