Financial Literacy presentation at MASFAA

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Nov 13, 2009 in Economy, Money, Video | 3 comments

Here’s a recording of a financial literacy presentation I did for the Massachusetts Association of Student FInancial Aid Administrators. Please watch this with a friend or colleague present and do the exercises together for maximum benefit!

Video

Slides

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Inbound Marketing Summit: Social Media ROI

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Nov 12, 2009 in New media, Video | 0 comments

If you missed it earlier this year, I presented at the Inbound Marketing Summit on the ROI of social media. Here’s the session video. Enjoy!

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Punchlines and Personal Quotes

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Nov 8, 2009 in Awakening | 6 comments

If you’ve spent any time on my personal site, there’s one page I’d like you to think about replicating on your own, either publicly or privately, and it’s the quotes page.

Why?

Well, the idea for the quotes page came from the father of one of my teachers, the late Ira Hayes, motivational speaker. His son, Stephen K. Hayes, found among his belongings a page of punchlines that he kept as a crib sheet for speaking. What’s funny is that Ira didn’t write down the actual jokes, just the punchlines, so unless you attended his speeches back in the day, no one is really sure what the actual jokes are. Ira just collected the punchlines together over time as he spoke and developed new material.

The quotes page on this site isn’t quite punchlines, but it is stuff I’ve collected over time that I find personally significant. Little expressions of things that made me think, things that are worth remembering.

Why do this? There’s more content than ever today. More blogging, more tweeting, more everything, and it’s so tempting to get into the easy, lazy habit of assuming that Google will remember for us what we’ve experienced that we just turn our brains off. Hear a funny speech? Someone probably recorded it, right? Read a funny quote on Twitter? Google will have it, right?

Don’t bet on it. If it’s important, don’t bet on it. In my Advanced Social Media class, I admonish my students that the live sessions may or may not be recorded, but they should act and work as if the sessions will NOT be recorded, so that they train their brains to capture useful information, rather than rely on a third party.

I encourage you to do something similar for yourself. It doesn’t have to be public like my quotes page is, but make a habit out of saving and storing valuable information, useful information, in a compact form. If you speak publicly, obviously this is a practice that has an immediate use for you, but even if you don’t, it’s still a good habit to get into for tuning up your brain.

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What you need to do next in social media for success

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Nov 5, 2009 in Awakening, New media, Social networks, Technology | 3 comments

What’s next? Is it Google Wave? How should we be using Twitter? Which social networks should we be on? What’s next?

Familiar questions? You hear these questions at conferences, trade shows, events, in the fishbowl, just about everywhere. They reflect a certain hunger, an almost desperate feeling from folks in the social media fishbowl, even from veteran practitioners.

What’s next is a simple question to answer. As with many things, however, what’s simple is often not easy.

What’s next is you. More specifically, what’s next for you is improving you, breaking away from existing limitations. No matter where you are on your social media journey, you’ve accrued some habits. Some are good and useful, some are not. Some habits are outdated already and aren’t serving you particularly well. For example, it might be your habit to reply to tweets at a certain time of day, but if your followers have changed and grown over time, they might want to hear from you at a different time of day, or new followers might have different expectations of how frequently you’ll keep in touch with them.

What’s next isn’t more tools, which is that desperate hunger I mentioned earlier, that wanting of more shiny objects. You see this most acutely in people who are disappointed in new offerings like Google Wave, whose expectations were that it would dramatically change their lives. If you’re chasing after the tools, that’s understandable. After all, understanding and mastering the basics of the tools that you currently have has gotten you to this point.

I’d offer instead that instead of longing for more tools, new tools, shinier objects, that you instead focus on becoming more powerful with the tools you already have. What do I mean? Let’s look at a martial arts example. There are only so many ways that physics, biology, and psychology permit us to punch, kick, or throw someone with any degree of effectiveness. Most of the tools you can achieve a basic, minimum level of competency with in about six months per tool if you practice diligently and frequently.

After you understand and can use the basics, then what? Just more of the same? Sort of. In the martial arts, you start putting combinations of the basics together. You start to examine human nature, to figure out why someone would behave in such a way that necessitates using a punch or a kick on them. You start to dig deeper into people’s motivations and into your own weaknesses, solidifying the tools you’re not so comfortable with, figuring out what it is in your own nature that prevents you from being as effective as possible with that tool.

Ultimately, once you reach higher levels of proficiency in the martial arts, the most juice for your squeeze comes out of self improvement. Got a quick temper? Learning how to channel that and tame that will do more for your quality of life (and keep you out of more fights) than the physical tools alone. Easily intimidated? Learning how to fortify your spirit will bring rewards not just to a physical encounter, but also to job interviews, workplace stress, and family problems, too.

The tools of social media are no different from a big picture perspective. (Obviously, punching someone has much more immediate impact than tweeting them) Once you’ve gained proficiency with the tools themselves, if you want to be more and more effective, if you want to get more and more out of them, you have to look away from the tools and the distractions of the day and focus on what in your own human nature is holding you back from accomplishing even more.

How do you do that? By first and foremost being honest with yourself, privately, internally, and quietly. Take some time, just a minute or two a day to start, to sit up straight and take a few deep breaths, then ask yourself these two questions:

1. What one thing did I do today that I’m proud of?
2. How can I take that thing I did and improve on it?

Some days, it’ll be a little bit of work to accomplish even #1. That’s okay. That’s what’s powerful about social media. You can generate results very quickly, so go find something worth doing before each day is over and use the tools that you have to do it. Then put the results into your brain with question #2 and see if you become more effective, more free, more powerful with the tools you already have.

Do this often enough, and you’ll wake up one day and realize that the answer to what’s next is and always has been inside your own heart and mind.

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Advanced Social Media Course is Live!

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Nov 4, 2009 in Education, New media, Social networks | 25 comments

I’m proud to announce that after several months of very hard work and significant effort on the parts of the University of San Francisco and our instructors, the Advanced Social Media certificate course is now live and available to the world!

In this eight week course, you’ll get instruction from true social media experts and marketers like Jay Berkowitz, Jim Kukral, CC Chapman, and myself, plus expert legal advice from lawyers David Bates and Gaida Zirkelbach on managing the risks and best practices of social media from a legal perspective.

What’s so different about this course versus every other social media thing on the Web?

Since I designed the course, I have a fairly good idea of what went into it and who’s teaching, and I can say we’ve got some great content and a top-notch roster of experienced people who’ve generated real world results using social media.

When I put it together a few months ago, I wanted to create a course that approached different practice areas of social media – marketing, advertising, PR, small business, agency work – and cross-cut that with social media practices. For example, the lectures fall into 7 tracks:

Track 1: Basics, review, concepts
Track 2: Marketing perspective
Track 3: Public relations perspective
Track 4: Service perspective
Track 5: Monetization/commercialization perspective
Track 6: Executive/strategic perspective
Track 7: Tool Time

Then the course runs over 8 weeks, with these 8 topics:

Week 1: Introduction to Social Media
Week 2: Listening/Monitoring
Week 3: Creation
Week 4: Communcation
Week 5: Metrics and Science
Week 6: Legal and Ethical Considerations
Week 7: Adopting Social Media
Week 8: Case Studies

Overall, I think the course delivers an exceptionally solid, well-rounded perspective of social media. The one aspect of this course that makes it so very different from other social media courses is the lab track. Each week, I ask course participants to do some outside work in “labs” that should deliver to graduates of the course a working social media presence at the end of the 8 week course:

Lab 1: Set up accounts on major social media sites, plus a personal blog and affiliate account
Lab 2: Create a listening dashboard in Google Reader
Lab 3: Create content for your site and distribute on social media platforms
Lab 4: Participate in one open forum (e.g. #journchat)
Lab 5: Analyze 5 weeks’ of your data and derive conclusions about where your traffic is coming from and why
Lab 6: Assess potential risks and practices for your own niche
Lab 7: Make at least $1 in affiliate sales from your efforts thus far.
Lab 8: Draft your own case study and publish on your blog

If students fully participate in the course and do the coursework and the labs, by the time they graduate, they’ll have a serious social media presence and the skills and experience needed to make social media work for them and the businesses or organizations they work for. There’s no other course quite like this one out there, and so I’m really thrilled that it’s live and running. On top of that, the course is offered through an accredited university and has financial aid and other goodies available with it that many other courses don’t have.

If you’d like to know more about this course, please visit this page on Edvisors.com and request your free information packet.

Full disclosure: Edvisors.com has an affiliate relationship with USF and earns a very nominal fee for referring prospective students to USF. I in turn work for Edvisors.com and a very small part of that very nominal fee ends up in my pocket as part of my salary.

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