Video: Awaken Your Superhero from #140conf
I had the pleasure and privilege of presenting at Jeff Pulver‘s 140 Character Conference in New York City about a favorite topic of mine, Awaken Your Superhero:
One of the key points I hope you take away from this talk is that right now, you have superhero powers, you have opportunities to be a superhero, but you may not have the motivation to be a superhero, or may not realize your own power. As I suggested in the talk, this is an exceptionally dangerous place to be.
Without proper motivation, without a reason, a cause, something to believe in, your superhero powers will corrupt you. Sometimes it will corrupt you to just selling crap as a marketer. Sometimes the corruption will be much worse, making you believe you’re someone you aren’t, or don’t want to be, or never thought you could be.
Without proper awareness, you’re treating your superhero powers as something mundane instead of the tremendous gift that they really are. You’re beyond giving away your power – you’re actively resisting, actively denying your full potential as a digitally connected human being. Imagine Superman preferring to be Clark Kent all the time. Imagine Bruce Wayne staying in his mansion at nights, refusing to help Gotham. When you treat your powers as mundane aspects, or worse, as crass tools, you’re forfeiting the place that has been prepared for you to do amazing things with your life.
I hope this talk has motivated you to explore the your full potential as a future superhero in the digital world and given you a chance to take a step back and realize the power that you do have. Take that power and do some good with it!
If you enjoyed this talk, please consider leaving a recommendation for it here. Thank you!
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How to make better interview videos with Levelator and iMovie
At a variety of events I’ve been to recently, people have been shooting videos using handheld video cameras, like Flipcams and the built in video capabilities of the iPhone. These devices are wonderful – compact, good quality video recorders. However, they all suffer from one major deficiency:
The sound is usually terrible. Why? Most of the handheld video cameras simply have small, poor, or incorrectly aimed microphones that fail to record audio in nearly the same quality as the video. There are a number of ways to try to work around these limitations.
1. Get a wireless microphone setup. Talking with Tom does this using a wireless lavalier mic that brings focused sound into his iPhone. Not cheap, but very effective.
2. Record audio separately. This is what I do most often if I’m doing an interview that really matters. I’ll use a Zoom H2 discreetly placed out of field of view and record audio on it, then sync it up later in the video. Effective, great quality, but has a moderate financial cost and a significant time cost.
3. For video shot on the fly or if you don’t want to shovel money at the problem, your best bet is to use Conversations Network’s Levelator. This very simple sound cleaning software takes an existing audio file and tries to clean it up, fixing volume disparities (a very common problem when the interviewer is talking much closer to the camera than the interview subject), and other audio oddities.
The Levelator is fantastic at cleaning up conversation. One caveat: the same tech that lets it clean up speaking also mangles music, so don’t use it on any musical files.
Here’s how to do it in iMovie very simply:
1. Arrange things and know which clips you want in your project (and for how long).
2. Select Detach Audio.
3. Select Export via Quicktime and choose Sound to AIFF.
4. Drag and drop the audio into the Levelator. Let it do its thing.
5. Drag and drop the cleaned audio file back into iMovie and align it with the clip if need be.
6. Delete the original audio clip (purple) and publish your movie.
Here’s an example of a clip of Steve Garfield and Ewan Spence before levelation:
Note the volume differences between Ewan and Steve.
And here’s the clip afterwards:
Ewan and Steve sound roughly the same, and you don’t need to crank the audio all the way up.
Special thanks to Steve Garfield and Ewan Spence for their comedic skills at Blogworld NYC.
Updated: Doug Kaye from the Conversation Network left some clarifications in the comments.
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Grab my new book, Marketing White Belt
Have you had people ask you how to get started in digital marketing?
Are you working with social media practitioners who lack a firm grounding in the basics of marketing?
I’m pleased to announce my first book, Marketing White Belt: Basics for the Digital Marketer, is available right now in the Amazon store and at Barnes & Noble. Longtime readers of the blog will remember a short series by the same name. The book is an enhanced, edited version of that series plus new material, exercises for each of the concepts, and more.
My motivation for writing the book was noticing that a lot of people have found themselves in digital marketing roles with little or no marketing background at all. Believe me, I know – I speak from long, difficult experience. I came into Marketing via technology and had to teach myself everything from the ground up. I lived in the Portable MBA series for a while, took classes, etc. until I understood marketing as well as I understood technology. Much of what I found in standard university marketing classes (apologies to the schools I’ve attended) was unhelpful past a certain point, but there were a ton of basics that were and are relevant even in the digital age.
That’s what the book is. It’s not long – about 60 pages. It’s not a substitute for an MBA (though it’s a heck of a lot cheaper). It’s not magic fairy dust that will instantly change the world just by purchasing a copy and not reading it (believe me, if it was, I’d price it much, much higher). It’s a summation of the basics that I’ve learned, use, practice, and find valuable in my day to day work as both a practitioner and a teacher, stuff like Marketing Mix, SWOT, ROI, and more.
Many people in marketing roles today – social media practitioners, digital marketers, etc. – are coming into their roles without the basics. They’re coming in from equally valuable backgrounds in technology, PR, advertising, etc. and being thrown to the sharks, expected to sink or swim. This book is for you, a digital life preserver. (note that your Kindle/iPad/device does not in fact float, so don’t use it as a real lifesaver)
One warning about it: its value significantly diminishes if you don’t do the exercises in it. The exercises are simple, nothing requiring acrobatics or anything, but if you just passively read the book and don’t do them, you won’t get practice using the tools. It’s the difference between buying a hammer at the hardware store and then putting it in your basement versus buying the hammer and building something with it. You’ll be much better off if you actually use it. The same is true of the book.
I hope you enjoy the book, but more important, I hope the book provides value to you and makes you a better marketer in the digital age. Grab a copy here from Amazon for the Kindle Platform or for B&N and the Nook. If you find value in it, please tell a friend or colleague about it, or just buy them a copy and gift it. Thank you for reading!
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Do Auto-DMs Work?
Some people love them, some people hate them (rather like popups, right?). But the question isn’t whether or not you like them, the question is, do they work for generating any kind of traffic or attention? The answer is… let’s test!
You see, as much as I may have an opinion on any given marketing practice, I frequently need to remind myself that I am not my audience. I am not my customers. I am no one except myself, one anecdotal bit of evidence in a sea of data waiting to be explored. I routinely rail against the HIPPO problem – the highest individually paid person’s opinion – as being the cause of many marketing failures, so it’d be absurd for me to let my personal preferences dictate whether or not something is worth trying.
So let’s look at a few days’ worth of data from my analytics. The goal in this case was pure traffic alone, not conversion. I wanted to know if auto-DMs would have any kind of real effect on traffic to my website, since traffic is the easiest commitment to get out of someone – just show up. On June 6, I kept doing all of my normal Twitter practices (welcome message, #the5, etc.) plus turned on the auto-DM feature in TweetAdder (affiliate link) with a simple message and a custom, trackable hyperlink.
Before I show the data, I want to ask you this as a fellow marketer: do you have an opinion of auto-DMs? Is that opinion founded on data you collected or the HIPPO problem in your head? If the latter, there’s a good chance you’re not making the most of many different marketing tactics and strategies because you’re letting your judgement cloud opportunities.
Ready for the data?
Here’s the contents of the daily welcome message I send, usually first thing in the morning:
Good morning friends from (wherever I am). (something relevant daily). New friend? Welcome aboard: http://cspenn.com/w
This message shows up in my analytics as cspenn.com welcome message / linkshortener.
Here’s the auto-DM I was sending:
Thank you for following me. If you’re interested in learning more, here’s a quick summary: http://cspenn.com/dm
cspenn.com welcome DM direct message / linkshortener
A key part of testing is making sure you have tracking turned on and made as granular as practical in order to get reliable data. Doing this experiment without correct link tracking would lead to bad conclusions or no conclusion at all. In this case I set up custom URLs on my site and tagged them with the Google Analytics URL builder.
In the period between June 6 and June 10, I picked up 86 new followers. (thank you and welcome aboard, folks)
In that time period, we can see that 45 of them responded to the welcome message (since very few followers who’ve been around for more than a day or two click through on it – they’ve seen it). 3 responded to the auto-DM.
Proportionally:
- The daily welcome message engaged 52% of new followers.
- The auto-DM engaged 3.5% of new followers.
The winner is clearly the daily welcome message and not the auto-DM. Once I had a few days’ worth of data, I turned it off. With as large a Twitter audience as I have and as busy a frequency I have, I’m confident enough in my own data to say that it’s not working for my audience.
Does this mean you shouldn’t use auto-DMs? NO! No, it doesn’t, because your audience may be different from mine. The people interested in you may respond differently. If you don’t test it, you’ll never know. If you let your opinion in advance of data cloud your decisions, you’ll never know and you may be losing money, opportunities, or other things you value. Test it. Test everything, and only after you have reliable data that you sourced yourself should you pass judgement. This is true of every marketing method you have available to you. Write off methods without testing at your peril.
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How to use rel=author tags for SEO
Google’s created a concept called “AuthorRank” (coined by Matt Cutts here) in which savvy web writers can tag themselves in a variety of ways to let Google know that their stuff is legitimate. This is partly a reaction to the endless amount of scraping that goes on of content – by using rel=author and its companion attribute, rel=me, I suspect Google aims to catch scrapers that reprint the articles but never link or reprint the bio pages.
Whitney Hoffman asks:
@cspenn can you explain rel=author to me sometime and where to put it?
Here’s how to use this. In any article you write on a given domain, include the rel=author attribute in a link back to your profile on the same domain. If I write a blog post on ChristopherSPenn.com, in that blog post I should link back to, say, my about page on ChristopherSPenn.com. It’s really that simple.
For example, I could put a byline on this blog post when writing it that says something like “By Christopher Penn“, and then link that up to my about page on my site. In the link, I’d add the rel=author attribute, like so:
Now I’ve attributed this post to me on my site, linking back to another page on my site. When the scrapers come by (and they inevitably do), they’ll pick up this post and reprint it word for word on some other site, but now there’s a mismatch. Rel=author on ChristopherSPenn.com points to my about page on ChristopherSPenn.com, but the same article on IScrapedYourJunkAintNothingYouCanDo.com will be linking off site – an indicator to Google that the scraper is not the real thing.
That’s not the only authorship change you should make, though. Google also included a rel=me attribute in their documentation to address authors who write on multiple sites. If you’re contributing in more than one place, Google is asking you to link your profile pages. For example, if I write regularly on someone else’s blog, I should put a link on my profile page on that blog to ChristopherSPenn.com and put a reciprocal link on my about page on ChristopherSPenn.com to the guest blog. This tells Google I’m the same author, and I suspect then shares the “AuthorRank” across both sites.
Bonus tip: use rel=me on links from your about page to your social networking profiles. It may be difficult to add the reciprocal link (I tried on LinkedIn and Twitter to no avail, Facebook I was able to from my page’s app, and Flickr allowed me), but at least you can signal to Google that those are your profiles on the major social sites. If the concept takes off, I suspect some of the social networks will start allowing you to add the attribute, or do it automatically.
Now, if you’ve been an avid reader of my newsletter, you know about the Shortcode Exec plugin for WordPress, and you’ve been diligently using its shortcodes in your posts, right? So here’s the power tip for you, the power user: edit your shortcode right now to include an attribution link back to your about page.
Boom! Now all your old blog posts are retroactively using the new rel=author tag. This immediately discredits all the scrapers hosting archived versions of your old posts with just a few clicks and boosts all of the original content on your blog past and present that’s using the shortcode.
If you don’t use this plugin, you can still accomplish the same thing, you’ll just need to open up and copy/paste an author line in all your old blog posts. Sorry. You can, yes, include it in your WordPress theme, but remember that the template isn’t scraped when scraper bots do their thing, so you’ll get less juice out of the rel=author trick than putting it in the post itself.
That’s how you use the new rel=author and rel=me stuff. It won’t take you long to implement, and with Google creating this AuthorRank stuff, there’s a good chance that a minimal investment of time now will pay dividends in the near future.
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