ScentTrail Marketing

New ScentTrail Marketing Home

2013-12-30T13:07:00.003-05:00

ScentTrail Marketing has a new home - ScentTrail.com - and a cautionary tale. I started this little blog in 2007 as a "throw away". I wanted a term I could spin into a marketing term, a term with few documents returned. In 2007 "scenttrail" generated three documents and "scenttrail marketing" none.

I started blogging sharing personal stories and tips from almost 14 years of Internet marketing and 20 years of brand marketing with companies such as M&M/Mars and NutraSweet where I sold sweetener back to the consumer products goods companies I'd left.

The cautionary tale is you never know how what you do today will need to grow and scale in the web of tomorrow. Instead of a "throw away" ScentTrail Marketing has hosted almost 100,000 "unique visitors" who visit for more than 3 minutes per visit (on average). This little "blogspot blog's" New vs. Returning has moved from all new to almost half returning (the magic number since returning visitors = engaged visitors and engaged visitors = you are doing something right lol ).

The New ScentTrail Marketing will build on achievements from "the little blog that could". Thanks to regular readers, people who leave thoughtful non-spam comments and my many collaborators. The "new and improved" ScentTrail Marketing will feature more guest posts, a wider range of content and more opportunities to share, debate Internet marketing's quickly evolving "best practices" and create community.

Together we are smarter than alone. Please visit the new ScentTrial Marketing, join our mailing and contributor list (as soon as I have it created) and continue to help drop ideas as crumbs we can follow back home no matter how dense our current forest.

5 Secret Internet Marketing Tactics For 2014

2013-12-16T00:04:00.000-05:00

Disrupt In 2014

What happens when everyone has a website? Competition increases and prizes go to teams who can disrupt the norm. Doing things in the same way as everyone else is a sure prescription for online disaster. This post shares 5 Secret and highly disruptive Internet marketing tactics for 2014. Some ideas such as ecommerce and social media may not feel either secret or disruptive. They are and this post explains why.

2014 Tactic #1:
Enterprise Crowdfunding

With the SEC's late October ruling to allow equity to be crowdfunded 2014 will see an explosion in crowdfunding. As important as crowdfunding is for startup entrepreneurs it will prove even more valuable for enterprise.

Crowdfunding for Small to Medium Sized Businesses and Fortune 1,000 companies will prove such a revolution I've decided my fifth company will be CrowdFunde.com, a tool that helps any website add crowdfunding as a new marketing channel.

2014 Tactic #2:
Content Widgets

I created another Haiku Deck to help explain this idea:

2014 Tactic #3:
Mobile First

The Mobile Revolution is a movement not a phone. The sooner your information architecture, User Interface Design (UX) and marketing changes to be "Mobile First" the more money you stand to make. More than money is at stake. Many e-commerce retailers take a "do the minimum" approach to mobile marketing thinking their commitment can end once their content looks good on a phone.

Not so much as it turns out. The mobile revolution requires a vast RETHINK of....well everything. If you spend 2014 figuring out the mystery wrapped in an enigma that is mobile and you may create online competitive advantage for years.

2014 Tactic #4:
Ecommerce

Creating a store is so easy and valuable everyone should have one. I know the B2B relationship sellers have just left the room thinking ecommerce can't apply to them. That belief is why adding ecommerce is so disruptive.

Stores bring User Generated Content (UGC) and "QDF" Quality Deserves Freshness" to any website's content that is hard to match. Reviews, comments and interactions make a store a content marketing gold mine.

Even if all you "sell" is your logo merchandise every content marketer should create an online store in 2014 if they want to create SEO, traffic and social share benefits competitors will find hard to match (unless they get it and immediately open a store too).

2014 Tactic #5:
Social Media Marketing

Strange to think of social media as a "secret" tactic, but so few brands, companies and marketing teams have fully embraced social media blue ocean, ocean not turned red with competition, remains. Having a Twitter account, a Facebook page and experimenting on GPlus does not a social business make.

Unknown to many presence is a promise, a promise to do more than use social media as an extension of PUSH advertising. Social media is a conversation. When a company ignores social media's conversation they create an opening for competitors who listen and respond to their customers on social media.

If you are following back less than 10% of your followers you are breaking the first law of social media - find inspiring people from those who already love you and increase their engagement by listening, responding and asking for help.

Building On Combinatorial Creativity via Maria Popova Design Matters Interview

2013-12-14T12:18:00.001-05:00

Content Curation Defined

Great and defining interview between Design Matters Debbie Millman and BrainPickings curator Maria Popova. If you don't know Maria's curation you should. This post builds on some of the most intelligent and defining content curation THINKING I've found:

Time Code 24:00
Combinatorial Creativity

Maria believes everything we are goes into every moment of curation. Our lives are a collage of content she calls Combinatorial Creativity. Combinatorial Creativity reminds me of Alton Pickens. Studying art with Alton at Vassar was an exercise in combinatorial creativity.

Picken's insistence on judgement suspension and acceptance of seemingly dissonant ideas was my first lesson in Internet marketing (though I didn't know it at the time). More than simply in the moment automatism Alton attempted to teach mature teenagers a valuable truth - if you can't see the connection yet try harder.

Artists are creative engines and CONTENT fuels the engine. Alton was sharing a lesson about space, time and value only possible to understand thirty years later (who knew). Find the thread because threads are there. Maria connects Sontag, Gandhi and Dawkins so we can combine art, marketing and science.Too Good!

IMPERATIVE we lucky few Internet marketers see connection since to not, see, feel and know the Internet's "secret layer" is to deny the web and good luck with that. "Every idea builds consciously or subconsciously on what came before." Alton would have loved Maria.

Time Code 28:00
Curation as Framework

"Curation is about creating a framework for what matters and why and building that framework into a pattern that your audience intuits by just sticking with it."

Framework is a word we are about to know very, very well. Conversations can't be penned in ways we are used to organizing corporate information and websites. Conversations are mercury - slippery and sticky at the same time, here, there and everywhere.

The more we think "websites" the less we understand what is happening. BrainPickings.org is a simultaneous conversation on a thousand fronts with a million people - welcome to the new world. Listen very carefully to Maria's day and WHY she can curate as she does (WP's ability to generate unique URLs = multiple posts a day don't step on each other but add to the size of BrainPickings' net instead). Maria doesn't care about TOOLS as much as she explodes conversations using whatever is at hand (mostly her brain).

There is a moment when Debbie complains about Maria's original thoughts being stolen. Maria moves on with an audible shrug. Maria understands FRAMEWORK means she doesn't OWN as much as she inherits, contributes and moves on. That exchange reminds me of David Amerland's What If We Had A New Value System For Goods and Services highly influential post.

Debbie noted a funny story. Each time we Internet marketers use "curation" a museum curator kills a kitten is a statement she attributed to Maria. Today's "museum" is happening NOW on phones, pads and laptops. Today's curators develop flexible frameworks for what matters, frameworks so close to the art Alton Picken tried so hard to teach they are indistinguishable from one another.

Time Code 28:28
Popova Pattern Recognition

"Pattern recognition is finding threads that run across different disciplines or eras or modalities of relating to the world and pulling them together in a way that makes sense and that illuminates each of them in a way that’s greater than the sum of those parts."

I am in love (lol). WOW, Mari's brain is AMAZING. Many geniuses get the first part of Maria's quote, the connection across time, media and an ocean of seemingly disparate ideas. Few understand those connections create a whole where sum is greater than parts - also called a "commons" or Google.

Understanding connection can trump how those connections matter (for many). Again, David Amerland's "New Value System" is an exception. Dawkins, Godin and Gandhi all understood the second part of Maria's magical equation. Do you? Does your Internet marketing?

Few businesses understand the full force and implication of Maria's pattern recognition. Maria's quote kills proprietary zero sum thinking. Maria's cogent articulation of "finding threads" across disciplines has another name - GOOGLE (lol).

Google's "combinatorial creativity" is perfectly defined by Maria's thinking. No wonder she has a million followers a PageRank7 blog, almost 10,000 inbound links and Google's love and admiration. And why shouldn't she have Google's love since the difference between their art is indistinguishable.

Amazing brain, great interview.

Ecommerce Stuck In Mud - Crowdfunde To Rescue

2013-12-11T19:11:00.002-05:00

Retiring To Start Crowdfunde

As many friends know I've "retired" from my position as Director of Marketing for the Raleigh web and software design agency Atlantic BT. I've decided the Shuffle Board Championships can wait and plan to create a new company to help websites easily add crowdfunding into their marketing mix.

I call this idea "enterprise crowdfunding" and our company is one of the few that sees how the SEC's late October crowdfunding for stocks ruling, now in 90 day comment, will change online marketing too. Ecommerce needs a shot in the arm as I outline in a recent Curatti.com post Is Ecom Stuck In The Mud?

B2C and B2B Internet marketing teams struggle with many of the things crowdfunding can help with including:

Reliable sources for quality User Generated Content (#UGC).
Consistently exciting "water cooler" content.
Inexpensive UGC based content.
Keyword rich and brand aligned inexpensive but high quality content.
Current and consistently updated content.

Millenials and their children are growing up with an entrepreneurial ethos. They want to create something an may need to since the number of great jobs has been greatly reduced after eight years of grinding recession and the web's vicious resetting of the rules. Older generations are aspirational.

Older generations want to live vicariously risking a little but not leaving their day jobs. This is the fifth time I've put up my 401k to create a company. I can understand reluctance to give up a "good job". I gave up my "good job" because I'm most alive when creating something.

Being able to create is an honor and a privilege and nothing I take for granted. Following my "year for cancer" is going to be TOUGH on the life savings, but what are saving for if not the ability to create something magical, new and exciting?

Shuffle Board will have to wait and the Haiku Deck above will provide a background on the 5th company I'm starting. If you would like to be on the "biz plan reading" committee let me know as that document is due by Monday. Any ideas, thought or suggestions always welcome and much appreciated.

Ecommerce = Mobile x Community Squared

2013-12-08T11:25:00.001-05:00

Einstein's Mobility

Mobile is about much more than smart phones. Mobile's "appification" changes how we think about and code information. Appification organizes code and information into Lego-like blocks.

Agile programing is an expression of appification:

Agile software development
is a group of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. It is a conceptual framework that promotes foreseen tight interactions throughout the development cycle.

Wikipedia

Agile programming is THE expression of our time just as Einstein's famous formula changed how we understand space and time. Appification and its "Agile" expression is as much philosophy as science, and the "agile appification"philosophy is catching on. Agile Marketing attempts to create "burn down lists" and other mnemonics lifted from agile programming to Internet marketing.

Community & Connection

Mobile's appification and our increasingly agile approach serves a greater goal - the creation of community. Community is identifying and empowering a group of "like us" contributors to win the hearts and minds of friends and friends of friends via brand and idea advocacy.

Community, like the speed of light, is squared thanks to George Gilder whose law about the value of a telecommunications network arrived at by squaring its members is attributed to Robert Metcalfe. Easy to see why any network is more valuable as people join. Imagine having the only phone.

Once two people have phones the "value" more than doubles and that is easy to understand too. Once two people have phones those two phone users are highly likely to enlist their friends and their friends will do the same. Any network of 2 people has a "value" of 4 at least partially because more nodes are on the way.

The most important marketing goal is creation of a self sustaining community. Communities "self sustain" when recruitment vastly exceed decay (or the loss of members).

New Ecommerce

The new ecommerce combines Agile's iterative cross-functional teams to create sustainable community. Content, the building block of community, is being changed too. When content's value is creation and help in sustaining networks content's nature moves from self referential "lectures" to conversation and interactivity.

Once content's role becomes finding and empowering a tribe of "like us" supporters it must be relevant, flexible and happening in near real time or threading community is an impossible mission. Ecommerce merchants view content with some suspicion.

Content can feel "contra-indicated" to an ecommerce merchant's ability to convert visitors into buyers. Content has and will always be at the core of ecommerce conversions, but the strange serendipity and complexity of online conversion attribution makes knowing content's what and why difficult.

Recent studies from the Content Marketing Institute and others show a narrowing of the "content marketing" gap. B2B "relationship" marketers embraced the concept of "inbound marketing" or the use of content at "the new advertising". B2C merchants have stripped story away in favor of bullet points and technical information.

Most ecommerce merchants view product page as a means to a revenue end. Attribution is mysterious online. Looking at the product page as a single point of conversion removes upstream influence such as reviews, word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and prior visit to the website and/or competitor's websites.

Community has and will be a "prime mover" in ecommerce, so, much like the speed of light, its value to the new Ecommerce = mobile x community is square the members all those upstream efforts helped recruit.

Genius Lunch At The Pit - Be Like Water My Friend

2013-12-06T13:59:00.003-05:00

Genius Lunch At The Pit

Had an inspiring "Genius Lunch" yesterday with Phil Buckley @1918, Don Rhoades @TheGonzoSEO, @RyanAHoover, @KarlSakas and Christopher Douglas @FlyingNCMBA. "Call something a 'Genius Lunch' and everyone wants to come," Phil told me as I sat down.

We discussed the Raleigh Jaycees need to increase membership. The Jaycees, a volunteer group your father may have been a member of back in the day, can't form a consistent message online or off. Confused customers do many things converting is never one of them.

Websites are only important until they aren't.

Once your website isn't HARMING your marketing importance immediately drops by half. The "millennial" audience the Jaycees want need social and mobile touch points, but fixing their website is a great place to start.

As if on queue Ryan mentioned visiting the Jaycee website and leaving confused about how giving away his time could help his career or life. Christ knows making the Jaycees cool again is a multi-channel marketing challenge.

Hellfighers

Phil's new SEO" Hellfighters concept was a perfect follow to the Jaycees universal need for market creation. Phil's idea is simple and brilliant. The social, mobile, local web in a post Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird era needs different strategies. SEO may not be dead (please Mark don't yell at me again :), but it is DIFFERENT.

Different enough that the agency monthly "service contract" for SEO doesn't make sense.

The not so hidden secret of "monthly SEO" was your website received a lot of work in the beginning and very little toward the end of your "services contract". Before our current mobile and social storm SEO took MONTHS to fully understand at the FABRIC level.

The "fabric level" is understanding how changes moved Google's model, the way Google "knows" your website. If your site is indexed in Google (if you can find it by typing its name) then the complexity of SEO contributions from social media, technical SEO, inbound links, page load speed, information architecture and several hundred other measurements makes the old "optimize and cash the checks" SEO model more harmful than helpful.

Once Navneet Panda discovered how to speed up Google's ability to "see" the web's content SEO changed. Buying a monthly service contract is now stupid. When Phil began discussing Helfighters I didn't see how "game changing" the concept will become.

Why Helfighers Is The New SEO

Phil saw how SEO is changing. SEO doesn't need a slow monthly climb where all the real work was done six months ago. The web moves too fast for such an "agency SEO" approach. Link building, techncial SEO (the right keywords in the right places) still matter, but SEO is a marketing "channel".

Back when I was a Director of Ecommerce Organic SEO was a channel. Marketing channels are subgroups of marketing activities such as email marketing, PPC and content marketing. Internet marketing teams divide budget and sales by channels to help know what is winning worth more investment.

Hellfighters, Phil's highly specialized, flexible and fast team of website fire fighters is the new SEO because every website catches fire (and not in a good way). Being a "Director of Ecommerce" requires courage, intuition and the ability to learn fast. My team were great fire fighters.

Knowing when something is on fire is the first marker of great Internet marketing fire fighters. As good as my team was then, I left my Director of Ecommerce position to ride a bicycle across America in 2010, I would hesitate to grab a hose today for anything but the most routine fires.

The 2013 web is so much FASTER, more INTERTWINED and connected than 2010 putting out fires requires a cross functional "dream team" of deep experts.

Website Fire Fighting Expertise (the New "SEO")

Content marketing.
Technical SEO.
Mobile Marketing.
Marketing and branding.
HTML5 & CSS.
Conversion and Ecommerce.
Social media marketing.
Information architecture.
Email marketing.
Video marketing.
Cause Marketing.
PPC.
Analytics.
Quanty Stuff (algorithms and advanced math).
Predictive analytics and statistical modeling.
and 10 others I can't think of at the moment

Like most Internet marketers I've dabbled in each of these, but "deep expertise" is limited to a few. I have "deep expertise" in 3 (ecommerce, content and social marketing), passable expertise in 3 (cause marketing, analytics, technical SEO) and the ability to pick up 3 fast (video, PPC, predictive analytics). The more Internet marketing you learn the easier learning becomes.

Phil's brilliant realizations:

SEO is transformed into a multi-channel and multidisciplinary issue and
NO ONE can have the "deep expertise" required to put out a website fire in more than 3 areas. Why Hellfightes is brilliant.

Creating Best Website Firefighters

By focusing New Media Leaders on website fire fighting Phil forms a flexible team. A team capable of being expanded or contracted quickly as needed. One key benefit is learning and becoming great at ONLINE FIRE FIGHTING. Forming an Internet marketing fire brigade is genius because it recognizes another important truth - no Internet marketing team can learn the "new web's" steep fire fighting learning curve.

The moment my old team put out a fire we would resume "regular" Internet marketing duties. No one can fight fires part time anymore. In a post Panda web, attempting to fight fires "part time" fan flames more than extinguish them.

Be Like Water

Great Tweet from Don Rhoades today with the link to Bruce Lee discussing Web 3.0's need to be "like water". Agree with Don "fluidity" is where we are going. The more agnostic we are about tools, platforms and widgets the better. Own the conversation, own the traffic.

And, when your hard work is ON FIRE, go to NewMediaLeaders.com and learn more about Hellfighters.

Is Enterprise Crowdfunding A Game Changer? Yep!

2013-12-05T11:05:00.002-05:00

Crowdfunding For Companies

Most think the SEC's late October ruling makes crowdfunding stocks an imminent entrepreneur reality. The law is in its 90 day comment period and its approval will help startup entrepreneurs form capital for "proof of concept" ideas. Crowdfunding will be an investment game changer for Small to Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs) and Fortune 1000 firms too.

Crowdfunding as practiced by Kickstarter , IndieGoGo and others is more than an investment channel. Crowdfunding provides other benefits.

Crowdfunding Benefits

Cash (via "investors").
Customer Segmentation (Gladwell's Maven, Sales People, Connectors).
Social Media Marketing.
Buzz

Crowdfunding as a new distribution channel.

Internet marketers organize online marketing into "channels" such as content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing and cause marketing. They evaluate the cost and profitability of marketing activity in a channel. This is how

Email marketing was a full 10 points more profitable consistently creating net return of higher than 30%. "Organic SEO" came in a very distant second (and Google's algorithm changes transformed organic SEO into content marketing).

Crowdfunding As New Channel

Crowdfunding's ability to help segment customers, create highly shareable content and buzz is more valuable to an enterprise than cash. Enterprise Internet marketing depends on brand advocacy and the links, LIKES and shares advocacy brings.

When I worked for M&M/Mars Snickers had a half a billion dollar ad budget. Even if a product could afford such a massive traditional ad spend few would advise such a spend. The web's destruction and fragmentation of traditional ad channels eliminates Return On Investment from such massive media buys.

The web destroyed the ability to reach a mass audience with a single bold stroke in a single channel such as TV or print advertising. Buyer psychology is now changed forever. Trust can't be earned by media alone no matter how great the spend.

Trust is earned by consistent communication, performance and brand advocates. Brand advocates are marketing's new "Sherpas". Spending $500,000,000 in advertising today is a fool's errand. The new marketing is about winning hearts and minds online.

Hearts and minds must be "earned". Winning more hearts and minds faster than competitors requires care and feeding of a special army - the 1% army. 1:10:89 says 1% of visitors to a website will contribute meaningful content (User Generated Content or UGC), 10% will vote on content created by the 1% and and 89% ride for free.

If you are sitting in at M&M's headquarters in Hackettstown, NJ a freshly minted MBA working for M&M/Mars as I did a lifetime ago your greatest challenge is identifying and empowering your brand advocate sherpas. In The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell described three "tribes":

Mavens.
Sales People.
Connectors.

Back at M&M's national office a Brand Manager trys to segment her brand advocates. She needs to know where people fall to empower them, create a reasonable "ASK" and market through them. Marketing by proxy is different.

Marketing by proxy is hearing your messaging coming back more robust than when it went out. Marketing by proxy is an active conversation. Lectures are gone killed by the social web. Marketers don't win hearts and minds with lectures anymore.

An army of brand advocate sherpas sharing a brand's content with their social nets is how to win hearts and minds. Enterprise crowdfunding will prove an invaluable asset in creating the customer segmentation, social media content, media buzz and cash needed to trust the results.

While cash isn't as important to enterprise crowdfunding as a seed round is to entrepreneurs cash plays an important role. Nothing is as easy to understand online as CASH. Customers may join mailing lists, follow a brand on Facebook and Tweet about a promotion, but anyone who puts up even a nominal amount of cash is immediately more important and valuable.

Cash helps identify the 1%, the magical brand sherps willing to go the extra mile to help win hearts and minds. M&M/Mars may not NEED crowdfunding cash, but its presence clarifies and enriches the channel.

Elaine O’Neil Love North Carolina Calendars

2013-12-04T17:19:00.002-05:00

Buy Elaine O'Neil Love North Carolina Calendar & Help Cure Cancer

Love North Carolina? Want To Help Cure Cancer?
For over a decade textile artist Elaine O'Neil weaves places we love in North Carolina into her art. Next year's calendar features lighthouses in the snow and a pair of golf pants I could swear my father wore, bears, music and more. I purchased a calendar for the June golf image and sent it to my father who has the same CLL leukemia I do with a note about the FDA's approval of a new drug that "cures" our cancer.

Some of the proceeds from Elaine's calendar help cancer researchers at UNC Lineberger develop another cancer cure. Don't forget to contribute directly to cancer research at CureCancerStarter.org our new crowdfunding website featuring research from UNC Lineberger, the Duke Cancer Institute and two other cancer research centers. Donating to CureCancerStarter.org is a great gift for the cancer survivors on your holiday list. Last but never least buy a pair of Cure Cancer Socks from our CureCancerStore.org, where all of our profits go to cancer research.

5 Quick & Easy Content Marketing Tips

2013-11-26T15:03:00.000-05:00

Tips for Startups & SMBs

This post shares 5 tips for how your content and social marketing can gain 10x by a few simple, fast and easy ideas.

Content Marketing Tip #1: Before, During, After Events

Triangle Startup Factory's Fall Showcase was a great event, but TSF left the door to their garage open on mischief night. I know Chris and Dave at TSF well AND I know how hard they work to help entrepreneurs understand the complicated ropes of growing up and becoming real companies.

I also hope to share this tip with Chris and Dave soon. When I worked at P&G they taught us a simple mnemonic for presentations: tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you told them. Successful content marketing is a little like that mnemonic.

Let's say I'm TSF's content marketing manager and we are headed into our Fall Showcase. Starting midway through the fall class, TSF sessions last 12 weeks, good idea to create content teasing the upcoming showcase. Process is product is the name for this idea.

Whatever you are doing NOW is a product IF you share it. Snapping pictures of meetings, riffing snippets, creating Vine videos and writing about the journey AS IT IS HAPPENING creates a supportive tribe. People attend the showcase feeling like they "know" the companies before they present.

I just scooped a post about major brands turning to "smaller" more visual messaging in 2014. Great post for startups to read. Don't feel like you have to sit down and create War and Peace, but create something cool daily. No matter what you do daily, be sure to create content BEFORE, DURING and AFTER major events like TSF's "Showcase".

PS. One other quick note is to drive links back into your content that reinforce the keywords you want. Note I linked to TSF above on 2013 Fall Showcase thus reinforcing keywords we want to gain traffic from. More advanced tips on linking strategies are beyond this post's subject, but don't simply LINK always LINK WITH PURPOSE.

Content Marketing Tip #2: Support Great Posts About You

I wrote a post about Rocketbolt.com today for Atlantic BT. Here s what they should do to support that post:

Grab unique ideas such as "conversational popunder" and buy the URL.
Write content about how Rocketbolt is a "conversational popunder" and why that is different (better) than typical "blast" popunders (same message to all).
Support the post with Tweets, GPlus and Facebook posts for 2 days.
Write first major support post in 2 days (then support your own post for 2 days).
Curate what you learned from the mountain of social feedback and write a post about what you learned (that post should be about a week out).
Find another unique idea such as the greater LTV claim and create a contest to find a partner to help prove the claim.
Contest should have three stages: apply, review and cut down (to 5 to 7 "semifinalists") and social runoff. Using 3 stage process maximizes social return and buzz.
Work with Thundershirt to create a detailed study of benefits from using Rocketbolt. Benefits should be money, segmentation, list growth and LTV (eventually LTV can take months to fully model).
Have another contest for a quant to help structure the LTV test.

I could go on, but you get the idea. When someone hands you a gift BUILD CONTENT ON IT and do so right away.

Content Marketing Tip #3: Don't SELL, CURATE Instead

The CATCH-22 of online marketing is to the extent you attempt to sell yourself you are LESS LIKELY to make the sale. Your job is Curator In Chief and you have every right to take a post such as the one I just wrote about Rocketbolt.com for AtlanticBT.com's blog and riff it to within an inch of its life (lol).

Many businesses don't understand the web's CATCH-22. They share content about how great they are and no one cares. Such self serving content won't generate the social signals needed to confirm its validity and so will slide down and off the web's "truth" wall.

Is there a way to create content so your brand or company gets to curate the content you want? Yep, see the next tip.

Content Marketing Tip #4: An Eye On What You Want

If you want your brand to be "cutting edge" then share "cutting edge" content. If you want your brand to be save the world" then share how you helped save the world. Map three to five key messages and use that map to inform your content calendar.

This tactic of creating content to support brand aligned shares is not FISHING for compliments as much as an intelligent understanding of how content marketing works. Your content marketing should curate content in the world about your company, brands and products.

You are responsible for creating content to define your brand too. If you sponsor a Tough Mudder event writing 1,000 words about why you sponsored (before), picture of the event (during) and a "why we sponsored a Tough Mudder event" after is a great idea.

Content marketing is diplomacy by other means. You are "seeding" the ground with messages and then "harvesting" those crops to learn if what you think you are doing is what THEY think you are doing. The ultimate goal of great content marketing is to lower barriers such as US and THEM.

When your content marketing is synced with your customers magic happens.

Content Marketing Tip #5: Tools Matter

Wish I could say use X tool and your content marketing will sing like an angel. There is no single tool capable of watching your content's Key Performance Indicators. You will a toolbox. Google Analytics and the 5 Secret And Disruptive Content Curation Tools I wrote about last week for Atlantic BT's blog are all on our "recommended" tool list. There are at least 10 more great and helpful content curaiton and creation tools out there so be sure to share your favorites and we will curate in.

Why Conversations Crush Platforms, Blogs and Websites

2013-11-22T21:01:00.000-05:00

Website? Blog? Conversation?
It was there in front of me, a rare undeniable truth. Asked to write a consulting brief on the creation of a new art retail website in 2011 I shocked my client. "Don't do this, Websites are dead and gone," I said. A site:etsy.com command in Google showed me why websites such as Redenvelope.com were all but over.

I put up two numbers and he saw it too (these are today's numbers but they make the same point in 2011):

Pages In Google

RedEnvelope.com 31,300

Etsy.com 19,000,000

Cost of creating both websites is about the same. Value of Etsy.com is many multiples of RedEnvelope.com (one of my favorite gift sites from back in the day).

What Changed
Everything changed. Google changed. Facebook changed. Twitter changed. Phones changed. Etsy.com was a reaction to how poorly Ebay.com served craftspeople. Etsy.com thought PLATFORM and UGC (User Generated Content) and CRUSHED RedEnvelope.

Why?

Social and mobile changed the world several times since RedEnvelope.com and we launched FoundObjects.com (now gone sadly) in 1999. Etsy understood some important implications of those changes including:

DIY had more power than ever thanks to scaled systems and social networks.
An artist doesn't have to sell millions of dollars to make a living.
And 19M artist selling even a little on Etsy.com meant they would make plenty.
Key is creating a market accessible to an artist who can't afford a huge investment in WEB.
Who makes the most consistent money in a gold rush? Stores who sell mining equipment.
Mobile meant access was about to go through the roof world wide.
The "network" is the computer, the store and the product.
The main idea is to mine THEIR social mobile contacts NOT develop your own!

What Changed Since 2011
When I wrote Platforms vs. Websites not long after telling my client to not create an online store (he did anyway and it is now closed) I didn't give enough credit to our social mobile age's real currency - the conversation.

We don't passively consume anything anymore. We Tweet, Facebook and blog about movies watched, TV shows watching and reactions to sports or other news. And if I am a 5 on the Social/Mobile/Social scale the generation behind me and then behind them are 10s and 20s.

What is changing is we are conversation loyal and platform agnostic.

Etsy might get us to start following an artist. Over time our "following" might shift to the artist's website, GPlus page or Scoop.it. We are becoming conversation-centric and platform agnostic.

RedEnvelope.com (or Sears vs. Amazon) should create a platform capable of curating conversations not people or products. Own the conversation, own the traffic.

How do you "own" a conversation?
Etsy.com could add an ORM (Online Reputation Management) function and grab relevant keywords for an artist. The artist could review the feed, much like Scoop.it's social web suggestions and then curate links and mentions into her profile or "magazine". See my Scoop.it Revolutions for examples of the end result (content curated into "magazines").

One way you "own" a conversation is spider the social web for relevant keywords, structure a Scoop.it-like feed and let the artists curate a "magazine" of relevant content.

Keywords Key To Conversations
Another way to "own" a conversation is find relevant searches of QDF (Quality Deserves Freshness) content. If our artist creates pottery similar to Jonathan Adler they could create a search of the web for QDF content about Adler.

By aligning with relevant master brands an artist gains legitimacy and "made to stick" relevance. The realization our new artist's work is like Adler helps buyers trust the work's quality and the artist. People trust when they understand.

Another way to curate conversations is to search for relevant and related keywords and help the artist use the information to create a conversation about THEM.

Owning A Conversation
How can Internet marketers "own" a conversation? Conversations take place all over, but you and your website or blog can "own" a conversation if you use a few simple ideas and tool:

Collect relevant posts using a "spider" tool such as Scoop.it (that link is to my Scoop.it magazines created with the help of their social media spider tool).
Value any high quality related post even if they come from competitors.
Apply some filtering (not everything is worthy of curation).
Create informative snippets to support your conversational curation.
Don't argue, but don't back away either. Always appreciate someone's comments, ideas and input even if they differ from yours.
Don't support trolls, don't curate mean spirited content just to point out how wrong they are since you get painted with the same brush. Mean breaks down on its own so never pile on it.
If your thinking changes share that and give credit.
Ask before you curate someone's content into your mashup of a conversation (applies more to people than pro-bloggers but never a bad idea to thank and credit pros).

By shifting thinking so "US" is a larger collective not just people who work in your company you act as an Authority. Becoming an Authority increases your Google value 10x. Hardest thing for most companies and brands to realize and act upon is the non-proprietary nature of being an "Authority". Share great content no matter who created it = acting like a Google Authority.

Be careful with how you curate content. Use blockquotes and clear references so you aren't seen as duplicating someone else's content. Give credit and be generous by sending a link back if you quote more than a line.

Always add substantial content to curated content.

If you grab the bullets above, for example, good idea to block quote them, make sure they are in a post of yours with 500 or more words, send a reference link back to ScentTrail Marketing and send an @ScentTrail note on Twitter with the link. An "alert" note is a nice touch, a touch that may prompt authors whose content you've used to support your piece across their social nets.

Master Blaster Role
The role of Etsy.com or any conversation Master Blaster platform creator is curate the latest greatest content, share tips and tricks so no single artist builds up a dominate share and train artists on how to use the new Etsy.com to own conversation.

Money is NOT the biggest barrier to creating platforms capable of owning, curating, publishing and selling conversation. IMAGINATION is the biggest barrier. Each time we have an "own the conversation" discussion it comes back as "create a website". Be platform agnostic and mashup tools to own your or even better THEIR conversations.

2013-11-22T02:41:00.000-05:00

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad

Haiku Deck Not Just An Ipad App Anymore

To celebrate one of my favorite apps, Haiku Deck, launching their desk and laptop beta I wrote a post for Atlantic BT about 5 "Secret" Disruptive Curation Tools:

Links to my profiles on each of these tools:

Internet Markeing Lessons From Coke Freestyle

2013-11-19T18:41:00.001-05:00

New Coke Freestyle Machine

Coke's Internet Marketing Lessons

If you haven't seen a Coke Freestyle machine you are missing out. Coke's engineers built a machine able to dispense and combine any flavor soda from some basic building blocks. The machine has an easy to use User Interface (UI) than can combine flavors creating over 100 soft drink combinations.

Love Coke's marketing copy:

Coca-Cola Freestyle^® is all about you. Your choice, your taste, your drink. It’s more than the new way to quench your thirst. It’s the refreshing new way to express yourself.

If you can "express yourself" with a soft drink machine imagine how powerful your blog is (lol). Here are lessons we lucky few Internet marketers can learn from Coke's Freestyle Soft Drink Machine.

&nbsp Internet Marketing Lessons From Coke Freestyle Machine

More choices are better.
More choices are better IF you have a good User Interface (UI).
Approach everything like Lego blocks (start simple, build simple).
Combine basic building blocks in unique ways to produce new products.
More power closer to the customer is better.
Touch makes complex technology feel simple (thank you Apple).

Sometimes biggest barrier to innovation is existing systems. Imagine all those trucks delivering all those syrup and carbonation bottles. Kudos to Coke for finding ways to improve the customer experience at the point of delivery by imagining a new way to "deliver" soda.

The biggest Internet marketing idea is how coke "appified" their delivery system. By looking at the forest of all trees they figured a way to combine trees in unique ways. By looking across all flavors they could identify core elements, the building blocks of a machine capable of delivering 100 flavors of soda.

Thinking of your applications, websites and content as Lego building blocks helps imagine an cool set of "new" ideas no more complicated than clicking Lego blocks. Coke's combination and delivery genius is matched by making an impact with customers.

Work From Customers To Everything Else

The other great lesson from Coke Freestyle is to start all the way out. Start with customers and work backwards. How can a fountain drink customer's experience be dramatically better?

More choice.
Ability to create unique combinations.

Now create THAT.

As a Director of Ecommerce I learned to work from the cart in. In the summer, never at this time of year, we would test new time lines, trust symbols, fewer steps and other cart improvements. After an extensive study I discovered every .5 improvement in cart abandonment was worth $500,000 in sales.

Product pages were next on the "test" parade, but they couldn't generate as much return. Product pages look the same, but 20% of our products contributed 80% of our profits. Inevitably product pages improvements might help some products while hurting others.

Shopping cart improvements provided universal benefits. When we reduced abandonment with trust marks, better navigation or a more concise layout we made more money faster than any other improvement we tested (and we tested everything).

Improving your customer experience, whether it is getting a soft drink or buying from a website, is the most important work you do.

Next Gen Coke Freestyle Ideas

Would love to see Coke continue to innovate their Freestyle machine. Here are some ideas for cool next gen freestyle machines:

Connect machines to the web and show top choices for this location.
Also show top "downloads" from major related cities (Charlotte or Austin for Raleigh).
Widgetize the "popular soda" app so it can be easily shared on blogs.
Have a contest on who can create the most tasty new flavor.
Show a video on how to create new favors.
Create FourSquare-like mobile - Freestyle games and interactions.

The last idea is about how to use Coke's Freestyle machine to create community. Imagine you have a Coke Freestyle app on your phone. It tells you where a Freestyle machine is and asks for a login. Once logged in you don't see other people in the restaurant you see other FLAVORS who have also signed in.

Coke could award prizes when a tribe of Fanta orange people hit a quorum. They could text message other Freestyle app phones in the area and alert if a restaurant only needs a few more "flavors" to win a prize. By creating a mobile community in real time, sharing incentives to "play" and watching the data Coke sells more soda, their mobile website gets more engagement and the build on the "express yourself" idea expressed in their copy.

Anything we do is made more powerful by connection and connection is made more powerful by real time interactions, contests and games.

Content Marketing Tangled Up In Blue

2013-11-16T01:27:00.003-05:00

Dylan For The First Time
Early one morning the sun was shinning.
I was laying in bed.
Wondering if she'd changed at all.

I was standing on the side of the road rain falling on my shoes.

Tangled Up In Blue.

How can content create Dylan's sense of space? How can stories confuse, thrill and teach? What is your content's tone? Confident? Fun? Mysterious? Kind? Are words music? Do they sing off the page?

Wait before you roll eyes and click away. Why create content? Writing is an intimate act, a share between siblings whispering in an early quiet dawn. Great content is calm. We read because we must.

Tangled Up In Blue.

Every dream, sentence and word is thought accepted typed and rendered in an old way. We don't "set" type except in our mind where words play, dance and scream. We imagine a hundred possibilities select one to share secrets only siblings know.

Maybe no one reads anymore, but words matter.

Words sing our song electric. Words dance across a world more ready for them. Russia, England, Switzerland and Africa hear words know our voice see our desire for better.

We wake up early. We share everything. Unsure confused and calm we open a laptop, phone or pad and think another next thought.

Tangled Up In Blue.

Context slips and is recovered. We tell a story, sing a song, find place, time and truth. We share truth we have, the one we know. Story starts the same. Fear in like cold November fog. We lie in bed thinking, planning,wondering. Is joining a circus still possible?

There is no circus and that is good and bad. Good because boats are burned, escape shut. Choice is the myth of fingerprints. What we believe avoids us.

Out alone cold against a hard winter rain we jam hands in pockets. We imagine smoking a cigarette even as smoking is not something done. Revolution is in the air. We sell everything.

Tangled Up In Blue.

The air is crisp, cold, sharp. We walk faster seek shelter know shelter is and has always been illusion. Thoughts made material is risk defined, risk taken and risk shared. Our words leave swept by wind flipping and dancing like a bag lifted, spun and teased.

We fear loss and reward. We risk all as anything else would be insulting. We are here, there and everywhere. More exposed than settlers could imagine or we fully know we use a little too much force.

Finally we slip away lost in a clear, clean moment becoming smaller and bigger. Sundown yellow moon we know every scene by heart.

Tangled Up In Blue.

First Indy GiveGuide Features Story of Cancer On Cover

2013-11-14T18:39:00.003-05:00

Story of Cancer Foundation on Cover & In IndyWeek.com GiveGuide!

Nice UNC Lineberger Cancer Center Surprise
I've been surprised at UNC's Lineberger Cancer Center before. Never as pleasantly surprised as today. Today, starring up at me from a table, was the Story of Cancer Foundation's strong little girl. I walked by the publication thinking, "Wow someone else saw the strength, beauty and hope in that picture too".

Someone else did the IndyWeek.com team. The Independent is a beloved Triangle institution. When Danny Rosin from Brand Fuel and Band Together set up a meeting to discuss the inaugural Indy GiveGuide I was glad to go.

If you've never read The Independent you are missing our area's bible for everything cultural, political and the publication with their fingers on the pulse of our special Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill zeitgeist.

The Independent was purchased recently and their new owner created a Wilmette GiveGuide that helped local charities with over a million in donations last year. I loved the concept, but their "Tabula rasa" approach was was painful to sustained online authority and reputation build.

Tabula Rasa because the Wilmette GiveGuide wiped their content clean with each new guide AND there were no unique pages. The guide played like a slideshow where the frame was the only permanent content. My advice is NEVER DO THIS.

Google ranks PAGES and, once ranked, wants your pages to grow in stature, authority and power not get removed once a year. When content goes "in and out" like a yo yo Google hates it and won't rank it. Our first idea was to riff the GiveGuide off of CureCancerStarter.org the new crowdfunding platform for cancer research.

When it was clear Atlantic BT's CureCancerStarter.org work was going to go right to the wire I called my friends Eric and Cynthia at WTE Solutions in Hillsborough, NC. Eric is an ecommerce genius who helped me create a new million dollar website when I was Director of Ecommerce.

Just to make life interesting the project got started about 8 weeks ago. Seeing the beautiful results reminds me how good Eric's team of designers, programmers and content marketers is especially in combination with an equally talented team from IndyWeek.com.

Great work and our Story of Cancer Foundation is honored to be included with 27 other local nonprofits from tigers to music we should sing together (Danny's Band Together). Thanks to Eric and Cynthia and the team at the Independent.

IndyWeek.com Give Guide

Story of Cancer Foundation Indy GiveGuide DONATION page

BTW, just did a search for "Story of Cancer Foundation Give Guide" and our page is #1 because Eric and WTE team are great at SEO.

SMBs and Content Marketing: 5 Quick Tips

2013-11-14T01:55:00.001-05:00

Small Business Is Overwhelmed

When you love something as much as I do Internet marketing it is easy to spend a life learning how the world's biggest and most dynamic game works. Small to Medium Sized Business people love the businesses they started.

After an amazing conversation with the owner of my favorite Smoothie King I want to share five quick tips to help. Hope these tips will help my friend feel less overwhelmed by transitioning from print marketing to content marketing on the web.

SMB Content Marketing Tip 1: There Is No THEM

My friend's franchise is part of a chain. He pays Smoothie King for the name and some marketing assistance. No umbrella national company can create relationships online for my friend. National umbrella companies think and act nationally. The relationships he needs are local.

My friend hands out coupons and tries to use what traditional advertising he can afford (Val Paks and Yellowpages). He isn't unaware of the web. He collects emails and said an important thing during our conversation today.

"My email list is bigger, but my open rates are lower," he said. Welcome to the mobile influenced web where relevance and the stories you share create the "opens" you need.

SMB Content Marketing Tip 2: Email Marketing With Personas
Robert Rose wrote the best book I've read about how to create customer groups called personas. Robert's book is Managing Content Marketing and it is a fast read. Personas are important because digital marketing can and should be customized. Discussing weight lifting powders, he sells health supplements too and they make up 20% of his gross sales, with a vegan customer doesn't work and creates distance between customer and my friend's Smoothie King store.

Let's say my friend has 2,000 people on his email subscriber list. If he want's his email open rates to go up he needs to create content for three to five personas. Let's take a stab at that and guess my friends personas to demonstrate how to think of a list in persons or helpful groups:

* Molly Mommy Blogger - divorced and married for a second time with her children and his, busy, approaching 40, health conscious and is gatekeeper for family.
* Tommy Triathlete - married, hard working IT pro in his thirties Tommy works out 4 to 6 times a week and prefers Smoothie King to Starbucks. Wants to qualify for Iron Man. Tommy buys supplements too.
* Holly Healthy - Holly is single, in her twenties, a vegan but not fanatical about it. She likes having a smoothie before going to her paralegal job, something that is temporary as she works on going back to school.

Instead of trying to get overly complicated, my friend should include creative elements for each persona in his email marketing right away. At some point he will need to stop "batching and blasting" or sending the same email to everyone on his list (one reason his open rates are going down). How do you know who fits into the Molly, Holly or Tommy categories?

Ask.

Ask when you gather names or send an email with an incentive (free Smoothie say) to answer 3 to 5 quick questions. Never SURVEY as they take too long. Always position these requests as a desire to serve better, give and incentive and say thanks to the 10% of your list who will profile themselves for you each time you ask (btw don't send a "profile email" to customers who've already shared their information since profiling is no longer relevant).

SMB Content Marketing Tip 3: Blog Q&A Content

A blog is just a diary online. Sharing pictures, your favorite thing that happened today, feedback from customers and Questions and Answers helps customers learn and get to know you. The more intimate and frequent your connection the more smoothies you make.

I created CrowdFunde, a Wordpress blog, yesterday in 3 hours. I do this for a living and that blog wasn't my first rodeo so triple my time. Tripling my time means my friend can create a Wordpress blog from a template in about a day. That day may be the most important investment he will ever make.

A blog should be the HUB of all digital marketing. YES use Facebook, Twitter and Gplus, but remember when you use a big social network every piece of content you provide enriches them - and they are already rich. Be sure to drive links from social nets to "owned" digital assets like my friend's blog or a website.

Since my friend's national franchise has an umbrella website he should create a Smoothie King Raleigh (or Smootie King Creedmoor) blog and POST THE URL in his store. Pant "Easter Eggs" around your blog. Easter Eggs are little prizes. When someone sees the Easter Egg on your post about a new smoothie flavor they get a free smoothie. Another Easter Egg could reward a customer for providing profile information. Find ways to make your site fun and exciting.

SMB Content Marketing Tip 4: Conversations Not Lectures

Social media and content marketing is best as a two sided conversation. I love Q&A content because it "sounds" conversational and is helpful.

Watch your @Twitter and Facebook. When someone asks a question answer and say thanks. When someone ReTweets your tweet about the new smoothie flavor say thanks and remember when you use @name tweets they only go to the @name person. If your content gets picked up and shared say thanks. Spend half your content and social marketing time saying thanks in the beginning.

Saying thanks a lot at first cements a content marketer's reputation as "getting it" or understanding the rules of the content and social media marketing world.

SMB Content Marketing Tip 5: Have Fun and Create Fun
Many SMBs I know think of content and social marketing as a chore. How you feel comes through and your customers can sense it, so if loving content and social media isn't in he cards at least have fun with it.

I recommended asking for Instagram pictures in store with favorite smoothie stories rewarded by shares on his blog and social nets (especially Facebook) and a Weekly Smoothie Of The Week winner (with more pictures and maybe a short video of someone saying how they never win and how exciting it is to win a smoothie).

Create games, curate your customer's responses and have fun and build community. Fun works as well online as it does in life.

Dustin Stout's Best On GooglePlus List

2013-11-12T18:00:00.000-05:00

Want a dramatic demonstration in why GooglePlus ROCKS? Here is Dustin Stout asking a GREAT question and getting some amazing responses, responses I will be working on for hours as I follow those who made recommendations (anyone that willing to share GOLD is a must FOLLOW) and learning about the G+ Gurus they recommend. Great idea Dustin!

Curatti.com Launches Editors of Chaos

2013-11-11T14:19:00.003-05:00

Curatti.com New Website Launched

Jan Gordon explains things on Scoop.it better than almost anyone. Perhaps her ability to explain comes from her UCLA degree in psychology or her ability to listen so intently, but Jan gets to the heart of content she curates quickly and never misses the mark.

Jan is a visionary who understands how close we lucky few Internet marketers are to killing the proverbial golden goose. Content marketing, something no one cared about as soon as several years ago, is all the rage now. Inbound marketing, the ability to create content so compelling it gets shared and those shares generate billable hours, is the promise of many and the honest castle of only a few.

Jan's idea is to create a giant flypaper website where only GREAT gets through thanks to The Editors of Chaos. Chaos is what threatens the golden goose of content marketing. Jan is determined to create a website where visitors find gold and other precious metals without mining and sifting through so much junk.

Curatti.com represents a great and important idea - screaming louder only kills the golden goose faster so Curatti's Editors of Chaos dedicate themselves to meaning we all seek. Editors of Chaos force a choking torrent of content through a GREAT and IMPORTANT filter. Anything that makes it through is sure to be important for every Internet, content and social marketer.

Be sure to join Curatti.com's subscriber list to find GREAT and IMPORTANT content without drowning in junk and to get a free "Insiders List" from Jan.

SEO Controversy

2013-11-09T12:57:00.002-05:00

First SEO Is Dead Proclamation

The room suddenly quieted. People stopped texting and looked up at Robert Rose. Rose sensed the moment and repeated his statement. "Don't spend one more minute trying to optimize your websites to win traffic," he said again.

Robert Rose, the author of Managing Content Marketing (one of my favorite how to create personas and segments books), was speaking at the Inbound Marketing Conference in San Francisco two summers ago when the "death of SEO" wasn't as common as it is now.

I confess to mix emotions to Robert's important declaration. I was trained in SEO at the foot of Bruce Clay, one of the founders of the industry that became SEO, and my team made millions from what we learned there.

On the other hand fighting "inside baseball" SEO optimization fights was one of my least favorite Internet marketing tactics when I was a Director of Ecommerce. Our team spent as much time worrying about how our content would play inside the arcane and Byzantine world of tuning a website to search engine math as we did creating great content.

Something was upside down.

Navneet Panda's Revolution

When Google's brilliant engineer Navneet Panda figured out how to speed up Google's read they were shocked. Shocked at how "dirty" our rooms became. The net effect of Google's arcane SEO rules was an industry was created and we capitulated to MAD.

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) meant if I went to Bruce Clay and you didn't I might create advantage, advantage that only existed in the math not in the world, not in our products or services. If the democracy of the link didn't mean the most valued content was at the top Google was in trouble.

Google's original business model was based on a simple idea - people link to what they value. Assign value based on links and content relevance and truth can be known. When the web was NEW this system worked well. As the web grew up those with LINK POWER figured it out.

Websites with high PageRank (Google's assigned value to a page that used to be mostly based on who linked in) could sell their links. Other websites could attend courses at Bruce Clay (and many other similar classes) and learn how to optimize better and so win traffic FOR NO OTHER REASON than a mathematical advantage.

Either one of those problems, either selling links or the ability to create advantage from "inside baseball" math, is a cancer on Google's entire business model. Google solved these problem with several genius moves:

Floated the index.
Sped up their read (Panda).
Changed "link law" (Penguin).
Created GPlus.
Incorporated social signals as "confirming social signals".
Created "Author Rank".

Explaining some of these moves would take thousands of words, but they all fall under a single idea - finding ways to pivot and creatively destroy in order to increase speed and relevance in search.

SEO Death Controversy

Apparently there is a huge backlash against people who say SEO is dead. I'm a former SEO. Teams I've managed made literally millions from "over optimization" tactics that are now dead. Those tactics are dead because they were never sustainable in the first place. Winning traffic with math never converted well. We used to wash 14,000 people through our website daily to make between 500 and 700 sales.

Why did we do such STUPID things? MAD creates a strange cult. You do things NOT because they are the right things to do but because to not do them seems dangerous. The OVER (what we stood to gain) seemed so clearly more than the UNDER (what we stood to lose) we spent lots of money and time learning "inside baseball" math.

I hope we never tipped all the way to where we were spending more time optimizing than creating, but I honestly can't guarantee that. I know, without a doubt, we spent at least as much time tuning for SEO math as creating great content.

As Robert Rose pointed out using time to optimize content to within an inch of its life is over, dead, gone. Without corresponding social signals content doesn't matter. Without corresponding social signals content sticks out like a sore thumb.

Today my friends, in an effort to protect me from some perilous SEO IS DEAD police warned me to tune my statements or be rendered and waterboarded. Sorry, I agree with Robert Rose SEO is dead.

Long Live SEO

SEO being dead is not as narrow as "black hat SEO is dead". My teams never practiced black hat SEO, but what we practiced, let's call it over optimization, is dead. We treated SEO as if it was a channel capable of generating converting traffic just like PPC, print ads and email marketing. SEO isn't a channel anymore. That SEO is clearly gone.

SEO as a confirming signal is alive and well (as the chart above describes). Maybe the controversy is so red hot because SEOs think saying SEO is Dead is saying they are dead, that they don't have an important contribution to make anymore.

I'm not saying that (at all). I don't regret the time I spent in Mill Valley with Bruce Clay. Many of what Clay taught such as Siloing, bleeding and bottling are still important even if their importance is different. Improving information architecture, the core of what Clay really taught, is and will always be important even as our ability to "over optimize" our information architecture and links isn't worth the time.

Over optimization is different than optimization. Knowing how to align a website's content strategy to how customers search for and buy the site's services via keywords, making sure critical keywords are in the right places and watching stop word ratios as you write are still important ideas, ideas SEOs know way better than most.

The death of SEO as an industry, as a channel, doesn't mean SEOs can't make an important contribution to content and social marketing. This "controversy" started for me when I scooped a post about OAO (Online Audience Optimization). All things being equal I still make more money WITH a Phil Buckley or Bill Ross than I do without, but expecting either Phil or Bill to create converting traffic and great listings alone is over and unfair.

The web's most important currency is and will always be change.

Teams I've managed didn't make millions by insisting on OUR beliefs and genius. We made millions by learning minutes faster than our competitors (sometimes seconds faster). Instead of creating a false controversy about whether, if or how SEO is dead I wold prefer to use the time learning what is happening now (content and social marketing, GooglePlus, mobile, appificaiton of everything, video, cause marketing).

Life is too short for getting mad about whether SEO is dead or not.

Get mad about how 14M Americans have cancer and then go DONATE to CureCancerStarter.org if you want to get MAD at something useful and save the world productive. Yes SEO as my team and I practiced it is dead. If that means I get burned in effigy so be it burn away. M

Image from Fasthosts in the UK

Care and Feeding of Networks & Top 10 Must Follow Scoopers

2013-11-05T18:16:00.000-05:00

Content Networks Are Different

After reading a great Neil Ferree post encouraging lawyers to embrace content marketing supported by social I wrote an Atlantic BT post about the Digital First Movement. Those ideas are more connected than they seem. Acceptance two years ago would have worked.

Mere acceptance of content and social marketing's central role post the GOOGLE content revolution isn't enough. As strong as my Digital First proclamations they aren't strong enough either. Yes your Internet marketing MUST create an ever increasing circle of support, but the care and feeding of your support network is of equal importance.

Never take your your content network for granted since doing so risks all. This post shares 5 Tips For The Care and Feeding of Your content support network.

Network Care & Feeding Tip 1: Join A Strong Community such as Scoop.it

There are some content marketing lessons you can only learn from others. When Guilluame and Marc allowed me to play with their very cool content curation tool called Scoop.it just out of beta little did I realize what a powerful gift they shared. My Scoop.it "Revolutions".

True power in any content network lives by the same 80/20 rule ecommerce merchants know well. When I was a Director of Ecommerce I did an experiment with our numbers. One day I wanted to prove that the 80/20 rule was actually a repeatable fractal so I examined a single category cutting the data ever smaller to see if an 80/20 rule (80% of sales created by 20% of the products) existed NO MATTER HOW SMALL the data set.

I proved my theory.

This means when you join a community like Scoop.it find the 20% of curators creating 80% of the waves. I NEVER stop there. I always find gurus, wizards and "like me" Internet marketers that may not be in the 20% but whose ideas, perspective and communication challenges or confirms my beliefs and theories.

10 MUST FOLLOW Scoopers are (in no particular order):

Robin Good - amazing new app and tool reviews and helped create cannons of content creation.
Ally Greer - Guillaume's great content curator and always FIRST to something cool and insightful.
Guillaume Decugis - Scoop.it CEO and brilliant man.
Jan Gordon - can help you understand anything from semantic web to SEO.
Jesus Hernandez - brilliant international view of digital trends and most visual marketer I know.
Brian Yanish - brilliant marketer and the best at using Scoop.it to fuel his Internet marketing engine.
Karen Dietz - has forgotten more about telling stories online than I will ever know.
Thierry Saint-Paul - another liquid BRILLIANT marketer.
Neil Ferree - new to Scoop.it but I follow Neil's blog, tweets and GPlus like bees to honey.
Anna Cristina Pratas - closing in on 1M views because she finds great STUFF (especially on educaiton and there is a real education trend on Scoop.it with many teachers and educators in the community).

Sure I am forgetting at least as many, but if you want to become a great content curator follow any three of those and you will learn fast.

Network Care & Feeding Tip #2: Be Present Every Day

Your content network NEVER sleeps. I create a lot of content. About 5% of that content goes "mega-viral" (shares close to 1,000,000). Half of those "mega-viral" posts went up Saturday morning. Every day your content network does one of two things: it grows or shrinks. Growing is better so be present and create something, react to something, comment on something, video something, write something daily.

Network Care & Feeding Tip #3: Be Nice & Share LOVE

I LOVE what I do for a living (at least to the extent I sort of understand what I do for a living lol). When someone shares my content I say thanks, favorite their share or make sure to repay the gesture. I know where my "quid pro quo" meter is with a handful of VIIM (Very Important Internet Marketers) at all times.

When I OWE I pay. When I am owed I don't expect anything and that is the way this Thank You economy works. Never think, because an expectation wasn't met, you board is negative. You are never in the negative in this support and create Thank You economy, but it can sure feel that way.

It feels like you are giving away $5 for every $1 you make or giving more than you are receiving. Not so much and any shortfall is created from our poor attribution and analytics tools not any actual shortfall. You are always getting more help and support than you know, so always DOUBLE DOWN on your support, generosity and share the love.

Network Care & Feeding Tip #4: Be Humble But Not A Push Over

No one respects someone who rolls, but people who pick fights on social media are also working against their own interests. I've been insulted and spit upon (metaphorically) and I turn my check and ask for more. Life is too short for BS spats. I am not NATURALLY that patient or kind, but I'm older and wiser now (lol). The social net thrives on love and controversy. Some never leave either camp.

Their entire social journey is all loving or all conflict. Conflict is unavoidable. You will say something and someone will say you are full of it. My response is to be thankful for the ability to have a conversation with a new friend. I am confident enough in any thing I write that apology is unnecessary.

Until apology is needed. I'm human and so make mistakes. When I make mistakes I face whatever music is associated. Mistakes is what makes every other piece of content I write valuable IF they are addressed honestly and straight on. When you look a difficult online situation or conflict in the eye (so to speak) and admit you were or are wrong every strong connection in your network gets stronger.

Your network will gain and lose important supporters. This gain/loss is the web's tide. Attempting to please the mob is the most displeasing thing you can do just as attempting to write viral content produces the least viral content. Be who you honestly are in this moment now and if you make a mistake or grow out of whatever you wrote yesterday admit it, expand on it and share it.

Network Care & Feeding Tip #5: Don't Kiss Ass, But Do Mention and Share Respect

After one of my Saturday posts for Atlantic BT's blog, Social Media's Magic Loops, was picked up by David Edelman and McKinsey Consulting I learned a valuable lesson. I never thought David would read or care about what I wrote, but sharing respect in specific ways is appreciated and viral. Don't attempt to make friends with gurus, wizards and people who live ten stories from where you live.

You should follow, retweet and comment on any expert's work. Kiss Ass Tweets are obvious and stupid. Intelligent blog posts, tweets or other content may or may not ever be read by the wizard you respect. Cool when they do read and comment on your work though, very cool.

Don't expect such a mention to mean they will follow you and sing around the fire, but make sure you are thankful in a public way (again being sure to be respectful). I've talked my way into working with Seth Godin, been mentioned by writers and curators from Robin Good to Chris Brogan. I don't SEEK this support, but I do show respect and try to always be original.

I could probably double these kinds of pickups if I was more succinct (lol), but that is way to big a price. Hope these five tips help you take good care of your social network perhaps one of the most important investments you make daily.

Why Social Media Is Really Save The World Marketing

2013-10-31T19:22:00.001-04:00

Death of Social Business Exaggerated

The future of your business is social, but the social revolution feels stalled. Analyst Brian Solis blamed the C level for killing the social revolution last week. This week Morgan Oney taught valuable lessons in how to become a "social business" and proved the death of social business is greatly exaggerated.

Morgan's Screaming Owl website has a Woot.com like mission. Screaming Owl's tag defines it well, "Hot Deals For Moms And The Little Ones They Love". Morgan emailed a passionate letter to her Screaming Owl list on Tuesday and CureCancerStarter.org received 2,000 Facebook Likes and enough donation support to move UNC Lineberger's fibrocyte research from my oncologist Dr. Hank van Deventer to 91% funded.

Morgan's army of "mompreneurs" aren't aware of the C Level's war against social media. Morgan's army of more than 225,000 Facebook followers want a great deal, a place to talk about the great deals they find and they are willing to use their social nets for good and for fun.

We were sure social demands would drive marketing. Morgan's army of screaming owls show social media is important in ways marketers don't fully understand. I learned some cool social media tips from Morgan including:

Screaming Owl Social Biz Tips

Define Your Tribe (moms and the little ones they love).
Define Your Mission (hot deals).
Align mission with something the web does well (communication).
Find tools to help create sense of urgency (the picture below is a great example of a feedback loop tool that really works).
Be Personal - Morgan's email has a great and authentic voice because it shared a tough personal experience but did so in an inspirational way.
Give something of value away.
Enlist and enroll (by sharing or donating Screaming Owl moms up the ante and receive more chances to win the bag).
Short deadlines (3 days and on to the next thing).

AHA Social Marketing Moment

Shared this list of Screaming Owl social media tips on GPlus yesterday, but had an AHA Moment today. Something moved in my brain's dusty attic. I remembered reading Demanding Brands on TrendWatching.com last month.

Demanding Brands discusses how today's consumers want to work a little, and, having worked, develop stronger relationships with "demanding brands". Screaming Owl fangates their deals asking for customers to EARN their way in. Fangates are little hurdles customers must jump over to earn something like a deal, an entry into a contest or membership in a social tribe.

Brian Solis may be right about the C Level and their collective social media yawn. But something is clearly happening. Some important brand marketing trend is emerging. One of the common pieces of feedback we are receiving about our new crowdfunding cancer research website CureCancerStarter.org is how many people are asking for things all the time. The web is making The Ask feel out of control.

Combine that CureCancerStarter.org feedback with Screaming Owl's "social deals" and instant results with TrendWatching's demanding brands report and maybe the best use of social media is to reinforce the exclusive clubs we join. And to have the value of your join reinforced daily as we treat those special club members rewarding "work" they've done and ask for more.

The final brick in this "maybe we just don't understand social media" thought comes from brand marketing guru Faith Popcorn's famous, "People don't BUY brands they JOIN them," statement, a statement more prescient every passing social media marketing and connection economy day. Perhaps the most important "social ideal" is in its ability to create community in name and action, arm that community with an ASK and marvel at how fast a hive of motivated bees can make honey.

Let's combine these ideas into an If, Then, Then logic problem:

1. People don't BUY brands they JOIN them.

2. Social networks make creating "like me" community such as mompreneurs easy.

3. Demanding brands are finding stronger relationships and increased advocacy after customers earn their way in.

4. Reinforcing any website or brand's "exclusive club" daily help cement bonds and strong bonds grow community.

5. In a land of infinite choice we buy, donate to and support those we love.

6. Love must be earned but it can also be shared, granted and gained from trusted friends.

7. Love is a conversation not a lecture, a willing give and take.

8. Perhaps social media's as yet unrealized value is to have conversations previously avoided, conversations about love, passion, life and meaning.

9. Brands, companies and personal branding must become comfortable with BIG IDEAS since social networks make Save The World Marketing possibly the most important dimension to any online marketing.

For a long time I've felt the lines between nonprofit marketing and for profit sales are crumbling. For profit brands and companies must tell emotionally resonant myth-like heroic stories, form community and listen carefully traditional nonprofit strengths. Nonprofits must amplify their message, cut through clutter and master distribution all traditional for profit strengths.

My Save The World Marketing Slideshare didn't go far enough, based on today's AHA Moment. Over 10,000 people have viewed Save The World Marketing, so I owe 10,000 people Save The World Marketing II soon.

###

Here is a picture of the magic feedback loop tool that powers Screaming Owl's fangate. There are three hurdles. Like is a single entry, share generates more entries and donation the most entries into the drawing for the Lucy Bag. Brilliant staging with significant drop offs at each stage, but even if only 1% of the 2,000 Likes we received donate that is 20 more donations that we had before.

Win The Most Powerful Purse In The World

2013-10-30T15:31:00.001-04:00

Enter Screaming Owl LUCY Purse Giveaway

Enter Here - Ends Friday

Mompreneurs + Cancerpreneurs = Cure Cancer

What makes Screaming Owl's purse the most powerful purse in the world? Screaming Owl's tagline is "Hot Deals For Moms and the Little Ones They Love". Screaming Owl proves how powerful moms and mompreneurs are. Since they launched their amazing Free Lucy Purse offer more than 1500 new friends have liked CureCancerStarter.org on Facebook.

OFFER ENDS FRIDAY!

Screaming Owl didn't stop with LIKES. Sharing the link and donating give powerful mompreneurs more chances to win the most powerful purse in the world. We haven't begun to tally CureCancerStarter.org MOM donations yet, but here is an amazing email from Morgan

How would you like to have this adorable chevron handbag, filled with other goodies from the Screaming Owl overstock closet…for FREE? Today could be your lucky day and you can enter to win below, but now that I have your attention, allow me to first tell you about an amazing organization that we’re partnering with today to bring you this amazing giveaway.
As some of you may know from our recent Breast Cancer Awareness month promotion, I lost my mom to breast cancer 9 years ago. She battled the horrid disease for 13 years, and much of my childhood was spent in hospitals, testing facilities and chemo rooms. To say that I have a strong hatred for this disease would be an understatement!

Recently, a friend of mine who knows my story and knows how badly I’d love to see a cure one day shared with me an organization that I fell in love with right from the start. It’s called Cure Cancer Starter and their mission is to use the popular trend of Internet crowdfunding help give research projects at some of the country’s leading cancer centers the money they need to tackle this monster.

As an owner of a social based business, I love the idea. And even more, I love that they allow the donor’s to specifically select which research project they’d like their money to fund. And the best part…100% of the money that is donated goes to that project!

I could go on and on about this amazing organization, but at the risk of losing your interest along the way, let’s get right to it! Today through Saturday, we’re giving you a chance to win that adorable handbag and goodies, and all you have to do is check out Cure Cancer Starter.

To enter to win, we ask that you simply like their page on Facebook, which you can do below. If you’re interested in the organization and would like to do more, you can also gain extra entries by sharing their page on Facebook with your friends and family, or even better, if you choose to donate to a specific research project, you can gain even more entries!
Screaming Owl is in no way benefiting from this giveaway and we’re not asking for any likes or shares for our business. We just want to help Cure Cancer Starter get their name out there because we believe in them.

We think they truly may be on the path to helping fund a cure and that’s just something we’d love to be a part of! If you’ve ever been affected, directly or indirectly by this terrible disease, we hope you’d like to be a part of it too!

Hearts and Minds - Why Next Web Favors People Not Logistics

2013-10-26T20:59:00.002-04:00

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad

Thinking Web First

We are upside down. The pre-web logistics systems, the contemporary equivalent of the Roman Aqueduct, created by big box retailers has been riding a big wave. As big boxers (big box retailers) figured out how to squeeze brands and consumer products goods manufacturers consumers were getting squeezed too.

Many ecept 1% at the top made less money last year then the year before (in real dollars). As the economy's vice grips tightened big box retailers with their "low price" promises rode in on a big white horse and offered a rescue.

Drowning men use what they can to stay afloat. Don't expect big box retailers, as heavily invested in existing logistics as they are, to do anything more than the bare minimum to help develop our new, better, mobile web enabled web.

Hearts and Minds

Big box retailers think they are large and in charge, but their undoing is in view. With so much sunk into logistics and focus 100% logistics, a very particular kind of financial arbitrage, it is easy to miss the next web revolution.

The mobile, social web is the revolution.

The web destroys expensive and stupid. We will look back on today's multi-touch middleman in control logistics as expensive and stupid...eventually. Gatekeepers and middlemen don't fare well in a web enabled world no matter howgreat their logistics.

Self reinforcing systems only marginally focused on winning hearts and minds win some loyalty. Winning hearts and minds is not the game they play. Logistics based systems are dead men walking and the new Google is why.

The New Google

I don't know if the new Google, the one that values content and confirming social signals, is Google's creation or reaction and it doesn't matter. The new Google's valuation of content, community and conversion mean any logistics-only system is dead...eventually.

Thinking like a middleman is a sure prescription future pain. No one loves middlemen or at least no one loves middlemen for very long. This is not to say logistics genius has no value, but logistics genius is so prevalent and readily available value can only go in one direction DOWN.

On the other hand those who build community demand is only going UP. Community is hard and expensive to build right now. Those two lines will cross - the line associated with hearts and minds social systems creation costs and the line expressing value of existing logistics super systems. Once the over (what is to be gained) on logistics is less than the under (costs of creating the system) big boxers are vulnerable.

When the inevitable line crossing day arrives and cost of creating hearts and minds social systems (the under) is clearly miles away from the over (ever increasing gains from developing the sysem) the battle is over once and forever.

All the logistics in the world can't make someone love you.

Last week was an amazing week. Our new crowdfunding cancer research idea is LIVE (CureCancerStaretr.org). We created the idea of crowdfunding cancer research with great partners like my two treating institutions (UNC & Duke). Since 100% of donations go to cancer research and we've had some BIG costs associated with building the new website I'm trying to THINK my way to new ideas that can help keep my job and so contunue to have an income I can use to upgrade our new website.

The CureCancerStarer.org crowdfunding cancer research idea lives in the middle of the Thank You economy. We are doing the right thing and hoping for the best. I sold insisting we would learn so much so fast my employer, Raleigh web and software developer Atlantic BT, would benefit in unique ways. I vastly UNDERESTIMATED how much we would learn and how fast (so good news).

Things Changed Again

Google has changed everything again. The new Google with insistence on QDF (Quality Deserves Freshness), content and social signals favors a handful "trusted authority" websites. How can your website become a trusted authority? Spend millions and plan for it to take years to climb the trusted authority ladder one wrung at a time.

Castle building is crazy when a giant pisses on your head as you lay each stone. Better to find a way to put your castle (castle = app, widget, content) in THEIR trusted and authoritative castle. Create CONVERSATIONS not websites. Conversations go anywhere, cost less and win more hearts and minds than any website ever.

My very tired story after an amazing week. What about you? How do you think big box retailers will change. Can they pivot and GET IT, the need to win hearts and minds, fast enough to continue to make money from the vast logistics networks they've built or are they soulless giants sure to fall? I go for the later even as I realize castles don't crumble in a day.

Lean Design Book Project

2013-10-26T09:32:00.000-04:00

What: Publish A Book In 3 Weeks

Why: Cool Idea, Fun, Profits to Cure Cancer
Who: Writers Willing To Share 1,000 Words
Send To: Martin(at)StoryofCancer.org

Deadline: Halloween

Writing A Book Together Fast, Curing Cancer

Have you ever wanted to be a published author? Publishing a book is on my bucket list. After having a little epiphany the other day about Lean Design I wrote some friends and asked for 1,000 words by Halloween. I decided to leave 1 to 3 chapters for writers I don't know but who would like to contribute to the topic.

I'm picking up all publication costs. Profits, should there be any will help cure cancer by going to our 501c3 nonprofit Story of Cancer Foundation. Story of Cancer is the fuel behind CureCancerStarter.org, our new crowdfunding cancer research website and CureCancerStore.org the website where shopping helps cure cancer.

Here are links I shared with friends, the posts that sketch my lean design epiphany:

http://sco.lt/5LGxl3 Sccop.it overview

https://plus.google.com/102639884404823294558/posts/XHXxCn5qgEb ;

https://plus.google.com/102639884404823294558/posts/DTLgQM8a9Kk ;

https://plus.google.com/102639884404823294558/posts/3jFjeERF4uv

If you are a passionate Internet marketer, love to write and would like to have your thoughts in print and next to some amazing Internet marketing wizards take a few hours to read the outlines above, sit down, pull out the laptop and write 1,000 words on how Lean Design will impact something you know about. How often do you get a chance to have your words help cure cancer? Not very often (lol). Hope you can join us.

Lean Design Movement Implications For Ecommerce

2013-10-24T15:11:00.004-04:00

Create Conversations Not Websites

Websites are becoming clunky and old fast. Working on CureCancerStarter.org today how much web design must change is clear. Here is why "website design" must change:

Post Google Algo Changes CONTENT is King.
Not all content is equally valuable.
Some content produces more social shares and so is the most valuable.
Existing scaled websites are fortified castles.
Don't SIEGE fortified castles, build YOUR stuff inside THEIR castle.
Web design more about partnerships than content marketing or SEO.

The Lean Design Movement

The Lean Design Movement is happening NOW. The movement builds on the ideas of author Lisa Gansky (The Mesh). Gansky's book and website are early signs of the lean design movement. Why, Gansky asks, recreate the wheel? Better to build your cool thing on top of or as part of THEIR scaled ecosystem.

The implications for #startups and how we "design" websites are significant. We started our CureCancerStarter.org journey mapping development of a scaled "commons". A commons is a place where User Generated Content helps build an open field into a mighty castle.

Building such a commons was a good Idea five years ago not so much now.

Google's algorithm changes are our new "lean design" gatekeepers. There are tremendous advantages to BEING a trusted source. So many advantages that breaking into the "trusted sources" club is all but impossible. For every article you post they will post 500. For every comment you get they already have 5,000. The environment is built to keep LARGE and IN CHARGE players on top of YOU.

My lesson today, and it was a tough one, is learning yesterday's web design doesn't work today. Yesterday (or several years ago) Platforms vs. Websites declared websites DEAD and platforms as their successor.

Platforms are now dead too.

Authority in today's web comes from social signals (all those page visits, likes, comments and links). If you don't already have a supportive tribe building one is almost out of the question. Out of the question in any business vertical that is already massively online (as most now are). Your rebel army doesn't have resources needed to lay siege to a castle. Can't be done, so don't try.

Better to "appify" and "widgetize" your startup. Appify and widgetize means you focus on the conversation you want to curate and create and then build minimal and lean technology to allow already scaled players to easily incorporate your conversation.

Startups like to build things everyone loves. They want to be the next Twitter. Great if CureCancerStarter.org could be the Kickstarter of cancer research, but odds are against building such a castle in today's SEO world. Better to create an app or a widget that moves the "crowdfunding cancer research" conversation anywhere the conversation needs to go.

Focus less on CASTLE and more on an end goal - in this case raising cancer research donations. As government funding continues to decline cancer researchers WANT to have the alternative funding conversation. Most cancer researchers have scaled websites (even if they don't fully understand how to use them), so better to build INSIDE of their castle than building our own castle.

Being the next Kickstarter is great for the ego, but hard to accomplish given the way the Internet marketing chess board is set up NOW. Better to figure out ways to MESH your ideas into theirs. This is NOT to say building a website is a BAD idea.

There is still a "catch fish" role for a website. SCALE comes from SCALE, but you can't catch fish without casting a net so continue to create a website but THINK differently about how to achieve scale. Find ways to co-opt the scale of others to give you the space you need to survive.

Best way to survive long enough to matter is focus on an important conversation you care passionately about (as I do curing cancer) and then appify, widetize and gamify an easy to install app that scaled websites can't live without.

Ecommerce Implications

Implications for merchants are significant too. Merchants are castle builders. The way the Internet marketing chess board is set up now, with so many social signals coming in so many directions all at once, merchants who "set free the bears" will do well.

Setting Free The Bears, other than a John Irving reference, means to stop thinking in terms of driving traffic to a location and start thinking in terms of where is the traffic now an and how do we convert that traffic. Commerce can happen anywhere so why isn't it?

Commerce is constrained by out THINKING. We merchants, I used to run a big ecom website, think in chess terms. We move a knight here a pawn there to diversify our chances and hedge our bets. We still see a funnel that happens in a place we own and control. WHY?

Facebook will always "own and control" more traffic and profiles than you. Why recreate the wheel when there are so many wheel makers asking you to use theirs? Commerce can happen anywhere. Keep that thought in mind and we move into the holiday selling season.

Death of Social Business Exaggerated Or Right?

2013-10-23T00:02:00.002-04:00

Brain Solis and the C-Level Failure

When someone with more grey cells than me proclaims the death of "social business" the post is worth a read (or two or three). I love this Brian Solis paragraph:

It’s not that the ideas are losing or that the goals are without merit, they are. The problem is that the deeper meaning and richer context is being lost on executives who still think the word “social” indicates a frivolous time-wasting pursuit. To them, it’s about what someone ate for lunch. Or it’s that thing their teenagers do to ignore them at the dinner table. Despite the Arab Spring, the customer revolution and an increasingly connected society which turns to Twitter with every earthquake or news event, the idea of being a Social Business has failed to break through the care barrier in most C-Suites.

In 30 years I've worked for and sold to C-level executives almost exclusively since my twenties. I am the pesky "teenager" in Brian's quote. In 1984 I purchased a PC with money I didn't have, a 640K IBM dual disk drive monochrome monitor PC with Lotus 1-2-3 costing $5,000.

I bring this memory up because use of computers was seen as a "frivolous time-wasting pursuit". Turns out I don't mind having my life so wasted. I learned early on the technology wasn't as important as the CHANGE it created in me.

I haven't attained a C-level position so one could read my life as FAILURE. I'm a cancer survivor and having the Big C teaches many lessons. LIVE what you LOVE is perhaps the most important cancer survivor lesson. You don't always make the most money living what you love and doing it with those you love. You don't always attain the C-suite, but those C-level dreams feel OLD and boring.

The idea that a C-level executive has some secret beans that I too must have or my life is failure and miserable failure is absurd. The average tenure of a CMO is two years so apparently they aren't trusted as far as they can be thrown (lol).

So let's agree with Brian that C-level executives are true to form and will be the laggards in our three act social business play. Here is Solis again:

Indeed, as I have heard from executives in charge of billion dollar lines of business, they “have people for that”. They have yet to see the bigger opportunity to seize competitive advantage or the risk to their business. It’s as if they were frogs being put into a pot of cold water being slowly brought to a boil. It’s not so painful that they need to make a massive investment to transform their organizations. They continue to make money and operate as they always have. That is the problem. The old model of organizational design and profit making is obsolete but it hasn’t yet completely or visibly failed for the people in charge.

This Solis quote reinforces the technological revolutionary (me) as administrative assistant in a world made FLAT by C-level myopia. Here is the other thing I learned about C-level executives. C-levels change when they get fired and never much before. Their conditioning is so complete change risks all. Their core stays "steady on" no matter.

I remember being a young revolutionary at M&M/Mars (I was in my late twenties and so very full of beans and dangerous as only youth can be :). Red in the face I explained the coming digital revolution within 20% of where we ended up. I also outlined how poorly we (M&M's) were set up to take advantage of the winds of change. "And what exactly do you want me to do," came the clearly angry response from the VP Sales. I was as a loss. It seemed so clear right up until he said that (lol).

Change of the magnitude we were discussing forces its presence like water on a stone. My visualization of the digital revolution was much FASTER, more VIOLENT and more BOLD something I realize all these years later can be put down to youth's rose colored revolutionary glasses - the ones that make everything seem faster, bigger and more dramatic (lol).

That our "social business revolution" would go drip, drip, drip instead of FLOOD is disappointing. Nothing like a good flood to clean away yesterday's BS, but Solis hits on another problem and that problem is US.

Why haven't we consumers risen up and demanded our social due?

It is not sloth or lethargy that prevents us from donning beret and arming with social Molotov cocktails, but our dependence on THEM. A moment ago life was controlled by THEMs. We watched what THEY programmed, listened to what THEY played and purchased the official revolutionary garb THEY sold despite the absurdity of "official revolutionary garb". We revolted in defined and acceptable ways. We were more revolting than real revolutionaries. Solis again:

Being an eBusiness was simply about getting online to sell your stuff – if you didn’t do it, you were going to lose your position in the market. Social Business is about being more social, more connected, more human and so much more. By being more connected and transparent, we increase the flow of information inside and across the organization. By being more authentic and empathetic, we can increase trust with our peers and our clients. For the acolytes, becoming a social business is about the future of business, and how great everything could be if we fixed what’s wrong with the status quo. For others, who don’t have a clear view of what a successful Social Business looks like, its just another management fad with which they can’t be bothered with beyond the marketing department.

This Solis quote is right and wrong. It is RIGHT about THEM and wrong about US. The implication is THEY (C-level executives) can determine social business will be "just another management fad" and Solis is right BECAUSE of us. Not the US of my fellow Internet marketers but the collective proletariat us.

We haven't woken all the way UP yet.

America's promise is work hard and the democracy of our meritocracy will out. Problem is truth is our contemporary truth is much messier. Truth is we've been incubated Matrix-like for a long time. We read Seth Godin and then want to work for IBM. There is no IBM anymore Godin proclaims yet a generation continues to see such false idols as worthy of their life's greatest treasure - their TIME.

We imagine and dream the revolution more than we live it.

RIGHT THIS MINUTE I've bet my life savings on the revolution. I am here to tell you placing such a bet is SCARY and HARD (lol). I'm also here to share another red faced prediction - our technical social lives are rapidly becoming more powerful than any life controlled by gatekeepers.

What is a C-level executive if not a gatekeeper.

Great C-level executives, and I've known several including J. Langdon at M&M's and Mary Kay O'Connor at Nutrasweet, have three jobs: the vision thing, coaching their team to understand the vision thing and gate keeping the P&L and corporate ROI.

I AGREE with Brian's assertion. Our "social business" revolution is currently hung up on a rock. He hints at OUR (the royal we) complicity. I agree with the idea of our complicity most of all. Were Brian and I divulge is in the inevitability of the drip, drip, drip of change. The social water will erode C-level stones just as the digital water rushed up and got us here.

That money and profits can still be made in the old way is no surprise. But count the devastation:

Market creation via push advertising is all but over.
Gatekeepers aren't GONE but their strangle hold is loosening.
Since the hypnotic stare of ever MORE media is over, some authenticity is creeping in.
Authenticity spreads like a virus.
Once authenticity is created it is hard to take back or return to saccharin.
The MAN may still control the means of production, but he is more scared than ever.

Yes we continue to work for the man, but the man is increasingly becoming US.

Each day's social media's drip, drip, drip erodes the rock a tad. Will we ever create the social business we saw so well a few years back? Probably not if past is any indicator of future. We build sand castles on the beach and the tide always comes in. Our social media tides feel increasingly right, true and authentic.

What's next? More drip, drip, drip as stone gives up surface and soul to river and the distance between each other shrinks. We will try on our ability to be gatekeepers of our lives. We may still work for the man, but he is less HIM and more US every darn social day.

Great post Brian. Thanks.

ScentTrail Marketing

New ScentTrail Marketing Home

5 Secret Internet Marketing Tactics For 2014

Disrupt In 2014

2014 Tactic #1: Enterprise Crowdfunding

2014 Tactic #2:Content Widgets

2014 Tactic #3:Mobile First

2014 Tactic #4:Ecommerce

2014 Tactic #5:Social Media Marketing

Building On Combinatorial Creativity via Maria Popova Design Matters Interview

Content Curation Defined

Time Code 24:00 Combinatorial Creativity

Time Code 28:00 Curation as Framework

Time Code 28:28 Popova Pattern Recognition

Ecommerce Stuck In Mud - Crowdfunde To Rescue

Retiring To Start Crowdfunde

Ecommerce = Mobile x Community Squared

Agile software development

Community & Connection

New Ecommerce

Genius Lunch At The Pit - Be Like Water My Friend

Genius Lunch At The Pit

Hellfighers

Why Helfighers Is The New SEO

Creating Best Website Firefighters

Be Like Water

Is Enterprise Crowdfunding A Game Changer? Yep!

Crowdfunding For Companies

Crowdfunding As New Channel

Elaine O’Neil Love North Carolina Calendars

5 Quick & Easy Content Marketing Tips

Tips for Startups & SMBs

Content Marketing Tip #1: Before, During, After Events

Content Marketing Tip #2: Support Great Posts About You

Content Marketing Tip #3: Don't SELL, CURATE Instead

Content Marketing Tip #4: An Eye On What You Want

Content Marketing Tip #5: Tools Matter

Why Conversations Crush Platforms, Blogs and Websites

Haiku Deck Not Just An Ipad App Anymore

Internet Markeing Lessons From Coke Freestyle

Coke's Internet Marketing Lessons

Work From Customers To Everything Else

Next Gen Coke Freestyle Ideas

Content Marketing Tangled Up In Blue

First Indy GiveGuide Features Story of Cancer On Cover

SMBs and Content Marketing: 5 Quick Tips

Dustin Stout's Best On GooglePlus List

Curatti.com Launches Editors of Chaos

Curatti.com New Website Launched

SEO Controversy

First SEO Is Dead Proclamation

Navneet Panda's Revolution

SEO Death Controversy

Long Live SEO

Care and Feeding of Networks & Top 10 Must Follow Scoopers

Content Networks Are Different

Network Care & Feeding Tip 1: Join A Strong Community such as Scoop.it

Network Care & Feeding Tip #2: Be Present Every Day

Network Care & Feeding Tip #3: Be Nice & Share LOVE

Network Care & Feeding Tip #4: Be Humble But Not A Push Over

Network Care & Feeding Tip #5: Don't Kiss Ass, But Do Mention and Share Respect

Why Social Media Is Really Save The World Marketing

Death of Social Business Exaggerated

AHA Social Marketing Moment

Win The Most Powerful Purse In The World

Mompreneurs + Cancerpreneurs = Cure Cancer

Hearts and Minds - Why Next Web Favors People Not Logistics

Thinking Web First

Hearts and Minds

The New Google

Things Changed Again

Lean Design Book Project

Lean Design Movement Implications For Ecommerce

Create Conversations Not Websites

The Lean Design Movement

Ecommerce Implications

Death of Social Business Exaggerated Or Right?

Brain Solis and the C-Level Failure

2014 Tactic #1:
Enterprise Crowdfunding

2014 Tactic #2:
Content Widgets

2014 Tactic #3:
Mobile First

2014 Tactic #4:
Ecommerce

2014 Tactic #5:
Social Media Marketing

Time Code 24:00
Combinatorial Creativity

Time Code 28:00
Curation as Framework

Time Code 28:28
Popova Pattern Recognition