Christopher S. Penn : Awaken Your Superhero » Video

An interview with Don F. Perkins on ZMOT

Christopher S Penn — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:57:33 +0000

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Don F. Perkins from Mind Mulch about a few different things on my mind of late, such as Google’s Zero Moment of Truth. Watch the short 5 minute interview below to see what we chatted about.

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Video: Awaken Your Superhero from #140conf

Christopher S Penn — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 11:59:47 +0000

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!

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Video: Chris Pirillo on why Empire Avenue works

Christopher S Penn — Thu, 26 May 2011 12:12:06 +0000

For what I do in my work at Blue Sky Factory and personally, I still haven’t gotten much juice for the squeeze out of Empire Avenue, and that’s okay. I’m still learning and evaluating, but I got a chance to ask one of the heavy players of EAV about it at Blogworld: Chris Pirillo. Here’s what he had to say about what’s working, how it’s working, and his tips for getting started in a 9 minute video:

Can’t see the video? Watch it on the website.

Find Chris at his website, on Twitter, or buy his stock at (e)PIRILLO.

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Presenting on Fox25 about Facebook iFrames

Christopher S Penn — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 02:20:41 +0000

I had the opportunity this morning to talk on Boston’s Fox 25 News about upcoming changes to tabs on Facebook. Here’s the video interview:

For more information about how to actually implement this change, check out this very lengthy tutorial I wrote on the Blue Sky Factory blog.

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Awesome sword dance performance

Christopher S Penn — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 13:35:00 +0000

Caught this from Ze Frank originally. Wonderful to watch.

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It Gets Better: Marketing

Christopher S Penn — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:16:33 +0000

There’s a very inspiring project created by Dan Savage called It Gets Better, in which people lend their voices to LGBT teens to encourage them in the face of bullying and harassment. I added my own perspective and encourage you to add yours.

Hi. My name is Christopher Penn, Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at Blue Sky Factory, one of the Inc. 5000′s fastest growing companies in America. I have this message for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender kids. It gets better. It gets a lot better.

Here’s why: it gets better because after you leave the little fishbowl of school, there’s an entire world out there that needs your differences. Now, I have no experience of what it’s like to be gay or bisexual, but I do know what it’s like to be different, growing up as a minority in an overwhelming majority. The things that set you apart as different in school are in many cases the things that employers are desperately going to need when you’re out of school.

I work in marketing, and one of the hardest things in the world is to figure out what’s called a unique selling proposition, the thing that makes your product or service different. If you’re a member of the majority that’s never been different or experienced different, this is an incredibly difficult thing to do and it’s why the ads for so many products and services really suck.

If, on the other hand, you can see different, you can create different, you can think different, then you can be incredibly successful in business. Doing what everyone else is doing, trying to be what everyone else is will get you to second place at best. Only those folks who are different, who are willing to step outside the status quo and go where others are afraid to will succeed.

You feel different now and may feel like that’s a negative. It won’t be. Stay with us. Keep going. Keep persevering through other people’s shortsightedness, because in the real world, all of us need your differences on our team to succeed.

It gets better.

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Hire Friday: Alternate Advance Close, Porcupine Questions

Christopher S Penn — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 13:14:03 +0000

Every time you write a cover letter, every time you send a resume, every time you get on the phone for an interview, you are selling. You are working in a sales job with the most important product in the world to you: your talent. While it might seem obvious to you why you’re the perfect fit for a job, chances are the person on the other end probably isn’t aware of that. Your job is to guide them into that decision, and to do that, you need to learn how to sell.

Here’s one of the biggest, most obvious, most blatant missed opportunities for a shot at a job: the closing sentences of a cover letter/email. I’ve lost track of how many cover letters end with this stupid statement (or variations thereof):

I look forward to discussing the opportunity with you at your earliest convenience.

This is epic failure, because as a hiring manager who has other crap to do, it’s never convenient to talk to you, the candidate, and therefore you won’t get a call back.

The antidote to this failure is the alternate advance close, a simple close in which you provide two options, both of which result in a win for you.

Christopher, I’d love to discuss the opportunity with you. Which is better for you, a phone call on Thursday at 2 PM ET or a phone call on Friday at 11 AM ET?

Either answer results in getting the appointment set up, which is the goal!

Suppose the hiring manager says, “neither is good for me”? I’ve seen people stop the conversation dead at this point and lose – they stammer out a “uhhh, okay, well, whenever is good for you…” which is equivalent to saying, “don’t ever call me back”. The right way to respond is the porcupine technique (in which you toss back the question immediately, as if someone had thrown a porcupine at you): “I understand. When is good for you?”

Be politely persistent with your selling. Keep tossing out alternate advances and porcupine responses until you’ve got your shot in the spotlight for the interview – and then keep selling in the interview. Sell in your followup call and email. I’ll leave you with this YouTube clip from the Boiler Room of a high pressure, super hard sell.

Should you sell like that? That’s up to you and your style, but let me leave you with this thought: if you’re talking about putting food on the table for yourself and for anyone you have responsibility to care for, how determined would you be to learn how to sell, in order to buy them the future they look to you to provide?

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Getting stuff done (video)

Christopher S Penn — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:37:16 +0000

A staff memo turned into a video on how to be more productive by chaining productivity ideas together.

Systems discussed:

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What content are you sitting on?

Christopher S Penn — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:00:32 +0000

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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Mandatory viewing: Sir Ken Robinson at TED 2010

Christopher S Penn — Mon, 24 May 2010 23:42:46 +0000

Mandatory viewing, especially if you’re thinking at all about education and how badly we’re failing the generations of students now in school. Read more at TED.com.

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