It’s not the camera
Take a look at this photo taken with an iPhone 3G, one of the old models that can’t even run iOS5.
Now take a look at this photo shot with a Nikon D90 with a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens on it.
They’re both lens cap photos (or in the case of the iPhone, intentionally shot with my thumb over the lens). Whether the camera costs nothing or thousands of dollars, if you lack the skill to use the gear, quality and cost of your gear is irrelevant.
Now let’s contrast with this photo taken from the Flickr Cameraphone group by FedeSK8:
At a recent event, someone repeatedly commented to me that my camera took incredible photos. No, it didn’t, otherwise all those times I left it on the table in front of me, it would have been shooting and I could have retired to the bar instead. The camera certainly helped, but in the end, it’s the skill of the photographer that makes the gear powerful, not the other way around.
This week, I’m keynoting the UoT Internet Marketing Conference and this is one of the key points of my talk. Social media doesn’t make us more powerful, more effective, or more profitable. Social media is just intangible “gear”. What makes us more powerful, more effective, and more profitable are our skills in using the gear that we have. The sooner you get beyond the toolbox, the sooner you will focus on what’s going to move the needle for you and get you the results you want.
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On recycling blog posts
I’ll gently disagree with Chris Brogan’s idea about recycling blog posts yesterday. Go read it if you haven’t.
Welcome back.
Here’s why this is a bad idea. Senior master instructor Ken Savage of the Winchendon Martial Arts Center likes to compare life to a wheel on a wagon. Each year, the wheel turns around and you’re back to where you started. What we often fail to take notice of is the distance that the wheel has traveled in that year. Each year, we’re further down the path than the year before. Each birthday that rolls around is another year of travel, and a lot happens in that year. You learn a lot. You change. You grow. The wagon is in a different place, too. The terrain is different, the environment is different.
If I write a blog post in, say 2008, about something “evergreen” and then just repost it as is or link it up without changing it, I’m giving short shrift not only to my readers, but also to myself. By doing that, I’m failing to acknowledge that a lot has happened in 3 turns of the wheel and who I am today in 2011 should have even more insight, even more value to add.
If you want to recycle older stuff, especially stuff with no interactions or comments on it, take just a couple of minutes to polish it up, rewrite parts that have changed, and add in anything that you’ve gained from your experiences as the wheel has turned. Then take your old post, redirect it to preserve any inbound link juice, and let the world know about your newer, more updated perspective on things.
When you think about it in terms of real world recycling, the exact same thing happens. The old is crushed into raw materials, melted down, impurities extracted, and then reformed into something new. Don’t just hand someone a “used bottle” blog post – truly recycle it and give them something fresh.
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Where have your heroes gone?
At a certain point in your life, you’ll notice that your heroes are vanishing. Some will vanish from old age, illness, or death. Others will, in the words of Harvey Dent, live long enough to become the villain. Our earliest heroes, our parents, eventually leave us. Others, such as our cultural icons, succumb to death or perversely, we destroy them.
No matter how you choose to view it, the places in your life for your heroes will slowly become emptier and emptier. What do you do about it? Who is supposed to fill those places, fill those shoes?
You are.
If your life feels as though there’s an absence of heroes, it’s because the role of the hero was meant for you. Once you reach a certain point of capability in your life in any area of skill, you are supposed to turn your abilities, capabilities, and powers towards helping others, towards energizing your abilities with compassion. You’re supposed to step up, transcend your limitations and the boundaries of an ordinary life to become more, to brighten your world a little more.
Are you a marketer? After you’ve become proficient, you’re supposed to turn those skills towards more than just asking people to buy crap.
Are you a social media community manager? After you’ve learned how to manage a community, you’re supposed to direct it to more than just reducing customer complaints.
There are consequences if you don’t.
I recently had the chance to talk at length with Lama Samten Gyamtso about how we deal with heroes, especially in the online world where developing a following and influencing others en masse is relatively easy (compared to the pre-Internet age). Without some guiding light, some kind of guiding direction, corruption is inevitable. When 10,000 (or 100,000, or a million) people are following you on Twitter, listening to what you have to say, giving you approval and encouragement, it is almost natural that you’re going to end up deviating off the path into trouble if you don’t have something guiding you.
Sometimes the trouble is financial, where you stop seeing friends and start seeing monetization opportunities. Sometimes the trouble is carnal, following the path of music rockstars in a very literal way. Sometimes the trouble is much deeper, to the point where you lose yourself and then wake up one day wondering who it is you’re looking at in the mirror.
The way back to where you’re supposed to be going is driven by compassion and ideal.
- Who are you supposed to be?
- What are you supposed to be doing?
- Are you using your skills and abilities to those ends?
If you use these questions as a lens to focus your efforts, you’re more likely to mitigate or eliminate corruption, as you’ll be working too hard to be diverted away from your most noble goals.
Then a funny thing will happen. One day, you’ll wake up, look in the mirror, and find that the hero you were looking for in your life is staring right back at you.
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Two obvious iOS 5 marketing tips
Today marks the rollout of Apple’s new iOS 5, the operating system that drives its devices such as the iPhone and iPad. Among the new features are a voice driven assistant named Siri and significant updates to the Safari mobile browser. Let’s talk about these two changes.
Siri provides, among other things, a voice interface to many of the common functions in iOS. As with all voice recognition systems, there’s a good chance that the easier something is to pronounce, the better the system will do. As this sort of voice interface becomes more widespread, it will impact your marketing in a few ways.
- Your business needs to be recognizable by voice. You know all those clever companies that decided to start omitting vowels from their domain names? A voice interface won’t necessarily realize you meant an intentionally misspelled brand name, especially if it’s not well known.
- If you have hyphens and other oddities in your domain name, now might be the time to buy an alternative. If you want someone to get to your site by voice navigation, the odds of a computer getting MarketingOverCoffee.com spelled correctly vs. i-want-2-make-ur-marketing-1337.net are pretty good. Pronounceable domain names matter more than ever.
- Search queries will get longer on mobile devices. If Siri works as advertised, queries could become entire, full sentences. Watch your queries like a hawk to see how things like query length and complexity change.
The second major change incorporates Read-it-later/Instapaper functionality right inside of the Safari browser. Among other things, this standardizes fonts, cleans up text, and removes navigation and advertisements from web copy. Take a look:
A few major impacts here:
- Sites that rely heavily on AdWords and other advertising programs? You just got pantsed. Reader cleans up all of those ads.
- If you’re not coding to standards and learning HTML5, there’s a good chance that your site will get chopped up in new and unpredictable ways. Part of HTML5 is incorporating tags like <article> inside your content, which then lets the browser find the relevant stuff and display it.
- When you’re blogging, you absolutely, positively need to be adding calls to action to your body copy. That’s what’s going to get seen. That wonderful template with the exquisite call to action buttons in the navigation? Look at the picture above. They’re going to fade away when someone uses the Reader feature. Here’s a quick sanity check for you right now: go subscribe to your blog and read it in something like Google Reader. Your ads, your navigation, your calls to action – all of them are gone and you’re left just with the core copy itself. The way around this is to be placing vital calls to action in the body copy itself so that it’s seen no matter how you slice and dice. For example, in my blog posts, I use a WordPress plugin called Shortcode Exec PHP that executes a snippet of text at the end of each post. Every platform I know of syndicates all of my calls to action at the end of each post, and chances are very good that iOS 5 will as well. Consider doing something similar.
So, that’s iOS 5 in a nutshell for marketers. Oh, there’s just one more thing…
… Twitter is everywhere. If you’re not currently active on Twitter, you’re going to miss out on the interactions with all the iOS 5 users who are. Get going.
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Where are the advanced conferences?
One of the questions that crops up all the time in social media and new media events is, where are the advanced conferences? Where are the events tailored to the veteran practitioners, the folks who have been doing it forever and are already good at it, beyond the basics? The answer may surprise you: there aren’t any.
Why?
The answer comes back to teaching and learning, and how teaching evolves throughout your educational process. At the most basic levels of learning, a one-size-fits-all methodical approach works extremely well. Memorize this multiplication table. Learn the periodic table. Execute this set of procedures. Follow this recipe to make a cake. Move your hands like this and your feet like this.
After a certain point, however, you achieve proficiency in the basics. You know how to Tweet. You know how to post items on Facebook. You’ve sat through the same “How to build your brand” session at every conference. This is the point where most conferences stop, and understandably so. At this point in your education, you need to start experimenting.
Experimentation, testing, breaking things and seeing the results – this is the essence of more advanced education. There isn’t a single conference in the world that can give you this experience. You have to go out and do it. Test things, play around, vary stuff, until you find what works and what doesn’t work for you. The problem is, no one can teach you this in a conference session.
At this point, you need to be working with a mentor, a guide, someone who has gone before you and has made their own mistakes and learned from them. You might get a few ideas about new things to test or new tools to experiment with at a conference, but there is no substitution for the journeyman’s path at this point in your education. It’s up to your mentor to give you more advanced cases to learn the intricacies of your craft. For example, they might suggest building different kinds of Facebook pages to see which works better for you, a brand page or an organization page.
Once you’ve gained proficiency, once you’ve gained a certain degree of mastery, then conferences and events really become useless. At the most advanced levels, you and your teachers are simply explorers on the path together, sharing discoveries, learning and teaching each other. You’ve transcended the basics, transcended the need to have someone give you different scenarios to test, transcended the need for going to conferences entirely unless you’re there for the social aspect or to teach as a presenter.
Can you, as a veteran practitioner, still get value out of conferences? Absolutely, but it’s value you have to create for yourself. Here’s an unpleasant truth: most conference organizers in the social media space aren’t veteran practitioners of social media themselves, so they have no idea what would be of benefit to you. Find other veteran practitioners and go grab lunch or coffee while you trade ideas and your own research, so that you can get fellow explorers’ input on what you’re doing. Find the local coffee shop near the venue or the diner or other places where you can create meetings and brainstorming sessions for yourself.
If you’re a conference organizer, try to create as many open spaces as possible such as lounges and alcoves with open seating so that veterans can get together outside of sessions. One of my favorite facilities in this regard is the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, where we hold PodCamp Boston 6. There are tons of little alcoves that are wired up with displays and pervasive Wi-Fi, so veterans can gather in impromptu meetings to share and discuss, some of which are out of line of sight to ensure a little more privacy.
The bottom line is this: once you no longer need to sit in conference sessions about the basics, the rest of your journey is largely your responsibility. Find mentors, find fellow explorers, and see what you can create together, but understand that there is not and likely never will be a conference for you.
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