Influential Marketing Blog

The Course I Always Wanted To Teach

Photo Credit: saikofish (Lou)
Do you remember ever sitting in a class and thinking to yourself that if you were teaching, you'd do it completely differently? Most of us can probably relate to some version of this experience, though we usually don't get the chance to do it our own way. Starting this week, I'm getting this chance by leading a Masters level summer course at Georgetown University in the Center for Social Impact on Global Communications.

The format of the class is loosely based on the format for the TV show, The Apprentice (though thankfully, no one gets fired!). So each week we'll have a real client project with two teams competing to create the best strategy. The winner is decided by the client. To add a wrinkle, we're not just doing US-based projects either. Next week the class will get a project for a client in Russia, and after that they will tackle client projects in Sweden, South Africa, China, India, and Brazil - before the entire class heads to London for the last week of the class in early August.

Along the way, I've chosen to include a few real world elements in the course such as making most of the reading assignments based on the web and real time sources, requiring each student to do a blog post on the topic of the week (and choosing the best post each week), running each week like a typical RFP (Request For Proposal) response situation and creating a grading system that incorporates the way that presentations and efforts of this sort are typically judged in the real world.

It's going to be an interesting experiment over the next few weeks as the class unfolds. In case you're interested, you can check out the class blog at http://globalcc.wordpress.com to see what the group of students comes up with each week, and add your comments and thoughts. As I say in my first post, the blog will be very much like a typhoon - lots of activity for a short amount of time, followed by relative calm. Also, the class is using a service called GroupTweet to all contribute tweets to the group account @globalcc - so you can follow us to see our updates as a class throughout the summer and from London as well.

How Social Media Will Change History

There is a cliche that many people often share about history, and how it is written by the victors. The conquerors across the world, for the most part, are the ones who transcribed the history for others to read. We have terms like "revisionist history" to account for the fact that we realize the truth may be quite a bit grayer than those historical accounts we read lead us to believe. And it is often the sole dissenting voice that points us toward what the true history may be - some in between version where the good guys are perhaps not quite so good, and the bad guys not so bad.

It is easy to think of these shades of history while traveling in Greece (where I spent the past week), because the evidence of this is all around. From the city of Acropolis high over Athens to the softly smoldering volcanic remains in the caldera of Santorini. What was once religion is now called mythology, a sign perhaps that our religion of today may befall the same fate. Amongst those ruins of temples and palaces, there is the beautifully frustrating knowledge that we will probably never know what these really looked like or how these people truly lived.

The history today will be different. With technology and social media, we have the effortless ability to capture our individual truth and experience in minute detail and save it on shared servers for the world to access hundreds or thousands of years from now. Ironically, this fact may make the study of history that much more complicated, as historians in the future will have many versions of truth to study and contrast. Rather than piecing this history together through buried bone fragments and stones with the rare written account as they have done for many years, they will do it through compiling and sorting data, analyzing imagery and watching video.

Combined with global historical initiatives such as the Internet Archive and Google Earth, the portrait of our world as it stands today will be far more complete and multi-experienced for historians of the future than any other age that has come before. For those of us who write blogs or upload photos, the scope of our actions are easy to forget or minimalize. But we are the new historians of our time and our content will one day be history - and probably for more than just ourselves. It's a humbling to imagine your own words on this scale ... particularly when you think of who could be reading them a long time from now.

I Am Sooo NOT Tweeting This!

Sometimes I think I live an overtweeted life. I'm on nearly every social network and I revel in the instant-on real time pleasure of knowing what people are craving or bitching about anywhere in the world at any given moment. Despite the incessant distraction of this "ambient awareness" - I'm a keen believer too that it helps me get closer to people that I would otherwise never have the chance to get to know, and smarter about the world in general. For the interconnected life I lead, though, I love my time away from it as well. It's not uncommon for me to "go dark" on Twitter most weekends, or to randomly take a break from blogging. Those are the moments when I'm part of my real world, being a Dad or just decompressing. And I pride myself on not being the guy in the corner tweeting every moment of a party (even if it's full of social media geeks like me). I'd rather just talk to people. The point is, there's a time when all this stuff needs to be shut off.

For me, that time is going to be this coming week - when I take a vacation to Paris and then on to several Greek islands with my wife (and no kids). I plan to relax, to write and to spend some time in a beautiful environment getting inspired. Most of that doesn't really involve Twitter. So tonight I'm scheduling a few posts with photos to go live on my blog over the week (as a virtual way to share where I am going to be) ... but otherwise I'm hanging up the proverbial "gone fishing" sign and planning to be back on June 1st with more posts and more than likely a few marketing lessons I have learned along my journey. After all, I may be able to leave Twitter behind ... but I'll always be a writer at heart and have my Moleskine and pen by my side to capture ideas as they happen.

For a digital guy, I'm still old school like that.

The Greatly Exaggerated Death Of The "Who's Who" List?

Are you old enough to remember the "Who's Who" list? Actually, it's not just one list but many companies that offer these sorts of lists. Usually they are billed as professional networking groups of influential people and they actively recruit new members through flattering emails and letters talking about "exclusivity" and "rare achivements." In the past, most people used it as a sort of virtual rolodex to extend their personal networks and find leads of people to hire or partner with.

Over the past few months as I have been contacted by several of these lists to be part of their "exclusive" 2009 publication. They have names like Presidential, Continental and Marquis - and they all promise things like blasting my bio on a billboard in Times Square, and accessing a site where I can connect with all sorts of other highly influential people that I may not know yet. All in exchange for my paying a small "listing fee" to augment my "free listing" which apparently will be part of the directory anyway.

With the rise of online professional networking tools like LinkedIn and social networks like Facebook - you might have thought surely these Who's Who lists have become a forgotten relic of the past, but they seem to be alive and well. Though it may be hard to imagine people still pay for this sort of thing for someone like me who is active on social networks and publishes content to connect to more people, perhaps this Who's Who list subculture is the secret engine really driving business relationships and networks. Am I missing something here, or are these Who's Who lists a virtual ego stroke destined to join Encylopedia Brittanica as tools of a past age that our digital lives are making obsolete?

How To Cost Less Without Lowering Your Price

Do you know how much your product or service costs? Hint: it's not the price you are asking for it. In global warming terms, environmental cost is commonly referred to as a "footprint." Most people understand that an environmental footprint of a product or company isn't just about the manufacturing, but also the process of shipping, importing, exporting, packaging, and eventually even the use of that product.

When it comes to how much you cost - why not think of your business that way? Your real cost to your customers isn't just the product they buy or the service they use. It's the time they need to spend waiting in line to get it. It's the effort that it takes to load it into their car. It's all the fields they need to fill out online in order to get a "free" username and account. It's the number of times you force them to change their password and remember a new one in the name of security. These are all costs. Not in terms of dollars, but in terms of time.

How can you cost less without lowering your price? Lower the time that it takes for your customers to interact with you. Make buying easier and faster. Let them go for longer without seeing you. Sometimes, the less interaction you force a customer to have with you, the more satisfied they are. Here's a good example - over time, people are more likely to love their car if they have never gone into the dealer to get it fixed ... not because they got an extra $1000 cash back when they bought it. So forget about lower your prices in a recession or trying the "two-for-one-special" mode of thinking. Focus on being easier to do business with and take less time from your customers' schedule. It will pay off.

When Conversation Doesn't Matter

People who work in social media spend a lot of time talking about conversation. We (I include myself in this category) talk about having a dialogue with customers, about encouraging two way interactions and generally being more open with how business communicates. But does the weary business traveller finally arriving at her hotel after a long flight really want a conversation? What about the embarassed boyfriend who is sent to the all night pharmacy to pick up feminine hygene products for his girlfriend? Or a mother trying to quickly finish an errand before a sleeping baby wakes up?

The point is, there are many valid business situations where a conversation is actually the last thing a customer wants. All the examples I used above are real life situations, of course, but are there similar situations online? Here are three common ones:

1. Price comparison (using comparison engines to find the best price online for something)
2. Bill paying and online services (financial accounts, egovernment tasks, etc.)
3. Time sensitive information seeking (such as movie or flight times)

There can still be an important role for social media to play in each of these situations, but if it is focused on generating conversations, it is likely to fall short. The lesson in this is that conversation shouldn't be a blind ambition with social media, but rather an end that you seek strategically ... and one that you are willing to leave behind when it seems ill advised or just plain wrong.

The Real Joke About Marketing: Lack Of Integration

Yesterday I made a joke. It was April Fool's Day and in my April 1st blog post I decided to announce that I would only focus on the "right now" and devote my blog to talking about Twitter. Some people got the joke, while others loved the idea of another blog about Twitter. My point from the beginning of that post was entirely truthful - there is indeed something amiss in the world of marketing. And it cannot be solved by focusing just on what's happening right now, or by focusing on any one tool.

There is a plague facing the marketing world today, and it has to do with lack of integration. Strategy, advertising, PR, direct, interactive, social media, search, and many other marketing functions are all separated by departments or outsourced to a combination of agencies. In each case, internal or external political battles over budget and responsibilities ensue, and the end result is usually a marketing impasse at the expense of effectiveness. Not only does the right hand of a marketing group often not know what the left hand is doing - most of the time they end up arm wrestling.

The mission of this blog will always be to share useful marketing lessons and stories that go beyond just one tool, channel or category. The real power of marketing comes through integration, and the tragedy is how easy that is to forget. So the next time you hear someone suggest a Twitter strategy without talking about anything else around it, don't accept it. Seek more integration and demand it from the people you work with. Here are some tips on how to do it:

1. Think in terms of hubs and extensions instead of single channels for a marketing effort.
2. Respect the fact that marketing tactics you may not understand can actually work as well.
3. Make integration someone's job to manage and ensure that it happens.
4. Stop thinking of media consumption as an "either-or situation" - most people use multiple types
5. Have consumers settle disagreements - ask them what is more important and focus there.

Now I can officially put the "twinfluential marketing blog" to rest.

Refocusing On The "Now"

Something is changing in the world of interactive marketing. For five years now I've written about the intersection of all kinds of marketing, ranging from talking about television and "traditional" media to newer social forms of media. Through it all I have tried to focus on trends happening in the marketing world with an aim of keeping my blog current. That's why over two years ago I changed the name of this blog from "Influential Interactive Marketing" - to just "Influential Marketing." My thought at the time was that talking more broadly about marketing would allow me to offer more valuable content and help readers think about their marketing more holistically rather than just in terms of the latest greatest tool or site.

Let me be the first to admit that I think this may have been a mistake. By talking about marketing in all forms, some have emailed and told me that I no longer have the purity of talking about a single subject extensively. They may be right. So today I'm announcing a shift in focus for this blog. From this point on, I will only write about marketing in real time. That means profiling campaigns as they happen and sharing experiences live. In fact, I'm going to make this blog more like a Twitter stream.

UPDATE: Due to popular demand, I'm going to be changing the name of this blog as well. Check out the new blog header already live for "Twinfluential Marketing."

No one has time to read full length blog posts anymore anyway, so rather than spend hours putting those together, I'll shift my priority to small pithy nuggets of marketing goodness, delivered 3-5 times a week. Of course, this means I'll devote more of my blog to talking about Twitter - how great it is, how you can use it for marketing, how it's changing the world, etc. That's all most readers want to read about anyway. And as anyone in search knows, those Twitter lists are awesome traffic drivers too.

Coming up tomorrow - my inaugural post after the refocus that I've been researching for weeks - "How Twitter Can Solve The Financial Crisis" ...  ... hope you enjoy it!

PS - Let me know what you think of this refocus and please help me spread the word and retweet this message: Starting today, Influential Marketing Blog will focus on the "now." Read why: http://bit.ly/twinfluential

NOTE: This was an April Fool's Day post - read my real perspective here.

Why I Didn't Buy An iPhone

Earlier this weekend, I sent a tweet noting that I was in the market for a new phone as I looked to upgrade my cell phone contract with AT&T and I mentioned that I was considering an iPhone. As I expected, I was immediately responded to by over a dozen folks talking about how much they love their iPhone and how it has changed their life through technology. Don't get the wrong idea - I have tried the iPhone and I think it's a great product. This is not an anti-iPhone post, but rather an exploration of something many of my digerati counterparts and connected colleagues may find shocking ... that someone could choose not to get an iPhone and be ok with it. So here's my reasoning:

1. I have a Blackberry for work. Being a digital kind of guy, I get asked on occasion why I don't have an iPhone. My main reason so far is that I have a Blackberry from work where I can already get email, browse the Internet, access maps and locations online, send Twitter updates and more. The only problem is, my work doesn't pay for cell phone access - so I still need a phone to make calls. But to get another phone and pay for a data plan myself seems redundant (and no, I'm not saying they are equivalent choices - the Blackberry is definitely more limited with what you can do).
2. Expectation of Apple price gouging/discounting. As I started thinking about purchasing the iPhone, more than a few people suggested to me that I may want to wait for an upcoming announcement from Apple about a newer version, or perhaps a discount on the current models. Given their track record, the honest truth is that I don't trust Apple not to lower the price or introducing a new product as soon as I purchase it. For TODAY, that offered me enough doubt to spend some effort looking for other options instead of just blindly going for the iPhone.
3. Avoidance of significant ongoing investment. Currently, I don't pay for any data plans on my personal cell phones and don't purchase any accessories like applications, ringtones or games. If I got an iPhone, not only would I pay a higher upfront cost (many other phones were virtually free after a rebate) - I would also need to pay a recurring data plan fee which I would otherwise avoid, and any incremental fees for applications I buy (and based on all the cool applications I know exist and those I've seen from friends, I would end up buying quite a few). At the end of the day, all this adds up to over $1000 extra dollars per year to get the iPhone. Ultimately, I'd rather spend that money elsewhere.
4. Found a deal too good to ignore. The more practical reason I didn't go with an iPhone (and perhaps the most important) was because I found a deal in the AT&T store where I could get two new LG Vu* phones (also with a touch screen), for about $10 each - after factoring in the instant rebate and my corporate discounts (none of which are available on the iPhone). That combined with the fact that I needed two new phones instead of just one and reviews talking about the great sound quality of the phone were the last piece of this experience that helped me decide.
5. I actually enjoy not being an "Apple guy." As someone who has written a lot about brand personality and how individuals respond to the more personal attributes of a brand, I am a BIG admirer of their marketing and how it inspires a cult of Apple supporters (reinforced by products that live up to the marketing). I have also been vocal in the past about how I'm not a blind supporter of all they do either and take pride in not being a "fanboy." Does this mean I don't have any Apple products? Definitely not. But I'm not in the category of people who believe Apple can do no wrong, and I'm happy about that.

So there you have it, my five reasons why this weekend I decided against getting the iPhone. Let the barrage of comments telling me how much I'm missing out on begin ...

*DISCLAIMER: LG is currently a client - but I have done no work on the LG Vu and didn't get any pricing or consideration from LG for writing this or choosing their phone. Honestly, it just happened to be the best phone for my current situation (and is currently AT&T's best selling model this week and next due to their March Madness promotion where you can get 2 months of mobile TV for free).

Your Brand Is Not Batman

Today I had the chance to take part in an entertaining panel moderated by my friend Debbie Weil all about blogging and social media as part of a book launch event for David Meerman Scott's new book, World Wide Rave. Along with me on the panel were Greg Verdino, a fellow blogger and agency guy from Crayon, and Henry Posner, the social media and digital marketing guy from B&H Photo (probably my favourite NY photo store that I've purchased much of my photographic equipment from over the years). Our conversation ranged from blogs and Twitter to the role of social media in a broader marketing mix - and the difference between Batman and a Cowboy.

Batman has a utility belt. On that belt, he has batarangs, inflatable scuba gear, smoke makers, batcuffs, batraygun and just about anything else he could ever need. He's a crimefighter, and never knows what bad guys he is going to face next. He actually needs and uses all that stuff. A cowboy, on the other hand, carried just a revolver. He never needed all that fancy stuff, just one tool that did its job. The gun was the only thing a cowboy needed, and he used it strategically to stay alive.

Now think about this in relation to how your brand is approaching social media. Are you treating your brand like Batman, trying to have a presence everywhere, launch one of everything and using many things that you don't really need? The problem with that is that your brand isn't Batman ... and you end up spreading yourself too thin and doing nothing really well. Instead, think of your brand like the cowboy and find the one tool you need to succeed. Comcast found Twitter. Blendtec found YouTube. Forget about creating a social media utility belt. Only Batman needs one of those.