Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Search results for: “feed”

Recipe books and social media

They’re considered relics of antiquity now, but once upon a time, corporate sponsored cookbooks were all the rage. In my grandmother’s kitchen cabinets, you could find the Betty Crocker cookbook series, Good Housekeeping’s set, Kraft’s set, you name it. Dozens and dozens of cookbooks, some famous in their own right. Each of the cookbooks had hundreds of recipes, and of course, the directions would call for each company’s respective products as an ingredient in the recipes. Make that killer potato salad with Hellman’s or that great kids snack with Kraft Mac & Cheese.

The companies that created these cookbooks were on to something because it was one of the best ways to get your mind on their products without a direct hard sell. Who needs to blast “BUY NOW! BUY NOW!” for a bottle of salad dressing (that was ignored even before the Internet) when every salad recipe had your brand in it?

The soft sell in those cookbooks was made all the easier because the cookbooks solved a problem – what should we make for breakfast/lunch/dinner/that party on Saturday night? They solved the consumer’s problems and part of the solution was the product the company was trying to move.

Contrast this with the epic failures of selling in social media today, where every spammy Twitter DM is hawking a solution – for the seller, but not for you. Contrast this with the endless product pushes, pointless pitches, and total failure to present any benefit to the consumer, to the buyer. This is one of the many reasons people in social media hate things and terms like monetization – not because we begrudge companies the right to earn some money, but because what you’re selling simply isn’t useful, doesn’t solve a problem.

The next time you go home to a grandmother’s, mother’s, or aunt’s kitchen, go look on their cookbook shelf. Pick up a few, and then start to cook up your own products or services in a different way.

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

May 14, 2009
Turning this economic ship around

Take a look at these three charts.

Bloomberg’s commodities index of indices:

Commodities, or commodity futures, are investments in the future value of things like rice, gold, oil, cattle, and other tangible goods.

Baltic Dry Index:

The Baltic Dry Index is an index of costs to ship things on cargo ships. As BDI goes up, the price to ship something goes up. Unlike most investment metrics which are based on future value, BDI measures what it costs now to ship something. BDI is important because you don’t buy shipping if you’re not moving stuff to sell.

New Jobless Claims:

This is the number of new unemployment claims, measured weekly.

All of these charts show stabilization in the economy – arresting the freefall. Is it because of sound economic policies, stimulus, or the natural course of time and the business cycle? Hard to say. Certainly anyone promoting their own interests will claim that they’re the key influencer, but I suspect it’s all of the above with an emphasis on natural market dynamics. Even the largest forest fire eventually runs out of things to burn and snuffs itself out in time.

Once the fire has passed, it’s time for the forest to regrow. Small, tentative steps at first, little sproutlings and seeds, but regrowth always happens.

I still think there’s other parts of the forest just catching fire now – commercial real estate, credit cards and last-resort consumer credit, etc. – that will burn for some time to come. That said, there is cause for optimism, however cautious. Be on the lookout for areas of regrowth that you can partake in and carefully wade in.

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

May 10, 2009
Your attention, please

Attention is incredibly scarce. Why? There are so many ways to divert it. Father Roderick Vonhogen once famously said that the Catholic Church isn’t competing with Islam or Judaism – it’s competing with ABC, CNN, YouTube, and Facebook. The same is true for you, your company, products, or services, and your industry. You are competing for the same 24 hours a day that every other form of media is competing for. The fact that you’re reading these words at all is something for which I owe you thanks because of the myriad other ways you could be spending your time and focus right now.

It used to be in the old days that the easiest way to buy attention was to trade it for money. On a large scale, you bought attention from media outlets. On a small scale, giving away your stuff for free was a great way to trade money for attention. Nowadays, things are a little more complicated. Everyone and everything is the media, which means that buying up attention in media is virtually impossible. Giving away something for free is so commonplace that consumers have grown to expect free as a cost of your doing business rather than a kindness.

So what’s left? How do you still get a consumer to spend some attention with you?

There are two parts to this mystical formula. The second we all know well – have stuff worth talking about, worth paying attention to, worth sharing. Vintage marketing advice. Sometimes that’s enough – in the rare cases when something “goes viral”, or explodes in popularity, word of mouth is enough. The catch is this – in order for people to spread it, they have to know that it exists. That brings us to the first point – how do you get someone’s attention long enough for them to become aware of your existence?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is advertising. Interruption marketing. It’s still a necessity until you reach the critical mass of consumers needed to start spreading the word, a bit like getting a campfire started. After a certain point, you just throw wood on it – your quality products or services. But in the beginning, no amount of wood thrown in a pile will ever turn into a campfire without that initial flame.

What gets that fire started? Well, you can still buy advertising. That doesn’t work as well as it used to, but it does still work if you have the budget. What if you don’t have the budget? For good or ill, social media and social networking amplify Malcolm Gladwell’s Connectors – people who are hubs of their networks with hundreds or thousands of friends, connections, and followers. Find those people, connect with them, invest your time in politely interrupting them, and if what you have is worth paying attention to, they’ll help you get the attention of their networks.

The very best connectors are the connectors in your vertical. While it’s amazing and impressive that my friend Chris Brogan has 65,000+ friends and followers on Twitter, if you’re, say, an independent musician or a freelance photographer, your work will be of interest to only a certain percentage of Chris’ audience. Better to spend your time looking for the Connectors in your vertical, your niche, who have audiences keenly interested in what you’ve got to share.

How do you find those Connectors? That’s a topic for another time…

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

April 28, 2009
Identifying and nuking Twitter spammers

Twitter’s the hot new thing, the shiny object du jour. As such, it’s also turned into a massive cesspool of spam from marketers desperate to try hawking their ineffective wares in another channel, hoping against hope that consumers on Twitter are not as smart at filtering them out as they are in other media.

Sorry, guys. This blog post is about making your life harder.

Here’s how to identify Twitter spammers in your personal timeline using Yahoo Pipes.

Go to Yahoo Pipes and start a new pipe. Grab a Fetch Feed box from Sources and drag it into the worksheet.

In the box, insert your Twitter personal timeline. It’s formatted like this:

https://username:[email protected]/statuses/friends_timeline.rss

where obviously username and password are your Twitter username and passwords.

Next, drag two filter boxes from Operators. Drag the blue circle at the bottom of the Fetch Feed to the first Filter box.

Then drag the blue circle from the bottom of the first Filter Box to the second, and from the bottom of the second to Pipe Output.

Set the first to Block All and the second to Permit Any.

In Block All, set the item title dropdown to @. This filters out @ replies, since those are likely to be a little more legitimate than pure crap tweets. Not much, but at least a little.

In the Permit Any filter, start adding text in for the tweets you know are garbage. Typically they have “make money” in them, words like “F*R*E*E” and other useless fare. Add these line by line until you have a list of the garbage.

Name, save, and run the pipe. If all goes well, you’ll see a screen with options.

From that RSS box, you can subscribe to this Yahoo Pipe in the feed reader of your choice. All of the tweets that end up in it should be crap, which you can then promptly unfollow either manually from your feed reader or automatically if you’re handy at writing against the Twitter API.

Next, grab a beer, wait a few days for the pipe to fill up, then say farewell to people using Twitter as just another dumping ground or a meager prop for their failed business model as you unfollow them.

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

April 24, 2009
Twitter following practices

I thought I’d detail some of the processes and thinking behind how I manage and maintain nearly 10,000 followers on Twitter. Before we dig into tech stuff, I have two stated goals for Twitter:

1. Focus on people who want actual conversations.

2. Eliminate people who want to advertise. I don’t care. I didn’t care when you cold called, sent junk mail, spam, Facebook group invites, and I still don’t care about your products or services on Twitter, either.

You’ll need 3 tools to maintain Twitter at maximum speed: Nambu, a tabbed web browser, and Friend or Follow. Nambu’s a Mac app, FriendOrFollow.com is a web site, and use a web browser of your choice, but it has to support tabs, and it has to support fast keyboard switching – no clicking the mouse to switch tabs. I use Camino on the Mac.

Step 1: Find people who want actual conversation. I use Twitter search, find everyone who @cspenn’s me, and follow them back.

I could use Nambu for this, but I like to use a browser because it shows me which profiles I’ve already visited in this session, saving some time.

Step 2. Fire up Nambu. Check DMs. Immediately nuke any auto-DM that’s a crap ad. One right click and they’re gone.

Step 3. Go back to the browser, load up FriendOrFollow.com. Look at people who I follow who are not following me back.

Nuke anything without a profile pic first.

Step 4. Check the remaining profiles to ensure that FriendOrFollow.com didn’t actually flag anyone by accident, then unfollow.

As you can probably tell, this process is relatively manual, so I don’t do it frequently. It’s also insanely important to be able to switch tabs in your browser using the keyboard – it’s MUCH faster and will let you follow or unfollow with great speed compared to using the mouse. Save the mouse for clicking on the follow/unfollow button.

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

April 23, 2009
Time is not money

There’s a popular expression, a cliche, that says time is money. However, time isn’t money. Why?

There is no such way to intermediate time. There is no coinage for time, no way to purchase time back that you have spent. If time were actually money, you could buy back that missed softball game or child’s first play. You can’t.

In fact, when you think about it, time isn’t money, but money is time. Money represents a store of value in classical economics terms, and value is time and energy spent on something.

Look at all of the things that function as money or precursors of money. The Pequot tribe had a certain kind of seashell called wampum. Multiple civilizations used gold and other metals as coinage. Why? Because these items were rare. Finding them, prospecting them, and refining them took time and effort.

Consider money as a store of time and energy, then. How long does it take for you to mine up a nugget of gold? Let’s say as a skilled miner that takes you two hours. How long does it take to harvest an ear of corn? For a skilled farmer, probably a few minutes at most. Thus, that nugget of gold is a time equivalent of two hours for a skilled tradesman. If you can harvest 80 ears of corn in two hours as a skilled farmer, then your corn is worth two hours of your efforts – or a nugget of gold, or whatever other store of value you choose. More important, as trades specialized over millennia of human history, it would take far longer for the miner to skill up his corn harvesting than it would for him to simply pay for the corn itself.

Time + energy + skill = value.

This is the basis of money, the raw foundation of money. Money stores value, and value is time, energy, and skill combined.

Consider what this means for social media and new media.

What things are you investing your time in, building skill, so that you’re creating value?

When someone starts to talk about monetization, exactly what value are they placing on your time, effort, and skill? More important, what value do you place on yourself?

This, by the way, is why so many folks in social media object to monetization – not because money is bad, but because any new field inevitably has two extremes: those folks willing to value themselves for a pittance (thus devaluing everyone else) or those folks who pimp and sell at obscenely high prices far above the value they create, thus undermining the entire community’s reputation and devaluing everyone else. After a field matures and the low bidders & snake oil salesmen are washed out, a balanced perspective on value is usually achieved.

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

April 21, 2009
Learning from Wintergrasp: Marketing On The Offensive

In the World of Warcraft, there’s an epic battlezone known as Lake Wintergrasp. Players who choose to play in this part of the game join one of two teams with either the goal of defending Wintergrasp Fortress or attempting to take it over from the other team.

Without delving too deeply into the game mechanics, for the defense, you need to stop the other team and their various siege engines. Typically, you do this by shooting at them a whole bunch of times, trying to take over their siege engine factories nearby, and attacking the offensive team’s camp.

For the offense, you need to build siege engines and take over the fortress, seizing control of a relic inside.

While other players’ experiences may vary, teams on the offense seem to consistently win more often than teams on the defense, and here’s why: teams on the defensive have multiple objectives. Teams on the offensive have one objective. As a result, more often than not, teams on the defensive split their forces and lose, overwhelmed at various points by the offensive team. When the defense wins, it’s not because of overwhelming force (usually) or great strategy, but because the offensive team has committed a serious tactical error.

What does this mean for you and your marketing? Consider just how many distractions there are in marketing – a new social network to join every 10 minutes, a new meme to try and hop onto, a new shiny object that is the buzz of the moment and is forgotten in 15 minutes. Consider what you need to do to win, and where you can concentrate limited forces and resources. What’s the fastest path to victory? If you face lots of competition, in what ways will they be distracted or their forces divided, giving you an opportunity to focus, concentrate, and win? If you have to divide your forces, can you adapt quickly to changing conditions, or will you be overtaken because no one point is strong enough to hold?

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

April 15, 2009
The Right Hand Blade of Doom For Marketing

There’s a fun drill we do in the martial arts that I first learned from master instructor Bud Malmstrom. Given that you have so many choices, so many options, so many techniques, it can be tough to excel at something, especially in a system like mine which has an absurd number of exercises, drills, patterns, and skills to learn.

Bud’s drill goes something like this: for this drill, your attacker will do whatever they want. You as the defender are only permitted to use your footwork for evasion and your right hand in a shuto (hand blade/hand sword) form to protect yourself.

The goal, of course, is to develop mental flexibility and agility.

How many different ways can I use this one technique, this one form?
How unconventional can I be with a very limited toolset?
How, under limiting conditions, can I still win?

Think about this in marketing terms. How many different marketing books do you have on your book shelf? How many different tools – SEO, direct mail, cold calling, advertisements, pay per click, email, autoresponders, landing pages, billboards, transit ads, television, radio, podcasting, Twitter, and so on – do you have at your disposal? How competent are you in the use of any one of those tools?

Try this the next time you’re thinking about your marketing efforts. If you were limited to just one tool under very tight circumstances, how well could you use that tool? If you work for the kind of company that has multiple products and product lines, find the red headed stepchild in that line and practice your marketing tool skills on it. See how fast you can make that left handed smoke shifting widget’s sales grow through only the use of podcasting or only the use of email marketing. Test yourself out as a marketer and see which tools are sharpest in your toolbox!

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

April 14, 2009
Waiting For Wintergrasp: The Moment to Lead

Waiting For Wintergrasp: The Moment to Lead

People need leaders. They want leaders. They hunger for leaders. In some cases, people are so desperate as a crowd for leadership that they’ll follow and even swear loyalty to terrible leaders, as long as they don’t have to take up the mantle of leadership themselves. Nowhere is this more apparent to thousands of people every day than in Lake Wintergrasp.

What’s this? If you don’t play World of Warcraft, it’s a really big competition between two teams to take control of a battlefield. Without getting too deep into the mechanics of Wintergrasp, suffice it to say that teams are organized in groups of 40 people, and at a certain point dictated by the game, everyone goes and tries to capture the objectives of the game.

What’s interesting to me as a marketer and student of behavior is what happens before Wintergrasp starts. See, the teams aren’t automatically formed by the game. Teams have to be organized by individual players, and that’s where things get interesting. Very, very few people want to take leadership of a team, even when there are no significant adverse consequences to doing so. Many people simply wait around, asking aloud to be invited to any open team if there is one.

Imagine what this is like – dozens, sometimes hundreds of people milling around looking for leadership. The instant someone forms a team and takes leadership, the entire crowd galvanizes. The team forms up and you’re ready to go within minutes.

What makes this important is that this is a human behavior. Forget for a moment that this occurs in a fantasy role playing game that’s traditionally (and incorrectly) associated with high school kinds and nerds living in parents’ basements. This need for leadership and simultaneous unwillingness to step into a leadership role is an opportunity for you, if you can overcome your own hesitation, to establish yourself in any industry, niche, market, or space.

People want leaders.

Is your marketspace crying out for someone, anyone, to take a leadership role and do something as simple as organize a team to accomplish a deed?

Are you looking to build your own personal brand or gain experience? Look for opportunities and marketspaces where people are just milling around, waiting for a leader, and step up. Take on the responsibility of providing leadership, and gain back what you give and more.

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

April 10, 2009
SMJBOS Homework: Grilled something or other

If you watched my session from Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Jungle Boston, you know that I gave everyone some homework – your favorite grilling item, sent to Justin Levy. While I have lots, I thought I’d share something slightly different. Here’s how I grill, period.

First, I use charcoal because I like fire and lighter fluid. I know lots of people despise lighter fluid as they say it gives food a bad taste. Honestly, I can’t tell the difference on a mature charcoal fire where the fire has had a chance to burn everything off.

What’s different about my fire is that I use random deadfall in my fire as well as briquets. I find that throwing lots of old wood pieces and chips makes for a plenty hot fire with rapidity, and the fireball on ignition is well worth the price of admission alone.

Take a bunch of random wood pieces and build a pile of wood in your grill.

Make sure there is PLENTY of air space between the wood pieces.

Then put charcoal on top.

Douse with lots of lighter fluid or the accelerant of your choice, then stand well, well back when you light it. Did I mention this part can be dangerous? Lighter fluid plus matches is a dangerous combo.

In about 20 minutes, you have charcoal that’s hot plus plenty of wood coals as well. You’re ready to grill, assuming you weren’t caught in the firestorm and hospitalized.

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

April 6, 2009

More posts

Pin It on Pinterest