Two literary pet peeves

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 29, 2009 in Rant | 25 comments

I read quite a bit of feedback and writing on a daily basis, from moderating forums to emails to blogs, and there are two word misuses that top my list of minor annoyances:

1. Ironic.

2. Tragedy.

Just as quick review, in case your mom wasn’t as diligent about English as mine was…

1. Ironic is the opposite of what was intended. For some reason, folks use it as a synonym for coincidence. As George Carlin pointed out, a diabetic getting hit by a truck is an accident. A diabetic getting hit by a sugar truck is poetic coincidence. A diabetic getting hit by an insulin truck – now that’s irony!

2. Tragedy isn’t something sorrowful or disastrous. We have words for that – sorrowful and disastrous. In its original form, tragedy is a specific calamity that’s the direct result of a character flaw, usually hubris. A death isn’t tragic unless the person brought it on themselves through a character flaw that led them to die. An airplane crash isn’t tragic unless the pilot, in his hubris, was saying in the cockpit, “I’m such a good pilot I can fly blindfolded! See? ”

Does anyone care about the misuse of these terms? Besides standup comedians (we miss you, Mr. Carlin), probably not. However, when I’m reading (particularly blogs and web sites of prospective future employees or other folks who I’m asked to evaluate), you certainly accrue bonus points if you’re using the language well.

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Fighting museum syndrome

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 26, 2009 in Jedi mind tricks, Marketing, Video | 15 comments

Ever heard of the marketing problem known as museum syndrome? Probably not since I just made that up. Museum syndrome is simply this: an individual masterpiece in an art museum is a wonder to behold. When you place a masterpiece against a wall with dozens of other masterpieces, your ability to appreciate that one piece becomes more difficult. Consumers have a finite amount of attention they can spend at any one time and place, and if you’re fortunate enough to be the recipient of that attention (fleeting thought it is), you need to help the consumer appreciate what’s in front of them.

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make – myself included – is the error of putting a buffet in front of someone who wants a snack. The sheer amount of choice can be staggering, but more importantly, every offering is diminished, no matter how good it is. Every offering is diminished because that finite amount of time and attention is divided among the number of offerings.

That’s why sites like Woot.com, for example, are incredibly popular. Instead of asking consumers for their attention at a million different products at once, Woot slaps one product up and says, here, pay attention to this only. It’s the equivalent of a museum curator locking the rest of the museum up and placing one masterpiece on a podium in the lobby with a spotlight on it only.

Marketers face this problem writ incredibly large in the digital age, when media is so available and abundant that the consumer’s attention is always being split. There’s the DVR in the living room, the iPod on your hip, the smart phone in your pocket, the endless depths of the Web on a browser near you, social media conversations flying by, books both analog and digital piled up on the nightstand – media everywhere, all begging for a slice of your attention. How, as a marketer, can you present what you’ve got in such a way that you beat museum syndrome? How, as a marketer, can you create that masterpiece experience for your product or service?

I’ve been thinking about this a great deal as I get ready to revamp the FAFSA application guide site I run, FAFSAonline.com. This topic, more than any other in the world of financial aid, is bewildering to consumers and especially to those who don’t have a good head for numbers. More students lose financial aid each year from issues and errors on the FAFSA than pretty much anything else except not bothering to apply for scholarships. So my challenge in the next few months as I get ready for the 2010 FAFSA season to start is to figure out how to beat museum syndrome in the world of financial aid.

Why? Here’s what’s at stake: if I can beat museum syndrome on this topic, it may mean that thousands of kids will go to college that in previous years would have been defeated by the FAFSA process. Big stakes, big chance to make a difference.

How will we make this happen? I’m looking around constantly for more examples of ways people have beaten museum syndrome. Woot.com is one. Another that’s been working is the way I have the homepage of the Financial Aid Podcast set up, with a single video that introduces the user to the site, focusing attention and eyeballs on the visually compelling cue of a video.

What ways are you beating museum syndrome in your marketing?

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Jonathan Zittrain's Random Acts of Kindness

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 25, 2009 in Awakening, Video | 7 comments

A great TED talk that’s worth your 18 minutes. Let it inspire you and make you laugh!

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How to calculate your social media influencer value

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 23, 2009 in Metrics, Money, New media, Social networks | 16 comments

“I would do this for free, but I make you pay so that you understand the value of what you are getting.” – Mike Lipkin via Mitch Joel

C.C. Chapman had a great podcast the other day about valuing yourself and your time as an influencer, particularly in social media. I wanted to build off his conversation by giving you a benchmark for how to calculate your value.

The monetary value of your social media influence starts with your current pay. After all, it’s the fairest price estimate of what the market is willing to pay for you. Here’s how to calculate that on an hourly basis. If you’re salaried, take the total sum of salary and benefits and divide by 2080. (52 weeks x 40 hours per week) This gives you your hourly rate. If you’re an independent contractor, self employed, or hourly worker, calculate the same way – use your 2008 taxes and expenses to judge the total cost of your self-provided health insurance, income, etc.

Once you know your hourly rate, whatever it is, you understand your current market value. If a company sends you a product for review on your blog and it takes you an hour to review it, its value had better exceed your hourly rate or you’re losing value. You’re giving away more value than you’re receiving, because theoretically, you could be working for your current employer at the same rate.

When a corporation approaches you about helping them with their campaign, you must know your hourly rate as a baseline to judge whether or not something is worth doing. As C.C. said in his show, sometimes you’ll work for no monetary compensation in lieu of exposure, reputation, or other non-monetary currencies. That’s fine. You don’t have to charge your friends, but you must know the value of what you are giving them, especially if they’re representing a company in their request. For example, if Scott Monty asked me to put up a blog post about an automobile, he may know me as a friend, but he’s asking on behalf of a commercial account, and whatever comes with the request had better be valued at my hourly rate or I’m losing value.

Think about what value your personal web site provides. Check out similar sites with similar PageRanks, traffic, and reputation, especially commercial sites, and determine what an ad costs to place on those sites. If a commercial entity comes to you and asks you to display a badge on your blog, know what they’d pay on other similar sites (use Google Ad Planner and Compete.com, for example) and judge whether you’re getting that value from the company in exchange for your efforts.

The reason we have so much trouble with social media ROI begins with not having any idea what our value is. Use some of the points in this post to start assessing your own value, and you’ll have the beginnings of understanding what the ROI of your social media influence is.

How much money are you leaving behind?

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The impossibility of bottling success

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 22, 2009 in Awakening, Ninjutsu | 11 comments

Ever see someone try to copy a successful person? Not in the literal copy/paste sense, but in the “I’m going to be just like him/her!” I can’t begin to enumerate the number of times that I’ve seen this, in business, in martial arts, in gaming, in everything. I read Twitter and see people aspiring to be just like Robert Scoble or Chris Brogan or Steve Rubel. I go to martial arts seminars and see people aspiring to be just like Masaaki Hatsumi or Stephen K. Hayes. I listen to chatter in World of Warcraft where hundreds of people daily talk about joining the top raiding guilds like Ensidia, Premonition, Halcyon, and so forth.

None of these people will succeed. Not one of them.

Why can’t you copy these people? Why can’t you achieve the same success they have if you do the same things they do, or use the same gear they do?

You’re not them. That’s why.

So what if you want to achieve their levels of success? How do you do that if you can’t be them? You have to decide instead to model their outcomes. Here’s an example. Instead of saying that I want to be just like Stephen K. Hayes in martial skill, it’s more productive for me to say that I want to achieve the same outcomes as him on both a macro and micro scale. I’ll look not necessarily just at what he does in a technique to make it work, but also at what the outcomes are on his training partner – loss of balance, inability to counterattack, a fall at a certain angle.

What’s the difference? By focusing on outcomes, I know what capabilities and skills I have that can generate those same or similar outcomes. See, I don’t have Stephen K. Hayes’ skills or abilities, so for me to just try to mimic and copy him will only result in failures for me, or sporadic successes at best. By focusing on the results I want to copy, I have a better chance of making them happen because I know what my capabilities are with my own skills and abilities, and I know what combinations of my skills and abilities can create those outcomes.

For example, Stephen K. Hayes may be able to unbalance someone simply by virtue of his position relative to them. My level of skill in positioning isn’t nearly as good, but I know I can achieve a similar effect by punching someone in the face in a certain way. The techniques and minutiae are different, but the outcome – a person falling backwards in a certain direction – is the same, and if the technique’s success is contingent on that person falling backwards just so, we’ll both achieve success. Mine requires more compensation for skills I don’t yet have, but the outcome is the same. The success is the same.

It’s important to keep in mind that some results I won’t be able to get to with my current skill set, no matter what, in the same way that my general understanding of physics will not, no matter how creative I am with my skills, get me to a point where I can create a particle accelerator in my backyard next week. I can, however, figure out what results are part of the pathway to that end result that are within reach now and start working on those.

Think about this in your own quest for success, and when you encounter a roadblock, rather than try to merely copy the person who has achieved the success you want, look at their outcomes and which outcomes you can achieve with your own tools, abilities, skills, networks, and power.

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