Influential Marketing Blog

4 Ways Social Media Could Save The Arts

Last week I had the fortune to be part of an event that we should all care about. It was a meeting of the National Arts Marketing Project, a conference sponsored by the Americans for the Arts and designed to help art based organizations around the country use marketing to drive more engagement, subscriptions, and attendance with patrons (a much better word than consumer, by the way). To understand the vibe of the event you need to look no further than a colllection of titles from some of the sessions put on during the three day conference:

• Are You An Urbanite? Attracting Young Ticket Buyers and Donors
• Hacking Copyright: Making "Free" Work In The Arts
• She Says Pithy, I Say Prissy. Let's Call The Whole Thing Off: How Marketing And Development Can Sing In Harmony
• I Can't Do That! How To Make The Big Ask For A Major Gift
• Release Your Organization's Inner Blogger
• Strategies For Countering The Reasons Patrons Resist Subscribing

My own session was called "Embracing Your Accidental Spokespeople: How Obama Let His Best Supporters Speak For Him, And Why You Should Too" and in the roundtable format, we talked about how to find the voices that are passionate about what you do, and unlocking them to share their experiences more widely online and through social media. Over the course of two round table discussions, I learned a lot about the unique challenges that many arts based organizations are facing, as well as discussed several engaging ideas for solutions. Here are a few of the creative solutions that we all came together and discussed as a group about how social media and interactive marketing techniques might help arts based organizations to better promote themselves:

1. Create a sonic brand. Though more specific to groups that create or promote music, one idea that we collectively talked about was what it might be like if every venue or group had a sonic brand. So, for example, like you might hear the Intel jingle at the end of an ad, you would hear a signature piece of music to signal the end of intermission. Something that offers a recognizable brand for a music based organization, while offering an apt extension of a brand based on something that is inherently a part of it.
2. Offer creative material openly for mashups. As more and more people create content online, they will need material like music, still images, and video clips to incorporate. One of the marketing tactics I am fond of at istockphoto.com (a site I use all the time to purchase images to use in my posts and presentations) is having an image for free download each day. What if an arts organization created their own collection of content and offered it for free reuse, dependent on giving credit back to the organization? It could be a great way to spread some brand awareness, as well as offer something viral and useful to content creators.
3. Invite social capital donations. Many people using social media tools are supporters of the arts, but not necessarily donors or people to go to art events. Though it may be difficult to convince them to open their wallets, it may be much more acceptable to have them donate their influence. One brilliant example was a campaign run across both parties during the recent election where you could "donate your Facebook status" to remind people to vote for your guy on election day. It's an example of letting people donate their social capital instead of real money.
4. Allow patrons to share their experience. This topic raised some concerns among the group for a variety of reasons. The two most vocal were that sometimes performers have union contracts that prevent any recording, and that sometimes the artists are afraid of negative criticism that may come with letting their work be freely shared. Still, there are other ways to let people share their experiences - perhaps through live Twittering, or making a cast available after a performance for flipcam interviews with video bloggers. The point is that every arts group needs to find a way of helping word of mouth about what they are doing to travel.

The Great #080808 Beijing Olympic Twitter Campaign Catches Fire

Anyone who has been to enough events with social media creators knows that it is inevitable that people will find a way to connect and find one another. To a degree, Twitter first caught on from this need a year and a half ago at SXSW in 2007. I have witnessed it over and over, through examples like attendees of four conferences finding one another to share an evening of Korean BBQ in NYC a few months ago, or finding someone to hang out with as you are travelling to a foreign city for business. Social media creators are not just creating content, they are becoming experts at connecting with one another.

So I wasn't surprised to see that the tag 080808 is catching on as a way for all of us in Beijing at the Olympics to find and connect with one another. Started by three Chinese bloggers (Flypig, Webleon and Babechloe) and described on http://tag080808.com/, this campaign is already bringing together not just everyone here in Beijing who is creating social media content, but is also becoming a brilliant way to follow all these live voices of the Games in a real time stream. As the Olympics kicks off tonight, this tag and the resulting conversations on Twitter will accelerate dramatically. For my part, I have already started tagging my content with this and will soon revise my Twitter icon to use the 080808 template created for the campaign (the image below is a compilation of current icons from a post about the campaign on Read Write Web).

In addition, I just sent out a Tweet about a blogger meetup that will be sponsored by Ogilvy and Lenovo where we can try to get some of the many diverse bloggers here in Beijing together for a drink and chat. If you happen to be here, send me a message at @rohitbhargava and let me know if you can make it to The Bookworm in downtown Beijing on Sunday, August 10th at 7pm. And even if you're not in Beijing, you'll want to start using this tag to find the best content and impressions from social media creators here at the Games. This is a case study in the making ...

Official Image from the Tag080808 Site:

The 4 Big Problems With Blog Metrics And How To Solve Them

Like most bloggers, I struggle with true metrics for my blog. The problem isn't so much about technology as it is about understanding what is useful to know about my blog to make it better and attract more of an audience. I've got lots of metrics that I can look at today, from my Technorati ranking to where my blog is on the Power150 list. I can check the number of comments I get, or look at the number of daily or monthly impressions. There are several big problems with any of these approaches, though:

1. RSS skews most metrics - When readers are consuming your posts through RSS, most of the time they don't need to visit your site. While this may reduce your page views and monthly visitors, it can often lead to a greater engagement and wider distribution. 
2. Inbound links aren't all equal - Perhaps the greatest injustice of many metrics systems today is that they reward "linkbait listing" (the activity of listing a large number of blogs and links in the hopes those sites will also link back to you). As a result being part of some of these lists, some blogs can be propelled to higher numbers of links and authority without producing any quality content to earn it.
3. Content expires though it may still be relevant - One of the most frustrating things about Technorati as a tool is that it expires older content. There is lots of good content that is getting ignored simply because it was written over six months ago.
4. There are multiple ways to measure engagement - Looking only at links to a post or comments are incomplete measures. People use different sites and different ways to engage with content, from commenting to saving it.

In a sentence, the real challenge for blog metrics is to find a more comprehensive way to see if people are really connecting to the content on your blog. Melanie Baker, the community manager at yet another smart Canadian startup called AideRSS emailed me last week with a very interesting solution to this challenge of measuring "social engagement." They have created a system using what they call "PostRank" to measure the engagement of any individual blog post. Posts are ranked from 1.0 to 10.0 with the top score going to those posts that generate the most activity. Instead of just focusing on inbound links, their ranking system looks measures such as comments, number of saves on del.icio.us, number of Tweets mentioning the URL, and how many Diggs a particular post gets. Then an aggregated score for your blog is calculated based on the individual performance of your blog posts. This is brilliant for a number of reasons:

1. It separates metrics into blog posts instead of one big number. This means that you can get a better sense for which blog posts are really working and driving engagement and which aren't.
2. By allowing you to view your entire blog in terms of your top, best, great and good posts, you can start to spot trends in what content is the most viral.
3. As the name suggests, the site can be used to make your RSS subscriptions more useful by helping you to filter all the posts you get into just the top posts which are the most discussed.

There are only two slight limitations in their model that I can see. The first is that it only looks at a small subset of sites where engagement can happen so some large sites (such as a social network on Ning, or a Facebook group) where there may be lots of discussion can get ignored. The sites AideRSS uses are also very US-centric, which means that significant international discussions could often get ignored. The second limitation is that some of the blog-wide metrics that could complete the picture of blog influence, such as number of RSS subscribers or affiliations of a blogger are missing - so it's not a complete picture of blog influence.

Still, the idea of using PostRank to filter posts and judge the quality of a blog overall is one worth taking a look at. Particularly if it could be easily combined with a tool like Alltop which pulls in RSS feeds by category to make reading blogs and finding the highest quality blogs in a particular category easier.  Any service that can give bloggers a better idea of how to produce higher quality content AND help readers to more effectively decide what content in their flood of RSS subscriptions is most worth reading http://gr.aiderss.com/ should be a big hit.

If you haven't visited this site yet, you need to check it out. A great place to start is with Melanie's blog post where she remixes Viral Garden's list of Top 25 marketing bloggers in order of "social engagement."  Also, in case you're curious, here's what AideRSS came up with as a list of my top ten posts from the last year:

My Top Ten Blog Posts:

Why Sprint's New Campaign Wins Only 50% Of Their Battle

As I tour around at events talking about why brands need to have a personality, a question that comes up often is about which brands don't have a personality and suffer from facelessness. One of the most obvious categories that has built a dreadful reputation for itself is the wireless phone industry in the US. On the whole, people are distrustful, disloyal, and generally suspicious of just about anything these carriers do. The reasons are fairly obvious, from their cruel pricing structure designed to charge you for every kilobyte or nanosecond of use, to their requirement that you lock yourself into long contracts before they will give you service. In my own experience, my last month's wireless bill was 18 pages long (and I don't even have a teenager at home).

There have been a few pioneers that are trying a different model, such as Virgin Mobile with their prepaid solutions ... but the world of the wireless carriers still promises much more flash than substance. For examples of this, just look at any recent advertising campaign by these carriers, from the fanfare behind launching the iPhone for AT&T or the wierd city name mashups used by T-Mobile to illustrate how their network would work in places where they vast majority of their customers will never travel. So while watching my DVR last week, when I saw a TV spot featuring the new CEO of Sprint talking in a more human voice about how they are simplifying their service, I stopped to pay attention. Here's the ad:

This is not the approach we are used to in America from our cell phone providers. He comes off as genuine and the plan they are offering is as simple as you can imagine. Taking this human approach certainly sets them apart from their competitors. The reason why this is only half of their battle is because alongside this declaration by the CEO and new direction are two other telling videos.  The first is a clearly scripted YouTube video read by an uncomfortable employee talking about what Sprint is "really" like, and the other is from an irate customer who received a bill for $14,000 from Sprint and tried unsuccessfully to get it resolved:

Now in the second case, the customer did ultimately get her problem resolved thanks to it getting reposted on the Consumerist blog, but the damage for Sprint was already done. I love the simple plan they have come up with for customers and the authentic way the CEO is trying to tell the story. The problem is that consumers are likely to see it alongside other examples of exactly the opposite. It seems to be a case study in how advertising alone cannot reshape an industry or a brand. Without combining it with a smart strategy for social media and word of mouth, the best laid brand messages will likely fall on deaf or disbelieving ears.

5 Great Marketing Blog Lists And What You Can Learn From Each One

As a marketing blogger with a fairly decent audience, I tend to make it onto a lot of marketing lists. And they are pretty popular these days. Sometimes it seems like each month I get placed on several of these new lists (along with the accompanying requests to include a list to the lists on my sidebar). Recently I got yet another one over the weekend and realized that this tactic is likely to get more and more popular as companies continually try to find ways to connect with prominent bloggers. If you are considering coming up with your own list, you might want to take a look at a few relatively successful marketing lists and what you can learn from each one:

1. Todd Andrlik and the Power 150 - This is probably the ultimate marketing list example, because it led Todd to a partnership with AdAge magazine where his original Power 150 list is now the standard used by the magazine to rank all marketing and advertising blogs worldwide. Early on when many marketers were still trying to build a good metric for influence, Todd created a wieghted system using a combination of factors, from Technorati rank to number of Bloglines subscribers. This led him to a more detailed rating system that was ahead of its time, and now has become the standard for rating marketing and advertising blogs.

The Lesson: Create a truly authoritative way of measuring influence, and let others share it.

2. Guy Kawasaki and AllTop - Guy Kawasaki's latest entrepreneurial effort is getting a lot of attention among bloggers, in part because he has managed to appeal to the blego (blogger's ego). Each category of Alltop blogs are chosen by a group of individuals invited by Guy and his team to help select the blogs that should be featured. Once you make it, you have access to a host of great badges to include on your blog, including the one you'll see on my sidebar which indeed does offer confirmation that I kick ass.

The Lesson: Involve leading thinkers in the development and promotion of your list.

3. Mack Collier and the Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing Blogs - Mack has been publishing his list of top marketing blogs for several years now and does get credit for being among the early ones to publish a list of marketing bloggers. He has the added benefit of having a personal connection as an individual with most of the bloggers featured on his list ... so as a result the Viral Garden list feels more like a club than pretty much any other marketing blog list out there.

The Lesson: Get to know and build personal relationships with the bloggers on your list.

4. Joe Pulizzi and the Junta42 Content Marketing List - I had a chance to review an early version of Joe Pulizzi's new book on Content Marketing which will be out in a few months and I share his enthusiasm for the idea that content is the new standard for smart marketing. As part of his site, Joe has created a new metric for rating marketing blogs based on how often the talk about content marketing. As a result, his is one of the few marketing blog lists where you'll see the order completely shifted around, and new names on the list that are not on every other list.

The Lesson: Find a niche for your list that you can own.

5. Lee Odden and the Biglist Search Marketing Blogs - Lee's list will likely be one of the most comprehensive you will find anywhere, because the list includes just about every site under the sun that talks about marketing. Instead of ranking all these blogs, the list simply organizes them alphabetically. As a result, it is a less useful list ... but makes for brilliant "linkbait" as all the blogs included on the list now know about Lee's list and several have included the Biglist badge on their blogs.

The Lesson: Create the most comprehensive list possible if your goal is to increase your "link love."

Get Your Name On The Back Cover Of PNI!

Since I launched my new book PNI, I have been getting emails, Facebook messages, Twitter updates and live feedback at events about what people liked and didn't like about the book. These comments are a wealth of insight, but no one aside from me is getting the benefit of seeing them. Amazon reviews are the most visible way right now of sharing this type of feedback, but most people will not bother to go to the effort to write a review on Amazon - unless they have the right incentive. That's what this post is about.

If you have read Personality Not Included and have some thoughts about it, I'm asking you to post your review on Amazon.com (or on an international version of Amazon if you happen to be outside the US). To offer an incentive, I also agreed with my publisher that we will be taking one quote from an Amazon review and featuring it on the outside back cover of the next edition printing of Personality Not Included (McGraw-Hill makes the final call). That means anyone who picks up the book in a bookstore or searches it online will see your name and organization name or URL. So before I start, I want to clarify a few things.

First of all, I am NOT in any way asking you to lie or share opinions about PNI that you don't personally feel. If you read the book and hated it, go ahead and post your review to that effect on Amazon or anywhere else. I probably won't use it for the back cover (obviously), but I'm not trying to stop you from doing that. Instead, my goal is to reach the many people who have read the book, but have not posted a review on Amazon because there is no tangible reason or benefit. Hopefully, this idea gives you a reason ... visibility. You don't need to be a blogger or a CMO to participate. My goal is to take a piece of REAL feedback from one of you and feature it on the back cover of the second edition, and encourage some useful book reviews on Amazon.

If you have already posted a review, don't worry - you'll be included in this competition. If you haven't, but had some thoughts after reading the book, please share them on Amazon. And if you think this idea is just a cheap stunt to get more Amazon reviews, post a comment here and let's talk about it. As an author, asking for reviews is a minefield because you don't want to manipulate people, but you do want them to review the book so more people hear about it. Successful or not, I'm considering this an experiment in doing that.

Admission: For the more astute, you probably noted an assumption in this post - which is that PNI will actually get a second edition printed. All expectations from the publisher are that we will do one ... but it does depend on sales of the first edition, so I don't want to mislead anyone to thinking its a done deal. The chances are pretty good, though.

Addictomatic Offers The Ultimate Ego Search

If you're among the social media initiated, chances are you are Googling yourself more than once a day. In fact, you probably have Google alerts set up with your own name to notify you (and your ego) whenever anyone mentions you. It's ok, you can admit it. As many of us build our digital profiles and publish content online, seeing who else is talking about us has become more than a voyeuristic thrill ... there is a personal ROI that is rapidly emerging, and it relates to your personal brand.  I have lots of thoughts about personal branding, including something that I'm planning to share very soon which will hopefully be quite useful for any of you trying to build your personal brand.

In the meantime, you might want to check out a site called Addictomatic that I was just referred to by Dave at Rollyo - a site from several years ago that offered the then-unique ability to "roll your own search engine" based on offering search within a selected subset of sites that you could create. Addictomatic is a relatively simple meta search that returns results on a set query from multiple online services. It essentially pulls lots of services through widgets together on the same page - and is not a technically difficult solution ... but I like the way they have positioned it as sort of the super charged personal search. If you want to see what the real buzz is about you, visit the site and type in your name to see who's talking about you on Twitter, videos and photos tagged with your name, who's bookmarked your content on del.icio.us and lots more.  It's ultimate ego search for the ultimate egomaniacs ... bloggers.

Example search for "rohit bhargava":

Inside the 5 Badges of the Conference Caste System

At every conference or tradeshow, you get a badge.  I have a box full of them on my desk, an increasing number of them with the title of "Speaker" affixed beneath my name.  I recently had a conversation with some colleagues about the importance of being a speaker at an event.  Often, the most important benefit is not just the visibility of speaking, but the license that speaker tag gives you to have a conversation with other speakers.  If you think about it, the badges at a conference are like a caste system.  Your badge identifies which group you belong in and can often dictate how people embrace or shy away from a conversation with you. 

There are usually only five types of badges that you can get at a conference (listed in order of importance):

1. Speaker
2. Media
3. Sponsor
4. Attendee
5. Vendor

Being a speaker is usually the best choice, because it positions you as an expert at the event and you also have a chance to demonstrate your expertise in front of a subset of attendees.  Media is usually second best, because just about all the sponsors and vendors want to get media coverage.  Last week at an event like the Consumer Electronics Show, however, most people would agree that media was definitely number one because of the relative importance of media coverage to that event.  The interesting thing about "media" at CES (as well as at most other large events today) is that this group is usually divided into two categories: bloggers and press.  For CES, the blogger badges were gray, and the press badges were red.  Thinking this would be a good chance for a bit of a social experiment, I went and got both badges ... the blogger badge by virtue of my blog, and the press badge as a result of my writing being republished by the good folks at Digital Media Wire (sorry I missed the Insider event, Ned).

What did I learn?  Probably not surprisingly, the blogger badge got a lot less attention and special treatment.  It was an odd feeling to walk through certain booths first with my gray badge and then switch to the red one.  There were different rooms for bloggers versus press, and in the press room there was real food (not just snacks), rows of press releases that you could pickup and many invites for private parties or events.  Clearly, there is a gap in perceived value between bloggers and journalists from the organizers of CES, as well as many of the vendors exhibiting at the event.  It really is no different than a caste system where individuals are judged based on the color of their badges.  The question is, when will we see this situation change?  Already, there are signs that it is changing.  Most notably, the fact that there is a blogger room and blogger credentials at an event of this size at all.  The way I see it, in another few years, events like this will start to embrace bloggers and media on the same level and apply a similar criteria to who gets credentials.  This means the real metric will be audience and reach.  Regardless of whether you write for a blog or something else, your credentials will be based on the number of people you reach.  It's just a matter of time before it happens.

Announcing The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore

Several months ago I participated in the LitLiberation Blogger Challenge launched by my friend Tim Ferriss to try and raise money for DonorsChoose.org (a site which allows teachers to submit funding proposals to ask for help doing something they don't normally get the funding for).  Around the same time, I started playing around with Amazon Affiliate links and made more than ten bucks on links by just using a few links on several blog posts.  That's only a small amount of money, but it got me thinking about the potential of using an affiliate program to generate money for charity in the marketing world.  Over the time that I was away from blogging, one of my side projects was to start contacting several influential people to see if they would be willing to participate in a new kind of bookstore - which I called The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore.  Today I am launching it (although I will resist the temptation to call it a "Beta launch").  Here's how I described the purpose of the site and what makes it different:

This site is different because it features all the reading lists of marketers that you already know and respect in one place.  From CEOs to marketing directors to top marketing bloggers - The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore lets you see and shop from all their reading lists ... and all for a good cause.

The way most of us find out about great marketing books is the same way that we learn about great products ... through recommendations from people we trust.  Most online bookstores are just categories of books selected by one or two people.  They are great if you trust those people, but they are not comprehensive. 

As I describe above, all the proceeds from affiliate commissions that this site generates will be donated to DonorsChoose.org on a monthly basis and I plan to try and spread the word in the marketing community about this new bookstore and will be adding new names on a weekly basis.  Here are a few reasons why I think this idea can work:

1. Collects a central hub of reading lists from marketers that are currently widely distributed online. 
2. Encourages marketers who are not sharing their reading lists to do so in an easy way.
3. Makes great marketing books easier to find and buy.
4. Creates a community of marketing book readers and allows them to contribute to a good cause
5. Offers a platform for new marketing books to get promoted to an interested audience

That's the initial idea, but I'd love to hear some feedback on what you think could make it better.  I am still reaching out to marketers to add their book lists, so stay tuned in the next few weeks as I will likely be adding lots more names to this list, and I plan to publish updates with money raised and associate this bookstore with a challenge on DonorsChoose.org so the amount raised (and what the dollars are being spent on) is highly visible.  Blog badges and other tools to promote the site are in the works as well.  Any other suggestions?

Note: A big thank you to all the people who responded to my LinkedIn question about which charity could be the best to support for this.  DonorsChoose.org was the most popular suggestion.

Influential Marketing Blog Featured in Wall Street Journal

Many of you may have already caught this yesterday, but this blog was cited in the Recommended Reading  section of the Wall Street Journal yesterday in an article by Keith Huang.  As Jay Berkowitz from Ten Golden Rules shares on his team blog, my blog was one of 60 resources that they recommended to the journalist as part of their reading list and was selected from that list as a recommended resource for companies looking to "optimize their online presence."  Here's the writeup:

Influential Marketing Blog, rohitbhargava.typepad.com
Rohit Bhargava's blog is intellectual and educational. In a recent post, he discusses the art of stamp collection and how, even today, many smaller countries use stamps as a key marketing tool. He writes, 'Next time you pass a post office in any country, pay attention to how they are using their philately to promote the country, cater to tourists, or commemorate moments of significance.'

It is a great media hit and to be selected from a list of what I am guessing were 60 stellar resources is flattering.  I'm in awe at being included among the other bloggers and authors mentioned in the article - including Seth Godin, Steve Rubel, Matt Cutts, John Battelle, Chris Anderson, Joseph Jaffe, and Danny Sullivan. Thanks to Jay for including me in this great list, and to Keith for selecting to include my blog!