From MSNBC’s homepage:
Anyone from President Bush’s administration “tutoring” someone else on foreign policy is a lot like career binge alcoholics tutoring high school students on responsible drinking.
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How To Monetize Your Social Media Outlet
How To Monetize Your Social Media Outlet
In a variation of a Financial Aid Podcast blog post this morning, here’s a brief economics 101 explanation of how you can monetize your blog, podcast, Twitter lifestream, or other social media outlet.
Economics 101
Supply and demand are inversely related. When demand exceeds supply, you have to pay others to take your stuff. When supply exceeds demand, other people pay you for your stuff. Value comes from demand. Here’s a simple monetization chart:
If your social media outlet is in high demand, you can get paid for it. If your social media outlet is not in high demand, you have to pay others to take your stuff. If supply and demand are in equilibrium, you’re at totally free.
This is why advertising is the main method of monetization for most social media. Your social media outlet in and of itself has very little value, sorry to say. What has value is your audience. They’re the commodity that you have to sell, and you do sell them, whether or not you want to believe you do. You can sell the actual audience in the form of renting or selling an email list, or more likely, you sell access to your audience in the form of endorsement, sponsorship, or ads. Your audience is the value to the advertiser, and in turn, your content is the value for your audience.
See the entry on the chart where it says your blog, podcast, and twitter stream? See how it’s actually in the you pay others section? It’s true. Statistically, you pay others for your content. You may say that you’re blogging for free or giving away your content, but the reality is that you’re paying others, in hosting fees, bandwidth, in domain name purchases, in your time and energy to create and market your content.
You’re paying others.
Social Media Metrics That Matter
How do you know when you’ve become a true social media success?
When everyone pays you.
Advertisers pay for access to your audience. Your audience pays for access to your content – perhaps in cash, perhaps in inbound links, perhaps in word of mouth marketing on your behalf. Major media outlets pay in time and energy to cover what you’re talking about.
Most important of all, checks arrive in the mail or by direct deposit that are sufficiently large enough for you to meet your expenses and then some. At the end of the day, whether or not you can afford to eat and put a roof over your head is the only metric that matters.
How To Monetize
How do you get there? Back to the chart.
You’re fighting an uphill battle if you think you can reduce overall supply, so you have to be a specialist, an expert in something that is in short supply. Ideally, it should be something in short supply but high demand – like insider stock tips, or financial aid information.
As I’ve said in the past, I’m not a podcaster. I’m a financial aid expert who has a podcast.
So let’s assume you’ve got basic supply solved – you’ve found a niche, a place where there’s market demand for your supply. Then it’s up to you to market your content. Marketing, as I’ve said in the past, is about sharing ideas, which is a kind and gentle way of saying marketing is creating demand for your ideas.
Marketing is the creating of demand for your supply.
The more you effectively market, the more demand there will be for your content. That in turn will drive audience growth, which you can monetize directly (audience pays) or indirectly (advertisers pay), or both.
As my friend Whitney Hoffman says, you can’t outrun Adam Smith and the laws of economics. If you’re currently being paid for social media, enjoy that you are, and realize that if your monetization model doesn’t conform to the basic laws of supply and demand, your model is not sustainable and sooner or later, the money will stop.
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SEO more important than ever with Google Chrome
Google’s announcement of Chrome, their new open-source browser, was greeted with a relatively lukewarm reception online today.
Here’s the part that a lot of folks missed, from the Chrome comic book. (yes, a comic book)
Get it?
If your SEO efforts aren’t up to par, Google’s ignoring you in the testing of their browser, too.
If their browser achieves any level of success, Google will test against your site – if you rank.
Now this part is the gem, the part that marketers NEED to pay attention to, or ignore at their peril.
If users think your site is worth remembering, Chrome will do it for them.
If your site ranks for your keywords, Chrome will suggest it – IN the browser itself. No need to be using Google suggest.
Seth Godin is fond of saying that if you make your content remarkable, you win.
Google Chrome now says if you make your content remarkable, they’ll market it for free to their users directly in the OmniBox.
We’ll see how this new browser does, but marketers – pay heed.
Google Chrome debuts September 2.
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What is visionary? What is vision?
What is visionary? What is vision?
Stephen K. Hayes posted an interesting challenge to me for my blog.
“I would enjoy seeing your take on “visionary” and why you feel that the term is used so frequently by others to describe your work.”
To me, vision is being able to see where you’re going, to see what’s up the road ahead, in both literal and figurative senses. It’s being able to see the potholes before you drive the car into them, being able to skillfully navigate.
The problem facing most businesses, to continue the car analogy, is that most people are driving using the rear window to navigate. They’re steering based on where they’ve been, and maybe, just maybe they catch a glimpse out the side windows for what’s happening to them right now. They don’t know where they’re driving, they can’t see the sharp turn in the road ahead, and they believe that past is prologue, that biography is destiny.
Most important, vision is about knowing where you’re going, so that you know if you’re there, and even more vital, knowing if you’re off course and not any closer to your goal.
Take a look at any of the problems facing America today. The mortgage crisis is entirely due to lack of vision, a willful ignorance of the future and the consequences for tomorrow of what you do today. Thousands of Americans bought houses they couldn’t afford, plain and simple. Some were duped, some were scammed, and some were simply desire overriding rational common sense. Thousands of financial experts who should have known better opted to ignore fundamentals, basics, and laws of economics, believing that something really could come out of nothing, and that there would be no consequences.
Really. There’s no mathematically sound way for a clerk making 30,000/year to be able to afford a900,000 mortgage, but an awful lot of people wanted to believe that lie, wanted to blind themselves from the truth that they could not afford their purchase under any sustainable terms.
That’s lack of vision. Lack of knowing what will happen because you’re in violation of the basics, because you have no idea of where you’re going or how you’re going to get there, you just want it now.
Take a look at China. As much as people rail about China and its human rights policies, the ugly truth is that the United States consumers made China the powerhouse it is today through lack of vision. Through ever greater demands for more stuff, cheaper stuff, stuff at any cost as long as it’s the lowest price, we’ve shipped our manufacturing overseas, exposed consumers to dangerous products, and made a nation-state that isn’t on the friendliest terms with the United States into an economic powerhouse that rivals us. All for want of a cheaper plastic bowl and other consumer goods, and a lack of vision.
Another example is Brian Conley’s arrest and deportation from China. I admire Brian’s work and willingness to speak his mind. However, his arrest in China, while brave, deprived him of his most powerful weapon, the ability to build a network of people locally to create content. By traveling and documenting a Tibetan protest group during China’s Olympics, he was able to highlight the lack of freedom of the press and speech in China… but cut himself off from greater opportunities.
What would a visionary strategy, a sneaky ninja strategy, have been? As distasteful on the surface as it might have been, if a ninja were tasked with trying to highlight the plight of Tibet, they would have made some astonishingly positive and complimentary videos of China, of the progress they’ve made, helping the government showcase its achievements for the Olympics. They would have made sure to promote a positive message that would have gotten them on the right guest lists, invitations to events with Communist Party members… and greater access to the country.
Over a period of years, the sneaky ninja would have created more positive video, building a reputation among Chinese party officials that they were a video blogger worth having around, and even being allowed into “sensitive” areas… like the Tibetan plateau. Over time, they would have developed a small, very quiet network of people to shoot video, as Brian has done in Alive in Baghdad, and then one day down the road, revealed all of the work done at once in what the tabloids would have called “a shocking turn of events”, showing hours of video clandestinely shot in Tibet and other contested areas.
Vision is ultimately about knowing the result you want and being willing to make difficult choices to achieve that result. It means compromising on choices, masking your ideals, exerting inhuman levels of patience, and being able to see what’s in your path so that you can tell the difference between a choice that feels right and a choice that gets you the long term results that you want.
How you develop and cultivate those skills… that’s a post I’ll leave to Stephen K. Hayes.
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Thoughts on politics
“The reality is that the American eagle needs both a left wing and a right wing or he ain’t getting off the ground.” – J. Michael Straczynski
We need both. Neither is more or less correct as long as we actually want to fly.
Food for thought: an eagle has a right wing and a left wing, but the head, heart, and talons?
They’re all in the middle.
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Government real estate numbers are a load of crap
The Bureau of Economic Analysis uses a wholly bogus imputed rent variable in its calculations about the health of the US economy and the health of the real estate industry.
BEA treats homeowners as businesses, which pay rent to themselves. Therefore, homeowners contribute to the real estate industry’s GSP even if not employed by the industry.
Talk about artificially inflating economic figures to make things look better than they are. This is akin to saying that if you own an iPod, you’re essentially running an iPod rental business, renting your iPod from yourself every month.
Does that make any sense at all to you? It doesn’t to me – and that means that the numbers on things like productivity, inflation, and the economic health and well being of the country are flawed.
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What Martial Arts Can Teach Us About Improving Presentations
What Martial Arts Can Teach Us About Improving Presentations
One of the keys to being successful in the martial arts is taking good notes, storing away information. In ninjutsu, a secondary key is taking good notes in such a way that your notes are useful only to you. If someone borrows, copies, or steals your notes, they’re functionally useless to them. Yes, you may have possession of the Takagi family’s sacred scrolls, but unless you’ve been initiated into translating them, they’re not terribly helpful.
I was looking over my notes from Tuesday night’s class at the Boston Martial Arts Center, my personal notes for second degree black belt, and realized that in many ways, they’re the antithesis of a good presentation.In my notes, I have the general prompts I need to recall something from memory, not a step by step outline of exactly what to do. I know what to do because my teacher taught it to me, but if I need to jog my memory about the setup, my notes contain enough detail to make me go, “Oh, yeah, that one!” and I’m ready to go. None of the nuance or subtlety makes its way into the notes because it doesn’t need to be there, and more importantly, can’t easily and quickly be put into words anyway, any more than you can accurately convey what a lychee tastes like in words. If you’ve had a lychee, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’ve never had a lychee, that sentence is devoid of context.
This is the danger, the curse of knowledge, that plagues presentations. The presenter knows what’s in their notes, and knows the subject matter, which means they risk leaving out vital pieces of information that surround their presentation, the context. The presentation may have giant gaps in it, but the presenter doesn’t know it because they don’t see their presentation – they see their experiences instead, filling in the gaps in their own head but leaving huge potholes for the audience trying to follow along.
This is why in both the martial arts and in Zen the concept of the beginner’s mind is so important, to be able to see without the past clouding our vision. As a presenter and speaker, seeing your own material with a beginner’s mind is vital but supremely difficult.
Listen carefully to the feedback from your presentations to see whether you’re failing to provide context and details in your presentation. You may find some critical points that, with just a few extra details, could radically improve your presentations.
Besides audience feedback, make sure you review video of yourself presenting, and ask yourself throughout the video if you’re making sense. If you can, have two cameras set up, one to film the audience, so that you can watch the crowd react to what you have to say, catching subtleties that you missed while presenting. It doesn’t have to be elaborate or expensive – a simple Flipcam on a tripod will do the trick. Be on the lookout especially for body language changes en masse, as well as facial expressions – these nonverbal cues can tell you when you’re being impactful – and when you’re missing the point.
As Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen master, said, in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few. If you want to explore the possibilities of becoming a better speaker, embrace the beginner’s mind and avoid the curse of knowledge.
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Why PodCamp Works – Integrated Verticals
Imagine for a moment that your industry, that your specialty, is a single post, a single beam. It represents your vertical, everything you’re good at, and also everything that’s wrong with your industry’s growth. It’s fishbowl. It’s vertical. It’s a silo, an echo chamber in which no new ideas flow in or out.
You keep struggling to find new ideas, new innovations. Event conferences in your industry are the same old, same old, with vendors marketing the same solutions to yesterday’s problems.
Now imagine you found a way to tie together your vertical with others.
Imagine you found a way to bridge the gap between your vertical, your silo, your fishbowl, and not just with one other silo, but with a ton of silos. Imagine a series of fishbowls connected, so many that you effectively have an ocean to swim in. Imagine you found the commonalities among verticals that were strengths, and that working with others in completely unrelated fields helped mitigate your individual weaknesses.
This is the mission of PodCamp. Bring together everyone from different worlds who wants to learn, share, and grow your new media skills. Bridge the gap between pools of ideas so that the best ideas are accessible to everyone, and the power of friends working together can overcome the obstacles that by yourself stood in your way.
Bring together the verticals and see what you can achieve.
See you at PodCamp.
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What martial arts can teach us about marketing
The martial art that I practice places an incredible amount of emphasis on the basics of the art. Basic footwork patterns, basic abilities to hit, grapple, throw, and otherwise put the kibosh on someone trying to hurt you.
One of the things that every senior instructor at my dojo, the Boston Martial Arts Center, constantly emphasizes is the refinement and polishing of our basics. If you punch someone, you want them to stay punched. If you throw someone, you want them to stay thrown. All the fancy moves and movie-like choreography will do you no good whatsoever if the bad guy gets back up and starts griefing you again; conversely, all the fancy moves are completely unnecessary if you get out of harm’s way and deck the guy so hard that his unconceived children feel it.What does this have to do with marketing? Simple. We forget the basics all too often. In our attention deficit society, in our 90 hour work week system, we’re so easily distracted by flashy toys and tricks that we forget to practice and refine our basics. The ability to send out an effective direct email campaign. The ability to optimize a web page for the basics of search engine optimization. The ability to design a usable interface to our information.
This is a topic I’ll be talking about more at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in October. We’ll explore the levels of marketing basics just like a martial art, showing you what “white belt” skills will always pay off no matter how many grades of black belt you have.
In the end, no matter how fancy your marketing or martial arts, chances are in any real encounter on the street or in your vertical, you’re going to get one shot that will decide whether you make it or don’t. There’s no second place prize. The only way to be confident in that one shot is to have solid basics that you can rely on.
Ask yourself this as a marketer: what are your basics? How reliable are they? How confident are you in the results you can generate with them?
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FDIC Insurance Fund Falls Below Statutory Limit
Financial results for the second quarter are contained in the FDIC’s latest Quarterly Banking Profile, which was released today. Among the major findings:
Provisions for loan losses continue to be the main cause of falling earnings. Rising levels of troubled loans, particularly in real estate portfolios, led many institutions to increase their provisions for loan losses in the quarter. Loss provisions totaled 50.2 billion, more than four times the11.4 billion the industry set aside in the second quarter of 2007. Almost a third of the industry’s net operating revenue (net interest income plus total noninterest income) went to building up loan-loss reserves.
Noncurrent loans are still rising sharply. The amount of noncurrent loans and leases (90 days or more past due or in nonaccrual status) increased by 26.7 billion (20 percent) during the second quarter, following a26.2 billion increase in the first quarter and a $27.0 billion increase in the fourth quarter of 2007. Almost 90 percent of the increase in noncurrent loans and leases in the last three quarters consisted of real estate loans, but noncurrent levels have been rising in all major loan categories. At the end of June, 2.04 percent of all loans and leases were noncurrent, the highest level for the industry since 1993.
Assets of insured institutions declined. Total assets of FDIC-insured institutions declined during the quarter for the first time since 2002. The 68.6 billion (0.5 percent) decline was caused by a reduction in trading assets at a few large banks. Assets in trading accounts, which increased by135.2 billion in the first quarter, declined by 118.9 billion (11.8 percent) in the second quarter. In addition, the industry’s holdings of one- to four-family residential mortgage loans fell by61.4 billion (2.8 percent). Real estate construction and development loans declined for the first time since 1997, falling by $5.4 billion (0.9 percent).
The FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund reserve ratio fell. Due to a significant increase in loss reserves, including reserves for failures that have occurred since June 30th, the DIF balance fell to 45.2 billion at the end of the second quarter, down from52.8 billion at the end of the first quarter. While insured deposits rose only 0.5 percent during the quarter, the decline in the fund balance caused the reserve ratio to fall to 1.01 percent as of June 30th from 1.19 percent one quarter earlier. Because the reserve ratio is now below 1.15 percent, the Federal Deposit Insurance Reform Act of 2005 requires the FDIC to develop a restoration plan that will raise the reserve ratio to no less than 1.15 percent within five years.
This is a big deal, folks. A scant 1.01% reserve is all that stands between you and massive runs on banks.
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