Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

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5 tips for dominating local

Five basic tips for dominating local. If you’re a local business, local musician, local event planner, local anything, you need to try these methods.

1. Optimize your site or microsite for local. Buy a local domain name, like Boston Martial Arts. When people are searching for generics, they’ll Google for your locality and the generic term – and chances are generic terms are more likely to be available at the local level.

2. Register for local. Set up your Google Local Business Center. Get events into local calendars like Craigslist for your city.

3. Recruit local. Hit up local message boards, follow people locally on Twitter, find discussion groups and email lists that are local and introduce yourself to your community.

4. Be at local events. Attend things like PodCamp Boston (if you’re in Boston, obviously), or create your own PodCamp, BarCamp, TEDx, or other event for your area.

5. Go local offline. Got a business you’re promoting? Look at local delivery systems to enhance your business. One of my friends who is an avid local marketer promotes his business through an online and offline affiliate program, and gives affiliate coupons to other local businesses. His biggest success? A local florist shop includes his coupons in their deliveries. The florist gets affiliate fees if the customer signs up, he gets free marketing, and the customer gets his business if they want what he has to sell – and the sell is slightly easier because the arrival of flowers tend to brighten moods to begin with.

What are your local tips and tricks?

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July 27, 2009
What Warcraft's wool cloth should teach you about marketing

I’m an avid gold-maker in World of Warcraft. Like real life, the amount of gold you have in the game is a direct measure of how much value you bring. If you quest like mad and rack up thousands of gold, you’ve got the skills and the time to complete lots of quests. That’s value. If you farm materials like in-game consumables, you’re generating value for other players who don’t have to spend their time farming, and the gold pours in. If you play the Auction House, knowing your markets and trends, you can arbitrage items that are sold for unusually low prices by players that don’t know better and resell them at market prices – and the gold pours in.

What I want to highlight today, though, is an important aspect of the gold making game. Take a look at the top 5 items I’ve sold in game recently:

The first and fourth items are rare cloth that can be made only once every 4 days. Scarcity makes them incredibly valuable. The same is true for item 3, the Hat of Wintry Doom, because it’s made from rare items.

The second item is an in-game pet that can only be acquired in a little-loved backwater part of the world that takes ages to get to. People pay a price premium for it because they don’t want to burn up the time and effort it takes to get there.

What’s really important is item 5, wool cloth. For anyone who does not play World of Warcraft, wool cloth is a commodity. Not only is it a commodity, but it’s an especially plentiful commodity that most early players encounter by the bucket before moving onto more challenging parts of the game. If chess pieces wore clothing, pawns would be the ones sporting wool cloth – it’s common.

So why is such a mundane commodity the #5 seller? Two reasons: first, it’s used by several professions in game, which means there’s consistent demand for it. Second, most players run right past the stage of the game where they’d accumulate a significant amount of the cloth in their pursuit for better, shinier objects. Thus, while it’s plentiful, most players forget about it and move on rapidly, long before they accumulate any significant amount of it.

Consistent demand. High potential supply, low actual supply. This is a profit engine.

So what does this have to do with marketing? How many people are searching for the shiny object, the rare, the Ebonweave cloth of marketing? Social media currently holds this crown, though a few years ago it was SEO, and before that it was email. Everyone wants into the new, the shiny, the really glittery with the high potential payoff, and for those few that do succeed in making the Ebonweave of marketing, the payout is handsome.

But.

But there’s more than enough money in the marketing equivalents of wool cloth. In the rush to social media, people forgot search optimization. In the rush to search optimization, people forgot email marketing. All along the way, there are lots of valuable methods that generate real results and real income, and those rushing to reach Grand Master Social Media Marketer are leaving money and opportunity on the table.

Remember your wool cloth. Revisit the things that used to be hot and see, now that they’ve reached maturity, just how quietly profitable they can be. Some things won’t be any more, but some things perceived as a commodity could still be one of your best sellers if you’re good at it and the attention deficit crowd has moved onto whatever new shiny has appeared for the day.

Good luck farming your wool cloth.

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July 23, 2009
What the Tacoma Narrows Bridge should tell you about your marketing

Resonance:

Mechanical resonance is the tendency of a mechanical system to absorb more energy when the frequency of its oscillations matches the system’s natural frequency of vibration (its resonance frequency or resonant frequency) than it does at other frequencies. It may cause violent swaying motions and even catastrophic failure in improperly constructed structures including bridges, buildings, and airplanes a phenomenon known as resonance disaster. – Wikipedia

Resonance, demonstrated at the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington State, 1940:

Resonance disaster can occur in more places than the physics of bridges. Resonance disaster – and success – can occur in media.

Take an example like United Breaks Guitars. This video would have flopped miserably if the airline industry’s service was superb. No one would have spread the message. But the video and campaign resonated with people, deeply. People who had bad experiences with airlines and luggage spread the video like wildfire, and the mainstream media (many of whom are frequent travelers themselves) boosted the video even more.

Media resonance is when a message matches the pre-existing message within the audience and as a result the power of the message’s absorption is amplified, in the same way that an opera singer’s voice can match the resonant frequency of a crystal glass and shatter it, or the wind-induced vibrations can collapse a bridge.

Resonance is at the very heart of what messages are sticky, what messages spread, what messages will go “viral”. A message that resonates with its audience will be amplified by the conditions within the audience and rapidly escalate beyond anything the message creator anticipated.

How do you determine resonance as a marketer? Lots and lots of research and human life experience. Research using tools like Google Trends, Google Insight for Search, Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and any other mood or sentiment indication tool to determine not only what’s on people’s minds, but how they say it. Deeply examine your own life experiences for things that piss you off, things that delight you, things that resonate with you, and extrapolate your own experiences to larger human characteristics. Look at messages on Twitter that are retweeted and become trending topics for what resonates about them. Watch the long-standing hit movies that retain their hit quality decades after release. Immerse yourself in what resonates with people and you’ll have a very good idea over time of what messages will resonate and what messages will not.

Here’s the devil of resonance: most of what you market, your products, your services, the things you have for sale, probably will not resonate with people. Sorry. At best, a majority of people will be somewhat interested in what you have. Your job is not to make them care, because you can’t, any more than you can force a bridge’s resonant frequency to change (you can’t unless you tear it down and rebuild it). The best you can do is figure out what latent resonance is already in people and rethink how you present your products and services to more closely match an existing resonance, or build a new product on top of existing ones that does match the resonance of your audience.

Good luck finding your resonance.

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July 21, 2009
Watching footfalls

A tweet from Amber Naslund this morning reminded me of an interesting lesson.

@ambercadabra: Ah, o’Hare on a Monday AM. So many friendly people. Ahem.
@cspenn: Watch footfalls. It’s an easy way to pass time in crowds.

What did this mean?

Footfalls are, simply put, how people walk. Some people walk as if they’re gliding across the floor with grace; others look like they’ve just newly risen from the grave as zombies. All of the walks and footfalls are unique and are signatures of our past and present. Watching footfalls in a public space gives you great insight into the people around you.

What’s interesting about the footfall from a ninjutsu perspective comes from a lesson in the middle level material of the Koto family tradition. There’s a moment in someone’s walk, after their foot has been placed or committed but before their weight has been transferred, during which you can strike them with relatively little force and knock them back or on their butt. Strike them sufficiently hard enough at that moment and you might even put their lights out, because the body is wholly expecting the footfall to be completed as several million previous ones were – with transfer of weight and progress forward.

When something interrupts that deeply ingrained habit, the body has almost no idea what to do, and it’s in that moment of confusion through what should have been an orderly, predictable transition, that the ninja technique displays its power. You’re not going head to head with the person’s strength (after their weight has transferred) and you’re not attacking from too far away (before they’ve stepped) because they’ll react and adjust. Only in that moment of transition do you get an opportunity to truly take advantage of someone’s habit and knock them into next week.

We as a society, as a culture, as a world of business are going through a similar transition and disruption now, especially in media. Our media footfalls are used to the broadcast model, where media broadcasts the message and the consumer receives it passively, then goes out and buys things they don’t need. The transition and disruption of new media has thrown a ninja strike into traditional media’s footfall, and it’s falling on its butt as we take advantage of its confusion.

The lesson moving forward is simple (but not easy): as new media becomes mainstream, as new becomes mundane and habits form, look for the footfalls. Watch to see what traditions and rituals appear, watch their timing like you watch people in the airport, and you’ll know when to disrupt them, when their moment of transition becomes your moment of opportunity. More important, as you keep an eye towards the future, look for services, technologies, and ideas that will be the ninja strike to other present day footfalls in your industry or niche. Learn the ideas and you’ll have carte blanche to take over that niche while everyone else is catching their balance.

Keep your eyes open and your feet on the ground!

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July 20, 2009
Why do we do these things?

We hate salesmen trying to sell us stuff but we love going to street fairs with lines of merchants wanting to sell us stuff. Why?

We hate high pressure sales but we love going to expos like the Big E where barkers shout out the highest pressure pitches you could possibly ever receive. Why?

We hate advertisements of all kind in our media but we love tuning into the Super Bowl for the ads. Why?

Please leave your answers in the comments.

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July 19, 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
Compare 2 videos – TU-154 vs. Boeing 757

The crash in Qazvin, Iran (July 15, 2009):

Flight 93, Pennsylvania (September 11, 2001):

Bear in mind the plane that crashed in Iran was a TU-154, roughly the same size as a Boeing 727 (slightly larger). 157ft long, MTOW 220,000 lbs.

The Boeing 757 is is 155ft long, MTOW 255,000 lbs.

Shouldn’t the Flight 93 impact site show roughly similar characteristics as the TU-154 site? Anyone with aerospace engineering credentials, please comment.

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July 15, 2009
Have you done your dailies?

Have you done your dailies? World of Warcraft players are intimately familiar with this question. For those that don’t play, most of the quests in the game – go somewhere, deliver something, kill a monster – are one-and-done adventures. Once you’ve done them, they’re done and gone. Daily quests are different – each day you have the opportunity to go and do the same quest. The rewards are usually reputation, money, loot, gear, or other rewards that you want to keep accruing for your character.

Here’s the thing about dailies in Warcraft – they’re important for really good rewards. For example, one of the dailies currently gets you a type of currency which in turn will allow you to buy some nifty upgrades for your character. (Argent Tournament Champion’s Seals) If you miss a daily or two, it’s not a big deal, but miss enough and your progress towards that loot is severely inhibited. The other trick with dailies is that there’s no way to catch up – miss a week of dailies, and that opportunity is gone. You can’t earn back the daily rewards, can’t catch up.

What does this have to do with anything?

Like Warcraft, marketing has dailies. Your boss, coworkers, or customers may not have blue exclamation marks hovering over their heads, but you have dailies – writing blog posts, checking forums, optimizing web pages, responding to customer emails, all the little chores that come with marketing on a daily basis.

Like Warcraft, you can occasionally miss a marketing daily – but miss enough, and your business suffers badly. New business stops coming in the door, your ranking for top keyphrases in Google drops, customers stop buying as much as often.

Like Warcraft, you can’t catch up, either. Sure, you can respond to a customer’s email a few days later – but either you’ve lost reputation in that customer’s eyes or they’ve simply gone somewhere else to buy. Sure, you can wait to respond to a media query – but chances are the reporter has gone to another source already and at best you’ll be backup.

So how do you manage your dailies? Unlike Warcraft, you don’t get a neat, tidy list automatically (cooking daily, fishing daily, daily heroic dungeon, etc.) but there’s no reason you can’t create one. Sit down with a clipboard and look at the tasks you accomplish over a week. How many of them are repeating tasks? How many should be repeating tasks? Figure out which tasks are the high value ones – responding to customers, tweaking a web site, blogging – and assemble them in a nice list that you can print on real paper and photocopy.

Then set aside however long you need to do your dailies. For example, I tend to do my cooking & fishing Warcraft dailies first thing in the morning, before I even leave the house for work. It takes just a few minutes and I get them out of the way at a time when the server isn’t crowded with people trying to do the same thing. Anyone who’s done the Cheese for Glowergold daily at peak hours knows how awful peak time is. Do your marketing dailies off peak, preferably before your day starts, and you’ll see impressive, sustained growth in your business (assuming your dailies are high value tasks) that wasn’t possible when you didn’t treat the tasks as dailies.

Here’s to your daily success!

Updated: Chris Brogan shares his dailies here.

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July 15, 2009
Tomato Leather

An interesting thing I tried over the weekend. Take a can of crushed tomatoes, add salt and pepper as necessary, then pour it all on a baking sheet and bake it in the oven at 170 degrees for 12 hours or until dry and dark. You end up with a snack that tastes like sun-dried tomatoes and handles like a fruit rollup. Cook it longer or get a cookie cutter and cut circles out of the sheet and bake at a slightly higher temperature and you’ve got tomato chips.

Unlike potato chips, these have zero fat, only as much salt as you put in (or that came in the can), and are darned tasty. For extra fun, add in exceptionally finely chopped basil before drying.

Delicious, healthy, and dirt cheap to make. Especially good if you like the taste of sun-dried tomatoes.

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July 13, 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

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