Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

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Bring the player, not the class

There’s a peculiar expression that accompanies World of Warcraft that needs to make its way into social media, and quickly:

Bring the player, not the class.

In Warcraft, there are different classes of players – mages, paladins, shamans, etc. Each of the classes has different traits suited to different kinds of players and playing styles. One of the most common sources of arguments, debate, and complaints is X class is better than Y class, to no one’s surprise.

Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind World of Warcraft, has said that it designs the game to be as balanced as possible, so that no one class is better or worse. The expression they use is bring the player, not the class, especially with regard to difficult challenges in the game.

Their belief is that a skilled player will make the most of the classes that suit their personal style of play best, and that a class in the hands of one player may be outstanding, while a different class may be a disaster. I know from personal experience that playing a frost mage suits my temperament and style best, and being a Death Knight tank, not so much.

Bring the player, not the class is the advice Blizzard gives to its guilds and groups in the game – find the best players you can, and class will sort itself out. Bring the best players you can, and you’ll defeat the enemies you’re to face.

So what does this have to do with social media?

Bring the producer, not the medium.

Which is better, Twitter or Friendfeed? Which is better, video or audio, blogging or podcasting, YouTube or Qik…

You get where I’m going. Your content will dictate which forms of social media you participate in (some content is better in one format than another), but what will govern your success is YOU, the producer. How skilled you are and what you’re most comfortable with will do more to contribute to your success than any given platform by itself.

Just as a Warcraft player’s spec (Blood vs. Unholy vs. Frost vs….) doesn’t make that player any better or worse, neither should your choice of medium make you any better or worse a media producer. Find the forms of media that best suit your style, content, and what you want to communicate. Try as many as you practically can to see what’s available, but recognize that some will feel better to you. Do those. Even if they’re currently unfashionable (podcasting was so 2005? Tell that to the listeners of the Financial Aid Podcast or Marketing Over Coffee) if they fit you best, you’ll create and produce media best in them.

More important, invest time in making yourself a better producer! Forget about being a social media expert. They’re a dime a dozen, if that (hey, it’s the Great Recession, everything’s on sale). Be an expert in a subject or field and use the best form of media available to communicate it, old or new, social or broadcast.

One of the best pieces of advice ever given to me was from my Edvisors CEO, Joe Cronin, who years ago said, don’t be a podcasting expert, be a financial aid expert who has a podcast. In terms of doing the most good and helping the most people, that advice has paid off handsomely. I know plenty of social media experts, gurus, wizards, whatever, and none of them have helped a family put their kid through college.

Bring the player, not the class is sage advice to guilds and raids in World of Warcraft.

Bring the producer, not the medium is the pathway to long-term success in media, social or otherwise.

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March 5, 2009
Stop whatever you're doing and watch this video

This is mandatory, absolutely must see material.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

I only wished the video went further. It ends at the credit crisis and failing investments – and the chain reaction beyond that is choking of credit to businesses, which puts some out of business, which creates joblessness, which creates more mortgages that can’t be paid, which creates…

Hat tip to Garr Reynolds for this one.

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March 1, 2009
Neighborhood watch 2.0

How many of you know what a neighborhood watch is? It’s an old school idea – neighbors keep an eye out in the neighborhood for suspicious activity and report it to the police. It’s especially effective when neighbors know each other and are happy to look out for each others’ interests.

How many people know their physical neighbors well?

You should.

If you don’t, make friends, and soon. Why? Simple.

The economy is spawning more crime. The numbers estimated by the University of Arizona suggest that a 1% increase in unemployment correlates to a 1% increase in crime rates. Crimes begin casually, with opportunity crimes, and worsen from there if unchecked.

Kicking it up a notch

A basic neighborhood watch is effective, but now add in the capabilities of social media, of new media to the mix. If you have several social media aware folks in your neighborhood (or you can train them easily), when you meet with your police department’s crime prevention officer (CPO, the officer assigned to instruct Neighborhood Watch programs), introduce him or her to Twitter. Get your neighbors who are Twitter-savvy to create a hashtag for your neighborhood like #54&Pine or #7Gables and have members report mildly suspicious activity there (“scruffy kid, about 5’6″ with black backpack walking around block 5th time this hour”). Show your CPO how to use Twitter Search so that real-time updates can be casually viewed at the station.

Got a camera on your data-enabled mobile phone? You have an awesome crime deterrence tool. Use services like TwitPic to take instant shots of suspicious activity and upload them immediately to your neighborhood watch Twitterstream.

Own a digital camera with a decent lens and low light ability? Take photos and load them up to sites like Flickr so that your neighbors and CPO can inspect in detail things that you find suspicious.

Know someone talented at using Google Docs and Google Maps? Help your local police department geographically map crimes in your area and look for trends using freely available Google tools.

What other new media/social media tools can you think of to empower ordinary citizens to help local law enforcement prevent crime?

Note: in no way do I advocate unnecessarily putting yourself in harm’s way or taking the law into your own hands. As with all community-based initiatives, the idea is to work WITH your local police, not compete with them.

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February 26, 2009
Stop staring at the pizza!

A friend was at a recent business meeting where product marketers were going over color palettes, organization of their stores, and a bunch of other details, all important. What was critically missing, however, was their marketing. When asked, they said that they were doing marketing, that all of the operational details they were discussing was marketing.

Wrong.

They’re staring at a pizza. See, a pizza can be good. It can be tasty, with crispy crust and sweet but salty tomato sauce, hot cheese, in exactly the right proportions, made just the right way to be delicious and awesome.

That pizza will never, ever sell itself. At a minimum, the pizza has to be delivered or received somehow. That’s service. Given how much competition there is for pizza joints, even if it’s the best pizza in the world, the parlor will at least initially need to let people know about it, invite them to try it, tell them of its existence. That’s marketing.

Where my friend’s colleagues went wrong was in mistaking the product for the marketing and service. They thought that making a quality product was marketing and wondered why their stores were empty day after day after day. “But we have an awesome product!” “Maybe we need a new color palette for the inside of the store!” “Maybe we should move the register closer to the door!”

They’re rearranging toppings on the pizza instead of figuring out how to get people in front of the pizza to at least take a bite. They’re staring at the pizza, wondering why no one is buying it and eating it.

Are you mistaking product for service and marketing? Are you staring at the pizza instead of sharing it? Ask yourself these questions in the next marketing meeting you sit in, and if you’re in that situation, get people in your company to stop staring and start sharing your pizza.

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February 18, 2009
Association is not recommendation

Guido Stein asked a terrific question in this Twitter conversation:

cspenn: @chrisbrogan I am stingy with my recommendations, but when I recommend something, I *mean* it. High bar, but kudos if you reach it.
GuidoS: @cspenn how can you be stingy about recommendations but not about people in your network? Isn’t association partly an endorsement?

To some, perhaps. In the slightly warped perspective of the ninja, association isn’t recommendation. Association is information. If you look at the folks who follow me on Twitter, who are friends on Facebook, who are contacts on LinkedIn, you’ll find an enormous variety of folks, from Asian cooks to college students, from presidents and CEOs to exotic dancers, from independent musicians to search engine optimization wizards. All of these people that are in my network are folks I ‘associate’ with, but more importantly, each of them has unique perspectives and information that I find helpful.

There’s an old ninja expression relating literally to seeing in the dark – the lower you go, the more you can see. Try it at night sometime. It’s a metaphor as well – the closer to the ground, to the real people doing real stuff, you can get, the more you can see. It’s easy from a financial or economics perspective to look at macro stuff like GDP, the Dow Jones, etc. but if you want some real insight, you need to put boots on the ground and see what’s really happening. You can only do that through association, through making lots of acquaintances across the spectrum of people out there.

Recommendation is different – recommendation to me means that I have experience with some aspect of the person, product, or service, and when I recommend something, I confer a bit of whatever trust you have in me to that person, place, or thing. In this crazy world we live in, trust is exceedingly scarce, exceedingly rare, and something that you should absolutely be stingy with.

Associate with lots of people. Associate to learn, to grow, to share your experiences. Recommend only when you want to confer trust, because if you blow it on a recommendation, you betray that trust a little, and as everyone from Presidents to CEOs to the broken hearted know or are finding out, trust is very, very hard to recover.

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February 12, 2009
A different stimulus idea that might work

Jobs are what matter most. Here’s a stimulus idea to send to Washington.

Create a $100,000 loan grant run through the federal department of your choice, backed by the Treasury.$

Businesses of any size may apply for and receive a100,000, one year loan at the Federal Funds Rate. If a business then spends that loan funding solely on employment (verified by new payroll taxes and W-2 data from the IRS), at the end of one year, the loan is forgiven, essentially giving the business a free employee or three for a year.

Conditions: payroll taxes and W-2 data should verify that the business spent the equivalent of $100,000 solely on employing new hires. Using data the government collects anyway, controls should be able to easily verify that these are new hires and not existing employees. Don’t spend it correctly? IRS detects a little hanky panky? Interest capitalizes and the loan enters repayment immediately.

Why a stimulus idea like this? Rather than attempt to plow money into specific industries, this lets businesses hire or rehire based on what that specific business needs to grow. The Student Loan Network might need a junior web developer but the Advance Guard might need an admin. By giving businesses the discretion to hire who they need, the market can get the talent actually required, rather than decided by government fiat.

This kind of stimulus will, by design, disproportionately benefit small businesses. Because they’re more agile, this will help them grow faster. Because it’s small business, the ability to bring unemployed citizens in for retraining will work better – after all, you’ll learn the craft of baking bread faster at a small family bakery than you will at Omni Consumer Products Grain Division. (though certainly they can apply and get the same loan)

What’s the cost? The IRS estimates roughly 30 million small businesses exist in the US. Guess what? This is a three trillion dollar stimulus. Considering some of what’s being flung around Wall Street and DC, that’s in the ballpark of other proposals. What makes this one different? If 10% of businesses get the loan and start hiring, the 3 million job deficit goes away immediately, rather than waiting for government funding to flow through states, cities, and banks.

What’s your stimulus idea?

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February 11, 2009
Micro?

A serious question in a bit. First, consider:

Micro-famous.
Micro-blogging.
Micro-finance.
Micro-marketing.

Are we so desperate to feel any sense of importance that we’ll attach the word micro to anything just so that the definition includes us? (by the way, the same applies to new and social)

No disrespect to the creators of the terms, but it seems that we attach micro, social, or new to anything that we can’t otherwise measure up to.

Not famous? Micro-famous!
Too lazy to blog? Micro-blog!
Can’t get a loan? Micro-finance!
Don’t have the juice for large scale marketing? Micro-market!

What do you think?

inspired by the famous Chris Brogan.

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February 10, 2009
Why marketers don't understand the Amazon Kindle (or Kindle 2)

I’ve read and heard a lot of buzz about Amazon’s Kindle and Kindle 2 lately. Of the folks who are not wild about the device, the main criticism is that it’s not a book. It lacks the real world charm of books – the feel of the paper, the smell of the book, etc. You’re right – the Kindle is not a book, and that’s the whole point.

A quick story. Last year, I was flying back from Tampa on a business trip and sat next to Grandma Rosenblum, a wonderful 80 year old great-grandmother. I was surprised, amidst the usual contents that an 80 year old carries, to see an Amazon Kindle in her purse, and asked her about it, since my stereotype of 80 year olds generally doesn’t include cutting edge technology. Her response? “I love my Kindle. Everyone I know at my senior center has one. We all love that you can make the letters as big as you want. One of my friends has really bad eyes but she can read again now!”

I asked her about the other features of the Kindle – blog subscriptions, newspapers, etc. and she said she didn’t read anything like that, just books and the occasional article. Except she was wrong. She did read a couple of blogs – Huffington Post was in there, as well as mainstream news sources like the New York Times. She just didn’t call the Huffington Post a blog. It was merely, to her, a series of articles.

The Kindle 2 has even more stuff. Based on initial product description, it’ll have the 3G wireless component, but it will also have document conversion and a basic web browser. Guess what, gang? That’s not an eBook reader any more. That’s a tablet computer. Granted, you may not be working in Excel or playing Warcraft on it, but with the addition of a browser and document conversion, the Kindle is now a computer that can be used for productivity above and beyond reading stuff.

What’s the takeaway here? The Kindle 2 seems to be a workable tablet computer disguised as a book reader, rather like the iPod Touch is a workable PDA disguised as a music player. If you’re a business type, I would bet you’ll get some enhanced productivity out of the new Kindle.

If you’re a marketer, all I have to say is this: you had better be cranking out eBooks, you had better be cranking them out in Kindle-supported formats, and as a bonus, if you have the absolute trust and love of your readers, you might even get them to register their Kindle document conversion email addresses to get new eBooks from you when you have them. (did you know you can email documents to Kindle for conversion?)

Full disclosure: links to the Kindle are paid links for my employer, using Amazon’s affiliate program. Purchasing a Kindle through these links earns my employer the standard Amazon commission.

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February 10, 2009
Yes, you're in a depression

There’s no formal economic definition of a depression like there is a recession. That said, a depression is basically a really bad recession. The current environment fits that description aptly. Despite wishes to the contrary, more folks are realizing that we are in the midst of a new depression.

Wall Street Journal:

International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said the world’s advanced economies — the U.S., Western Europe and Japan — are “already in depression,” and that the IMF could slash its global growth forecasts further. The “worst cannot be ruled out,” he said.

The IMF managing director’s comments to reporters after a speech in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, represent the most dire estimate thus far of the state of the global economy by a major political figure, and were far more pessimistic than forecasts released by the IMF as recently Jan. 28.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Scotland On Sunday:

‘WE SHOULD agree as a world on a monetary and fiscal stimulus that will take the world out of r… depression.” Thus spake Gordon Brown at Prime Minister’s Questions last Wednesday, creating shock waves as far afield as Washington (“He said the D-word!”).

San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Janet Yellen:

The economy is “severely depressed,” and the U.S. faces “horrific” deficits over the long term, Yellen said in response to audience questions.

Yes, it’s a depression. The D-word. It’s okay to say it. It’s okay to admit it, because to use it brings our public discourse in alignment with reality.

Often quoted are the unemployment rates during the last depression – 25% of the workforce. During the last depression, that accounted for 11,385,000 people at the peak.

On Friday, we hit 7.6% unemployment – 11,616,000 people.

Percentage-wise, the percent of the labor force unemployed during the depression of the 1930s was much higher than today. That’s what you hear politicians say over and over again as they try to soothe anxieties of the public that are looking at a very different reality than the marbled chambers of Congress.

In terms of real families, real kids’ mouths to feed, real parents awake late into the night, we’ve just surpassed the last depression.

If we’re willing to drop false pretenses and admit in our public conversation that yes, this is a real depression, perhaps that’s the wakeup call that our political leaders need to hear. Drop your stupid partisan agendas, BOTH parties, listen to the economists who have been proven right over and over again in this climate (Nouriel Roubini, James K. Galbraith, many others), and get America moving again.

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February 9, 2009
What's all the stuff in the early morning tweet about?

More than a few people who follow me on Twitter have been asking about what all the stuff is in one particular Tweet that I do daily, more for my own benefit to see where market indicators are. Here’s your morning tweet cheat sheet.

Sample:
DJIA +146 VIX 42.28 TED 95bps 3mo LIBOR 1.17 1mo OIS 20bps MSCI +1.53% BDI -2.54% 30yr 4.85% BCF 51.39 GLD 919.90 RR 12.30

DJIA: Dow Jones Industrial Averages futures for the day, based on Bloomberg after-hours market data. Gives an idea of what the market sentiment will be at the start of trading, typically due to Asian and European market movements.

Updated: At the recommendation of Mike LaLonde, I’m throwing the S&P 500 Futures (SPX) in right after the DJIA. The S&P 500 is a measure of a broad range of companies, giving a bigger picture of market sentiment.

VIX: Chicago Board of Options Exchange Volatility Index, based on Yahoo Finance data. The VIX is considered by some to be a leading indicator of how crazy the market is, based on S&P futures. A high VIX number (above 20) indicates that something’s going on in the market.

TED Spread: The difference between Treasuries and Eurodollars, typically T-bills and LIBOR (London Inter Bank Offering Rate), as measured by Bloomberg. A big TED spread indicates banks don’t trust each other and would rather borrow from the government.

3mo LIBOR: The interest rate for 3-month LIBOR, as measured by Bloomberg. This is the rate banks charge each other in London for borrowing money and is a good non-government measure of interest rates.

1mo OIS: 1 month overnight index swap, an interest rate that measures risk and liquidity in the money market, as measured by Bloomberg. A higher OIS indicates less cash in the system as banks hoard cash. A lower OIS indicates banks are willing to lend more freely.

MSCI: A stock market index of world stocks (MSCI used to stand for Morgan Stanley Capital Int’l), as measured by Bloomberg. This is an index containing stocks from 23 countries, and tells you how the world market is doing.

BDI: Baltic Dry Index, as measured by Bloomberg. This is a daily average of the price to ship raw dry materials, and is a good current indicator of economic health for goods and services. The reason why is that it costs money to put stuff on a boat and ship it – so if BDI is low, it means producers and retailers aren’t shipping stuff and the economy is unwell. A high BDI means that people are paying real money to ship stuff.

30yr: The average 30 year fixed mortgage interest rate. Since housing is such a vital component of the economy, seeing what mortgage rates are doing is useful for figuring out how housing is likely to be doing.

Updated: At the recommendation of economist Maria Simos, I’m adding BCF and GLD.

BCF: Brent Crude Futures, as measured by Bloomberg. This is the price of barrel of Brent crude oil, which gives a sense of where energy costs will go based on the source product. Neat trick – take the price of a barrel of oil and divide by 25, and you often get very close to the retail price of a gallon of gasoline.

GLD: Gold 100 oz futures, as measured by Bloomberg. Gold is the, well, gold standard, of a third party measurement against inflation. As countries inflate or deflate their currencies, the price of gold goes up or down.

Updated again: I’m adding RR: Rough Rice futures, Chicago Board of Trade. Why? Most of the planet eats the stuff, far more than other grains. When rice prices are high, you’re talking about a global increase in prices on the consumer. i was debating corn or rice, but chose rice because it’s purely a food stock, whereas corn has additional deviations due to things like ethanol.

Any one of these indicators has economic implications, but combined, I think they’re a good quick snapshot of different parts of the economy and how things are going on a day to day basis in a broader perspective than just the stock market.

What public leading economic indicators do you think are important?

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February 5, 2009

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