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The year of the ox ahead

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 30, 2008 in Buddhism, Ninjutsu | 1 comment

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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Your marketing cooldowns

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 26, 2008 in Marketing | 3 comments

Here’s a question – what are your marketing cooldowns? This comes from a weird amalgamation of marketing, a hot shower, and World of Warcraft.

See, in World of Warcraft, especially as a spellcaster, you have spells you can cast that function like ammunition. Each spell can be fired with a mandatory wait between casts, called a cooldown. Some spells have longer cooldowns than others, meaning that you have to wait longer in between uses.

When it comes to marketing, our marketing tools have cooldowns, too. Take a look at this brief, incomplete list of marketing tools:

- Press releases
- Email promos
- SEO
- Twitter
- Blogging
- Podcasting
- Direct mail
- Cold calls

Here’s the question – how often can you use each of these tools, assuming you have reasonably good content and reasonably good products and services? If you were to send out email promotions day after day, hour after hour, you’d burn your list to the ground very quickly. If you were to send out press releases, how often could you spend $200-$600 before you hit diminishing returns?

That’s what I’d tentatively call a marketing cooldown – the time you need to let a tool rest so that you don’t suffer diminishing returns. If you’re putting together a calendar of marketing efforts as part of your planning, knowing the cooldowns on the various tools you have at your disposal would let you best determine how to allocate your resources in advance, rather than on the fly.

You’d know, for example, that your particular house list (every list varies) has a 5 business day cooldown – that if you send more frequently than that, your unsubscribe or complaint rate goes up. You’d know that your Twitter followers drop off faster if every 9 tweets is about your company vs. every 22 tweets. You’d know that SEO has diminishing returns after a point and once you get close to that limit, your efforts are best spent elsewhere.

I can’t tell you what your marketing cooldowns are, because every company, every industry, every customer database is radically different. Some house lists don’t mind 3 emails a day, like Peter Shankman’s HARO. Other lists won’t tolerate more than a quarterly update. Spend some time determining what your company’s cooldowns are, and you’ll rapidly improve your marketing effectiveness.

Bonus food for thought: as you level up in World Warcraft, meaning you become more and more powerful, more and more skilled, your cooldown times decrease. (assuming you gear properly, etc.) A level 70 spellcaster can use their spells faster and more effectively on average than a level 1 spellcaster. The same is true for your marketing efforts – the better your products and services are and the more skilled a marketer you become, the more often you can use your marketing tools to promote them, because more people will actively want to hear about how you can help them solve their problems. Once you know where you stand in terms of your tools and their cooldowns, work with the rest of your company to buff up your products and services, and you’ll find that marketing them becomes easier and easier.

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Twitter Power Guide eBook

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 26, 2008 in Books, Twitter | 3 comments

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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Make your corporate holiday card useful

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 21, 2008 in Marketing, Video | 5 comments

I can’t begin to tell you how many holiday cards, videos, photo greetings, slide shows, and more I’ve received from nearly every company I’ve done business with over the past two weeks. Many of them were tasteful and well made, a few were silly, some clever, and one or two just missed the mark.

Not one of them was useful – useful in the sense that the holiday card made my life or my work better beyond the entertainment factor. (not counting personal gifts from dedicated partners)

Here’s the thing. If you’re going to invest time and money, especially these days, in a holiday greeting that’s as well produced as many of the greetings have been, invest some time and energy into making the greeting even more powerful by making it useful. Include a link to a free eBook, audiobook, or other media that accompanies the greeting so that the recipient gets some additional value. Did you present at a conference? Share the video of your talk.

It doesn’t even have to be anything epic – a simple video like this one of popcorn is enough:

Heck, it doesn’t even have to be your own stuff – add a link in to a video from a PodCamp or your favorite TED talk of the year if you don’t have any inventory of your own handy, and just write up a personal note saying, this video made a difference in my life and work this year, and I hope it will do the same for you in the coming year.

Whatever you do for a holiday greeting, make the recipient’s life better in some way by sharing something useful with them. Their holidays may be happy, but with your shared insight, their year ahead will be better, more productive, and more powerful because of it.

Think about it this way – when you’re sending out this kind of corporate communication, do you want to be remembered as funny, snarky, witty, silly, etc. – or do you want your customers, clients, and prospects to remember you as useful, helpful, and insightful?

A very happy holiday season to you.

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Social media marketing is not cheaper

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 16, 2008 in Marketing, New media | 19 comments

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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