And when I worked with the people who designed this blog I asked them to create a category called ‘Inbound Marketing’ because I felt that the concept had potential to effect change in the digital marketing world.

I didn't create the category to publish posts about inbound marketing, but to publish posts that people could relate to in the context of what inbound marketing represented.

One-to-one Marketing

Constantly sending emails about your whitepapers probably makes people think you are giving those away for free because you're really intending to use it as a way to sell product. Frequency can diminish value.

Putting people's first name in the email salutation isn't inbound marketing. Writing a personal email that offers something that's relevant to a need or pain point you discovered a specific person has would likely be more effective. Inbound marketing is sold as being more effective.

Inbound marketing seems like it should be more about one-to-one marketing. Inbound marketing would discover what kind of problems I'm working through right now. And what kind of challenges the people on my team are trying to overcome.

I want my team to be the best they can be, and that means I'm open minded to consider any resource that my team feels can best help them be efficient, agile, and moving towards achieving the long term goal. I have a team? Yes, you could easily find that out by looking at my LinkedIn profile. You could even easily use Twitter to find some of the people on my team.

If inbound marketing was inbound-marketed, inbound marketing would never be talked about by inbound marketers, right?

There should be a balance. There is no one perfect way for anybody. Every business is different based on factors like the maturity of the business and the near term objectives and the big goals on the long term view.

Can a community help almost any business, in any industry or niche? Of course. Community ups the chances of your survival rate, especially if you can build a thriving community within the first three years of launching your product or service.

And having a great product is probably far more important than being a great storyteller. Offer a great product and you will get other people to tell your story for you. It's just marketing.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Effectively communicating a message to people in a way they can relate to.

That was my answer. I don’t remember what her answer was, but I probably rolled my eyes a half second into her definition because I know for sure we never had that discussion again. We never even talked about our answers. The conversation ended like a Wes Anderson movie.

A valuable marketing skill

If you’re out somewhere and you meet somebody that attracts your interest, and they ask you what you do, you’re going to romanticize it. You know it. It’s not a bad thing at all. You’re just trying to be memorable.

It could be effective. According to friends.

Marketers that help people become memorable, or help brands become memorable should probably be considered among the best at what they do. And if you can figure out how to do this, you should go far doing what you love, without worrying about money or what people think about you.

This is a valuable marketing skill. Helping someone or something become memorable. Memorable things and memorable people are talked about for a long time after they are gone. That feels like real marketing.

Once you get the memorable thing figured out, it’s probably easier to keep the story going.

Hannah Smith published a thought-provoking post about how audience feedback and speaker ratings are part of the problem with too few women getting speaking opportunities.

This is probably a dumb idea to solve the problem

I think the responsibility to make conferences more accessible to female speakers is mostly on conference organizers. Organizing an international SEO or marketing conference is not something I have experience with or can relate to, so this could be a really dumb idea, but I feel like one solution could be anonymous pitching.

The conference organizers would have to let potential speakers pitch their idea anonymously, making the strength of their idea the focal point of deciding who they let speak.

How anonymous pitching could work

I realize that speaker’s names and reputations are what bring people to digital marketing conferences. And the after parties probably bring the majority of people, so I can understand that the idea of letting speakers pitch anonymously is a risk to reaching attendance and revenue goals.

But here’s how I think this could work:

1. The conference organizer creates a landing page for interested speakers to set up an anonymous profile (don’t cookie anybody please)
2. After the anonymous profile is set up, the interested speaker is taken to a page to pitch their idea
3. All communication is done through the speaker profile landing page, and all done anonymously
4. When the speaker’s pitch is submitted, they are told when to log back in to see if their pitch was accepted
5. After the pitch is submitted, the organizer gets an alert and goes through the review process
6. By the decision deadline, the organizer sends a message to the prospective speaker indicating if they were accepted or not
7. If they are accepted, the normal speaker process goes on from there

Why this idea might not work

You may be thinking of a few reasons why this idea won’t work. Before writing this I bounced the idea off of a colleague and they told me it was a little out there. But I think one of the main reasons it might not work is because it would be difficult not to try to determine the gender of the person by what they wrote and how they wrote it.

People are into solving mysteries, so there’s definitely a mystery aspect to the idea of anonymous conference pitching. Maybe it would be too distracting.

Who will pilot the idea of anonymous conference pitching?

I don’t plan on organizing any conferences in the near future, but if you’re a conference organizer and you want to pilot the idea, I’d love to help any way I can. And if you have another idea to solve the problem, let’s hear it.

Who cares? It doesn’t matter.

What's interesting about apps like Vine are the people who create them. And even more so the people who take the product they didn't originally create to a whole new place the originators either didn’t think of or couldn’t get to fast enough.

Photo credit: AG Beat

Before Pinterest showed up there were plenty of options to find images through searchable databases. Like Google image search.

My guess is that Pinterest makes it interesting for people to find unique images because the images are from real people, not algorithms. Pinterest seems like it's more synced up with the way people are. If there are programmers and marketers out there making a platform for Vine, I hope they succeed.

Even though I don’t see the appeal of Vine, it’s one of those things that feels like it needs a platform that delivers the kind of experience people get from Pinterest, but maybe with the community element that Google+ is perfectly built for. In more of a structured platform that makes it easy for people to find other people and their Vine videos, and to publicly and privately connect.

And maybe if Nickelback and Creed merged they would truly be the best worst band in human history?

You can compare one social phenomenon with another as a way to project the next social phenomenon, but obviously it could get ugly.

It’s exciting knowing that smart programmers and marketers are out there building and creating things I could never dream of. And hopefully in unexpected and unlikely places. It's amazing what people can do with technology to positively impact the lives of other people from all different backgrounds and walks of life.

It’s probably all just getting started. But somebody out there knows what it'll be in 5 years and beyond. And it should be fun being a spectator.

This piece made me think about something I felt passionately about in the past, which is higher education. Higher education is something I strongly believe in when a person feels like it's going to help them achieve a bigger dream or goal in life.

I posted the work Anthony published on Inbound.org, under the community section because I felt like it would be valuable for people to hear what the marketing community has to say about the idea of higher education stepping up to instruct people in contemporary marketing.

One of the commenters in the Inbound.org thread is somebody who was an intern where I was the marketing director. I know he's currently in a good position at a paid search agency and hopefully doing well. When he was in college he worked at what could be considered a full time job, at a tech/ed startup.

His college experience gave him the opportunity to learn the best way, actually doing the work -- working with people of varying skill level and emotional intelligence, but in an environment that was trying to be a 'real' business.

I don't know exactly what he learned there, but I know he had an overall good learning experience, all while he was earning his undergrad totally debt free. Maybe parents and leaders could help kids create a plan to earn a debt-free degree? Or at least get close to debt-free. I know it sounds crazy when we're talking about college, but it makes me sad to see bright and energetic people with raw talent feel held back in life because they are stressed over monthly student loan payments.

Why are colleges trying to produce factory workers in the 21st century?

The article has good thinking. But currently, the traditional college model is still operating in the way that was designed to produce factory workers and white collar workers -- people who stayed with the same company for a lifetime and rode into the sunset of life with a crappy gold watch and a lot of regrets.

I think those days are gone and never coming back. And I believe this because of the way I see young people (Millennials) giving their time to help their communities, to volunteer, and to serve other people. This is a beautiful thing that's happening in our world, so I feel like people who run colleges should start thinking about the people that are trusting them to help light the path to their future.

I'd love to see colleges offer marketing courses, but don't just let irrelevant professors teach them. People like you should be involved with teaching college-level marketing courses. The people actually doing the work, the people whose jobs might be on the line if they don't perform or can't quantify their work, they should help write the curriculum by telling their stories.

Do you have a team of people making the business you started successful? Great, then colleges should let you get involved with educating people if you have the heart to do it. If you have business experience and have learned from failures and successes, the doors of America's universities should be open to you.

I see younger people handling work pressures and performing in ways I never would have been able to when I was their age. It's impressive but it's also a responsibility for those who are actually running colleges (the professors?) to have some empathy towards the weaknesses and the strengths of the generation of people who are trusting them.

Facebook doesn't make much sense and doesn't seem to be evolving into a platform that will bring the world closer together. Facebook drives people apart.

When other social channels get more creative and innovative in the ways that they give people the ability to create context around the content they are publishing, maybe Facebook's shareholders will go on alert.

As a marketer, I appreciate that Mark Zuckerberg and his comrades in Palo Alto are getting more creative with the ways they can deliver highly targeted advertising. But if people stop using Facebook, so what? And if people lie about themselves on Facebook, does the personalized targeting even matter?

If you're a Facebook advertiser how is your conversion-per-clickthrough or revenue-per-clickthrough looking? Up or down? Flat? Not sure?

Facebook, et al, find a better way to let people create context around the content they are sharing. And maybe even want to tell the truth a little better so the world can come closer together.

@mattcutts "We don't care whether we make money or lose money. … The question is.. Is this good for the user?" #SESSF

— Kristine Schachinger (@schachin) August 15, 2012

Is this guy for real?

Even if I had no idea who Matt Cutts is, and somebody showed me the quote and told me a guy from Google said that, it would still be the most laughable and ridiculous quote published on Twitter this year.

You can’t make the argument about not understanding the context. No matter what the context is, it makes him sound like the Central Banker of Search.

Photo credit: WebProNews

If you have a more laughable or ridiculous quote from Twitter, let’s see it.

Photo credit: http://brokeassstuart.com

Take another look at the picture. Get an idea about what you think is happening. Maybe even quickly make up a story in your mind about the people in the picture.

Now take a look at the picture again, but this time note what’s written on it, and in the context of this being a marketing blog.

Photo credit: http://brokeassstuart.com

Did the story you made up about the picture change after reading the statement, “Marketers Should Get This Right”?

What is the statement communicating?

Unless someone told you the story about how the statement relates to the picture and how that relates to you, or to marketing, trying to understand what it all means could be a waste of time.

Creating context – not a groundbreaking idea, but as marketers, we’re fighting for milliseconds of people’s attention, so context should be top of mind. And if you're a consultant, you might only have a few seconds to capture the attention of a Senior Vice President you're pitching an idea to.

Figure out a way to help the person relate to you, and then create context around how you can solve their problem.

Alright, now that we've arrived at the point of the post, this brings me to SlideShare.

SlideShare: great for publishing, not so great for context

Most marketers seem to love SlideShare, me included. SlideShare is an SEO-friendly publishing platform, and this feature alone makes it valuable to anybody with a message to share.

But, people’s attention spans aren't going up anytime soon, so to win the fight for attention I think publishing platforms like SlideShare should develop a way for their communities to create context around their content.

When I walk through a presentation on SlideShare, I don’t necessarily want to be left to my own devices to decipher how to take action on what the presenter is trying to communicate.

Creating context around the content people publish can make it much easier to get the most value out of what SlideShare can be as a community-driven resource to solve people’s problems.

How SlideShare (and you) could create context around your content

I just have one not-amazingly-creative idea for SlideShare – let your community publish a video that accompanies their presentation, and that plays in synchronicity with the presenter’s slide deck.

In the context of the idea, I use the word “synchronicity” to mean that SlideShare could add value to their platform and create a better experience by engineering a way for people to deliver their ideas and solutions that connects with auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learners (sort of for kinesthetic learners).

I know SlideShare lets you embed a YouTube video in a presentation, but the idea is to let their community create context by publishing a video of their conference session or a video they shot on their own to specifically accompany their presentation.

And for conference organizers who hold the distribution rights to their session videos, maybe you could get creative with licensing the video content you own?

Storytelling

Hopefully in the future platforms will be engineered to give their community of publishers a better way to tell a story. I think that is very good for the mind.

A year ago, maybe more, I read a guide from Distilled that logically and creatively helps you to think through ways you can earn links.

I don’t recall exactly how I found this out, but I learned that the writer of the guide was a 17 year old intern at Distilled.

That was Ed Fry.

Now, Ed’s managing Inbound.org. And in the short time Ed’s owned the job of creating a positive experience there, it’s definitely more enjoyable to be a part of. I would guess that in the past month the amount of comments and other actions people are taking on the site have jumped by 25%. Probably more.

It’s a positive story. Respect for that.

Sorry. There’s no data or Google Analytics screenshots about how the site performs. The story is, I clicked a link somebody I follow on Twitter shared and I landed on this accounting site:

I like this site a lot. I don’t get the color scheme. But the site has a good vibe. And for accountants the copywriting is amusing, with subtle intelligence running through it.

They seem like accountants you’d like to get a beer with and not accounts you’d like to squirt sriracha in their eyes.

Balance Virtual deserves a link. Not that my crappy blog will do much to help their site get more visibility in search, but why not.

3 out of 3 accounts agree: this site sucks

Before I wrote this post, I sent a link to Balance Virtual’s site to three accounts and asked, “What do you think about this site?”

All three responses were about the same. To paraphrase:

“The website sucks and doesn’t look like what an accounting website should look like.”

Great. Now I like the site even better.

If I had to make some SEO critiques, they might want to put a keyword like Accounting or Small Business Accounting in their title tags, and they should put their physical mailing address with their phone number somewhere logical on the site (hint: footer). Maybe even set up Authorship and become mobile-friendly.

As a marketer, what I like most about the site is that it’s supposed to be boring, because accounting is supposed to be boring, but it’s not boring at all.

Check out their pricing page:

To me, this is done well. Whether or not you agree with their revenue model, you can probably agree it’s a creative way to sell stuff.

If there’s a point to writing a post about Balance Virtual’s site, it’s that if your client thinks they’re in a boring industry, so it's OK to have a boring site with terrible writing and stock photos, think about making a business case for why they should do the opposite.