Why Awaken Your Superhero?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jul 5, 2010 in Awakening, New media, Social networks, Strategy | 7 comments

A funny thing occurred to me recently as I was redesigning this blog. (by the way, if you haven’t stopped by the actual site lately, it’s got a whole new look) There’s a very specific reason why it’s named Awaken Your Superhero – you’re already a superhero. You have only to realize it, to awaken it within yourself.

Consider this: from where you sit reading this right now, you have access to streams of real-time information from all over the world, knowledge spread the moment it’s created. You can watch far-off places, have immediate or near-immediate access to the sum of publicly available human knowledge, communicate with thousands, if not millions of people with just a few clicks of a mouse, influence and affect people next door and thousands of miles away.

In another time, in another place, these would have been powers reserved only for the greatest of superheroes. Comic books would have been written about such a person with these powers…

… and that person is you, here and now. You have superpowers that a generation ago would have been not only legendary, but even absurd. Comic books of years past would have called infinite knowledge an amazing feat; we call it Google. Action hero movies of yesteryear would have called global mindreading an astonishing power; we call it Twitter.

Here’s the snag: we have superhero powers, but we don’t necessary have superhero awareness. We don’t necessarily know what we’re capable of, don’t necessarily understand all of the different ways we can use our powers.

That’s what this blog is about, ultimately. We’re on a never-ending quest to understand not just the new media space, but to understand our role in it and how we can be more effective, more powerful, and more heroic through it. We have to awaken ourselves – awaken our superheroes, and it’s a journey I hope you’ll join me on.

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What content are you sitting on?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 25, 2010 in New media, Podcasting, Video | 13 comments

I was going through my archives the other day, sifting out stuff that I didn’t need to hold onto any more, and found some pretty amazing content collecting dust. I have hours and hours of video, text, and all kinds of media, some of which has never seen the light of day but is incredibly valuable. Other stuff used to be posted online, but has since vanished due to changes, time, even companies going out of business.

Here’s a really simple exercise for you to try: wherever you keep your archives and backups (you do keep backups, right?), go sifting through them for 15 minutes at some point today and see if there’s something in there that is worth bringing back to the light.

Why? Your network, your audience is ever-changing, ever-shifting, and hopefully ever-growing. There are people you are friends with today that had never heard of you a week, a month, a year ago. While your old stuff may be dusty to you, it may be brand new to them – and more valuable than it ever was. Rather than discard old stuff simply because it’s old, take a look at your old stuff and see if it’s worth rseurrecting.

Here’s an added twist: with what you know now, see if your old content improves. Do you have access to better tools, better knowledge, better processes? Here’s a photo I shot way, way back in 2001, which is practically the stone age in digital terms.

What’s different is that today, I have access to tools like Aperture and Adobe Photoshop. When this photo was taken, I would have been using Adobe Photoshop 6.0. Today’s version, CS5, is technically version 12.0 of that same software, and the tools have just gotten better. I used Aperture’s basic auto-enhance tools on this photo and it looks better than it ever did back then.

Here’s a video clip of world-renowned master martial arts teacher Stephen K. Hayes from 2007.

What’s changed? iMovie 9 has motion stabilization and audio normalization, so what would have taken me a ridiculous number of steps back then to edit took relatively few today. You get to enjoy the content – which is still as valuable as ever – but re-creating the content is much less painful.

Back when I did a daily podcast, years ago now, I would go to concerts and with the artist’s permission, record stuff live. All those old recordings are still sitting around in raw form, collecting dust in the archives. When I dug back into them to resurrect something, I found that they definitely needed editing – but my editing skills have changed and improved vastly in the 4 years it’s been since I made the recording. Here’s an example, Rebecca Loebe’s song Grace recorded at a bar in Cambridge, MA about 3 1/2 years ago (MP3). Sounds better than ever with better audio editing knowledge.

So what are you sitting on? What stuff seems old and stale to you but your newest friends might really, really enjoy? It’s a summer Friday – go take a few minutes and bring something back from the past. If it’s still high quality, all of us will appreciate enjoying it again, whether we’ve seen it or not.

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Are you ready for the Twitpocalypse?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 16, 2010 in New media, Twitter | 21 comments

UPDATED: Twitpocalypse postponed to August 31, 2010

Original:

Are you ready for the Twitpocalypse?

On June 30, 2010, Twitter will change forever. For many of you, your favorite widgets, sites, clients, and applications will shatter. Twitter will simply stop working for you in the way you’re used to.

Why?

Twitter announced a really, really long time ago that on June 30, 2010, they’re ending support for basic HTTP authentication, and requiring that all applications that access Twitter via the API change to OAuth authentication. This is being done for security purposes, to make Twitter more secure and accounts less vulnerable to hijacking.

How do you know if you’ll be affected?

Simple. Any application, site, widget, etc. that requires you to type in your Twitter username and password will stop working once Twitter flips the switch. This includes software like popular desktop clients, iPhone apps, and services like TwitPic and many others.

Any application, site, widget, etc. that requires you to “authorize” an application will continue to work as intended.

What can you do if you will be affected?

Plan for a short time to use the Twitter web site until your favorite tools convert over to OAuth if they’re not already on OAuth. Contact the manufacturers of your favorite tools to let them know to switch over to OAuth if they still ask you to type in a username and password today. Find alternatives to your favorites on sites like OneForty.com by searching for applications which specifically use OAuth. If you’re highly dependent on an application or service that uses Basic Authentication and there’s no sign it’ll be ready for the switchover, let your friends and followers know where to find you besides Twitter.

Ultimately, the switch to OAuth is an important one and a good one, but there will definitely be some pain along the way. Be ready now.

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Work-related: SocialSync leaves the nest

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 8, 2010 in Marketing, New media, Social networks, Technology | 0 comments

I very rarely write about work-related stuff directly here because I figure you can get it on the company blog if you’re so inclined. That said, this is an announcement that’s been a long time in coming (more than two years!), well before I was even an employee at Blue Sky Factory. Today, we’re all very proud to kick our newest child out of the private beta nest and see how well it can fly.

Today, we announce SocialSync.

What is it? Short version: take your existing email database, turn on this service (part of the Publicaster service), and in a relatively short amount of time, see how social that database is. Who’s on Twitter? Who’s on LinkedIn? Who’s on Facebook?

Then we kick it up a notch by adding friend/fan/follower/connection numbers. Who’s influential? Who has audience? Who can, if communicated with in an intelligent manner, help you get your messaging way beyond the inbox?

The beauty of SocialSync is that no data processing is required on the customer’s part. Social segmentations “magically” appear alongside your regular email marketing segmentations, and sending socially-focused messages takes literally just a few clicks.

Why is this important? So many companies are sitting on gold mines. Treasure troves. Keys to the kingdom. Those jewels are their customer databases, but until now, there was no easy, simple way to mine that database for social information and get actionable knowledge from it. Now there is.

One of my lists

More important, from a strategic perspective (which is my specialty), SocialSync can do things that you can’t do right now. If you don’t have a social strategy at all as to even where you should be participating, SocialSync will tell you your customers are here or there, so go there and start listening. If you do have a social strategy, SocialSync will either confirm that you’re in the right place or show you where you need to be focusing more of your time.

It’s incredibly powerful for sales, marketing, and customer service. Customer service departments can learn where they should be listening for their customers. Marketing can learn where the influencers in their audience are and jump-start precisely targeted social campaigns using a tried and true asset, their email database. Sales can take existing prospect lists and understand where they should be prospecting socially.

I’m very proud and thrilled to see this service come to market at long last. It’s not the first of its kind – back in a previous career I was using similar data tools, but back then you had to be a database administrator and a developer with mad technical chops and willingness to code for hours and hours to make this work. I’d wager that no marketer on the planet could have used it in its raw form back then, because almost no marketers are programmers or database admins. SocialSync is the first of its kind that does NOT require you to have that expertise, and that’s what makes it so important.

If you’d like to learn more about how SocialSync can help your business, go hit up the info page on the Blue Sky Factory web site.

Stupidly obvious disclosure: I’m an employee of Blue Sky Factory. While I’m not specifically compensated to write about work on my personal blog, I still benefit personally from the success of the company. For a complete list of who else has paid me off, visit my disclosures page.

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.

Why Personal Brand is Essential To Corporate Marketing Success

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Apr 2, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing, New media, Public Relations, Social media | 35 comments

Plenty has been written about the pros and cons of employees engaging in social media at work, officially or unofficially. Plenty of people have gained and lost jobs through the judicious or indiscrete usage of social media and new media, but by and large, most corporations haven’t truly accepted full employee participation in new media. Here’s a slightly different perspective on personal brand, personal blogs, and corporate success:

Personal brand is absolutely essential to future corporate success, at least from a marketing perspective.

Here’s why. If you have employees who are already engaged in new media – blogging, podcasting, social channels – then they likely already have and belong to other communities. Some of their interests overlap with their coworkers, but not many.

If we drew a Venn diagram (you remember these from school, yes? Logic class?) of the various personal networks and interests of your employees, you’d get something that looks like this:

That tiny little wedge in the middle is the intersection of personal and corporate networks. Companies that force their employees to rigorously keep personal and professional separate or even require employees not to participate in personal media creation outside of work create and get access to only that tiny little wedge in the middle, and nothing else.

Now imagine that a company, instead of discouraging or trivializing employees’ personal brands, encouraged them to actively grow their own networks, to use and leverage social media and new media to the best of their abilities. Imagine a company so forward-thinking that each employee had their own powerful personal brand and the freedom to express it (as long as said employees weren’t doing anything materially harmful in public).

What would that company’s reach be? Well, instead of the tiny intersection in the middle of those three networks in the chart above, the company’s effective reach would be the sum, the union of all the networks. Each employee’s personal network would contribute to the effective reach of the whole network.

More important, those employees have different audiences than your core corporate audience. For example, look at a few of the employee non-work blogs of the folks over at Radian6:

- Marcel LeBrun
- Amber Naslund
- Lauren Vargas
- Teresa Basich
- Robin Seidner
- Robbie MacCormack

Each of these folks has their own audience. Some of their audience probably doesn’t even know what they do for work. By liberally encouraging their staff to be out and about in new media, Radian6′s reach is much greater than its corporate blog, and its reach extends into different audiences.

What would it take to make this happen? A few things.

On the corporate side:

1. Employee education. Not just about what is or is not professional even in a personal blog (hey, you know that party photo you have in your photo feed…), but also how to build and grow audience, how to communicate effectively, how to create interest in what they’re doing on a personal level.

2. An awesome company with amazing products and services that’s worth talking about. Requiring employees to blog about your company usually falls flat. You shouldn’t have to ask if your employees legitimately love working for you – they’ll do it on their own. You can generally suggest (hey, we’ve got a kickass promotion for new customers, please tell your friends) but you can’t force it on your employees in their personal, non-work spaces.

3. An embrace of the 80/20 rule. Google and 3M are most famous for embedding this rule in their cultures, wherein employees have up to 20% of their schedule freed to experiment, to try new things, to work on stuff that isn’t in the core business objectives list. This includes stuff like personal blogs, networking outside of corporate target audiences, and participation in things that at first glance don’t seem to feed direct ROI numbers. As long as your team is meeting or exceeding their objectives otherwise, let the 80/20 rule operate to bring in the benefits of serendipity.

On the employee side:

1. Employees need to exercise profoundly good judgement at all times, even outside of work. Each of us is in sales. Each of us is in marketing. Each of us is in customer service. Each of us is in public relations. This is true no matter what title is on your business card. Wherever we go, wherever we interact with other people (online or offline) we are ambassadors of the company we work for. Does that mean we’re working 24/7? No. It does mean we’re not a public embarrassment, however. If you’re going to participate in new media in any way, shape, or form, recognize that you are also implicitly representing your employer whether you want to be or not.

2. Employees need to look for opportunities to build business. If an employer implements the 80/20 rule, there’s an informal social contract that effectively says, if you’re allowed to do your own thing and build your own brand using some work time, throw us a bone here and there so that we’re getting an equal exchange of value. Put up a navigation bar link on your blog with our top SEO keyword (hey, look at that shiny email marketing link), mention us if it’s appropriate when the topic of our business comes up in conversation, and refer people to sales if you’ve got a friend who really and truly needs what we have to offer.

3. Don’t feel obligated to participate. At companies where you have highly engaged coworkers, you may be asked or even subtly peer-pressured into doing the same things. Don’t. If your heart isn’t in blogging or Tweeting or creating new media, don’t do it, because the outcome will suck. The outcome will reflect your lack of passion, and your time is better spent doing things you love.

If you can match up the power of personal networks and different audiences with a great company, great products, and talk-worthy stuff, your reach and influence will be magnified far beyond what you have today.

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.

What You Need to Succeed in Social Media

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 23, 2010 in New media, Social media | 11 comments

As both a practitioner and teacher of social media stuff, it’s interesting to see what people ask for, what people ask to be taught, what other teachers view as important. Here’s an unpleasant truth to social media:

Most of what you need to be successful has nothing to do with social media.

We focus a great deal on tools and metrics because these are tangibles, as tangible as you can get for an information-based medium. We talk about tricks, hacks, methods, and skills because frankly, we have nothing better to teach, and we won’t for a while.

It’s not for want of intelligence or cleverness. It’s that what powers social media is ultimately being skilled at communicating something fundamentally human. Media, social or not, merely amplifies what’s already there.

So how do you succeed in social media quickly? Figure out what human skills you’re already great at. Unless you’re a complete failure at everything in life, you have at least something you’re proficient at. Find that human skill set and work the message amplification power of media into it.

We’ve said for years that you have to be the expert in order to be successful in your use of social media, but not because people inherently trust expertise.

No, you have to be the expert at something because it’s where you’re most confident, most comfortable, most skilled as a human being. When you are communicating with others, if you work in the dead center of your comfort zone, it shows. It’s reassuring to people. It’s energizing to watch, to listen. It’s compelling to see a true master at work in their trade.

In other words, it’s exactly the kind of thing you want to see in your media, social or otherwise. Why watch the Olympics, for example? Because it’s a breathtaking display of the world’s very best, demonstrating to us all what incredible mastery looks like.

If you’re new to social media, communicate from the dead center of your comfort zone at the peak of your game so that whatever mistakes you make with the communications tools themselves are easily glossed over and shined away by the demonstration of your mastery on display.

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.