Marketing with direct experience

Posted by Christopher S. Penn on Nov 1, 2009 in Advertising, Marketing, Social networks, Twitter | View Comments

Something that’s been on my mind a great deal lately is how to integrate more direct experience into everything we do, from marketing to advertising to life itself. One of the most critical things to understand in business is the difference between exoteric and esoteric, or obvious and hidden.

Exoteric is exactly what it is – surface details, things you can glean from stored knowledge alone. You can read, for example, about faraway places or follow Twitter streams from conferences and events and get a fairly hefty amount of data just from those sources. For example, if you followed a conference like the Inbound Marketing Summit on Twitter, you got a whole bunch of bite-sized ideas, some of which may have been immediately usable. There’s a lot of value in the exoteric, and it’s one of the things that makes social media shine, as a distilled representation of a reality in another place that you can’t be.

Esoteric is another thing altogether. I like to call esoteric direct experience, because it’s only things that can be transmitted or learned through direct experience. I talked about this with lychee nuts, but here’s an even cruder, more obvious example. No matter how much you read about it, no matter how many videos you see on the Internet about it, no matter how many people you talk to about it, there is no substitute for actual sex, is there? That’s an experience that can only be direct. In fact, it’s so powerful a direct experience that it’s illegal to market the experience at all in many places!

Where we can run dangerously off path is believing that new technologies can replicate direct experience. A lot of folks seriously believe Twitter is a replacement for real interaction (they tend to be folks who prepend tw- to every other word, like twebinar, tweetup, twestival, tweep, twevent, tweeple, etc., what I rather tactlessly label twasturbation) and as a result, despite being more “social”, they’re lonelier and more isolated than ever. A lot of folks in business and marketing believe that being social will cure their business of its ills. Social media is not a panacea for a failed business model. Never has been, never will be, except for the snake oil folks who make a quick buck off you (learn how to make $300 a day on Twitter!) before moving on to the next trending topic.

If you want to get the most juice out of your marketing squeeze, look at direct experience. What direct experiences are your customers having with you and your products or services? What direct experiences can you give your customers that no other competitor is giving them right now? For example, one of the events I volunteer at every year is College Goal Sunday, when students get together to complete the FAFSA form. This isn’t charity for me – this is an important event that helps me to better understand and witness what my audience experiences when trying to fill out this form. No amount of surveying can replace actually watching someone try their best to fill out government paperwork, and that then helps me to make my products and services better.

Do you own your products or services? Do you use them personally? Have you bought them in the store and tried to set them up in the same way your customers would? Have you used them for any amount of time and thought, gosh, this product really needs this or that feature? That’s the direct experience you’re looking for. When you share direct experiences with your customers, you understand implicitly what they’ve experienced with your products and services and can truly help them.

There is no substitute for direct experience. Don’t get caught in that trap, especially in social media. A simple way to check if you’re too far down the rabbit hole? If your spell checker is flagging every other word in your communications as unknown, you might not be getting enough direct experience and might have too much social media Kool Aid in your diet.

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The Pareto Principle of Twitter Spam

Posted by Christopher S. Penn on Aug 26, 2009 in Twitter | View Comments

The Pareto Principle – 80% of something comes from 20% of something – is so often repeated that it’s cliche.

It’s also true.

The majority of your revenue comes from a minority of customers.

The majority of your time spent on anything is focused on a minority of time sinks.

and so forth.

Twitter’s no different. Recently, Robert Scoble unfollowed everyone. He paid a service to do a mass, mass unfollow of hundreds of thousands of people and has been manually refollowing since then. For those of us with fewer connections than Robert, it’s worth pointing out that the majority of crap in your Twitter stream comes from a minority of people. Filter them out, unfollow them, and you’ll see Twitter become usable again.

My criteria for an instant unfollow are pretty simple:

1. If you talk about making money on Twitter at all, you’re gone. This is the fastest and easiest kill of all.

2. If you talk without listening – meaning your stream has absolutely no conversation, you’re gone. Doubly so if all you’ve got are sales and promotions.

3. If you just retweet with nothing else, nothing original, not even “my cat just threw up!”, you’re gone, because you’re probably a robot.

4. If you’re a robot, you’re gone. Robots are fairly easy to spot – unlike humans, they typically truncate tweets mid word over and over again in their stream.

5. If you’ve just got stuff I don’t care about in your stream, you’re gone. One person had nothing but quotes from Jesus in their stream. Not my cup of tea, being Buddhist and all. Another person was a true cat blogger and cat tweeter with nothing else. I have a cat, so rather than experience their cat vicariously, I’ll just peek at my lump of gray fur.

Here’s a simple way to weed out the crap. Once an hour, go to your Twitter home page. Browse through the tweets. Cull off any stupidity or robots you see, and repeat for a couple of days. It takes literally seconds to peek quickly and make a decision – we’re not talking a major investment of your time at all.

You’ll find that just by pruning out the garbage after a few runs, Twitter will be easier to use. The Pareto Principle holds true – 80% of your crap is from 20% of your follows, so nuke them.

If you use a client like Tweetdeck, you’ll find you miss fewer updates from friends, especially if you follow a lot of people. All clients like Tweetdeck pull a limited number of tweets from your stream on a regular basis, so the more crap you filter out, the less likely it is you’ll miss good stuff from your friends.

Remember, unfollowing someone doesn’t mean you stop communicating with them. You can and always should be monitoring without needing to follow – if you haven’t grabbed a copy, go get the Twitter Power Guide eBook. It’s free.

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The following daily

Posted by Christopher S. Penn on Aug 19, 2009 in New media, Social networks, Twitter | View Comments

Simple and easy way to show some love for people who mention you:

1. Go to search.twitter.com and type in your Twitter handle with the @ sign.

2. For profiles you haven’t visited recently (blue links), control-click (on PCs) or command-click (on Macs) to open each profile in a new tab.

3. Swap through each tab (control-tab in Firefox) and click follow for everyone you’re not following.

Do this daily, every morning. This will ensure that folks who are kind enough to mention, reply, or retweet what you’ve got to share are paid attention to. Should take you a maximum of 5 minutes or so if you’re fast on the keyboard.

This is one of those things that you have to do daily. If you let it pile up, it will eat up a tremendous amount of time. If you manage it daily, it takes seconds, maybe minutes at most. Set an alarm on your calendar and do it without fail every day.

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How to search your Twitter DMs with Google Reader

Posted by Christopher S. Penn on Jul 10, 2009 in Technology, Twitter | View Comments

CC Chapman on Twitter said:

The problem with more and more conversations happening over DM is there is no easy way to search them

Which is more or less true in the native interface. Luckily, RSS comes to the rescue.

From the Twitter API:

direct_messages

Returns a list of the 20 most recent direct messages sent to the authenticating user. The XML and JSON versions include detailed information about the sending and recipient users.

URL:

http://twitter.com/direct_messages.format (requires authentication)

So here’s how you do it. Craft a URL like this:

http://username:password@twitter.com/direct_messages.rss

Copy this.

Updated: For DMs you have SENT: http://username:password@twitter.com/direct_messages_sent.rss

There’s a bug in the way either Twitter renders RSS or Google Reader interprets it. Not sure which, but you need to set up Yahoo Pipes as an intermediary to make everything and everyone happy.

Go to Yahoo Pipes and drag a Fetch Feed onto the worksheet. Paste the Twitter RSS URL there. If you’re doing DMs sent, add a second box under the first one and paste the second URL there.

Next, name it, save it, and run the pipe. Do not publish it or the pipe will be publicly viewable! Copy the Get as RSS URL.

Now go to Google Reader. Paste in the Pipe RSS URL.

Congratulations. Now all new DMs will be recorded by Reader and will be fully searchable from the search box.

You’re done!

If you’d prefer all in one using GMail, you can also take the Pipes RSS feed and use any RSS to Email service (feedburner, feedblitz, etc.) and have your DMs emailed to you.

Update: If anyone knows how to implement this feature using OAuth rather than plaintext, please comment!

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Geeking Out: Twitter from the command line

Posted by Christopher S. Penn on Jun 18, 2009 in Technology, Twitter | View Comments

I enjoy communicating with Twitter, talking to all of the friends I’ve made over the past few years at conferences, events, etc. I enjoy many of the Twitter clients out there like Tweetdeck, Twhirl, Nambu, and others. The one thing I don’t enjoy? Every Twitter client seems to have a large memory footprint. Leave any of them running and you’ll be sacrificing up to a gigabyte of RAM for them to manage your Twitter experience when you follow and are followed by over 10,000 people.

That’s why, despite all the cool new features in all of the clients being rolled out, I really wanted a command line client. Old school black and green terminal command line, minimal memory footprint, zero graphic footprint, no need for Java or Adobe AIR or even a web browser.

Enter TTYtter, a Twitter client written in Perl (using cUrl and a few other libraries) that should run out of the box on any recent Mac. It follows the timeline, sets apart @replies and DMs, lets me pull profile information, and pretty much everything that every other Twitter app supports.

Popular hashtag? I can set up a one-shot search or keep track of it. Replies in the public timeline? No problem.

It’s a thing of beauty to have a super-lightweight Twitter client, especially if I’m on an EVDO or other mobile connection where connection is spotty and data economy is at a premium.

You can try it out for yourself by downloading TTYtter from here. I will warn you that it is not for the technologically faint of heart. If you’ve never run something from the command line, this might be a little outside your comfort zone…

… but then, isn’t that part of the fun of new media?

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