Awaken Your Holidays

Posted by on Dec 22, 2011 in Awakening, Books | 2 comments

To celebrate the holidays, instead of doing a silly video or the myriad of other Christmas themes, I thought I’d honor the timeless tradition of regifting and give you something other people gave me.

Back in early 2011, I took a trip to South Korea and during that time period, I knew that blogging and the usual stuff was out of the question. For 10 days, 10 authors took my place and wrote some incredible material. I’ve packaged up those posts as a totally free, no-strings-attached eBook for you to enjoy over the holidays. Without further ado, Awaken Your Superhero:

Awaken Cover

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#re2011: Top and bottom 10 posts from my blog this year

Posted by on Dec 21, 2011 in Advertising, Blogging, Marketing | 0 comments

Holidays 2011

Beginning tomorrow, I’m starting a Twitter series until the end of the year called #re2011. It’ll be a replay of the top and bottom 10 posts from my blog as determined by Google Analytics. Each post will be tagged, indicating whether it’s in the top or bottom 10. At the conclusion of the series, we’ll have a wrap-up blog post with everything in one place. If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you can find me at @cspenn to see the updates every day.

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Should you have a formula for creating marketing programs?

Posted by on Dec 21, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Strategy | 1 comment

Yesterday on his Kitchen Table Companies chat, Chris Brogan asked:

“Should you have a formula for creating marketing programs?”

The answer should be relatively evident to anyone who’s ever tried to cook something: it depends.

beef wellington revealed!

If you’re cooking a dish for the first time, following a formula, following a recipe, is probably a good idea. After all, if someone says, make me a Beef Wellington and you have only a vague idea of what Beef Wellington is, the outcome is probably not going to be what your diner is expecting. So the first time, you follow the recipe religiously. You render the Duxelles, you braise and wrap the beef in the puff pastry, and you make the peppercorn sauce. The first few times you make the dish, you screw it up a lot. The beef gets too tough or the pastry gets soggy, but eventually you get the hang of it.

After a number of tries, you need the recipe less and less. You don’t need to remember what ingredients go in the Duxelles. You don’t need to remember how to render peppercorn sauce. You just do it.

After many, many tries, you can do it from memory entirely, and you even start to improvise on the dish. Maybe you add curry or garlic to it, maybe you try brining the beef or using a different cut than filet. Now not only are you not using the recipe, you’re slowly deriving a new twist on the recipe, a recipe that is different than you’ll find in most cookbooks or online. If people love it enough and ask for it enough, you may even publish your own take as a recipe of its own, and then someone else will take up your Beef Wellington recipe, starting the cycle over agian.

Should you have a recipe for creating marketing programs? It depends on how talented and experienced you are at creating marketing programs. Like the chef, you’ll want that recipe for the first bunch of times until you’re proficient at it. As you gain more and more experience, you’ll use the recipe less and less and begin adapting it more and more, until someday you publish your own marketing recipes.

Bon appetit!

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Be your own social media customer

Posted by on Dec 20, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Social media, Social networks, Strategy, White Belt | 3 comments

Seattle Trip 2010 Day 6

If you want a viable long-term social media strategy, there’s one that is nearly foolproof: be your own customer. This has been phrased in many, many ways, such as eat your own dog food, etc., and for good reason: it’s true. Despite being true, however, we rarely do it.

More important, we have to expand this idea from just the product or service that you’re marketing to everything that you’re doing with your social media marketing. Think of your marketing as a service unto itself, a service that adds value to the salable goods or services you’re promoting. In that light, is your social media marketing a valuable service?

Ask yourself this: how often do you go back to check your own blog for something you wrote previously? One could argue that this is just a symptom of a variety of attention deficit issues, but it’s also a sign that you’ve stored valuable information on your blog. If you never go back to reference your own blog for yourself, it might not be valuable enough.

The same is true for your social media channels. I store links and URLs on my Facebook page in order to archive them somewhere for reference when I publish my weekly newsletter. I am my own customer – I go there to remember what I published. How often do you check your posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+? Never? Your content in social media might not be valuable.

Much has been made of influence scores and retweet/share metrics, but the simplest metric of all is to look at your own behavior. If you never go back to look at your own stuff, if you find no value in what you publish, chances are that no one else does, either. Start repairing your social media marketing by publishing things that are of value to you, and you’ll automatically be publishing things that are of value to others.

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Making the cut

Posted by on Dec 19, 2011 in Awakening | 3 comments

Decide: from French decider or Latin decidere, infinitive of decido (“cut off, decide”), from de (“down from”) + caedo (“cut”).

To decide something isn’t to just make up your mind. To decide, in the truest sense of the word, is to cut down or cut away from all other possible choices. Once you cut down the tree, there’s no uncutting it. There’s no undo, no going back.

Practice on the mountainside

As we wind down the year and start preparing for the new one, start thinking about what you’re going to change. More specifically, we have too much right now vying for our attention. Rich or poor, we are being bombarded every minute of every day with demands for our attention, our eyes and ears, our mindshare. Foods manufactured with tons of additives scream for our attention via our tastes. Music and ads blare at every opportunity for just a few moments. Our inboxes overflow with requests for our time.

To make your days more productive and powerful, think about what you can cut out from your life.

Perhaps it’s a person, someone in your life who brings very little that’s positive and a whole lot that’s negative. Examine your previous interactions with this person and consider whether cutting them out would be a relief. In the digital age, cutting someone out is easier than ever. Simply block or remove them from all your channels. Cut them out!

Perhaps it’s a medium of some kind. Professionally or personally, managing and maintaining tons of social networks is draining, especially if you’re making a legitimate attempt to provide unique value on each. Would you be more effective if you laid one or two channels down to rest and simply paid them no heed? Cut it out!

Perhaps what you need to cut is some busy-ness. Time is most easily recouped from mindless habits that we have. We might turn on our favorite video game or television show. We might fill our days with strings of mindless tasks that we do purely out of habit, such as compulsively checking email or vacantly surfing through friends’ Facebook profiles. Look at what fills your days, find the least valuable thing you do, and cut it out!

Cutting effectively requires commitment. Anyone who has ever cooked and used a knife in the kitchen knows this to be true. You can’t half-heartedly saw at a cut of beef or a baguette and expect to get any kind of worthwhile results – you have to commit, exert some force, and make the cut.

Here’s the secret to all of this: pick just one thing and cut it out. In the martial arts, using a blade against multiple attackers is one of the most difficult skills imaginable, requiring years or even decades of practice to be able to do effectively. Real life is no different! You can’t cleanly and effectively cut 10 steaks at once without insane skill. You can’t clean 10 rooms in your house at the same time without a robot army. Pick one target, one habit, one negative influence in your life, and cut it down. Once you’re sure it’s finished off and isn’t going to get back up and fight you, move to your next target, but don’t try to tackle a whole horde of them.

Are you ready to begin cutting? Have you picked your target for 2012? Sharpen your blade, firm your resolve, and draw your sword!

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