Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

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Re-syncing Twitter

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For fun, I logged into Twitter tonight and checked the followers page. To my great surprise, it seems as though about half of the people I thought I was following are not, so it’s an evening of re-syncing Twitter to follow friends old and new who I thought I was in sync with.

The scale of it almost makes me think that Twitter did a database rollback of some kind. Very strange.

I’m also taking the Chris Brogan philosophy of Twitter following, too. Unless you’re an obvious spambot, I’ll follow back whether or not I think you’ve got anything of value to say. This is the surest way to de-fuse the criticism that I follow some and not others (and yes, some people have actually said that!) – by devaluing my Twitterstream to near uselessness, I achieve equality of everyone’s voice. No one’s voice is greater than anyone else’s, because I can’t hear any of it. Not that I could anyway, with Twitter’s reliability being in the toilet lately.

Short summary: if you suddenly got a notice saying I was following you, this is why – re-syncing Twitter.

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June 9, 2008
Seriously, what are those guys smoking?

Reality is a harsh mistress.

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June 6, 2008
Pitches that miss the mark

I got a hilariously off topic pitch from a PR firm today to the Financial Aid Podcast.

“Financial Aid Podcast Feature Topic – New Proposal Offers Free Cell Phone Headsets To Motorists Ticketed Under New Cell Phone Ban Law”

Christopher,

Here’s some information for a timely and interesting feature topic. The release below details how one company is launching a creative way to help educate motorists about the new hands free cell phone bans being implemented in more and more states nationally.

We would be happy to arrange interviews help in any other way further. If there is someone better to send this to can you please forward this to him/her or provide me with the contact information? Thanks and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Name withheld to prevent accidentally promoting this firm

I’m not sure where to begin evisceration.

First, the journalism outlet – the Financial Aid Podcast – is an internet radio show about financial aid. Has nothing to do with driving, cars, telephony, headsets, mobile phones, or hands free cell phone legislation. This isn’t just off-topic, it’s off-industry.

Second, how did you even find out about me? Yeah, I’m on lists like HelpAReporter.com and such, but if you’re pitching based on that subscriber list, Shankman’s going to toast your ass.

Third, when I read the actual release out of morbid curiosity, you as a PR firm missed the point of your client’s release. It’s actually an interesting story of sorts – the company is doing some cool stuff that might be worth talking about, instead of the generic, bland copy you sent along as a cover letter to the release. You need to hire a better copywriter.

I’d be tempted to add the PR firm’s address to the PR spammers’ wiki, but honestly, I don’t want to give ANY ink to the firm, positive or negative, and I kind of actually want to keep getting their press releases, just to see what additional, wildly off-topic releases they send to me. They’ll never get published, but at least they’re good for a laugh.

Of course, if I were this PR firm’s client, I might be questioning the ROI of using this firm. Just sayin…

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June 5, 2008
Woopra!

I just got the Financial Aid Podcast approved for a beta of Woopra.

Oh. my. goodness.

This really is web analytics porn. There’s no better way to describe just how neat this is.

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June 4, 2008
Social Media and Business Ethics

Social Media and Business Ethics

Prior to my involvement in social media and new media, customers were exactly that – just customers. Rows in a database, indexed by various criteria, points of data making a beautiful line, so to speak. As an online business, my company, the Student Loan Network, never had to really deal with customers all that much, since almost all transactions were digital, almost all were automated, and almost all were without incident. Having a customer base that was a complete commodity also made business decisions relatively easy – send newsletters and notices X number of times a month, accept X percentage unsubscribe rates, calculate X percentage revenue from the clickstream.

To be perfectly candid, we never really had to think about the customer as a human being.

Sure, we said we did, just like everyone else, but if you had asked me off the top of my head to name three customers without opening a SQL command line, I’d have given you a blank look.

Social media changed all that. From the day I got my first piece of feedback as a podcaster, social media changed how I, and how the Student Loan Network, interacts with its customers. Suddenly, at the other end of the command line output, there were human beings I knew by name, and even call friends. I’ve had lunch with a few.

More importantly, when I go to write a newsletter, a blog post, or an episode of the Financial Aid Podcast, I have to consciously think about what level of quality I’m creating, about what value I’m creating, because it’s no longer just about percentage clicks from the clickstream, it’s about making sure that when Ricky, Fernando, Leah, Nolan, James, and many others get the content I create, they get some value out of it.

Sure, some days will be better than others, but I know that personally knowing customers makes a huge difference in how you approach your business. Being friends with customers radically changes how you do business, because ultimately, if you’re a person of sound ethics and morals, you don’t willfully screw your friends over. It’s the same general concept as requiring the children of elected officials to serve in the infantry of a country’s armed forces – there are real, personal consequences to every decision you make.

This is one of the many upsides of social media – the ability to transform your business into a human enterprise again, if you’re willing to be adventurous and take the risk of letting employees truly and openly communicate with customers and develop real relationships.

June 3, 2008
Food for thought on Memorial Day

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

– President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1956

Food for thought: the United States military budget is $713 billion dollars. (Slate) For every American man, woman, and child, that’s $2,376 paid out every year.

Whatever your politics, understand that this reflects our national priorities, where we put our tax dollars to work, governed by who we vote for.

Food for thought: two months’ worth of the military budget would wipe out the student loan debt of every current student in America and then some.

Four months’ worth would send every student academically eligible to attend college to school for free.

Three months’ worth would pay for the entire reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, erasing Katrina’s damage.

As we remember those who have given their lives for the country, please consider carefully who you vote for this fall, and urge every American you know to get educated about the candidates and participate by voting and staying involved in the political process after the election. Hold your elected representatives accountable by staying in communication with them, sending them email, faxes, YouTube videos, whatever it takes to ensure your voice continues to be heard about the priorities that are important to you.

“Pray for the dead. Fight like hell for the living.” – Mary “Mother” Jones

May 26, 2008
Ask, ask, ask
I’ve been looking again at MySpace, as a recent blog post detailed. One of the things I’ve been looking at is the depth of engagement. Is a friend relationship enough to market on? What is the value of a MySpace friendship?

Over the last five days, I’ve been sending out 200 messages a day or so to my MySpace friends, advertising the Financial Aid Podcast. It’s themed pretty basically:
- Thanks for being a friend of mine and of my show.
- Here’s three links to iTunes, Google Reader, and the site.
- Please subscribe.
How’s it been going?

I started with a Feedburner number of about 1,000. The show had been static around that number for a while, a couple of months at least. Today? Hit a new record – the last four out of five days.

Ask. Ask those in your network to get connected, ask them to take action, ask them to be more involved in your community efforts. If you don’t ask, you definitely won’t receive.
May 17, 2008
And this is why I'm not voting for Hillary – ever.

From CNN:

In the face of criticism from a slate of economists who say her gas tax holiday plan would be ineffective or even harmful, Hillary Clinton said she wasn’t taking stock of their opinions and emphasized that this was a short-term fix that would primarily benefit long-distance drivers.

“I’m not going to put my lot in with economists,” Clinton told George Stephanopolous on ABC’s ‘This Week’ after he asked her to name a single economist supporting her plan.

Because you wouldn’t want to listen to folks who actually know what they’re doing when it comes to money, right?

Idiocy.

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May 5, 2008
Power Calendaring with iCal, Google Calendar, and Sync

My calendar grows increasingly crazy as the various ventures I work with continue to gain popularity, from the Student Loan Network and the Financial Aid Podcast to Marketing Over Coffee and PodCamp. Recently, I found myself having to sync two iPods, a phone, Google Calendar, and iCal, and in the process, a whole bunch of things got badly messed up.

Here’s how I fixed it.

First, I took Google Calendar – since that’s where I do most of my data entry – and exported the calendars there as iCal ics files. Those I saved to my desktop.

I deleted my entire Google Calendar, top to bottom.

I also reset sync on all my devices, effectively telling those devices to start from scratch the next time they started up.

After all the external points were deleted and reset, I disconnected everything and started up iCal. I imported all the different ics files and found I had a calendar about 10 times as large as I expected. Literally had half a dozen entries for every single event, which was unmanageable to say the least.

I found this terrific script called iCal Dupe Deleter (donationware). Ran it against iCal overnight (it took that long!) and when I woke up this morning, I had a clean calendar, free of duplicate events, ready for the world.

I connected all the mobile devices, synced them, then connected back to Google Calendar using Spanning Sync. Now iCal was serving as the master record, and everything else got copies of iCal. Going forward, Google Calendar will remain the data import point for new events, but iCal will still be the “golden master” if I need to do this manual re-sync process again to de-dupe and clean up.

Disclosures: Spanning Sync, by the way, is $65, just so you know. I get zilch from recommending it.

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April 30, 2008
Why Old Media Matters More Than Ever

Why Old Media Matters More Than Ever

There’s a persistent dangerous meme in new media, the idea that old media (television, radio, and newspapers) is irrelevant and dying. It’s not. In fact, if anything, old media is more relevant than ever.

Why?

In the old days – and by that I mean pre-1996 – old media was the only game in town if you wanted to reach a large audience. Newspapers and magazines covered print, television and movies brought the moving image to large audiences, and radio gave us music.

The Internet changed a lot of things, including effectively limitless channels of distribution, where every web page was a newspaper and every audio stream was a radio station. People – including myself – predicted the death of old media. As the barriers to content creation and distribution got lower, everyone could be a media producer.

Therein lies the problem.

When everyone can be a media producer, when a certain percentage of the population is producing media, it gets really hard to find media worth consuming.

A popular new media meme is that 99% of people just consume media and only 1% create it. With an estimated 1 billion people online, that’s 10 million media producers. Anyone who owns a cable television knows that it can take the better part of half an hour just to go through 900 channels, much less 10 million.

So what does this mean for old media? Instead of bouncers keeping out the masses, old media is evolving to become a content filter, finding decent stuff in new media and using its distribution networks to take the best stuff and bring it mainstream. The reason this model works is that advertisers provide an automatic filtering mechanism – if an old media outlet shows enough crap, people will stop tuning in to that show, to that channel, and advertising dollars will follow.

To keep advertisers – who pay the bills – happy, old media outlets have to find good stuff and present it. I’ve had this experience many times over the past year, as old media outlets have found the Financial Aid Podcast and featured it in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, BusinessWeek, and US News & World Report. Find good stuff and present it, and the advertisers are happy.

Those old media outlets who insist on the bouncer model are indeed headed for the pages of history. Those old media outlets who are adapting and changing will become more relevant than ever, as advertisers trust their editorial judgement – something a lot of new media producers lack, for good or ill.

Does this matter to new media producers? Absolutely. I speak from personal experience that while Google juice is great, and position #1 for a popular search result is wonderful, the traffic from the New York Times is equally great. The smartest new media producers are the ones figuring out how to successfully marry old and new media distribution outlets together to create the best of both worlds.

What’s your old media strategy?

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April 29, 2008

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