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Life after 80, or what World of Warcraft can teach you about marketing mastery

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jul 8, 2009 in Marketing, Technology | 12 comments

In World of Warcraft, there are 80 levels a character can reach. All characters start out at level 1, and progress via quests, killing creatures, and other activities through 80 levels, which can take anywhere from months to just a few weeks, depending on how dedicated a player you are.

But what happens at level 80? What happens when you reach the end, and there are no more levels to achieve?

It turns out the game changes quite a bit once you reach the top level. Instead of improving your character’s abilities through levels (and associated rewards) you change to getting better equipment for your character and improving your play skill.

See, in Warcraft, every character has dozens of abilities depending on their class. Mages can cast a whole bunch of spells. Priests can heal, shield, and resurrect other characters. Warriors can deliver a beatdown in more ways than you can count. But during the leveling process, you typically rely on a few of these skills as your bread and butter, and the rest are skills you pick up along the way but don’t really use.

Once you reach level 80, you start entering progressively harder dungeons, teaming up with a few or a few dozen other players to take down bigger and meaner creatures. This in turn requires you to dust off all those secondary skills you picked up along the way and figure out just when they’re the perfect solution to the problem at hand. Skills that you never really used on the way up to level 80, skills that you might have forgotten about completely, might make or break your ability to succeed after 80.

What does any of this have to do with marketing? Simple. Take an inventory of all the skills and abilities you have, especially skills you’ve built along your career that you don’t use a whole lot. Take an equal inventory of all the tools and technologies at your disposal that you’ve used, tried, and experimented with along your marketing journey. Now start to view them from the perspective of not just tools, but specific skills that you can use at the right time, for the right job – even if you didn’t give them a second glance as you became a marketing professional.

Last night on the Small Business Buzz Twitter chat, Question 8 was “Twitter vs. LinkedIn vs. Facebook?”. The answer is the right tool for the right job. Just as a frost mage needs to know when to pop Ice Block, Ice Barrier, and Cold Snap in Heroic Halls of Lightning to survive Loken’s Lightning Nova, so must a marketer know when Facebook is the right tool for a campaign, when Twitter makes the most sense, and when LinkedIn is exactly what’s called for. There are times when social media is exactly the wrong answer, and direct mail is the right one. As a marketing professional and as a Warcraft player, knowing which tool fits each situation best is the definition of mastery.

Many of us rushed past experimenting with a lot of our secondary skills on the way to level 80 in both Warcraft and marketing. Now that we’ve got the job, now that we’re practicing professionals, we need to see what else we’re capable of that’s sitting in our inventory, perfect solutions for the problems we have at hand.

This is what’s next for a lot of people – not another new, shiny object to play with, but mastering the tools you already have so that you can achieve exactly the results you want. One of the biggest ways you can set your own career back is to constantly chase after new tools and shiny objects rather than master the ones you’ve already got. Yes, absolutely, try new things, but devote more of your time towards perfecting the skills and tools you currently have, and you’ll find life after 80 – in Warcraft and in your career – to be incredibly rewarding.

May your marketing quests be as fruitful as your Warcraft ones.

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Patriot

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jul 4, 2009 in Awakening, Politics | 3 comments

It’s Independence Day, the day in history when the United States declared independence from the Crown of England.

It’s a day steeped in patriotism, with a little nationalism and some jingoism mixed in.

There are some very lengthy debates about what patriotism is vs. nationalism (which is widely credited for things like Nazi Germany). I’m not a philosopher, so I’ll let that debate be, save for a couple of sage perspective:

“Loyalty to my country, always. Loyalty to the government, only when it deserves it.” – Mark Twain

This to me is the essence of patriotism.

We are supposed to disagree. We are supposed to think freely, to question authority, to debate. We are supposed to have similar common goals – the good of a people, of a nation – with different approaches as to the best way of getting there. Patriotism means wanting less of things like crime, poverty, and misery, wanting more safety, prosperity, and happiness for all, even the people you disagree with most, and working with them towards these common goals. Patriotism means when someone says, “This is the way it’s always been done” having the freedom to ask, “Yes, but it is the best way?” and the courage to abandon a position when you’ve been proven wrong.

On this Independence Day, ask yourself this: how can you declare your independence from the sleepwalking state of blind loyalty to consensus? How can you find true freedom to always think for yourself?

Oh, and patriotism also means that if you disagree with this blog post, that’s more than okay too. Frankly, I’d be happy if you did.

Happy Independence Day.

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A Week With A View: July 4th

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jul 3, 2009 in Photography | 3 comments

In today’s A Week With A View, an abstract of sorts, ribbons of flags for the Fourth of July.

Flags by Hryck.

It’s interesting that so many of the July 4th holiday photos on Flickr have a ton of political commentary rabidly espousing a viewpoint with them. Independence Day at its core celebrates freedom from someone else’s tyranny. Have your viewpoint, of course, but have a willingness to find what’s right in someone else’s viewpoint as well, no matter how else you may disagree with them. The willingness to be able to see how others view the world with an understanding heart – that is freedom too.

Whatever your beliefs, I hope your holiday weekend is a happy, safe, and inspiring one.

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Will social media burn conferences to the ground?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jul 2, 2009 in Conferences, New media | 213 comments

Every conference these days has a hashtag and attendees are (unless explicitly prohibited) tweeting, live-blogging, streaming audio and video. If you wanted to, from your desk, you could attend nearly every conference in the world, and for free as opposed to paying $50-$5000 to attend. In terms of content, you’d probably get anywhere from 80% – 99% of the content presented.

If you can attend 95% of the conference virtually and not pay, or attend 100% of the conference in person and pay, which will most people rationally choose? Which would you choose?

Right now, social media, for all its glamour and buzz, is still a relatively small space compared to the world of business as a whole. As it grows, how long will it be before conference organizers have to clamp down on usage to avoid completely devaluing their conferences?

Will social media, in other words, burn conferences to the ground? Yes – and it should.

My answer as co-founder of PodCamp and co-organizer of PodCamp Boston 4 is one we’ve been researching and looking at for years. Whether live or recorded, the talking head portion of the conference is something that is part of the old conference model.

While I love speaking publicly, I also recognize that it’s not terribly valuable in and of itself. I could convey the exact same information with a video camera and a YouTube account, and in fact I’ve done this to a degree. 60+ people saw my PAB 2009 presentation live. Over 300 have seen it virtually. Did the attendees of PAB 2009 get more out of the public speaking experience than the people at their desks? No, not really.

What we’ve been exploring with PodCamp year after year is how to take the other parts of conferences and amplify them, the parts you cannot get out of a talking head presentation. Side conversations in hallways. One to one interactions. Spontaneous group discussions. These are all things that you can’t bottle, and honestly, you can’t tweet, stream, or liveblog either. There’s simply no way for you, as a new media journalist, to be at 300 mini-sessions, or 3,000 micro-presentations, and if the conversations are valuable, you’ll be too busy participating to be archiving and broadcasting – and that’s as it should be.

What I think the conference model will evolve to, and where PodCamp is leading along with the other *Camp events, is the truly interactive community brainshare. Would I pay $500 to see Seth Godin speak? Sure. Would I pay more to sit down over beer with Seth and a few other folks at a roundtable and have him look at my marketing campaign, maybe sketch out some ideas on a napkin? Heck yeah. Multiply that times many tables over many hours and I’d walk away with a literal goldmine of useful information that’s tailored to me and my business. That’s what we want to bring more of to PodCamp – fewer talking heads and more sharing brainspaces.

When you walk away from a PodCamp, I don’t want you to say “that was a great conference!”. I want you to say, “I met and learned from some awesome people at PodCamp!” because in the end, your community is your strength. The conference is just a convenient place for the community to meet.

What do you think the future of conferences will be? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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