And to you readers who have hung in there during my long hiatus from blogging, this is the year that I come back, with a new, compassionate, informative, and hopefully entertaining blogging style. Let’s make 2012 a year of positive change – together.

What are you changing to make your life better this year?

(via http://DanZarrella.com)

Chapter 1 – High Tech Marketing Illusion

This is how the traditional high-tech marketing model progresses, theoretically:

The technology adoption life cycle for disruptive (discontinuous) technologies

It’s a continuous curve, and a company should move pretty smoothly from segment to segment.

Here’s a quick rundown about the people who make up each segment:

Innovators – They care about the tech, the elegance or creativity of a technology at solving the problem.

Early adopters – They care less about the actual tech and more about what it can do for them. Looking for a quantum leap forward.

The early majority - They are pragmatic. They’ll go with new(ish) tech, but only to keep up. They want tested, stable tech.

The late majority – They’ll change when they have to. Generally uncomfortable with most technology, they want easy-to-use, mature, widely adopted tech.

Laggards – They hate you, your technology, and the kids that get on their lawn. They not only hate your tech, they’ll try to convince others to stay away as well.

Here’s how the model actually unfolds:

It’s not a continuous curve, there are gaps between each segment where a company can fall. You fall by not successfully moving from one segment to the next (e.g. getting stuck with the early adopter crowd but nobody in the early majority adopts). Most gaps are thin, but the chasm is huge, which brings us to…

Chapter 2 – High Tech Marketing Enlightenment

For discussion’s sake, a high tech market is defined as

• a set of actual or potential customers
• for a given set of products or services
• who have a common set of needs or wants, and
• who reference each other when making a buying decision.

My note: The last point gets emphasized by Moore, and at the time of writing, gaps like geography and discipline, were critical. As he puts it, a doctor in Zaire isn’t in the same market as a doctor in Boston. However, with the expansion of the Internet, those markets really are becoming global, because communication is a lot easier. It’s now a lot easier for the doctor in Zaire to read a review or get some feedback from the doctor in Boston than it used to be. So basically, your markets can be a lot bigger, even by Moore’s definition. However, I think that geography in particular is still useful in segmenting your markets.

Early Markets – Innovators and early adopters. Innovators find and explore new tech, early adopters check with innovators to find new technological solutions for problems.

Early Market Problems

• Problem 1: Crappy segmentation and positioning – you bit off more than you can chew. To fix it? Go find a pond where you can be the biggest fish. Once you dominate that pond, go “pond-hopping” until you capture the market.
  

  My note: this has the feel of solid advice for any entrepreneur.

• Problem 2: Vaporware – You promised that big-time C-level exec some crazy stuff and now you have to make it. As you try to produce, you find out that you overpromised and you can’t deliver. Now, everybody’s unhappy, and you’re dead in the water. There’s only one thing for it: try to find something useful in all the crap you just built and sell it to someone that likes it. Welcome to a much smaller pond.
  

  My note: This reminds me of the product validation tour story they told me when I started at Instructure. Basically, the founders went on a road trip and just dropped in on administrators at a dozen or so colleges and universities. However, rather than selling them a product that didn’t exist, they asked them what the ideal product would look like if they could build it. After taking copious notes, the founders came back, sat down, and figured out what they could actually build given their resources. However, they hadn’t promised anything, so there was nobody to upset or let down, and the founders were the only stakeholders (fewer cooks in the kitchen). This allowed them to build a product that the market wanted, without having to kowtow to particular early adopters to develop their product. If I ever launch a tech product, this is how I’m going to do it.

• Problem 3: Marketing fails to define benefits – This time they don’t figure out how to get past the “this technology is so geeky/cool/revolutionary” message for innovators to the “this is how our tech can save you money/increase your sales” message for early adopters.
  

  My note: Let’s face it, if you can’t talk ROI with a potential client, you’re probably not going to be financially successful. There’s not a huge mainstream market for technology for technology’s sake.

Mainstream Markets – Early majority and late majority. These guys make up the vast bulk of any market. The early majority is the leader who adopts technology; the late majority tends to follow along behind.

Mainstream Market Problems

• Problem 1: Stop improving your current product to fund new product development elsewhere – This has been the death of a lot of companies who were once mainstream market leaders.
  

  My note: This reminds me of a few companies: Novell, Blackboard, Inc., and one other that I’m pretty familiar with.

• Problem 2: Shoot yourself in the flagship product – You updated your product and guess what? It blows and now nobody wants it. Some companies get smart and fix it. Some don’t and allow small startup companies to come in and start taking away marketshare.

A Note About Laggards

So at first blush, my thought was that you should just ignore these guys. After all, I believe in not feeding the trolls or wasting time with people who are determined to hate me. There are just too many other willing buyers and advocates. However, Moore made me think twice. He mentioned that while they’re not a great market to sell to, they’re a bit like the “canary in the coal mine.” They’ll be the very first to point out where your marketing and sales pitches don’t match up with the actual product. Pay attention and it’ll keep you honest and show you where to improve your product.

THE CHASM

And here we are at the point of all this (finally). The reason why there’s a chasm and not just a gap between early adopters and the early majority is because the early majority is scared and they need references from people like themselves to make a buying decision. This creates a “catch-22″ where a company can’t get into the early majority segment unless it has references from the early majority and it can’t get references from the early majority unless it gets into the early majority segment. This is a problem. And why won’t the early majority refer to the early adopters for buying decisions? Turns out the early majority hates early adopters because:

• Early adopters don’t respect their colleagues’ experiences – After all, this is what makes them innovative. Everyone else has been doing it wrong and they can see a waaaaaay better way.
• Early adopters love technology more than they love their industry – They’d much rather be on Engadget than reading an industry blog. This makes them look unfocused and flighty to the pragmatists of the early majority.
• Early adopters don’t account for existing infrastructure – They’d rather just build new, from the ground up. This is infuriating to the early majority, who worry about interoptability and care about best practices.
• Early adopters are disruptive – Moore puts it best: “From a pragmatist’s point of view, visionaries are the people who come in and soak up all the budget for their pet projects. If the project is a success, they take all the credit, while the pragmatists get stuck trying to maintain a system that is so “state-of-the-art” no one is quite sure how to keep it working. If the project fails, visionaries always seem to be a step ahead of the disaster, getting out of town while they can, and leaving the pragmatists to clean up the mess.”

Next post >> Crossing the Chasm: Part 2 (or how to actually cross the chasm)

At the same time, since I last wrote I’ve since taken a new job as The Marketing Department at Instructure, a small edu-oriented startup. This new job has shown me just how much my marketing education is lacking. To rectify the situation, I’ve come up with a list of influential advertising and marketing books, which I intend to read and take notes on. This brings me to my point: instead of keeping my notes in my black notebook, I think I’m going to try to keep them on this blog. That way, if you’ve read (or are reading) the same book, you can point out to me the obvious points that I have no doubt that I’ll miss. And maybe, if you haven’t read the book, you’ll still be able to glean some of the wisdom contained therein. At very least, you’ll get to see what happens when I try something I read about.

Also, I make no promises as to frequency of my posts, but I’m hoping for a post a week, at least.

As for my reading queue, here’s the list as it currently stands:

• “CROSSING THE CHASM” - Geoffrey A. Moore
• “THE E-MYTH REVISITED” – Michael E. Gerber
• “ALL MARKETERS ARE LIARS TELL STORIES” – Seth Godin
• “INFLUENCE: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSUASION” – Robert B. Cialdini
• “MADE TO STICK” – Chip and Dan Heath
• “TRUST AGENTS” – Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
• “POSITIONING: THE BATTLE FOR YOUR MIND” – Al Ries and Jack Trout
• “CRUSH IT” – Gary Veynerchuck
• “PURPLE COW” – Seth Godin
• “HEY, WHIPPLE. SQUEEZE THIS: A GUIDE TO CREATING GREAT ADVERTISING” – Luke Sullivan
• “OGILVY ON ADVERTISING” – David Ogilvy
• “GOOD TO GREAT: WHY SOME COMPANIES MAKE THE LEAP AND OTHERS DON’T”  – Jim Collins
• “THE 22 IMMUTABLE LAWS OF BRANDING” – Al Ries
• “ADVERTISING, SECRETS OF THE WRITTEN WORD” – Joseph Sugarman
• “THE 22 IMMUTABLE LAWS OF BRANDING” – Al Ries and Laura Ries
• “WHERE THE SUCKERS MOON: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF AN ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN” – Randall Rothenberg
• “THE BOOK OF GOSSAGE” - Howard Luck Gossage
• “BLINK: THE POWER OF THINKING WITHOUT THINKING”  – Malcom Gladwell
• “ICE TO THE ESKIMOS” – Jon Spoelstra

What do you think? Anything I’m missing in here?

(Thanks to AdAge.com and a few other sites and sources for the recommendations.)

One of the emerging buzzwords in corporate social media is “content schedule.” This isn’t a new concept, neither is it particularly complicated. However, as companies venture deeper and deeper into social media’s broad territory, it is becoming more and more critical to have some kind of overarching framework from which individual channels are managed.

After all, when you’re talking about managing multiple social media channels, each with its own set of unique needs, requirements, and content, things can get overwhelming quickly and pretty soon channels start to go unwatched and unloved. Creating a content schedule helps with this, because it allows you to see in a discrete and orderly fashion what content is needed where.

It also allows you to see relationships between channels, like when you need to follow up a killer blog post with an equally killer tweet. So here you go: this is my system for coming up with a social media content strategy. As with pretty much anything I post here, there are a million ways to go about it. However, these are the things I’ve found to be the most effective to think about when creating a social media content schedule:

1. Channels – First of all, think about where you want to manage your brand’s presence. With hundreds of social media channels available, you can’t manage a presence on all of them, nor would you want to, since your customers (both present and future) are probably only congregating on a few sites. The obvious channels to talk about here are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and MAYBE MySpace or LinkedIn. However, there are so many smaller niche networks, that you might find a great little gathering of perfect prospects on some obscure site. So how do you find them? There are a few ways, some more expensive than others. First, you could pay for a social media listening tool like Radian6 or Techrigy SM2. Just punch in your brand terms and see what pops up. Another (free) option is to look at referring sites in your site analytics. Keep an eye out for good amounts of traffic coming from social media sites. Finally, do a search on Google for one of your main keywords and in the left-hand column, select the “latest” option to see the latest real-time search results. That can let you know where conversations are taking place. Browse a few pages, get a feel for volume, and look for surprises (like a niche social network).
2. Frequency – Decide how often you’re reasonably able to post to each channel. Be realistic, and then set a goal slightly below. Believe me, it’s easier to start small and realize that you have enough content to bump your frequency up than it is to start too fast and then realize that you’ve run out of things to say. When starting a blog, for example, I think having the goal to post just once a week is a great idea. It’s easy to expand that number if necessary, and you don’t feel as much pressure in the meantime. Sooner than later, you’ll get the hang of the blog thing and get some company-wide help (hopefully) and then you can bump the frequency up a notch or two without causing yourself to burn out.
3. Content – This is the magic part of the calendar where you get to decide what gets posted where. While I’ve already written about types of content to post, you have to tailor that content to the various channels you’re calendaring. Also, here’s a tip for populating a content schedule quickly – come up with themes (hopefully pulled from either your business goals and needs or your SEO keywords, or both!) and then turn them into recurring features. For example, if you sell snowboards, on the first Tuesday of every month, you might write about the board of the month. That way, every first Tuesday, you know what you have to write about. This has the added benefit of building expectations with your readership. So keep an eye on which recurring features get no  comments and shares. Drop them and keep trying to fill the space with new ones that are more engaging. A little trial and error later, and you’ll have a killer lineup of recurring content that your readers are anxiously waiting to consume and share.
4. Help – Once you know what your content needs are, you can start looking around within your company for people to help you create said content. Believe me, your life will be easier and your content more engaging if you can vary the source from whence it comes. If you’ve got a series on shoe design, find the biggest clothes horse you know and ask them to create some stuff. If they’re passionate about it, they should have no problem coming up with some content that speaks to other enthusiasts in an authentic way, and that’s the kind of content that gets shared and reshared.
5. Flex, Rinse and Repeat – As with anything scheduled, your content plans will be thrown awry. People will miss deadlines, emergencies will crop up, and new ideas will occur. Don’t be afraid to adjust the schedule to accommodate them. That’s one of the gifts of working with social media; you have the ability to be incredibly flexible. If you find yourself making the same adjustments repeatedly, make it permanent. Just make sure that the schedule works, or you’ll stop using it and it will have been a colossal waste of time.

So that’s it. That’s my magic advice. Do you use a publishing schedule, and if so, what do you do to create it?

• New information – This includes breaking news, original research, and unique conclusions or ideas.
  • Ideas – Create a whitepaper. Share interesting statistics from your business. Think about what your audience finds interesting and provide unique insight about it.
• Infographics – Interesting facts centered around a specific topic and represented graphically so as to make them easier to digest.
  • Ideas – Read this blog post.
• Humor – This is fairly obvious to describe, but more difficult to execute. Some of the
  • Ideas – Really the best advice I can give you is to look inside your organization and think about the funny stuff that happens inside the office. What do you laugh about around the water cooler? Try to adapt those ideas to your business. Your other option? Find the funniest coworkers you know and ask them to brainstorm together.
• Contests – This takes some investment in both time and money, but it’s worth it when properly executed. Contests can range from a sweepstakes (Twitter retweet contests, Facebook “Like” contests) to actual contests (like photo contests, email essay contests, or other judged events).
  • Ideas – Think about your goals. Do you want more followers/fans? Run a sweepstakes where following/”liking” is a requirement. Want  engagement from current fans (and some user-generated content)? Run a photo/essay/video contests.

This is in no way a complete list. There are countless other methods and ideas, and some of the biggest successes in social media have come from outside the box. That said, social media is a science, and these are some proven avenues of success. What kinds of content have you found to be successful with your corporate social media?

1. Make a list of which social media activities you regularly engage in. Do you answer product questions? Support requests? Recommend your product/service? Drop links to viral campaigns that drive visitors to your site? There are endless numbers of things you could be doing. You just need to catalog them.
2. Think about how each of those items on the list impact the business. Do they result in sales? Positive press mentions? Lower churn? Make sure you have a positive business outcome for each action you take. If you can’t come up with a positive business result for some of your actions, consider not engaging in that activity.
3. Take your activities and divide them into two categories- those that create new revenue, and those that create cost savings. For example, answering product questions instead of sending it to the sales team is a cost savings for the company, whereas driving traffic to a signup page via a blog article results in new revenue (hopefully).
4. Figure out how to attach a dollar amount to each activity. When it comes to determining revenue generation, it’s fairly simple. First, use tracking links wherever possible (custom tracking links in conjunction with link shorteners, etc.). Second, keep a detailed timeline of your social media activities, so that you can measure increases in sales against the baseline. Coinciding increases can be connected with your campaigns (albeit somewhat circumstantially). When it comes to cost savings, things are a little bit more difficult. To better explain, I’ll demonstrate through my own experience. One of the activities I spend a lot of time doing is solving support issues via Twitter. To calculate the dollar savings of that activity, I talked to our support people and found out how long the average support call takes. Then I determined the median wage for a support tech. This gave me an approximate cost per call (a lot support managers will already know this number, you just have to ask). With that number, I could now demonstrate a cost savings for every request I took off of supports’ hands.
5. Think outside the box. After examining the obvious ways that your activities generate revenue and cost-savings, look at other side benefits your activities generate. For example, if you’ve created some evangelists along the way and you observe one of them taking on support questions proactively, you could count each incident as additional cost savings (as per the last example). After all, if you hadn’t contacted that evangelist, odds are good that the customer would be talking to your support people instead. The same thing goes for purchase recommendations from evangelists.

So that’s my $.02 on the process that I go through when considering the financial impact of my corporate social media activities. What’s the process you use to determine the ROI for your your social media activities?

“By recording your goals and dreams on paper, you set in motion the process of becoming the person you most want to be.”

-Mark Victor Hansen

One of the mantras of goal-setting is that if a goal isn’t written down, it’s just a dream. So, as is popular across the blogosphere, I’m writing my social media goals down here.

First, let me say a little something about the rationale behind these goals. I’ve found that as social media has become my job and career, it has become more difficult to manage. I’m no longer doing it just for the fun of it, and I have a lot more riding on my social media success. Furthermore, I’ve learned a lot about social media in the past year, and I want to make sure I’m living according to my knowledge. So without any further ado, here are my 2010 social media resolutions:

• LinkedIn – In the past, I’ve done some work with LinkedIn, including completing my profile, working to get recommendations, and doing some networking. This year, I’d like to use LinkedIn much more effectively. In order to do so, I will spend an hour every week:
  • Updating my status
  • Finding new groups to join
  • Participating in discussions in groups I’m already a member of
  • Answering some questions in the Q&A section
  • Seeking out new contacts.
• Facebook – I have to admit that I’ve been conspicuously absent on Facebook recently. One of the reasons is that I’ve adopted other methods of communication, and much of what drew me to Facebook has evaporated at this point, but the hypocrisy of being a social media guy who doesn’t use Facebook is somewhat galling, so I’m going to reengineer my Facebook presence and get involved again by making sure that I log in every day to do Facebooky things like
  • Updating my status
  • Writing on my friends’ walls
  • Finding groups to network and exchange information with
  • Checking on some of the pages I’ve started (and maybe even start some new pages).
• Twitter – I’m on Twitter a lot, I just need better consistency. I want to:
  • Tweet at 3 new people
  • Drop at least 3 useful links
  • Retweet at least 3 awesome tweets every day (outside of my normal tweeting)

I have to admit that it feels a bit lame to put a solid number on this, but I think that if I want to improve the quality of my Twitterstream, this is how I’ll do it.

• Blog – This is the area I’m most excited about, because blogging is where I got my start in social media, and it’s still the area that I enjoy the most (although you wouldn’t know it by the number of posts lately). I want to become a much better blogger, and in order to do so, I’m going to
  • Write one post every day, even if I don’t post it. I mostly just want to get into the rhythm of writing every day.
  • Publish at least twice every week, pulling from the body of content I’m creating in my daily post writing.
  • Comment on two blogs every day in order to be a better blogosphere citizen (blogozen?).
  • Finish working on my blog theme by adding Facebook Connect, better sharing and commenting functionality, and an awesome footer.
• Misc. – I’m going to do something groundbreaking this year, I’m just not quite sure what it’s going to be yet. Vague? Yes. Unrealistic? Possibly. But what’s the point of goals if you don’t have something exciting to drive towards? I’ll be taking more time to flesh this goal out, deciding what constitutes “groundbreaking” and how I plan on achieving it.

But more frequently fear is a negative thing. It can kill your mojo and cause you to miss out on amazing opportunities and experiences. After all…

You miss 100% of the shots you never take.

-Wayne Gretzky

So how do you overcome fear? I asked that question on Facebook and here are some of the responses I received:

• The only way I have (overcome my fear) is to face it. I had a fear of heights and to over come it I went on the sky coaster at Lagoon, scared the crap out of me but I lived!
• i was gonna say the same thing about doing exactly what you’re scared of … i was scared of heights too, so i went skydiving. now i’m cured! i still get scared when i’m up high and i’m thinking about it, but then i remember, what’s scarier than jumping out of a plane? nothing!
• I think about people who have been there for me, who count on me to just do things. I don’t want to let them down, and think to myself – if I don’t do this – who will? Then I take a breathe and leap. Usually its all good.
• My biggest revelation came by observing that my 3 year old daughter is a chip off the old block. She’s the type to hem & haw 30 minutes before she’ll set foot in a cold swimming pool. Sometime (most of the time), you just have to get in the #@!#$% water, already.

This big takeaway from these is that if you hope to overcome your fears, ultimately you’ll have to face them. But how do you get to that point? From these quotes and my own experience, I’ve compiled a list of several ways to overcome your fears.

1. Peer pressure – Think about how many times in your life you let somebody talk you into doing something you didn’t want to do. It’s a fairly obvious fact that peer pressure absolutely influences our decisions. Most of the time it’s viewed negatively. But what if you could use it as a tool to help you overcome your fears? One possible solution is to share what you’re trying to overcome with friends and colleagues and ask them to help you get past your fear. Most of them will be more than happy to help and encourage you. I think another effective and interesting application of this idea is to identify some people you know and admire who demonstrate a fearlessness in the area you’re working on. Start spending time with those individuals, watch what they do, learn from them, and allow yourself to be infected by their enthusiasm. I can name several instances in my own life where I learned how to overcome my fear merely by associating with people I admired for their fearlessness.
2. Obligation – This is the  “If I don’t do this, who will?” idea. Obligating yourself is a great motivator. Whether it’s a promise (verbal or implied) to a beloved family member or a commitment to a boss, creating an expectation in others is a great way to give yourself some extra incentive to get past the initial “I’m scared” bump. Another variation on this is to make the obligation to yourself. While an internal promise may be enough, I’ve found another motivator – money. I’ve found that when I pony up and pay some cash to do something I’m scared of while I’m removed from the situation and still able to think logically, I’m way more likely to do it, because I don’t want to waste my money.
3. Optimism – Paralyzing fear is often rooted in the spectre of failure. Nobody wants to fail. Next time you’re afraid of failure, sit down with yourself and take inventory of what you would actually lose if you fail. While in some cases, this won’t help (if you fail in skydiving, you have a LOT to lose) in many of the day to day things that we avoid because of fear, our actual potential losses are insignificant at best.
   

   “It is not failure itself that holds you back; it is the fear of failure that paralyzes you.”
   - Brian Tracy

   As an addendum to this, learn to deal with failure positively. In this engrossing article about learning the skill of luck, the author points out that one of the things that makes people lucky is their attitude towards ill fortune (or failure, for that matter). From the article:

   Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

   When you learn to deal with failure in a healthy, optimistic way, all of a sudden, it’s not so scary anymore.

4. Persistence – This is a tactic I use myself, with great success. Here’s how it works: pick one thing every day that scares you. Start little, but make sure that you do it. You’ll find that as you build up a pattern of facing your fears, it will become easier and easier to do, until you don’t think twice about those little butterflies in your stomach.
5. Bravery – They say that fortune favors the bold, and I can prove it. Just talk to Nate Bagley about The Blogworld Miracle. ‘Nuff said.

So that’s my list. There are all sorts of other ideas and hundreds of books about this, but these are just some of the things I came up with. What do you do to overcome your fears?