Time 25:26

Making choices has become more difficult in an era of significant transformation – transformation in the economy from consumer obsessed to consumer cautious, from gatekeepers to personal brands, from physical to digital.

The mindset required to first absorb the present, and then plan the future, is quite difficult to establish. In the last post, we examined how Seth Godin’s direction is to first shed what you learned in school and then pursue your craft. In today’s podcast with friend Stephanie Hester, author of Choose a Better Life, it’s a story of a personal journey from blindly being on society’s typical treadmill, to hard times, and renewed dedication.

It’s one of those stories where personal experience allows Stephanie to connect with her audience. Stephanie Hester conducts workshops and team building session with Fortune 500 companies, government organizations focused on helping unemployed, and HR directors in retraining programs.

The key to creating change is to first change the way you view your world. This is an age old doctrine, I go back to Einstein who said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

And so first is always a personal choice to view the world differently. In Hester’s case it’s to choose the positive, then work your way from there. Sure this is nothing new, but certainly one of the most difficult things to do. Then Hester weaves a little social web thinking into her commentary which is excellent with three critical tactics as you pursue your destination

1. 1) stay connected (Stephanie is a huge LinkedIn user)
2. 2) stay involved (give back in some way, from Meals on Wheels, Big Brother, Big Sister, volunteer to help someone)
3. 3) stay motivated (oddly the above help achieve this tactic)

BOOK DRAWING

Enjoy the podcast, if you’d like to get in the drawing for the book Choose a Better Life, email me at MarketingEdge AT providentpartnes DOT net

Preface: Linchpin is a new book by Seth Godin the premise is that you must make yourself indispensable to your employer, clients in order to truly have job security. “A linchpin is the essential element, the person who holds part of the operation together. Without the linchpin, the thing falls apart.” quoted from Mashable interview.

For those who attended yesterday’s Seth Godin Linchpin event they received a workbook called ShipIT. It’s a small guidebook to make sure the high you get inside the event doesn’t turn into a reality hangover when you go back to work the next day.

For those that need a frame of reference, Godin is a combination of Dr. Stephen Covey, Tom Peters, and Dr. Wayne Dyer, but truly that’s only for those that need a reference. Godin is uniquely Seth.

Seth Godin is navigating his way in uncharted waters. His brand as I see it is – Marketer for the new century – but his words and passion in the presentation I attended yesterday in Minneapolis (see on Twitter #sethgodinmpls) is one part marketer, two parts motivational speaker, and one part rebel, kind of like Peter Finch rebel in the movie Network.

I’ll cover separate parts of Godin’s message in several blog posts here. Let’s set the stage with these points.

Brilliant Points for Marketers

These are Seth’s ideas filtered through a Maruggi perspective (yes it may be a little twisted but that’s why you return here) : )

1) Figure out the world view of your audience and use it to frame your discussion. Example, say you are trying to sell NBA Timberwolves tickets to a fan upset by the number of blowouts last year. Now it becomes a question of selling the youth, athleticism and hustle (and yes the product actually needs to produce that expectation) as opposed to some notion of playoff contender. Plus I would not make a big deal out of seeing Wade, Bosh, and that other guy.

2) Lizard thinking. The ability of some people in an organization to protect their species called status quo. You run into Lizard think in many larger organization, usually because smaller organizations don’t survive with many Lizard thinkers on board.

I worked as a political appointee in the Federal Government and the agencies are loaded with Lizard thinkers on both sides of the political spectrum. They know their species has lasted a hell of a lot longer than you. The thinking goes like this, “I’ll just bake here in the sun and watch you try to change the world, then your kind will die off and they next generation come in. Democracy is great ain’t it?”

Godin’s guidance about the Lizard thinker – distract them, appease them, remove them. Details of doing this are unique to every situation and past success does not predict future performance with Lizard thinkers, but suffice it to say the world is full of them, don’t let them get you down.

Funny on the topic of people who are protective of the status quo and resist change, I asked Robert Scoble years ago whether they can stop social media from growing and he said no. I asked why and he replied, “they will eventually die off.” As a 51 year old social advocate and believer in the current revolution, this was a bittersweet statement.

Brilliant Personal Note

Godin talks about following your passion, making a difference and creating art. His palette is comprised of words, so it is easy to get caught up in the moment of “Yes this is my destiny.” Godin, more so than others who talk the “follow your passion talk” does include a healthy reality check. Thank God.

He acknowledges the parameters that most people face, family obligations, work constraints, time, money, etc. In fact, when he talked about these he gestured by placing them around his body as if they were walls of a box. And without any sugar coating he said one of these may need to get blown up, he also used the word sacrifice. Yup, that’s it. Sacrifice, and for those in the audience who have built a career, family, obligations, those walls are higher and thicker than for others, that’s just reality. For those individuals, Godin’s words are no less inspiring, but the path to implementing them is more arduous for you and those that depend on you.

Brilliant Perspective

The lens through which the reality check should be seen is Godin’s comment about the revolution now underway. Godin said each of us is both worker and factory owner. The digital factory which each individual now owns is a computer, each enriching asset a person owns is an idea, and the myth many of us need to shed, is the myth of needing to ask permission to succeed.

You don’t need permission to pursue your art. This was the most enlightening, realistic and sad concept of the presentation. Given today’s ability to create and share we don’t need any one’s permission to believe and work towards a dream. The industrial system rewarded conformity, bastards. It’s a yoke the anyone born before 1990 may well be carrying around. I’m not talking rebel with long hair and torn jeans, I’m talking, as I interpret Godin here, the ability to create anything, period. A book, a Tshirt, a store, a widget, anything. I submit to you this mindset is more important to success than talent, an idea, a network, anything. The myth is the first thing to blow up, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Now so I don’t go too far a field from the readers of this blog, this myth of permission is also true for your potential competition and for your customers. They have few if any barriers to implement their ideas about themselves or about you. So if you have linchpins make sure the Lizards don’t get them down or they can become your competition. If you deal with consumers directly, understand their ability to share their perspective, right or wrong. Doctors, are you listening? Hotel front desk people do you get this? Wall Street, your next because the cost for this revolution are magnitudes less than 10 years ago so do you know what that means? Conformity to your short-sighted view of the world may not be in my world view.

Thanks Seth, more in the days ahead as we get deeper into the Linchpin revolution. I recommend you attend a Linchpin event in your area.

Time 21:33

We round out part two of this series on Facebook Marketing with some highlights from restaurant. shipping companies and others . We then get into the social promotion of the social web with Facebook Marketing An Hour A Day co-author Chris Treadaway.

Here are some examples of Facebook Marketing tactics that work.

1. 1) Dumb Questions – yeah some people think they are dumb, the type of questions where you might say “Who Cares” but oddly enough, they get people responding. Questions like, what did you have for lunch or what’s your favorite color. Why do they get a response? Perhaps because they are easy questions, you know the answer right away and it takes little time to answer. Perhaps because there is no right answer just an opinion and everyone has those. The result is lots of conversation starters, which may convey the perception that you have “sway”, that you can get people engaged. 

2. 2) Seek Advice – Chris Brogan did this with his new office using a Facebook wall post, showing pictures of his empty office and asking how he should arrange it. Classic, we the progress from, IKEA furniture to his beverage selection. One of the benefits to this tactic is it sets up a storyline that you want to follow to its conclusion. 

3. 3) Facebook Ads – I’ve had some success with Facebook Ads, whether it provided market insights in the potential online market size of people that can be engaged or actually producing ads that drove behavior, Facebook ads are a valuable resource. 

This chart shows the pattern of click throughs on an ad for USA2Pilipinas, a shipping service to the Philippines. We targeted market segments in the Philippines and Filipino communities in the US using Facebook Ads. The ads are producing a steadily increasing number of click throughs and we’ve adjusted to copy and even gone dark to assess interest. This program had an objective to register 1000 users by the end of the year, it has achieve more than half that number in the first 6 weeks.

Facebook Ad Stats Chart

Treadaway on Social Promotion

In part two of our conversation with Chris Treadaway about his book written with Mari Smith, Facebook Marketing An Hour a Day, we get into some of the subtleties of promotion in social media. It’s a very interesting time, a paradox in that some of the tactics that are selfless, talking about the accomplishments of others, can also be self-serving, gaining inbound links. Hhhmm I wonder if Brogan or Treadaway will link to this page?

No criticism here, just an observation about how interdependent we are. This is highlighted in the Free Economy as coined by Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson where there is so much information available for free. The logic is no different than your local grocer offering samples of product in the aisles, maybe you’ll by some of my intelligent property while you are browsing.

Facebook Marketing An Hour A Day Drawing

We are giving away the book Facebook Marketing An Hour a Day to those entering the drawing. To enter either email me MarketingEdge AT providentpartners DOT net or just tweet a link to this post. Now if that’s not self serving I don’t know what is. Any proceeds gained will go directly to my five children.

As I post this Facebook is rolling out it’s location check in service called Facebook Places. check back here for ways to incorporate that into Facebook marketing.

Time 24:33

This post is a quick comment on Shel Holtz’s Deathwatch: Why Facebook Won’t Kill the Website who responded to Jay Baer’s 3 Ways Facebook is Killing Your Website Baer, one who does have a way to use words to ignite a response concluded in his post “RIP websites, It was great while it lasted.”

I’m less inclined to believe the website is dead, but acknowledge our mark is left in many more digital places including Facebook. Will companies abandon their websites for their Facebook page? Companies active in the social web have an increasing percentage of their content on Twitter, YouTube Facebook et. al. but they do need the digital version of the American Dream, home ownership and not to be a tenant in Facebook’s apartment complex inside a walled city.

A website is a place to keep your stuff organized, a place to call your own. From a business perspective it’s a place where you can engage and set the rules without the whims of a crowd which only a very small percentage have an interest in you (and visa versa truth be told). Perhaps as a destination the website has seen better days. It’s really not that imperative to “drive” people to my site, it is more important to engage with others, especially from a business perspective. Perhaps the term web repository is better than destination, even if it is just there to make me feel comfortable about my own possessions, my own content, my own intellectual property. After all without that, what do I have? A website is like a book, a place where I can compile my ideas, my way. Yes I know books are dying too, but not the concept of the book as a place of structured thought.

Format Note:

For those regular listeners of the Marketing Edge Podcast I am trying this a bit differently today by using an audio file I recorded using Cinchcast. I use Cinch as a supplement to the regular Marketing Edge Podcast as a quick, unedited audio capture and release type of format. Most of the time I record on Cinch while I’m walking the dog early in the morning. Since I added my thoughts in print and wanted to link back to Holtz and Baer, I figured it would be more complete to include the audio file as well. Let me know if you like it or it threw you off. thanks

Time 24:33

You know I could have done the solutions headline and just throw a number in there, but I hate those things. The hungry part is because in some of this podcast we talk about Facebook and restaurants. Facebook Marketing, An Hour A Day is a book by Chris Treadaway and Mari Smith. In this podcast we talk to Chris Treadaway about some of the ways Facebook is used to market companies. Facebook is a place that requires attention, lesson one if you are not prepared to give it attention, forget it. This is where the hour a day comes in.

To pull a favorite useful idea out of this podcast I’d call attention to using Facebook as a market research tool. Creating an ad in Facebook will give you insights into potential online market size. Here is an example where I took the city of Chicago, people age 21 and over that self identified interest of football or fantasy football. The kind of information of interest to a sports bar owner. Targeting by interest, geography, age and other variables is a great feature of Facebook.

Using Facebook Advertising for Market Research from Albert Maruggi on Vimeo.

We are holding a drawing for the book Facebook Marketing An Hour A Day. Email MarketingEdge AT Providentpartners DOT net – put Facebook in the Subject line. Link should do that for you.

Other Examples of Social Marketing to Hungry Patrons

Smalley87Club – Tied Twins ticket drawings to items people like on the menu with a link to the Smalleys 87 Club menu page. (I helped on this one)

Dino’s Gyros IAMDEZ – Guess random number between 1 and 10,000 on Tuesdays before 7PM, closest 10 get a free gyro.

Izzys Ice Cream incorporates a variety of platforms and communities. Also has unique notification of the availability of limited time flavors Dave Erickson

The Sterling Cross Group broke new ground with Motoi only Japanese saki brewer in Twin Cities

Back in 2005 it really hit me that public relations was impacted by social media. Between a client (Technomic Asia) getting called directly from a National Public Radio reporter after the reporter listened to his podcast, and another client’s feature piece on the front page of the Wall Street Journal getting but an ounce of subsequent attention, I realized the world of communications was changing.

So I did a little keyword number crunching and dug up this chart from Google Insights for Search. The Red trend line for good ol’ PR is not exactly stellar performance. If the PR trend line were a company’s stock performance heads would roll. Now I completely understand that these search terms are relative and in some cases public relations has more absolute searches, relative to social media, however public relations keyword searches were on a long slide to parity if not lower than the term social media.

I suspect social media consultants and PR firm executives will battle royal over which is which, and who was a leader and who was a follower. The inconvenient truth for corporate communicators, marketers, and public relations professionals is the two must coexist. In my digital dog walk audio piece for Tuesday, August 4 I reminisce about the public relations & social media tipping point, and reflect that it is not an us vs them world.
Here’s what i have found to be helpful for client PR as these two functions have converged:

Four Ways to Capture Reporter’s Attention

1. Identify key people inside a company that can relate to a social audience
2. Find ways for the client to tap the social web either by their own actions or mentions by others on the social web
3. Tell the client’s story on social channels
4. Create a multimedia newsroom
5. Reference articles and blog posts in your client’s digital footprint

Time 25:21

In this podcast we highlight two major issues 1) The idea of resonance as implemented by promoted Tweets and interpreted by Brian Solis at a recent presentation in Minneapolis, and 2) We dig a bit deeper into the 9 ways marketing is being transformed in a conversation with college curriculum developer and instructor Mia Lee

We have a winner for the drawing for Brian Solis’ book Engage with my commentary in the margins where necessary – Ken Okumura of Minneapolis and a Marketing Edge listener is the winner of Engage. Solis was a guest on the Marketing Edge prior to his presentation in Minneapolis on July 27.

I attended his presentation which was thought provoking. One of his key areas for social media moving forward is the concept of resonance. It’s a word Solis combines with Relevance and Significance as a major way to determine value of social object. A social object is a piece of digital content, a tweet, a photo, etc. As companies continue to find ways to engage social commnities and platforms look for ways to garner advertising dollars, measuring the investment of time and dollars is being refined.

Measurement includes Retweets, mentions, clicks, actions, influence etc. During Solis’s presentations I tweeted this :

@WichitaCindy on Twiter asked me why. The reason for the excitement is because it’s a chance to engage and perhaps have an impact on anything, products, service, government etc. The reason for the nausea is caused by the many ways popularity and influence can be manipulated. The irony is that as consumers we revolt against advertising, even coming up with technologies to circumvent ads and now on social media those same consumers may well be part of message, and I don’t mean that in a good way. I mean just because you get a $5 coupon for a burger if you get your friends to fan a restautant doesn’t make it any less of an advertisement. In some respects we are being coopted under the guise of being social.

This is a fine line, and I hope I’m not the guy throwing sand in the social media sandbox, but the potential exists and there are plenty of tactics being used that contribute to search and klout. For more on resonance see Jeramiah Owyang of the Altimiter Group. The Solis event was produced by Jen Kane who does a wonderful job on these events.

9 Ways Marketing is Being Transformed

A while back I did a post on 9 Ways Marketing is Being Transformed. The beginnings of this post was an exchange on Twitter with WebbieGirl AKA Mia Lee instructor and program curriculum developer of digital marketing workshops. Mia developed a popular e-marketing program at the Wichita Area Technical College for social marketing.

In this podcast we get into some of the ways marketing is changing, including

1. 1. Very public behavior – privacy or not
2. 2. Ability to call bull – corporate transparency
3. 3. Everyone is a media outlet – content marketing at its best
4. 4. Consumers are marketers – How to build a community of passionate customers
5. 5. Social culture vs. social tactics – Companies will benefit by adopting their culture to the social web
6. 6. Consumers have an active role – the more you interact the better the information companies will provide
7. 7. Personal brand networks matter – Instead of direct mail lists, online networks will preform better
8. 8. Knowing how the system is gamed – the more social is quantified the more participants will try to gain an advantage, ethically or unethically.
9. 9. Product development will dominate marketing – the social web will recreate how products are researched and developed

Have any to add?

Time 21:36

The tables have turned in five years. Back then social media zealots were telling company execs, “you don’t get it”. They loved to bring out charts of percentage growth and the ever referenced “if Facebook was a country…” It took among other things, two election cycles, (the US and Iran), numerous gadget launches, a pop star’s death, a golf icon’s fall from grace, the year-long roll out of the first “social” car (you can comment which car you think I’m referring to here), and a World Cup for executives to retort, “We get it now.”

And now it’s their turn to say to the social media business community, “you don’t get it.” The it for them is how companies work for anyone to move from side project freak show to bonafide, no snickering business function. The holy grail for social media practitioners is Engagement, the holy grail for corporate executives is Process. The mutual nirvana are the key performance indicators (KPI) that give each side a reference point for their work.

Engagement means dialogue, participation, exchange of ideas

Process means your work is part of a decision oriented workflow system with predetermined actions to be taken based on certain events

KPI means “a metric that helps you understand how you are doing against your objectives.” This definition is from Avinash Kaushik from an excellent post on different types of measurement.

In this Marketing Edge podcast with Brain Solis, we discuss how to support the social media champion in an organization by understanding how to fit social into the company’s goals. Even the smallest pilot project needs to be structured in a way that will assimilate into the larger picture if it is to succeed.

I love when Solis says every champion hits a ceiling. You can’t just walk into a meeting of senior executives, say the world is going this way, and they will come along. His latest book Engage Solis peels the onion back a few layers than most social media books by examining how to work social media into the corporate process. The journey to achieve getting social media included in corporate processes is what Solis calls the last mile. He has written about the last mile in social media on his blog BrianSolis.com

I look at the culture of the business to determine whether the last mile will be a walk in the park or the last mile of a long journey across a desert. I highlight social culture vs social tactics in a podcast called, Is Your Company Social At Its Core ? It’s the story of a small, but growing premium ice cream brand, Izzys Ice Cream, and how their culture is spawning sophisticated uses of social technology.

Fun for Listeners

We are going to do a few neat things with this podcast and post.

First we have a drawing to win Solis’ book Engage. Email MarketingEdge AT providentpartners.net and put Engage in the subject line. This is not just a copy of the book, but it is the copy I have read and included comments in the margins, kind of like a combination book and blog. The physical replication of social media, only slower with fewer people, but unique nonetheless.

Second, we invite you to join Brian Solis in Minneapolis, July 27 at 6PM at Solera in Minneapolis. It’s an event An Evening with Brian Solis, sponsored by the Minnesota chapter of PRSA, register for the event today, it will be enlightening and inspiring. Hat tip to Jen Kane for leading this event.

Disclaimer – this is not a shot at the USA on its birthday. This is not a political commentary because this is the Marketing Edge podcast and Blog. I hope it will be a quick eye opener to acknowledge that the citizens of America and the world, live in an interdependent world.

Let’s separate Independence the apple pie, flag waving idea from independent growth.

Independence is the beautiful way Americans have been able to worship as they choose, to roam our vast land without “papers” (with some exceptions over our very short history), to assemble, start a business, build an idea into reality, have children etc. etc. etc. That’s our society, warts and all that we choose to celebrate today. I’m in favor of it. Happy Birthday.

Now let’s look at independent growth. This is the notion that we glamorize for individuals who achieve certain levels of accomplishment. You know top ten lists, richest people, All-Star teams, A, B, C, and D Listers. We love to refine things and people to lists, without appreciating how those on the list came to be, how they were impacted by other people and events.

The social web has put a spotlight on the amazing gifts we give to each other, some of which contribute to personal gain and recognition. The concept that we learn from others in this or past generations is not new. One that comes to mind today is the electrical engineer Nikola Tesla whose work was trumped by Thomas Edison in his day, is the foundation for today’s energy saving light bulbs.

Let’s apply that interdependent concept in the area of social media authors. For example. today’s social media thinking by Charlene Li of Altimeter Group on Open Leadership, a wonderful book about the new participating consumer and how companies can embrace them. It’s a premise based on the work of Shel Israel and Robert Scoble in Naked Conversations or the Cluetrain Manifesto Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, and McKee Jake. Can we trace some of this thinking to Ralph Nader and his early consumer empowerment? On the marketing side do we owe some recognition to Neil McElroy the Procter and Gamble marketing executive who advocated the concept of brand managers, market segmentation, and several brands under the same parent company?

How about that patio furniture, your sitting on or the grill, or lawn chair at today’s Bar-b-que. My bet is one of them was made by a worker earning $5 a day instead of $10 or more an hour. (Not a political statement just an economic fact of life) What about the house, car, boat for today’s activities, likely owned by a bank now or at some point in the past. This consumerism and ownership is based on the interdependence of individuals and institutions.

America is a nation built on economic and intellectual interdependence. Our roots grew on blood and sweat of willing and unwilling Europeans, Africans, and native Americans (for the most part). Independence – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

In pursuit of these rights we are an interdependent people of the world. Social media brings this to light with each minute on twitter, each shared cause on Facebook, each entry in Wikipedia, and on and on. It has never be clearer to me that our Independence is based on our interdependence which is now expanding beyond our nation as the social web grows. Our fast-paced society likes to pedal short lists of everything, from recipes to
people. I hope that with every list read today, there is a mental asterisk with the caption *this list compliments of the contributions of many other individuals.

Time 14:20

This was a fun piece to put together, let’s face it I went back to Izzy’s Ice Cream three times to research all the different flavors. Izzy’s Ice Cream is a premium, delicious ice cream with unique flavors, some of them available on a limited basis. Izzy’s co-owner Jeff Sommers realized the loyalty his customers had to certain flavors. He also puts great effort, ingredients, and love into the product. The combination of a quality product and loyal customers, gives a business owner great confidence to do what is best for the customer.

Izzys Ice Cream – Flavor UP from Albert Maruggi on Vimeo.

Sommers created a system where customers could subscribe to a flavor and be notified via email, on Twitter and Facebook It’s called Flavor Up – pretty interesting stuff. As the ice cream server replaces the flavor in the dipping case, they also replace the sign with the appropriate flavor name. The sign has an RFID tag on the back which communicates the new ice cream flavor name to a database which in turn updates, well everything. The system was a Sommers brainchild and the Nerdery did the development work along with contributions from other service providers from laser cutting signs to RFID tags.

Izzy’s is famous for “The Izzy” - a delightful little dollop of ice cream to taste on top of most any selection you choose. The concept of the Izzy’s scoop is to allow people to discover new flavors at minimal risk, to reward customers for remaining loyal to a premium product and to potentially engage the conversation about ideas for new flavors.

Sommers brilliantly comments in the podcast and video about the power of the social web crowd to come up with solutions that may not otherwise be achieved, and for individuals from that same crowd to advance an idea that is beneficial to the community at large. This concept and the way Izzy’s has grown a mom and pop shop into a taste playhouse of retail innovation is an example of a social culture in a business. Whatever social tactic Sommers uses will be a success because he begins and ends with the two most important ingredients. They are - a steadfast dedication to a quality product, and the belief a customer engaged with the Izzy’s experience will always look forward to their next time there.

The takeaway of this podcast for other companies is to determine whether your culture is social. After listening to Sommers’ comment on the Izzy mission statement, do you have a similar perspective about your customers. Social media can be used as a marketing tactic, but without a social culture my experience is it will have a short term impact of limited success.

Special thanks to David Erickson from Tunheim Partners for including me in the Flavor Up news conference. David is the author of the e-Strategy Blog.