Take the marketing label scrape test

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 18, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing | 17 comments

Here’s a quick test to determine if your marketing sucks or not.

Scrape off the labels, names, and brands in your marketing collateral and see if you can tell if the company/product/service is still unquestionably you, or if it could be anyone at all – maybe not even in your industry.

Try it with a friend who you don’t do business with. Don’t tell them who the company is, just scrape off the labels and see if they can tell who the company is.

Let’s try it right now!

XYZ is a software technology company that enables high-quality voice and messaging services across multiple devices and locations over broadband networks. Our award winning technology serves approximately X million subscribers. We provide feature-rich, affordable communication solutions that offer flexibility, portability and ease-of-use.

Now take this quiz. Is this:

A. Skype
B. Verizon FIOS Telephone Service
C. Vonage

Do you know? Can you tell? Does it even matter?

Here’s another one:

XYZ is an industry-leading email service provider based in Someplace, Somewhere. Founded in 2001, for the past 7 years we have been assisting our clients with a combination of both service and technology solutions that help them maximize the email marketing channel. XYZ provides both full service and self service email marketing solutions to our global client base of over X. Our leading web based platform, X, is currently in its seventh release, bringing the latest leading feature set to our clients browsers. The latest release offers enhanced deliverability solutions, detailed and customized reporting and analytics, and an easy to use intuitive user interface, all combined with leading customer service and support.

Is this:

A. Constant Contact
B. Exact Target
C. Blue Sky Factory

I don’t think you care. I certainly don’t. My eyes glazed over the moment I hit the words “industry leading”.

Last try.

XYZ ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the X and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the X. Today, X continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, X operating system and X and professional applications. X is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its X portable music and video players and X online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary X.

Is this:

A. Dell
B. IBM
C. Apple

Even with a lot of scraping and anonymization, there’s no question that this is Apple, Inc. If you can take your marketing collateral and remove the brand and product, and your identity STILL comes through, you’re doing it right. If you can just knock out your company name and no one has any idea what company it is, if they mistake you for your competitors, or if they can’t even tell what industry you are in, you’re in trouble. Go back and sharpen your pencil until your identity and culture shine through.

Oh, and for the quizzes, the answer was always C. We’ve since revamped Blue Sky Factory’s email service provider about page. It’s still a work in progress, though, so if you have suggestions for it, we’re listening

Photo credit: qnr

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What marketing can learn from martial arts mistakes

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 17, 2010 in Marketing, Metrics, Ninjutsu, On ko chi shin | 9 comments

One of the “secrets” that one of my teachers, Ken Savage of the Winchendon Martial Arts Center, says is that if a technique is not working, something in the previous step went wrong. If a throw isn’t working, perhaps your footwork or positioning in the entry was wrong. If a kata (pre-arranged routine) isn’t working at a certain point, rewind just one step to see if there’s something that can be adjusted there, some effect that can be repaired so that the chain reaction of mistakes subsequent to the initial error can be prevented.

Very often as martial artists, we’ll try to force our way through a technique that is failing without going back through the chain of events to figure out where the first obvious mistake is, then taking one step back more to see the precursor events that generated the mistake. If we can do that, if we can find the pre-error conditions that create the error, all the subsequent mistakes, all the frustration, all the brute force can be done away with.

Marketing, believe it or not, is no different. One of the dangers of being focused solely on a metric like qualified leads (which is a vital, vital metric) is that we see the end result but no information about the process that generated the result. Things like web site traffic, visits to a landing page, Twitter followers, etc. are not revenue generation metrics, but are still important to the extent that they’re diagnostic metrics that illuminate where we have made mistakes.

If, for example, we look at web site traffic as a diagnostic rather than a goal, we can see the impact of social media. If we make a serious mistake with our social media efforts, we may never see it in the social context itself, but we will see it as our first obvious mistake in our web traffic statistics as a drop in traffic from social sites.

If we look at event tracking statistics like Google’s trackEvent calls on web site objects like buttons, we may see obvious changes in the number of clicks on a button that indicates a mistake has happened in the design of that page, and if we change the design, we should see the effects in the subsequent step, clicks on the button.

Like martial artists, marketers who don’t know how to diagnose their techniques resort to brute force with mixed results at best. If your solution to every marketing problem is “throw more traffic at it!” or “spend more money on ads!” or “do more SEO!” without an understanding of what’s broken in your processes and where, you’ll just waste time, energy, and resources without fixing the fundamental issues.

Whether you’re a marketer or martial artist, map out your processes and try to figure out where your first mistakes occur. Then take one step back. Start as early on in your technique as possible, and you may find that instead of having to fix all your mistakes all over the place, addressing an early-on, root cause problem may fix a bunch of things downstream and save you immense time and frustration.

Oh, and if you’re in the Winchendon, MA area, go visit the Winchendon Martial Arts Center. You’ll be hard pressed to find a better martial arts school anywhere in north central Massachusetts.

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Ninja Mind Control Trick

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 15, 2010 in Awakening, Jedi mind tricks, Ninjutsu, On ko chi shin | 24 comments

So much of what we perceive is defined by subtle cues and clues. Ever heard the cliche that clothes make the man? Like many cliches, it’s mostly true. The clothes you wear do indeed change the perceptions of others, controlling at least the initial impression, the blink, that you make. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though.

Even more control can be exerted by controlling what your nonverbal language says. Watch how different people do seemingly mundane actions – opening doors (do they hold doors for others? if so, how?), shaking hands, sitting down in chairs. Does their body language convey a sense of control over themselves? Elegance? Casual ease? All of these little things matter as a collective way to measure what kind of person someone is.

What are you conveying in your own language, in your own style? Have a friend follow you around for a little while, especially at a conference or event, and just keep a video camera recording you. Record the little stuff, too, like getting up to get a cup of coffee or checking your email.

Watch the footage of yourself and ask yourself what habits you have that aren’t conveying the kind of impression you want to convey. Ask yourself if the habits you have are reinforcing in others a perception that you no longer want attached to yourself. Are you careless in your body language? Sloppy? Timid? What don’t you want to be any more?

Next, try this experiment: determine what impressions you want to make on other people. If you want to be perceived as a competent, effective policeman, find as much material to study like video footage and on-the-street observation as you can to isolate the behaviors that those you perceive as effective perform. If you want to be perceived as a successful public speaker, what cues and behavioral traits do you see and can you model?

Extend it a step further and look at how your successful role model operates in an online capacity. If you’re going for the respected dignitary or celebrity, what do the folks you deem successful say and do online? If you’re going for the rock musician persona, drunk tweeting is not only appropriate but expected – consider doing so even if you’re stone cold sober, for example. How often do the people you believe to be successful blog, for example? What do they blog about? What do their profiles say about themselves online?

Take your new modeled behaviors out for a test drive. It can be incredibly difficult to effect change when those who know you best are accustomed to (and therefore locking you into) certain behaviors. Go to a conference or meetup where the majority of people have no idea who you are, and test out the traits you’re modeling. Start up a different online account and model some behaviors. See what a new you might look, feel, and act like. The opportunities to interact with people you don’t know and change who you are as a result are more limitless than ever.

The ultimate mind control trick is on you – and that’s a good thing. We as human beings respond to feedback loops. The more the people around us tell us we’re worthless, the more we begin to behave and believe that we’re worthless. The more that people around us tell us that we’re a rockstar, the more we begin to behave and believe that we’re a rockstar. You aren’t told by the company you keep – you become the company you keep. Changing the perceptions of those around you of the kind of person you are changes how they treat you, which in turn changes your perception of yourself.

Decide who you want to be. Decide who you know, who you have access to, that’s successful (in whatever success means to you), determine what behaviors they have that contribute to the perceptions of their success, and try them out for yourself.

Try it!

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Weekend Foodblogging: Hotel Ceviche

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 14, 2010 in Blogging, Foodblogging | 9 comments

A recent tweet from CC Chapman at SxSW about his hotel room having no amenities for preparing food (fridge or microwave) got me thinking: what’s the best food you could prepare in such conditions, assuming you had access to a local grocery store but not much else, and you didn’t want to buy a ton of stuff that you’d either have to ship home or abandon?

The answer: ceviche. Ceviche is a South American cold fish dish, “cooked” by using an acid to denature the proteins in a meat as opposed to using heat. It’s light, very refreshing, tasty, healthy, and very cheap to make. I first learned about it at the ETC2010 conference from the Chilean embassy and fell in love with it immediately.

If you switch out some ingredients, it’s also incredibly portable. For fun, to see if I could make it work, I contacted Heidi over at True Lemon (disclosure: they’re a Blue Sky Factory email marketing client) and asked whether True Lemon’s acidity matched that of a real lemon. The answer? Yes, so True Lemon is substituted in this recipe for portability. Most of the ingredients can be prepared ahead of time and put in a zip-top bag.

Here’s what you’ll need:

5 packets of True Lemon
5 packets of True Lime
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp sugar
Black pepper to taste
1 tbsp cilantro – home-dried from fresh is best
1 plastic bag
1 piece of fish, preferably a mild white fish like tilapia, haddock, or sea bass
5/8 cup of water
1 plastic knife

Everything except the fish and water can be put in the plastic bag and packed in your luggage. That said, you might occasionally get some questions from security, but it’s okay to let them sniff the contents. The salt, pepper, and sugar you can probably source on site, along with a plastic knife.

When you get to your destination, find your local grocery store and hit the frozen fish section. Buy your fish frozen, because for this application, you want fish as germ-free as possible, and deeply frozen fish is less likely to have nasties than the fish counter. The citrus juice will kill off most nasties, but not as thoroughly as applying heat, so the fewer you start with, the better.

Thaw the fish by putting it in your hotel room sink with some warm water. Cut it up into little tiny pieces. Any knife will do – a little plastic one, a pair of scissors from the front desk (washed, of course), etc. Put the fish and water in the bag. If you’re not sure how much 5/8 cup of water is, it’s about a third of a coffee mug’s worth. You don’t have to be perfectly precise with this. It’s also a full to the brim shot glass.

Throw everything in the plastic bag and toss around.

Let this sit for a couple of hours in the refrigerator. No in-room fridge? No problem. Get the ice bucket, put your zip-top bag in the bottom, and put some ice on top of it.

The dish is done when the fish has turned white as if cooked:

Put it in the serving vessel of your choice – perhaps that empty shot glass – and enjoy!

Now, obviously, you can substitute real ingredients for the portable ones. You can use the juice of freshly squeezed lemons and limes (5/8 cup total), use fresh cilantro, add in some onion or garlic, etc. but if you’re in a hotel room, the last thing you want to try to do is cut citrus with a plastic fast food knife and attempt to do serious culinary work, hence the True Lemon. If you’re at home with a full kitchen at your fingertips, you can modify this recipe to your heart’s content. Perhaps another time I’ll post up a full, at-home recipe.

Ceviche is easy to prepare, requires no heat, and is really tasty. Try it sometime.

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How to do blog re-runs intelligently

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 12, 2010 in Blogging, Jedi mind tricks | 12 comments

How many of you knew me in 2008? In 2007? Far fewer of you than today, I’m sure. There’s a lot of good stuff on this blog – and on your blog – that you’ve undoubtedly missed if you’re a relatively new friend. Let’s talk today about how to intelligently do re-runs of your blog or other content.

First, you have to have an idea of what to re-run. Fire up your statistics package of choice. I’ll be using Google Analytics. Now, go to Content > Top Content. In the filter, type in the earliest year that you’ve got content for – in my example below, I typed in /2007/. Now look at the top content data you see. You’re looking at content for that year that search engines and visitors to your site still consider relevant today.

This is very important. Don’t use the data from way back then as a starting point because what was important and hot then may not be now. Use today’s data set (last 30 days) but filter on your post dates. I should add that if your URL structure doesn’t include the date in it, I have no idea how you’d do this. You’d have to know which of your older stuff was still popular.

Take a look at the list. Which stuff is evergreen, which stuff is still popular long after other content has gone to content heaven, in terms of audience interest?

Find a couple of these pages and pop them open in your editor. Re-read them, re-edit them, spruce them up, make any relevant updates to them, add links to your newer content that might have reference the older content, and then make a new summary post on your blog about the older pages you’re going back to.

Now, you may be saying, why shouldn’t I just copy and paste into a new blog post, so that it appears as brand-new content on my site? Those of you who mentally replied, “because older pages have valuable inbound links you want to keep”, pat yourselves on the back. Go back and spruce up, but leave the old URLs alone so that any existing links don’t break. You’ll also revive older comments and discussions if you leave the existing post alone and just shine a spotlight on it.

Remember this above all else when it comes to old content: it’s old to you, and probably you alone. In the ever-increasingly hypernetworked world we live in where new friends find us all the time, what you think is old content (assuming it’s not time-sensitive, like news, obviously) is brand new and fresh to them. Help them find your best stuff, no matter when it was written.

Here’s my old stuff highlight for now: How to build a video or camera stabilization rig for about $7. Still good after all these years, and for the very few of you who have been reading me for that long, did you remember this post existed, or was it just as much a refresher for you as it is new content to the newer friends reading it for the first time?

Good luck in dusting your old stuff off, and I look forward to reading what I’ve missed.

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.