Anjum’s SEO Killers Include

• Mobile.
• Social Media.
• Technology.
• Google.
• Users.

I would add a sixth force killing SEO – Entropy.

How Entropy Creates

Writing How Entropy Is Creating Web 3.0 Right Under Our Noses the death of SEO was only tangentially considered. Life inside of the world’s largest content network isn’t as anthropomorphic as we make it. Digital life is mathematical and instantaneous over and over.

SEO’s Thermodynamics

As Brian Cox explains entropy and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics predicts the universe. Left to its own devices the universe and all riders upon it moves from Low Entropy (ordered) to High Entropy (random).

“Entropy always increases. Why is that? Because it is overwhelmingly more likely it will.” Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe

SEO’s Sandcastle

The old SEO was a series of interrelated shifting rules.  Creating SEO in support of the e-commerce website my team managed for seven years felt like building sandcastles on a beach. No matter how elaborate its defense all sand castles succumb. Entropy wets the sand, crumbles walls and moves particles from low entropy (SEO and its rules) to high entropy (signals bouncing in every direction from mobile to apps and back again).

Forces noted by Anjum’s article contribute to an inevitable shift. We lucky few Internet marketers are nothing if not prolific sand castle builders. Internet marketers all learn a natural lesson fast – it is impossible to step into the same ocean twice.

The ocean, our lives and the world’s largest content network change in an instant.

Entropy explains why TIME moves in one direction. Entropy explains why Internet marketing is and will always be dynamic and changing. We can’t step into the same Internet twice.

There for a moment we SEOs believed in order, rules and structure. Even words such as “structure” and “chaos” color neutral events. The secret behind the curtain is NO ONE and NOTHING is “In Control”. Control is an illusion lifted away by entropy’s gentle insistence as time moves in one direction – forward.

Inspiration Not Rules

Humans are so funny. We grasp at straws hoping to change the universe. We form tribes and self-reinforcing consensus as if our tiny human insistence could stop the tide.

We are so much SMALLER than our philosophy and beliefs. We are tiny in the hands of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. We are statistically more likely to create patterns and connections than they are to exist.

As Nicolas Taleb so conclusively points out in his masterwork The Black Swan BECAUSE we want a glimpsed pattern to be SO doesn’t make it so. Our wishing however insistently can’t change laws sure to outlive us all.

For a few moments SEOs were Masters of the Universe, an elite priesthood capable of rubbing two nickels together to create a quarter. As Taleb’s freakonomics explains we are rarely as skilled and intelligent as we believe (lol).

The future of Internet marketing is about inspiration and greatness more than rules. Life is short and better spent chasing greatness than playing an endless game of Follow The Lemmings Leader.

Service and Humble Greatness

So much of our conditioning as SEOs (or people) is serendipitous. Some reward pellet is released as we hear a secret bell ring. We register an accidental pairing and immediately test to make it happens again.

Bingo – we say even if the test was muddled or inconclusive. We SEE connection so strongly denial hardly has a chance. Everything isn’t only random all of the time. Greatness DOES exist and we have a batter’s chance of recognizing it (about .400).

We have about the same chances to create greatness. Anyone who tells you they bat better than .400 is trying to sell something. Marketing isn’t capable of batting better than .400 because entropy has the universe’s best curve ball.

We may create the idea of SEO Castles, castles of impenetrable stone instead of sand, because time is short and our pattern recognition so strong we believe our own follows, press clippings or self reinforcing feedback loops.

Don’t.

The best approach to Internet marketing is and will always be as a humble servant approaches a Zen master. “Master,” one student leaned in to ask his much older teacher a question, “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” The master held the student’s gaze for ten seconds before slapping him firmly across the face.

The master said nothing as the student rubbed his cheek.

The post SEO’s Terminal Entropy appeared first on New Media Leaders.

Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us explains differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Around 30% of people are extrinsically motivated Pink explains. Extrinsically motivated people respond to Stimulus – Response rewards more than intrinsically motivated people. Extrinsic motivation requires escalating rewards.

Most capitalist systems are based on extrinsic motivation. Capitalism assumes workers ONLY work for rewards. You don’t have to read Drive to know people work for many reasons. Apply the wrong motivational approach and results suffer. When Sweden paid blood donors blood donations went down. When Sweden made a contribution in a blood donor’s name conversions and response increased. Don’t apply extrinsic motivation when people want to help (i.e. are intrinsically motivated).  

Why are most marketing and sales approaches based on extrinsic motivation?  Pink’s book explores reasons our motivational systems are helplessly “old school”. Great Internet marketing must motivate extrinsic and intrinsically motivated people.

Ways your Internet marketing can motivate the intrinsically motivated:

• Create authentic 360 degree marketing.
• Share everything early.
• Address 5 W’s in your marketing (Who, What, Where, When, Why).
• Create active presence in social networks.
• Develop relevant and fun email marketing.
• Listen more than you talk.
• Curate what you hear back to supporters.
• Market to WE not US and THEM.
• Recognize importance of the Hero’s Journey.

Only As Good As Your “Myths”

Hearing, “What we do is BORING,” at content marketing conferences never ceases to amaze. “Boring” used as an excuse for why a small to medium-sized business (SMB) can’t develop great content is absurd. Passion and aspirations drive behavior. A “curse of knowledge” could be the problem. In Made To Stick the Heath brothers share something most marketers know – the worst team to sell something is the one closest to it.

What you do is heroic. What you do changes the world in a measurable and important way.  Do you need to get back in touch with your company’s greatness?

Ways to re-discover your hero journey:

• Create a “help tell our story contest” INSIDE your company.
• Create a “help tell our story contest” OUTSIDE your company.
• Ask key customers to help reconnect with your GREATNESS.
• Hire a writer/marketer to rewrite your about page after doing some research.
• Ask customers and employees to PIN your story on Pinterest.
• Use an Online Reputation Management tool such as Radian6 and review ALL comments and beliefs about your company.
• Hire someone like my friend Mary Kay O’Connor to conduct customer interviews.
• Interview your employees.

Discover or re-discover your creation story, hero’s journey and listen carefully for the ring of truth from the social web.

Compete Different

Know your story AND become a great storyteller are CSFs (Critical Success Factors) for Internet Marketing. Compete different is a CSF too. Google demands content and rewards “altruism”. Google’s algorithm is based on LINKS. Links are VOTES. Google is a vote tabulation machine.

“Link Love”, sharing a link from your website, blog or social networks,  might be the most altruistic act on earth.

Seth Godin, speaking at High Point University several weeks ago, shared a story. Godin told an audience of more than 400 students and Internet marketers how a Paris coffee shop is so sure their coffee is great their loyalty program encourages customers to try other Parisian coffees.

This “collaborative competition” creates a rising tide. All Parisian coffee shops will rise with the tide. Together we are stronger than alone in marketing, Google and life.

Does your company have the confidence to suggest customers try competitors? Can your company take a wider view and so become an authority?

Greatness means passion, art and commitment. Google and Godin tell us greatness happens by taking a larger view, by caring enough to create rising tides.  Imagine we sit at a Paris sidewalk cafe sipping cinnamon latte spiced with nutmeg. “Want the sports section.” a fellow ex-pat asks. “Yes,” we say because yes is always the answer to such a helpful stranger.

* Godin picture from High Point University blog.

The post Internet Marketing: End of Zero Sum appeared first on New Media Leaders.

Image from www.simpleton.com/

Haiku Deck App Review

A product review is not something you’ll see very often here on New Media Leaders. Maybe never again.

But it’s been a long time since I’ve been this enamored with an app…and an app to create presentations no less! Not something one usually gets worked up about.

The powerful secret of Haiku Deck is its Zen-like simplicity. It almost forces you to create better slide decks!

Haiku Deck obviously takes its name from Haiku, Japanese poetry that creates complex psychic imagery out of a fixed number of on (phonetic sounds) in a fixed pattern (usually 5-7-5). Haiku relies on the contrast and relationship between two entities brought into juxtaposition. Consider this from one of the masters of haiku, Matsuo Basho:

Autumn moonlight –
a worm digs silently
into the chestnut.

In a similar fashion, Haiku Deck restrains the number of words per slide and then brings in images that help the few words say more than they could by themselves. Here’s a great example from Jonathan Colman, Principle Experience Architect (good Lord I love that title!) at REI:

Painting Poetic Presentations

After attending many conferences I realized that the most memorable presentations were the ones that kept words to a minimum (every time you create a bullet point a kitten–and your audience–dies) and let beautiful images tell the story. Haiku Deck makes this easy.

Creating each slide involves words and then images. You’re forced to keep the words few: you have space for one larger font text line and one smaller. The idea is to distill down to the main idea.

HaikuDeck Text Entry Screen

Then when you click the images button, Haiku Deck uses your words to search for Creative Commons attribution-licensed images. Select an appropriate one and it fills the slide with full-bleed brilliance. You can also upload your own images, or create cool charts and graphs right in the app.

HaikuDeck Image Search Screen

You have to try it to see how it can inspire you. But first peruse their gallery to get a feel for how people have used it creatively.

Here is a Haiku Deck I created recently: “Rand Fishkin’s Top 10 Content Marketing Tips”:

The post Haiku Deck: Making Presentations Poetic appeared first on New Media Leaders.

Last week I had the honor of listening to Amy present to a packed venue on Content Marketing where the Tweetable quotes flowed like water. Let me be clear, the entire event was packed with super smart advice, tips and inspirational quotes. One in particular hit me personally like a freight train.

Awesome message: “Make heroes of the brave.” – @commsninja #SEOMeetup

— Dan Speicher (@DanielSpeicher) March 26, 2013

Amy was quick to point out that the concept came from Chuck Hollis (VP and Global Marketing CTO at EMC) during a Geek Whisperer podcast she was participating in with him the previous week. Amy had asked him a question (at about the 17:45 mark) about forcing employees to participate in social media or choosing the people who raise their hands. Chuck explains that he finds success when he introduces selective social modeling.

Find the thought leaders, find the brave, find the passionate – make heroes of them.

What I love about this concept is that it should inspire both the would-be heroes as well as their managers. Stop waiting to be chosen and step up. Stop prodding the unwilling and take advantage of the people who already want to shine.

The post Make Heroes of the Brave appeared first on New Media Leaders.

Content Riffs

Miles riffed by using a composition’s outline to create boundaries for improvisations. Content marketers riff too.

Great Internet marketers like fellow New Media Leaders (Mark Traphagen, Phil Buckley, Amy Lewis) know how to riff content like Miles played jazz. They improvise inside of a piece of content’s borders.

They may find and create new associations and leaps of brilliance and faith, but they know their content’s borders. They bend those borders as they create new ways of thinking, writing and curating.

G+ A Riffer’s Dream

The best tool for riffing content is Google Plus. G+ is conversational and so easy to build up a conversation. Twitter takes work to stop the ensemble (those you follow) long enough to even hear the solos.

Facebook has its moments, but your Facebook audience isn’t as singular as G+’s circles can create. Many of my Facebook friends don’t care about Internet marketing, so friends may drop off my page. Nothing hurts SEO and personal branding as much as Facebook churn.

Facebook’s ad engine may be a powerful instrument to riff content, but I haven’t used Facebook that way yet (has anyone?). The power of all that FOCUSED data seems to promise finding an appreciative audience and fellow players is possible and even easy.

LinkedIn also feels like riffing content should be easy. LinkedIn came up in Atlantic BT’s top 10 referring websites for last year and for first quarter 2013 (I’m Atlantic BT’s Marketing Director). Presence in Atlantic BT’s Top Referring websites is somewhat miraculous considering what we’ve done on LinkedIn (nothing), so Linkedin earns a campaign soon.

If anyone has experience prospecting with Facebook or LinkedIn please comment in, or Tweet @NewMediaLeaderz with #RiffTumble or comment below.

Scoop.it is another favorite content marketing instrument. Scoop.it’s immediate feedback loop shares views and Rescoops in close to real time making it invaluable in what the Expion team defined as “Real Time Marketing” at SXSW.

Tumbling Content

When a curated post gets an immediate response on Scoop.it or any other social net I double down. I move the content through my social networks (5 blogs, 4 Twitter accounts, 5 Facebook pages, Pinterest, Google Plus, Tumblr and other social nets such as StumbleUpon and Delicious).

“Doubling down” tumbles the content. Tumbling most content quiets it right down (lol).

This “quieting” is similar to the old “stop, drop and roll” advice from when we were children. If your pants catch fire, “Stop, Drop and Roll” to put them out. Tumbling most content puts out the spark, the precious viral ember.

Tumbling curated content isn’t a huge investment. Writing content or hiring writers to create content is expensive. 95% of the content you tumble will become less viral. Content that becomes less viral after being tumbled, at least in its present form, has gone as far as your curatorial care can take it.

But there is a very special 5% of content every Internet marketer / content gold miner lives to find. When you tumble these magic coins the tumble gets stronger faster as powerful forces sign on and support your tumble with shares, comments and tumbles of their own.

Strike this iron just right, tumble hot topical content in just the right place at the right time and the magic dryer exponentially produces gold coins. We Internet marketers are secret magic dryer junkies. We spend hours analyzing patterns to understand the magic dryer. We dream of gold coins cloning and reproducing themselves at ever faster rates of speed.

Riff and Tumble

Explaining content marketing to my brother over dinner recently I noticed he had that look, the one I used to give my father when he tried to explain what he did for a living. “Do you create the content,” my brother asked and I knew he was lost. “Sure,” I explained, “but we see curation as an important alternative”. I went on to explain how content marketers play for authority inside the largest content network the world ever imagined.

Problem is the network isn’t sitting waiting for ME and MY CONTENT. There are existing “authorities” who jealously guard their industrial sized magic dryers. Disruption out in the “long tail” is the only rebel tactic capable of generating return.

“Rebel tactic” got my brother’s attention. He asked for an example. I told him about 5 Magical Do More With Less Curation Tools. I knew tools reviews achieve a high number of social shares. I knew every Internet marketing team feels under resourced and overwhelmed because I used to manage one. I combined those two ideas to riff a piece of content that tumbled so fast it now has a potential audience over a million thanks to ReTweets, G+ Shares and Rescoops.

“So you play for The Share,” my brother asked. Sort of I explained. Shares confirm the riffed or tumbled content is hitting a nerve. To PLAY FOR shares reduces chances of getting any. That statement produced a huge, “huh?” Miles didn’t improvise to promote himself but to encourage a journey inside the music. Content marketers riff and tumble content to create conversations with other marketers.

We create content marketing out of LOVE and passion.

A great content marketer’s involvement and care is easy to see and feel. It is easy for other marketers to pick up lines of thought and tumble or riff on top of existing content. I called this “sum is greater than the parts” collaboration The Commons Revolution a few days ago on Atlantic BT’s blog.

Seeing my brother’s thousand yard stare again I promised to discuss The Commons Revolution at our next dinner. “So what you do is like Jazz,” he said as I nodded, smiled and smacked his shoulder a little. “Yes, what I do is like jazz,” I said.

Follow New Media Leaders @NewMediaLeaderz

The post Tumble & Riff, Internet Marketing’s Jazz appeared first on New Media Leaders.

But you did stop. Because the “social miracle” to which I refer is the ubiquitous traffic light.

Think about what happens at traffic lights (and stop signs) thousands upon thousands of times every day. People seeing a green light facing their street proceed at full speed through the intersection. They do this without hesitation because their experience tells them that they can trust (with thankfully very rare exceptions) that people encountering a red light on the perpendicular roadway will stop.

Why do people stop at red lights? Sure there is the fear of possible punishment from law enforcement if you don’t. And there is the risk of being hit by someone coming the other way. But a mass disobedience by all the people encountering any given red light could obviate either of those in a moment. But that doesn’t happen. 99.99% of the time, people stop.

I submit that the primary reason they do is a conditioned understanding of the value of cooperative trust in a social system. My stopping on red gives someone else a chance to go; and the mutual stopping of others allows me to go in my turn. Through this unspoken but powerful social transaction, we all get where we are going faster and more efficiently.

Sure the punishment and injury threats strongly reinforce this behavior, but I still believe at its core is an innate knowledge, programmed into us by evolution, that cooperation based on trust aids the survival and thriving of our species.

Trust and the Power of Collaborative Consumption

All economies are built on a similar social trust in some form. In the capitalist economies of the Industrial Age, we were asked to place that trust in large institutions, primarily banks that control the capital and governments that regulate its flow. While that economic model built great and mighty things, it also thrived on scarcity and finite games resulting in a few big winners and lots of lesser players (or losers).

In the emerging connected economy trust and the capital that flows from it are increasingly decentralized and distributed. Now it is possible for virtually anyone to become a center of trust and reputation in any given field. And from that center can flow capital (in all forms, not just money) and power/influence.

Here’s one example of how such new economies are already emerging. In a TED Talk last year, Rachel Botsman spoke about the power of what she called “collaborative consumption.”

Here’s her definition of collaborative consumption from the video:

Collaborative Consumption: A social and economic system driven by network technologies that enable the sharing and exchange of assets from spaces to skills to cars in ways and on a scale never possible before.

Time Magazine called Collaborative Consumption one of “Ten Ideas that Will Change the World.” [Tweet the Collaborative Consumption definition]

Watch the video for a number of examples of Collaborative Consumption, but let me highlight one that Ms. Botsman speaks about. AirBNB is an online service that connects people with extra space (from a spare bedroom to a spare medieval castle) with people looking for a place to stay in a particular city. It has taken off incredibly, with people now in 192 countries willing to open their homes and spare spaces to strangers.

How does AirBNB get that to happen? In part, they work hard to build security around the connections they make with things like verified profiles, damage insurance for hosts, holding of transactions until both parties are satisfied with the arrangements, and allowing guests and hosts to connect through mutual, already-established social connections via Facebook.

But at the core of the success of AirBNB is an effective trust rating system based on reviews. Both guest and host can be reviewed. The benefit for hosts is obvious, but what is different and powerful here is the benefit for guests from such a rating system. A frequent guest who earns a high rating can command special deals and preferences from potential future hosts. Reputation has its perks.

Online Networks Build Economies of Trust Between Strangers

According to Ms. Botsman, ”It’s about empowering people to make meaningful connections, connections that are enabling us to rediscover a humanness that we’ve lost somewhere along the way…Instead of consuming to beat the Jones’s, consuming to get to know the Jones’s.”

At one point in her TED Talk she reminds us that a trust economy among “ordinary” people is nothing new. It was the basis of every medieval village or American small town. What is new because of the Internet is the ability to rapidly scale such powerful trust among perfect strangers across the globe.

A study by the Pew Research Center found that “the typical internet user is more than twice as likely as others to feel that people can be trusted.” Online connections really do help establish reputation which turns into the power of trust. [Tweet this!]

However, we all know trust doesn’t eliminate danger, especially when strangers are involved. Someone could run that red light and kill us. That deposed Nigerian prince sending us emails offering to share his wealth may not be who he says he is.

The Importance of Reputation Scoring

Every economy needs ways of evaluating trusted sources of capital and trustworthy individuals in whom capital should be invested. In the industrial economy we had tust markers like ratings of bond issues by businesses and municipalities, and credit ratings for consumers.

So every online community needs trust measures and reputation scores. There have been some somewhat ham-fisted attempts at assigning a very high level score, such as Klout or Kred. But such scores have very limited utility when it comes to figuring out who you can actually trust to perform a certain service for you or join you in a partnership of some kind.

Ms. Botsman makes the point that reputation is contextual [Tweet this!]. Just because you’re trustworthy in one thing doesn’t mean you are in another. An individual’s “Reputation Capital [is] the worth of her reputation–intentions, capabilities, and values–across communities and marketplaces.” She envisions that in the not-distant future there will be apps that will allow us to access the earned reputation of individuals across a broad array of categories.

Image screen capped from http://youtu.be/kTqgiF4HmgQ

There are already startups working on this. Reputation will become the most powerful currency in the 21st century [Tweet this!]. And it will make a number of staples of the 20th century industrial economy obsolete: credit scores, resumes, headhunting services among them.

A Future of Wuffie?

Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Downandout.jpg

One of the wilder envisionings of such an economy is in Cory Doctorow’s science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (free download). In a world some fifty years from now where scarcity and deprivation is a thing of the past and all basic needs of all humans are met, the only thing to strive for is luxuries and the freedom and ability to create. In Doctorow’s future, the basis of earning those privileges is wuffie.

All individuals in the novel have implanted brain chips that are able to transmit and record wuffie. Wuffie is simply the cumulative score of reputation garnered from others who have encountered you. If you do something amazing or beneficial, your wuffie will go up. Be rude to someone or break a promise, and your wuffie may go down. Wuffie can be consciously sent to another, but most transactions take place automatically and unconsciously as the brain chips simply measure and transmit the sentiments of one human being toward another.

Whether or not wuffie is in your (or your grandchildren’s) future, what seems certain is that reputation measurement will drive much–if not all–of the connected economy.

The Future Is Now: Google Search and Authorship

However, we don’t need to wait for Doctorow’s Magic Kingdom to see the new reputation economy at work. In addition to services like AirBNB that trade on the basis of earned and measure reputation, the world’s largest Internet connector, Google, is rapidly moving in that direction.

Since Larry Page and Sergey Brin first came up with the Google “PageRank” algorithm while at Stanford University, web search engines have been about reputation measurement in some form or other. Until fairly recently, that measurement relied almost entirely upon hyperlinks from static web pages that were counted as “votes” toward the potential authority of a page to which they pointed.

With the advent of the social web, Google has increasingly been incorporating a “social signal” into the complex algorithm that controls how pages rank in Google Search in response to a given query entered by a user. This social signal, generated by individual persons interacting with a certain piece of content in various ways–sharing it, commenting on it, liking it, +1′ing it, etc.–is valuable because it gives some indication of what real people think the authority of a page ought to be.

In early 2012 Google introduced “Search + Your World” (S+YW), a new iteration of their search product where users logged in to their Google accounts would have their search engine results significantly affected by their Google network (friends on Google’s social network Google+ as well as other Google contacts, such as one’s Gmail address book).

So now if I search Google for “top real estate agents on Twitter” I get top results like this:

The little grey silhouette I’ve circled above indicates that this is a personalized result. In other words, Google has elevated this result above some I might have seen otherwise for my query. Why? Because Bill Gassett, the author of that article, is in my Google+ circles. Because I’ve circled him, and perhaps also because I interact with Bill quite a bit on Google+, Google figures his result might be more meaningful to me than many others from “strangers.” And they are right! Because I know Bill via Google+ I know that he is knowledgable about social media marketing for real estate. And so I really do trust and value his article above any others I might read.

Google Authorship. But there’s more at work in the result shown above than just personalization of search. See the photo of Bill next to the result for his article? Bill’s face is there because he makes use of a Google feature known as Google Authorship. Authorship allows content creators to connect their online content anywhere on the web to their Google+ profile. In return, they can qualify to have the “authorship rich snippet” we saw above appear for their search results.

The value of this ought to be obvious. We are programmed by evolution to be drawn to human faces, and to trust anything associated with that face over anything we deem more impersonal. In the case of Bill’s result, that trust is well-warranted as I explained. But how do we know such trust won’t lead us astray? Sure my eyes may be drawn to a face in my search results, but if I don’t already know that face, why should I trust that person more than any other stranger?

Enter Author Rank. Author Rank (sometimes expressed as “AuthorRank” in homage to Google’s PageRank) is a community-created term for something Google has talked about, in patents and elsewhere, for several years now. The idea of Author Rank is to use Authorship to trace the social signals pointing at a given author’s content on a given topic and score the author in that topic by the amount of social trust signals directed toward it. Most importantly for our reputation credit discussion here, more important than how many people engage with a given piece of content is who does. If a person who also has a high trust ranking for “Google search” often interacts favorably with my Google search-related content, that will count for more for me in that topic than a lot of non-authoritative people doing the same. The resulting score would serve as a boost to the author in the search results when people search for the topic

If and when Google implements Author Rank, it could be a real game-changer in terms of online influence and reputation. And as we’ve discussed above, in the connected economy reputation is a marketable economy. I’ve been predicting for over a year now that we will see the day when the salary market for high-reputation online Google Authors will be as high as it is now for people like talented web developers [Tweet this!]. (If you want to know more about Google Authorship and Author Rank, see my post “Google Authorship and Author Rank.”)

Building Wuffie in a Reputation Economy

To conclude this article, let me refer back to the principle expressed in my first post for New Media Leaders: “The Circle of Giving: Why Make a Gift of Your Expertise?”

If reputation is the currency of the new economy, how does one build up such capital. Some of the ways should be obvious from our current experience. Create a high-quality product or service. Provide exceptional customer service. Deliver more than is promised.

But there is another factor which I think will be many times more powerful in the connected economy than it was in the industrial economy: the power of giving it away. [Tweet this!]

Even in the current economy giving away product or expertise has some ROI. It can be a way of getting people in the store or giving them enough of a taste of your talents that they are willing to pay for more.

But in the connected economy, giving away will be a major way of directly earning capital. Not the old-style capital of money or money-related credit, but the new capital of reputation. By giving in ways meaningful and helpful to others in online communities, they begin to send major wuffie your way as they share your content, rate you favorably on rating services, and recommend you to their friends. And as we saw above in the Google example, the web is maturing in a way that can rapidly expand and spread the capital value of such good reputation.

What are you doing right now to build your reputational capital in the emerging connected economy? [Tweet this!]

Postscript: Fellow NML blogger Marty Smith pointed me to this post by David Amerland: What If We Had a New Value System for Goods and Services? Read it for a (seemingly) radical proposal on how to turn the present scarcity economy upside down and turn it into the giving economy I’ve sketched at here and in my previous post.

Stop Light Photo Credit: atomicshark via Compfight cc
Strangers on a Bench Photo Credit: estherase via Compfight cc
Shadow People Photo Credit: Pink Sherbet Photography via Compfight cc

Here is a HaikuDeck retelling of this post:

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad

The post Trust: The Currency of the New Economy appeared first on New Media Leaders.

Imagine Your 3 Favorite Brands
Coke, Nike, Tom’s Shoes or Prada? Brands are shorthand we use to swim through contemporary life’s information flood. Without brands we drown in marketing.

Groupon isn’t sustainable marketing because it destroys brands.

We don’t BUY brands, we JOIN them.

- Faith Popcorn, marketing guru

Groupon was a boiler room operation with a predictable demise. Groupon is all about the pitch. Small to Medium Sized Businesses suckered into believing Groupon campaigns = Internet marketing may or may not recover. At some point the “greater fool” theory can’t scale.

You can’t scale a BAD idea no matter how much VC money you burn. Groupon’s 50% price cuts were and are the very definition of a bad marketing idea. Most small businesses, those who have been in business for any amount of time, know that price is tricky.

Value perceived is value created.

What happens to those hard-won “value propositions” when you are at a party and someone tells you they just ate at your favorite restaurant on a Wednesday night, ordered your favorite dish and got the same meal you buy on Saturday 50% off?

Word-of-mouth advertising, normally the best recommendation engine always, just worked AGAINST the restaurant foolish enough to believe customers gained with such steep discounts can ever be profitable. They won’t and can’t.

Survival after Groupon’s wrecking ball for brands comes to town is victory and survival is not enough. Once Groupon swoops in and quakes the hard-won value propositions of everyone’s favorite restaurant, gym or childcare center who cleans up the mess?

Those foolish enough to give in to Groupon’s mass hysteria, the “greater fools” clean up mess. Even businesses who REJECTED Groupon must do some cleanup. Their value propositions have been tarnished too.

Because I TELL you I am a wizard doesn’t make it so.

Groupon fired their CEO Andrew Mason today (picture at top) reminding me of a friend’s first day at Pepsi. “We’ve fired a bullet at you,” my friend was told after signing her paperwork, “when it hits you is only a question of TIME”.

Put aside the hubris and arrogance of such a statement long enough to realize Groupon’s Founder Andrew Mason has been dead man walking since their business model was created.

I am proud to be an Internet marketer. That something I love like life itself could be so debased, so spun into something it is not and can never be is depressing.

Let’s imagine again.

You’ve owned a dry cleaning business for 20 years. You aren’t rich, but you’ve educated your children. Education is something you and your wife had to leave early to work. You even have a few dollars set aside for retirement. One day a bright young man calls and asks if he can help your business grow online.

His pitch is confident and you buy a Groupon campaign.

You buy because you don’t understand the web and are afraid your lack of understanding will cost you. Groupon plays on that fear painting a picture of FEAR (what if your competitors do Groupon first) and greed (this one thing can make the web work for  you).

Now walk into the same dry cleaner with an actual silver bullet.

Place the silver bullet on the counter and make the same claims. “Fire this one bullet and all of your dreams will come true, put aside the hard incremental work that got you here and use our silver bullet,” and our soon to retired dry cleaner throws you out without thinking twice.

Internet marketing is a loaded gun.

The next time some fast talking huckster aims Internet marketing’s loaded gun at you be smart enough to duck and tell them to leave.

What about you?

Did you buy a “Groupon”? Did it work short and long term? Did your business grow? Tweet your reactions to @ScentTrail, @1918, @CommsNinja or @MarkTraphagen with #NMLGroup and we will curate in.

#NMLGroup Comments

* Wizard photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/treehouse1977/2788908633/ via creative commons.

The post Why Groupon Doesn’t Work appeared first on New Media Leaders.

Junk Heap Of Habituation

There were rumors, “Christo is doing something, you know one of his wrappings,” you heard at a coffee shop nearby. You Googled Christo and instantly knew his work. The Oslo cathedral buildings were beautiful to visitors and tourists, but you couldn’t see them with “new eyes” anymore.  For a moment you thought about the frivolous use of what had to be a lot of money then you went on about your life.

Christo knows his enemies. Complacency, judgment and smallness fight any artistic desire for joy, magic and love. Christo knows his process disrupts and resets vision changing patterns. For moments in places around the world Christo asks us to do things that scares us. Christo asks us to imagine.

“Yeah he wrapped a building or put those orange banners in Central Park, so what,” the hardened skeptic says.

Slouching Toward Big Ideas

You know the skeptic. You may have one on your team. Skeptics start the wrecking ball of big ideas with sentences such as, “I don’t want to play ‘devil’s advocate’, but…” or my personal favorite “What is the ROI on that?”

Return On Investment is important, but more greatness has been killed by the ROI Police than can be counted. Here is a cool ROI trick I’ve learned for the precarious ledge we occupy, the ledge between greatness and oblivion. Flip the question from presence to absence.

Ask your financial Scrooge to provide the ROI associated with doing nothing, with reducing risk to the point where there is NO RISK. Done honestly any Internet marketing analysis favors presence and action over absence and inaction. Investments, as they do in the real world, naturally decay online. The network is always moving and it only ever moves in one direction – FURTHER and FASTER.

Why BIG Ideas Important NOW

I live, sleep and think about Internet marketing. I am not obsessed just in love. I love the strange and changing art and science of Internet marketing. Most of my friends are similarly engulfed and consumed by Internet marketing (certainly my fellow New Leaders of the Purple Sage Phil Buckley, Mark Traphagen and Amy Lewis are as bewitched).

As you read this something BIG is shifting under our feet…again.

I’ve been pecking at the shifts I feel as much as know with posts such as How Entropy Is Creating Web 3.0 Right Under Our Noses and SEO Knowing The Unknowable. Those ideas are part of a larger shift, a tectonic shift. Evidence of the shift abound and include (but are not limited to):

• Mobile and Smart Phone ubiquity.
• Facebook passes Google as #1 web traffic destination.
• Second screen active consumption of previously passive media.
• TV is now connected to social media.
• Soon print will be connected via QR codes.
• The gamification of everything  promotes positive heuristics.
• The New SEO’s insistence on ever improving heuristics (time on site, return visitors, pages viewed, etc.).
• The secret implications of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm changes (storytelling and video marketing).
• And so on…

These tends are boiling and crashing into one another fighting for TIME and ATTENTION. When choice is infinite, when there are a number of GREAT options, we BUY with different currency. We buy with LOVE. Money is the last transfer in our black is white and up is down new world of Internet marketing. Earn enough “new currency” and money is an anti-climax and the smallest contribution to the most generous gift – advocacy.

The only certainty is there will be more questions.

Know answers to your company’s or brands biggest questions including:

• Who are we?
• Why are we here?
• How do we align with our customer’s Unique Customer Aspirations?
• How do we save the world in an an appreciable way?

Unique Customer Aspirations (UCA)

I promise a post on UCA soon. The simple idea is know how customers and supporters will be changed thanks to their interaction with YOU, your company and products. Will they be more joyful, proud or likely to explore? UCA is a mashup of two important books: Jim Stengel’s Grow: How Ideals Power Growth And Profits At The World’s Largest Companies and The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin. Read both books, but page 38 in Grow is BEYOND IMPORTANT.

Page 38 explains how to align your marketing to your customers ideals.

The web never waits. The web creates expectations every second of everyday. You enter with sins and prove yourself guilty or sin-free by actions. If actions are grounded in a strong sense of SELF, and I mean the SELF that is a company or a brand, then you may win disproportionate treasure in the blink of an eye. Any wobble will be accentuated and can easily blow years of hard work, advertising and strategy up in seconds or minutes.

Welcome to the wild west that is Internet marketing where your brand’s life is table stakes and Big Ideas only keep you in the most dynamic game ever rendered until the River or the Raise. Big Ideas will RULE because they already ARE ruling. Soon my fellow New Media Leaders (Phil and Mark) and I will discuss how BIG IDEAS can be created. We have a growing army of magic wands, tools capable of generating more ROI even as you use them less.

Let’s leave quickly since our ROI Police may be more relaxed now that at any other point. Sleep well my ROI Police as we Internet marketers,we “lucky few”, rub hands together in front of a New Media Leaders fire and slowly slouch toward the Big Ideas we knew were there, the Christo ideas, the artistic “reasons to live” and have joy stuff no one likes to discuss but we all depend on to get through the day…

What are your Big Ideas? What ideas help you find life’s joy and get through this day and then the next?
Tweet your Big IM Ideas to @ScentTrail @1918 @MarkTraphagen or Amy Lewis @CommsNinja

The post Why Big Internet Marketing Ideas Will Rule appeared first on New Media Leaders.

A good example would be when Tiger Woods was in the middle of a sand bunker, 214 yards from the pin and there was the crowd and a lake between him and the green at the Bell Canadian Open in 2000.

For 10 years Tiger Woods was unstoppable. I can’t remember him ever laying up in a tournament. He wasn’t interested in earning a living playing golf, he wanted to win. He wanted to change the game so that when you thought of golf, you thought of Tiger Woods. He did exactly that starting in the late 1990′s.

By deciding to “go for it” and then actually doing it, Tiger caused the other players to basically give up. Research by Jennifer Brown shows when Tiger was in the hunt, other golfers scored worse.

The effect was strongest for top-ranked players—the ones competing directly with Tiger for the big money. In fact, Brown calculates that Woods has raked in an extra $6 million dollars in winnings through this fear factor alone.

They were seemingly resigned to the fact that Tiger would somehow pull one out of his hat and win anyway, so they took their foot off the gas. Seth Godin would refer to this as The Dip. The space between you and the person in front of you is such a gap, that it is smarter to give up.

Thinking through the process of making yourself seem more unbeatable is fun. First you visualize everyone coming to you for advice. Next you see your competitors referencing you as an expert. Third is the constant stream of wins. As a Red Sox fan, I often saw the New York Yankees that way. It was impossible to get past them.

Who do you put in that framework? Don Bradman? Lance Armstrong? David Ogilvy? George Patton? Let me know in the comments?

The post Refusing to Lay Up appeared first on New Media Leaders.

I’ve written about my love affair with The Pit BBQ in downtown Raleigh before. They won me over the very first time I visited in 2008 because of their good food and even better attention to detail.

The Pit is not some high-priced fancy restaurant that only the beautiful people can get in to. You can get in and out for lunch in under 30 minutes for about $12.

They have a secret sauce that I haven’t run across in any other restaurant in the area, and it’s the same one that your grandmother added to all her recipes.

Love

I don’t eat at The Pit as often as I would like, but every single time I do, someone there comes over and says hello to me. For a year or two it was usually one of the waitresses (who has now become a manager) who would see me from her section across the restaurant and come over to hug me and talk to me for a few minutes. That type of greeting is not in any handbook, I can assure you.

There has been a dozen occasions where desert will appear, with the waiter explaining that they’re happy to see me and my group back at The Pit.

That treatment is great for me, and I’ll admit I’ve become spoiled by it, but what about everyone else?

I have no doubt there have been people through there that have experienced less than awesome service, but everything is set up to limit that. The management team at The Pit has figured out what I consider a perfect way to serve customers, make sure the wait staff makes good money and maximize profits all while delighting their customers.

Every table has 3 people looking after it. That doesn’t mean there are three times the staff, they just tag team their section. What that allows for is time to connect with each table without stressing out that some other table is waiting.

BBQ plate at The Pit

No matter how long I chat up someone there, they are always attentive and patient. If that is in a handbook someplace, it is, it’s brilliant, I think it has more likely just become the culture there. Everyone likes to feel valued, even if all you’re doing is eating some barbecue and sweet potato fries.

The servers then police themselves. They only want other servers who will love their customers as much as they do, so people who don’t fit the mold don’t stay around very long. They get with the program or find someplace less awesome to work.

Culture

The culture of The Pit is am amalgamation of smart people doing their artistry for a group of followers that understand and value the performance. I am lucky enough to count Eric Harris as a friend. Eric was one of the managers at The Pit back when I first found it. Eric later explained to me that it wasn’t an accident that I fell in love, he had planned every step. He explained how they kept tabs on their social media evangelists. How he eventually had a few of our Twitter profile pictures taped behind the hostess station so that they could let him know if any of us came in. Eric took his opportunity to delight his best customers. There is no way that dedication to excellence went unnoticed by the other employees. It raises every other employees game to a new level.

You can not delight and amaze everyone. What you can do is build a tribe that understands what you’re trying to accomplish and lead that tribe, love that tribe and trust that tribe. Don’t worry about the people outside the tribe who don’t understand. The effort it will take to half-convince them is better spent taking care of your tribe.

When people talk to me about my love of The Pit, I always end up explaining that the food, while delicious, is secondary to the feeling you get when you walk in the door, sit down and a smiling face greats you to explain the difference between Eastern and Western BBQ sauce.

The post Hugging your customer appeared first on New Media Leaders.