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  • 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.

    Flickr: Advanced SearchFlickr: Advanced Search sunset - Flickr: Search

    Ready? Show the world.

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  • What's next

    What’s next?

    There has never been a more repeated question in all of marketing, and there has never been a time that question has been asked more frequently than now. Marketing, like so many other industries, has had its world turned upside down in the last decade. Marketing executives’ heads are spinning at such a rate that if you put magnets and wiring around them, they could generate enough electricity to power a company. Marketing professionals from the C suite down to the entry level college graduate are all wondering what’s next. What opportunities are there? What will imperil my career?

    Here’s a couple of thoughts on what’s next. Disclaimer: this is speculation. I reserve the right to be wrong.

    Decentralization is coming to social networks. Look at the specs very carefully for Google Wave and you’ll see that behind the flashy interface is a massive re-architecting of social networks, making them much more resistant to shock. The Wave protocol (separate from the product itself) specifies that a federated data store and server be available for Wave. Just like your company has its own email server, so it might have a Wave server if you jump on board that platform.

    What does this mean for you? Services like Twitter, for example, are highly centralized. From fail whales to databases, everything Twitter does is centralized, which also means that if the company ever goes out of business, everything you’ve built on Twitter goes with it. Wave is Google’s answer to that – if the architecture plays out the way it reads, it will make local stores of all your social networking activity, meaning that if Twitter the company goes down or goes away, theoretically, Wave’s knowledge of how it works will let you keep on tweeting.

    Takeaway: resilience for social networks is on the way, which means that the time and effort you spend now may someday soon have persistence. That will eventually make social networking an easier sell, as you’ll own your data. For now, make sure you keep backing up your social networks.

    Your email list is more important than ever. Yes, social media is taking off like a rocket ship. Yes, new ways of communicating are appearing every day, it seems. The currency up until now of Web 2.0 has been the email address. Ask yourself how many times a social network wants to check your GMail or Yahoo account as soon as you sign up, so you can invite your friends. Some services are starting to migrate to OAuth, which means service to service communication is improving without the need for an email address, like Friendfeed and Twitter. That said, check out this tech spec, again from the Wave protocol documentation:

    Wave users have wave addresses which consist of a user name and a wave provider domain in the same form as an email address, namely @. Wave addresses can also refer to groups, robots, gateways, and other services. A group address refers to a collection of wave addresses, much like an email mailing list. A robot can be a translation robot or a chess game robot. A gateway translates between waves and other communication and sharing protocols such as email and IM. In the remainder we ignore addressees that are services, including robots and gateways – they are treated largely the same as users with respect to federation.

    Takeaway: The Wave protocol uses the same syntax as email. Many other services still use email addresses as their primary mode of identification. Build your house lists now like crazy, and protect your email lists at all costs! If you rent or sell lists, rethink your pricing on them, because as each big new service goes online with email as a primary identifier (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Wave, etc.), the value of that address to connect to your customers keeps going up, up, up.

    Trust is becoming less abstract. Mitch Joel mentioned this on a recent episode of Media Hacks, his fear that social networks will become more private as tools allow people to maintain their private networks more easily. We see this already in Facebook, as its privacy settings have grown more granular over the years, and you can bet that as more distributed protocols become available, the tools for separating private from public will become more powerful. It wouldn’t surprise me to see spam filtering companies evolve to integrate with social networks in the near future, creating whitelists of people who are permitted to contact you through a variety of different means based on your friendships with them.

    You have a very limited period of time right now when everything is in the open, when you can openly and plainly see influencers, when you can openly and plainly see how people are networked together. Study the networks now! As privacy continues to evolve, this period of Wild West openness will fade away, and suddenly the job of being a marketer will become a nightmare for anyone who relies on mass marketing, because the consumer simply will not let you in, not to their whitelist, not to their inner circle, not to their sphere of influence, unless the consumer actually wants what you have.

    Takeaways: Spend time, invest time now in making connections with influencers, with superhubs in the social networks, because you’ll need their help later on to reach their trusted networks when you no longer can. Focus intensely on search, as that will be the one open mechanism for consumers to find you.

    Above all else, maintain your focus on making products or services that don’t suck, because the tolerance for mediocrity will continue to decrease. No one wants mediocre in their social circles. They want awesome. They want to talk about awesome, share awesome, and be both consumer and purveyor of all things awesome. If you are not awesome, if your company’s products or services are not awesome, then the best advice I have is to keep your resume up to date.

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  • Rockstars of conversation

    Last night I had the opportunity to attend Radian6’s Rockstars of Social CRM. Interesting event. The panel discussion was mostly on interaction with customers, but all of the side conversations throughout the night made it absolutely epic. Some highlights:

    Radian6 Rockstars of Social CRM

    Talking with Olivier Blanchard about the ultimate evolution of social media and speculating what true mastery of communications looks like.

    Geeking out with Dan York over yet even more new stuff about Google Wave, including rich media in Waves and Wavelets. Incredible. Stay tuned as he’ll have a video we recorded about what Wave will make possible that’s beyond our ability to grasp yet.

    Chris Brogan going gangsta.

    Radian6 Rockstars of Social CRM

    Talking with Chris Newton about some of the new back-end features of Radian6’s integration with Salesforce. Honestly, I’m not sure they even fully get what they’ve created, but if they’re both lucky and good, they’re going to manufacture a bucket of money. We’ll see if the idea discussed over dinner can turn them from a million dollar category business to a billion dollar category business. Let’s hope they do.

    Hanging out with the Boston social media crowd.

    Radian6 Rockstars of Social CRM

    The true power of events like this isn’t even in the entertainment or the presentation, but in putting lots of very smart people in one room and letting the chips fall where they may. Last night, as long as folks were paying attention and studying carefully what was being demo’ed, everyone was dealt a flush hand. If you were there, I hope you took advantage of the amazing conversations and know what the future looks like for the next 12-18 months in social media.

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  • Marketing says unity is possible

    We spend a lot of time focused on differences because we’re programmed to. That’s a crude survival mechanism. As Mitch, Hugh, and CC pointed out on the most recent episode of Media Hacks, the one silver lining in the current Iranian… situation?… is that our prejudices about what Iran and its people are like are rapidly shattering. Once you look past the subjects of the riots, you realize that the streets in Tehran don’t look all that different.

    Here’s an even broader look, the marketing in Tehran, courtesy of a bunch of Flickr photos.

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    Are we so different? Our marketing says we’re remarkably similar. Any American in Tehran could easily figure out, not speaking a word of Persian, exactly what’s going on in most of those ads. I’d bet you 10,000 rials that if I went to any suburban Iranian family’s home, I could tell you exactly what each junk mail ad was advertising without reading a lick of Farsi.

    This could be any street in America, Tehran, Jerusalem, or Tokyo:

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    In the end, we are so much more alike than we are different.

    Our marketing departments agree.

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  • I was on a boat called PAB09

    Podcasters Across Borders 2009 has wrapped up and the team of Mark Blevis and Bob Goyetche threw yet another impressive event. This year’s PAB theme was ostensibly bringing outside knowledge into the podcasting world, but the general subject of many of the presentations was on story more than anything – ways to more effectively communicate your story from Six String Nation to a Hollywood career. There were some spectacular new tools and techniques debuted which I look forward to integrating into my shows, the Financial Aid Podcast and Marketing Over Coffee, ideas that I think will, if they work well, bring things up a notch. Also picked up some great new photography techniques I’ll be trying out soon.

    Along the way, I presented an 18 minute talk on monetization and why it’s vital to new media. Longtime readers of this blog will find many of the themes to be as familiar as old friends.

    I also did my usual Sunday morning semi-improv presentation, My Top 20 Social Media Tools. Unlike the other presentation, I’m not publishing this presentation in any context, and here’s why: you had to be there and ready.

    The Sunday morning presentation is always a tough one for people to make. It’s at 8 AM, which, after a night of partying, only the hardcore attendees can usually make. Delivering a super-tight, all-meat presentation that many have expressed a desire to see is my way of thanking them for making that extra effort to show up.

    It’s also part of a martial arts lesson my teacher, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center, is constantly reinforcing with us. Very often in the black belt class, he’ll show a technique only once as a way of helping us train our minds to capture and catch as much information as possible, to be vigilant about paying attention.

    Social media in some ways makes us reliant on the crowd, reliant on the tools, reliant on waiting for someone to retweet or blog or podcast an important event. That laziness – and it is mental laziness – softens our ability to capture vitally important things that happen which may never happen again. Think about your own life. Have you ever had the experience of missing a child’s first important event, missing a news story break on the street right in front of you, missing a key piece of information at a conference? I know I’ve missed information, especially in the dojo, because of a lack of focus. I know I’ve missed some terrific photos due to inattentiveness.

    Thus, that presentation will never happen again, at least not like that. The slides won’t be posted, the video won’t be uploaded, the information never shown again. If you were there – fully and wholly there, meaning you were paying attention and not twittering, blogging, chatting, etc. – then you got some information I hope you find useful. If you weren’t there, then please make the effort to actually show up at events like Podcasters Across Borders or PodCamp rather than hoping someone will live stream/live tweet/live be there for you. You’ll find that there are many more gems from the weekend which will probably not be published from other presenters and attendees as well.

    Also, big shout outs to all of the longtime friends and fabulous conversations from the weekend, from Marko Kulik’s photo advice to intense debates about the future of media with Whitney Hoffman, Tod Maffin, and Julien Smith, to the many other great conversations over the weekend.

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  • Geeking Out: Twitter from the command line

    I enjoy communicating with Twitter, talking to all of the friends I’ve made over the past few years at conferences, events, etc. I enjoy many of the Twitter clients out there like Tweetdeck, Twhirl, Nambu, and others. The one thing I don’t enjoy? Every Twitter client seems to have a large memory footprint. Leave any of them running and you’ll be sacrificing up to a gigabyte of RAM for them to manage your Twitter experience when you follow and are followed by over 10,000 people.

    That’s why, despite all the cool new features in all of the clients being rolled out, I really wanted a command line client. Old school black and green terminal command line, minimal memory footprint, zero graphic footprint, no need for Java or Adobe AIR or even a web browser.

    Enter TTYtter, a Twitter client written in Perl (using cUrl and a few other libraries) that should run out of the box on any recent Mac. It follows the timeline, sets apart @replies and DMs, lets me pull profile information, and pretty much everything that every other Twitter app supports.

    Popular hashtag? I can set up a one-shot search or keep track of it. Replies in the public timeline? No problem.

    It’s a thing of beauty to have a super-lightweight Twitter client, especially if I’m on an EVDO or other mobile connection where connection is spotty and data economy is at a premium.

    You can try it out for yourself by downloading TTYtter from here. I will warn you that it is not for the technologically faint of heart. If you’ve never run something from the command line, this might be a little outside your comfort zone…

    … but then, isn’t that part of the fun of new media?

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  • How exactly is this making a difference?

    I have a serious question for everyone who’s not in the country of Iran but is participating in the various Iran memes floating around the social media world, such as changing your location or making your avatar green. I want to hear your thoughts and debate on this.

    How does something like changing your avatar or other forms of “showing your support” make any tangible difference to the citizens of Iran?

    Bonus: if you’re Iranian, I’d like to hear what tangible impact the memes and movements online have had on you and your fellow citizens.

    Please leave your comments, thoughts, and opinions below. Keep it civil.

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  • People I respect

    From Twitter:

    sophware: @cspenn Good stuff. Do you have a similar list of people you respect? That’s usually harder to make catchy, but would be great to see.

    People whose records actually do speak for them.

    People who accomplish real, tangible results.

    People who happily say “I don’t know” and follow up with “but I bet I can find out.”

    People who Google first, ask questions later.

    People who embrace thankless tasks and prefer unsung hero status.

    People who can find that artful balance of truth and conversational appeal so that their words are fully truthful, neither underestimated nor overexaggerated.

    People who can teach effectively.

    People who never stop learning.

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  • People I'm Wary Of

    Financial coaches who aren’t fabulously wealthy.

    Chefs who crusade against foods. There’s more than enough to advocate for that if you’re crusading against something, you’re probably not cooking delicious things.

    Fitness personal trainers who are seriously overweight.

    Black belt “masters” under the age of 13.

    Social media experts.

    Any (American) politician whose ads include the American flag. If you’re so patriotic, why do you need to stuff Old Glory in your ads?

    Life coaches under the age of 70. If you’re claiming to coach life skills, shouldn’t you have lived most of it first?

    All of these share the same common theme: the claim a person makes directly contradicts the apparent evidence.

    When it comes to your personal brand, how out of sync is what you say with the results you’ve generated?

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  • Souvenirs from MarketingProfs B2B Forum

    I had the pleasure and privilege of speaking on the Robust Online Content panel with Dr. Matthew Grant, Phil Juliano from Novell, Valeria Maltoni from Sungard, and Mike O’Toole from PJA on Monday at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum. One of my personal themes (that I didn’t articulate in the panel) for the conference has been souvenirs from conferences.

    My friend Chris Brogan has an interesting quote – when times are good, people love strategy. When times are bad, people want tactics. I’ll take this a step further for conferences: people want something to take home. In this economy, people want a souvenir that they can take away that’s immediately usable, something that, when they sit down at their desk the day they get back, they can plug in and turn on right away and start making a difference, as well as show off to the folks who didn’t go.

    Tony Robbins calls this sort of thing profound knowledge – information that once you have, changes everything. You can’t ever go back to the way you used to do things unless you try really hard. A good example of profound knowledge is the rule of thirds in photography. Put a tic tac toe grid mentally over your viewfinder in your camera. Put subjects at the intersections of horizontal and vertical lines, and instantly your photos are likely to become better. Now that you know that, you can’t ever go back to NOT knowing how to apply that rule.

    I brought two souvenirs with me to give away at MarketingProfs, one of which I discussed in the panel, and one of which I discussed in the Twitter Therapy sessions. Whether or not you were at the conference (and you really should have been), you can have the souvenirs, too.

    1. Customer service isn’t a burden. Customer service is a gold mine. If you’ve ever wanted for content to blog about, to podcast about, to share, to act on, you will never find a better source than the customers you already have and the problems they desperately want you to solve. I’ve recorded 900+ episodes of the Financial Aid Podcast and the customers of the Student Loan Network are my constant inspiration. I don’t need millions of dollars of research. I don’t need millions of dollars in marketing budgets. My customers tell me exactly what their problems are. Your customers are doing the same. The catch? You have to want to listen to them. Far too many people in executive suites are content to glance at their marketing dashboards and that’s as close to the customer as they’re willing to get. You have to be willing to dig – as you would in any gold mine – to get to the real treasure.

    2. Try the 8 foot test. This is an easy test to do. Load up your web site on your computer. Maximize your browser. From 8 feet away, is there an immediate and obvious call to action that gets your visitors to do what you want them to do? Here’s an example I use in my demo – go to StaffordLoan.com and do the same. If you can’t tell what we want you to do (apply for a Stafford loan), then you need to see an eye doctor. If you don’t have a room big enough to walk 8 feet away, then load the sites up on your mobile device and hold it at arm’s length for a similar effect.

    Hopefully, these two souvenirs are worth enough that they alone made it worth it for you to come to MarketingProfs. Hopefully, every other speaker and presenter gifted you with a souvenir or two as well, so that you went home with an armload full of stuff that will immediately make your business better.

    My thanks as well to Ann Handley and the MarketingProfs team for putting on another great event and assembling a terrific panel.

    Bonus: grab the eBooks I mentioned at the panel discussion here.

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