Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

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What I'll Be Sharing at PodCamp DC

What I’ll Be Sharing at PodCamp DC

A few people have wondered what I’ll be sharing at PodCamp DC. I’ve got two sessions blocked out, plus possibly a panel – we’ll see about the last part.

Session 1:

New Media Marketing: How New Media Powers Business. 10 AM Saturday. I’ve been working on refining this ever-evolving presentation which now includes aspects of sales, internet marketing, search engine optimization, and just about everything else, all linked to a framework that you can take home and apply to any product, service, or organization.

If you’re thinking about using blogging, podcasting, social networks, or other new media tools to promote the ideas you care about, this session is for you.

Session 2:

Power Your Personal Network with LinkedIn. 3 PM Saturday. I’ll be co-presenting with Dan Williams, another LinkedIn Power User, on how to use LinkedIn to power your networking skills. This is a session by request from a few participants who’d asked early if there was going to be something about LinkedIn. I’ll be sharing a few of my tips about using the service, what it’s good for, and how to help you build your personal brand with it, including simple but effective techniques you can start using immediately for better results.

Dan’s got even more juice to add to the discussion as the person on LinkedIn ranked #1 in the country for recommendations. He’ll talk about his LinkedIn stories and power tips as well.

Session 3:

Speed Mentoring: Promoting Your Political Ideas in Social Media. 4 PM Saturday. This is an idea based on Dan Patterson‘s PodCamp NYC panel about how social media is changing the political landscape. In this session, I’d love to put a bunch of us together and workshop either a candidate or cause’s social media efforts, showing where social media can optimize a campaign’s efforts to share and spread ideas.

It seemed funny to have a political discussion panel at PodCamp NYC and not have one in the heart of politics itself, Washington, DC.

This is not a discussion on politics itself – this is a collaboration, a brainstorming session, to help those individuals working at organizations with causes to power up their efforts. The ideas and techniques we discuss should apply equally to all parties, beliefs, and campaigns.

I’m unsure whether or not uStream or other services will be available for the distance aspect, as I don’t know what the venue’s Internet access will be like, so if you can make it in person, great!

If you plan on attending any of the sessions at PodCamp DC that I’ll be participating in, please feel free to ask questions in advance of the event itself – just leave comments here!

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April 14, 2008
Preparing for PodCamp DC with the Jeff Pulver Method
Preparing for PodCamp DC with the Jeff Pulver Method

Jeff Pulver writes a great recurring blog post about how to prepare for an upcoming conference. His method of making a conference a productive experience for you is one that is infinitely valuable, and I highly recommend adopting the framework for your own conference experiences, whether at one of Jeff’s highly recommended VON conferences or unconferences like PodCamps.

Here’s my action plan for PodCamp DC, based on Jeff’s method.

Join the community. Taken care of.

Set your goals. My goals for PodCamp DC are twofold – to share as much as I can of the stuff I’ve been working on with all of the folks in new media who want to hear about it, and to learn from folks doing important work about what they’re doing and how I and my network can help. Social media has given me a rare opportunity to be a part of a community of millions, with thousands just a click away on networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.

I especially would like to meet folks who are interested in taking their existing communities in the political and government relations realms into the new media realm. There are a lot of people in new media who can be especially helpful to your work, and I’d love to be able to connect the two worlds together a little.

Say hello. Here I am. There are a lot of ways to get in touch with me. A few include:
- LinkedIn.
- Twitter.
- Facebook.
- You can even email me right on this site.
- Leave me a voice message at 646-452-3376.
My friend Chris Brogan recommends posting a recent photo of yourself before each conference so people know what you look like. To be honest, I haven’t really changed all that much in a decade or so, so this photo is perfectly up to date.

Change my email habits. I’ll definitely be checking email less frequently, probably in the early mornings and evenings. As much as I can, I’ll try to stay in touch.

Study the map of the conference. In this case, Google Maps is the main game, as I’m staying in one spot, helping with the UnKeynote in another spot, and presenting in a third sport. Here’s my public PodCamp DC map.

Be aware of the event schedule, and be in control of your own schedule. Both will be tough, but I think there will be plenty of time for, as Jeff calls it, serendipity.

Originally, PodCamp DC was scheduled for two days, but logistics and other considerations demanded a full one day instead. As a result, I’ll have a little extra time on Sunday if folks want to get together to chat, do some informal stuff, maybe grab a cup of coffee or lunch before I fly back to Boston. If you’d like to schedule a meeting on Sunday, please hit up one of the contact links above, and I’ll do my best.

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April 14, 2008
Andrew Baron Selling Twitter Account, Database For Sale?
Andrew Baron Selling Twitter Account, Database For Sale?

Chris Brogan raised the question people should be asking about Andrew Baron’s eBay sale of his Twitter account.

What are you buying? What’s the value?

Laura Fitton said on Twitter: “you can’t sell relationships.” You can’t. But you sure as heck can sell data.

In the case of Twitter, you can’t export meaningful amounts of data from Twitter followers from Twitter directly.

If Baron put up his Facebook account, that’d be a different story, because I can extract real data from it – names, email addresses, other contact information. At that point, it’s a database, and we buy & sell databases all the time.

What would I pay for that? The going rate is about $1.50 per valid identity on the commercial markets - you can buy header files from credit bureaus with roughly the same data for about$ 1.50 a head if you’re buying in bulk. Experian, Transunion, Equifax – all of them are selling YOU already, at a cost far below what your personal worth is.

Companies are buying and selling your data all the time. I can’t give specifics, but of the companies I’ve worked for in the last decade, most of them bought customer lists at one point or another, and the sad reality is that your personal identity, information, and privacy are dirt cheap.

You are for sale.

A piece of Andrew Baron is for sale, as is his followers on Twitter.

He’s just being transparent about it.

Incidentally, if I were a current or future Rocketboom advertiser, I’d buy this account in a heartbeat and run some analytics on it. Who DMs or @s Andrew the most, about what topics, and are those people running media channels of their own that I should advertise on?

Also, you can’t export data from Twitter. But you can cross-reference data pools you already have with Twitter. A social graph of Twitter cross-referenced with your house list and other social networks will tell you quickly who participates in that account’s first level relationships. THAT has value to someone who wants to market to Andrew or his connections.
- Name? Maybe.
- Location? Fairly often.
- Friend count? Definitely.
- Follower count? Definitely.
Combine that with other data pools, and Twitter is giving me something truly usable, something that might be worth paying for.

With the right tools, if I started with a million address email list bought on the cheap from a broker, I could use social networks – especially high profile ones like Andrew’s – to cleanse my list and determine if the addresses were of value. Remember, you can’t pull any data from private or protected profiles publicly – but if you bought a high profile account, you’d gain access to those individuals who established relationships privately but are still hidden publicly. Value.

Oh yeah, and if you see a LinkedIn profile for sale, be afraid. There’s lots of usable data in there.

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April 13, 2008
Marketing Sucks

Marketing Sucks

Marketing sucks. That’s the perception that many, many consumers have about marketing, for good or ill. Here’s an example of what I mean. Richard Mondello, a high school senior in Dover Plains, New York, recently wrote on his blog:

In my opinion, marketers will always be marketers. It’s their job to manipulate you into purchasing their product or service, and this isn’t arguable.

This is depressing, mostly because Richard’s right. Decades of bad behavior, bad marketing, bad advertising, and general shortsightedness on the part of corporate marketing departments have blackened the profession’s name to the very people we want to reach.

At every opportunity for new means of communicating, bad actors work as fast as possible to piss in the pool in the hopes that they’ll be able to scrape up a few meager commissions or sales before being consigned to the bin of perpetual ignorage by consumers in that channel.

Don’t believe me? Here’s one of my favorite examples – Twitter is 18 months old and has tons of clueless marketers trying to garner attention every hour of every day. Not a single day goes by when I don’t get a follower notification from some asshat marketer whose Twitterstream is only pimpage.

How did it all go wrong? Short term thinking, short term vision. When companies, organizations, or individuals focus only on the short term, whether it’s quarterly results on the Street or whether you can get some action at the single’s bar tonight, the same desperation is created by short term thinking. That combined with a profit above all else mentality has turned marketing into the corporate equivalent of that guy in the bar who smells of equal parts aggression, fear, and desperation – and the target audience stays far, far away.

Marketing can be more than this. Marketing can be more than desperate selling or attention whoring. Marketing can be, at its ideal, the sharing of ideas, the promotion of ideas. One of my favorite quotes from Seth Godin is that marketing can kill people. Bad marketing has basically been responsible for things like genocide in Darfur or the war in Iraq because the ideas that would have led to the most favorable outcome were not marketed as well as the ideas that have led to current outcomes.

So how do we get from desperate, lonely attention whoring (buy my product! digg my article! watch my video! pay attention to me!) to the ideal McMarketing outcome – billions and billions of lives saved? It really comes down to a change in our perception of what marketing is. Look at what the American Marketing Association says marketing is:

Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.

Quick, close your eyes and try to remember that. I’d say marketing has a branding issue, wouldn’t you?

Try this:

Marketing is the sharing of ideas.

The idea that college is affordable with the right solutions.
The idea that a conference can be more than wooden panels and hotel food.
The idea that a marketing podcast can inform and entertain.
The idea that you can change your life for the better in an instant.

We need to change our own belief system about marketing from corporate pimpage to the sharing of ideas, of knowledge, of insight. If you have a product or service that is unremarkable, that is not worth sharing, either change your product or create something on top of the product that is worth sharing. That’s been the basic idea behind the Financial Aid Podcast. Student loans – especially federal student loans – are commodity products. They’re fundamentally more or less the exact same thing, give or take a few minor details. So how do you make a commodity interesting? I couldn’t.

But what I could do was create something else that was interesting – an internet radio show and new media initiative that changed how I thought about financial aid, and in turn helped others to change their ideas about financial aid. Instead of being a boring, obscure process that happened behind closed doors and in back room deals at conferences and golf courses, the Financial Aid Podcast has helped to bring at least part of the financial aid process out into the open, into the digital dialogue. It’s about sharing the ideas I’ve learned in financial aid with everyone and anyone who wants to listen and have a conversation about financial aid.

Are my ideas any good? That’s for the audience to judge, but based on the results so far – thousands of listeners, thousands of friends on Twitter, LinkedIn, and other networks, coverage in US News & World Report, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, WCVB Boston 5 – I’d say that they’re at least worth talking about to some degree.

If you’re a marketer, the very best thing you can do is to start figuring out what ideas you have that are worth sharing. Not products, not services, not pimpage, but actual ideas. If you work at a company that, frankly, has no ideas worth sharing, you either have to create them, or work for a different company.

What are your ideas worth sharing?

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April 13, 2008
I have 2 SocialThing Invites. Want one?

I have 2 SocialThing Invites. Want one?

Here’s what you must do. Get THREE people to register for PodCamp NYC, and in the “how did you hear about PodCamp NYC” section, have them put YOUR email address (munged is okay, like cspenn at gmail dot com) and the word socialthing. Example:

How did you hear about PodCamp NYC? Heard from cspenn at gmail dot com / socialthing

First two people who refer THREE signups to PodCamp NYC gets the invite.

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March 31, 2008
Why Twitter Matters : It's Your AP Newswire
Lots of debate lately about Twitter – what it is, why it matters, how to use it. I’ll throw this thought out there:

Twitter is my personal AP Newswire.

Here’s the thing. I can’t afford a Bloomberg terminal ($1,800/month) or an AP newsfeed in real time and I’m unwilling to even spend on real time stock quotes, since by and large I don’t trade in equities. However, there are LOTS of people on Twitter who either work at or have connections in the companies and industries that I follow and study.

A few examples:
- On the day of the Bear Stearns crash, a Twitterati told me about conditions at Merrill Lynch and what was the thinking there
- Jay Moonah tipped me off to Google AdWords Demographics before the post showed up in Reader
- Pick any major newsworthy crash/disaster recently, like crane collapses or aircraft issues. Twitter has it long before CNN.
- A Black Hat SEO recently disclosed a VERY cool trick for gaming Digg on Twitter. Never would have seen it otherwise.
Scoble‘s on track – it’s about who you follow that gives Twitter its value, and not who follows you. Being popular is fun, being informed is valuable.

For me, Twitter is my AP Newswire…

…I’d wager, in fact, that it’s faster than AP.

Names of some parties have been withheld for their protection, and in some cases, you won’t even find them in my public “people I follow” list.

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March 30, 2008
Snapple Antioxidant Water is a Soft Drink

A few folks have been mentioning Snapple’s new soft drink, Snapple Antioxidant Water.

“Wait, it’s water, it’s not a soft drink!” I can hear Marketing shouting.

I beg to differ.

Exhibit A: water.

Ingredients: Water.

Serving Size: 1 cup (240ml)
Servings per Container: About 2.5
Calories per serving: 0
Total calories per bottle: 0
Total Fat: 0g % Daily Value (Fat): 0%
Sodium: 0 mg
% Daily Value (Sodium): 0%
Total Carb: 0 g
% Daily Value (Total Carb): 0%
Sugars: 0 g
Protein: 0 g
% Daily Value (Protein): 0%
Niacin (B3): 0%
Vitamin B6: 0%
Vitamin B12: 0%
Pantothenic Acid (B5): 0%
Vitamin A: 0%
Calcium: 0%
Vitamin E: 0%
Magnesium: 0%
Zinc: 0%

Exhibit B: Snapple’s drink.

Ingredients: Purified water, sugar, potassium citrate (electrolyte), citric acid, natural flavors, fruit and vegetable juices (for color), modified corn starch, calcium lactate (electrolyte), calcium gluconate (electrolyte), magnesium lactate (electrolyte), vitamin E acetate, calcium disodium edta (to maintain freshness), grape seed extract, zinc gluconate (electrolyte), vitamin A palmitate, EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate), manganese gluconate (electrolyte).

Serving Size: 1 cup (240ml)
Servings per Container: About 2.5
Calories per serving: 50
Total calories per container: 125
Total Fat: 0g % Daily Value (Fat): 0%
Sodium: 0 mg
% Daily Value (Sodium): 0%
Total Carb: 12 g
% Daily Value (Total Carb): 4%
Sugars: 12 g
Protein: 0 g
% Daily Value (Protein): 0%
Niacin (B3): 20%
Vitamin B6: 20%
Vitamin B12: 20%
Pantothenic Acid (B5): 20%
Vitamin A: 10%
Calcium: 2%
Vitamin E: 10%
Magnesium: 2%
Zinc: 2%

Lots of stuff in Snapple’s drink that you won’t find in authentic water, including the 125 calories per bottle.

Is it a good drink? That’s opinion. I haven’t tried it, so I can’t say. Is it water? Hell no. It’s got as many calories per bottle as a 12 ounce Guinness, a small soda, a 12 ounce orange juice, and infinitely more calories than unsweetened coffee, tea, or water. If you drink 5 bottles of water, at the end of the day, you will have consumed 0 calories. If you drink 5 bottles of Snapple, at the end of the day, you will have consumed 625 calories, or a Burger King Whopper (no mayo).

What does this mean from a marketing perspective? By calling it water instead of a beverage, drink, etc. – pretty much anything that’s not water – it’s inherently misleading. People who drink it without reading the label and believe that it’s a substitute for water are in for a surprise, especially in their waistline. And Snapple’s not alone, not by any means. Sobe, I’m looking at you. Call it what it is – a soft drink. It may not be carbonated, and it may have more vitamins than a Diet Coke, but it’s still not a water substitute, and drinking it in lieu of water, if you’re thinking about health and weight control, will unpleasantly surprise you.

Updated:

I did some quick checking around. I found that another beverage, based on the marketing tactics above, can also be called antioxidant water!

Yes, it’s true – with only 160 calories per bottle, plus healthy doses of polyphenols, as many health benefits as red wine, and the antioxidant ferulic acid, here’s my antioxidant water!

Please consume antioxidant water responsibly.

Fun experiment: of all the people who drink antioxidant beverages, how many could even explain what antioxidants are?

Updated again:

Snapple’s marketing agent is going to send me some of their antioxidant water for a taste test and review. I plan on reviewing Snapple, tap water, bottled water, and beer.

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March 27, 2008
Learn to use the power of the Dark Side

Learn to use the power of the Dark Side of the Force. Listen to the best marketing podcast ever produced in a doughnut shop with my friend and co-host John Wall. In this week’s episode, it’s a Google showdown between for-profits and non-profits, and why it will make your keyword costs go through the roof.

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March 27, 2008
Scholarship Search eBook on WCVB Boston 5

Happy to say my Scholarship Search Secrets eBook was profiled on WCVB Boston 5 on the 6 o’clock news. That eBook, now in its fourth iteration, is one of the products of the Financial Aid Podcast – doing daily scholarship searches for 3 years makes you good at finding scholarships!

Original blog post and eBook download link is here.

And yes, that’s a Goodbye Planet Earth sticker on my MacBook Pro. That’s also Jacob Lewin, son of PodcastingNews.com’s Elisabeth Lewin and James Lewin.

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March 25, 2008
Easter Egg Hunt
Chris Brogan wrote:

Here’s what you do: find a “hidden gem” blog, someone who you think is writing good stuff, but who has only one or two comments per post. Write a blog post telling us just a little bit about that site, why you like it, who should become a regular reader, etc. Make sure there are TWO links in the post: one to that new site so we can find it, and one back to [chrisbrogan.com].

Actually, despite having published over 1,400 blog posts and 760+ audio podcast episodes, the vast majority of my posts on FinancialAidPodcast.com get zero – yes, zero – comments. I’ve debated for a long time why this might be. Comments are enabled, no registration required, etc. so it’s not necessarily barrier to entry. I think it might be the case that for my audience, it’s perceived as an “expert” blog and therefore audience members are reluctant to contribute, treating it more like an information source than a discussion.

The desired audience is fairly inclusive – students, parents, families, financial aid professionals, and anyone who likes:
- Free stuff
- Job hunting tips
- Personal finance
- and of course, help paying for college
So, Chris Brogan, send over the commenting hordes!

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March 23, 2008

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