Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Author: Christopher S Penn

  • A Chat with a Rich Kid

    In my work, I get the opportunity to talk to a lot of interesting people, as both part of the Financial Aid Podcast and PodCamp. Last year, while I was doing outreach for the podcast on MySpace, I got a chance to talk to a kid who has had a decidedly different educational experience than most kids in the US. I can’t legally use her name since she’s under the age of majority, but let’s call her Sara for the purposes of discussion.

    First, a bit of background. Sara is from one of Massachusetts’ old money families – bluebloods, as the slang goes – and as a result she attends a private school coupled with private tutoring. She’s from a family and background that will never, as far as I know, need the services of the Student Loan Network, unless it’s to offer a multimillion dollar scholarship to the Edvisors Foundation.

    Now, most people would probably have a casual chat and be on their way, but I really, really wanted to know one thing: what’s her school system like? What does a child of wealth and privilege experience in school? It turns out to be something very different.

    Here’s what she’s been studying as a sophomore in high school:

    • Calculus
    • Greek
    • Latin
    • Debate
    • Rhetoric
    • Classical English literature
    • Phyiscs
    • Logic
    • Geography

    This, in short, is a pre-20th century curriculum focused on academic rigor with the intent of giving a child the mental toolkit to be a leader, to have at their fingertips a knowledge of the world and the mind. Most important, she moves at her own (rapid) academic pace because her tutor is integrated with her private school, moving her along academically as quickly as possible to increasingly complex subjects.

    What’s more, when I asked her what else she needed to learn, there was one important component that virtually no one is taught in school – as part of her education, she’s expected to be able to network with her peers. If Sam needs something and Jane has it, Sara acts as the intermediary, the power broker, connecting the two. At family parties and gatherings, she’s expected to greet and introduce herself to the guests – and gather information from them for later use.

    This blog post is not to express any opinion except to offer a glimpse behind the garden wall.  If you have kids, what are they learning?

  • Icanhazurpersonaldata – The Q TrustVirus and How Bad a Trust Virus could be

    The buzz this weekend was clearly about Q – the first TRUE viral marketing product I’ve seen in new media. It’s viral just like a real virus – it spreads to everyone you’ve come in contact with, and the power of its infection is multiplied by the level of contact you have with others. We’ll probably talk about this at length during this coming week’s best marketing podcast, Marketing Over Coffee.

    My first read on Q is this – good. Good that it happened, good that the payload was relatively innocuous (so far), good that it demonstrated a flaw in social networking without obliterating the network in the process. I’d still change your password if you’re a current or former Q user on any email account you’ve used it with.

    Just how bad could the Q Trust Virus (trustvirus? is that even a word?) have been? Consider this: how many times have you synced your online web mail’s account information with an address book or other utility? I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that if you’re in the social space, you’ve used a tool like Plaxo or LinkedIn or another sync tool that promises to bring together all your data, and you’ve done so.

    I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts right now that in your address book on XYZ service as well as on your personal computer, you not only have friends’ email addresses, but their real names, physical world addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, and more.

    Imagine a Q-style TrustVirus (it’s officially a word now) that aggregates all of that, but doesn’t tell you, nor does it mass email all of your friends. Instead, it stores it in one large data warehouse, and cross-references people in your network with the same people in other networks, until it develops a comprehensive profile of an individual based on fragments gathered from that individual’s many friends. CC Chapman may not have my birthdate in his address book, but Chris Brogan might. Steve Garfield may know my cell phone number, and someone might know my work address. Put the sum of my friends’ knowledge about me together, and you’d have enough for a profile of reasonable accuracy.

    What to do with such a profile? Well, selling it to an identity theft ring would probably be lucrative and almost impossible to trace. Selling it to marketing data firms, selling it to just about anyone who wants top-notch, qualified personal profiles (three letter government agencies?) would be profitable.

    Think about it – not only would a trustvirus gather a lot of information quickly, but it would be highly accurate most of the time, because you’re hijacking trust relationships across networks. Bryan Person trusts me enough to tell me his birthday, and I have no incentive to put inaccurate data in my address book. I trust Anji Bee with my mailing address, and chances are very good she’ll record it accurately. A trustvirus knows this and therefore the data it collects will be highly trustworthy.

    What’s the lesson in all this? Think carefully about the information you put online. Think carefully about what you share with whom, even close friends, because they are human and therefore susceptible to trustvirus hijacking. Encourage your friends, if you’re of a sufficiently paranoid mindset, to not record sensitive data that could be used for identity theft (name, SSN, and date of birth is the magic trifecta that unlocks most doors) and be very careful about how you store data about them.

    The easiest benchmark of all is to ask yourself this: what don’t you want the world to know about you – and who else knows about it?

    Beware the trustvirus.

  • Will You Light The Night?

    For every light that shines, a shadow falls. – munk

    Last year, 19 close friends and colleagues contributed $2,010 towards leukemia and lymphoma research. This year, my wife and I are walking again in the Boston Common to support the Leukemia and Lymphoma Research program. What’s being researched? This caught my eye:

    Multiple myeloma is a lethal malignancy for which cure remains elusive. Stem cell transplantation results in improved disease free survival but ultimately fails to prevent recurrence. A promising area of research is the use of cancer vaccines to educate the immune system to target and eliminate tumor cells. Studies demonstrate that the immune system is particularly sensitive to cancer vaccines following stem cell transplantation. We have developed a novel tumor vaccine involving the fusion of potent immune stimulating cells known as dendritic cells (DC) with a patient’s own tumor cells. The vaccine presents a wide array of tumor proteins to the immune system. Laboratory studies have shown that DC/myeloma fusions stimulate lymphocytes to recognize and kill myeloma cells.

    Will You Light The Night? 1A lot of the time, pleas for donations and contributions go the human route – here’s little Johnny who needs to be saved, please open your hearts and wallets. I call Bravo Sierra on that – it’s nice, but this shows you how your money is being used.

    If you’re not biotech minded, cancer researchers are looking at treating cancer like the flu or any other communicable disease, using the body’s own immune system to fight tumors, rather than just pump someone full of drugs and hope it takes. How cool is that? Going with nature and natural defense mechanisms rather than trying to sidestep them.

    Please continue to support innovative research (which will in turn save little Johnny) like this with your generous contribution to Light the Night by clicking here.

  • Offline

    I’ll be off the grid until 9/4/07. If it’s urgent, call me if you have the number. Play nicely with each other!

  • Blog Day 2007 – PodCamp UK

    Today we’re celebrating BlogDay 2007, and in honor honour of PodCamp UK, I thought I’d highlight the blogs of PodCamp UK’s organizers organisers and sponsors.

    So, in no particular order:

    If you’re in the UK and are free 1 September and 2 September, stop on by PodCamp UK and celebrate the day after Blog Day 2007!

    Tags: blogday blogday2007

  • This is the New Media Fishbowl

    This is the New Media Fishbowl. A commenter on Mitch Joel’s blog pointed out a Facebook Application that could draw a hyperbolic map of your friends in your network and how they were related. I was stunned to see a true, graphical, and clear representation of the New Media fishbowl, the echo chamber, whatever you want to call it.

    This is the fishbowl

    The inner ring of hyperconnection is the fishbowl. It’s new media. Everyone in the outer ring? Financial Aid Podcast community members for the most part. These are all the people that the folks in the fishbowl are NOT connecting to – and there’s a lot of them. Most are college students.

    Believe it or not, I’m happy with how my map looks, because the outer ring signifies that I’m trying to reach outside the fishbowl.

    What does your map look like?

  • New Media Occupation of the Near Future: Meme Jumper

    iPhone. Bacn. Chocolate Rain. LOLcats. Copybot. Bum Rush the Charts. Lonelygirl15. What do all these have to do with each other?

    They’re all “viral” memes – high speed, high attention, sticky microcontent that spread like wildfire in various online communities. Just a mere mention of them on a blog can, if caught early enough, drive a tremendous amount of traffic to a blog, podcast, or web site, simply by virtue of obtaining good placement in early search results.

    Right now, it’s kind of a free-for-all in online memes. Things appear and disappear like so many flashes in the pan, but if you can time the meme market just right, you can ride the waves of attention like a surfer, as Justin Kownacki pointed out about the city of Pittsburgh and its two recent hits.

    How, though, do you make use of this? Enter a career of the near future: meme jumper. Working in concert with a Community Developer, a meme jumper is the person who coordinates tying content and products into relevant memes and promotions.

    Case study: Virtual Thirst, the Coke campaign conducted by Crayon New Marketing. As a contributor to Matthew Ebel‘s Second Life live album, it was no mistake that it was named Virtual Hot Wings and tied into the Virtual Thirst promotion. At the same time, we tried to add as much value as possible to Virtual Thirst by offering a tangible good to an intangible campaign.

    How to be a meme jumper? Connect. Connect, connect, connect. Use tools like Twitter for near-real-time monitoring of what’s getting people’s attention. Use Yahoo Pipes to aggregate a list of URLs from the Twitterstream into a format that can be parsed, then look for the most common URLs in a 24 hour period. Technorati and Google Blog Search will keep you on top of blogged items, but check them frequently. Find a meme to latch on to that’s appropriate, then tailor your content to match the meme as best as possible, adding value to it and propagating it.

    What’s the goal of a meme jumper? Build lots of short bursts of high intensity traffic to a web site to garner attention and eyeballs. It’s then up to the Community Developer and other marketing staff to convert those eyeballs into subscribers, reader, and customers.

    A meme jumper is different than a brand hijacker. The latter just plugs into as many buzzwords as possible with standard link baiting strategies without adding any additional value. It’s less symbiotic and more parasitic.

    How do you apply for such a job? It’s all about the track record. Start with small organizations and volunteer work – find charities to plug into that desperately need the help, and make them powerful presences online for fundraising drives. Once you’ve done a few, take your show on the road.

  • Out of the Office Autoreply: God's on break, please call back later.

    Based on what’s in the book of Genesis from the Abrahamic bibles, God created everything in six days.

    Day 1. Universe.
    Day 2. Earth and water.
    Day 3. Land and shrubbery.
    Day 4. Seasons, day, and night.
    Day 5. Critters.
    Day 6. Mankind.
    Day 7. Break.

    If you assume that God’s calendar works differently than humans, and that the universe, based on the best research available, is between 12 and 16 billion years old, here’s a rough timeline:

    Day 1. Universe. 12 billion years ago.
    Day 2. Earth and water. 1.3 billion years ago. (Rodinia)
    Day 3. Land and shrubbery. 500 million years ago.
    Day 4. Seasons, day, and night. We’ll chalk this one up to error as pre-biblical folks weren’t exactly strong at astronomy 5,000 years ago.
    Day 5. Critters. 300 million years ago.
    Day 6. Mankind. 2 million years ago (homo erectus)
    Day 7. Break.

    Based on the giant times between periods – 200 million years or more – it’s funny to think that we might still be on Day 7, meaning God’s still out having coffee or whatever it is deities do during their off hours, and probably will be for at least another 180 million years…

    Do prayers get an out of the office autoreply? It certainly would explain why a lot of people’s prayers are not answered but occasionally some are. Maybe God checks his messages infrequently when he’s on vacation.

  • Unlimited Power!

    The Superheroes of tomorrow are at today's PodCampsIn an interesting conversational thread on Twitter, the topic of power, motivation, and energy came up, as it often does, and Laura Fitton wrote: “always wondered what powers the mighty cspenn. Star Wars music?”

    Well, music in general. There are some pieces that I find personally motivating, and it’s something that I emphasize everyone should have at hand, on an iPod or CD or computer or whatever it takes. Set aside a personal power playlist for each of the kinds of motivation you need – whether it’s getting your day started, powering through a task, or setting your mind and spirit for the journey home.

    Some of my personal favorite selections, not from any one particular mood:

    • Superman march by John Williams
    • Imperial march by John Williams
    • Latte Days and Porter Nights by Matthew Ebel
    • Breakaway by Kelly Clarkson
    • Rockstar Poor by Rayko KRB
    • Angel by Aerosmith
    • I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing by Aerosmith
    • Scared by Ball in the House
    • Moonlight Sonata by Ludwig v. Beethoven
    • Two Thousand Years by Billy Joel
    • Mine Again by Black Lab
    • I Am (acoustic) by Munk
    • Time to Start by Blue Man Group
    • Rest in Peace by Joss Whedon and James Marsters
    • Life is a Highway Rascal Flatts cover of Tom Cochrane
    • Bring me to Life by Evanescence
    • Calling Baton Rouge by Garth Brooks
    • Estranged by Guns ‘N Roses
    • Everywhere by Michelle Branch
    • I Do by Rob Costlow
    • Warriors by Ronan Hardiman
    • The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel
    • Old City Bar by Trans-siberian Orchestra

    What’s on YOUR list of powerful music to immediately change your mindset?

  • How secure is your new media money?

    A funny thing happens when there’s excess liquidity in a financial market, as has been the cases in the past 6 years due to housing. First, a quick primer. Liquidity is any asset that can be converted to cash quickly and with minimal loss of value. A blue chip stock – like Coca Cola – is a good example of a liquid asset. Barring a complete collapse of the stock market, you can sell your Coca Cola stock relatively quickly with minimal friction. If you had a doctor’s bill you had to pay, you could sell your Coke stock today and have cash to pay with tomorrow.

    An illiquid asset is something like a house – you can’t really trade it quickly or easily. It’d take weeks, if not months, to sell that house and get the proceeds to pay off a doctor’s bill.

    Excess liquidity is when there are too many dollars chasing too few goods or services. A nation’s central bank can print more money, and when they do, those dollars have to go somewhere. The same is true on Wall Street for investors. A sudden influx of money means they have all this extra money to play with and nowhere to invest it. This creates great investment opportunities, but it also creates a bubble that will eventually burst.

    Enter new media. Investors looking for the Next Big Thing have been dumping tons of money into new media companies. Podshow, for example, received 8.8 million in round 1 of its financing and15 million in round 2. Plenty of other companies and web properties have been funded partly through all the play money generated by the excess liquidity on the market.

    The market, however, is being called. People are cashing out and it’s causing both a liquidity squeeze and a credit crunch – loans at absurdly low interest rates aren’t available any more, investors aren’t buying portfolios where the value is just a guess, and available cash to play with is going away fast.

    What does this mean for you? If you’re working at or running any kind of new media or Web 2.0 company – or a company that relies on them for cash flow – it’s time to bootstrap. Forget VC money, forget private equity, dismiss thoughts of being bought out and everyone getting a fat chunk of investor proceeds, and get down to business. Get cash positive, nuke your debt, and build the business. Not only does your survival depend on it, but so does new media’s.

    If you’re a member or a part of a new media company, for example a podcaster at a podcasting network (pick any one), you’d better have a Plan B. Make sure you have archived copies of all your shows on a few data DVDs or an external hard drive. Back up your blog, show notes, and site. Make sure you have copies of everything, including emails, because Plan B assumes that one day, you’ll go to upload your show or edit your blog and there will be a big 404 there – and nothing else.

    I’m not saying it’s going to happen like that, but for a couple hours’ work, it doesn’t hurt to plan for it. Anything less than that and you’ll feel smugly overprepared.

    What are YOUR plans for Bubble 2.0’s bursting?

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