Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Technology

Why you need calls to action in your blog posts

If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time, you’ve likely noticed these lovely buttons on the right:

You may also have noticed that there’s a deeply redundant piece at the bottom of every blog post:

I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself, Chris, that’s redundant. And it’s redundant, too. Why do that? Do you think people are so blind or stupid that they don’t notice the obvious, user-experience focused, carefully placed call to action widget at the top of the page?

Not at all. Only very smart people read my blog. The stupid people are all at YouTube right now, watching endless selections of crotch kick videos and videos of kittens. No, the real reason I put that block of code at the end of every blog post despite its redundancy is simply this: my decor does not travel with my blog posts.

Exhibit one: Google Reader.

No part of my theme makes it into Google Reader. None of it. But that lovely block of redundant code makes it into Reader just fine. Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself, yes, but what’s the point? People are already subscribed to your blog if they’re reading it in Reader. That’s even more redundant!

That would indeed be the case except for one thing: the Share button built into reader that automatically shares the post – with subscription buttons – to the friends and followers of others. When the calls to action go with the post, they go into the Shared Items, too, for others to see and act on.

Exhibit two: Google Buzz.

Now we’re really getting into the thick of it. When you Buzz a blog post (or share it in Reader, which likely auto-buzzes it), you’re stripping the post of ANY context. Someone in Reader might think, hey, I’m reading someone else’s Shared Items, and since this is mostly blogs, this is probably a blog I can subscribe to. When you’re using Google Buzz, you’re sharing all kinds of stuff in there from many different sources. There’s no intuitive leap whatsoever to subscribe to items people are Buzzing…

… unless you embed the subscription calls to action right in your blog post, so they go with the Buzz, too.

So how do I do this? It’s stupid simple but manual. Make some nice buttons for yourself. If you’re too lazy to make buttons, use some of the Crystal Clear icons from Wikimedia. They’re free. Then just code up some really simple HTML and store it in a text file on your computer. If you’re more sophisticated, use macro software like TextExpander for the Mac or Texter for the PC and wire in that block of code so that when you’re done with a blog post, you just hit your macro and it auto-pastes the code right in for you:

I just type çß?† into the blog post and bam! Instant block of code that’s ready to deliver calls to action wherever this post ends up.

Do you have to do this? Not at all. But if your work is getting any distribution in things like Buzz, Google Reader, Feedburner, etc., then people are consuming your content without having any way to get back to you and sign up for more. That’s your loss and their loss, too. Putting together a simple block of HTML for every blog post with a few buttons takes just a few minutes, and it can help you build your audience every time someone shares your material. Try it!

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March 4, 2010
How to tell if you are a doomed marketer
Once upon a time, marketing was just marketing. It was a fabulous era of big brands, big launches, big parties. Martinis were de rigueur, agencies ruled the world, and three piece suits (that looked MAHHH-velous) were the signs of the professional marketer.

Once upon a time, technology was just technology. If you were in IT or development, you slung code all day, making the cool new thing (whether or not anyone wanted it). You plugged your earbuds in, cranked your music to 11, and reformatted servers, made objects and classes, hit up the LAN parties, and stared into the Matrix.

Along the way to today, something funny happened. The very best technology became marketing. Social networks suddenly transformed from cool technologies to cool marketing tools, and the reach of marketers went from whatever the ad spend budget was to whatever they have that was worth paying attention to. The very best marketing became technology. Brand mindshare became followers, fans, and friends. Direct mail became email marketing, which in turn fueled social marketing.

So here we are. Marketing is technology is marketing. It’s a crazy new world where someone like me with an MS in information systems who has never set foot in a marketing class is suddenly a professor of marketing at a reputable university because marketing is technology, technology is marketing. It’s a crazy world where the first ubernerd becomes the richest man on the planet and his successors start stupid picture-based web sites in college that turn into the largest communications platform in the world.

What does this mean for you? Here’s how to tell if your company is going to thrive or be doomed in the next few years.
- If marketing and technology aren’t having lunch together once a week, you’re doomed.
- If marketing and technology aren’t working together all the time, you’re doomed.
- If marketing has no technology capabilities and technology has no marketing focus, you’re doomed.
- If you as a marketer don’t know at least a high-level explanation of these three marketing-related technology terms, you’re doomed: FQL, SEO, API. Bonus points if you know what federated identity is and what it means for the future.
At my previous company, the Student Loan Network (the best student loan company) business thrived even in a hostile, highly competitive environment because marketing and technology were often one and the same. This gave an incredible competitive advantage over slower moving, slower thinking competitors.

At my current company, Blue Sky Factory (the best email marketing company), marketing suddenly has more technology capabilities, and it shows. While the specific detailed numbers are under NDA, newly-aligned marketing and technology initiatives have boosted marketing’s lead generation results by over 3,000% year-to-date. (there may eventually be a case study on this, though!)

Marketers, especially social media marketers, like to say that content is king, content is everything, and that’s partly true. Great products, great services, great content are vital to the long term success of your business. However, even the best content is useless if you don’t have the platforms and technologies in place to distribute them. Put another way, you might have the best pizza in the world, but if you have a drunk, highly unreliable delivery guy, your customers may never know about your pizza because it’ll never get to them.

As I’ve said many times on Marketing Over Coffee (the best marketing podcast), the way to get started fixing things, regardless of where you are in the corporate hierarchy, is to find someone in technology – at your company, preferably – and start having lunch with them once a week. Find out what those technology terms mean. Find out what technology is capable of, because once you know, your ability to market using technology will give you an incredible advantage over everyone else in your vertical space.

Plus, technology folks like lunch. Believe me, I know.

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March 2, 2010
Why Google Buzz is brilliant and deadly to social media 1.0
From the moment it launched, Google Buzz generated buzz:
- OMG another social network to manage
- OMG there’s too much noise
- OMG this is so redundant
And for the early adopters, it’s exactly that and more. It’s noise. It’s clutter.

It’s brilliant.

Here’s why. Google wants the best of the best data. Remember this. They are a data company. They are a data quality company. They are algorithmic in their approaches to solving problems.

For a lot of the social media crowd, the moment Buzz turned on, our valued inboxes became insanely cluttered as we linked up all our social media sites, networks, and properties. We discovered that frankly, we didn’t want the firehose of social media in our inboxes.

We realized quickly, if we didn’t already know, that most of our “friends” are in fact valueless robots spewing garbage at us all day. On services like Twitter and Facebook, we don’t really notice because it’s bite size garbage that passed by quickly. When it piles up in the inbox, we notice. Fast.

So for the early adopters, those who keep Buzz on, we’re pruning back hard. We’re not following back. We’re dropping auto-follows. We’re down to just a handful of people, close friends, that we REALLY want in our inboxes. How many of the self-proclaimed social media gurus are you actually allowing inside your inbox, in Buzz? Exactly.

Buzz is working as intended. Google wants data quality. We immediately filter out completely all the noisemakers who bring no value to the table.

Buzz also incentivizes us in a couple of ways. It tells us to prune back our own spewage lest our friends, the ones we care about truly, unfollow us and eliminate us. It tells us that redundancy of information is of no value to anyone using Buzz, since you can get blog posts and status updates already from FriendFaceTwitterFeedBookSquareWallReader service (now with more blatant self-promotion from social media experts!). So we share and discuss only the stuff that’s either super high quality that we just can’t afford to miss, even if it’s redundant, because of the quality, or we share stuff that’s not being shared elsewhere.

Google figures out from our activity in Buzz that either there’s new stuff to be examined (remember in the initial presentation that Buzzed stuff gets indexed the moment it’s shared, and Google wants to find EVERYTHING to index) or there’s stuff that’s so important and so good that you’ll let it into your inbox even if you can get it elsewhere.

By placing Buzz so close to the incredibly precious, valuable territory that is our inbox, Google is forcing users to reveal what we truly value, what we’re willing to let into a very private space. It’s the perfect walled garden, because instead of enforcing the walls on us, Google simply lets us build the walls for them.

The lesson for marketers and content creators is this: social media 1.0 is drawing to a close. Social Media 2.0 is about relevance, value, and authentic connection, because you will never, as a marketer, get through the gates of the walled garden with a boring-as-crap press release or product announcement. No one cares about you. All of the services, but especially the big ones, are giving users more tools to screen out anything they don’t care about, anything that doesn’t engage them, anything that isn’t actually great quality.

Buzz is just a very visible demonstration of how much crap our “friends” spew out that’s of no value, and why we were so annoyed by it. Now that it’s under control, now that we’re isolating actual friends from “friends” and our networks are getting trimmed, we’re starting to get more value out of it.

And you can bet Google is paying VERY close attention to us and what we do with our Buzz.

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February 11, 2010
The iPad will be legendary for sales and marketing

Steve Jobs and gang did a phenomenal job introducing the iPad for consumers. Books! Movies! Music! Games!

…but…

The iPad has the potential to make sales and marketing people into legends. Take any sales demo you’ve ever done. Take any presentation you’ve ever done. Now take it on the road. Got a prospect you want to chat things over with in a coffee shop? Bring out your Keynote app (iWork for the iPad) and you’re showing your deck or demo on a glass 10 inch screen without all the hassle of keyboards, mice, remotes, or other crap. Just open your leather binder and show the show.

… and then …

Remember: iPhone apps run on iPad out of the box.

So you swap from your slide deck to your Salesforce.com iPhone app. You take the order right there. You’re done, and you’re on a device that looks as slick as your product or service hopefully is. No Salesforce? Use iWork’s Numbers app and fill in your order spreadsheets, or fire up Safari and complete the lead form on your web site because you’ve got 3G wherever you’ve got good mobile service.

Professional speaker? The Keynote Remote app for the iPhone will run out of the box on the iPad. Instead of squinting at your iPhone while using it as a remote for your Keynote presentations (because your laptop is tethered to the projector), you have a gorgeous way to display your speaker notes and control the show from the podium. Just slap your iPad on the podium and swipe its screen to change slides, see your speaker notes, and not miss a beat. If you’ve ever presented professionally and wished that the venue could provide a speaker’s screen, the iPad is now that screen for you regardless of venue.

Image: Engadget

Yes, you’ll be able to handle all the mundane things that iWork and other iPhone apps can do, but the large, large screen will be perfect for when you’re at trade shows, conferences, and coffee shops as a way of showing your customers and prospects all the goods you have to offer without lugging an entire IT department around with you. Anyone who’s ever hung out with me at a conference knows that I lug a server farm with me – and I probably still will to some degree, but this device certainly will make life easier for the working professional. As a bonus for conference-goers, when the venue Wi-Fi implodes – as it always does – your iPad will feed your data addiction with its 3G connection.

I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these.

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January 27, 2010
Start with a mobile browsing strategy
Everyone and their cousin in marketing is panicking about your mobile strategy.
- “We have to get our sites ready for mobile!”
- “Mobile computing is the future of the Internet!”
- “Mobile devices will be the #1 web browsers real soon!”
Some of this is true. Before you rush headlong into deploying mobile everything and trying to convert every last bit of marketing collateral you’ve got into something mobile, think. Think for a few moments about mobile. What things do you like and not like about mobile?

I’ll give you an easy one. Take a look at the FAFSA form, the financial aid form that I’ve spent the last 7 years studying, presenting, and guiding people through. This form is about 108 questions long.

No matter how good your mobile platform is, no matter how awesome or shiny your mobile device is, you will not fill out the FAFSA on a keyboard – real or virtual – that’s the size of chicklets and retain your sanity after 108 form fields. Now, will there be one or two users among your many that will try? Of course. Is the amount of time and effort needed to develop a pure mobile implementation of the FAFSA justified for those two users a year? I’d have to say probably not.

Start with a mobile browsing strategy.
1. Look at your content, look at what you have that people can look at but don’t necessarily have to interact with. That’s where your mobile work should start.
2. Use plugins for your WordPress blog – I’m a fan of the free WPTouch plugin.
3. If you have something location-based, make sure you’re set up with Google Local Business Center and have updated listings on all the major local services.
4. Check your analytics to see what percentage of users are browsing using a mobile device – find this in the screen sizes section. Look for really small screen sizes.
5. Create content with mobile in mind. Instead of giant blog posts, break topics up into sections, segments, or pieces so they can be consumed in snack size or all at once.
It’s absolutely true that mobile will be an integral part of your online marketing strategy over this year and coming years. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible. That said, the desktop/laptop isn’t going anywhere either – so don’t throw everything away for a future promise that isn’t here just yet (though it’s arriving more every day).

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January 26, 2010
In the absence of other metrics

I had an interesting conversation last night with a photographer friend who said he faced a dichotomy in his work: on the one hand, he doesn’t overly care about others’ opinions, and on the other hand, he feels as though he should shoot for views as the best way of seeing how his work is being valued as he doesn’t sell his photos.

To me, there’s no dichotomy here. We focus on things like views of a photo, followers, retweets, fans on a fan page, etc. because these are the measures and metrics we know about. This is the best we have to work with, for the most part, and so valuing them isn’t wrong or crass. In the absence of other, better metrics, we value what we know.

To alleviate my friend’s dichotomy, I suggested he consider other metrics that would more accurately gauge his work – in essence, expanding what he knows about his work and how people perceive it. Sales, of course, is one such measure. It’s easy to click follow or subscribe or friend someone, but it’s much more of a commitment to open your wallet and purchase the work of an artist. You have to be much more invested in it to put up some money.

If you’re in it for the love and not the money – which is perfectly okay and good – dig deeper into your analytics. Last night in my USF Advanced Social Media course, I talked a bit about using Google Analytics to measure inflows and outflows to social networks as a way of better gauging what people are doing with your stuff. Here’s two examples.

1. Measuring outflows. Using Google Analytics’ virtual pageviews, you can tell whether that giant Twitter badge on your blog is worth keeping around. Set up links using an arbitrary virtual pageview, and every time someone clicks out to a social site or platform from your blog or destination site, you’ll know. That giant “BE MAH FRIEND” badge may be taking up valuable real estate for little value. Add a virtual page view to high value links or affiliate links as a sanity check for your affiliate reporting, too.

Example code – no virtual page view:

<a href=”https://twitter.com/cspenn”>My twitter account</a>

Example code with virtual page view:

<a onclick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview (‘/vpv-twitter-text-link’);” href=”https://twitter.com/cspenn”>My twitter account</a>

This will show up in your Google Analytics under Content. Filter for the virtual page name to see how popular it is. (/vpv-twitter-text-link in the example above, can be anything you want it to be, like /omg-im-linking-to-chris-brogan for example)

2. Measuring inflows. Nearly everyone on Twitter uses bit.ly or another URL shortener to make stuff easier to share. Go the extra step and use the Analytics URL Builder so that you can see traffic from individual social links you’ve shared – and how well they convert.

Take the link to your site, blog, or destination that you were going to share, feed it to the URL builder, append some useful data (did you share it on Twitter? Facebook? is it PPC? shared to a specific user? Customize as you like!), then feed the Google Analytics enhanced link to bit.ly.

Now, when you share that link, you’ll see exactly where your traffic is coming from and more importantly, you’ll see how your traffic does on your site. You can isolate, for example, how many people from an individual tweet bought something or downloaded an eBook. It’s laborious to do this with every single thing you share, but for high value stuff, this is the way to go.

For my photographer friend, every link he places to his photos (or embedded photo on his site) should have either an inflow or outflow, and if he had some engagement metric like a free eBook download, he’d begin to know more than just views about his photos. He could see how many people went from a tweet to his photo blog to subscribe to download, and if someday he chose to sell his photos, he’d need only add that to Google Analytics to deepen his understanding of his audience.

Try out these tools and see if you can make them work for you.

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January 15, 2010
What RoboCop Can Teach You About the Dangers of Social Media

Fans of the original RoboCop movie remember all too well the searing disappointment with its two sequels. The original RoboCop movie was bloody, intensely violent, dystopian, and wonderful to watch as we saw nearly-deceased police officer Alex Murphy wreak vengeance on his would-be killers and try to find his humanity again inside his robotic self.

The first RoboCop movie was a box office success, which immediately activated the sequel machine. In the following movies, producers largely made the human story a subplot to lots of shooting, lots of gadgets, and even more gadgets. I can just hear the conversations in the executive suite now…

“RoboCop needs more cool somehow… I know, to jazz up this franchise, let’s give him a jetpack! The kids will love it!”

What made RoboCop successful wasn’t the gadgets. It was the stories, the fairly complicated subplots in the original that were abandoned for larger explosions and more gadgets in the sequels, which did increasingly poorly at the box office.

Your social media efforts aren’t so different.

Rather than looking for the next big thing, the next shiny object, the next bit of wizardry to spruce up your social media presence, stop for a moment and assess what has given you success so far. If you’ve achieved any level of success, a good bit of it is likely from your human efforts, from your story-based work and not the social media equivalent of rocket backpacks.

As you assess your social media efforts for this year, put aside the platforms and technologies for a little bit and look at what stories you are currently telling, what stories you plan to tell, and how your audiences and communities will receive those stories. This year, I’m certain the platforms will change. Stuff that’s hot right now will be less so, and there will undoubtedly be newer, shinier things.

Had the producers of RoboCop’s sequels left the gadgets behind and focused on the story of the human beneath the machine, they might have made even more box office gold. Don’t let the same fate happen to your social media efforts. Forget the gadgets. Bring out the human behind your social media machinery and tell those stories instead.

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January 10, 2010
A funny thing happened on the way to the future…

…screens got really small and really big at the same time. Check out these two screen sizes from my blog’s analytics:

In position #6 is a screen the size of an aircraft carrier.

In position #9 is a screen the size of a postage stamp.

One’s a large monitor, probably an LCD like a 24″ iMac. The other’s almost certainly a mobile screen.

This presents a dilemma to content creators. How do you manage to create stuff that looks passable on both?

For the big screens, don’t be afraid to go large with great art. If you have a staff member with a photographic penchant, feature their work (if they permit you to do so, or if their contract permits you to do so) in your creatives. If appropriate, offer freebies in your marketing promotions, like desktop wallpapers, downloadable screen savers and slideshows, and other high resolution, high impact ideas. When I do outreach to college financial aid administrators in the fall, very often I’ll pull photos from my portfolio of New England foliage and just send them as gifts to be used for desktop wallpaper. Costs me nothing, earns me goodwill, and makes use of that Nikon D90 I lug around all the time.

For the really small screens, I recommend two things: first, install WordPress and then install the MobilePress plugin, which is what I run on this blog. It automatically reformats your blog on the fly in a lightweight format that looks good enough but loads instantly.

Second, go install or use mobile phone emulators to see what your properties look like, if you don’t own every phone under the sun. You can download an iPhone emulator from Apple or use TestiPhone.com for the iPhone platform, and Google has Android emulators for the Android platform.

This should help you make the most of the smallest screens coming to visit you.

Small or large, get your content future-ready today. It’ll be here sooner than you think.

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January 8, 2010
What you need to do next in social media for success

What’s next? Is it Google Wave? How should we be using Twitter? Which social networks should we be on? What’s next?

Familiar questions? You hear these questions at conferences, trade shows, events, in the fishbowl, just about everywhere. They reflect a certain hunger, an almost desperate feeling from folks in the social media fishbowl, even from veteran practitioners.

What’s next is a simple question to answer. As with many things, however, what’s simple is often not easy.

What’s next is you. More specifically, what’s next for you is improving you, breaking away from existing limitations. No matter where you are on your social media journey, you’ve accrued some habits. Some are good and useful, some are not. Some habits are outdated already and aren’t serving you particularly well. For example, it might be your habit to reply to tweets at a certain time of day, but if your followers have changed and grown over time, they might want to hear from you at a different time of day, or new followers might have different expectations of how frequently you’ll keep in touch with them.

What’s next isn’t more tools, which is that desperate hunger I mentioned earlier, that wanting of more shiny objects. You see this most acutely in people who are disappointed in new offerings like Google Wave, whose expectations were that it would dramatically change their lives. If you’re chasing after the tools, that’s understandable. After all, understanding and mastering the basics of the tools that you currently have has gotten you to this point.

I’d offer instead that instead of longing for more tools, new tools, shinier objects, that you instead focus on becoming more powerful with the tools you already have. What do I mean? Let’s look at a martial arts example. There are only so many ways that physics, biology, and psychology permit us to punch, kick, or throw someone with any degree of effectiveness. Most of the tools you can achieve a basic, minimum level of competency with in about six months per tool if you practice diligently and frequently.

After you understand and can use the basics, then what? Just more of the same? Sort of. In the martial arts, you start putting combinations of the basics together. You start to examine human nature, to figure out why someone would behave in such a way that necessitates using a punch or a kick on them. You start to dig deeper into people’s motivations and into your own weaknesses, solidifying the tools you’re not so comfortable with, figuring out what it is in your own nature that prevents you from being as effective as possible with that tool.

Ultimately, once you reach higher levels of proficiency in the martial arts, the most juice for your squeeze comes out of self improvement. Got a quick temper? Learning how to channel that and tame that will do more for your quality of life (and keep you out of more fights) than the physical tools alone. Easily intimidated? Learning how to fortify your spirit will bring rewards not just to a physical encounter, but also to job interviews, workplace stress, and family problems, too.

The tools of social media are no different from a big picture perspective. (Obviously, punching someone has much more immediate impact than tweeting them) Once you’ve gained proficiency with the tools themselves, if you want to be more and more effective, if you want to get more and more out of them, you have to look away from the tools and the distractions of the day and focus on what in your own human nature is holding you back from accomplishing even more.

How do you do that? By first and foremost being honest with yourself, privately, internally, and quietly. Take some time, just a minute or two a day to start, to sit up straight and take a few deep breaths, then ask yourself these two questions:

1. What one thing did I do today that I’m proud of?
2. How can I take that thing I did and improve on it?

Some days, it’ll be a little bit of work to accomplish even #1. That’s okay. That’s what’s powerful about social media. You can generate results very quickly, so go find something worth doing before each day is over and use the tools that you have to do it. Then put the results into your brain with question #2 and see if you become more effective, more free, more powerful with the tools you already have.

Do this often enough, and you’ll wake up one day and realize that the answer to what’s next is and always has been inside your own heart and mind.

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November 5, 2009
Marketing with iTunes 9, iTunes LP, and iTunes Extras

No linkbait in that blog title, no sir.

Anyway, yesterday Apple released iTunes 9, along with two new formats of media, iTunes LP (enhanced albums with art, interviews, text, interactive, etc.) and iTunes Extras for Movies (think DVD extra content and features). Some off the cuff thoughts about how these tools, when made available to content creators, will impact marketing.

iTunes LP will obviously help musicians a great deal in selling albums vs. tracks. The idea of being able to buy an album with a concert video embedded in it, or an interview, or whatever appeals most to fans will make selling the whole album as a package a draw over the individual track. That’s a good thing.

iTunes Extras will obviously port existing DVDs into iTunes, helping out movie studios, etc.

What I’m really interested in is how these tools will be made available to content creators, because I could easily see releasing a super-enhanced podcast that contained photos (say if the show were an interview at a conference or something), a book excerpt, transcript, or other enhanced features. Being able to create your own enhanced iTunes LP collection – whether or not your “album” is in the iTunes store, would be a huge benefit to marketers wanting to offer more goods to consumers.

Where I think the juice will really flow is in iTunes Extras. For anyone who does public speaking, imagine being able to take video of your presentation at a conference and embed your speaker notes, photos, handouts, or even a transcript of your remarks in one slick package. You could include bonus footage like Q&A, media interviews, or other pieces of media in the exact same manner as you would on a full DVD – without the DVD.

I look forward to hearing from Apple and independent publishing houses like CD Baby to see how accessible these features will be to folks not affiliated with a big publisher or label.

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September 10, 2009

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