Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

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The most basic business lesson taught by World of Warcraft
The most basic business lesson taught by World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft’s Auction House is the in-game marketplace, the bazaar where players can sell virtual stuff to other players. Magical potions, plate armor, everything under the virtual sun gets traded millions of times a day. Auctions listed in the Auction House can last up to 48 hours, after which they expire and your virtual goods are returned to you. If you don’t relist them, they just remain in your character’s bags. To be a successful auctioneer, you have to be “open for business” by constantly keeping items on the market for sale.

There’s one fundamental lesson the Auction House can teach us, one fundamental lesson we must take to heart and practice in our businesses:

If you’re not open for business, no one can buy from you.

It doesn’t matter how epic the items you have for sale are. It doesn’t matter how long it took you to win them in the game or make them from your trade skills. It doesn’t matter how low or high demand those items are. If they’re sitting in your bags and not on the market, no one can buy from you. You must be open for business to make money.

I know what you’re saying. You don’t play the video game. You don’t have a business that even remotely looks like this. The principle still applies, however. If You’re not open for business, no one can buy from you.
- You’re not open for business when someone calls and no one answers the phone, or worse, robots do it (poorly) for you.
- You’re not open for business when someone searches for your product or service and you don’t appear anywhere in the search results.
- You’re not open for business when someone emails you and you don’t respond ever, or worse, their email ends up in your spam bucket.
- You’re not open for business when someone asks a question about your company in social media and you aren’t part of the conversation at all.
- You’re not open for business when someone goes to check out online and your web site doesn’t let them complete the transaction.
Where are you open for business? Where are you effectively closed, turning away actively interested buyers who want to give you their money?

Want to make some real money? Where are your competitors not open for business, and can you be open for business in that space?

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May 12, 2010
What World of Warcraft's Patchwerk Can Teach You About Recovering Morale

What World of Warcraft’s Patchwerk Can Teach You About Recovering Morale

Last night, our guild downed Patchwerk, a giant abomination in Naxxramas, for the zillionth time. Patchwerk isn’t a challenge any more – in fact, he hasn’t been a challenge in a really long time. We bring our 10 man team in and in about 11 minutes from start to finish, we crush Patches, loot his swollen, bloated corpse, and move on with our evening…

… and I love him for it. I love that he’s absolutely no challenge whatsoever because sometimes, you just need some easy wins to rebuild your momentum. When life throws you challenges, you get to step up, learn more about yourself, explore and go beyond your limits, and ultimately become a more powerful, better person.

That said, challenges that are never-ending can grind you down. They can, if you’re not careful, wear you out. Going 120% all the time means you run out of fuel much faster, and that can create significant gaps in your personal momentum and progress from burnout.

That’s why non-challenges like Patchwerk are useful, productive, and essential to you. You absolutely need some stuff that’s easy-mode, that’s a sure-fire victory to bolster your morale, provide some mental breathing space, and give you perspective. What was once a hard fight, what was once a hard battle, is now a walk in the park and that change in perspective can be incredibly reassuring. You can measure and see objective results about how far you’ve progressed by how easily you crush your formerly difficult enemies.

If you’re pushing the boundaries of your personal or professional life, who’s your Patchwerk?

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April 29, 2010
What World of Warcraft's Healing in Ulduar Can Teach You About Your Marketing Team

Over the weekend, my Warcraft guild managed to down 4 bosses (really big bad guys) in Ulduar. Two of the bosses posed two separate challenges for healers. One boss, a giant robot named XT-002, hands out lots of damage over a relatively long time to your entire team. Your healers must continuously refill the team’s health throughout the fight in a fairly aggressive manner.

The second boss, Kologarn, hits only a couple of members of your team, but he hits them very, very hard and very fast. Your healers must protect those team members and shield them from as much harm as possible while healing them.

In the first fight, there’s a class of healer known as a druid who can dispense lots of healing to lots of people over time. Druid healers really are ideal for addressing XT-002’s damage method. In the second fight, there’s a class of healer known as a discipline priest who can put up shields on a few people – but not the entire team and still stay focused on key members – and protect them from harm. Discipline priests are ideal for mitigating Kologarn’s intense damage.

As you can probably imagine, discipline priests who excel and shielding and protecting a few targets have a difficult time healing an entire team on XT-002. Druid healers who excel at healing over a period of time get overwhelmed very quickly when Kologarn dispenses near-instant smackdown, and fall behind quickly.

So what does this have to do with marketing? It comes down to knowing which members of your team have which abilities, and knowing how to properly allocate those abilities for the “fights” you face in marketing.

To make a comparison, if you need to generate lead flow over a period of time, you want to look to your inbound marketing team for search engine optimization, for brand and awareness building, for affiliate and referral marketing programs – things that keep the leads flowing.

Likewise, if you need to apply intense, high lead volume over a very short period of time, you want to look to your outbound marketing team for techniques like press releases, blogger outreach, high volume email marketing – things that are not sustainable for long periods of time but can throw some big numbers up very briefly for a specific campaign.

Asking the inbound team to generate outbound results is exactly the wrong thing to do. They can’t put those numbers up any more than a druid healer can heal through Kologarn’s spike damage. Asking the outbound team to generate inbound results will end equally badly – they’ll burn up all their resources, generate intense fatigue in their channels, and likely piss off a lot of otherwise loyal customers and prospective customers if they have to maintain pace over an inbound team’s normal operating period, just as a discipline priest will not be able to sustain focus and effectiveness over an entire team versus focusing on mitigating damage on just a few players.

Inbound and outbound marketing are complementary and equally effective if you’re competent at the methods and you know what you should be using when, just as druid healers and discipline priests are both excellent healing classes, as long as you know what they are and are not capable of. The wise raid leader brings the right class to each fight to maximize success, and the wise marketing and business leader brings the right teams to each marketing challenge.

May your raids and marketing equally never hear a Tympanic Tantrum!

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March 23, 2010
What World of Warcraft's Lunar New Year Can Teach You About Growth

In World of Warcraft, there are seasonal holidays that roughly correspond to real world holidays. One of these holidays is Lunar New Year. In the Warcraft version of the holiday, in addition to fireworks, there’s a quest to defeat a gigantic two-headed demon named Omen.

Last year, I and the friends I play with took a beating trying to kill Omen. I know I took a number of tries just to defeat him, with my character dying over and over again.

This year, as I rode to Lake Elune’ara, I wondered how the battle against Omen would go. I found out quickly:

The demon had lost his bite.

I was able to tank Omen solo with just one healer and a random mage with ease. He went down faster than the stock market after a Federal Reserve meeting.

After the initial celebration wore off, I wondered how it was that Omen was so easily defeated. His abilities and capabilities were the same as last year…

… but I and my character were not. Quite the contrary. Omen hadn’t changed, but I had, significantly for the better. What killed my character last year was barely even worth mentioning this year, and what relatively insignificant damage I was able to do to Omen last year was replaced by a venti quadruple shot cup of whoopass with a twist of lemon.

It’s difficult for us to see how we’ve changed. We change slowly, over time, and in many cases are the last to get the memo on anything. Things like Omen are a good way to realize just how much we have changed, just how we’ve transformed from year to year. If you don’t have an Omen-like challenge in your life, look for one as a way to diagnose who you are and how you’ve changed. Find something that’s a challenge for you this year, win, and then see how the challenge feels next year. Have you grown? Have you changed? Have you become more proficient?

Bear in mind the challenge needs to be somewhat static. Maybe it’s an annual photowalk, a half marathon, a creature like Omen – whatever it is, make sure it’s something where you’ll see the difference in yourself while the challenge itself remains mostly the same.

Omen (and his meaning) is summed up best, oddly enough, by Nelson Mandela:

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

May your Lunar Festival grant you the insights you seek.

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February 18, 2010
What World of Warcraft can teach you about customer quality

One of my favorite parts of World of Warcraft is the in-game marketplace known as the Auction House. Inside the AH, you can see relatively free markets at work with minimal regulation by the game’s owners. You can especially see how market forces create supply and demand, and if you’re good at understanding human nature, you can make a fair bit of virtual money.

Right now, there’s an in-game Valentine’s Day event going on. Below is a picture of the Auction House and the price of a Buttermilk Cream chocolate. The current asking price in the marketplace is $54, and demand is so high that none are currently being sold – the marketplace is empty of this item.

Yes, $54 for a single chocolate. Suddenly the real world holiday doesn’t look quite as expensive. My character here is about to sell 3 of them for $163.

Here’s the funny part: the in-game quests needed to obtain this item take about 5 minutes, total. (dropping off a charm bracelet to another character and offering 10 characters some perfume samples) So why does the price of this chocolate seem so very high compared to the relative amount of work needed to create it? This marketplace item can teach us a lot about customer quality and behavior.

Some players may not know how to obtain it besides the marketplace. They simply buy everything in the marketplace. These, however, are long-term poor customers, because the moment they get clued in, they will stop buying from marketers and start creating their own items. True, as the old gangster saying goes, you can’t wise up a chump, but that’s not the sort of customer you’d want to rely on or build a business on.

Some players like the convenience of one-stop shopping, and will pay a premium just to be able to buy everything in one place. These are better customers because they have a persistent need (convenience). This makes them a better long-term prospective customer as they have a need that will always need to be met. The downside is that these folks are usually very price-sensitive, so a competitor who prices the same goods at even a penny less will beat you to the sale. If supply is a greater issue than demand, unless you’re always the lowest price, you won’t sell anything.

Some players just don’t like questing, period. They pay a premium in the marketplace – sometimes a very high premium – to not spend a single minute in the game doing things that aren’t fun for them. If you can provide exactly what they need, when they need it, you’ll develop a reputation in-game for being a useful sort of marketer to have around, and the kind of person who they will approach directly whenever they need to buy something. These folks will even ignore marketplace prices and just pay you obscene premiums directly because they know you’re reliable and can get them exactly what they want. It almost goes without saying that these are your very best customers in the long-term.

We have, in short, three kinds of customers – the sucker who may or may not even buy, the customer who wants convenience but is super-sensitive to price, and the premium buyer who wants to outsource everything they don’t want to do.

Which do you want as a customer? Common sense should dictate that if it’s long-term maximum profitability you’re after, you want the premium buyer. It will require more work on your part to develop reputation in your community for being the go-to marketer that has exactly what someone needs, but if you put in the time and effort in your marketplace, you can escape the always-lowest-prices race and make a ton of money.

Now, would anyone like to buy a Buttermilk Cream? Only three left…

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February 9, 2010
What World of Warcraft's Holidays Should Teach You About Power Blogging

World of Warcraft has in-game holidays that closely mirror many real world holidays, such as Pilgrim’s Bounty (Thanksgiving), the Feast of Winter Veil (Christmas/Hanukkah), Noblegarden (Easter), Midsummer Fire Festival (Fourth of July), and so forth.

Savvy auction house marketers know exactly what goods and commodities are needed for each holiday and have them up for auction the moment the holidays begin, often at ludicrous markups. For example, for the Feast of Winter Veil, small eggs used to cook gingerbread cookies and egg nog, normally for sale for 50 silver (think 50 cents), rocket up in price by crafty salesmen to 9-15 gold each (think $9-$ 15) for a few days until the laggards in the market realize the holiday’s on and start undercutting prices.

Here’s the funny thing: the in-game calendar is published months ahead of the actual events, in the game and on Blizzard Entertainment’s web site. Every player of the game is given in-game notices in major cities about the impending holiday. There’s plenty of time to stock up the goods you need to sell…

… but few ever do. Few are willing to plan that far ahead, to farm the eggs or deeprock salt ahead of time and be ready for the doors to burst open the moment the holiday starts. As a result, those few who look at the calendar and plan accordingly reap huge profits.

So what does this have to do with blogging? The same applies in the blogosphere as in Azeroth. Google Calendar has a holidays calendar for every nation in the world. It lets you see all the major holidays you could possibly want, for your country or others, for different religions, for just about anything that you can stick on a calendar and call a holiday.

The power bloggers can look at the calendar and decide in advance, like an editorial calendar, what should happen in the lead up to the holidays on the calendar. Do you blog about marketing? You know when Valentine’s Day is – work out now what things you want to blog about as that holiday approaches. Do you blog about history? Seems like everyone’s got a holiday about them.

Having your blog posts published in advance of the holidays ensures that search engines can index your content. Having a decent social network ensures that you can move the needle in real-time search on the day before and day of the holiday. Having time to plan ahead lets you come up with creative memes that can stick well ahead of time – you can even beta test memes and hashtags to your current followers to see who says “heh, that’s clever” or the equivalent reaction you’re looking for.

You’ve got the calendar in front of you. The holidays on it are not a secret by any means, but know that most everyone in blogging and social media is probably going to wing it at best on the holiday. Farm your small eggs and deeprock salt now so that in 2010, you can profit handsomely when the times are right.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hit some rock elementals for deeprock salt. We sold out this year, so I’ve got a year to farm for next Winter Veil.

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January 13, 2010
What World of Warcraft Can Teach You About Project Management

What World of Warcraft Can Teach You About Project Management

With the opening of Icecrown Citadel in the latest edition of World of Warcraft, the challenges facing guilds and players of all levels of skill have increased. During a recent run in the Forge of Souls (facing the evil alter ego of the late James Brown, no less), I noticed that our usual team’s play style had to adjust to the new challenges. Here’s what I mean:

In Warcraft, you have two general methods for beating up the bad guys: focused fire and area of effect. Focused fire is exactly what it sounds like. In a crowd of bad guys, all the heroes point their swords/arrows/spells/pewpewlazerbeamz at one of the crowd until the bad guy drops, then you switch to the next one, etc. Area of effect has the heroes cover wide spaces with their weapons to take on the whole crowd at once. Think about the difference between, say, a rifle and a grenade. That’s the general idea.

Warcraft differs from life in that area of effect methods are significantly weaker than focused fire. When you face enemies weaker than you and your merry band of heroes, you just open up and take them all down at once. When you face enemies who are stronger than you, generally speaking, your attacks on them won’t kill them before they kill you, so you drop them one by one while the guy wearing the most armor (the tank) distracts the rest of the crowd.

So what does this have to do with project management? Simple: projects are like Warcraft’s bad guys. If you have a handful of very minor, insignificant things to tackle, you can multitask and burn them all down at roughly the same time. Bug fixes, memos, email responses, Twitter replies, etc. can all be nuked with the project equivalent of an area of effect attack.

If you face a major project or several major projects, chances are you can’t crush them before they overwhelm you. Instead, you gather your team at work, grab a seat at the conference room table with your laptop, and you burn down each project one at a time. Trying to tackle all of them would be as much of a wipe as a Warcraft raid trying to tackle all the bad guys at once.

Here’s the Icecrown Citadel twist: you have to recognize when it’s time to switch modes from one to the other. Warcraft teams used to area of effect nuking everything will suddenly find the battles in Icecrown Citadel to be much harder to deal with, and they’ll need to adapt quickly back to focused fire methods.

Likewise, the sooner you recognize that a project has gone beyond trivial requirements into something more serious, you have to switch methods in your organization.

The reverse is also true. If you take an epic geared, epic skilled team into a Warcraft raid and expect them to use the focused fire methods on bad guys that they can knock over just by sneezing, you’ll bore your team and take far longer to complete a dungeon than if you just uncorked your team’s power against weak opponents and wiped the floor with them.

From a project management perspective, that’s what causes boredom and loss of talent inside your organization – you’re asking top quality epic talent not to live up to their potential.

The challenge for any raid leader, the challenge for any business leader, is to recognize when you need one approach or another. It’s not just a matter of looking at gear in an instance (you can be epic geared and still suck at playing) or looking at resumes on a desk. No, you have to adapt quickly when you realize that your team is either getting their faces eaten by bone ghouls or project milestones and focus fire, or recognize when your team is so bored that they cast Basic Campfire against their opponents or doodle their way through project meetings and switch to area of effect crushing mode.

This is why great leaders in both Warcraft raids and the business world are great – and more rare than most epic gear. Good luck in your quests to be the best, whether it’s beating Sindragosa or this quarter’s numbers.

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December 13, 2009
What World of Warcraft can teach you about synergy and profits

How can you make as much gold as possible in World of Warcraft?

If you’re not familiar with the game, World of Warcraft has an in-game currency, gold, which you use to play and improve your character. There are a number of ways to make gold in the game, from speculating in the game’s in-world marketplace (the Auction House) to creating items to sell to others (tradeskills and professions) to selling raw materials to others, like fish, ore, and other resources.

One of the secrets of making a LOT of gold in Warcraft, however, is synergy – what happens when you start putting together players with different skills. For example, in my guild, I have a character that does in-game mining, pulling various ores and minerals out of the ground. The ore is sent to our guild’s jeweler, who prospects the ore for high quality magic gems that make a character better. He in turn gives those to our guild alchemist, who transmutes them into exceptionally high quality magic gems that I then sell on the marketplace, often at prices that are as much as 1500% higher than the raw materials. We then split the profits among us equally.

Here’s why this is interesting – to do this myself, I’d have to play the game three times as much, or surrender a giant percentage of profits to other players not in my guild, making my mining efforts far less profitable and worthy of my time. Instead, our synergies together – miner, alchemist, jewelcrafter – mean that we can take our respective skills and together make items that are far more profitable than any of our efforts alone.

So what does this have to do with you? Even if you don’t play Warcraft, figuring out your team’s synergies can yield huge profits. For example, at the Student Loan Network, I’m a good creator of content. I write some fairly decent stuff like the Scholarship Search Secrets eBook. On our team, I have a number of folks who are great at SEO who can help make my copy more easily found, access to our Scholarship Points members who can tell me if my writing reflects their reality as customers, and a CEO who has long range, strategic views on everything that can help make a good project great. When we pool our talents together, the end result is almost always better than going it alone.

Figure out who is or should be in your marketing guild. It doesn’t have to be coworkers – it can be friends online, on Twitter, casual social acquaintances – and then figure out which strengths each person specializes in. Get the right team, figure out your synergies together, and chances are what you’ll create will be of far higher value than your own efforts.

Oh, and if anyone’s looking for blue quality Wrath gems and you’re Alliance on Arathor US, hit us up. I’ll give you the social media discount rate of 1495% profit, 5% off our regular prices 🙂

Photo credit: cliff1066

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September 14, 2009
What World of Warcraft can teach you about gear and skill

If you’ve ever played any character in World of Warcraft, you know about the diminishing returns of gear. If you’ve never played Warcraft, it works something like this: once you’ve reached the top level of growth for your character (currently level 80, soon to be 85), any gains you get to make your character better come not from “leveling up” but from getting better gear, better armor, weapons, etc.

In the beginning of your gear quest, vast improvements in your character’s capabilities are easy. Going from a green “uncommon quality” item to a blue “rare” item can add more power, more strength, more valued attributes to your character in great leaps. Your character can perform far better in the game in these early jumps in equipment.

However, as you keep gearing up, going from blue “rare” items to purple “epic” items, the items get more costly (or more difficult to obtain) for statistical improvements that are orders of magnitude smaller.

After a certain point, you reach diminishing returns, where the gear’s improvements are so small that the comparatively large efforts to get the gear simply isn’t worth it for the average player. Where a blue “rare” item might take half an hour’s worth of work, a top, best-in-game item might take weeks. Granted, it’s a game, so as long as you’re having fun there’s no penalty towards getting that gear, but it’s still significant diminishing returns.

After you reach the point of diminishing returns on gear, the best thing you can do as a Warcraft player is to spend time learning how to play your character’s skills with the gear you’ve got. Gear, after all, merely magnifies your skills. Learning the various ways your character can behave in combat, learning to fine tune your use of the right skill at exactly the right time – these are the things that will not only make the most of the gear you’ve got, but in some cases will negate any gear disadvantages you have. Anyone on a team in the game knows that it’s better to have a slightly undergeared, excellent player leading your team than a highly geared, incompetent buffoon running the team.

So what does all this have to do with anything? Well, life is exactly the same. Take photography – after a certain point, you’re just spending money on lenses and other gadgets with fewer and fewer returns. That first zoom lens makes a big difference in your photography. The jump from a 55-200mm to an 18-200mm isn’t earth shattering, just convenient. Photography gets to diminishing returns VERY quickly – better to learn how to compose and shoot with the gear you have after the entry level improvements. Better pictures come from better skills – gear magnifies skill, but doesn’t improve it. Only learning and practice improves skill. I’ve got a Nikon D90 with a few lenses, and when talking to Marko Kulik (a photography expert), he basically said I’ve got all the gear I could possibly need for years – now I need to learn how to use it well.

Look at marketing. The first analytics software you start using is an incredible leap from no analytics at all, or guesswork based on server logs. After that, you get diminishing returns on the quantity of information you get from web analytics – and the real juice to be had in web analytics is not learning what numbers you have, but what they mean and how you can change your business practices to serve your customers better.

Accounting? Lots of businesses run quite well on Microsoft Excel, not because they don’t want to buy an accounting package, but because their accounting staff is sufficiently skilled enough in Excel that the gear upgrade won’t make a difference in their performance – and might even diminish it.

In the end, gearing up is important only to the point of diminishing returns, whether it’s marketing or Warcraft. The lesson is the same across nearly all professions, trades, and hobbies: gear magnifies skill. Gear up to get past entry level limitations, then focus your time and energy on the skills you need to tap the potential of that gear.

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September 5, 2009
Life after 80, or what World of Warcraft can teach you about marketing mastery

In World of Warcraft, there are 80 levels a character can reach. All characters start out at level 1, and progress via quests, killing creatures, and other activities through 80 levels, which can take anywhere from months to just a few weeks, depending on how dedicated a player you are.

But what happens at level 80? What happens when you reach the end, and there are no more levels to achieve?

It turns out the game changes quite a bit once you reach the top level. Instead of improving your character’s abilities through levels (and associated rewards) you change to getting better equipment for your character and improving your play skill.

See, in Warcraft, every character has dozens of abilities depending on their class. Mages can cast a whole bunch of spells. Priests can heal, shield, and resurrect other characters. Warriors can deliver a beatdown in more ways than you can count. But during the leveling process, you typically rely on a few of these skills as your bread and butter, and the rest are skills you pick up along the way but don’t really use.

Once you reach level 80, you start entering progressively harder dungeons, teaming up with a few or a few dozen other players to take down bigger and meaner creatures. This in turn requires you to dust off all those secondary skills you picked up along the way and figure out just when they’re the perfect solution to the problem at hand. Skills that you never really used on the way up to level 80, skills that you might have forgotten about completely, might make or break your ability to succeed after 80.

What does any of this have to do with marketing? Simple. Take an inventory of all the skills and abilities you have, especially skills you’ve built along your career that you don’t use a whole lot. Take an equal inventory of all the tools and technologies at your disposal that you’ve used, tried, and experimented with along your marketing journey. Now start to view them from the perspective of not just tools, but specific skills that you can use at the right time, for the right job – even if you didn’t give them a second glance as you became a marketing professional.

Last night on the Small Business Buzz Twitter chat, Question 8 was “Twitter vs. LinkedIn vs. Facebook?”. The answer is the right tool for the right job. Just as a frost mage needs to know when to pop Ice Block, Ice Barrier, and Cold Snap in Heroic Halls of Lightning to survive Loken’s Lightning Nova, so must a marketer know when Facebook is the right tool for a campaign, when Twitter makes the most sense, and when LinkedIn is exactly what’s called for. There are times when social media is exactly the wrong answer, and direct mail is the right one. As a marketing professional and as a Warcraft player, knowing which tool fits each situation best is the definition of mastery.

Many of us rushed past experimenting with a lot of our secondary skills on the way to level 80 in both Warcraft and marketing. Now that we’ve got the job, now that we’re practicing professionals, we need to see what else we’re capable of that’s sitting in our inventory, perfect solutions for the problems we have at hand.

This is what’s next for a lot of people – not another new, shiny object to play with, but mastering the tools you already have so that you can achieve exactly the results you want. One of the biggest ways you can set your own career back is to constantly chase after new tools and shiny objects rather than master the ones you’ve already got. Yes, absolutely, try new things, but devote more of your time towards perfecting the skills and tools you currently have, and you’ll find life after 80 – in Warcraft and in your career – to be incredibly rewarding.

May your marketing quests be as fruitful as your Warcraft ones.

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July 8, 2009

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