When you write a blog post you give away to the world on your blog, it is not free. You spent time, energy, effort, and knowledge writing it, time that could have been spent doing something else.

When you share a video of your session from a conference, it is not free. You are directly harming your ability to be hired as a speaker at future conferences because why should prospective attendees pay if they know the video will be available for free later?

When you interview someone for your podcast, it is not free. Both of you are giving up time and knowledge that might be better spent elsewhere.

The only time something is truly free is when it has no value, when the person who creates something believes it to be of no inherent value that it’s only worth throwing away. Your excrement is free. In fact, you pay people to take it away. Same for your garbage and your recycling.

Mitch Joel quotes Mike Lipkin often: “I would do this for free but I make you pay so that you understand the value of what you are getting.”

As a new media/social media creator of content – blogger, podcaster, Tweep, etc. – I want you to understand that what you make available without a financial transaction taking place is not free. You may indeed be rewarded in other non-financial benefits for what you give to others, in reputation, social currency, popularity, fame, etc., but don’t call it free unless it is of no value.

I appreciate what you create on a daily basis when I read your blog, listen to your podcast, watch your video, and I acknowledge gratefully that it is not free, that it has inherent value and worth. You spent hours of your time on what you’ve made, time you could have spent with your family or playing with other hobbies, and for that I thank you.

I will not demean your work by calling it “free” – valueless – and assuming that because you don’t charge me money for it that I am entitled to it with nothing ever given back.

Thank you for giving of yourself on your blog, on your podcast, in your Twitter stream, and beyond. I appreciate you all the more for it.

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The problem with more and more conversations happening over DM is there is no easy way to search them

Which is more or less true in the native interface. Luckily, RSS comes to the rescue.

From the Twitter API:

direct_messages

Returns a list of the 20 most recent direct messages sent to the authenticating user. The XML and JSON versions include detailed information about the sending and recipient users.

URL:

http://twitter.com/direct_messages.format (requires authentication)

So here’s how you do it. Craft a URL like this:

http://username:password@twitter.com/direct_messages.rss

Copy this.

Updated: For DMs you have SENT: http://username:password@twitter.com/direct_messages_sent.rss

There’s a bug in the way either Twitter renders RSS or Google Reader interprets it. Not sure which, but you need to set up Yahoo Pipes as an intermediary to make everything and everyone happy.

Go to Yahoo Pipes and drag a Fetch Feed onto the worksheet. Paste the Twitter RSS URL there. If you’re doing DMs sent, add a second box under the first one and paste the second URL there.

Next, name it, save it, and run the pipe. Do not publish it or the pipe will be publicly viewable! Copy the Get as RSS URL.

Now go to Google Reader. Paste in the Pipe RSS URL.

Congratulations. Now all new DMs will be recorded by Reader and will be fully searchable from the search box.

You’re done!

If you’d prefer all in one using GMail, you can also take the Pipes RSS feed and use any RSS to Email service (feedburner, feedblitz, etc.) and have your DMs emailed to you.

Update: If anyone knows how to implement this feature using OAuth rather than plaintext, please comment!

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First, via Blytic, a look at food stamp usage and unemployment.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or an economist to figure out that this recession still has legs and a long way to run before we even begin to approach “normalcy”. Anyone talking about recovery is being a little on the premature side, don’t you think?

Second, via Barry Ritholtz:

Again, you don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to figure out that the housing bubble still has a long way to come down. A 4 year old with a ruler and a crayon could diagram out the long term mean and see that when it comes to reversion to mean on a multi-decade basis, we are still far, far away from the mean, which indicates that housing prices still have a long way to drop.

When you strip away the spin of government press flacks and media outlets desperate to gin up advertising revenue by getting consumers to spend unwisely, when you reveal the data as opposed to the opinion, the news is less than good, and the calling of a bottom, recovery, and green shoots is premature at best.

So what does this mean for you?

If you’ve been getting by, keep doing what you’ve been doing, only moreso. Thrift is the new black. Keep watching the fridge and the toilet paper.

If you’ve not been getting by, I’m sorry. There’s not much advice or counsel I can offer that hasn’t already been thrown at you a dozen times over. Consider putting a few hours into setting up some affiliate stuff, knowing that a payout if successful is probably 30-60 days away, but it might be a little supplementary help. If you’re job hunting, take what you can get.

Above all else, if there’s a single concept you must get sooner rather than later, it’s that positive cash flow means everything in this environment, whether it’s your business or personal life. Positive cash flow is pretty much all that matters for the short term. Get more money coming in than going out.

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But what happens at level 80? What happens when you reach the end, and there are no more levels to achieve?

It turns out the game changes quite a bit once you reach the top level. Instead of improving your character’s abilities through levels (and associated rewards) you change to getting better equipment for your character and improving your play skill.

See, in Warcraft, every character has dozens of abilities depending on their class. Mages can cast a whole bunch of spells. Priests can heal, shield, and resurrect other characters. Warriors can deliver a beatdown in more ways than you can count. But during the leveling process, you typically rely on a few of these skills as your bread and butter, and the rest are skills you pick up along the way but don’t really use.

Once you reach level 80, you start entering progressively harder dungeons, teaming up with a few or a few dozen other players to take down bigger and meaner creatures. This in turn requires you to dust off all those secondary skills you picked up along the way and figure out just when they’re the perfect solution to the problem at hand. Skills that you never really used on the way up to level 80, skills that you might have forgotten about completely, might make or break your ability to succeed after 80.

What does any of this have to do with marketing? Simple. Take an inventory of all the skills and abilities you have, especially skills you’ve built along your career that you don’t use a whole lot. Take an equal inventory of all the tools and technologies at your disposal that you’ve used, tried, and experimented with along your marketing journey. Now start to view them from the perspective of not just tools, but specific skills that you can use at the right time, for the right job – even if you didn’t give them a second glance as you became a marketing professional.

Last night on the Small Business Buzz Twitter chat, Question 8 was “Twitter vs. LinkedIn vs. Facebook?”. The answer is the right tool for the right job. Just as a frost mage needs to know when to pop Ice Block, Ice Barrier, and Cold Snap in Heroic Halls of Lightning to survive Loken’s Lightning Nova, so must a marketer know when Facebook is the right tool for a campaign, when Twitter makes the most sense, and when LinkedIn is exactly what’s called for. There are times when social media is exactly the wrong answer, and direct mail is the right one. As a marketing professional and as a Warcraft player, knowing which tool fits each situation best is the definition of mastery.

Many of us rushed past experimenting with a lot of our secondary skills on the way to level 80 in both Warcraft and marketing. Now that we’ve got the job, now that we’re practicing professionals, we need to see what else we’re capable of that’s sitting in our inventory, perfect solutions for the problems we have at hand.

This is what’s next for a lot of people – not another new, shiny object to play with, but mastering the tools you already have so that you can achieve exactly the results you want. One of the biggest ways you can set your own career back is to constantly chase after new tools and shiny objects rather than master the ones you’ve already got. Yes, absolutely, try new things, but devote more of your time towards perfecting the skills and tools you currently have, and you’ll find life after 80 – in Warcraft and in your career – to be incredibly rewarding.

May your marketing quests be as fruitful as your Warcraft ones.

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It’s a day steeped in patriotism, with a little nationalism and some jingoism mixed in.

There are some very lengthy debates about what patriotism is vs. nationalism (which is widely credited for things like Nazi Germany). I’m not a philosopher, so I’ll let that debate be, save for a couple of sage perspective:

“Loyalty to my country, always. Loyalty to the government, only when it deserves it.” – Mark Twain

This to me is the essence of patriotism.

We are supposed to disagree. We are supposed to think freely, to question authority, to debate. We are supposed to have similar common goals – the good of a people, of a nation – with different approaches as to the best way of getting there. Patriotism means wanting less of things like crime, poverty, and misery, wanting more safety, prosperity, and happiness for all, even the people you disagree with most, and working with them towards these common goals. Patriotism means when someone says, “This is the way it’s always been done” having the freedom to ask, “Yes, but it is the best way?” and the courage to abandon a position when you’ve been proven wrong.

On this Independence Day, ask yourself this: how can you declare your independence from the sleepwalking state of blind loyalty to consensus? How can you find true freedom to always think for yourself?

Oh, and patriotism also means that if you disagree with this blog post, that’s more than okay too. Frankly, I’d be happy if you did.

Happy Independence Day.

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Flags by Hryck.

It’s interesting that so many of the July 4th holiday photos on Flickr have a ton of political commentary rabidly espousing a viewpoint with them. Independence Day at its core celebrates freedom from someone else’s tyranny. Have your viewpoint, of course, but have a willingness to find what’s right in someone else’s viewpoint as well, no matter how else you may disagree with them. The willingness to be able to see how others view the world with an understanding heart – that is freedom too.

Whatever your beliefs, I hope your holiday weekend is a happy, safe, and inspiring one.

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If you can attend 95% of the conference virtually and not pay, or attend 100% of the conference in person and pay, which will most people rationally choose? Which would you choose?

Right now, social media, for all its glamour and buzz, is still a relatively small space compared to the world of business as a whole. As it grows, how long will it be before conference organizers have to clamp down on usage to avoid completely devaluing their conferences?

Will social media, in other words, burn conferences to the ground? Yes – and it should.

My answer as co-founder of PodCamp and co-organizer of PodCamp Boston 4 is one we’ve been researching and looking at for years. Whether live or recorded, the talking head portion of the conference is something that is part of the old conference model.

While I love speaking publicly, I also recognize that it’s not terribly valuable in and of itself. I could convey the exact same information with a video camera and a YouTube account, and in fact I’ve done this to a degree. 60+ people saw my PAB 2009 presentation live. Over 300 have seen it virtually. Did the attendees of PAB 2009 get more out of the public speaking experience than the people at their desks? No, not really.

What we’ve been exploring with PodCamp year after year is how to take the other parts of conferences and amplify them, the parts you cannot get out of a talking head presentation. Side conversations in hallways. One to one interactions. Spontaneous group discussions. These are all things that you can’t bottle, and honestly, you can’t tweet, stream, or liveblog either. There’s simply no way for you, as a new media journalist, to be at 300 mini-sessions, or 3,000 micro-presentations, and if the conversations are valuable, you’ll be too busy participating to be archiving and broadcasting – and that’s as it should be.

What I think the conference model will evolve to, and where PodCamp is leading along with the other *Camp events, is the truly interactive community brainshare. Would I pay $500 to see Seth Godin speak? Sure. Would I pay more to sit down over beer with Seth and a few other folks at a roundtable and have him look at my marketing campaign, maybe sketch out some ideas on a napkin? Heck yeah. Multiply that times many tables over many hours and I’d walk away with a literal goldmine of useful information that’s tailored to me and my business. That’s what we want to bring more of to PodCamp – fewer talking heads and more sharing brainspaces.

When you walk away from a PodCamp, I don’t want you to say “that was a great conference!”. I want you to say, “I met and learned from some awesome people at PodCamp!” because in the end, your community is your strength. The conference is just a convenient place for the community to meet.

What do you think the future of conferences will be? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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Bonfire by Dominic.

This one is just… impressive.

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Clouds in Quebec by Michel Fillon:

Victoria Glacier in Alberta by Laszlo:

Vancouver Island by Zedzap:

And new media friend Angela Misri, shot at Podcasters Across Borders 2009:

5 most recent Financial Aid News articles:

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By Koshyk.

This is a photo of Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, a Sikh site. I love the light in this picture.

I look forward to seeing your Week With A View entries.

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Did a search for hiking. Saw this:

by Adam Baker.

What I really like about this photo is the very strong path my eyes follow through the photo from the hiker all the way up the mountains. In that respect it’s very similar to a lot of Chinese landscape paintings, with pathing that guides your eyes.

Tag: #wwav

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There’s an impressive amount of photography on Flickr. There are some amazing photos on there from amateur and professional photographers. Here’s a blogging exercise I’d like you to try this coming week. Find a beautiful photo licensed for Creative Commons use, a moving photo, a stunning, stirring photo each day this week. Tag it #wwav – Week With A View – and post it on your blog with a short description of why the photo is beautiful, then share the heck out of it so that we can all see some of the best, most beautiful photography available online.

General Guidelines & Suggestions

• Yes, absolutely they can be your own photos as long as they’re Creative Commons licensed.
• Post a photo a day from June 29, 2009 – July 4, 2009.
• Link and give full credit to the photographer!
• Ideally, they should be Creative Commons commercially licensed so that you can post them on a corporate blog, too.
• Search for keywords of things that YOU personally find beautiful. Everyone always seems to search for sunsets. What do YOU like?
• TAG YOUR BLOG POSTS! TAG YOUR TWEETS! The whole point is to see what OTHER people find beautiful.

Here’s a set of screenshots from Flickr’s Advanced Search.

Ready? Show the world.

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There has never been a more repeated question in all of marketing, and there has never been a time that question has been asked more frequently than now. Marketing, like so many other industries, has had its world turned upside down in the last decade. Marketing executives’ heads are spinning at such a rate that if you put magnets and wiring around them, they could generate enough electricity to power a company. Marketing professionals from the C suite down to the entry level college graduate are all wondering what’s next. What opportunities are there? What will imperil my career?

Here’s a couple of thoughts on what’s next. Disclaimer: this is speculation. I reserve the right to be wrong.

Decentralization is coming to social networks. Look at the specs very carefully for Google Wave and you’ll see that behind the flashy interface is a massive re-architecting of social networks, making them much more resistant to shock. The Wave protocol (separate from the product itself) specifies that a federated data store and server be available for Wave. Just like your company has its own email server, so it might have a Wave server if you jump on board that platform.

What does this mean for you? Services like Twitter, for example, are highly centralized. From fail whales to databases, everything Twitter does is centralized, which also means that if the company ever goes out of business, everything you’ve built on Twitter goes with it. Wave is Google’s answer to that – if the architecture plays out the way it reads, it will make local stores of all your social networking activity, meaning that if Twitter the company goes down or goes away, theoretically, Wave’s knowledge of how it works will let you keep on tweeting.

Takeaway: resilience for social networks is on the way, which means that the time and effort you spend now may someday soon have persistence. That will eventually make social networking an easier sell, as you’ll own your data. For now, make sure you keep backing up your social networks.

Your email list is more important than ever. Yes, social media is taking off like a rocket ship. Yes, new ways of communicating are appearing every day, it seems. The currency up until now of Web 2.0 has been the email address. Ask yourself how many times a social network wants to check your GMail or Yahoo account as soon as you sign up, so you can invite your friends. Some services are starting to migrate to OAuth, which means service to service communication is improving without the need for an email address, like Friendfeed and Twitter. That said, check out this tech spec, again from the Wave protocol documentation:

Wave users have wave addresses which consist of a user name and a wave provider domain in the same form as an email address, namely @. Wave addresses can also refer to groups, robots, gateways, and other services. A group address refers to a collection of wave addresses, much like an email mailing list. A robot can be a translation robot or a chess game robot. A gateway translates between waves and other communication and sharing protocols such as email and IM. In the remainder we ignore addressees that are services, including robots and gateways – they are treated largely the same as users with respect to federation.

Takeaway: The Wave protocol uses the same syntax as email. Many other services still use email addresses as their primary mode of identification. Build your house lists now like crazy, and protect your email lists at all costs! If you rent or sell lists, rethink your pricing on them, because as each big new service goes online with email as a primary identifier (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Wave, etc.), the value of that address to connect to your customers keeps going up, up, up.

Trust is becoming less abstract. Mitch Joel mentioned this on a recent episode of Media Hacks, his fear that social networks will become more private as tools allow people to maintain their private networks more easily. We see this already in Facebook, as its privacy settings have grown more granular over the years, and you can bet that as more distributed protocols become available, the tools for separating private from public will become more powerful. It wouldn’t surprise me to see spam filtering companies evolve to integrate with social networks in the near future, creating whitelists of people who are permitted to contact you through a variety of different means based on your friendships with them.

You have a very limited period of time right now when everything is in the open, when you can openly and plainly see influencers, when you can openly and plainly see how people are networked together. Study the networks now! As privacy continues to evolve, this period of Wild West openness will fade away, and suddenly the job of being a marketer will become a nightmare for anyone who relies on mass marketing, because the consumer simply will not let you in, not to their whitelist, not to their inner circle, not to their sphere of influence, unless the consumer actually wants what you have.

Takeaways: Spend time, invest time now in making connections with influencers, with superhubs in the social networks, because you’ll need their help later on to reach their trusted networks when you no longer can. Focus intensely on search, as that will be the one open mechanism for consumers to find you.

Above all else, maintain your focus on making products or services that don’t suck, because the tolerance for mediocrity will continue to decrease. No one wants mediocre in their social circles. They want awesome. They want to talk about awesome, share awesome, and be both consumer and purveyor of all things awesome. If you are not awesome, if your company’s products or services are not awesome, then the best advice I have is to keep your resume up to date.

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Talking with Olivier Blanchard about the ultimate evolution of social media and speculating what true mastery of communications looks like.

Geeking out with Dan York over yet even more new stuff about Google Wave, including rich media in Waves and Wavelets. Incredible. Stay tuned as he’ll have a video we recorded about what Wave will make possible that’s beyond our ability to grasp yet.

Chris Brogan going gangsta.

Talking with Chris Newton about some of the new back-end features of Radian6’s integration with Salesforce. Honestly, I’m not sure they even fully get what they’ve created, but if they’re both lucky and good, they’re going to manufacture a bucket of money. We’ll see if the idea discussed over dinner can turn them from a million dollar category business to a billion dollar category business. Let’s hope they do.

Hanging out with the Boston social media crowd.

The true power of events like this isn’t even in the entertainment or the presentation, but in putting lots of very smart people in one room and letting the chips fall where they may. Last night, as long as folks were paying attention and studying carefully what was being demo’ed, everyone was dealt a flush hand. If you were there, I hope you took advantage of the amazing conversations and know what the future looks like for the next 12-18 months in social media.

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Here’s an even broader look, the marketing in Tehran, courtesy of a bunch of Flickr photos.

Are we so different? Our marketing says we’re remarkably similar. Any American in Tehran could easily figure out, not speaking a word of Persian, exactly what’s going on in most of those ads. I’d bet you 10,000 rials that if I went to any suburban Iranian family’s home, I could tell you exactly what each junk mail ad was advertising without reading a lick of Farsi.

This could be any street in America, Tehran, Jerusalem, or Tokyo:

In the end, we are so much more alike than we are different.

Our marketing departments agree.

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Along the way, I presented an 18 minute talk on monetization and why it’s vital to new media. Longtime readers of this blog will find many of the themes to be as familiar as old friends.

I also did my usual Sunday morning semi-improv presentation, My Top 20 Social Media Tools. Unlike the other presentation, I’m not publishing this presentation in any context, and here’s why: you had to be there and ready.

The Sunday morning presentation is always a tough one for people to make. It’s at 8 AM, which, after a night of partying, only the hardcore attendees can usually make. Delivering a super-tight, all-meat presentation that many have expressed a desire to see is my way of thanking them for making that extra effort to show up.

It’s also part of a martial arts lesson my teacher, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center, is constantly reinforcing with us. Very often in the black belt class, he’ll show a technique only once as a way of helping us train our minds to capture and catch as much information as possible, to be vigilant about paying attention.

Social media in some ways makes us reliant on the crowd, reliant on the tools, reliant on waiting for someone to retweet or blog or podcast an important event. That laziness – and it is mental laziness – softens our ability to capture vitally important things that happen which may never happen again. Think about your own life. Have you ever had the experience of missing a child’s first important event, missing a news story break on the street right in front of you, missing a key piece of information at a conference? I know I’ve missed information, especially in the dojo, because of a lack of focus. I know I’ve missed some terrific photos due to inattentiveness.

Thus, that presentation will never happen again, at least not like that. The slides won’t be posted, the video won’t be uploaded, the information never shown again. If you were there – fully and wholly there, meaning you were paying attention and not twittering, blogging, chatting, etc. – then you got some information I hope you find useful. If you weren’t there, then please make the effort to actually show up at events like Podcasters Across Borders or PodCamp rather than hoping someone will live stream/live tweet/live be there for you. You’ll find that there are many more gems from the weekend which will probably not be published from other presenters and attendees as well.

Also, big shout outs to all of the longtime friends and fabulous conversations from the weekend, from Marko Kulik’s photo advice to intense debates about the future of media with Whitney Hoffman, Tod Maffin, and Julien Smith, to the many other great conversations over the weekend.

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That’s why, despite all the cool new features in all of the clients being rolled out, I really wanted a command line client. Old school black and green terminal command line, minimal memory footprint, zero graphic footprint, no need for Java or Adobe AIR or even a web browser.

Enter TTYtter, a Twitter client written in Perl (using cUrl and a few other libraries) that should run out of the box on any recent Mac. It follows the timeline, sets apart @replies and DMs, lets me pull profile information, and pretty much everything that every other Twitter app supports.

Popular hashtag? I can set up a one-shot search or keep track of it. Replies in the public timeline? No problem.

It’s a thing of beauty to have a super-lightweight Twitter client, especially if I’m on an EVDO or other mobile connection where connection is spotty and data economy is at a premium.

You can try it out for yourself by downloading TTYtter from here. I will warn you that it is not for the technologically faint of heart. If you’ve never run something from the command line, this might be a little outside your comfort zone…

… but then, isn’t that part of the fun of new media?

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Let me give you an example from World of Warcraft. One of the side parts of the game (a very big side part for me) is the in-game economy. You make gold by creating stuff, by killing stuff, or by trading with other players for their stuff. In the game, there are “secrets” – great spots for earning gold through killing things or great tactics to use in the Auction House (an in-game eBay of sorts).

These secrets are powerful, capable of generating hundreds or thousands of gold a day, compared to the average player who earns perhaps a few dozen gold a day. The catch is this: their value decreases in direct proportion to the number of people who know and use the secrets, because the server’s economy is a zero sum game – if I know the secret and you learn it, at best our earning potential is halved, unless you’re truly incompetent.

There are lots of similar examples in real life – in the world of search engine optimization, Google Juice is more or less a fixed sum game. If I learn a powerful SEO tactic, the more people who know it, the less value it has.

Contrast this with the social media world of sharing everything (from the mundane to the powerful), openness, and transparency. If you share something of value, your social currency increases among those you share it with.

Here’s the questions I have for you: how do you value a secret vs. the social currency earned for sharing the secret? Which is more valuable to you, and in what context?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments. Yesterday’s discussion was especially good to read, so I look forward to hearing less from me and more from you.

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How does something like changing your avatar or other forms of “showing your support” make any tangible difference to the citizens of Iran?

Bonus: if you’re Iranian, I’d like to hear what tangible impact the memes and movements online have had on you and your fellow citizens.

Please leave your comments, thoughts, and opinions below. Keep it civil.

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sophware: @cspenn Good stuff. Do you have a similar list of people you respect? That’s usually harder to make catchy, but would be great to see.

People whose records actually do speak for them.

People who accomplish real, tangible results.

People who happily say “I don’t know” and follow up with “but I bet I can find out.”

People who Google first, ask questions later.

People who embrace thankless tasks and prefer unsung hero status.

People who can find that artful balance of truth and conversational appeal so that their words are fully truthful, neither underestimated nor overexaggerated.

People who can teach effectively.

People who never stop learning.

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Chefs who crusade against foods. There’s more than enough to advocate for that if you’re crusading against something, you’re probably not cooking delicious things.

Fitness personal trainers who are seriously overweight.

Black belt “masters” under the age of 13.

Social media experts.

Any (American) politician whose ads include the American flag. If you’re so patriotic, why do you need to stuff Old Glory in your ads?

Life coaches under the age of 70. If you’re claiming to coach life skills, shouldn’t you have lived most of it first?

All of these share the same common theme: the claim a person makes directly contradicts the apparent evidence.

When it comes to your personal brand, how out of sync is what you say with the results you’ve generated?

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My friend Chris Brogan has an interesting quote – when times are good, people love strategy. When times are bad, people want tactics. I’ll take this a step further for conferences: people want something to take home. In this economy, people want a souvenir that they can take away that’s immediately usable, something that, when they sit down at their desk the day they get back, they can plug in and turn on right away and start making a difference, as well as show off to the folks who didn’t go.

Tony Robbins calls this sort of thing profound knowledge – information that once you have, changes everything. You can’t ever go back to the way you used to do things unless you try really hard. A good example of profound knowledge is the rule of thirds in photography. Put a tic tac toe grid mentally over your viewfinder in your camera. Put subjects at the intersections of horizontal and vertical lines, and instantly your photos are likely to become better. Now that you know that, you can’t ever go back to NOT knowing how to apply that rule.

I brought two souvenirs with me to give away at MarketingProfs, one of which I discussed in the panel, and one of which I discussed in the Twitter Therapy sessions. Whether or not you were at the conference (and you really should have been), you can have the souvenirs, too.

1. Customer service isn’t a burden. Customer service is a gold mine. If you’ve ever wanted for content to blog about, to podcast about, to share, to act on, you will never find a better source than the customers you already have and the problems they desperately want you to solve. I’ve recorded 900+ episodes of the Financial Aid Podcast and the customers of the Student Loan Network are my constant inspiration. I don’t need millions of dollars of research. I don’t need millions of dollars in marketing budgets. My customers tell me exactly what their problems are. Your customers are doing the same. The catch? You have to want to listen to them. Far too many people in executive suites are content to glance at their marketing dashboards and that’s as close to the customer as they’re willing to get. You have to be willing to dig – as you would in any gold mine – to get to the real treasure.

2. Try the 8 foot test. This is an easy test to do. Load up your web site on your computer. Maximize your browser. From 8 feet away, is there an immediate and obvious call to action that gets your visitors to do what you want them to do? Here’s an example I use in my demo – go to StaffordLoan.com and do the same. If you can’t tell what we want you to do (apply for a Stafford loan), then you need to see an eye doctor. If you don’t have a room big enough to walk 8 feet away, then load the sites up on your mobile device and hold it at arm’s length for a similar effect.

Hopefully, these two souvenirs are worth enough that they alone made it worth it for you to come to MarketingProfs. Hopefully, every other speaker and presenter gifted you with a souvenir or two as well, so that you went home with an armload full of stuff that will immediately make your business better.

My thanks as well to Ann Handley and the MarketingProfs team for putting on another great event and assembling a terrific panel.

Bonus: grab the eBooks I mentioned at the panel discussion here.

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The Conference FAQ

So what do you do?

I’m the CMO of Edvisors, Inc., a college student marketing company based just south of Boston. We operate Edvisors, the Student Loan Network, and a few dozen sites, and offer federal student loans, private student loans, online degrees, and student credit cards to the higher education audience. We’re always looking to work with new partners, and our 1.5MM+ audience is a great audience to share your stuff with. Grab me at the Forum if you’d like to talk more, or shoot me an email.

I also run the Financial Aid Podcast and co-host the Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast with John Wall, the not-basketball marketing star. If you’re around Boston, I invite you to be a part of PodCamp Boston 4.

Do you have a business card?

You’re looking at it right now. If you’d like to contact me, there’s a handy form on this site. You can also email my GMail address, cspenn at gmail. I don’t carry a pile of paper cards because [a] they’re environmentally bad and [b] information changes so frequently, it’s easier just to give you my personal web site URL, www.ChristopherSPenn.com

Are you on Twitter?

Yes.

Are you on Facebook/LinkedIn?

Yes.
Yes.

I welcome all connections on all social networks.

Do you ever do other conferences, private speaking engagements, etc.?

Yes, through Edvisors. Feel free to contact me for more info on that.

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What is social media? Seriously, what defines social media from any other form of media?

Lots of folks responded.

bigguyd: @cspenn interactions. SM is a two way street where traditional media is one way, typically.
comedy4cast: @cspenn We all wear colorful hats!
discordia77: @cspenn other forms of media have “experts” telling the information, social media is interactive between all elements involved in the story.
seanrehder: @cspenn asks “define social media.” Social = peer and media = information. Social media = information gained from our peers vs. “the man.”
sizzlemaker: @cspenn Media–such as newspapers or broadcasts–is one way. Someone producing content to give you. Social media allows you to interact.
tommorris: @cspenn Nothing. ‘Social media’ is a term used by marketeers for just about everything. It’s lost all meaning. It’s a pointless buzzword.
keithbooe: @cspenn higher level of real time (or near) interaction and direct user involvement than traditional media?
mlseaton: @cspenn the amount of people claiming to be experts or gurus! That is pretty much what defines it.
Ed: Essentially @cspenn Built in sharing. Conducive both by design, and user intent
JoyHaynes: @cspenn For me, real time conversation and connections to other people.
theelusivefish: @cspenn imho, there are 2 things distinguishing social media from the rest – low barriers to entry and the ability for any to participate
kristenmchugh22: @cspenn SM is both expression & engagement. There are some ppl wielding infl for good&selfish int., but not engaging on meaningful scale.
heykeenan: @cspenn the connection makes social media different from other media.

Here’s what I think defines social media apart from any other form of media: Metcalfe’s Law.

From Wikipedia:

Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2). First formulated in this form by George Gilder in 1993, and attributed to Robert Metcalfe in regard to Ethernet, Metcalfe’s law was originally presented, circa 1980, not in term of users, but rather of “compatibly communicating devices” (for example, fax machines).

Something can be termed social media when its core value relies on the network effect – Metcalfe’s Law.

For example, is a blog post a form of social media? No. The value of the blog post is the same whether one person reads it or one million people read it. Its value is inherent in and of itself. The same is true for a podcast, a TV show, a commercial, a newspaper, etc.

Contrast that with a bulletin board, a call-in radio show, Twitter, discussion forums, comments on a blog post, Facebook, etc. The core value that these forms of media deliver relies on Metcalfe’s Law – the more people who use them, the more valuable they are. The more social they are. The core value diminishes with fewer people and ultimately, the product or service has no inherent value.

When you need to develop an understanding of whether something or not falls in the social sphere, examine careful what its value is, and how the impact of more people changes its value. If the value of the item, network, service, or thing is independent of participation, if Metcalfe’s Law does not drive its core value, it’s not social – and that’s perfectly okay. A well-made hammer’s value is not reliant on the number of people who buy and use it.

If the same product, service, etc. has its value completely unravel if Metcalfe’s Law were applied in reverse – taking away people from it – then it’s social, and requires people to generate its value; the more people who generate value, the more value it has.

This also means that some aspects of “traditional media” are inherently social – call-in radio shows, the classifieds in newspapers, even a corkboard in the employee breakroom.

Three things for marketers to think about: if something isn’t social by design, that’s fine. Don’t try to force it to be social, because it won’t fit. A bouquet of flowers and a perfect sunset can’t Twitter, and never should. Instead focus your efforts on using a different marketing model that works with whatever the core value of your product or service is.

If something “traditional” is social by design in your work already, bringing it online will vastly accelerate its growth and value thanks to how easily socially-powered things spread online.

When your boss, client, friend, neighbor, or kid asks you to make something social (because social media is the shiny object of the day) ask them this: do you want to create something which [a] has no value of its own and [b] is solely reliant on the temperament of the crowd for its value, knowing that one screw-up can destroy everything and leave you with nothing of value?

Personally, I’d ask them instead whether they want to create something that has so much value inherent to it that others can’t help but talk about it and promote it for you in a social context.

What defines social media for you?

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In that brief moment, you touch the world, all of it, because every drop of water that touches your feet has touched every shore, every beach ever.

So it is with the Internet, with social media, and with the news. When you check the morning news in your country, do you just check what’s happening in your nation, province, or city? Or do you take advantage of that little copper or fiber wire in your wall that is your footstep into the world?

I try to make a habit of checking headlines from major news sources every day to see more than one perspective. On my morning news-stand (fed into Google Reader and Calibre for the Kindle as well):

• BBC News
• The Boston Globe
• Bloomberg
• Reuters
• CNN
• The New York Times
• Daily Telegraph
• Montreal Gazette
• Toronto Globe and Mail
• The Sydney Morning Herald
• Asahi Shinbun
• Al Jazeera
• The Jerusalem Post
• Xinhua

If you don’t already read the headlines or news from a country other than your own, start today. It’s free to do and will give you a much wider perspective on what the world thinks is important. As recently happened with President Obama’s speech in Cairo, while the American media was occupied with David Carradine’s death, the rest of the world was mulling over the President’s words. If you read only American news sources, you might have missed some very interesting reactions elsewhere.

Are you deeply involved in social media? If so, chances are you’ve got at least one follower or friend in another country. Might be useful to know what’s topping the news where your friends are, too.

What’s on your news-stand?

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chrisbrogan: 10,000 hours of practice: the magic number of skill mastery. – Gladwell.
cspenn: Gladwell failed to answer how to overcome advantages that other outliers have. Only major flaw in that book.
chrisbrogan: meaning, in a pool of many 10k folks, what causes one person to rise?
cspenn: more like his hockey example – if you were NOT born in the 3 golden months, how can you still excel?
chrisbrogan: I thought he posited that you can’t.

You can.

The art of the ninja is more about perseverance and psychology than throwing stars and swords. Ultimately, the ninja faced Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers to an opposite extreme: they were outnumbered, outfunded, outgunned, and outdone in nearly every way. They faced an unforgiving wilderness, a hostile government, treachery at every turn, and no room for error. By any rational standards, they should have been instantly wiped out, quickly condemned to the dustbin of history as a mere footnote.

Yet amidst all this, they still had to win, against impossible odds. How do you win against the outliers, against people who have all the advantages of resources, time, energy, manpower, and culture?

One of the “hidden secrets” of ninja sword fighting that we’ve been exploring recently in the Boston Martial Arts Friday black belt classes is that the outcome of certain sword kata (patterns) is more dependent on mastery of yourself and your emotions than on what your attacker does. Certainly, you don’t take lightly someone in front of you with a four foot razor blade. You pay attention to them. You guard against them. But your success doesn’t hinge on just them.

The “secret” to “winning” in these routines is more about finding the weaknesses inside of yourself that are holding you back or causing you to make stupid mistakes, and minimizing their impact. I can’t speak for my classmates, but overcoming the desire to “win” (even though it’s just a practice exercise with nothing to “win”, not even a cookie) is one of my biggest weaknesses that I’m working on. If I can get past that, if I can just be there without trying to force an outcome, if I can get out of my own way, I am successful more often than not.

Sun Tzu, the war strategist, is often quoted:

One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be in danger in a hundred battles.
One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes win, sometimes lose.
One who does not know the enemy and does not know himself will be in danger in every battle.

Most people, most businesses, most everyone falls in the third category. We don’t really know ourselves. We don’t really know what we’re up against, and frankly, it’s amazing we succeed at all. Make inroads even just a little at knowing yourself or knowing what you’re up against, and your chances of success go up.

The ninja won against all odds because they didn’t face perfect opponents. Certainly, they faced incredible odds, but by dedicating enormous time and energy towards knowing themselves and their own weaknesses, and doing their best to mitigate those weaknesses, they were able to win against enemies who statistically should have beaten them to a pulp 100% of the time – but didn’t.

Here’s the second-greatest “secret” of all: it’s easier to know yourself than it is to know the unknown future ahead of you. If you’re going to invest a ton of time and energy trying to even the odds, your best bet is to start with yourself. Yourself, your team, your organization or company, the things that you have control over and that you can study in great depth.

How do you do that? I leave that to my seniors, my betters, and recommend you pick up a copy of How To Own The World, by Stephen K. Hayes. An-Shu Hayes does a far better job laying out a practical means of figuring out what’s holding you back than I ever could. If you want to win more, go grab his book, read it, and practice the lessons in it.

(yes, there is a greatest secret of all, too. not for now.)

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Some other indicators? If you work in an office, see how often the cleaning service does things like empty trash or clean the restrooms. Check the quality of consumables like toilet paper – changes, especially significant, fast jumps in quality – indicate that the first stages of cost cutting are occurring, possibly silently. In a tough economy, it’s the prudent thing to do for companies. If your company has a cafeteria, see if food selection and quality change significantly in a short time. Know your admin team really well? Ask them how frequently they’re reordering supplies (supplies tend to go missing at a faster rate in tougher times) and if they’ve been given additional, more stringent purchasing restrictions.

All of these little economic indicators, in and of themselves, mean little, but aggregated may give you a more complete picture of how things are going in your neck of the woods, and can help you plan accordingly. If you see a series of sudden, abrupt changes in your company, it might be time to start looking for another job before it’s too late.

Congratulations to all. We’ve made it through the subprime crisis and only lost GM, every investment bank, nearly wiped out the FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund, put 1 out of 8 homeowners late or in foreclosure on their mortgages, and sent the economy into a tailspin. Otherwise, we made it through the subprime crisis.

We’re ready to start growing again, right?

Except… except the pool of alt-A and option ARM mortgages (all of which is defaulting at the same or higher rates of default than subprime 2 years ago) is still ahead, and it’s 50% bigger than the subprime mortgage market ever was.

If you’re thinking the worst of the storm has passed, it’s more like the eye of the hurricane. The second, stronger wall of the storm is arriving shortly. If you’re thinking that now is the time to spend a little more freely, to open up your wallet, think again and batten down the hatches. If anything, now is the time to increase your financial conservatism, to tighten spending if you can. Only once the storm has fully passed – in a couple of years – will it be time to go outside and start planting anew.

For more detailed charts, check out this post on Mish’s blog.

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Is it the light blue of an early morning sky? The light blue of a flower? The light blue from a popular corporate logo? All of these are contained in light blue, but none conveys the same light blue I’m probably thinking of.

It’s not that we’re unsure of how a design makes us feel. Quite the contrary, we know precisely and firmly how a design makes us feel. What’s imprecise are the words we use to describe it, and so we often end up with web site designs that leave us unfulfilled, like how you feel a half hour after a fast food meal. You know you ate, but it just doesn’t feel satisfying.

So how do you fix this?

Anyone who’s ever been fitted for any kind of corrective lenses – contacts, glasses, OMGlazerbeamsinureyes, etc. knows the process for assessing your vision. You sit in front of a fairly large pair of goggles and the opthamologist flips various lenses in front of your eyes as you look at the wall chart. Throughout the process he asks you which is better, 1 or 2, over and over again in rapid-fire sequence. (at least, my doctor only asked which was better, 1 or 2)

The eye doctor doesn’t ask you about the qualities of what you’re seeing – no questions about color reproduction or grain, sharpness or focus. He just asks which is better, 1 or 2, because very often a layman’s description would only muddy the waters. The speed at which he proceeds ensures that you don’t try to get verbal about what’s fundamentally a non-verbal issue.

The very binary question of which is better without any lengthy verbal judgements means that we don’t have to force words to describe what we’re seeing. We only need to pass judgement about general positivity or negativity. Yes, 1 is better. No, 2 is worse. The speed means we resort to trusting non-verbal, instinctive decisions, rather than laboring about how to describe something.

The next time you’re working on a web site, advertising creative, design or set of designs, try the eye doctor test. Print out the designs or stick them on Powerpoint slides, and show them to people rapidly. Which is better, 1 or 2? Don’t ask for anything that requires verbal analysis, just quick calls. Discourage discussion for this specific test (there will be plenty of time for deliberation later). Just cycle through your designs. Which is better, 1 or 2? For added sobering results, throw in designs from competitors and see how yours stack up in a rapid, first impression test.

You might be surprised at how easily people make good judgements in the blink of an eye.

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Here’s some food for thought – organic if you like. The difference between organic marketing and paid marketing is the difference between a real flower and a plastic one. If your goal is superficial (decorate the office quickly), plastic is as good as real, it’s faster, probably cheaper, and easier to manage and maintain.

If your goal, however, is for that flower to eventually grow, reproduce, and bear fruit, then the plastic version will not do. The trouble is, a real flower is a lot more work. It takes vastly more time, more energy, more maintenance than the plastic or cloth substitute, but if your goal is long term, lasting growth, only the naturally grown flower will do.

Is there a place for the plastic floral display? Of course – but it depends on your goals. Too much marketing focuses on the superficial, the fast hit, the quarterly or monthly numbers (which are vitally important, don’t get me wrong) at the expense of the long term growth. The investment you make in the plastic flower today will not diminish, but nor will it ever grow or bear fruit. The investment you make in the real flower will, assuming proper care and focus, not only grow, but increase until you hit a critical mass where your field of flowers are self-sustaining.

What are you growing in your marketing?

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Look at all the gold and shiny things you could sell. What should you sell? Where should you focus your attention?

If you followed the herd mentality, you’d put your resources into Runecloth. You’d spend every waking moment gathering Runecloth in the game, because that’s what everyone else is selling. 4,683 people are selling Runecloth – it’s wildly popular! Jump on now – everyone’s doing it.

If you don’t follow the herd mentality, you’d notice the item beneath it is Runecloth Belt, which is currently being sold by… no one. Not a soul is selling them. It’s not popular. It’s not hot.

It’s not being competed for. That means you can sell in that niche at whatever price you want to sell at. You have no competition. (caveat: it’s still a desired item – just one that isn’t being produced)

This is counter-cyclical thinking or blue ocean strategy – sell where the competition isn’t, and even a modest amount of product demand plus no competition will ensure profitability.

Contrast that with the commodity market where low price is everything and even the slightest sea change in the marketplace will throw you from profitability to loss in the blink of an eye.

Want to know what markets you probably shouldn’t be in? Real life doesn’t have an Auction House that details every last item available and its current profitability, but real life does have a spam box.

Spammers are the bottom of the barrel for any commodity, hoping to eke out the tiniest profit on sheer volume. One look at what’s “hot” in spam should tell you whether your industry is in trouble or not, whether you’re swimming in a flooded market. If you find your industry consistently in your spam trap, you need to give some consideration to alternate product lines and sources of revenue, because the spammers are crowding out all of your legitimate marketing efforts and probably undercutting you on price as well.

What and where should you be marketing? Wherever the competition isn’t.

Food for thought, by the way: when “everyone is joining Twitter” or “everyone is on Facebook”, everyone is doing the social media equivalent of piling into the Runecloth market. For leverage in the world of social media, are you looking for the Runecloth Belt market or hoping the herd is right?

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There is sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.

- Washington Irving

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?

- Kahlil Gibran

May your Memorial Day be a thoughtful one.

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How many times have you been to a conference and seen the same session descriptions over and over again, fully laden with jargon and as generic as toothpaste? “Industry leading best practices session given by noted thought leader…” Will the session even be what you want it to be about? You don’t know, and you roll the dice and hope the session isn’t going to bore you to tears or be one long product pitch.

PodCamp Questions are a different take on the conference. We all have piles of video of top speakers doing their talking head thing. You can, as Mitch Joel pointed out, attend the best conference in the world from your desk. Why would you spend the time and money to travel across town, across country, across the world to have the same experience, or even a lesser experience, since TED Talks are probably the best video sessions available to you?

You wouldn’t. I wouldn’t.

What you would do, what I would do as an explorer, as a person on a mission to get my questions answered, is trek all over the place to get real answers to my questions.

That’s why PodCamp Boston 4 is asking people to sign up not as speakers, not as presenters, but as Questioners to lead a Question discussion. What burning question do you have about new media, podcasting, blogging, social media, etc. that you just don’t have the answer to?

Think about that for a second. The “speaker” doesn’t know the answers to their “session”? Yes. That’s the whole point. It’s reversing the speaker/audience model completely, because for every person with the courage to ask a question, there are a dozen people with the exact same question that aren’t as eager to give voice to it and another dozen who never thought to ask the question but deeply want to hear the answer now that they’ve heard the question. Instead, you’ll ask the question and be in a room with dozens of like minded people, putting together the answer you could never get from a talking head speech. Chris Brogan started this at PodCamp Toronto 2007, leading a session called, “Somebody Teach Me Final Cut Pro”.

Think about how much easier it will be to decide where you want to spend your time at PodCamp Boston 4. Rather than wade through senseless, jargon laden session descriptions, you’ll just take a look at the questions and decide which ones you want the answers to as well.

- What’s next in social media?
- How do I get more viewers for my podcast?
- What’s the ROI of Facebook?
- How do I write an application against Twitter’s Social Graph API?

If you’re not registered for PodCamp Boston 4, you’re going to miss out on some great questions and answers – including yours.

Register today to attend PodCamp Boston 4, then sign up to ask a question and lead a discussion to the answers you want.

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Here’s how in one screenshot:

Click to see this full size.

Other blog platforms should be just as easy. If you’ve ever lost a blog, you know how much of it – especially comments – is unrecoverable and permanently lost.

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The companies that created these cookbooks were on to something because it was one of the best ways to get your mind on their products without a direct hard sell. Who needs to blast “BUY NOW! BUY NOW!” for a bottle of salad dressing (that was ignored even before the Internet) when every salad recipe had your brand in it?

The soft sell in those cookbooks was made all the easier because the cookbooks solved a problem – what should we make for breakfast/lunch/dinner/that party on Saturday night? They solved the consumer’s problems and part of the solution was the product the company was trying to move.

Contrast this with the epic failures of selling in social media today, where every spammy Twitter DM is hawking a solution – for the seller, but not for you. Contrast this with the endless product pushes, pointless pitches, and total failure to present any benefit to the consumer, to the buyer. This is one of the many reasons people in social media hate things and terms like monetization – not because we begrudge companies the right to earn some money, but because what you’re selling simply isn’t useful, doesn’t solve a problem.

The next time you go home to a grandmother’s, mother’s, or aunt’s kitchen, go look on their cookbook shelf. Pick up a few, and then start to cook up your own products or services in a different way.

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Bloomberg’s commodities index of indices:

Commodities, or commodity futures, are investments in the future value of things like rice, gold, oil, cattle, and other tangible goods.

Baltic Dry Index:

The Baltic Dry Index is an index of costs to ship things on cargo ships. As BDI goes up, the price to ship something goes up. Unlike most investment metrics which are based on future value, BDI measures what it costs now to ship something. BDI is important because you don’t buy shipping if you’re not moving stuff to sell.

New Jobless Claims:

This is the number of new unemployment claims, measured weekly.

All of these charts show stabilization in the economy – arresting the freefall. Is it because of sound economic policies, stimulus, or the natural course of time and the business cycle? Hard to say. Certainly anyone promoting their own interests will claim that they’re the key influencer, but I suspect it’s all of the above with an emphasis on natural market dynamics. Even the largest forest fire eventually runs out of things to burn and snuffs itself out in time.

Once the fire has passed, it’s time for the forest to regrow. Small, tentative steps at first, little sproutlings and seeds, but regrowth always happens.

I still think there’s other parts of the forest just catching fire now – commercial real estate, credit cards and last-resort consumer credit, etc. – that will burn for some time to come. That said, there is cause for optimism, however cautious. Be on the lookout for areas of regrowth that you can partake in and carefully wade in.

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Blog/PR/Twitter/Facebook/etc. Grader ranks you in the top X on the network of your choice.

All of these sound familiar, right? All of these sound wonderful, showcase your social media expertise, innovation, thought leadership, cutting edge, leading, luminary status. Fine and good.

How much power do you actually have?

When someone sends you a message asking for help finding a job, how powerful is your social media skill? Can you actually help them find a job with your network in a reasonable amount of time, or are your tweets, retweets, notes, and comments simply disappearing into the ether with no discernible results?

This is why I adamantly oppose anyone calling themselves – or calling me – a social media expert, guru, luminary, etc. I can’t guarantee that if you come to me, my network can provide you a new job opportunity in 24 hours. I can’t guarantee that if you come to me, my network can put together amazing amounts of business to restore you to profitability.

I would expect anyone billing themselves as a social media expert to have such great power and authority that they could do exactly that. Need a new job? One hit to the network and you’re all set. Need customers? A blog post on your super-authoritative blog instantly brings new success. I can’t and won’t make that promise. I know that I can’t fulfill it.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to have conversations with hundreds of people about social media, and a lot of people are passing the pitcher of Kool Aid and drinking too much. Social media is important in that it does help you expand your networks, your horizons, and your ability to connect with colleagues, consumers, professionals, and customers in new and different ways. Direct to consumer communication and interaction is unquestionably one of the continuing trends and people need to stay in front of what’s happening. That said, social media is not a panacea or a magic wand and far too many people are piling on incredibly unrealistic expectations of what social media should be able to do for them.

If you have solid business practices and revenue models, don’t you dare give them up in the hopes that a shiny object can improve them. Continue what you know works while you test new things. If you have a broken business model, a broken revenue model, you need to fix the foundations of your house first before delving into social media. No amount of Twittering about your company will shore up bad fundamentals. If your product, service, idea, or company is unremarkable, social media will only communicate that fact broadly and quickly.

Participate in social media, but don’t expect it to be a lifeboat if your ship is going down. At best, it’s a fine oar that requires you to already be sitting in a solid boat.

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1. Download and install Calibre. Plug your Kindle in and let it be recognized.

2. Fire up Calibre, and find the Fetch News panel.

3. Find all the publications you want to take with you, say, before a flight. Click Download now to add them to your queue.

That might be enough to get you started, but if you want to REALLY amp things up, click on the little arrow next to Fetch News, and choose Create Custom News Source.

4. Select Add/Update recipe, start a new recipe, give it a title, and start adding the blogs that you love most to the recipe. Now you’re making your own power newspaper of your favorite blog authors.

5. Once the new recipe is done, go back to the Fetch News tab and find your recipe under the Custom entry. Select Download now and you’ve got those blogs ready to go.

Bonus: Calibre auto-syncs with your Kindle, so it uploads all your newspapers and blogs via USB automatically.

6. Fire up your Kindle and voila! Instant, free news and blogs to go.

Caveats: Calibre ONLY works via USB. No wireless here – if you want wireless, you have to use and pay for Amazon’s service. Also, it doesn’t work with the iPhone app, only the Kindle device. Calibre also works with the Sony eBook reader, too.

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It used to be in the old days that the easiest way to buy attention was to trade it for money. On a large scale, you bought attention from media outlets. On a small scale, giving away your stuff for free was a great way to trade money for attention. Nowadays, things are a little more complicated. Everyone and everything is the media, which means that buying up attention in media is virtually impossible. Giving away something for free is so commonplace that consumers have grown to expect free as a cost of your doing business rather than a kindness.

So what’s left? How do you still get a consumer to spend some attention with you?

There are two parts to this mystical formula. The second we all know well – have stuff worth talking about, worth paying attention to, worth sharing. Vintage marketing advice. Sometimes that’s enough – in the rare cases when something “goes viral”, or explodes in popularity, word of mouth is enough. The catch is this – in order for people to spread it, they have to know that it exists. That brings us to the first point – how do you get someone’s attention long enough for them to become aware of your existence?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is advertising. Interruption marketing. It’s still a necessity until you reach the critical mass of consumers needed to start spreading the word, a bit like getting a campfire started. After a certain point, you just throw wood on it – your quality products or services. But in the beginning, no amount of wood thrown in a pile will ever turn into a campfire without that initial flame.

What gets that fire started? Well, you can still buy advertising. That doesn’t work as well as it used to, but it does still work if you have the budget. What if you don’t have the budget? For good or ill, social media and social networking amplify Malcolm Gladwell’s Connectors – people who are hubs of their networks with hundreds or thousands of friends, connections, and followers. Find those people, connect with them, invest your time in politely interrupting them, and if what you have is worth paying attention to, they’ll help you get the attention of their networks.

The very best connectors are the connectors in your vertical. While it’s amazing and impressive that my friend Chris Brogan has 65,000+ friends and followers on Twitter, if you’re, say, an independent musician or a freelance photographer, your work will be of interest to only a certain percentage of Chris’ audience. Better to spend your time looking for the Connectors in your vertical, your niche, who have audiences keenly interested in what you’ve got to share.

How do you find those Connectors? That’s a topic for another time…

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Sorry, guys. This blog post is about making your life harder.

Here’s how to identify Twitter spammers in your personal timeline using Yahoo Pipes.

Go to Yahoo Pipes and start a new pipe. Grab a Fetch Feed box from Sources and drag it into the worksheet.

In the box, insert your Twitter personal timeline. It’s formatted like this:

http://username:password@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss

where obviously username and password are your Twitter username and passwords.

Next, drag two filter boxes from Operators. Drag the blue circle at the bottom of the Fetch Feed to the first Filter box.

Then drag the blue circle from the bottom of the first Filter Box to the second, and from the bottom of the second to Pipe Output.

Set the first to Block All and the second to Permit Any.

In Block All, set the item title dropdown to @. This filters out @ replies, since those are likely to be a little more legitimate than pure crap tweets. Not much, but at least a little.

In the Permit Any filter, start adding text in for the tweets you know are garbage. Typically they have “make money” in them, words like “F*R*E*E” and other useless fare. Add these line by line until you have a list of the garbage.

Name, save, and run the pipe. If all goes well, you’ll see a screen with options.

From that RSS box, you can subscribe to this Yahoo Pipe in the feed reader of your choice. All of the tweets that end up in it should be crap, which you can then promptly unfollow either manually from your feed reader or automatically if you’re handy at writing against the Twitter API.

Next, grab a beer, wait a few days for the pipe to fill up, then say farewell to people using Twitter as just another dumping ground or a meager prop for their failed business model as you unfollow them.

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1. Focus on people who want actual conversations.

2. Eliminate people who want to advertise. I don’t care. I didn’t care when you cold called, sent junk mail, spam, Facebook group invites, and I still don’t care about your products or services on Twitter, either.

You’ll need 3 tools to maintain Twitter at maximum speed: Nambu, a tabbed web browser, and Friend or Follow. Nambu’s a Mac app, FriendOrFollow.com is a web site, and use a web browser of your choice, but it has to support tabs, and it has to support fast keyboard switching – no clicking the mouse to switch tabs. I use Camino on the Mac.

Step 1: Find people who want actual conversation. I use Twitter search, find everyone who @cspenn’s me, and follow them back.

I could use Nambu for this, but I like to use a browser because it shows me which profiles I’ve already visited in this session, saving some time.

Step 2. Fire up Nambu. Check DMs. Immediately nuke any auto-DM that’s a crap ad. One right click and they’re gone.

Step 3. Go back to the browser, load up FriendOrFollow.com. Look at people who I follow who are not following me back.

Nuke anything without a profile pic first.

Step 4. Check the remaining profiles to ensure that FriendOrFollow.com didn’t actually flag anyone by accident, then unfollow.

As you can probably tell, this process is relatively manual, so I don’t do it frequently. It’s also insanely important to be able to switch tabs in your browser using the keyboard – it’s MUCH faster and will let you follow or unfollow with great speed compared to using the mouse. Save the mouse for clicking on the follow/unfollow button.

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There is no such way to intermediate time. There is no coinage for time, no way to purchase time back that you have spent. If time were actually money, you could buy back that missed softball game or child’s first play. You can’t.

In fact, when you think about it, time isn’t money, but money is time. Money represents a store of value in classical economics terms, and value is time and energy spent on something.

Look at all of the things that function as money or precursors of money. The Pequot tribe had a certain kind of seashell called wampum. Multiple civilizations used gold and other metals as coinage. Why? Because these items were rare. Finding them, prospecting them, and refining them took time and effort.

Consider money as a store of time and energy, then. How long does it take for you to mine up a nugget of gold? Let’s say as a skilled miner that takes you two hours. How long does it take to harvest an ear of corn? For a skilled farmer, probably a few minutes at most. Thus, that nugget of gold is a time equivalent of two hours for a skilled tradesman. If you can harvest 80 ears of corn in two hours as a skilled farmer, then your corn is worth two hours of your efforts – or a nugget of gold, or whatever other store of value you choose. More important, as trades specialized over millennia of human history, it would take far longer for the miner to skill up his corn harvesting than it would for him to simply pay for the corn itself.

Time + energy + skill = value.

This is the basis of money, the raw foundation of money. Money stores value, and value is time, energy, and skill combined.

Consider what this means for social media and new media.

What things are you investing your time in, building skill, so that you’re creating value?

When someone starts to talk about monetization, exactly what value are they placing on your time, effort, and skill? More important, what value do you place on yourself?

This, by the way, is why so many folks in social media object to monetization – not because money is bad, but because any new field inevitably has two extremes: those folks willing to value themselves for a pittance (thus devaluing everyone else) or those folks who pimp and sell at obscenely high prices far above the value they create, thus undermining the entire community’s reputation and devaluing everyone else. After a field matures and the low bidders & snake oil salesmen are washed out, a balanced perspective on value is usually achieved.

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Without delving too deeply into the game mechanics, for the defense, you need to stop the other team and their various siege engines. Typically, you do this by shooting at them a whole bunch of times, trying to take over their siege engine factories nearby, and attacking the offensive team’s camp.

For the offense, you need to build siege engines and take over the fortress, seizing control of a relic inside.

While other players’ experiences may vary, teams on the offense seem to consistently win more often than teams on the defense, and here’s why: teams on the defensive have multiple objectives. Teams on the offensive have one objective. As a result, more often than not, teams on the defensive split their forces and lose, overwhelmed at various points by the offensive team. When the defense wins, it’s not because of overwhelming force (usually) or great strategy, but because the offensive team has committed a serious tactical error.

What does this mean for you and your marketing? Consider just how many distractions there are in marketing – a new social network to join every 10 minutes, a new meme to try and hop onto, a new shiny object that is the buzz of the moment and is forgotten in 15 minutes. Consider what you need to do to win, and where you can concentrate limited forces and resources. What’s the fastest path to victory? If you face lots of competition, in what ways will they be distracted or their forces divided, giving you an opportunity to focus, concentrate, and win? If you have to divide your forces, can you adapt quickly to changing conditions, or will you be overtaken because no one point is strong enough to hold?

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Bud’s drill goes something like this: for this drill, your attacker will do whatever they want. You as the defender are only permitted to use your footwork for evasion and your right hand in a shuto (hand blade/hand sword) form to protect yourself.

The goal, of course, is to develop mental flexibility and agility.

How many different ways can I use this one technique, this one form?
How unconventional can I be with a very limited toolset?
How, under limiting conditions, can I still win?

Think about this in marketing terms. How many different marketing books do you have on your book shelf? How many different tools – SEO, direct mail, cold calling, advertisements, pay per click, email, autoresponders, landing pages, billboards, transit ads, television, radio, podcasting, Twitter, and so on – do you have at your disposal? How competent are you in the use of any one of those tools?

Try this the next time you’re thinking about your marketing efforts. If you were limited to just one tool under very tight circumstances, how well could you use that tool? If you work for the kind of company that has multiple products and product lines, find the red headed stepchild in that line and practice your marketing tool skills on it. See how fast you can make that left handed smoke shifting widget’s sales grow through only the use of podcasting or only the use of email marketing. Test yourself out as a marketer and see which tools are sharpest in your toolbox!

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People need leaders. They want leaders. They hunger for leaders. In some cases, people are so desperate as a crowd for leadership that they’ll follow and even swear loyalty to terrible leaders, as long as they don’t have to take up the mantle of leadership themselves. Nowhere is this more apparent to thousands of people every day than in Lake Wintergrasp.

What’s this? If you don’t play World of Warcraft, it’s a really big competition between two teams to take control of a battlefield. Without getting too deep into the mechanics of Wintergrasp, suffice it to say that teams are organized in groups of 40 people, and at a certain point dictated by the game, everyone goes and tries to capture the objectives of the game.

What’s interesting to me as a marketer and student of behavior is what happens before Wintergrasp starts. See, the teams aren’t automatically formed by the game. Teams have to be organized by individual players, and that’s where things get interesting. Very, very few people want to take leadership of a team, even when there are no significant adverse consequences to doing so. Many people simply wait around, asking aloud to be invited to any open team if there is one.

Imagine what this is like – dozens, sometimes hundreds of people milling around looking for leadership. The instant someone forms a team and takes leadership, the entire crowd galvanizes. The team forms up and you’re ready to go within minutes.

What makes this important is that this is a human behavior. Forget for a moment that this occurs in a fantasy role playing game that’s traditionally (and incorrectly) associated with high school kinds and nerds living in parents’ basements. This need for leadership and simultaneous unwillingness to step into a leadership role is an opportunity for you, if you can overcome your own hesitation, to establish yourself in any industry, niche, market, or space.

People want leaders.

Is your marketspace crying out for someone, anyone, to take a leadership role and do something as simple as organize a team to accomplish a deed?

Are you looking to build your own personal brand or gain experience? Look for opportunities and marketspaces where people are just milling around, waiting for a leader, and step up. Take on the responsibility of providing leadership, and gain back what you give and more.

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First, I use charcoal because I like fire and lighter fluid. I know lots of people despise lighter fluid as they say it gives food a bad taste. Honestly, I can’t tell the difference on a mature charcoal fire where the fire has had a chance to burn everything off.

What’s different about my fire is that I use random deadfall in my fire as well as briquets. I find that throwing lots of old wood pieces and chips makes for a plenty hot fire with rapidity, and the fireball on ignition is well worth the price of admission alone.

Take a bunch of random wood pieces and build a pile of wood in your grill.

Make sure there is PLENTY of air space between the wood pieces.

Then put charcoal on top.

Douse with lots of lighter fluid or the accelerant of your choice, then stand well, well back when you light it. Did I mention this part can be dangerous? Lighter fluid plus matches is a dangerous combo.

In about 20 minutes, you have charcoal that’s hot plus plenty of wood coals as well. You’re ready to grill, assuming you weren’t caught in the firestorm and hospitalized.

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Rather than do that, here’s a compendium of #followfriday tips that you can use to find the conversations you want to participate in.

1. Sync up your existing social networks on #followfriday. Try the Twitter Power Guide and Synchronizing Social Networks Guide for more details.

2. Find people mentioning your URL. Follow them. Example for FinancialAidPodcast.com.

3. Follow people who recommend you using Twitter search, especially on #followfriday. Example.

4. Follow people local to you so that you can actually meet up for coffee. Example using Hubspot’s Twitter Grader.

5. Follow people who are following you. Try out FriendorFollow.com for this.

6. Follow people in your area talking about your topics. Example using Google.

7. Follow people using very specific industry jargon in your niche. Example talking about the FAFSA. (try my FAFSA site for goodies on the FAFSA)

8. Follow people who reply to you all week long. Example.

What are your #followfriday tips?

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How many messages in your inbox are just languishing there?

Some of them are landmines. After all, yesterday was April Fool’s Day, but you might not get to those April 1 blog posts in your RSS reader for a while – how embarrassing would it be in a week to start tweeting, blogging, or podcasting about something that folks knew was a joke 6 days earlier?

April 2 is the best day of the year to simply click Mark All As Read or Archive or whatever mechanism you use for a clean start. Lots of people do this on January 1, but re-blogging a post from December 31 isn’t as big a deal as re-blogging a prank as a serious article on April 2.

So click that Mark All As Read button, force yourself to go to Inbox Zero today, and make sure that April Fool’s Jokes stay contained to April 1. Celebrate a clean new inbox on April 2!

Happy International Mark All As Read Day!

First, I want to take photos of flowers in Boston in the spring. Logically, I should be able to look at prior year data to see when the most photos of flowers in Boston in the spring were taken. This is where APIs fit in. Flickr and other photo services offer API interfaces. They don’t necessarily provide them very obviously because only a small minority of users make use of them, but for those of us who do, they’re invaluable. Here’s the Flickr API.

Take note that you can query the API by tags and formats in a series of GET variables:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?variablesgohere

So I figured, let’s add the tags boston, flowers, and spring, and get the API results as an RSS feed:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=flowers,boston,spring&format=rss2

We’ve got data!

I know what you’re saying. That’s really unhelpful, and in raw format, it really is. Enter one of the many free timeline web services out there, xTimeline. I threw the RSS feed results into xTimeline and…

Now I have visualized, clustered data. What does the timeline tell me? The people who took photos in Boston of flowers in the spring took a lot of them in the second and third weeks of April in years past. That, based on crowdsourced data, is when I should suggest mine.

So, if you’re game and the weather is game, let’s go for a walk with your digital camera if you’re in the Boston area on Sunday, April 19, 2009 from 4 PM – 7 PM. Bring your digital camera of any kind – iPhone, point and shoot, mammoth DSLR, whatever – out to Nobscot Reservation in metrowest Boston and let’s take some spring pictures and share what knowledge we have about how to take better photos!

This event brought to you by RSS, APIs, and nerds. By the way, you can do this kind of research with any RSS feeds or APIs that can generate RSS feeds. Give it a try sometime.

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I got my copy of the Boston Business Journal yesterday, which is a paper I normally enjoy reading, as it’s got decent coverage of the Boston business scene. Yesterday’s issue came with something new:

The paper, looking to maximize advertising revenues I suppose, has now permitted an advertiser to slap an ad over its content. Not with it, not alongside it, but over it, obscuring the usefulness of the content with an unhelpful ad. I figured okay, annoying, I’ll just remove it and throw it away, maybe write a blog post about how interruption advertising smells more desperate lately.

Unfortunately for both the paper and the advertiser, their ad destroyed the medium it was on, tearing off chunks of the paper and rendering its useless. Now instead of an ad being an annoying interruption, it’s actively destroying the reason I bought the paper in the first place.

For advertisers: before you make a media buy, ask about how your brand will be used, and please try to put some common sense thinking into your campaigns. An ad that annoys and irritates only harms your brand and decreases the likelihood that someone will buy your product or service.

For media producers, old and new media alike: Yes, I know times are tough. Yes, I know every dollar counts, and squeezing the most value out of your media efforts is important. I work at a college student marketing company. I know how tough the market is. However, if you’re not actively serving your audience – especially if said audience is paying the bills – you’re going to be out of business, period. Use some common sense when determining ad inventory.

What would I have done differently? At the very least, put the sticker over the logo of the paper instead of over the content. However, if I wanted to be more creative, I would have instead had pre-printed band-aids on the paper, perhaps on the logo or even still enclosed in their sterile paper wrappers, with copy like, our health care plan is so generous, we can give you this for free.

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… just sometimes …

… it distills the essence of what you want. It becomes all meat, no fat, trimmed to perfection. It’s rare, but it happens. Here’s an example of just how good Twitter can be if people distill the essence of what they want out of the service.

Danny Sullivan, SEO extraordinaire, held a Q&A session via Twitter. He then logged everything to a single blog post.

This is knowledge distilled. You’ll get so much out of this one post (and corresponding links to more resources) than you’ll get from 99% of the search engine blogs out there or the endless blathering of self-proclaimed “social media gurus”. I picked up and learned things from Danny’s session summary that I didn’t know, and I consider myself reasonably well versed in SEO.

The lesson reinforced: be an expert in something, and use social media to deliver the goods (as opposed to being a “social media expert”). In this case, Twitter forced both questioners and Danny as the expert to go for the all-meat distillation of knowledge, and the end product is concentrated brain food.

This to me is the essence of great Twitter usage and I’d love to see much more of this.

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Many thanks to Jeff Glasson and Perkett PR for recording and publishing the video, and to Jeff Pulver for hosting the event.

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I started with my phone in normal daylight, no flash. This was shot with a Nikon D90, aperture priority, 65mm f/5.3, no flash, on a tripod.

Not phenomenal, but good enough for a basic auction site. Next, I added two sheets of white paper beneath it.

So far, still not breaking the budget. The white background does help isolate the phone from its surroundings, but it’s still not quite what I want. I got a dirt cheap acrylic photo frame – the kind you can buy in the office supplies section of Walmart for 3 for $1 – all clear plastic, L shaped – and taped a piece of paper to it. I put this behind the phone to filter some of the daylight.

All that screen glare and reflection has now gone away.

With a bit of judicious cropping and a quick auto adjust in iPhoto, my phone looks far better than it really is:

The actual cost of this project? Literally pennies for the paper and call it 50 cents for the acrylic frame as a light filter. Now, is this as good as professional lightbox system? No, not at all. Is it good enough for what most people need to put up an item on an auction site? You bet. Do this and you’re ahead of 99% of the crowd that takes a picture with a handheld and a way-too-close flash. You can add more lighting and photo frames as needed – you’ll probably end up buying the pack of 3 anyway.

Disclosure: any Amazon links in this post go to my employer, the Student Loan Network, and earn a nominal commission.

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My teacher, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center, asked us to write a bit about how we got involved in the martial arts and why we’re still here.

Way, way back, as far as 4th or 5th grade in school, I was the short, unathletic kid who ended up getting bullied a fair amount. (the inside of a locker is surprisingly spacious if you’re not claustrophobic) Once I got to high school and found myself in a much larger population including some folks who took bullying rather seriously, I decided in 1989 to try out martial arts and asked my parents to take me to the local YMCA. There I met a teacher of Isshin Ryu karate and spent the next 3 years or so progressing through the grades and material in his school.

Learned some really interesting things from him, too, since he was by occupation a prison guard – things like, if you’re going to beat someone, do it with a garden hose since it doesn’t leave permanent marks for a judge to admit as evidence but still hurts like hell. Stuff like that was what kept me looking for something more in the martial arts than just how to administer a beating to someone else – but whatever it was that was missing from my training, I certainly wasn’t going to get it at the karate school.

All during this time, the ninja boom of the 80s was reaching its peak. I remember hanging out more than a few times in the martial arts section of the local bookstore, looking to see what other interesting things there were out there. One set of books always captivated me – a series of large format ninja books by some guy named Stephen K. Hayes, who was billed as the Western world’s foremost authority on ninjutsu. The ninja warriors seemed like they had it all – superior fighting skills, Jedi-like powers, and the ability to change the world to suit their needs.

Where do I sign up?

Well, it turns out, you really couldn’t sign up. Back then, there were very, very few legitimate ninja schools in existence (and to be truthful, there still are very few that are worth anything) and getting accepted into one of them meant having to rearrange your whole life, so I filed that all away as a wishful teenage boy’s fantasy and kept on training.

My martial arts career, such as it was, took a radical left turn when I went to college. Before going to college, I’d been prepping to take my black belt test in Isshin Ryu, feeling great about the progress I was making in the martial arts, thinking I was all that and a sandwich to boot.

On the first day of the martial arts club meeting, I met a sophomore from Boston named Peter Steeves and learned that he was a junior student at a school called the New England Ninpo Society – one of the very few legitimate ninja schools in the country in Stephen K. Hayes‘ lineage. (today, that’s the Boston Martial Arts Center) I decided to see if this guy Peter was legitimate and at the first workout, unleashed my tournament-winning spinning roundhouse kick.

He politely stepped to the side of it and punched me in the face. After laying on the floor and staring at the ceiling for a while, I asked him what he did. He said, “Well, you kinda missed…” and right then and there I asked him to show me what he’d learned in his training.

We spent the better part of four years working on whatever he was looking at in his training. Peter would head home during breaks and study with his teachers, Mark Davis and Ken Savage, then bring back whatever he’d learned and we’d try it out to the best of our abilities. Starting in my junior year, during holiday breaks like spring breaks, I’d go to Boston and spend the week taking every class I could at the Boston dojo. Nothing says spring break like traveling to one of the least warm, sunny places in America in early March!

As with all things, life changes. I graduated from college and decided I wanted to train more regularly, so I uprooted my life, quit my job, got accepted to graduate school, and moved to Boston, renting an apartment literally about a 3 minute walk away from the Boston dojo. That was 1998, and I’ve been there ever since.

What’s interesting throughout this entire journey is what kept me in the martial arts. To be blunt, I started in the martial arts because I was tired of being on the receiving end of some bullying and wanted to give back better than I got. One of the starkest lessons I’ve ever learned was that first workout in college – no matter how fast, tough, or powerful you think you are, there’s almost certainly someone else who is going to eat your lunch.

These days, being tough, being some super warrior is fairly far down on the list of motivating things to me. There are so very few things in life that are worth fighting for – family, loved ones, the safety and health of friends – and so many ways in which others can harm you without ever laying a finger on you. Ask anyone who’s ever been unemployed or desperate for money just how vicious life can be, and you quickly realize that being a tough fighter by itself isn’t much help there. Ultimately, a successful martial practitioner has to be able to win no matter what the situation is – and 99% of the battles we fight every day don’t involve bare knuckles or swords.

The reason I still train and go to the dojo twice a week is because so much of the ninjutsu training is about mastering yourself and learning powerful strategies for dealing with the threats to your happiness and the happiness of the people you care about. That’s what keeps me coming back – learning more, refining what I know, and learning some more on top of that.

It’s not just martial arts, either – the meditation and mind sciences in our tradition help me to improve myself from the inside out – everything ranging from understanding why I react in certain ways to how to lose my temper less.

Some of the strategies and ideas I’ve learned in my training I now share, both as an apprentice instructor at the Boston Martial Arts Center, but also in my work in new media and social media. For example, the old ninja battlefield strategy of joei no jutsu finds new life in a case study of using new media to locate a missing child successfully.

I’ll wrap up by saying that everything here is subject to change as I get older and more experienced. I may look back on this post in another decade and laugh my ass off at how ludicrous it seems from the perspective of a mid-40s, 30 year practitioner of the ninja martial arts. I look forward to that day, because it will mean that I’ve grown past what I understand to be true now – and I hope we’ll share the laugh over a beer when I do.

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For example, in a particular martial arts kata (routine or exercise) I remember stumbling over one movement time and again, and my teacher helped me to get past that because he’d made those exact mistakes when he went through the exercise. Now, as an apprentice instructor at the Boston Martial Arts Center, I see my juniors going through that exercise… and making those same mistakes, which I then help them to get past, relying on my teacher’s advice to me.

What does any of this have to do with social media? Here’s what: unlike martial arts, where you have to rely on slightly fuzzy (or very fuzzy, depending on how many times you’ve been hit in the head) memories of what someone has gone through, in social media you have a gigantic written record in our blog histories. Justin Levy made this point at SMJ Boston, and it can’t be underscored enough.

Want to know how folks like Chris Brogan or CC Chapman got to where they are today? Want to achieve things similar to what they’ve done? Look back in their blog histories. Look what they did to get things rolling – like Chris Brogan’s Grasshopper New Media (does anyone remember that?) or CC’s Random Foo productions. Look back at the original PodCamp from 3 years ago (seems longer than that, doesn’t it?) and see how that got started.

(Food for thought: if you live on Twitter, this historical record is much, much harder to come by. Keep your blog alive too.)

The end goal of a sensei in the martial arts is for a student to surpass their teacher so that they can explore, learn, and grow together as colleagues rather than in a rigid hierarchy of student and teacher forever. Once you get to a certain level of expertise, each begins to learn new insights and share them with the other so that both can flourish. Each has something to teach the other and to learn from the other.

As you develop your social media skills, as you look back at the written record of where we’ve all been and where things are going, remember to catalog your own insights so that when your juniors are coming up through the social media ranks, you can share with them all you’ve learned as well.

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- It really looks like commodities have bottomed. They’ve flatlined for almost a full quarter, which is a major improvement over freefall. Sure, some of it is speculative, especially in gold, but lots of it is just ordinary business.

- BDI has bottomed and is slowly edging back up. If you’re not a follower of the world of freight and shipping, BDI is the Baltic Dry Index. Unlike other indicators, BDI is a price index to put stuff on ships. Unless you’ve got sales, you don’t spend the money to put stuff on ships and haul it across oceans.

- In a few conversations over the weekend, there’s a lot of new entrepreneurial activity going on. I talked to one guy who’s starting up a cash-basis real estate venture, working deals with landlords to manage vacant properties. Another guy is entering the biotech small business world as an importer of scientific equipment. Still another is doing regional direct resales of telco gear from shuttered companies.

One very interesting commonality among all of the folks I talked to with entrepreneurial ventures is that all of their business models – which at first glance appear quite sound – are also entirely cash-based. No one is touching credit, lending, or any form of debt either to run their businesses or as a way for customers to pay for services or goods.

This is likely to be the trend for a while, I suspect. No one is talking about equities, lending, or speculation, and rightly so – those markets are still incredibly unstable, subject to additional losses, and frankly, who wants to invest in the companies that got us to our current economic situation?

What does this mean for you? There are new opportunities beginning to spring up. If you have cash, if you have capital, there may be some great new opportunities to put it to use, either as an investor or an entrepreneur. If you’re looking for work, search more than just the big job boards – dig deep, use Google, find new businesses in and around your area. You might just find that ground floor opportunity you’ve been looking for.

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Free

Garr Reynolds on effective presenting at Google

Sample effective slides by Garr Reynolds

Dale Carnegie’s The Art of Public Speaking book

TED Talks, my favorite conference video collection for examples of outstanding speakers

Not Free

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds (Amazon) [$]

Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath (Amazon) [$]

What public speaking resources help you make the most of your time in front of others?

Disclosure: Amazon links above are affiliate links that pay a nominal commission to my employer, the Student Loan Network.

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Jeff Pulver asked me to speak at Social Media Jungle: Boston and gave this intriguing guideline:

At Social Media Jungle, our discussion leaders will be presenting their talk as if they were sharing a blog post. And the people in the room will be asked to provide immediate comments to the content being shared which in turn will start a conversation.

So here’s the blog post we’ll be sharing. What numbers do matter in social media? After all, if you intend to use social media for business, then numbers have to enter the conversation at some point – but what numbers? Is it numbers of friends, followers, connections? What about the stalwarts of marketing – leads, conversions, sales? What really matters?

To answer this question, think about your typical marketing funnel:

Audience – who’s eligible to use your product or service
Prospects – who in your audience is most likely to use your product or service
Leads – who in your prospects you’ve reached out to or made a connection with and has expressed interest in your product or service
Conversions – who in your leads has made the decision to get your product or service
Evangelists – who in your conversions to customers loves your product or service so much that they’re eager to talk about it

For any given product or service, you can attach definable numbers to each of the stages. But that’s not enough, not to grow a business by.

See, the trouble with numbers like this is that they answer the question of what. What happened? What isn’t enough, though, because you’re dealing with human beings, and that means in addition to what, you also have to be able to address why. Why did something happen? Why did the lead choose product one over product two? Why did the customer abandon you?

This is where communication matters most. A high bounce rate – the number of people who visit your web site – may mean people hate your site and just leave in disgust. It may also mean people found exactly what they wanted on your site thanks to great navigation and content, got what they needed, and moved on. Which is the truth? If you don’t ask why, if you don’t ask the customer why, you’ll never know – and that means you may be making business decisions based on faulty assumptions.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard a marketing executive say, “Well, I think our customer wants X” or “I think our customers are buying Y on our site because…” and be completely wrong because said marketing executive wasn’t the customer. If you don’t ask, you’ll never get to know why, and that in turn blinds you to the most important question of all…

… now what? You know what’s happening. You know why it happened. Now what? What do you do to steer yourself or your business in the direction you want it to go? This is where experience matters most and where scientific thought is imperative. Once you know what numbers aren’t meeting your expectations and why, you have to come up with a few scenarios to test and examine.

For example, in old school email marketing, we know for sure that the open rate of an email campaign is principally governed by the subject line. The subject line is the digital equivalent of the envelope, and if the envelope is unappealing, no one’s going to open it, even if the contents are valuable. So you test – you fire off a series of test messages with different subject lines and you assess which subject line had the best open rate. Do this over and over again, and you begin to get an instinctive understanding of what subjects work best for your audience.

So those are the three questions that you need to apply to any kind of numbers – what happened, why did it happen, and now what? Let this relatively simple – because simple doesn’t mean easy – framework guide you in judging which numbers should matter to you. Let’s look at a few numbers that might or might not matter.

ROI: ROI is a largely unhelpful number. It’s important, to be sure, because in this economy you absolutely want some idea of what you’re getting for your money. ROI is only a small piece of the puzzle, however, because knowing ROI doesn’t necessarily lend insight into the why or now what, and that’s what makes it unhelpful. Can you judge social media ROI? Sure. Just ask a customer how they found out about you. If the answer is never social media, then social media’s obviously not working for you. That said, ROI doesn’t especially guide you to understand why you’re not getting the financial results you want, nor does it especially lend insight as to what to do next.

Audience: Does the number of followers/friends/connections matter? No. Does the number of right followers/friends/connections matter? Absolutely. My favorite example of this is the Gulfstream salesman. If he has 100,000 followers on Twitter but none of them buy an airplane from him, then he’s not going to get the results he wants. If he has 3 friends on LinkedIn but two of them buy airplanes, then that’s all the social media he needs.

Views/Visitors/Visits: Again, another what number, but at least this one tells you if people are finding their way to the destination you want them to get to. If they’re not making it here, wherever here is, then it’s worth digging into why. It may be something as simple as a URL that no one can spell correctly or as complex as your brand’s association with something unpalatable.

Leads: A what and why number – what happened tells you how many people want your product or service, and communicating with them will lend you the insight you need as to why – what was it about your product or service that made them want to take action.

Customers: A what and why number – what happened tells you that people find your product or service valuable enough to make a tangible commitment to it, and asking why should lend you guidance in understanding what most compelled them to make that final jump.

Do you see a trend here? The more valuable numbers are what and why numbers – they’re numbers centered around a behavior as opposed to a static fact. The more action required of someone, the more commitment given, the more insight you can gain into the number and the more action you can take because of it.

Take a look at your social media efforts. Whenever and wherever you are trying to apply some numbers to your social media efforts, ask yourself the trifecta of questions with an eye towards action. Does this number answer what happened? Does communicating with the customer answer why this number is what it is? Does knowing the business and your fellow woman or man tell you what you should do next to improve that number?

See you in the jungle.

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Bring the player, not the class.

In Warcraft, there are different classes of players – mages, paladins, shamans, etc. Each of the classes has different traits suited to different kinds of players and playing styles. One of the most common sources of arguments, debate, and complaints is X class is better than Y class, to no one’s surprise.

Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind World of Warcraft, has said that it designs the game to be as balanced as possible, so that no one class is better or worse. The expression they use is bring the player, not the class, especially with regard to difficult challenges in the game.

Their belief is that a skilled player will make the most of the classes that suit their personal style of play best, and that a class in the hands of one player may be outstanding, while a different class may be a disaster. I know from personal experience that playing a frost mage suits my temperament and style best, and being a Death Knight tank, not so much.

Bring the player, not the class is the advice Blizzard gives to its guilds and groups in the game – find the best players you can, and class will sort itself out. Bring the best players you can, and you’ll defeat the enemies you’re to face.

So what does this have to do with social media?

Bring the producer, not the medium.

Which is better, Twitter or Friendfeed? Which is better, video or audio, blogging or podcasting, YouTube or Qik…

You get where I’m going. Your content will dictate which forms of social media you participate in (some content is better in one format than another), but what will govern your success is YOU, the producer. How skilled you are and what you’re most comfortable with will do more to contribute to your success than any given platform by itself.

Just as a Warcraft player’s spec (Blood vs. Unholy vs. Frost vs….) doesn’t make that player any better or worse, neither should your choice of medium make you any better or worse a media producer. Find the forms of media that best suit your style, content, and what you want to communicate. Try as many as you practically can to see what’s available, but recognize that some will feel better to you. Do those. Even if they’re currently unfashionable (podcasting was so 2005? Tell that to the listeners of the Financial Aid Podcast or Marketing Over Coffee) if they fit you best, you’ll create and produce media best in them.

More important, invest time in making yourself a better producer! Forget about being a social media expert. They’re a dime a dozen, if that (hey, it’s the Great Recession, everything’s on sale). Be an expert in a subject or field and use the best form of media available to communicate it, old or new, social or broadcast.

One of the best pieces of advice ever given to me was from my Edvisors CEO, Joe Cronin, who years ago said, don’t be a podcasting expert, be a financial aid expert who has a podcast. In terms of doing the most good and helping the most people, that advice has paid off handsomely. I know plenty of social media experts, gurus, wizards, whatever, and none of them have helped a family put their kid through college.

Bring the player, not the class is sage advice to guilds and raids in World of Warcraft.

Bring the producer, not the medium is the pathway to long-term success in media, social or otherwise.

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The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

I only wished the video went further. It ends at the credit crisis and failing investments – and the chain reaction beyond that is choking of credit to businesses, which puts some out of business, which creates joblessness, which creates more mortgages that can’t be paid, which creates…

Hat tip to Garr Reynolds for this one.

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How many people know their physical neighbors well?

You should.

If you don’t, make friends, and soon. Why? Simple.

The economy is spawning more crime. The numbers estimated by the University of Arizona suggest that a 1% increase in unemployment correlates to a 1% increase in crime rates. Crimes begin casually, with opportunity crimes, and worsen from there if unchecked.

Kicking it up a notch

A basic neighborhood watch is effective, but now add in the capabilities of social media, of new media to the mix. If you have several social media aware folks in your neighborhood (or you can train them easily), when you meet with your police department’s crime prevention officer (CPO, the officer assigned to instruct Neighborhood Watch programs), introduce him or her to Twitter. Get your neighbors who are Twitter-savvy to create a hashtag for your neighborhood like #54&Pine or #7Gables and have members report mildly suspicious activity there (”scruffy kid, about 5′6″ with black backpack walking around block 5th time this hour”). Show your CPO how to use Twitter Search so that real-time updates can be casually viewed at the station.

Got a camera on your data-enabled mobile phone? You have an awesome crime deterrence tool. Use services like TwitPic to take instant shots of suspicious activity and upload them immediately to your neighborhood watch Twitterstream.

Own a digital camera with a decent lens and low light ability? Take photos and load them up to sites like Flickr so that your neighbors and CPO can inspect in detail things that you find suspicious.

Know someone talented at using Google Docs and Google Maps? Help your local police department geographically map crimes in your area and look for trends using freely available Google tools.

What other new media/social media tools can you think of to empower ordinary citizens to help local law enforcement prevent crime?

Note: in no way do I advocate unnecessarily putting yourself in harm’s way or taking the law into your own hands. As with all community-based initiatives, the idea is to work WITH your local police, not compete with them.

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Interrupting consumers doesn’t work any more. Outbound marketing – direct mail, trade shows, conferences, PR, advertising – just doesn’t work any more. Instead, you need inbound marketing. Attract customers like a magnet to your products or services! The new truth of marketing is that interruption is out. Ideas that spread, win. No one is listening any more. Go viral.

If you wholeheartedly believe every bit of this, stop reading now. Close this browser window, walk away, and have a wonderful, productive day.

Are you still here?

Which part of you does NOT wholeheartedly believe the new mantras of marketing?

Which part of you thinks there might be some falseness to what is claimed as absolute truth in marketing today?

That part of you is right. There is more than just “make a cool video on YouTube” or “optimize your web site for Google” to marketing. Do these things matter? Absolutely. Search and content that rocks are vital components of any marketing program, and it’s just as insane to dismiss them as it is to dismiss outbound efforts like direct mail and cold calling.

The truth of the matter is that inbound and outbound marketing are both vitally important to your company, your products, your services, your ideas, and they complement each other. They are equally important, and they balance each other. Look back over the thousands of years of human civilization and you’ll see inbound and outbound marketing together. In the earliest bazaars, barkers called out their wares for sale – the purest form of interruption marketing. “Apples! Fresh apples, just brought in by horse from Judea!” If you were in the mood for apples, you might have bought some, and if the vendor’s apples were good, weren’t full of worms, were as he claimed them to be, then he’d gain a little of your trust. Over time, if he kept fulfilling his promises, you’d probably tell a friend or two. “Hosea, try the fruit vendor Ismael next to the butcher!” That’s word of mouth marketing, permission marketing, inbound marketing.

Examine the long history of marketing through the ages. Look how media changed marketing, but more important, look at how core principles of marketing remain the same despite the changes. You still have to find people interested in what you’ve got. Inbound or outbound, a consumer who neither wants nor needs what you have will remain deaf and blind to all your marketing, no matter how hard you try any approach.

Inbound and outbound marketing are co-dependent on each other. When you first get started, you’ll find that you do a lot more outbound marketing than inbound marketing. This is the time to experiment with all the methods of outbound. Try out direct email, advertisements, trade shows, and all of the outbound methods, and find the ones that work best for you. Once you begin to gain momentum, more of your business will come from inbound methods – word of mouth, search as your web site gains more credibility, content that rocks, promises you keep to the consumer.

Ultimately, you should find yourself with a balance. You’ll still need outbound to continually find new customers, especially in unexplored niches and verticals where you’re always the new person, the new business. You’ll still need inbound to find friends of your friends, customers of your customers, and keep the promises you’ve made to the people whose trust you’ve gained. Will it be exactly 50/50? Probably not, but it will be in balance, in equilibrium.

If someone tells you that any marketing methods, inbound, outbound, direct, fax, whatever, is the only thing you need, you know two things to be true – they are either lying or clueless, and they probably have something to sell you.

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Wrong.

They’re staring at a pizza. See, a pizza can be good. It can be tasty, with crispy crust and sweet but salty tomato sauce, hot cheese, in exactly the right proportions, made just the right way to be delicious and awesome.

That pizza will never, ever sell itself. At a minimum, the pizza has to be delivered or received somehow. That’s service. Given how much competition there is for pizza joints, even if it’s the best pizza in the world, the parlor will at least initially need to let people know about it, invite them to try it, tell them of its existence. That’s marketing.

Where my friend’s colleagues went wrong was in mistaking the product for the marketing and service. They thought that making a quality product was marketing and wondered why their stores were empty day after day after day. “But we have an awesome product!” “Maybe we need a new color palette for the inside of the store!” “Maybe we should move the register closer to the door!”

They’re rearranging toppings on the pizza instead of figuring out how to get people in front of the pizza to at least take a bite. They’re staring at the pizza, wondering why no one is buying it and eating it.

Are you mistaking product for service and marketing? Are you staring at the pizza instead of sharing it? Ask yourself these questions in the next marketing meeting you sit in, and if you’re in that situation, get people in your company to stop staring and start sharing your pizza.

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cspenn: @chrisbrogan I am stingy with my recommendations, but when I recommend something, I *mean* it. High bar, but kudos if you reach it.
GuidoS: @cspenn how can you be stingy about recommendations but not about people in your network? Isn’t association partly an endorsement?

To some, perhaps. In the slightly warped perspective of the ninja, association isn’t recommendation. Association is information. If you look at the folks who follow me on Twitter, who are friends on Facebook, who are contacts on LinkedIn, you’ll find an enormous variety of folks, from Asian cooks to college students, from presidents and CEOs to exotic dancers, from independent musicians to search engine optimization wizards. All of these people that are in my network are folks I ‘associate’ with, but more importantly, each of them has unique perspectives and information that I find helpful.

There’s an old ninja expression relating literally to seeing in the dark – the lower you go, the more you can see. Try it at night sometime. It’s a metaphor as well – the closer to the ground, to the real people doing real stuff, you can get, the more you can see. It’s easy from a financial or economics perspective to look at macro stuff like GDP, the Dow Jones, etc. but if you want some real insight, you need to put boots on the ground and see what’s really happening. You can only do that through association, through making lots of acquaintances across the spectrum of people out there.

Recommendation is different – recommendation to me means that I have experience with some aspect of the person, product, or service, and when I recommend something, I confer a bit of whatever trust you have in me to that person, place, or thing. In this crazy world we live in, trust is exceedingly scarce, exceedingly rare, and something that you should absolutely be stingy with.

Associate with lots of people. Associate to learn, to grow, to share your experiences. Recommend only when you want to confer trust, because if you blow it on a recommendation, you betray that trust a little, and as everyone from Presidents to CEOs to the broken hearted know or are finding out, trust is very, very hard to recover.

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Create a $100,000 loan grant run through the federal department of your choice, backed by the Treasury.

Businesses of any size may apply for and receive a $100,000, one year loan at the Federal Funds Rate. If a business then spends that loan funding solely on employment (verified by new payroll taxes and W-2 data from the IRS), at the end of one year, the loan is forgiven, essentially giving the business a free employee or three for a year.

Conditions: payroll taxes and W-2 data should verify that the business spent the equivalent of $100,000 solely on employing new hires. Using data the government collects anyway, controls should be able to easily verify that these are new hires and not existing employees. Don’t spend it correctly? IRS detects a little hanky panky? Interest capitalizes and the loan enters repayment immediately.

Why a stimulus idea like this? Rather than attempt to plow money into specific industries, this lets businesses hire or rehire based on what that specific business needs to grow. The Student Loan Network might need a junior web developer but the Advance Guard might need an admin. By giving businesses the discretion to hire who they need, the market can get the talent actually required, rather than decided by government fiat.

This kind of stimulus will, by design, disproportionately benefit small businesses. Because they’re more agile, this will help them grow faster. Because it’s small business, the ability to bring unemployed citizens in for retraining will work better – after all, you’ll learn the craft of baking bread faster at a small family bakery than you will at Omni Consumer Products Grain Division. (though certainly they can apply and get the same loan)

What’s the cost? The IRS estimates roughly 30 million small businesses exist in the US. Guess what? This is a three trillion dollar stimulus. Considering some of what’s being flung around Wall Street and DC, that’s in the ballpark of other proposals. What makes this one different? If 10% of businesses get the loan and start hiring, the 3 million job deficit goes away immediately, rather than waiting for government funding to flow through states, cities, and banks.

What’s your stimulus idea?

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Micro-famous.
Micro-blogging.
Micro-finance.
Micro-marketing.

Are we so desperate to feel any sense of importance that we’ll attach the word micro to anything just so that the definition includes us? (by the way, the same applies to new and social)

No disrespect to the creators of the terms, but it seems that we attach micro, social, or new to anything that we can’t otherwise measure up to.

Not famous? Micro-famous!
Too lazy to blog? Micro-blog!
Can’t get a loan? Micro-finance!
Don’t have the juice for large scale marketing? Micro-market!

What do you think?

inspired by the famous Chris Brogan.

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A quick story. Last year, I was flying back from Tampa on a business trip and sat next to Grandma Rosenblum, a wonderful 80 year old great-grandmother. I was surprised, amidst the usual contents that an 80 year old carries, to see an Amazon Kindle in her purse, and asked her about it, since my stereotype of 80 year olds generally doesn’t include cutting edge technology. Her response? “I love my Kindle. Everyone I know at my senior center has one. We all love that you can make the letters as big as you want. One of my friends has really bad eyes but she can read again now!”

I asked her about the other features of the Kindle – blog subscriptions, newspapers, etc. and she said she didn’t read anything like that, just books and the occasional article. Except she was wrong. She did read a couple of blogs – Huffington Post was in there, as well as mainstream news sources like the New York Times. She just didn’t call the Huffington Post a blog. It was merely, to her, a series of articles.

The Kindle 2 has even more stuff. Based on initial product description, it’ll have the 3G wireless component, but it will also have document conversion and a basic web browser. Guess what, gang? That’s not an eBook reader any more. That’s a tablet computer. Granted, you may not be working in Excel or playing Warcraft on it, but with the addition of a browser and document conversion, the Kindle is now a computer that can be used for productivity above and beyond reading stuff.

What’s the takeaway here? The Kindle 2 seems to be a workable tablet computer disguised as a book reader, rather like the iPod Touch is a workable PDA disguised as a music player. If you’re a business type, I would bet you’ll get some enhanced productivity out of the new Kindle.

If you’re a marketer, all I have to say is this: you had better be cranking out eBooks, you had better be cranking them out in Kindle-supported formats, and as a bonus, if you have the absolute trust and love of your readers, you might even get them to register their Kindle document conversion email addresses to get new eBooks from you when you have them. (did you know you can email documents to Kindle for conversion?)

Full disclosure: links to the Kindle are paid links for my employer, using Amazon’s affiliate program. Purchasing a Kindle through these links earns my employer the standard Amazon commission.

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Wall Street Journal:

International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said the world’s advanced economies — the U.S., Western Europe and Japan — are “already in depression,” and that the IMF could slash its global growth forecasts further. The “worst cannot be ruled out,” he said.

The IMF managing director’s comments to reporters after a speech in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, represent the most dire estimate thus far of the state of the global economy by a major political figure, and were far more pessimistic than forecasts released by the IMF as recently Jan. 28.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Scotland On Sunday:

‘WE SHOULD agree as a world on a monetary and fiscal stimulus that will take the world out of r… depression.” Thus spake Gordon Brown at Prime Minister’s Questions last Wednesday, creating shock waves as far afield as Washington (”He said the D-word!”).

San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Janet Yellen:

The economy is “severely depressed,” and the U.S. faces “horrific” deficits over the long term, Yellen said in response to audience questions.

Yes, it’s a depression. The D-word. It’s okay to say it. It’s okay to admit it, because to use it brings our public discourse in alignment with reality.

Often quoted are the unemployment rates during the last depression – 25% of the workforce. During the last depression, that accounted for 11,385,000 people at the peak.

On Friday, we hit 7.6% unemployment – 11,616,000 people.

Percentage-wise, the percent of the labor force unemployed during the depression of the 1930s was much higher than today. That’s what you hear politicians say over and over again as they try to soothe anxieties of the public that are looking at a very different reality than the marbled chambers of Congress.

In terms of real families, real kids’ mouths to feed, real parents awake late into the night, we’ve just surpassed the last depression.

If we’re willing to drop false pretenses and admit in our public conversation that yes, this is a real depression, perhaps that’s the wakeup call that our political leaders need to hear. Drop your stupid partisan agendas, BOTH parties, listen to the economists who have been proven right over and over again in this climate (Nouriel Roubini, James K. Galbraith, many others), and get America moving again.

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Sample:
DJIA +146 VIX 42.28 TED 95bps 3mo LIBOR 1.17 1mo OIS 20bps MSCI +1.53% BDI -2.54% 30yr 4.85% BCF 51.39 GLD 919.90 RR 12.30

DJIA: Dow Jones Industrial Averages futures for the day, based on Bloomberg after-hours market data. Gives an idea of what the market sentiment will be at the start of trading, typically due to Asian and European market movements.

Updated: At the recommendation of Mike LaLonde, I’m throwing the S&P 500 Futures (SPX) in right after the DJIA. The S&P 500 is a measure of a broad range of companies, giving a bigger picture of market sentiment.

VIX: Chicago Board of Options Exchange Volatility Index, based on Yahoo Finance data. The VIX is considered by some to be a leading indicator of how crazy the market is, based on S&P futures. A high VIX number (above 20) indicates that something’s going on in the market.

TED Spread: The difference between Treasuries and Eurodollars, typically T-bills and LIBOR (London Inter Bank Offering Rate), as measured by Bloomberg. A big TED spread indicates banks don’t trust each other and would rather borrow from the government.

3mo LIBOR: The interest rate for 3-month LIBOR, as measured by Bloomberg. This is the rate banks charge each other in London for borrowing money and is a good non-government measure of interest rates.

1mo OIS: 1 month overnight index swap, an interest rate that measures risk and liquidity in the money market, as measured by Bloomberg. A higher OIS indicates less cash in the system as banks hoard cash. A lower OIS indicates banks are willing to lend more freely.

MSCI: A stock market index of world stocks (MSCI used to stand for Morgan Stanley Capital Int’l), as measured by Bloomberg. This is an index containing stocks from 23 countries, and tells you how the world market is doing.

BDI: Baltic Dry Index, as measured by Bloomberg. This is a daily average of the price to ship raw dry materials, and is a good current indicator of economic health for goods and services. The reason why is that it costs money to put stuff on a boat and ship it – so if BDI is low, it means producers and retailers aren’t shipping stuff and the economy is unwell. A high BDI means that people are paying real money to ship stuff.

30yr: The average 30 year fixed mortgage interest rate. Since housing is such a vital component of the economy, seeing what mortgage rates are doing is useful for figuring out how housing is likely to be doing.

Updated: At the recommendation of economist Maria Simos, I’m adding BCF and GLD.

BCF: Brent Crude Futures, as measured by Bloomberg. This is the price of barrel of Brent crude oil, which gives a sense of where energy costs will go based on the source product. Neat trick – take the price of a barrel of oil and divide by 25, and you often get very close to the retail price of a gallon of gasoline.

GLD: Gold 100 oz futures, as measured by Bloomberg. Gold is the, well, gold standard, of a third party measurement against inflation. As countries inflate or deflate their currencies, the price of gold goes up or down.

Updated again: I’m adding RR: Rough Rice futures, Chicago Board of Trade. Why? Most of the planet eats the stuff, far more than other grains. When rice prices are high, you’re talking about a global increase in prices on the consumer. i was debating corn or rice, but chose rice because it’s purely a food stock, whereas corn has additional deviations due to things like ethanol.

Any one of these indicators has economic implications, but combined, I think they’re a good quick snapshot of different parts of the economy and how things are going on a day to day basis in a broader perspective than just the stock market.

What public leading economic indicators do you think are important?

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Where’s the bottom?
When do things get better?

First, a disclaimer: I am an armchair economist at best. I’ve never taken a course in economics, but I do own Economics for Dummies and have read it cover to cover many times. That’s enough for the barest of basics, but I don’t want you thinking I’m some elite economics expert. I am not.

That said, theoretically, I can’t do worse than the “Experts” who have driven their companies into the ground in search of short term profits, can I?

Where’s the bottom?

The economy as it stands now hinges on two factors, employment and housing prices. Housing prices are important because an inordinate number of loans and investments based on loans rely on housing prices. As long as housing prices continue to fall, the value of those investments will continue to fall, and the credit, lending, and investment parts of the economy cannot recover. The exception to this is if a company that wholly owns its loans can write down the loans and sell them immediately, or devalue them so significantly that the book value of the loans is lower than housing prices will ever get.

Employment is the other piece of the puzzle, which controls the domains of consumer spending, productivity, and retail investing (including real estate). As long as employment continues to decline, more consumers will be benched on the sidelines, more people will not be able to afford homes or even basics. Demand for assistance in every form will deplete government by depriving it of both taxes and additional costs for services.

Of the two, employment is by far the most important. With employment and income, consumers will be able to afford real estate, especially if prices continue to decline. Once enough people are employed gainfully and can begin participating in the economy again, buying everything from commodities to homes.

How will you know the bottom? The same way you knew the top. Probably a quarter or two of waffling, neutral employment with neither gains nor losses, then two quarters of sustained growth in employment across broad sectors, with velocity towards the upside. Once employment ticks upwards significantly, you’ll see all the markets dependent on the consumer begin to recover as well – so figure real estate and housing prices stabilize a quarter or two after employment stabilizes, then ticks upwards a quarter or two behind employment.

When do things get better?

I don’t know. I wish I knew. I do know that many of the crap mortgages won’t flush out of the system completely until late 2011. There’s no telling whether broader economic declines will hasten the expiration of those mortgages or whether a recovery package inadvertently spawns new stupidity in lending. Both scenarios are possible. I’d say conservatively that 2009 is a write-off in terms of broad economic growth. 2010 may or may not show a turn.

Why don’t we know when things will get better?

Back to economics 101. GDP – gross domestic product – is a formula. C + I + G + (X – M).

C: Consumer spending
I: Investing
G: Government spending
X: Exports
M: Imports

Right now, consumer spending is in the toilet.
Right now, investing is in the toilet.
Exports are down.
Imports are down too, but our few exports – autos and airplanes – are in more dire straits than imports.

That leaves government. There is no way that the government can singlehandedly carry the entire economy by itself, no matter how great you think Barack Obama or Timothy Geithner is.

Government spending will increase, to be sure. What government is counting on is multiplier effects – throw enough matches and even a wet forest will eventually catch. The question is, how many matches is that?

So what do you do?

Look objectively at the situation. Cut costs. Conserve cash. Save like crazy, because there’s no telling if your job is next on the chopping block, as grim as that sounds. If you’re a business, spend wisely and invest in your people if you can.

In this environment, time is the only thing that will heal the economy. Time will flush out the poison.

In this environment, we are rich in time and poor in money. Thus, spend time rather than spend money. If you have the ability to pursue alternative forms of marketing that are lower cost – direct email marketing, social media, new media, PR, etc. – but time intensive, that might be a fair trade right now.

Give your company or business an objective and then give your team the freedom to get to that objective by any legal means necessary. Take the time to prune out processes that don’t work. Take the time to do inventory and jettison things that you’ve outlived, outgrown, outlasted.

If you’re unemployed or underemployed, time is an enemy because capital is limited. Spend it wisely, focus on job search and income generation. Be unrelentingly aggressive in your job search. If you have a choice between offending a few people with unsolicited email and putting food on your table, as Emperor Palpatine instructed Darth Vader, do what must be done. Do not hesitate. Show no mercy. Network as you can, but if you have to pull out the red saber, no one will fault you for wanting to take care of your family and home.

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Apple.

Maglite.

Dom Perignon.

All of these are premium brands, yes? They conjure up certain images, certain feelings, certain associations, all of which their respective marketing departments have worked hard to establish over the years. Premium denotes quality of product or service above average, a product you can aspire to as a consumer…

… unless you’re in the middle of a brutal recession. Suddenly, premium becomes a boat anchor around your leg as consumers seek out thrift, value, cost-conscious… cheap.

Sometimes premium can override cost concerns – the old “quality costs less in the long run” hack – but sometimes, it will just kill you.

As a marketer, think carefully about how your brand will be perceived in good times and in bad. Is there a brand association durable enough that it’s appropriate no matter what the economic climate is? Can you play the trend of the day in your communications while staying true to your core value proposition?

Here’s a tip: invest, invest, invest in your customer service, and by that I don’t just mean your call center, I mean every employee in your company. Service costs money, absolutely, but great service endures good times and bad.

When times are good, people love the personal touch and are willing to spend more for great service. When times are bad, people want to stretch the dollar as far as it can go, and if your product or service has value and can be backed up with great service (think a warranty w/a toll free number that humans answer on the second ring), you will endure when everyone else goes out of business.

Great customer service pays huge dividends. You can get more return out of great service than all the PR in the world, because in the uber-connected 2.0 world where everything is online and simultaneously service nearly everywhere borders on abusive, your great service will be worth talking about.

Great service, in other words, is a premium, a premium that will lend a shine to your brand no matter what’s happening in the world – and that’s worth paying for.

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A lot of your personality is revealed when you take up arms against someone else, whether in self defense or aggression. How you fight, your particular fighting style, reveals your traits – strengths, weaknesses, identity. After all, in a fight, you’re tapping into your most primal traits. Do you flee? Do you stand your ground? Does ego get the better of you? A fight is also incredibly stressful – how you react under intense stress tells a great deal about you.

That said, very few people get into fights frequently, which is a good thing. We like for our friends’ lives to be safe and free of violence.

Enter virtual worlds like World of Warcraft. Here, in a safe environment where players incur no true physical harm or injury, their skills, strategies, and temperaments are tested in ever increasingly difficult forms of virtual combat, from dealing with single encounters to fighting entire armies.

How a person behaves in a virtual fight is, of course, different than a real world fight – the risk to life and limb alters the equation, as it should. That said, you still gain a great deal of insight about how someone behaves under pressure:

- Does their temper get the better of them? Can they be goaded into making unwise choices?
- Does their ego hook them, forcing them into situations that grow ever worse for them the harder they struggle to reconcile desire and reality?
- Do they lack patience, rushing into unknown or known dangers foolishly?
- Do they have maturity, knowing how to lose gracefully and win even more gracefully?

All of this comes out in virtual combat, just as it does in real life combat. So what’s the point? What does this mean for you, especially if you don’t participate in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft?

Simply this – if you’re an employer, one of the most novel ways you could find a new employee would be in a virtual world, in virtual combat. Are you looking for a certain personality fit for your team? Do you want someone a little headstrong but willing to be bold? Does your corporate culture dictate a cool, calm, conservative demeanor, even at the expense of aggressive progress?

Very few things offer insight into your personality like the stress of combat, whether virtual or real. While I wouldn’t suggest that an employee interview involve leveling a character 10 times in Warcraft, I would suggest that if you find people socially in the realms where you play that have the skills you need, consider them as more than just players of a game.

They might be the best addition to your corporate team you’ve ever made.

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I heard an interesting comment made during Davos (I wasn’t there, but was listening to Bloomberg Surveillance) about the economic situation. One Davos participant said that it’s all a matter of trust. He hit the nail right on the head. Everything that you see happening right now is about trust, because trust is the foundation of money.

Remember the lesson we discussed recently: money is essentially a medium of exchange and a store of value. I trust you to represent yourself and your value accurately, and you trust me to do the same. Money flows between us, and business is done.

This is why, by the way, trust cannot be a commodity or a currency, as Julien Smith once posited – trust is a meta-quality of currency but cannot be currency itself. Let me put it another way. (Julien and Chris Brogan will be publishing a book about the topic of trust as currency, which I look forward to debating)

Money is a tangible form of trust.

If I write on a sheet of paper that this paper note is redeemable for one iPod, is that paper worth one iPod?

It depends. If you trust me and believe that I’m acting in good faith, and that I have that iPod, then yes, that paper is worth one iPod.

If you don’t trust me, then that note is just a sheet of paper with words on it.

Trust powers currency. The only difference between my sheet of paper worth an iPod and a sheet of paper from the government of the United States (besides obvious physical differences) is that relatively few people trust me, and a whole bunch of people trust Uncle Sam. If I do business with my close friends, that sheet of paper has as much purchasing power as Uncle Sam’s sheets of paper.

Our current financial crisis ultimately comes down to a lack of trust. We don’t trust realtors to accurately represent the price of a home, so we don’t buy. We as buyers and taxpayers don’t trust appraisers to accurately assess the value of a home. The real estate market tanks. As values go down, investments based on that real estate collapse.

Banks don’t trust each other’s investments because of poor practices, and so interbank lending and lending to consumers dries up. Banks conserve cash because they don’t trust.

And here we are. No trust anywhere in our institutional financial system is what’s ultimately causing it to malfunction. This, of course, has real consequences as investments decay, the job market deteriorates, and the overall economy grinds to a halt.

What ends this crisis is whether our trust can be regained by corporate America and the government. What ends this crisis is a re-establishment of trust – and as anyone knows who has violated or had their trust violated, that takes a long time, a lot of forgiveness, and a clear record of performance, of living up to promises in an unbroken record.

This is where social media is a start – authenticity, transparency, and humanity in our communications with others. Not PR. Not corporate-speak. Relationships we can begin to trust. When you talk to Pamela O’Hara or Greg Cangialosi, you’re talking to human beings who represent their companies, but the trust you have in them is at the human level.

If companies want to restore profitability and growth, they have to fulfill that trust. There’s a reason we say that brand is a promise. Fulfill that promise, earn back trust, and you will prosper. Violate that trust and in this fragile economic environment, your company disappears.

What should YOU be doing right now, in this economy? Building trust. Building relationships. Strengthening your network. Growing your network. Why? Relationships can exist without money – barter, trade, collaboration. Money can’t exist without relationships, because without trust, money itself fails.

Who do you trust?

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Last night I decided to give Journchat a spin, which is a Twitter-hosted discussion of journalism topics between PR folks and journalists.

Question: As a journ, who should I follow on Twitter to ensure my newsroom is on top of breaking news? (quick one) #journchat

Not a person, but topics. Try jargon for your news vertical in search.twitter.com like FAFSA or JPM or IMDB.

If you think news is happening somewhere, do location in search.twitter.com to see if there’s a mention.

if you want breaking news, tie a search from search.twitter.com RSS to an RSS->SMS service. Text to your phone of breaking tweets.

Connect Twitter RSS to Yahoo Pipes, filter, then send to Google Reader. See www.FinancialAidPodcast.com/twitterbook

You should also be using marketing tools like Google Trends, Insight for Search, etc. to find trending topics.

Plug in every kind of RSS search – Twitter, Google News, etc. – into Google Reader to find stories, esp. overnight.

Question: What do u think of The Big Video Debate: Rough or Slick?

Slick or rough matters less than relevant.

Crappy video in HD is still crappy video. Instead of spending money on HD, spend less money on a stabilizer!

If you want to try slick video on a Mac, look into the free software CamTwist. Text, crawls, logos, etc.

@howardkang and every reporter regardless of medium should carry a Flipcam or other pocket camera.

I carry a Nikon D90, Flipcam, and Samson Zoom H2 all the time, just in case. Have gotten decent local stuff.

Question: Journs and bloggers: how do you use twitter/online to source stories?

I use every channel available. Bloomberg, Twitter, Facebook, CNN, whatever has the info I want for my blog/podcast.

I do a lot of financial services writing, so Google Finance, Econoday, and friends on Twitter all are sources.

Twitter is great for reality-checking a piece and getting immediate feedback, esp. fact check. 4,800+ friends = fast checks.

Question: What do journs need and/or look for in a web 2.0 press room? (source’s site)

I need to see obvious contact information, multiple channels. Don’t make me hunt you down or I won’t bother.

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A while back, Mitch Joel posted his Pixelated conference series, a collection of seminars and sessions from conferences that contain the “best of the best” for any set of topics. I’ve been so busy doing stuff that I never got around to putting mine together until now. This version of Pixelated is focused on Business Marketing – ideas from sales, marketing, branding, and new media that should help any business do things a little better.

If this were a conference, a real life conference, I have no doubt that attending it would cost you thousands of dollars, at least for the first sessions. Thanks to the exceptional generosity of conferences and events who post their sessions, you can enjoy some of the best content on earth without leaving your chair.

Treat this as an actual conference. Take a day or half a day to watch the videos and give them your undivided attention. Have a bottle of water, a notepad, and an open mind as you watch the sessions, as if you were actually there.

Rather than just a pile of videos, I’ve also added brief annotations about why I think each session is important.

Updated: refreshed for July 2009, with some new sessions from TED and other shows.

Pixelated Business Marketing starts… now.

Seth Godin @ TED: This is Seth’s newest set of perspectives, based on his book Tribes. The evolution of marketing from mass media to hero culture of sorts.

Malcolm Gladwell @ TED: This session ranks super high on my list because Malcolm gets you to think outside the box. What product or service do your customers deeply want but don’t know it?

Joseph Pine @ TED: If nothing else, this talk should make you think about what experiences are and how to give them to customers, rather than products or services.

Dan Ariely @ TED: Dan’s book, Predictably Irrational, is the basis for this talk about how our decision processes are flawed, including why consumers buy things they really shouldn’t.

Garr Reynolds at Google Talks: Garr is the author of Presentation Zen, a phenomenal book that asks you to look at how you present information and how you can make your presentations better, more impactful, and less boring.

Seth Godin @ Inbound Marketing Summit: Seth is a master marketer. His talk goes over how you can make your products or services more remarkable.

David Meerman Scott from Inbound Marketing Summit: David’s book, the New Rules of Marketing and PR, power part of this talk as he goes over how the ground is changing underneath traditional business outreach.

A few of my sessions.

Podcasters Across Borders 2009: I talk about why monetization is vital to new media.

Inbound Marketing Summit: I talk about whether or not your business should be podcasting.

Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Mixer: Social media prerequisites. Things you have to have in order before you start down the shiny object du jour.

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Get rich quick! Quit your day job! Money while you sleep! All claims made of social media and virtually every other new technology, idea, or movement since mankind first created money itself. Can you make money in social media? Should you make it an aim?

To answer this question, we have to dig into the history and concept of money itself.

What is money?

Ask any child and most adults, and no one will have a coherent answer to this question. People know money by what it can do, but not what it is. The classical definition of money is a medium of exchange, a measure of account, and store of value. For the purposes of this discussion, we’re going to focus on a medium of exchange and a store of value.

A Medium of Exchange

Before money, we had barter. Let’s say I raised chickens and you raised cows. If I wanted some beef and you wanted some chicken, we’d get together and trade. We’d negotiate how many chickens equaled a cow, and vice versa. If all went well, I went home with some beef for my family and you went home with some chicken.

But… what if you didn’t want chicken? You had beef, and I wanted beef, but you didn’t want chicken? Suddenly, I have a problem. We couldn’t trade. No amount of chicken I had would be helpful to me if you didn’t want chicken. I’d have to find someone who wanted chicken and see what they had to trade. Maybe they had seashells, and you wanted seashells, so I’d have to trade chicken for seashells first, then find you and trade seashells for beef.

This got really inefficient around Greek and Roman times, which is when currency got invented. Suddenly, we have a neutral intermediary. I think chicken is worth 5 copper coins, and you think cow is worth 250 copper coins. Now, if I have chicken and you have beef, but you still don’t want chicken, that’s fine. I’ll find someone who wants chicken and trade with them for copper coins. Then I’ll come back to you and buy as much cow as I can with the same copper coins.

This is one of the core roles of money – instead of having to barter everything, you can trade in a generally accepted medium of exchange.

A Store of Value

Here’s another problem with barter. Let’s say instead of chicken, I have wheat. You have cows. During harvest season, we can trade. I’ll trade you a few bales of wheat in exchange for a cow. Everyone’s happy.

What about in the winter, though? I have no wheat. All my wheat either got milled into flour, sold, consumed, or… spoiled. Wheat is transitory. Wheat spoils, rots, molds, etc. if you don’t use it within a certain period of time. In fact, most consumables eventually spoil.

Here’s where money comes in again. I go to the market and trade my wheat to someone who wants it. I get copper coins. Unlike wheat, these don’t spoil, decay, or rot. (yes, they do oxidize, but that’s a different conversation) If I sell enough wheat, I amass a large pile of coins and throughout the non-harvest season, I have copper coins to buy things with.

This is money’s role as a store of value. It takes the fruits of my labors – wheat – and stores it in a form that’s less subject to spoilage. Also, it’s a lot easier to carry around a pile of coins than a bale of wheat.

What does any of this have to do with new media and social media?

If you are a social media practitioner interested in earning money for your skills, you have to deeply understand money first.

First, money is a medium of exchange for other goods and services. Money doesn’t solve the value equation – that is, what you do must have value to someone. Money only makes trading value easier. If what you do is of no value to anyone, then like the farmer facing no demand for chicken, no matter how skilled you are, no one will trade with you. As a social media practitioner, your work has to have value.

The most successful social media practitioners recognize that social media in and of itself is of relatively little value. It’s a communications channel. What is of value is what you deliver to your audience. I deliver, for example, financial aid information on my Financial Aid Podcast. The fact that it’s a podcast has no inherent value; what has value is the quality of the information.

If you’re considering offering up your services to someone else as a social media practitioner, make sure that they have something of value to offer their customers, or both you and your client will fail to generate any business. Your own track record must demonstrate that you understand underlying value and how to present it in a social media context.

If you’re considering engaging the services of a social media practitioner inside your company, look to see how adept they are at understanding value. Forget how many friends they have or how often they blog – look to see if they can communicate their own value and the value of their clients’ goods and services to others. Examine their other work and see if it conveys well the value of the client’s goods and services. Most important, recognize that a truly skilled social media practitioner will decline to do business with you if your offering has no value.

Second, money as a store of value is vitally important to social media practitioners. Like all industries, social media, new media, online media, etc. all have trends. There’s a new shiny object every day, and that presents new opportunities for you to demonstrate your skills and earn some money in doing so. You have to not only capitalize on trends, but sock those earnings away. You have to be able to store the value of a trend so that when it cools – and it always does – you have a strong base of capital to operate with.

Equally important is your ability to recognize value and trends ahead of time so that as a platform matures – as blogging has – you’re ahead of the curve and in new spaces. This is the often referenced blue ocean strategy, where there’s virtually no competition in any vertical in a new area. Blue ocean was podcasting in 2005, blogging in 1997, Twitter in 2006, Facebook in 2004 and so forth. As a social media practitioner looking to earn a living at your craft, you need to be able to spot new blue oceans and move in long before others do, while recognizing that it will be some time before that space is highly desired by a large population.

For companies looking at social media, recognize that the store of value means you need operating capital and strong revenue streams today from your social media efforts, but you need to be investing for the future as well. Your internal financial health will dictate how you prioritize investing for the future vs. banking on what’s hot today.

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Burger King needs a new agency.

If you haven’t been following along, here’s the very short summary. CP+B is the agency in question tweeting as the fictional King character for Burger King on Twitter. Some social media folks object to a lack of disclosure by the agency, a lack of authenticity.

Here’s a different perspective on the issue: ROI. What in the world was CP+B thinking? I’d love to see even a back of the envelope ROI argument for creating a Twitter account for a fictional character to sell sandwiches, which is the whole point of Burger King.

Forget about transparency, authenticity, and whether or not an agency should tweet as a client. What in the world is the ROI or even apparent value of this initiative?

Here’s how I would have handled a client’s request to be engaged on Twitter: create a Twitter bot that you can message with your current location. It returns the three nearest Burger Kings so that you can get something to EAT, since the whole point of Burger King is to provide something for me to eat. I’d use it in a heartbeat when I travel. If Burger King and CP+B approached Twitter or social media in general from the perspective of being USEFUL, they’d get more sales and a measurable ROI.

It’s absolutely true that you can’t get precise ROI on social media. My work for the Student Loan Network means that ROI gets fuzzy, but the business connections, enhanced distribution of things like eBooks, inbound links, and other measurable activities are all improved by Twitter and social media. Can I put an exact dollar amount on it? No. Can I say that Twitter has improved the bottom line? Yes. Have I helped folks on Twitter get financial aid questions answered? Yes.

Be useful in your social media experiments. Don’t just do something in social media because it’s what the cool kids are doing. Do something that is useful, that serves a need, and your social media experiment will be a success.

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Financial Aid eBooks

Scholarship Search Secrets, Fifth Edition. This is the book I’m most proud of. It goes over how to use Google and other techniques online to find money for college. Of all the eBooks I’ve done, this one I think has made the most tangible difference in the lives of the people who have read it.

2009-2010 FAFSA Guide. The FAFSA eBook is for anyone and everyone having to fill out the latest FAFSA, which the government simplified by adding more questions and making existing questions more complex. Good job, Uncle Sam.

How to Find Cheap College Textbooks. A fun little eBook on various tools and shopping comparisons for the ever-overpriced college textbook.

How to Write a Killer Cover Letter. Take one part copy writing, one part sales, and one part experience as a recruiter and hiring manager, blend carefully, and you get an eBook about how to write a cover letter that doesn’t hit the circular file immediately.

Marketing eBooks

The Twitter Power Guide. Tired of the endless re-runs of “What is Twitter?”, I thought I’d kick it up a notch by creating an eBook of advanced things you can do with Twitter once you’re past the Twitter 101 stage.

Synchronizing Social Networks. Want to do even more with your social networking experiments? Want to preserve the progress you’ve already made and help keep your social media efforts future-proofed? This is the eBook for you.

8 Step Podcast Marketing Guide. Want to get your podcast off the ground? Here’s 8 things to think about and consider as you turn on the microphone.

Social Media Listening in 15 Minutes a Day. A short guide to help you start listening to social media outlets like blogs, podcasts, Twitter, news, and more in an effective, low-risk way. After reading it, you’ll be ready to kick off a social media listening initiative at no cost to you and see what’s important to you and how you market your company’s products or services.

If you enjoy these eBooks, let me know!

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In a period of recession, your brand is your shield, defending you against the onslaught of market forces. Your brand reminds consumers why they did business with you in the first place, the value of business with you versus a lower priced, potentially lower quality competitor. Your brand as shield provides some cover for you to reposition, to adjust, to realign on new terrain, to bide your time until opportunity becomes apparent and it’s time to wield the sword.

If you are skilled only with branding as a sword, then the forces of recession will toast you as surely as a dragon’s breath the moment the market turns.

If you are skilled only with branding as a shield, you’ll be left behind when others charge forward to opportunity and prosperity.

How do you put this to use?

Wield your brand as a sword by creating something worth talking about, giving customers experiences that amaze them. Solve their problems. Cut away obstacles to their success. Deliver what you promise plus a little bit more. Serve them in the truest sense of the phrase.

Wield your brand as a shield by never failing to deliver what you promise, by providing great service as a defensive play, by reminding customers in as many ways as possible why they’ve done business with you and why they should continue to do so. In marketing copy and sales talks, ask customers to recount their experiences to you as a way of self-reinforcing the good. (assuming you delivered on your promises)

This above all else, though: know when it is time to advance with sword in hand or hold your ground behind your shield.

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Consider Fizzcrank Corporation. It’s been doing okay for the past few years with traditional marketing, from brochures to trade shows, but it’s feeling a little stagnant. Products aren’t revving quite as quickly, and buyers aren’t buying Fizzcranks at the same levels they did two years ago. Bob the marketing manager has been wanting to do more field work to see what customers want, but management isn’t willing to step outside its comfort zone. What does Bob do?

Leverage the power of the shiny object! Bob brings shiny objects like Twitter, Google Reader, and Facebook to the table and says that for no money and just some time and effort, Fizzcrank Corporation can become a leader in the Fizzcrank industry. Management is bedazzled by the shiny objects and says that as long as the no money part is true, Bob can do whatever he wants with social media. The CMO gets all excited and has a press release written (that is ignored) to announce Fizzcrank Corporation’s thought leadership in the Fizzcrank vertical.

Now the real work begins – Bob sets up his listening post tools, tying Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a bunch of other networks together. (see my Twitter eBook for more details on how) He sets up monitoring for keywords, starts listening for Fizzcrank in global searches, and before long finds out that customers would really like to be able to use a Overcharged Capacitor with their Fizzcrank. Bob takes the idea back to the engineering gnomes who inform him that matching up an Overcharged Capacitor with a Fizzcrank is not only simple, but a really good idea, and Fizzcrank OC is born.

Fast forward three months. Fizzcrank Corporation now dominates the Fizzcrank industry with Fizzcrank OC. Products are selling better than ever, and Bob now talks to customers regularly. Management is happy with profits. Bob is happy to be talking to real people instead of writing press releases and billboards. Customers are happy because Fizzcrank is creating products they actually need and want.

The lesson in this fictional account is that social media can be a way to introduce a cultural change in your company, away from broadcast marketing and toward listening to what your customers are saying. If you work at a company that has not developed a culture of listening, see if you can use social media as a stealth play to begin the practice – after all, your customers likely know better than you do exactly what they want out of your products or services.

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Here’s the part I wonder about: what’s your plan B? Suppose the outage had lasted all day? All week? Suppose Twitter ran out of VC money entirely and had to shut down? What’s your plan B? Twitter isn’t like email, where you can just slap up another SMTP server and the mail keeps flowing – if Twitter goes down, everything tied to it goes down.

If you’re positioning Twitter to clients, what do you tell them Plan B is?

If Twitter is essential to your business or marketing communications (or your clients), do you have any way of establishing contact with those folks who follow you, or does your business shut down when Twitter shuts down?

Food for thought.

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For me, outside of the martial arts, unleashing your potential is about tapping into the powers you already have. In a social media presentation I give at speaking events, I ask audiences to name a superhero based on this list of powers:

- Nearly omniscient
- Can influence events and things from afar
- Can see all over the world

The answer, of course, is you, with the help of Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and the myriad other utilities available to us that give us as human being unprecedented capabilities.

The catch is, even though we have the capabilities, we may not be using them. We may be leaving potential on the table, and that means leaving money, friendship, love, and many other things on the table as well. Truthfully, we all leave potential on the table every day because life is just that good – there’s so much to explore, learn, and share that we’ll never get to even a fraction of it all in one human lifetime. That said, it’s at least worth trying.

So here’s an exercise to help you unleash a little more of your potential today, right now. If you’re involved in the social media scene and you have followers/fans/friends, pick someone in your contact list/address book/follower collection that you don’t know well and take 15 minutes to learn more about them. Find out what they do for work, find out what they do for fun. This is unleashing the potential a little bit more out of your personal network, exploring resources that you may not have known were there.

Once you’ve done that exercise, start looking around for more ideas and ways to get more juice out of the potential that surrounds you, that you have free access to. What can you learn to do a little bit better today? Who can you know a little bit better today?

Unleash your potential, and by the time 2009 draws to a close, you’ll have had an amazing year no matter what.

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1. Make some spaghetti, enough for 1 person for a reasonable meal. Doesn’t matter what kind, just make sure it’s washed and cool/cold. Leftover plain spaghetti works best.

2. In a large frying pan, as large as you can have, put 1 diced onion, 5 diced stalks of celery, 4 tbsp oil, and salt to taste. Crank up the heat as high as it will go. Do NOT cover.

3. When the vegetables show signs of browning/burning a bit, pull the pan off and put the veggies in a very large bowl.

4. Put 2 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp minced garlic in a pan. Melt the butter on low heat, then crank it to get the garlic to brown.

5. Throw the pasta in. Be careful of oil splatters.

6. Toss 2 tbsp soy sauce on the pasta after you throw it in. Toss quickly, then let sit on high, high heat for 3-5 minutes or until pasta browns.

7. Take pasta off heat and throw in the bowl.

8. Scramble an egg in the pan with the residual oil.

9. Throw the egg in the bowl.

10. Stir for a minute or two, and you have a stir fry!

The secret to a good stir fry is a large pan with surface area to spare and high, high heat. Don’t be shy – fire up the afterburner.

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1. They have to be achievable.

2. They have to be measurable.

3. They have to be atomic. By this, I mean they have to have pieces and steps. It’s not enough say you want to lose 25 pounds – you want to lose a pound every week, or some granular measurement that tells you whether you’re on track or not.

But here’s the most important tip for new year’s resolutions – you have to be resolute about them, absolutely firm in your convictions about achieving them. Being resolute isn’t easy; it helps greatly to have two emotional driving forces to power it. You have to really, really, really want something that you can define in very concrete, emotional terms, and you have to really, really, really want to get away from something in the same kind of terms. Let’s look at some examples.

Bad resolution:

I want to lose weight this year.

Good resolution:

I want to lose 25 pounds this year.

Great resolution:

I want to lose 25 pounds this year at 3 pounds a month, or roughly one every couple of weeks.

Almost certainly going to happen resolution:

I want to lose 25 pounds this year at 3 pounds a month, or roughly one every couple of weeks so that I stop feeling ashamed of myself first thing in the morning in the mirror and so I can hang out with my athletic friends on Monday nights at the club and attract Samantha’s attention for a date.

See how each resolution gets more and more specific, with more and more concrete ways to measure your success and give you reasons to do it?

Do the same with your resolutions. One thing that seems to help a lot of people is to write a resolution down, perhaps on a sheet of paper or plank of wood, and carry it with you. Make sure your resolution has these emotional ties to it so that it’s there as almost a totem for when you stand the possibility of going seriously off track. If you can carry it around somehow, you should.

I wish you not only a happy new year, but a year filled with achievements and accomplishments. Thanks for being part of my life.

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HEISEI 21/TSUCHINOTO/USHI DOSHI/KYUSHI KASEI meaning the 21st year of the Heisei reign of current Emperor, 6th of the Ji-Kan 10 Celestial Stems Inner Aspect of Earth, Year of the Ox and a Nine Purple Fire Ki Year.

Year of the Ox, Signifies leadership, strength, power and stability. As for Kyushi Kasei it is the 9th number of the cycle of 9. It is situated in the south position which is at the top or head of the 9-star compass so it implies mental development and intelligence. 9 is the highest number compared to 1. Its color is purple which implies high rank. It is common sense that happiness visits the family who treasures life, ancestors and Kami. It is the sun above your head at noon and implies vigorous ki, especially mental ki. In terms of fortune it is the time to make a plan, to sow, to fertilize and to prepare for the future.

This has the makings of a very exciting, very promising year ahead.

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See, in World of Warcraft, especially as a spellcaster, you have spells you can cast that function like ammunition. Each spell can be fired with a mandatory wait between casts, called a cooldown. Some spells have longer cooldowns than others, meaning that you have to wait longer in between uses.

When it comes to marketing, our marketing tools have cooldowns, too. Take a look at this brief, incomplete list of marketing tools:

- Press releases
- Email promos
- SEO
- Twitter
- Blogging
- Podcasting
- Direct mail
- Cold calls

Here’s the question – how often can you use each of these tools, assuming you have reasonably good content and reasonably good products and services? If you were to send out email promotions day after day, hour after hour, you’d burn your list to the ground very quickly. If you were to send out press releases, how often could you spend $200-$600 before you hit diminishing returns?

That’s what I’d tentatively call a marketing cooldown – the time you need to let a tool rest so that you don’t suffer diminishing returns. If you’re putting together a calendar of marketing efforts as part of your planning, knowing the cooldowns on the various tools you have at your disposal would let you best determine how to allocate your resources in advance, rather than on the fly.

You’d know, for example, that your particular house list (every list varies) has a 5 business day cooldown – that if you send more frequently than that, your unsubscribe or complaint rate goes up. You’d know that your Twitter followers drop off faster if every 9 tweets is about your company vs. every 22 tweets. You’d know that SEO has diminishing returns after a point and once you get close to that limit, your efforts are best spent elsewhere.

I can’t tell you what your marketing cooldowns are, because every company, every industry, every customer database is radically different. Some house lists don’t mind 3 emails a day, like Peter Shankman’s HARO. Other lists won’t tolerate more than a quarterly update. Spend some time determining what your company’s cooldowns are, and you’ll rapidly improve your marketing effectiveness.

Bonus food for thought: as you level up in World Warcraft, meaning you become more and more powerful, more and more skilled, your cooldown times decrease. (assuming you gear properly, etc.) A level 70 spellcaster can use their spells faster and more effectively on average than a level 1 spellcaster. The same is true for your marketing efforts – the better your products and services are and the more skilled a marketer you become, the more often you can use your marketing tools to promote them, because more people will actively want to hear about how you can help them solve their problems. Once you know where you stand in terms of your tools and their cooldowns, work with the rest of your company to buff up your products and services, and you’ll find that marketing them becomes easier and easier.

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Not one of them was useful – useful in the sense that the holiday card made my life or my work better beyond the entertainment factor. (not counting personal gifts from dedicated partners)

Here’s the thing. If you’re going to invest time and money, especially these days, in a holiday greeting that’s as well produced as many of the greetings have been, invest some time and energy into making the greeting even more powerful by making it useful. Include a link to a free eBook, audiobook, or other media that accompanies the greeting so that the recipient gets some additional value. Did you present at a conference? Share the video of your talk.

It doesn’t even have to be anything epic – a simple video like this one of popcorn is enough:

Heck, it doesn’t even have to be your own stuff – add a link in to a video from a