Recommended: Scarborough Fair Bed and Breakfast, Baltimore, MD

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 19, 2010 in Review | 3 comments

Recommended: Scarborough Fair Bed and Breakfast, Baltimore, MD

There are few places in the world of hospitality that I’d actually recommend. Most of the places I’ve stayed – and there have been many – were sufficient to be a place where I’d get some sleep and a bite to eat, but nothing else.

Hotel chains are valued precisely for the consistent mediocrity, just like fast food – you know what you’re going to get the moment you see the sign on the road. You don’t have to ponder whether the Big Mac or the Holiday Inn will be significantly different in Topeka or Trenton. It won’t be.

As a result, most of the places I’ve stayed are sufficiently mediocre, which means I usually can’t wait to get home after a few days, and if someone asks for a recommendation for a certain city, I’m hard pressed to come up with one.

Except Scarborough Fair. Bed and breakfasts are not my thing, and to be perfectly honest, it wouldn’t have been a place that I searched out. But this particular one happens to be co-owned by a Blue Sky Factory employee, and is within slow walking distance of the Baltimore office, so it made perfect sense to stay there.

Wow, am I glad I did. I stayed in the lavishly appointed Edgar Allan Poe room, which was a lovely, if gothic, room decorated to evoke the themes of Poe’s life. An electric fireplace, a writing desk with Poe’s literary works on it, a giant private bathroom – it literally felt like home rather than a hotel.

The breakfasts were amazingly good, too. For the road warriors among us who are used to the standard rubber eggs and cardboard biscuits under the hotel lobby heat lamps, Scarborough Fair’s fare was a considerable step up. On my last morning there, breakfast was a cheese and crimini mushroom omelet with sage, vanilla oat parfait, blueberry and white chocolate biscotti, and of course coffee. Try getting anything like that at a hotel.

The innkeepers, Barry and Jeff, run an awesome little home away from home, and I’d definitely recommend staying there versus a regular hotel if you’re in the Baltimore area. It’s at 801 S. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD. How much did I enjoy staying there? They get the highest compliment I can think of from me, an optimized outbound link from an AdAge Power 150 blog, that’s how much.

Find their web site here: Baltimore Bed and Breakfast.

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What World of Warcraft's Lunar New Year Can Teach You About Growth

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 18, 2010 in Awakening, World of Warcraft | 3 comments

In World of Warcraft, there are seasonal holidays that roughly correspond to real world holidays. One of these holidays is Lunar New Year. In the Warcraft version of the holiday, in addition to fireworks, there’s a quest to defeat a gigantic two-headed demon named Omen.

Last year, I and the friends I play with took a beating trying to kill Omen. I know I took a number of tries just to defeat him, with my character dying over and over again.

This year, as I rode to Lake Elune’ara, I wondered how the battle against Omen would go. I found out quickly:

The demon had lost his bite.

I was able to tank Omen solo with just one healer and a random mage with ease. He went down faster than the stock market after a Federal Reserve meeting.

After the initial celebration wore off, I wondered how it was that Omen was so easily defeated. His abilities and capabilities were the same as last year…

… but I and my character were not. Quite the contrary. Omen hadn’t changed, but I had, significantly for the better. What killed my character last year was barely even worth mentioning this year, and what relatively insignificant damage I was able to do to Omen last year was replaced by a venti quadruple shot cup of whoopass with a twist of lemon.

It’s difficult for us to see how we’ve changed. We change slowly, over time, and in many cases are the last to get the memo on anything. Things like Omen are a good way to realize just how much we have changed, just how we’ve transformed from year to year. If you don’t have an Omen-like challenge in your life, look for one as a way to diagnose who you are and how you’ve changed. Find something that’s a challenge for you this year, win, and then see how the challenge feels next year. Have you grown? Have you changed? Have you become more proficient?

Bear in mind the challenge needs to be somewhat static. Maybe it’s an annual photowalk, a half marathon, a creature like Omen – whatever it is, make sure it’s something where you’ll see the difference in yourself while the challenge itself remains mostly the same.

Omen (and his meaning) is summed up best, oddly enough, by Nelson Mandela:

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

May your Lunar Festival grant you the insights you seek.

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Three Nearly Guaranteed Moneymaking Twitter Words

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 16, 2010 in Marketing, Sales, Social media | 29 comments

Ever notice the giant pile of social media “experts” who don’t have two nickels to rub together? Ever wonder why?

They spend a hell of a lot more time talking than listening.

They labor under the mistaken belief that the more you talk, the more money you’ll make as a social media expert, and I suppose as long as you’re good at duping the gullible, that’s true until the market is tapped out. Once the suckers have been skimmed, though, they have to move on to find the next big thing to latch onto. (just wait for the Google Buzz experts!)

For the rest of us, for the folks who actually want to do a sustainable business in social media, the secret is listening. Not a big secret in and of itself, but the bigger, less-asked question is “What do you listen for?”

A lot of companies are doing defensive listening. They listen for things like “XYZ Company SUCKS” and other brand mentions. This is a good start, a good entry point for retention and reputation protection. However, this is only a start.

The second tier of folks, the community engagement folks, listen for things like industry jargon. In financial aid, for example, the word FAFSA is a buzzword of the industry. No one goes to a bar on Friday night and chats up the attractive person of their choice with, “Hey, have you seen my FAFSA results?”. That never happens. Community engagers build reputation and presence of mind by participating in conversations, honing in on the right conversations to participate in using the buzzwords and inside jargon of the industry.

The third tier of folks, the folks who want to do business and make money in social media listen for intent.

Sound familiar? That’s what made search marketing so revolutionary a decade ago. Search was a red flag of intent – when someone searches for, say, email marketing, they’re exhibiting at least a casual interest in the subject matter. Focused, targeted questions asked to search engines belie even more intent. Searching for email marketing is one thing. Searching for “what is the best email marketing company in Reno, Nevada” displays clear intent, and search marketers have learned to make the most of these long-tail, deep, obscure queries. (they convert like crazy, too)

So how do you detect intent in social media? Let’s use Twitter as an example. What questions belie intent? Think about your own use of language and then start playing mix and match with these keywords:

• recommend
• suggest
• anyone
• [your keyword]

Try it. Try it in Twitter search with your industry keywords and vertical.

Look at a couple of results for “anyone recommend social media”:

• ianrbruce: anyone recommend a good book on social media metrics & measurement?
• splashrafting: anyone recommend free social media measuring tools? Looking at some at present need to start to use more
• hellaPR: Can anyone recommend any good cases or articles on hotels using social media, on a large scale preferably.

Each of these are home runs for a book publisher, a listening company like Radian6, and a socially-engaged hospitality chain. It would take mere seconds to respond and likely convert better than any cold call.

How do you listen? Take your top SEO keyword list (you have one, right?) and combine your top keywords with recommend, suggest, and anyone in various combinations. You’ll be amazed at the number of people blatantly flagging intent to buy your products or services, if only someone were listening.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

Why Google Buzz is brilliant and deadly to social media 1.0

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 11, 2010 in Marketing, search engine optimization, Technology | 87 comments

From the moment it launched, Google Buzz generated buzz:

• OMG another social network to manage
• OMG there’s too much noise
• OMG this is so redundant

And for the early adopters, it’s exactly that and more. It’s noise. It’s clutter.

It’s brilliant.

Here’s why. Google wants the best of the best data. Remember this. They are a data company. They are a data quality company. They are algorithmic in their approaches to solving problems.

For a lot of the social media crowd, the moment Buzz turned on, our valued inboxes became insanely cluttered as we linked up all our social media sites, networks, and properties. We discovered that frankly, we didn’t want the firehose of social media in our inboxes.

We realized quickly, if we didn’t already know, that most of our “friends” are in fact valueless robots spewing garbage at us all day. On services like Twitter and Facebook, we don’t really notice because it’s bite size garbage that passed by quickly. When it piles up in the inbox, we notice. Fast.

So for the early adopters, those who keep Buzz on, we’re pruning back hard. We’re not following back. We’re dropping auto-follows. We’re down to just a handful of people, close friends, that we REALLY want in our inboxes. How many of the self-proclaimed social media gurus are you actually allowing inside your inbox, in Buzz? Exactly.

Buzz is working as intended. Google wants data quality. We immediately filter out completely all the noisemakers who bring no value to the table.

Buzz also incentivizes us in a couple of ways. It tells us to prune back our own spewage lest our friends, the ones we care about truly, unfollow us and eliminate us. It tells us that redundancy of information is of no value to anyone using Buzz, since you can get blog posts and status updates already from FriendFaceTwitterFeedBookSquareWallReader service (now with more blatant self-promotion from social media experts!). So we share and discuss only the stuff that’s either super high quality that we just can’t afford to miss, even if it’s redundant, because of the quality, or we share stuff that’s not being shared elsewhere.

Google figures out from our activity in Buzz that either there’s new stuff to be examined (remember in the initial presentation that Buzzed stuff gets indexed the moment it’s shared, and Google wants to find EVERYTHING to index) or there’s stuff that’s so important and so good that you’ll let it into your inbox even if you can get it elsewhere.

By placing Buzz so close to the incredibly precious, valuable territory that is our inbox, Google is forcing users to reveal what we truly value, what we’re willing to let into a very private space. It’s the perfect walled garden, because instead of enforcing the walls on us, Google simply lets us build the walls for them.

The lesson for marketers and content creators is this: social media 1.0 is drawing to a close. Social Media 2.0 is about relevance, value, and authentic connection, because you will never, as a marketer, get through the gates of the walled garden with a boring-as-crap press release or product announcement. No one cares about you. All of the services, but especially the big ones, are giving users more tools to screen out anything they don’t care about, anything that doesn’t engage them, anything that isn’t actually great quality.

Buzz is just a very visible demonstration of how much crap our “friends” spew out that’s of no value, and why we were so annoyed by it. Now that it’s under control, now that we’re  isolating actual friends from “friends” and our networks are getting trimmed, we’re starting to get more value out of it.

And you can bet Google is paying VERY close attention to us and what we do with our Buzz.

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The 3 Benefits We Care About

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 10, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing, Money, Sales | 23 comments

Tony Corinda, the famous magician and mentalist, wrote in his classic textbook 13 Steps to Mentalism that there are three general topics which nearly everyone wants psychic predictions on. Knowing these makes the job of a mentalist on stage incredibly easy, as just providing the hook into any of the topics gets people talking about what they really want.

The three things most people care about and want to know more about?

• Love/Relationships/Sex
• Health
• Money

You could have probably guessed that right off the bat. To no one’s surprise, business is no different. Decision-makers in business – including you, if for no other role than decision-maker of your career – want three general things, too.

• How can I save more money?
• How can I save more time?
• How can I make more money?

Again, no surprise, right?

So why is it that legions of salesmen and saleswomen never actually answer these questions? Take a look at any product spec sheet, from industrial toilets to iPhone apps, and you’ll see features listed by the dozen. This toilet uses 1.4 gallons per flush. This iPhone app can switch between 3G and WiFi seamlessly. This CRM offers RDBMS support for 8 of the most modern RDBMS systems.

So what?

When I talk to vendors, I’m exceptionally blunt. Some appreciate it, some get derailed from their carefully crafted pitch. How will your product save me money? How will your product save me time? How will your product make me more money? If a vendor can answer those questions quickly and intelligently, I’m very likely to just pull the trigger right then and there, as long as their math is sound. If a vendor tries to defer those three questions until later so they can finish their pitch, the phone gets hung up with a polite but curt “not interested but thanks”.

Classic sales books and training materials always advocate answering “What’s in it for me?” as the key question to answer in a sales presentation. Throw those books out, or at least put them back on the shelf. If you can prove a strong case for any one of the three questions – time, money saved, money earned – you’ve answered a core WIIFM question. If you can prove a strong case for more than one of the three questions, prospects will be buying YOU lunch. If you can prove a strong case for all three questions, you can pretty much retire your sales department and just replace them with order takers, because word of mouth alone will be flooding your call center.

Take a look at your own sales and marketing materials today.

Will you save me time?

Will you save me money?

Will you make me more money?

Prove it, and I’m yours.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.