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Dec 31

The Marketing Weapon of Choice for 2010: Listening

December 31, 2009 • View Comments • Online Marketing

engage
Hugh MacLeod’s delivery is a little more um, to the point than mine would be. Some people need the message spelled out in black and white.

When a company first starts using social media, it’s like watching someone’s dad play with his first video camera. They seem to share everything in an attempt to “engage” just to show some results. That’s not a judgment, mind you. Everyone has to start somewhere and it’s just counterproductive to be mean about it.

The most powerful thing you can use social media for is listening. “Engaging” your audience without fully understanding who they are and how they relate to you is not engaging at all–it is as irritating as the ad that won’t stop blinking on the blog you are reading.

It is easier than you think to make people to want and need your product. Use tools like Tweetdeck, Google Alerts, RSS, Radian6, Community Insights or ScoutLabs and listen. Track terms in your industry, follow the players who are thought leaders in your space. Understand the current issues occurring in your industry. Create a product that goes above and beyond to solve these issues while not creating lots of other issues. Then show people your product. You can use an ad, a social media guru, whatever. The medium isn’t nearly as important as the message, which is “We are solving these issues you have.”

Listening and then acting upon what people need is far more powerful than any “engaging” you can do. I predict the companies that do it best will win out in 2010.

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Dec 20

Technology that Will Fuel the Real Time Web in 2010

December 20, 2009 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

Being around so many talented professionals in the online space allows me to see what’s coming down the pike sooner than the average bear. I’ve been exposed to some projects that can only leave me optimistic for what the future has in store since working for Rackspace Hosting.

2009 was the year Iranians stood up to Ahmadinejad for all the world to see on YouTube and Twitter. 2009 also featured the first president to communicate via email lists and YouTube. We saw Sarah Palin leading the charge against him via Facebook. News like the Fort Hood shootings is regularly broken on Twitter far before it hits CNN.

Anyone who thinks social media will ever “slow down” or “go out of fashion” is simply ignoring empirical evidence to the contrary.

I often don’t talk about the technical side of this phenomenon. Since I don’t see many who do, I figured I would this time. Here are some trends that will fuel social media adoption and groundswell. If you think of others or have any additions/corrections to these, please comment.

1.) Dynamic frameworks like Tornado or Hadoop. Social networks are actually pretty hard to build. Why? If they get adopted, there is a lot of simultaneous traffic going on at once. Friendfeed decided to create a web application framework called Tornado to handle their traffic. They then were bought by Facebook, who decided to open source it for others to use on their social networking projects.

2.) Non-relational databases like Cassandra. A traditional database language like MySQL has a hard time handling all the calls back and forth from a web application. Remember the Fail Whale? That’s because when Twitter took off, there really wasn’t a lot of technology accessible to the average startup that could handle all the data going to and from their servers. As non-relational databases mature, it will be easier for social networks to handle heavier loads of data transfer at the same time.

3.) Cloud computing, cloud computing, cloud computing. If you build a solid application with a solid database, but your web hosting can’t handle the traffic, your site goes down. There is no such thing as unlimited hosting for a finite dollar amount. Cloud computing allows you to handle the spikes associated with the real time web without downtime or having to overbuy. If your site is pummeled by Twitter traffic, it will now be able to handle it.

4.) The software community builder that is the API. 2009 saw LinkedIn open its API. Facebook developers also gained ground into the walled garden that is Facebook and Twitter saw an explosion of applications utilizing their API. The easier we make it to digest social networks and use them the way we want (mobile or otherwise), the more they get used.

5.) Silos like Gnip. There is a lot of data going in and out of a social network. A single API can’t handle it, so applications can use silos to better handle all the people wanting access to data. For example, if you want to build a social network that pulls tweets about only certain topics, you would pull the data from Gnip who is pulling it from Twitter. This fuels niche social networks only looking for data about certain things.

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Dec 04

Be Bobby Fisher Instead of the One Hit Wonder in Your Marketing Campaigns

December 4, 2009 • View Comments • Online Marketing

marketing chess movesMarketing is like a chess game. You need to set things up first before you can get your big wins.

That’s why I genuinely don’t focus on numbers until numbers are needed. I focus on what the late and great Elvis would say, “Taking Care of Business.”

The question we as marketers should not always be “What can I do to get more customers or traffic?” This is an instant gratification response. It feels great to log into Analytics and see that spike, but it isn’t necessarily going to last. The question should be “What messaging should we put across to make our company more sustainable and therefore profitable in the future?”

Think about it: if I put out one message that gets me 500 customers, great. That’s 500 customers I didn’t have before. BUT, if I put out a message that gets me the passionate lead architect or designer I needed to make my product great, that person has the potential of getting me thousands if not millions of customers with a fraction of the work. My message in a small, obscure community could get me one big investor who helps save my company. Who cares if only five people saw one particular message?

Each marketing message shouldn’t be about bringing in masses. It can be used to bring in employees, investors, partners, company cheerleaders who essentially do the selling for you, or press fanboys. You’re just communicating. As in chess, a big bold move too soon can make you vulnerable to attack from your enemy. Setting up the pieces first means you are in a better position to let numbers drive themselves.

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Nov 30

Are People Just Fatigued of Your Brand?

November 30, 2009 • View Comments • Meet People in Austin

Many “social media experts” will tell you to be everywhere. Leave comments on every post pertaining to your industry. Go to every meetup. Network with every professional. They tell you you can’t sleep to network and market yourself effectively.

I know people like this and I generally feel sad for them. I sleep quite well (ten hours if you let me), hang out with friends, and actually prefer going on vacation instead of every marketing or 2.0 conference imaginable so as to “brand” myself with this. Not only is networking everywhere pretty soul-sucking, being everywhere for anyone is actually dangerous for a brand. Now why is this?

It’s the same reason why actors should be choosy about the projects they are in. It’s the reason why Starbucks is now having to disguise itself as local chains to avoid public backlash. Scholars are calling this phenomenon “brand avoidance”. We see one face or one brand so frequently in too many places. I think the less technical, teenager-esque term for this is “trying too hard”.

Saying “no” to a speaking engagement, event, or networking event does not mean you’ll disappear into obscurity forever. On the contrary, it means that when you do show up, you’ll be more interesting because you’ll have had time to actually build things and/or learn. Being a “snob” of sorts will afford you the time you need to build a brand based on your merits, not just on your connections. People will also not get as sick of you as they are as they are of the five pound box of Honey Bunches of Oats that they bought from Costco four months ago.

Think of Apple. They go to absolutely no events, never leave comments on blogs, and yet people literally plan their days around their product launches. It’s not about being everywhere–it’s about being in the right places at the right times.

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Nov 23

You Just Can’t Hide: YouTube and the Police on the BART

November 23, 2009 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

I caught this video of a BART police officer slamming a drunk man’s face into a window from Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Twitter feed:

While I understand that police work is extremely stressful and often requires officers to make life and death situations that I will rarely make in my lifetime, this looks like a scene from a bad action flick. I’m glad BART officials have decided to investigate.

This video was shot on a cell phone video camera. It goes to show you that you are never in control of your message unless you decide to operate in a complete vacuum, which will never happen.

There are so many blogs about how to use social media to promote your business. There seem to be more experts everyday. If it were up to me, there wouldn’t be social media experts. There would be “here’s how to make your customers rock with your product” experts. A social media expert isn’t going to teach your organization to care about what they do everyday.

This video is an example of someone caught in a rough situation who did the wrong thing. The BART officials could have put everyone on Twitter, taught them best practices, and this still could have happened.

Care about the people you deal with every day. Sympathize with what they are going through. Nothing will weather the storm of social media better than understanding the human condition.

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Nov 17

ANOTHER BAILOUT!?!? Check Out “WordPress for Clunkers” Now

November 17, 2009 • View Comments • Upcoming Events

Yeah, this time it’s not Congress (phew).

WordPress Consutant Bill Erickson is offering his services to one lucky website owner in his “WordPress for Clunkers” contest. WordPress isn’t just the best blogging platform on the planet–it is also a content management system capable of building anything from a brochure site to a powerful site like CNN.

If you are in need of an overhaul of your current site, submit your site here.

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Nov 08

Twitter Lists: Find Useful People to Follow in Half the Time

November 8, 2009 • View Comments • Twitter

I can honestly say I turned a lot of people onto TweetDeck. My friend Renato and I made this video back in the day about how its listing featured allowed you better organize people on Twitter. That was a big deal then.

Now I know this isn’t terribly new news, but Twitter Lists are pretty cool. Looking at who a person follows is something Robert Scoble has been doing for a while now, and now Twitter has been nice and has allowed us to all do this with half the work with categorization to boot. Essentially, they now allow us to share the groups we’d already set up in Twitter clients like Seesmic or TweetDeck, which is a huge catalyst to social networking in general.

I have created a few lists so far and will continue to create more with the intention that if you follow my lists, you will actually gain value by using Twitter. There are a lot of uses for them and until TweetDeck incorporates them (which I’ve heard it will, and Seesmic already has), I can see myself using them almost exclusively. I am also hunting for other people’s useful lists and have noticed that a lot of the people who are really savvy to certain industries are too busy to create them. I hope after time this changes (*hint hint*).

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Nov 01

Game Theory and the Use of Social Media

November 1, 2009 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

I’m reading a book called The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley. I found it on Trey Ratcliff’s book list, which is quite good and I recommend highly.

The book features a perfect study to point out when someone says “Why should I waste my time with Twitter or blogging?” In the study,

“Adam is given £100 and was told to share it with Bob. Adam must say how much he intends to give to Bob and, if Bob refuses the offer, neither will get anything at all. If Bob accepts, then he gets what Adam has offered. The logical thing for Adam to do, assuming he thinks Bob is also a rational fellow, is to offer Bob a derisory sum, say one pound, and keep the remaining £99. Bob should rationally accept this, because then he is £1 better off. If he refuses, he will get nothing.

But not only do very few people offer such a small sum when asked to act Adam’s part, even fewer accept such exiguous offers when playing Bob’s part. By far the commonest offer made by real Adams is £50. Like so many games in psychology, the purpose of the ultimatum bargaining game is to reveal how irrational we are and wonder at the fact. But Frank’s theory has little difficulty explaining this ‘irrationality’, ven finding it to be sensible. People care about fairness as well as self-interest. They do not expect to be offered such a derisory sum by someone in Adam’s position and they refuse it because irrational obstinacy is a good way of telling people so. Likewise, when playing Adam, they make a ‘fair’ offer of 50:50 to show how fair and trustworthy they are should future opportunities arise that depend on trust. Would you risk your good reputation with your friends for a lousy £50?”

Ridley continues by explaining this simple truth: when experimenters try the same exercise but each party suddenly becomes anonymous to each other, the person in the giving role more than often gives £1 to the other party.

Why is the simple acknowledgment of identity so important in fair dealings between two parties? Why are we so much more giving to those we know than we are to strangers?

Identity introduces the concept of accountability. Social media tools allow us to bring our identity and our networks’ identities to the forefront. Basically if you hose somebody, they can now call it out to your friends and followers, which they would not be able to do in the often anonymous world we used to live in.

So you can say you “don’t have time for social media”, but bear in mind that you may end up receiving £1 when you could be getting 50.

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Oct 26

Today, I became a Racker

October 26, 2009 • View Comments • Upcoming Events

rackspace-web-hosting

Today, I joined the Rackspace team. It’s been a few months because we were trying to find the right fit, but I think we finally did it. I will say that I really like everyone I’ve met so far and am very optimistic about this opportunity.

Basically, Jim Curry (@jimcurry) and Mark Collier (@sparkycollier) work their tails off getting partners to integrate with the Rackspace Cloud. And then they put the tools on this site called Rackspace Tools and hopefully people use them. They really don’t have anyone marketing the site.

qSo my job is to to be like Q from James Bond or Alfred from Batman and show you all the cool tools you can utilize with the Rackspace Cloud. There is the CloudPlug which will automagically back up your hard drives to the cloud. There is Vanilla Forums, an open source forum software with some really cool plugins. Then there are tools for easily managing or load balancing servers like CloudKick or Zeus Load Balancer.

There are so many good applications and tools that help you both manage and better utilize the cloud, and I get to show them to you. Will they include exploding cuff links or machine gun pens? Maybe not…yet.

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Sep 22

The Mark That Your Company Culture is Broken

September 22, 2009 • View Comments • Other Social Networks

I get LinkedIn invites from time to time. Although I’m not a huge user of LinkedIn, I see its merits in its ability to basically get straight to the nitty gritty of someone’s work experience. After all, I like recommending friends for jobs, but not as much as I like recommending people who are actually competent at what they do.

I notice often that employed people often do not put their company affiliations on their profiles. I can see why you might do this in Twitter or in Facebook. Those can be used for business use, but can also be used for very personable exchanges. But LinkedIn is very business oriented. If a person doesn’t list their company on their profile, there’s a good chance they are looking for another job.

If you are an executive and you think your company culture is good, do yourself a favor. Search for your employees’ LinkedIn profiles and see what they list. Look to see what they are looking for on LinkedIn. Are they looking for business development or sales opportunities, or are they looking for jobs? If your company is either a small part or no part of their profile, that person isn’t happy with you and wants to leave. That’s not the attitude you want in an employee.

HUGE CAVEAT:
That doesn’t mean you should fire that person. Why? Because simply dismissing an unhappy employee is a great way to miss an opportunity for how you can make your company better. That seems very wasteful. An honest and open dialog can fix the problem and can make both your employee and you very happy.

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