The most basic business lesson taught by World of Warcraft

Posted by Christopher S Penn on May 12, 2010 in Marketing, Strategy, World of Warcraft | 11 comments

The most basic business lesson taught by World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft’s Auction House is the in-game marketplace, the bazaar where players can sell virtual stuff to other players. Magical potions, plate armor, everything under the virtual sun gets traded millions of times a day. Auctions listed in the Auction House can last up to 48 hours, after which they expire and your virtual goods are returned to you. If you don’t relist them, they just remain in your character’s bags. To be a successful auctioneer, you have to be “open for business” by constantly keeping items on the market for sale.

There’s one fundamental lesson the Auction House can teach us, one fundamental lesson we must take to heart and practice in our businesses:

If you’re not open for business, no one can buy from you.

It doesn’t matter how epic the items you have for sale are. It doesn’t matter how long it took you to win them in the game or make them from your trade skills. It doesn’t matter how low or high demand those items are. If they’re sitting in your bags and not on the market, no one can buy from you. You must be open for business to make money.

I know what you’re saying. You don’t play the video game. You don’t have a business that even remotely looks like this. The principle still applies, however. If You’re not open for business, no one can buy from you.

• You’re not open for business when someone calls and no one answers the phone, or worse, robots do it (poorly) for you.
• You’re not open for business when someone searches for your product or service and you don’t appear anywhere in the search results.
• You’re not open for business when someone emails you and you don’t respond ever, or worse, their email ends up in your spam bucket.
• You’re not open for business when someone asks a question about your company in social media and you aren’t part of the conversation at all.
• You’re not open for business when someone goes to check out online and your web site doesn’t let them complete the transaction.

Where are you open for business? Where are you effectively closed, turning away actively interested buyers who want to give you their money?

Want to make some real money? Where are your competitors not open for business, and can you be open for business in that space?

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Why you must bet the farm on mobile and social media

Posted by Christopher S Penn on May 10, 2010 in Marketing, Social media | 25 comments

Why you must bet the farm on mobile and social media

Mitch Joel‘s keynote at MarketingProfs (which is a neat evolution of a talk I saw him give at PodCamp Toronto years ago) sparked an idea in my head about how we’re communicating with customers and what it means for your business. In his talk, he mentions the internal conversation, the one to one conversation, and the one to many conversation – how marketers can interact with their audiences.

Let’s take this a step further. Before we do, let’s look at a few changes in computing and communications.

The 1990s were the decade of email and email marketing. Computers were leashed to the wall for nearly every task. Even my ultra-awesome at the time Powerbook 1400cs (cs stood for color screen, imagine that!) needed to be tied to the wall for any form of communications. Most people were still computing using machines the size of aircraft carriers, and while the Web had just gotten popular amongst the high-tech crowd, by no means was it mainstream. Email was it, partly because email was something that people could grasp onto and understand immediately – form of electronic communications that worked very much like the real world’s analog equivalents. There were letters, addresses, inboxes, etc. – a good entry point for many.

2000-2009 was the decade of the Web, unquestionably. Computers got smaller and much, much cheaper. The decade started out with the Pentium III line of processors barely topping 1 GHz, and ended with computers shipping with four-core CPUs. People figured out the Web, they figured out what was possible beyond making a brochure of their company. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter arrived. Wireless Internet access via Wi-Fi finally got hot and achieved some level of market penetration.

Here we are in 2010. Computers are shipping now with as much processing power in a handheld as in a desktop, and Wi-Fi + 3G are the standard rather than the exception. The latest computer is fully mobile – the iPad – needing only to stop to recharge its internal battery and not much else. All this and we’re barely into the mobile revolution. This corresponds with the latest change of mind – social media.

While social media got its start in the era of the Web, it’s rapidly evolving to take advantage of the devices now afforded to it in ways the regular web simply cannot. There’s nothing more social than hanging out with friends and passing a mobile device for someone to have a quick laugh at a text, a mobile pic, or a Tweet. There’s nothing more social than sitting with colleagues and just handing someone an iPad to say, “look at this…”

As devices get smaller and easier to use, they become more social. Clay Shirky said it best – when something becomes technologically boring, it becomes socially interesting. In the case of the iPhone and iPad, the interface becomes so intuitive so quickly that it fades away to nothingness, leaving only you and what you aim to accomplish.

So let’s tie all this together. Email was and is, for functional purposes, the one to one conversation. Yes, you can broadcast email, yes you can reply to all in a manner that’s as convenient as it is painful, but fundamentally email is a one to one conversation.

The Web was the one to many conversation. Put up your site and as long as your server can handle the traffic, you can do one to many conversations better than at any point in human history. You can get noticed, become popular, and do business at greater velocity than ever before.

Social – and the mobile devices that will increasingly power it – is the next logical extension of Mitch’s framework. Social is the many to many conversation, where you as a marketer are an active participant, but you’re not in control, not in charge, not even directing the conversation. You are among your peers, interacting, collaborating, and creating.

Just as the rules for email are different than the rules for the Web, so are the rules for social different than what preceded it. Chris Brogan and Greg Cangialosi often like to quip that the strategy of choice is “be there before the sale” but that’s not enough. You have to be relevant before the sale. You have to be credible before the sale. You have to earn a seat at the table not only before but at the time the decision is being made, which means you have to have persistent presence of mind in the business cycle of your prospective customers.

In this framework, that also means that everything you do has to have at least an idea of how it will appear in a mobile computing landscape. If all you do is broadcast useless updates on Facebook and Twitter, you won’t be shared or talked about. You’ll stop appearing in people’s streams – and when the majority of communication is done on smaller form factor mobile devices, what little slice of screen real estate attention you have left will vanish.

If someone were to pass around your web site on a mobile device at an executive roundtable, what would they see?

• How easy is it to find a call to action?
• How easy is it to find a call to share?
• How easy is it to pass around by word of mouth?

The future based on trend growth is clear: mobile devices will power the way your prospective customers communicate, and social media will be the many to many conversation medium in which you will do business. Bear in mind, there will still be one to one and one to many – but there will also be many to many, and you need to be there.

Are you ready?

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The fictional nature of money

Posted by Christopher S Penn on May 7, 2010 in Awakening, Money | 18 comments

How real is money?

From one perspective, it’s the most real thing in the world. Without it, you don’t eat, you don’t have a place to live, no clothes to wear, etc. unless you’re living out in the wilderness, foraging off the land. Money can be a tremendous amplifier of personal power. With an inexhaustible supply of money, you could solve world hunger, cure disease, and end conflict.

On the other hand, money is entirely fictional. It’s a construct, an artificial intermediary between things we value, because we may not value them equally or at the same time. I may sell email marketing and you may sell search engine optimization. If I don’t need SEO, no matter how valuable your skills are, I won’t trade with you no matter how much you need email marketing. With money, if someone else needs SEO, you can take their money and then give me that money for email marketing.

How fictional is money? The recent stock market mini-crash (due to a trading software error) caused several indexes to lurch as much as 10% below their value in mere seconds. At one point, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 998 points. This erased as much as $1.25 trillion dollars of theoretical wealth in mere minutes. Think about that for a second. Think about how much money that would be if you had it in your bank account.

• You could send 5 million students to college for 4 years.
• You could spend a million dollars a day and not run out of money for 3,424 years.
• You could own 1,667 super-giant luxury houses.
• You could pay cash for the entire Iraq/Afghanistan war and still have a couple hundred billion left over in change.

Think about the fact that $1.25 trillion was erased, vaporized, in just minutes. Imagine every student in college right now quitting all at once, or an entire city block vanishing in just minutes. That’s staggering, when you think about it. It’s hard to wrap your brain around.

Now think about the fact that the NASDAQ ordered a nullification of trades between 2:40 PM and 3:00 PM (when the mini-crash happened) for trades exceeding 60% of market value in either direction. Poof! Suddenly a big chunk of that imaginary money that was lost is back again.

You couldn’t build 1,600+ houses in minutes. You couldn’t enroll 5 million students in minutes. You couldn’t wage a 9 year war in minutes. But because of money’s fictional nature, you can make trillions of dollars appear with just a few clicks of a mouse.

What does this all mean for you? Think about your attitudes towards money, towards what you’re chasing. It’s a completely fictional construct that in our society is anchored to faith alone, making it the one true faith-based initiative our government has successfully created. Money is worth only what society believes it to be worth, because we can create or destroy vast quantities of it in minutes. It has no intrinsic value.

More important, if it’s entirely fictional, if it’s anchored only in belief of value, then instead of chasing money, think about how to create the perception of value. Think about how to inspire in someone else the desire to give you anything you want in exchange for that perceived value. What do people value about you, about your products or services? How can you provide more of that value perception? How can you boost the perception of the value that’s already there?

What do you value? I know that as a businessman, I tend to value three big things – things that will save me time, things that will save me money, and things that will make me money. If I perceive that your product or service can do any of those things well, I perceive that it has value and will buy from you.

Change your focus from trying to take other people’s money to creating the perception of value and see if other people start handing you a lot more money.

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.

The State of B2B Social Media from MarketingProfs B2B Forum

Posted by Christopher S Penn on May 6, 2010 in Conferences, Marketing, Social media, Social networks | 9 comments

The State of B2B Social Media from MarketingProfs B2B Forum

I’ve been attending and speaking at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum for a couple of years now, ever since stepping in as a pinch-hitter at the 2008 conference. What a difference a couple of years can make!

Two years ago, people were asking what Twitter even was. Whether Facebook was more than just a place for kids to hang out and post drunk photos. People were marveling at the power of YouTube and MySpace – especially MySpace, wondering what their MySpace strategy should be.

I was thrilled to see this year that the audience had collectively advanced so much. People knew and accepted what Twitter was, what Facebook was, what social networking was. This year, the common thread among the discussions was more about strategy and integration.

As I put it during several interviews, it’s like we went to the social media home improvement store. Two years ago, people were asking what a hammer was, how to use it, and why you’d even want a hammer. Today, we know what the hammer is.

The collective challenge now seems to be, at least for the B2B marketers I had a chance to interact with, how stuff works together. Continuing the home improvement analogy, people know what a hammer is and what a saw is. People can even use these tools competently.

We’re at a point now, however, where people don’t know how a hammer and saw can work together, what role each tool is supposed to play, and how various tools can complement each other.

Ultimately, we’re on track towards building the house of our dreams. Our next challenges lie in understanding how tools work together, how they complement and empower each other, and how to skillfully combine their use to build that house.

What’s your take on the state of B2B social media?

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.

Are we there yet? Diagnostic versus objective social media metrics

Posted by Christopher S Penn on May 3, 2010 in Marketing, Metrics, Social media | 13 comments

Are we there yet? Diagnostic versus objective social media metrics

One of my favorite discussion points in my social media ROI talk is also probably one of the most overlooked – the understanding of diagnostic versus objective metrics.

Imagine for a second you’re on a road trip.

Diagnostic metrics tell you how the trip is going.

Objective metrics tell you when you’re there.

As you can imagine, there aren’t too many objective metrics. You’re either at your destination, or you’re still on the road trip. There are tons of diagnostic metrics, though – mileage, miles traveled, rest areas stopped at, complaints from the back seat – you name it, there’s probably a metric for it.

In social media, we have tons of diagnostic metrics as well – Twitter followers, web site traffic, retweets, Facebook likes, etc.

At the end of the day, however, none of these are objectives. None of these tell you if you’re actually there yet.

Imagine how silly this conversation sounds:

“Dad, are we there yet?”
“18 cheeseburgers and 220 french fries, son!”
“What?”

“Dad, are we THERE yet?”
“So far we’ve managed 21.7 miles per gallon. Isn’t that great?”
“What?”

And so on. This is a silly conversation, yes? So why do we have this conversation:

“Are we succeeding in social media?”
“We’ve got 220 Twitter followers!”

“Yes, but are we succeeding in social media?”
“So far, we’ve managed 121 Likes on our Facebook page. People love us!”

These two conversations are the same. In both cases, we’re repeating back diagnostic metrics when the question is about objective metrics – are we there yet?

In your social media efforts, are you there yet? Do you even know where there is or how you’d know when you got there?

If not, don’t be surprised if your senior management gets just as cranky as the kids in the back seat and keeps asking “Are we there yet?” over and over again.

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