Awakening your superhero at #140conf

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 15, 2010 in Awakening | 0 comments

I had the pleasure and privilege of presenting at Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference yesterday. In just 10 minutes, I was challenged to change people’s thinking about the real-time web. Here’s what I came up with:

Hat tip to Sean Zinsmeister over at MBA Book Club for recording and posting the video.

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Game mechanics for non-profits

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 13, 2010 in Jedi mind tricks, Marketing | 3 comments

A while ago on Marketing Over Coffee and other places we discussed the SCVNGR game mechanics deck, a deck of cards with different mechanisms that stimulate human behavioral patterns. While marketers are more than happy to jump all over these methods, it’s well worth considering for marketing more useful things, like non-profit donations.

Let’s take a look at just a few mechanics and how a non-profit might be able to make use of them.

Progression Dynamics. Non-profits for a long time have had statuses such as donor levels, but they’re uncreatively used. At best, a donor level is listed in a brochure or program guide, and maybe the top achievers (donors) get a shout-out at an organizational event. This is the age of social! Make those levels public and spreadable! Imagine how simple it would be for an organization to post as a Facebook status or tweet every donation (for those who didn’t want to remain anonymous) along with thanks and donation level.

Example: “Thanks @cspenn for donating! You’ve reached donor level 23! Only $230 left until level 24!”

Badges. Coupled with progression levels, badges (from locations earned in Foursquare to Achievements in WoW) are an equally potent way to recognize people. Most organizations recognize large donors or longtime donors and stop there. Get creative! Badges don’t cost you a thing – make as many as you can and hand them out with great frequency, very publicly, to take advantage of the habit that people tend to collect damn near anything you put in front of them.

Example: “Congrats @cspenn for earning the Fastest Donor badge! You donated within 60 seconds of our tweet!”

Leaderboards. The only thing better than being in a progression guild in Warcraft is being listed in a progression guild in all the major guild leaderboards. People love to show off their status. Take advantage of this simple social mechanic in your community and publish a leaderboard, and make leaderboards for more than just one mechanic. For example, you have top donors, which is of course useful, but what about top social sharers, folks who might have more time than money? What about top referrals to your web site? What about top networkers who bring new people to your Facebook page? Find ways to implement leaderboards for all the metrics that matter to you and publish them to encourage people to compete!

Example: “Hey @cspenn! You just reached #23 in the Social Leaderboard! Keep telling people about us!”

Groups. Farmville would be fairly boring without other people. Warcraft would be equally flat without guilds to join of like-minded players. Do you encourage your constituents to network just with you, or do you help them network with each other? Create reasons for teams, guilds, groups, or other gatherings virtually or in real life of people who might gain something from each other, and have them compete for the above listed progressions, badges, and leaderboards as groups.

Example: “Hey @cspenn! Your guild, Unifying Force, is now in the top 20 donor guilds! Congrats!”

Take a look at the SCVNGR deck and figure out how you can work one or more game mechanics into your non-profit organization’s structure. Most of the mechanics will require little or no money and can encourage exactly the kind of behavior you want from your audience – and let them have some fun at it, too.

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.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you the following special bulletin

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 11, 2010 in Awakening | 1 comment

Reprinted with permission from J. Michael Straczynski, Amazing Spiderman 36

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you the following special bulletin.

Longitude: 74 degrees, 0 minutes, 23 seconds West.
Latitude: 40 degrees, 42 minutes, 51 seconds North.
Follow the sound of sirens.

Some things are beyond words.
Beyond comprehension.
Beyond forgiveness.

The questions come:

How could you let this happen?
Why didn’t you know this was coming?

How do you say we didn’t know? We couldn’t know.
We couldn’t imagine.
Only madmen could contain the thought, execute the act, fly the planes.
Even those we thought our enemies are moved. Because some things surpass rivalries and borders.
Because the story of humanity is written not in towers but in tears.
In the common coin of blood and bone.
In the voice that speaks within even the worst of us, and says

This is not right.

Also here are those who face fire without fear or armor.
Those who step into the darkness without assurances of ever walking out again, because they know there are others waiting in the dark.
Awaiting salvation.
Awaiting word.
Awaiting justice.

Ordinary men.
Ordinary women.
Made extraordinary by acts of compassion.
And courage.
And terrible sacrifice.

“We’ve voted, and we’re going to try to take the plane.
It’s the only way to stop them hitting Washington.
I love you.”

Ordinary men.
Ordinary women.
Refusing to surrender.

Ordinary men.
Ordinary women.
Refusing to accept the self-serving proclamations of holy warriors of every stripe, who announce that somehow we had this coming.

…probably what we deserve….
All of them who have tried to secularize America…the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians and the ACLU…. I point the finger in their face and I say, “You helped this happen.” – Jerry Falwell

– it is God’s will that America should fall through their iniquity and their sin – Osama bin Laden

We reject them both in the knowledge that our tragedy is greater than the sum of our transgressions.

Bodies in freefall on the evening news.

Madness in mosques, shouting down fourteen centuries of earnest prayers, forgetting the lessons of crusades past:

That the most harmed are the least deserving.

There are no words.
There are no words.

The death of innocents and the death of innocence.
Rage compounded upon rage. Rage enough to blot out the sun.
And the air still filled with questions.

Is it going to happen again?
What do I tell my children?
Why did this happen?

What do we tell the children?
Do we tell them the evil is a foreign face?

No. The evil is the thought behind the face, and it can look just like yours.

Do we tell them evil is tangible, with defined borders and names and geometries and destinies?

No. They will have nightmares enough.

Perhaps we tell them that we are sorry.
Sorry that we were not able to deliver unto them the world we wished them to have.
That our eagerness to shout is not the equal of our willingness to listen.
That the burdens of distant people are the responsibility of all men and women of conscience, or their burdens will one day become our tragedy.

Or perhaps we simply tell them that we love them, and that we will protect them. That we would give our lives for theirs and do it gladly, so great is the burden of our love.

In a universe of Gameboys and VCRs, it is, perhaps, an insubstantial gift. But it is the only one that will wash away the tears and knit the wounds and make the world a sane place to live in.

We could not see it coming. No one could. We could not stop it. No one could.
But we are still here. With you.
Today. Tomorrow. And the day after.

We live in each blow you strike for infinite justice, but always in the hope of infinite wisdom.

Because we live as well in the quiet turning of your considered conscience.
The voice that says all wars have innocents.
The voice that says you are a kind and a merciful people.
The voice that says do not do as they do, or the war is lost before it is even begun.

Do not let that knowledge be washed away in blood.

When you move, we will move with you. Where you go, we will go with you.
Where you are, we are in you.

Because the future belongs to ordinary men and ordinary women, and that future must be built free of such acts as these, must be fought for and renewed like fresh water.

Because a message must be sent to those who mistake compassion for weakness. A message sent across six thousand years of recorded blood and struggle.

And the message is this:

Whatever our history, whatever the root of our surnames, we remain a good and decent people, and we do not bow down and we do not give up.

The fire of the human spirit cannot be quenched by bomb blasts or body counts.

Cannot be intimidated forever into silence or drowned by tears.

We have endured worse before; we will bear this burden and all that come after, because that’s what ordinary men and women do. We persevere.

No matter what.
This has not weakened us.
It has only made us stronger.

In recent years we as a people have been tribalized and factionalized by a thousand casual unkindnesses.

But in this we are one.

Flags sprout in uncommon places, the ground made fertile by tears and shared resolve.

We have become one in our grief.
We are now one in our determination.
One as we recover.
One as we rebuild.

You wanted to send a message, and in so doing you awakened us from our self involvement.

Message received.

Look for your reply in the thunder.

In such days as these are heroes born. The true heroes of the twenty-first century.
You, the human being singular.
You, who are nobler than you know and stronger than you think.
You, the heroes of this moment chosen out of history.

We stand blinded by the light of your unbroken will. Before that light, no darkness can prevail.

They knocked down two tall towers. In their memory, draft a covenant with your conscience, that we will create a world in which such things need not occur.

A world which will not require apologies to children, but also a world whose roads are not paved with the husks of their inalienable rights.

They knocked down two tall towers. Graft now their echo onto your spine.
Become girders and glass, stone and steel, so that when the world sees you, it sees them.

And stand tall.

Stand tall.

Stand tall.

Reprinted with permission from J. Michael Straczynski, Amazing Spiderman 36

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.

5 Power Tips for Follow Friday

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 10, 2010 in New media, Social media, Social networks, Strategy, Twitter | 3 comments

A longtime tradition on Twitter is a weekly meme called Follow Friday, where on Fridays you recommend people to follow to your existing followers. Follow Friday is normally done by cramming as many usernames into a tweet as possible and somehow managing to shoehorn a #FF hashtag in there as well. Example:

The problem with Follow Friday tweets is that you rarely, if ever, get any kind of context or reason why you should be following this list of otherwise random people. You also usually don’t get a full list of who you should be following as you run out of space really quickly.

So how do you make Follow Friday more interesting and useful? Start by making some context-relevant Twitter lists on a service like TweepML, or with Twitter’s built-in lists. Why not make a list of coworkers or friends on a service like TweepML.org? See how much more relevant that is? You know why each person on that list is there… and at the bottom of the page, in just a couple of clicks, you’re following everyone on the list.

Want to kick it up a notch? Let’s say you find a list of interesting folks to follow on Twitter. Take a look at this page on TweepML, the list creation page. See the “Find users on this link” box?

Paste in the list URL (example shown) and hit find. Now you’ve got a list of that list for your own Follow Friday efforts. Once you click through to the list’s page after you create it, it’s just one more click and you’re following those folks.

Powerful, eh? Who else should you follow? Follow people who are relevant to you and who are of interest to you. How do you know who this is? Here are some suggestions.

1. People who mention your domain name or company name:

Remember, don’t just go manually clicking and following these folks. That’s a waste of time. Add them via the find by URL to your TweepML Follow Friday list, right?

2. People who reply to you. Search your username on search.twitter.com and then, yes, copy the URL into the find by URL box.

3. People tweeting nearby you. After all, there’s a good chance you might actually run into them. Copy them into your TweepML Follow Friday list.

via Advanced Twitter Search

4. People tweeting with specific keywords.

Also part of Advanced Twitter Search

5. People at an event you’re at (or might be). Here’s an example using Jeff Pulver’s #140conf (which I’ll be speaking at on Tuesday).

Once you’ve assembled your Follow Friday TweepML list, follow it yourself to start engaging with people who might be of interest to you, and then share it with the rest of the world on Follow Friday instead of a useless list of user names that has no meaning.

Happy Follow Friday!

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.

My 3 takeaways on Google Instant

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 9, 2010 in Advertising, Google, Marketing, Technology | 11 comments

Google Instant launched today. It’s rolling out to a Google web search box near you, very soon. If you missed the memo, it goes a bit like this:

Google shows results as you type now, in real-time.

If your account has it, try it out. Here’s a few thoughts as I was watching the press conference today…

1. I wholly agree with Neil Bearse’s assessment that this is going to totally wreck your PPC display to click numbers. Ads are refreshing in real-time based on your query as you build it. Try it – start typing marketing podcast slowly, and you’ll see the PPC ads change rapidly. If you’ve been relying on certain impression-based metrics, get ready to toss those out.

Watch as I type marketing:

and then one more letter, marketing p:

Change of ads in real-time. Do all of these count as impressions? No – Google has a 3 second rule to prevent massive over-display numbers, but 3 seconds is still way faster than ad churn under Old Google.

2. The rage in SEO for years has been long tail queries. Long tail page directories have been the fashion and the institution for some time now. However, notice that results begin to appear the moment you start to type your query. If you as a consumer see results that are relevant in the first two terms, you’re going to stop typing and start clicking.

The short head is back in business – expect much heavier competition for short head terms. The winner of the short head terms? Those with the largest warchests to spend to get to #1 for very common terms. Can’t compete on a very popular term? Start creatively thinking about using LDA-related queries to at least mitigate the damage.

3. Geo-targeted local search is built in. I started to type University of and College of while I was sitting in Federal Hill, Baltimore, Maryland instead of where I normally sit. Guess what queries automatically populated and what started showing:

Bear in mind I was logged into my regular Google account, which most often queries from Metrowest Massachusetts. Based on my location via Internet connection (since I don’t use any checkin services), Google was doing real time searching where I am, automatically. If you’re not registered with Google Places, now you’re losing even more business. Get registered and set up right now.

Google Instant changes human behavior. It’s spooky to watch, but downright scary for marketers trying to be found amidst more and more competition online.

Are you ready for Instant?

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.