Twitter favorites power tips

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 8, 2012 in Advertising, Marketing, Technology | 2 comments

When I first started working with Blue Sky Factory, I noticed something peculiar about the company’s Twitter favorites. It wasn’t actual favorite tweets at all – it was instead a collection of praise the company had received online. This was the brainchild of DJ Waldow, the community manager, and what started effectively as a content management system (because Twitter doesn’t provide search outside of a 2 week window) has become one of my favorite sales and marketing tools.

Here’s why this is powerful. In many ways, it’s just like recommendations on LinkedIn: a public set of testimonials and endorsements that other people have given you. What makes it more powerful to me than LinkedIn is that it’s a pile of tweets: very short, very compact praise that you can easily aggregate and show to any prospective customer. They can see for themselves just how many people think highly of your company (or you), and do so quickly through a very fast scan. For individual sales people and marketers, you can favorite any tweet you want, so if you don’t want to leverage a company’s entire collection of positive tweets, you can always favorite just a subset and showcase those.

Want to kick it up a notch? Take the raw text of your Twitter favorites page, clean it up a bit, and feed it to Wordle. (the process for preparing text for Wordle is outlined in this blog post)

Now you’ve got an idea of what words people are consistently using to praise you or your organization. Start using those words in your marketing materials instead of your standard marketing-speak, because what other people say about you now will resonate with the experience prospective customers should have with you.

Kick it up another notch! Using the SimplePie PHP library, add your Twitter favorites to your blog and suddenly you’ve got a curated feed of nice things people have said about you or your company available right on your website:

You’ve earned the praise already. Take these powerful methods of aggregating it and displaying it so that it can work for you to land new business, reassure and reinforce your value to existing business, and help grow your business reputation even more.

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Always on

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 26, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Strategy | 0 comments

We live in the age of always on. I don’t just mean the electronic devices that surround us, but that the audience itself is always on, which means we are always on. There is no time now when you and your employees are not potentially on YouTube, on Twitter, on Facebook. Your average smartphone or handheld camera can boot and be ready to record in 3-8 seconds, so if you and your company are not performing up to expectations, the cameras are rolling.

Some of the more famous examples of always on that have bitten companies?

(what’s especially scary for the brand is that searching for Fedex in YouTube brings this out as the first result)

(again, search for Domino’s Pizza on YouTube and this is the first result)

Pop quiz: how often do you search for your company’s name on YouTube?

In the age of always on, how do you operate effectively? Well, I suppose you could always back draconian Internet censorship legislation and try to legislate your way out of failure, but that’s not really an effective way to operate.

A more viable strategy might be something like this:

1. Run a company worth working for. We talked about this a while back, about having a legitimate vision and mission.

2. Hire people who genuinely want to work for you because they believe in what you do. Small businesses can do this relatively easily – once you become a large corporation, it’s exponentially harder (but not impossible) to bring on employees that have belief in you.

3. Figure out what the operational impediments are that keep employees from doing a 100% job. In the case of the Fedex guy, it could have been an employee having a bad day, or it could have been a delivery schedule that put added pressure to just “get it done” and not “get it done right”.

4. Encourage your employees to have a digital presence (this is dependent on steps 1 and 2) so that their other human aspects show regularly. It’s much easier to say, hey, I’m human and was having a bad day if you have a well-run blog, Twitter feed, etc. that’s showing other aspects of your professional life. Your CEO should have a blog, and so should your marketing intern.

5. Say I’m sorry, but say it in a couple of different ways as humanly as possible. Domino’s did well with their CEO apologizing for their employees’ misdeeds:

In the case of Fedex, where it was an employee not behaving with gross misconduct, having the employee appear with the president/CEO explaining why the package was delivered like that in an honest, sincere way would go a long way towards reassuring the public that the majority of Fedex packages are not delivered so carelessly.

In the age of always on, we have to be able to demonstrate that we are all human beings, not robots, who cannot be always on and delivering perfect performance 100% of the time. Having dedicated employees and dedicated media channels well in advance of a crisis are the necessary ingredients to mitigating those times when we are not on.

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3 methods to power social media success

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 16, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Social media, Social networks, Strategy | 3 comments

I wrote the other day on Google+ that the “secret” to social media effectiveness is to give first, without expectation. Mitch Joel cites this as giver’s gain, one of the best ways to build up social currency. One of the most common questions about giver’s gain that stops people from doing it is this:

“But what do I have to give?”

The answer is straightforward: give what people need. You may not be a great content creator, you may not have a lot of experience, but you can learn content arbitrage in about 20 seconds. It goes like this: learn what your network needs, learn who has it, and connect the two.

Learn what your network needs.

There are some universal needs that everyone in the business world wants. Revenue, obviously. Press and media attention. Employment. Very few people will say, no, I don’t want more customers. Very few people will say, no, my business doesn’t need any more press. Very few people will say, no, I’m not interested in more or better career opportunities.

How do you know what your network needs? Listen to them. The people who are top of mind for me are the people who respond to me, people who talk to me, people who overcome their own shyness or hesitation and say hello at a conference. They’re the people who make a solid impression that tells me in a very short period of time who they are and what they do in an impactful way.

Your network is telling you this every day. Look on Facebook for what people are saying to you. Read what they tweet. See what they’ve edited on their LinkedIn profiles. Then start a running mental or physical list of who needs what.

Here’s a “top secret” phrase you can search for: “anyone recommend”. Look at the results for the metro Boston area:

People are asking you for your help all the time. You can easily provide it.

Learn who has it.

A 6 year old can search Google pretty easily. Answering the question of who can provide what your network needs is a matter of asking for data sources. Want to find press opportunities for your network? Subscribe to Peter Shankman’s Help A Reporter service and read through the 3 emails he sends each day that have limitless press opportunities in them. Find relevant queries for people in your network and forward the individual queries by email, and you’ve given people in your network opportunities for free earned press.

Does someone in your network need a job? Subscribe to appropriate geographic and industry feeds on Craigslist (there’s an RSS feed at the bottom of every job category). Listen on Twitter for people posting job ads. Check LinkedIn for who is hiring in your area – just go to News > Signal, and type hiring in the search box and you’ll see everyone asking for people to hire.

Who wants more business? You can be the provider of connections. Look for complementary businesses in your networks and proactively reach out and connect people. Who needs business? Learn who does what in your network and broker introductions.

The power is in your hands.

Here’s the most important lesson of all: none of these tasks require a marketing degree, a large business budget, or anything other than the ability to search intelligently. If you’re a college student looking to build a network before you graduate, if you’re someone looking for work, if you’re a sales guy or gal looking for deeper business relationships, these are all things you can do right now, today, at no cost except your time.

Social media success is waiting in front of you right now. Go get it!

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Making mountains out of molehills

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 15, 2011 in Advertising, Jedi mind tricks, Marketing, Red belt | 1 comment

Making mountains out of molehills is an old idiom that refers specifically to someone blowing an issue far out of proportion. In cognitive psychology, this is known as magnification. It’s such a common psychological phenomenon that we’ve had cultural idioms for centuries describing it, such as Shakespeare’s play, Much Ado About Nothing.

Magnification works based on a simple principle, the feedback loop. For example, someone who makes mountains out of molehills would take a bad grade on an exam and repeat the event over in his head repeatedly until it became so magnified that he leaped to the conclusion he would fail college. In this case, magnification serves a harmful outcome.

Suppose, however, you wanted to use magnification for a more productive end, such as marketing? What makes it work?

First and foremost, magnification hooks onto one or two key points that get repeated in your mind over and over again. Rarely does anyone magnify a complex thought pattern, because the thought pattern needs to be able to loop quickly in your mind.

Second, magnification has to create a derived future outcome. Rarely do we conclude that the original event is the outcome; in the example above, the bad grade wasn’t the focused outcome – failing out of college was. In order to get your mind to create a derived outcome, there has to be some element of predictive language at work. Fail an exam becomes magnified to fail out of college.

Third, magnification has to be able to synergize with itself to create a large distortion. In the case above of the bad exam grade, every repeat of the loop adds additional energy to the original negative feeling. If a situation or consequence doesn’t compound itself, you won’t magnify it in your head. Conversely, if you’re out to create a positive feeling, the feeling must amplify itself with every iteration of thought. Every time your prospective customer repeats the positive feeling, it should build on itself.

Let’s examine a case of magnification done really well: the marketing around Apple’s iPad. First, it’s a simple campaign: a magical device at an unbelievable price. There are only two hooks to grab onto, so the marketing of it is kept simple.

Second, it creates a derived future outcome. The key there is how we treat the word magical. Everyone’s interpretation of magic is different, but the general future outcomes are relatively similar: things just happen. Thus, if you view the iPad as magical, you can create outcomes in your mind that are specific to you but are aligned with the idea of magic.

Compare that to how many Android tablets are marketed, emphasizing faster graphics or dual-core processors, and it’s quite clear that much of the Android tablet marketing can’t help you create a future outcome in your head. Old sales professionals will recognize this clearly as marketing the benefit vs. the feature. This takes benefit a step further and emphasizes open-ended future benefits beyond something very specific.

Third, repeating that derived future outcome in your head synergizes with itself. Every time you imagine the magical outcomes you could create (if only you owned the product), you amplify and build it up. You add new positive outcomes or grow the ones already in your mind. The appeal of magic inspires you to want to repeat the message in your mind again – who doesn’t want the easy, magical solution? Again, if you emphasize a specific feature or benefit, you close off the mind from wanting to go back and explore other related outcomes.

Take your own marketing messages and examine them for simplicity, derived future outcomes, and repetition synergy, then rework your messages so that they are more likely to be made into mountains by your prospective and current customers.

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5 Google Currents tips to power your personal brand

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 13, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Social media, Strategy, Technology | 2 comments

Much ado has been made of Google’s new offering, Currents, which is a Flipboard-like mobile app that presents you the news. What’s not been made mention as much is how powerful this app is for consolidating your personal brand as a publisher and blogger. You can do much more than just publish your blog through it.

Here’s a few power tips I’ve found that might prove helpful.

1. Unless you’re someone who already has a recognizable logo, use your head for your edition icon – literally. It instantly draws recognition and action in the mass of Currents icons.

2. Turn on and set up your Google Analytics. Currents shows up in your Analytics as a pathed page, so go to Content > Site Content > Pages and filter for the /currents path. You’ll see exactly what people are viewing and using in it.

3. Bring in your social! Did you know you can include Google+, Facebook, and Twitter feeds? You can. Look for the RSS feeds for each service and then use Publisher to bring them in as social feeds. For example, I wired up Google+, Facebook (page), and my #the5 tweets. Important: if you use the feed selection, you will be required to verify ownership, which you can’t. If you use the social updates selection, it won’t force ownership verification.

Facebook RSS Feed

The Social Feed option

Power tip: Twitter still has RSS feeds, but they’re hidden. Premium content subscribers to my newsletter should hit the back issues and grab the tutorial for installing these manually. I’ll re-publish that tutorial this week, so if you’re not subscribed as a premium member, now might be the time.

4. 302 redirect Google’s ugly URL. No one wants to try to remember that. I redirected mine through cspenn.com/currents for easy sharing. This puts handles on it that you can easily carry around.

5. Make it obvious on your site. Currents will display it in Search, but to make sure people are getting the right edition, promote it on your site and in your social outlets with the direct link.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a marketing post if I didn’t pimp it. Please subscribe to my Google Currents edition.

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I recommend: for Twitter audience building.