Be your own social media customer

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

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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Basics before the basics

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Nov 9, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, On ko chi shin, White Belt | 1 comment

How many of you remember the classic martial arts movie The Karate Kid? If you’ve never watched it, go find it on the movie rental service of your choice.

Remember how Ralph Macchio’s character Daniel was put through a series of seemingly pointless exercises by his teacher Mr. Miyagi, the most famously quoted being “wax on, wax off”? As humorous as those examples were, they served an important purpose, to teach Daniel about the basics before the basics in the martial arts. Wax on, wax off was a rote drill designed to teach the chudan-uke mid-level block to a punch, and by having him practice it over and over again in the context of a chore, Mr. Miyagi got the motion into Daniel’s muscle memory.

The martial arts in real life are filled with these kinds of exercises, designed to give beginners a strong foundation in the basics before they even start fundamental techniques like basic routines (kata). In my own training, we have conditioning exercises to strengthen key muscle groups, agility exercises, coordination exercises, and so on. Each of these exercises contributes to the base skills needed to make techniques work. These are called the basics before the basics, the raw materials that we fashion building blocks from.

It should be no great stretch of the imagination, then, to envision the basics before the basics of digital marketing. What pre-requisites would you expect of a new employee or a new vendor that would come before even wondering if they know how to use Twitter or Facebook to generate results?

Here’s a short list of some things I might look for, some of the basics before the basics of digital marketing and social media:

1. Is the person a strong writer? Writing is the foundation, the bedrock, of most content creation. Even things like audio or video often rely on a written script in order to deliver maximum impact. Can you communicate ideas clearly? Can you create language that is persuasive? If you can write well, you can apply that skill to nearly every form of content generation.

2. Is the person a good analyst? Given a set of information, a set of data, can they extract something of value, some insight from it? They don’t have to be a Ph.D. in statistics, but they should be able to look at a pile of data, make a chart from it, and at least see if there’s some kind of trend, because that’s the foundation of web and social media metrics.

3. Is the person a good researcher? When posed with a question, can they come up with a solution by any legal means necessary? Can they Google intelligently? Can they put together discrete information sources and find an answer? Can they learn independently, without much guidance or hand holding? The ability to find the right answer and the persistence and willingness to get one is also a foundation skill.

As you can see from this short list, there isn’t a lot that’s needed as the basics before the basics. Like a good boxer, you don’t need a huge toolkit to be effective, but you need to be able to use the tools you have with excellence and consistency.

Those of you who come from an education background should immediately recognize the old cliche of reading, writing, and arithmetic in the three core skills listed above, the basics of the basics. In our quest for the newest shiny objects, we often lose sight of the fundamentals that can make us great, that are pre-requisites for us being great. While it’s great to have the newest, shiniest, most buzzworthy tools and services at our fingertips, it’s ultimately meaningless if we don’t have mastery of the basics to use them.

Side note: the mid-level block is surprisingly difficult to do correctly. In the picture above, from Flickr, if you do it wrong against something like a kick, you get your arm broken. Don’t try martial arts without the supervision of a qualified instructor.

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How to make better interview videos with Levelator and iMovie

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 15, 2011 in Conferences, Podcasting, Technology, White Belt | 6 comments

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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Do you have a swipe file?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on May 27, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Productivity, White Belt | 4 comments

If you’ve not spent a lot of time around creative advertising and marketing folks, you may never have heard of a swipe file before now. A swipe file is a collection of stuff that has worked, arranged in such a way to inspire you and give you future ideas. Done properly, it can be one of the most valuable assets you can have to jumpstart your creativity.

So how would you go about creating such a creature? I’m a fan of Evernote, though certainly you can use any digital storage mechanism you like, such as Google Notebook or Docs.

Start by creating a simple organizational system designed around your creative blocks. Most folks working with swipe files tend to organize badly (if at all) and create a system that doesn’t solve the root problem of a writer’s/creator’s block.

Create a set of folders, notebooks, etc. labeled by your specific blocks. For example:

• Writer’s block
• Ad copy block
• Ad photo block
• Magazine headline block
• Email call to action block
• Ad layout block
• Blog post block
• Facebook Fan Page art block
• High contrast photo block

This way, whenever you’re working on a project and you can identify what kind of block you’re facing in your own mind, you can very quickly look to your swipe file for solutions. This is why most swipe files fail – they don’t address the actual problem you’re trying to solve, and thus you never learn to rely on it.

Once you’ve got the swipe file set up, start collecting materials. Set aside 5-10 minutes each day to pull stuff you’ve seen from the day (or previous day) into the relevant folders. Saw a great ad on the side of a bus that you snapped in your phone’s camera? Put it in the appropriate block file. Got an email that compelled you to buy something? Put it in the appropriate block file.

The key to a great swipe file is its contents – any time you see something that just makes you stop in your tracks, get it into your swipe file. That’s why I use services like Evernote – the phone app means that if I see a great ad while I’m out and about, I can capture it quickly and get it into the file, and the email forwarding function means I can just forward compelling messages straight to the file.

Set up and use a swipe file for a month to see how it can help you smash those blocks and keep your advertising and marketing efforts moving forward!

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Marketing White Belt: Foundations of Creative Marketing

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 24, 2011 in Advertising, Awakening, Marketing, White Belt | 2 comments

Marketing tends to be divided into two houses. One house is the analytical side, where data is the order of the day and results can be quantified with incredible precision. Return on investment is a straightforward financial calculation and campaign performance is measured by wonderful tools and methods.

The other house is the creative side, where data, analysis, and calculation can be incredibly counterproductive. Ideas rule the roost in the creative side of marketing, finding new and different ways to communicate to your audience. Data can provide some starting points for creative, but after that, it’s entirely about what appeals to our most human aspects.

At the risk of oversimplifying, great creative in marketing is founded entirely in passion and understanding.

You must deeply understand what it is you’re promoting in every practical way possible so that you can understand how it will appeal to different people. Part of that understanding is driven by product knowledge, and part is driven by understanding how people who currently love your stuff relate to it. There is no substitute for talking to customers here, no shortcuts you can take, no instant surveys you can deploy that will lend this insight. There’s also no substitute for actually using your products or services.

As a customer of what you have to offer, you can and should listen to yourself about the quality of experience you’re having. One thing you hear often about new Apple products just before they come out is that “Steve (Jobs) has been using it and loves it!”, which is high praise from the most difficult customer you could imagine.

The second area that drives creative marketing is passion. In order to construct marketing creative that will appeal to people, you must care deeply about what it is you have to offer. In an ideal situation, that extends to the organization you work for (non-profits are especially good at this) and the customers you serve. Being passionate about what you have to offer the world isn’t a skill that can be taught, any more than being passionate about a food you can like is something you can learn from a textbook.

Two areas where creative marketers tend to fall short with passion are simply not being passionate enough and being overly so to the point of blinding zealousness.

Lack of passion for a product, service, or company creates disconnected marketing, creative content that is confusing, and creative content that is undirected. It creates designs that are uninspired, ads that don’t catch attention, and marketing that fails to stir any emotion. You see this most often when design is attempted by a committee of people – the very process of design by committee often prohibits a passionate love for a product that is singularly expressed.

Ultimately, if your marketing design and creative lacks passion, you either have to retake the design process away from committee, or in the case of a single person or creative director, if you lack passion for your products, services, customers, and company, you may simply need to switch jobs to somewhere else.

Too much passion in creative marketing is equally problematic in that it tends to blind you to what will actually appeal to your customers. You’re so sure of what you’ve created that you fail to test, fail to have customer experiences yourself, fail to talk to customers, fail to accept any input at all. The cliche that love is blind is never more true than here.

I’ll leave you with two questions that can help clarify your level of passion to your products/services, company, and customers. Ideally, get your answers down to 140 characters or less. If these answers don’t flow easily, work on them until you achieve clarity. In the process of doing so, you’ll get a better understanding of where your passion lies and be able to transmit that in everything you design and build. Not enough passion and you’ll stumble for answers for a long time. Too much passion and you won’t be able to crystallize and condense your answers into a tight, compact form that you can easily communicate.

1. Why are you here? This is your mission statement. Not the cheesy “commitment to industry-leading best practice synergies” corporate-speak, but a real sense of mission, of what is wrong with the world that you intend to fix.

Example: At Blue Sky Factory, we acknowledge that most of the world, to be frank, really sucks at email marketing. That’s the ugly, honest truth. We aim to fix that. We aim to help you become a better marketer through effective email marketing.

2. What will the world look like after you’ve finished changing it? This is your vision statement. Again, not corporate-speak, but a very clear picture of how the world will look when you’re done changing it.

Example: At the Boston Martial Arts Center, we know we’ve succeeded not when someone straps on a piece of black cloth around their waist, but when they have been transformed from weak people – weak of body, weak of mind, weak of warrior spirit – into strong people, people who can go out in the world and bring their strength to others deeply in need of authentic leaders and heroes. In the words of Stephen K. Hayes, we unleash your potential.

Do you see how easy it would be to go to work every day with compact, powerful answers to these questions? Do you see how the answers can infuse every aspect of your marketing with the vibrance and energy it needs to leap off the page or out of the ad and grab consumers’ hearts and spirits? That’s what your marketing needs. Go forth and get it!

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Marketing White Belt: Marketing ROI

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 22, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Metrics, Money, White Belt | 14 comments

Pick a term that is bandied about the most but understood the least and chances are it will be ROI, return on investment. Before we go any farther, let’s say a few things about ROI.

ROI is a financial term with an actual financial formula. There is no substitute for it and there are no factual, intelligent ways to weasel around it. Expressions like “return on influence”, “return on engagement”, and “return on conversation” are largely invented terms by people who don’t know how to calculate ROI.

That said, ROI is not the ultimate measure of marketing performance. ROI is an objective metric (an endgame metric that tells you if you’re there yet) only if cost containment is a priority for your marketing. If you are in a growth mode with an objective of capturing significant market share, ROI can actually be a hindrance to your marketing efforts because over-focus on it will prevent you from taking short-term losses in exchange for long-term potential gains.

So what is ROI? Simply put, it is the following formula:

Income Earned from Marketing Efforts – Marketing Expenses / Marketing Expenses = ROI

That is ROI. It’s a deceptively simple formula. The reason why it’s so deceptively simple is that there are a lot of components in each of the two areas.

Determining income earned from marketing efforts requires the use of a good CRM that allows you to track what marketing methods actually result in sales, and what the revenue of those sales is. For example, let’s say you sell chewing gum. To the best of your ability, you need to be able to track exactly how much gum you’ve sold to consumers at what price, by marketing channel. The last part is the catch. It’s easy to figure out how much gum you’ve sold, but much harder to figure out what marketing channel drove those sales. Online is relatively simple – using tools like Google Analytics to track checkouts at a virtual store makes that fairly straightforward. Offline is trickier and requires things like surveying and statistical sampling in order to accurately assess why someone bought a pack of gum.

Income can be even trickier to determine if it’s decoupled from marketing, as is often the case with wholesalers and resellers. If you manufacture alkaline batteries like Duracell or Energizer, there’s a good chance you use a distributor or reseller like a Walmart or Target to resell your goods. As a result, your marketing efforts to build your brand are decoupled from the actual transactions because someone else is handling the sales – and as a result, all of your brand-building effort may be for naught if a reseller fails to display your products effectively. One of the few methods that gets around this problem to some degree is coupon redemption. If a manufacturer issues a coupon, they can get an actual idea of a channel’s income generation potential by tracking how many coupons were issued vs. how many were redeemed from that channel.

The expense side of marketing is also fraught with danger, especially in fields like social media. Almost no one tracks the single largest expense in social media: time. Time is not free. Time has never been free. How much you spend in any marketing channel isn’t just a question of money leaving your bank account or corporate credit card, but time spent as money.

Here’s an example of determining time spent as money. Let’s say you’re in marketing and you earn $50,000 per year. The effective number of working hours you have per year is 52 weeks x 40 hours per week, or 2,080 hours. Your effective hourly pay, then, is $24.04 per hour. For every hour you spend on Twitter, Facebook, Quora, etc., you are effectively investing $24.04 of time as money in that marketing channel. Suddenly, channels like social media get very expensive.

So let’s put the two sides, income and expense, together in an example so that you can see what marketing ROI looks like.

Let’s say you decided to advertise using Google’s Adwords pay per click advertising. Let’s say you spent $500 in cash and 5 hours of your time (at a $50,000/year salary) to get Adwords up and running, and in turn, you earned $1,000 in sales of, let’s say citrus-scented headphones.

Do the preparation math:

• Income: $1,000
• Expense (cash): $500
• Expense (non-cash): $24.04 x 5 = $120.20
• Total Expense: $620.20

The ROI formula is Income – Expense / Expense, so $1,000 – $620.20 / $620.20 = 61.24%.

This is an excellent ROI. It states that for every dollar spent, you earned the dollar back plus 61.24 cents. Any business would be very pleased with that ROI and would likely ask you to invest a little more time and a lot more money if that result remains consistent.

Let’s try another example for the same person at the same company. Let’s say you’ve decided that Facebook is the hottest thing since sliced bread and you’re going to avoid outlaying cash on your Facebook efforts. You set up a Fan Page for your citrus-scented headphones, take 80 hours to set it up, administer it, manage the community, do outreach, etc. but you spend no money on it and you manage to sell $1,000 worth of those strange headphones. You’re feeling good about yourself – this social media stuff works, right?

Do the preparation math:

• Income: $1,000
• Expense (cash): $0
• Expense (non-cash): $24.04 x 80 = $1,923.20
• Total Expense: $1,923.20

The ROI formula shows $1,000 – $1,923.20 / $1,923.20 = -48% ROI. Uh oh. When you account for time spent as money, Facebook (in this example) is a money-loser. For every dollar of time you invest in it, you’re losing 48 cents.

This is where it’s decision time for you as a marketer.

Remember, if cost containment isn’t a primary goal, ROI isn’t the correct metric to be focusing on. If you’ve made the conscious and strategic decision to take a financial loss (in cash and time spent as money) in order to grow a long term opportunity, then this ROI of Facebook for citrus-scented headphones may be acceptable. However, if cost containment is a primary goal for your marketing department, you have to make the decision whether to adjust your Facebook strategy or cut it out and stop your losses.

Ultimately, ROI is just one way to measure marketing’s performance, but it’s one of the least well-understood ways of doing so. By walking through this calculation, you’ll realize just how difficult it is to calculate with great precision and how meticulous you must be in your tracking methods in order to capture even moderately good quality data. If you can do that effectively, ROI is yours to analyze, but if you can’t because of organizational structure or operational issues, then you’ll need to forego the use of ROI as a marketing metric.

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