Did you get up this morning and decide to be productive? Happy? Sad? Frustrated?

Can you change that feeling around to something you want?

Social media is like life. It is what you make of it. A friend reminded me of that last night. The power of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook is that you get to decide who you want to have discourse with and you can’t complain if that discourse is not what you currently need. It is what you make of it, and you have made it that way.

Change it. I am, starting today with Twitter and then this blog over the weekend. Stay tuned.

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Thoughts on AudioBoo?

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But what I like the most about getting together with this group is that I get to play the contrarian, and I relish the role. Any member of my family or folks who have known me for a long time will tell you, I love to pick a fight. I’m not doing it to be annoying, I do it for one of three other reasons:

1. To determine if you REALLY believe what you just said;
2. To introduce another line of thinking that ultimately will shape your thinking;
3. To determine if I REALLY believe what you just said;

The key in being contrarian is not only to have an understanding of the topic, but to be around people who know you well enough to understand that you are not just doing this as an annoyance, but deliberately to encourage debate. This is an important role to have filled whether eating steaks with friends or filling out your executive staff. Too many “yes men” creates a weak organization, don’t surround yourself with those types of people or it will mean your failure to grow.

On that note I have made the decision to end “Engage In PR”. I’ve been blogging on this site (originally on blogspot) for nearly five years, but it is time for a much needed change. PR is still part of my job and will always be part of my professional DNA, however it is constraining when it is so central to the URL. Plans are in the works to launch a new site by the end of this summer and I’m excited to introduce you all to my co-authors at that point.

This is not my last post on Engage In PR, that will come later, but being the contrarian I knew it was time to question what I was doing and find the next challenge.

What did you question today?

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I tried the rice trick. No luck.

Folks made suggestions on alternatives. But I’m stuck for the time being with AT&T.

But I don’t miss my iPhone in the least after 48 hours. I think, in fact, I enjoy not having a phone to answer to (pun intended) at all times.

Could you live your life today without a mobile phone and mobile network access?

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We’ve already done so many cool things with video, social media, Flash, web, events and more. And because we think the environment and opportunity is so killer, we want to share this experience with someone who is looking to work in graphic design.

The official description is below, but hit me up on the blog, Twitter or eMail if you have any questions and spread the word because in my opinion this is a really great opportunity to be around some amazing people!

——-

Fast-growing technology company seeks graphic design student looking for opportunity to gain professional experience in a fast-paced work environment. You will work with a proven marketing team to leverage and develop your skills as a multimedia artist to create, among other items, web graphics, brochures, flyers, posters and booth backdrops.

Candidates must:

• Be a currently enrolled student focused on design
• Possess proficient skills in InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and Fireworks
• Thrive under tight deadlines
• Work well in a team atmosphere
• Have attention to the smallest of details
• Commit at least 15 hours per week on location

Photography, video editing and Flash skills are each a plus.

Submit your resume, cover letter and relevant portfolio samples to jobs@breakingpoint.com.

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Picture by www.shutterdaddy.com

Last night while toiling away trying to become smarter about SalesForce.com and javascript, I lost track of the Red Sox game happening in a browser window at the bottom of a virtual pile. The last thing I remember about the game was the Yankees had it down to a one-run game after back-to-back jacks and Okajima had struck out Derek Jeter. Flipping back to a blog post on SalesForce web-to-lead, time was lost within my puny brain and when I went back to the game it was over and all I knew was the Sox won 6-5. And for most people that would be enough, but I had questions; did Papelbon come into the game even though he was ill? Had Papi had another at-bat and what did he do with this opportunity? How many outs did Okajima have to get before, possibly, passing the ball to Papelbon?

What caught my attention during the game was a challenge we are trying to solve with SalesForce and our web analytics package. Already we have set up our online forms to auto-populate into SalesForce, allowing us to streamline web requests for more information. These forms give us basic information about the person and what they want, but I get ZERO information on how they found the form page, where they were before and how they originally found our site. Today we can do this manually with time-stamps and reverse-lookup, but you can imagine that this is tedious when you are getting a lot of inbound responses. What I want is to open up a campaign in SalesForce, click on an inbound response and see how they originally found our site (search, direct, Twitter, etc). All the information is out there, it just needs to be integrated into one…well a box score!

Those not into baseball, or even if you are into baseball but are not as old as myself, the box score is a statistical overview of a baseball game and it includes enough information for you to get a decent picture of what occurred. Let’s go back up to my problem having missed the end of the Red Sox game; I headed to Boston.com, clicked on the box score and scrolled to the pitching lines:

Courtesy of Boston.com

I now know that Okajima had to make 4 outs and struckout two more batters besides Jeter. Papelbon got another save, although he did give up another walk. And looking at the batting section I answered my question about David Ortiz, unfortunately. Suddenly the game was much clearer in my mind and I knew that in tonight’s game Okajima and Papelbon could certainly pitch again, but most likely no more than an inning a piece.

The box score provided clarity for one game and strategy for the next. All in one simple statistical representation.

I need a Marketing Box Score to look at every morning and quickly see the link between lead-generation and web analytics.

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• “Mistakes happen, but you have to minimize them when driving.”
• “Never underestimate the people around you, they may help you out of a jam.”
• “Always look twice before proceeding, you never know what could sneak up on you.”
• “Try to never go in reverse for that long of a period.”
• “Don’t worry about little Brian, I think you only clipped his left leg.”

OK, that last one didn’t happen and I’m sure my memory is not recalling the exact words, but the messages are consistent to the mantra I learned while learning to drive. The messages are also exactly what I would tell someone when approaching how to market in today’s communications world.

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B2B marketing is harder than B2C marketing. Feel free to argue the point below, perhaps one day I’ll do a post on the topic, but not today. Today I’m thinking about how B2B marketing is really B2C2C2C2C2C marketing. And this is why it is so difficult.

Marketing business-to-business sounds fairly mundane. One business communicates with another about goods and or services they can supply the other business for a nice big fat check. The problem is, and this may shock some of you, I have never in all of my years in this job seen companies talk to one another. No, never.

Companies are made up of people. People represent the company and different facets of its business. People talk to people, helping business talk to business.

B2B marketing is finding the right way, time and place in which the right people within your business can talk to the right people within their business.

All facets of this conversation are important and it is why, when undergoing B2B marketing you need to employ KUALLA:

• Know the people on the other end of the line (or Tweet to be completely current);
• Understand their pain point by making it your own;
• Ask where they congregate and communicate, offline and on;
• Listen to the stories of the people that make up the company your are trying to reach, versus simply understanding the company;
• Learn about the processes it takes for these people to get their job done within the company each day;
• Act on your knowledge to provide these people with the information they need to understand you and thus your company;

KUALLA helps you focus on the fact that you are talking with people, even when performing B2B marketing. Ultimately by the time you reach the end of KUALLA you have established a relationship with the right person in the right way. Marketing it may have been, but marketing it certainly did not seem.

UPDATE: And yes, this is poking fun at all the “marketing experts” who use inane acronyms to describe their methods…although if you are a book publisher I’m more than willing to write a few hundred pages on the “Power of KUALLA” ;)

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Monday Microsoft officially introduced us all to Bing. Although overshadowed by Google Wave, Bing is a slick search engine with a lot of features I’m digging. Things I think I like thus far:

• For starters, it is super fast, at least until it indexes everything on the Interwebs.
• The SERPs are slick, allowing you to mouse over results and get a quick glimpse at the page.
• You have more options when searching video and images, including filtering them by size, layout, even just by headshots (versus those full body kind).
• It is also indexing things a bit differently, for example on Google my name brings you my blog, on Bing it shows my LinkedIn page.

And this is why Bing is important for you, especially since they reportedly had 6% of search share before it was even officially launched. The results you have come to expect from Google, Yahoo and even Live are now different in Bing. What if you had been optimizing for “guitar picks”? On Google InTuneGP has the number one slot with their custom picks, while Bing has them second. But take a look at zZounds, who jump from 8th on Google to 3rd on Bing. That is above the fold, critical for any company, particularly a consumer company.

This discrepancy is critical and something you must be doing with all your keywords IMMEDIATELY. The reason is two-fold:

1. Words that you have been optimizing for Google may not be appearing in the same place as Bing and action may need to be taken.
2. Competitive keywords that were difficult to optimize for on Google may be easier right now on Bing, not to mention cheaper if you go the PPC route.

It is always fun to review all the bloggers talking about what is good, or most likely bad, about a new search engine. But it is important to put on your marketing cap and make sure all of your hard work in SEO is being realized on Bing and take advantage by getting a leg up in understanding this new player.

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@breakingpoint: If you could ask the Cyber Czar applicants just one question, what would it be?

Tomorrow…anything.

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