Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

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Social media as an agent of corporate change

Social media for business is unquestionably a hot topic in the current environment. Lots of folks want to know how it can help their business, make them some money, or reduce costs, and to a degree, social media can do all that. That said, a real stealth play for social media is using its shiny object status to effect change in an organization.

Consider Fizzcrank Corporation. It’s been doing okay for the past few years with traditional marketing, from brochures to trade shows, but it’s feeling a little stagnant. Products aren’t revving quite as quickly, and buyers aren’t buying Fizzcranks at the same levels they did two years ago. Bob the marketing manager has been wanting to do more field work to see what customers want, but management isn’t willing to step outside its comfort zone. What does Bob do?

Leverage the power of the shiny object! Bob brings shiny objects like Twitter, Google Reader, and Facebook to the table and says that for no money and just some time and effort, Fizzcrank Corporation can become a leader in the Fizzcrank industry. Management is bedazzled by the shiny objects and says that as long as the no money part is true, Bob can do whatever he wants with social media. The CMO gets all excited and has a press release written (that is ignored) to announce Fizzcrank Corporation’s thought leadership in the Fizzcrank vertical.

Now the real work begins – Bob sets up his listening post tools, tying Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a bunch of other networks together. (see my Twitter eBook for more details on how) He sets up monitoring for keywords, starts listening for Fizzcrank in global searches, and before long finds out that customers would really like to be able to use a Overcharged Capacitor with their Fizzcrank. Bob takes the idea back to the engineering gnomes who inform him that matching up an Overcharged Capacitor with a Fizzcrank is not only simple, but a really good idea, and Fizzcrank OC is born.

Fast forward three months. Fizzcrank Corporation now dominates the Fizzcrank industry with Fizzcrank OC. Products are selling better than ever, and Bob now talks to customers regularly. Management is happy with profits. Bob is happy to be talking to real people instead of writing press releases and billboards. Customers are happy because Fizzcrank is creating products they actually need and want.

The lesson in this fictional account is that social media can be a way to introduce a cultural change in your company, away from broadcast marketing and toward listening to what your customers are saying. If you work at a company that has not developed a culture of listening, see if you can use social media as a stealth play to begin the practice – after all, your customers likely know better than you do exactly what they want out of your products or services.

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January 13, 2009
Do you have a Twitter Plan B?

I was prepping for a presentation at College of the Holy Cross and noticed that Twitter had, at least for posting updates, ground to a halt this morning. There are a lot of folks in the social media space positioning themselves as Twitter experts, Twitter consultants, Twitter this or thats, and that’s cool.

Here’s the part I wonder about: what’s your plan B? Suppose the outage had lasted all day? All week? Suppose Twitter ran out of VC money entirely and had to shut down? What’s your plan B? Twitter isn’t like email, where you can just slap up another SMTP server and the mail keeps flowing – if Twitter goes down, everything tied to it goes down.

If you’re positioning Twitter to clients, what do you tell them Plan B is?

If Twitter is essential to your business or marketing communications (or your clients), do you have any way of establishing contact with those folks who follow you, or does your business shut down when Twitter shuts down?

Food for thought.

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January 9, 2009
Three words for 2009: Unleash your potential

Recently, my friend Chris Brogan asked what three words would define 2009’s goals and achievements. Mine come directly from one of my teachers, Stephen K. Hayes, and his Quest organization – unleash your potential. In the context of his To-Shin Do martial art, it’s about awakening a lot of things in yourself that you don’t know are there.

For me, outside of the martial arts, unleashing your potential is about tapping into the powers you already have. In a social media presentation I give at speaking events, I ask audiences to name a superhero based on this list of powers:

– Nearly omniscient
– Can influence events and things from afar
– Can see all over the world

The answer, of course, is you, with the help of Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and the myriad other utilities available to us that give us as human being unprecedented capabilities.

The catch is, even though we have the capabilities, we may not be using them. We may be leaving potential on the table, and that means leaving money, friendship, love, and many other things on the table as well. Truthfully, we all leave potential on the table every day because life is just that good – there’s so much to explore, learn, and share that we’ll never get to even a fraction of it all in one human lifetime. That said, it’s at least worth trying.

So here’s an exercise to help you unleash a little more of your potential today, right now. If you’re involved in the social media scene and you have followers/fans/friends, pick someone in your contact list/address book/follower collection that you don’t know well and take 15 minutes to learn more about them. Find out what they do for work, find out what they do for fun. This is unleashing the potential a little bit more out of your personal network, exploring resources that you may not have known were there.

Once you’ve done that exercise, start looking around for more ideas and ways to get more juice out of the potential that surrounds you, that you have free access to. What can you learn to do a little bit better today? Who can you know a little bit better today?

Unleash your potential, and by the time 2009 draws to a close, you’ll have had an amazing year no matter what.

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January 4, 2009
Simple stir fry

I twittered briefly about a fast, easy dinner I was making. Suddenly a whole bunch of people wanted to know how to make it too. Here’s how.

1. Make some spaghetti, enough for 1 person for a reasonable meal. Doesn’t matter what kind, just make sure it’s washed and cool/cold. Leftover plain spaghetti works best.

2. In a large frying pan, as large as you can have, put 1 diced onion, 5 diced stalks of celery, 4 tbsp oil, and salt to taste. Crank up the heat as high as it will go. Do NOT cover.

3. When the vegetables show signs of browning/burning a bit, pull the pan off and put the veggies in a very large bowl.

4. Put 2 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp minced garlic in a pan. Melt the butter on low heat, then crank it to get the garlic to brown.

5. Throw the pasta in. Be careful of oil splatters.

6. Toss 2 tbsp soy sauce on the pasta after you throw it in. Toss quickly, then let sit on high, high heat for 3-5 minutes or until pasta browns.

7. Take pasta off heat and throw in the bowl.

8. Scramble an egg in the pan with the residual oil.

9. Throw the egg in the bowl.

10. Stir for a minute or two, and you have a stir fry!

The secret to a good stir fry is a large pan with surface area to spare and high, high heat. Don’t be shy – fire up the afterburner.

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January 2, 2009
New Year's Resolute

A funny thing happens when a new year starts. For many of us, we craft these resolutions, these goals for the new year, as a way of making a fresh start to the year. Here’s a few tips to make those goals stick.

1. They have to be achievable.

2. They have to be measurable.

3. They have to be atomic. By this, I mean they have to have pieces and steps. It’s not enough say you want to lose 25 pounds – you want to lose a pound every week, or some granular measurement that tells you whether you’re on track or not.

But here’s the most important tip for new year’s resolutions – you have to be resolute about them, absolutely firm in your convictions about achieving them. Being resolute isn’t easy; it helps greatly to have two emotional driving forces to power it. You have to really, really, really want something that you can define in very concrete, emotional terms, and you have to really, really, really want to get away from something in the same kind of terms. Let’s look at some examples.

Bad resolution:

I want to lose weight this year.

Good resolution:

I want to lose 25 pounds this year.

Great resolution:

I want to lose 25 pounds this year at 3 pounds a month, or roughly one every couple of weeks.

Almost certainly going to happen resolution:

I want to lose 25 pounds this year at 3 pounds a month, or roughly one every couple of weeks so that I stop feeling ashamed of myself first thing in the morning in the mirror and so I can hang out with my athletic friends on Monday nights at the club and attract Samantha’s attention for a date.

See how each resolution gets more and more specific, with more and more concrete ways to measure your success and give you reasons to do it?

Do the same with your resolutions. One thing that seems to help a lot of people is to write a resolution down, perhaps on a sheet of paper or plank of wood, and carry it with you. Make sure your resolution has these emotional ties to it so that it’s there as almost a totem for when you stand the possibility of going seriously off track. If you can carry it around somehow, you should.

I wish you not only a happy new year, but a year filled with achievements and accomplishments. Thanks for being part of my life.

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January 1, 2009
The year of the ox ahead

Hat tip to Stephen K. Hayes’ Densho and the Tsubaki Jinja shrine for this stirring description of what 2009 may hold for us all:

HEISEI 21/TSUCHINOTO/USHI DOSHI/KYUSHI KASEI meaning the 21st year of the Heisei reign of current Emperor, 6th of the Ji-Kan 10 Celestial Stems Inner Aspect of Earth, Year of the Ox and a Nine Purple Fire Ki Year.

Year of the Ox, Signifies leadership, strength, power and stability. As for Kyushi Kasei it is the 9th number of the cycle of 9. It is situated in the south position which is at the top or head of the 9-star compass so it implies mental development and intelligence. 9 is the highest number compared to 1. Its color is purple which implies high rank. It is common sense that happiness visits the family who treasures life, ancestors and Kami. It is the sun above your head at noon and implies vigorous ki, especially mental ki. In terms of fortune it is the time to make a plan, to sow, to fertilize and to prepare for the future.

This has the makings of a very exciting, very promising year ahead.

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December 30, 2008
Twitter Power Guide eBook

If you’ve been hankering for some power tips to use with Twitter that go beyond the basics, be sure to check out my new Twitter Power Guide eBook over at the Financial Aid Podcast.

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December 26, 2008
Social media marketing is not cheaper

Much has been made of 2009 being a year of frugality for marketing departments and social media becoming the new darling for budget constrained companies. That said, I want to throw a contrary viewpoint out there: social media marketing is not necessarily cheaper than other forms of marketing.

What social media marketing achieves is a trade of time for cash. If you’re capital constrained, you’re going to be trading big cash spend for big time spend. If you’re okay with that, if you have the personnel resources to spare, then social media marketing is going to work well for you.

Social media requires a hefty investment of time, and even in the best of times has a squishy ROI. You can’t load up a social media marketing plan like you can an email marketing plan and say that if we post this item to Facebook or we Twitter this web page, it will result in 354 clicks to our product page and 14 purchases. You can do that with reasonable confidence with email marketing – you know what your open rates are, you know what your clicks are, and you know the revenue behind a click. There is no such formula or set of statistics for social media.

One of the catches in tough economic times is a stronger demand for ROI – making sure scarce resources are well-allocated. How do you calculate social media’s ROI?

We do know the market value of some items in social media; an inbound link from a certain class of web site carries a market value (in terms of what it’d cost to buy that link) so if you can get one for free, then that inbound link’s value can be directly attributed to social media’s ROI if the link couldn’t be obtained any other way. I know that if Chris Brogan twitters this blog post, there’s an audience of 26,566 that will briefly see it in their Twitterstream; on a CPM basis, I know that I would have to pay a certain amount for access to the same size audience. If he went a step further and asked you to link to it from your web site, then I’d have additional hard ROI I could build into my numbers.

Even with that, the ROI is tough to crunch. I wouldn’t necessarily make a business decision for social media based on those numbers, would you?

If you’re looking to get impact out of social media marketing, take a hard look at what you’re doing right now inside your company using more expensive channels and see where social media marketing might make a difference. For example, in my own work at the Student Loan Network, we’re always looking for great partners to work with; having a prominent LinkedIn network (cspenn at gmail dot com, all requests accepted!) is a great, low-cost way to find new partners to work with. Twitter has transformed from a big chat room to an honest-to-goodness source of lead generation and link building. Blogging is pure SEO food, podcasting has built the name of the company in the industry far beyond what should rationally be possible without massive ad spend, and the connections made through events like PodCamp, Podcasters Across Borders, and other conferences have driven incredible business connections.

I would argue that social media marketing isn’t cheaper per se. What I would argue is that it opens new, different doors and gives you opportunities you might not otherwise be able to generate without far more cash resources than you have access to, and therein lies its true value.

If you’re in marketing, how are you presenting why social media marketing is right for your company? Comment below! (comments are moderated but will be approved pretty fast)

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December 16, 2008
Salty is not savory but you might think otherwise

I was noticing and thinking about something earlier today when it comes to food. In a lot of foods, in our quest to cut calories and fat, we’ve substituted astonishing amounts of salt for savory, for flavor that originally came from modest amounts of fat. Take a look at bacon, for example. Salty, to be sure, but savory even more so, which means you need comparatively little to make up that savory flavor. Take the bacon out of the recipe, any recipe, and you find yourself dumping in heaps of salt.

What really brought this to mind was noticing that the sodium on a lot of foods was way higher than seemed reasonable, especially for prepared foods. When I cook meals at home, I use salt, sure, but I also use higher fat items like butter, bacon, etc. as well as other, more expensive seasonings like fresh garlic, onion, and herbs. Prepared, manufactured foods probably go the lowest cost route and just dump the salt in instead of richer, tastier, more costly ingredients.

In the coming year, as the economy continues to struggle, one of the best things in the world you can do for yourself is learn to cook reasonably well. Not gourmet, not master chef, just competent. Good enough so that when you go out for dinner, you’re more often than not disappointed, and the first thought on your mind is, “I could do this at home for half the cost and it’d taste better!” That’s when you’ve achieved competence. You’ll make tastier foods, you’ll save a ton of money, and you might even eat healthier, since 1 gram of bacon in place of 10 grams of salt is a fair trade.

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December 15, 2008
The soul of marketing

So here we are. The economy’s down, business everywhere is in trouble, prospects for the future look dim at best. What’s a marketer to do?

The thing to do is to take a moment and strip away everything in marketing that doesn’t matter. Put down for a moment ROI, analytics, metrics, conversation, social media, direct mail, campaigns, all the buzzwords that we insist upon. Put all that away because it clouds our vision.

The soul of marketing transcends all of this, all the technology, all the distractions. The soul of marketing can be boiled down into a simple three part creed. If you work for a great company, this is a formalization of what you already know.

I believe in myself.
I believe in my community and our ability to mutually succeed.
I believe in what I have to share.

I believe in myself. This is where you start. I believe in myself, I believe that I am larger, stronger, more powerful, more capable than any downturn, than any financial crisis or sagging economy, because I believe that I can make things happen in any environment, but especially in a challenging one. I believe that worry, doubt, and anxiety are largely mental limitations and I believe in my ability to go beyond my limitations.

I believe in my community and our ability to mutually succeed. I believe in my coworkers, that we share a common purpose to be successful, to do good, to help each other succeed. I believe that the more I share with my community inside and outside of my company, the more I receive in return unasked. I believe that giving is the greatest pathway to gain, and what I have, I have to share in order for everyone to prosper.

I believe in what I have to share. I believe in the company I work for and the products and services we have to offer. I believe that our goods and services legitimately improve the lives of the people who use them responsibly, and I believe that the company I work for stands behind our shared ideals. I believe that at the end of the day, our community, our customers, and our world is better for us having done business in it, and prosperity will be the natural by-product of the true value we create.

If you can wake up every day and affirm this creed truthfully to yourself, if you can look a coworker, colleague, or supervisor in the eye and feel these truths in action, then no amount of economic hardship will be able to slow you down.

If you wake up one day and you can’t affirm this creed, then you have to either change how your company does business or you have to change companies to one that does business in alignment with your ideals.

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December 9, 2008

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