Your attention, please
Attention is incredibly scarce. Why? There are so many ways to divert it. Father Roderick Vonhogen once famously said that the Catholic Church isn’t competing with Islam or Judaism – it’s competing with ABC, CNN, YouTube, and Facebook. The same is true for you, your company, products, or services, and your industry. You are competing for the same 24 hours a day that every other form of media is competing for. The fact that you’re reading these words at all is something for which I owe you thanks because of the myriad other ways you could be spending your time and focus right now.
It used to be in the old days that the easiest way to buy attention was to trade it for money. On a large scale, you bought attention from media outlets. On a small scale, giving away your stuff for free was a great way to trade money for attention. Nowadays, things are a little more complicated. Everyone and everything is the media, which means that buying up attention in media is virtually impossible. Giving away something for free is so commonplace that consumers have grown to expect free as a cost of your doing business rather than a kindness.
So what’s left? How do you still get a consumer to spend some attention with you?
There are two parts to this mystical formula. The second we all know well – have stuff worth talking about, worth paying attention to, worth sharing. Vintage marketing advice. Sometimes that’s enough – in the rare cases when something “goes viral”, or explodes in popularity, word of mouth is enough. The catch is this – in order for people to spread it, they have to know that it exists. That brings us to the first point – how do you get someone’s attention long enough for them to become aware of your existence?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is advertising. Interruption marketing. It’s still a necessity until you reach the critical mass of consumers needed to start spreading the word, a bit like getting a campfire started. After a certain point, you just throw wood on it – your quality products or services. But in the beginning, no amount of wood thrown in a pile will ever turn into a campfire without that initial flame.
What gets that fire started? Well, you can still buy advertising. That doesn’t work as well as it used to, but it does still work if you have the budget. What if you don’t have the budget? For good or ill, social media and social networking amplify Malcolm Gladwell’s Connectors – people who are hubs of their networks with hundreds or thousands of friends, connections, and followers. Find those people, connect with them, invest your time in politely interrupting them, and if what you have is worth paying attention to, they’ll help you get the attention of their networks.
The very best connectors are the connectors in your vertical. While it’s amazing and impressive that my friend Chris Brogan has 65,000+ friends and followers on Twitter, if you’re, say, an independent musician or a freelance photographer, your work will be of interest to only a certain percentage of Chris’ audience. Better to spend your time looking for the Connectors in your vertical, your niche, who have audiences keenly interested in what you’ve got to share.
How do you find those Connectors? That’s a topic for another time…
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Identifying and nuking Twitter spammers
Twitter’s the hot new thing, the shiny object du jour. As such, it’s also turned into a massive cesspool of spam from marketers desperate to try hawking their ineffective wares in another channel, hoping against hope that consumers on Twitter are not as smart at filtering them out as they are in other media.
Sorry, guys. This blog post is about making your life harder.
Here’s how to identify Twitter spammers in your personal timeline using Yahoo Pipes.
Go to Yahoo Pipes and start a new pipe. Grab a Fetch Feed box from Sources and drag it into the worksheet.
In the box, insert your Twitter personal timeline. It’s formatted like this:
http://username:[email protected]/statuses/friends_timeline.rss
where obviously username and password are your Twitter username and passwords.
Next, drag two filter boxes from Operators. Drag the blue circle at the bottom of the Fetch Feed to the first Filter box.
Then drag the blue circle from the bottom of the first Filter Box to the second, and from the bottom of the second to Pipe Output.
Set the first to Block All and the second to Permit Any.
In Block All, set the item title dropdown to @. This filters out @ replies, since those are likely to be a little more legitimate than pure crap tweets. Not much, but at least a little.
In the Permit Any filter, start adding text in for the tweets you know are garbage. Typically they have “make money” in them, words like “F*R*E*E” and other useless fare. Add these line by line until you have a list of the garbage.
Name, save, and run the pipe. If all goes well, you’ll see a screen with options.
From that RSS box, you can subscribe to this Yahoo Pipe in the feed reader of your choice. All of the tweets that end up in it should be crap, which you can then promptly unfollow either manually from your feed reader or automatically if you’re handy at writing against the Twitter API.
Next, grab a beer, wait a few days for the pipe to fill up, then say farewell to people using Twitter as just another dumping ground or a meager prop for their failed business model as you unfollow them.
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Twitter following practices
I thought I’d detail some of the processes and thinking behind how I manage and maintain nearly 10,000 followers on Twitter. Before we dig into tech stuff, I have two stated goals for Twitter:
1. Focus on people who want actual conversations.
2. Eliminate people who want to advertise. I don’t care. I didn’t care when you cold called, sent junk mail, spam, Facebook group invites, and I still don’t care about your products or services on Twitter, either.
You’ll need 3 tools to maintain Twitter at maximum speed: Nambu, a tabbed web browser, and Friend or Follow. Nambu’s a Mac app, FriendOrFollow.com is a web site, and use a web browser of your choice, but it has to support tabs, and it has to support fast keyboard switching – no clicking the mouse to switch tabs. I use Camino on the Mac.
Step 1: Find people who want actual conversation. I use Twitter search, find everyone who @cspenn’s me, and follow them back.
I could use Nambu for this, but I like to use a browser because it shows me which profiles I’ve already visited in this session, saving some time.
Step 2. Fire up Nambu. Check DMs. Immediately nuke any auto-DM that’s a crap ad. One right click and they’re gone.
Step 3. Go back to the browser, load up FriendOrFollow.com. Look at people who I follow who are not following me back.
Nuke anything without a profile pic first.
Step 4. Check the remaining profiles to ensure that FriendOrFollow.com didn’t actually flag anyone by accident, then unfollow.
As you can probably tell, this process is relatively manual, so I don’t do it frequently. It’s also insanely important to be able to switch tabs in your browser using the keyboard – it’s MUCH faster and will let you follow or unfollow with great speed compared to using the mouse. Save the mouse for clicking on the follow/unfollow button.
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Time is not money
There’s a popular expression, a cliche, that says time is money. However, time isn’t money. Why?
There is no such way to intermediate time. There is no coinage for time, no way to purchase time back that you have spent. If time were actually money, you could buy back that missed softball game or child’s first play. You can’t.
In fact, when you think about it, time isn’t money, but money is time. Money represents a store of value in classical economics terms, and value is time and energy spent on something.
Look at all of the things that function as money or precursors of money. The Pequot tribe had a certain kind of seashell called wampum. Multiple civilizations used gold and other metals as coinage. Why? Because these items were rare. Finding them, prospecting them, and refining them took time and effort.
Consider money as a store of time and energy, then. How long does it take for you to mine up a nugget of gold? Let’s say as a skilled miner that takes you two hours. How long does it take to harvest an ear of corn? For a skilled farmer, probably a few minutes at most. Thus, that nugget of gold is a time equivalent of two hours for a skilled tradesman. If you can harvest 80 ears of corn in two hours as a skilled farmer, then your corn is worth two hours of your efforts – or a nugget of gold, or whatever other store of value you choose. More important, as trades specialized over millennia of human history, it would take far longer for the miner to skill up his corn harvesting than it would for him to simply pay for the corn itself.
Time + energy + skill = value.
This is the basis of money, the raw foundation of money. Money stores value, and value is time, energy, and skill combined.
Consider what this means for social media and new media.
What things are you investing your time in, building skill, so that you’re creating value?
When someone starts to talk about monetization, exactly what value are they placing on your time, effort, and skill? More important, what value do you place on yourself?
This, by the way, is why so many folks in social media object to monetization – not because money is bad, but because any new field inevitably has two extremes: those folks willing to value themselves for a pittance (thus devaluing everyone else) or those folks who pimp and sell at obscenely high prices far above the value they create, thus undermining the entire community’s reputation and devaluing everyone else. After a field matures and the low bidders & snake oil salesmen are washed out, a balanced perspective on value is usually achieved.
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Learning from Wintergrasp: Marketing On The Offensive
In the World of Warcraft, there’s an epic battlezone known as Lake Wintergrasp. Players who choose to play in this part of the game join one of two teams with either the goal of defending Wintergrasp Fortress or attempting to take it over from the other team.
Without delving too deeply into the game mechanics, for the defense, you need to stop the other team and their various siege engines. Typically, you do this by shooting at them a whole bunch of times, trying to take over their siege engine factories nearby, and attacking the offensive team’s camp.
For the offense, you need to build siege engines and take over the fortress, seizing control of a relic inside.
While other players’ experiences may vary, teams on the offense seem to consistently win more often than teams on the defense, and here’s why: teams on the defensive have multiple objectives. Teams on the offensive have one objective. As a result, more often than not, teams on the defensive split their forces and lose, overwhelmed at various points by the offensive team. When the defense wins, it’s not because of overwhelming force (usually) or great strategy, but because the offensive team has committed a serious tactical error.
What does this mean for you and your marketing? Consider just how many distractions there are in marketing – a new social network to join every 10 minutes, a new meme to try and hop onto, a new shiny object that is the buzz of the moment and is forgotten in 15 minutes. Consider what you need to do to win, and where you can concentrate limited forces and resources. What’s the fastest path to victory? If you face lots of competition, in what ways will they be distracted or their forces divided, giving you an opportunity to focus, concentrate, and win? If you have to divide your forces, can you adapt quickly to changing conditions, or will you be overtaken because no one point is strong enough to hold?
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