If everyone is following a rule, doing the opposite will do at least as well – podcast
August 28th, 2008
Episode nine of the “Be the Voice” podcast stars Harry McCracken, editor and founder of Technologizer and former editor in chief of PCWorld magazine.
Summary (Harry McCracken):
- Want comments on your blog? Lead off with an opinion than straight reporting.
- All websites need to be works in progress forever. Adjust to what people read and don’t read.
- PCWorld realization: Almost any story can be done as a list. And if it’s done as a list, people will read it.
- There’s an abundance of “news” out there. It’s a commodity. Get seen by offering your take on the story.
- Very few tech sites do really good reviews of Web services.
- Often if everyone is following a rule doing the opposite will do at least as well.
- Don’t assume if you build something people will come. You need to start the conversation, prod people, and invite people in.
Full article:
How to quickly launch a brand new tech blog
Harry McCracken, former editor in chief of PCWorld, left the magazine to launch a brand new tech blog called Technologizer. Launching a brand new tech blog for money is a scary proposition given the abundance of competition in the tech blogging space and the audience you need to amass before you can start reaping a decent income.
But McCracken wasn’t starting from point zero. Having decades of tech journalism experience under his belt, thirteen of which were at PCWorld running the mothership, McCracken already knew his audience of tech enthusiasts. He also knew how to write compelling articles and eye-catching headlines. And he also knew what did and didn’t work online. Even though “Technologizer” is a new brand, “McCracken” isn’t. Thanks to his years at PCWorld, Harry McCracken is well known and well respected in tech circles.
When I spoke to McCracken, he was only seven weeks into production of Technologizer and already he was drawing thousands of readers a day and his posts are commonly featured on Techmeme, Gabe Rivera’s metablog that finds hotly discussed stories for the day.
Technologizer is more tightly focused than the editorial of PCWorld, said McCracken, concentrating more on personal technology. But as McCracken realizes, “All websites need to be works in progress forever…I will adjust what I do based on what people read. And I will do more of the stuff people care about and less of the stuff people don’t care about.”
Revenue for Technologizer comes through advertising which is being handled by Federated Media who also manages advertising for top tech blogs like TechCrunch and GigaOm.
When I asked what it took to get that much attention so quickly, the initial advice was obvious. You have to look at the news sites (e.g. Google News, Digg, Techmeme) and see what are the topics that are attracting people, said McCracken. He then picks hot stories that fall under his ever-evolving editorial mandate and adds his spin. There’s a lot of “McCracken-style” opinion on Technologizer and that’s what defines the brand. Technologizer is not a news site. That’s a commodity, believes McCracken.
“I never want to be generic. I always want to have my take on things. And by doing so I want to invite my readers to share their take on things,” said McCracken. “I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that on a lot of my posts I’ll get dozens of people responding. And some of them will agree with me. And some of them will disagree with me. But I’m starting a conversation and that’s far easier to do when you lead people off with an opinion rather than straight reporting.”
Dealing with the competitive overabundance of tech blogs
McCracken’s goal is to reach out to a much broader audience of tech enthusiast. Even though sites like TechCrunch and Scobleizer are extremely well known with the tech elite, they don’t have that same general audience penetration as did computer magazines (e.g. PCWorld, PCMagazine, and PCComputing) did in the 80s and 90s. McCracken is hoping to achieve that kind of recognition with Technologizer’s opinion and writing. He knows he’s never going to compete with sites like Gizmodo and Engadget in sheer volume of content. Those sites can crank out 40 to 50 posts a day. Even more during CES.
Brewing the editorial for Technologizer
While McCracken doesn’t think he’s going to be developing year long investigative or reader survey articles like he did at PCWorld, he does spend time developing his posts taking as long as a day for a single post. Most successful tech blogs have a team of journalists and McCracken knows that Technologizer will need to extend just beyond himself. He does plan on bringing on more talented journalists to write in the style of the blog. In addition, McCracken plans to more tightly tie in his community section (powered by Ning) with his content.
Almost any story can be done as a list
McCracken and I got to talking stylistically about how he writes posts to draw traffic. McCracken admitted to the PCWorld tactic of always putting a number on the cover of the magazine when his editorial team realized that “almost any story can be done as a list,” said McCracken, “And if it’s done as a list, people will read it.”
Headlines and stories should be clear, quirky, funny, and/or a little off beat. “Because if Intel announces something, there will be fifty stories with a really boring straightforward headline, if yours is a little more fun, people will read on,” said McCracken as he wants the site to be less formal and he’s willing to be silly from time to time. I mentioned the blog Good Morning Silicon Valley for which I think is the model for funny tech headlines.
Very few tech sites do really good reviews of Web services
While there are many sites that will play with a new Web service for five minutes and write a “review” there are actually very few that will do an in depth analysis. It’s one of the editorial mandates at PCWorld that they had to do solid tech reviews for their audience. McCracken feels that reviews will be a differentiating factor that makes his site more successful because in a lot of tech categories you simply can’t find them.
From zero to thousands of readers a day in just seven weeks
Here’s Harry McCracken’s advice on how to grow your blog audience quickly:
- Start with content your audience would care about.
- Dive in and don’t stress out. Get over your fears about negative feedback. The Web is an informal medium and typos can be fixed unlike his days working in print.
- Don’t get entranced initially by search engine optimization. “If people don’t care about the content, none of that stuff matters,” said McCracken.
- Ping people who do other blogs that might care about the content. Often they will link to your content.
- Use social bookmarking tools and community sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz, and Slashdot
- Don’t assume if you build something people will come. You need to start the conversation, prod people, and invite people in. Robert Scoble with Scobleizer is very successful this way in that he’s always engaged in the comments. It’s an area McCracken knows he needs to spend more time.
- Don’t get hung up on the “rules” of success on the Web. It’s possible to break every single rule on the Web and still do well and you can follow every rule and be an abject failure. McCracken points to the “rule” of posting on Monday and Tuesday and only post in the morning. McCracken has actually had his greatest success on a Sunday and he’ll often post in the afternoon because that’s when people are often NOT posting so he’s not cluttered by all the other “noise” online. “Often if everyone is following a rule doing the opposite will do at least as well,” said McCracken.
- Add a lot of opinion, ask for feedback, and don’t require people to register to comment.
- Don’t be afraid to promote your own stuff, as long as you’re above board about it.
Technologizer set to launch
Technologizer is still in soft launch phase now, but McCracken plans on making a more public announcement in September where he’ll bring on more journalists plus offer a rating system for his reviews.
Filed under: Blogging, Editorial, Podcast | 4 Comments »
Your audience doesn’t care about you. They care about themselves. What are you going to give them? – podcast
August 27th, 2008
Episode nine of the “Be the Voice” podcast stars online media mogul Susan Bratton, co-founder and CEO of Personal Life Media.
Summary (Susan Bratton):
- Podcast production: deliver exactly the same format consistently gives listeners the comfort that you’re there for them.
- Have an individual in mind (ideally a thought leader) when you’re asking questions during your show.
- Personal Life Media’s network of 25 programs have taken off thanks to the network effect which we all know by the other name of social media.
- Don’t be afraid to approach someone yourself if you think you’re the ideal candidate.
- Ad agencies need to follow UGC, not try to control it, and encourage engagement.
- Your audience doesn’t care about you. They care about themselves. What are you going to give them?
- Bloggers are not journalists, but some are. Proceed with caution.
Full article:
Susan Bratton is the co-founder and CEO of Personal Life Media, a podcast and blog publishing company that produces 25 weekly programs on the subjects of personal growth, relationships, longevity, and spirituality. One of those programs, DishyMix, hosted by Bratton herself, is a series of one-on-one interviews with leading members of the digerati. With each interview Bratton hopes to find out what these thought leaders are doing that makes them so special and what can her and her listeners do to copy their behavior?
I just figured out how to produce my own show, now I have to figure it out for everyone else too?
DishyMix is just one of dozens of programs that make up the Personal Life Media brand. To build the brand’s editorial, Bratton sought out top notch voices that fit under her editorial umbrella of “personal life media,” and taught them how to podcast. Using a “MadLibs production format” as Bratton called it, she rattled off a “how to” list that was obvious she has said many times before. Bratton explained her production formula for a great Personal Life Media podcast.
- Introduce yourself, the show, and your guest
- Explain who your guest is and why they were invited to be on the show.
- Go over the top things you’re going to cover.
- Play the show intro with music bed.
- After the show is edited, put highlights of that show immediately after the intro with music, so the audience knows what they’re going to hear.
- Once again tell the audience what you’re going to talk about so they know what you’re going to deliver.
- Do the show.
- Have a break.
- Wrap it up and say thanks.
“I do that exact same format every single week so my listeners know what I’m going to deliver for them,” said Bratton, “I think that consistency of always delivering in exactly the same format gives the listeners the comfort that you’re there for them.”
If you’re not of interest to other thought leaders, then you can’t be a thought leader yourself
Those are just the mechanics of producing a show. To deliver great content you have to keep the individual listener in mind. Its best to think of a real person you know that would be the ideal audience for your podcast. For Bratton’s DishyMix show which is filled often with social media thought leaders, she speaks to Andy Sernovitz, author of “The Word of Mouth Marketing” book, and a leader in conversational media. Andy becomes the representative audience member that she thinks about when she does her show. It’s something she didn’t believe Andy knew…until now. 
The reason she picks a person like Sernovitz is because he’s a though leader in the same space for which she’s interviewing others. As she’s preparing and interviewing a guest, she always thinks about Andy. Would Andy find this interesting? Is this the kind of information that would help Andy’s business? “It just gives me someone to talk to and think about so that my thoughts are collected at a pretty senior level when I’m doing my show which is my intent,” said Bratton.
Building an online media network allows you to take advantage of “the network effect.” Remember that? It’s also called social media.
Podcasting for Bratton is “The Global Microphone.” For Personal Life Media, “[It's] an ability to connect with an audience on a weekly basis and take them through a process of self empowerment in any given category. Whether it was your relationship or your weight or your body image or whatever it might be,” said Bratton.
Each host has their audio show, their blog, and their community. And they make money through advertising and given the similar nature of their media, sponsors will typically sponsor a minimum of five up to all of the shows across Personal Life Media. No one show makes or breaks the network, but each one helps each other grow because they actually like each other, enjoy being part of the Personal Life Media community, and cross-promote each other’s programming. As a result, in just a little over a year, Personal Life Media’s entire 25 program network has between 400,000 – 500,000 listeners, with each show having a listenership somewhere between 2,000 to 80,000, said Bratton.
Bratton understands how important it is to hold on to those listeners and nurture those relationships. That’s why the hosts of the shows also have blogs and contact information so they can engage with their listeners. Bratton is in the process of building out a community site for Personal Life Media and they just began offering a widget from Gigya that allows listeners who have blogs or profile pages on social networks to put the audio playing widget on their site so that they and their visitors can listen to the show in their own online space.
Susan Bratton isn’t scared of David Spark
I’m thrilled that Susan Bratton introduced herself to me for the Be the Voice podcast. She found my content online, realized that she would be an appropriate interview, and offered herself as a potential interview including a bio to show that she is in fact a leading voice for her market. I was so impressed by her approach and then I realized during our interview, this was far from the first time she’s introduced herself as being perfect for the job. In fact, that’s how she became a member of the board at Ad:tech.
Attending the Ad:tech conference back in 1996, Bratton was enthralled. She walked up to the founder and said, “I love this and I have ten ideas for you.” His response was, “You’re going to be on my board.” Since that first meeting Bratton’s programmed many worldwide events for Ad:tech and is still chair emeritus today.
How to deal with the ad agency question of “How many people am I going to reach and how much is it going to cost me?”
Given Bratton’s background in advertising, I asked her a question that always made pitching to ad agencies difficult for me. Ad agencies boil down everything to “How many people am I going to reach and how much is it going to cost me?” Because that’s how they buy media, in known quantities. When you’re dealing with an organization that knows its audience and its size, like a TV network or magazine, then you can answer that question. But the realm of social media doesn’t allow you to answer that question.
Bratton split her answer into two parts, first discussing user generated content where you don’t have control of the audience’s take on your brand, yet you still need to keep an ear to what people are saying. She recommended Andy Beal’s book, Radically Transparent and Pete Blackshaw’s book, Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000 for an understanding of how to get a handle around your online reputation.
The second part, as Bratton sees it, is social media, which is not about how the public is going to trash your brand, but rather “What more can I do to play with my customers, to listen to my customers, to give them some experiences with my brand rather than buying media and looking at impression measurements,” explained Bratton. There’s so much more engagement that can happen as people take your content and forward it or discuss it with their friends. “You might have to widen the aperture of your lens on how you measure impressions, [but] impressions can still be very aptly measured in the social media space,” Bratton said.
Honey, I want you and I to go to the next level. I want us to begin a campaign
Bratton agreed with me that the term “campaign” is dying as a term to associate with social media. Because social media is about relationships, and you can’t put the kind of effort you put into a campaign (which is a lot) into a relationship with your audience. It’s too costly and too exhausting. Social media tools like Facebook and Flickr allow you to create ongoing and sustainable relationships. Something a traditional ad campaign simply can’t do.
The initial cost of a social media engagement doesn’t end with the creative push. You have to be prepared with staff and funds to manage the feedback. Because while you may predict everyone’s going to love what you put out there, people are still going to have questions and criticisms of what you’re doing. Think about what your end goal is and make sure you’re “leaving room in your budget to have the time and the energy to really work it all the way through to customer satisfaction with any program you do in the social media realm,” advised Bratton.
The problem that Bratton is still having with social media is how she scales while she manages individual relationships. It’s a problem she continues to face when she sends out a well intended message to two hundred and fifty hand picked friends from a database of 8,000, and still gets messages back telling her to “take me off this list.”
The other issue she’s having is trying to find the right balance of communications with bloggers who are “being really prickly right now,” said Bratton. It’s a response I’ve heard before, of which I remarked, bloggers come in all shapes, sizes, and levels of ethics. Many don’t have to adhere to an editorial mandate from someone else, and most don’t get paid for what they do, so often they feel they can do what they want to do.
Getting started the Susan Bratton way
Like her steps for producing a great podcast, Bratton advises wanna be online voices to begin developing in the following way:
STEP 1: “You have to understand what you represent to someone else,” explained Bratton, “Why they want you and why they care about you. They don’t actually care about you. They only care about themselves. What are you going to give them?”
STEP 2: With every blog post, podcast, or video, show that you can deliver on that objective.
STEP 3: There’s never such a thing as an overnight success. You have to keep plugging at it and build your audience. Realizing this, Bratton delivers consistently on the production of her shows.
STEP 4: Don’t try to do too much. Meaning, don’t try to do a podcast, Facebook, Twitter, blog, videos, etc. all at once. Pick one to start with and be really good at it.
Filed under: Blogging, Collaboration, Editorial, Podcast, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »
The blog is the new resume – podcast
August 27th, 2008
For episode number seven of “Be the Voice” I talk with Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing at BearingPoint and prominent blogger at Buzz Marketing for Technology.
Summary (Paul Dunay):
- The blog is the new resume
- Starting a personal/professional blog can be your social media sandbox. Play with it and learn the tricks and traps before you launch something within your organization.
- If you work at a large organization, you’re going to need to some corporate blogging guidelines. There are tons.
- You want to grow your audience so write content to elicit conversation, not act as the voice of G-d telling people what’s right and wrong.
- Pick your platform wisely. You don’t want to run into a situation where you’re on one platform (e.g. Blogger) and want to switch to another (e.g. WordPress) and you’re hesitant because the change in addressing will cause you to lose your “Google juice.”
- The best way to get a blog audience is to follow the people you want following you.
- When hosting a podcast, ask questions that will elicit honest responses to experiences rather than the talking points marketing wants to hit.
- Veotag allows you to take advantage of podcasts’ shortcomings by bookmarking chapters throughout your program.
- Know what’s on your audience’s minds and follow the news and the trends. To grab an audience always try to hook your editorial with the day’s headlines.
Full article:
Back in May I was working at The CMO Club, producing editorial coverage for the organization’s first ever conference specifically for high level marketing executives. One of the presenters I wrote about was Paul Dunay of BearingPoint who gave a fantastic presentation about putting social media into the mix for a total media/marketing campaign. I was really impressed with the total level of involvement BearingPoint was committing to social media. They weren’t just doing one blog and one social network, they were everywhere, with lots of content, contests, and conversations in many different locations. In some cases they were creating their own properties for content (e.g. New Thinking blog at BearingPoint), and in other cases they would open up discussion groups in locations where people were already congregating (e.g. on Facebook).
What Dunay orchestrated for BearingPoint didn’t come overnight. It all began when he started building his own voice through his own blog. I asked Dunay about how he began.
The blog is the new resume
Paul Dunay’s inspiration to write the Buzz Marketing for Technology blog came after reading Keith Ferrazzi’s book, Never Eat Alone. Specifically, Dunay pointed to Ferrazzi’s projection that “the blog would be the new resume” (honestly, Dunay couldn’t remember if the line was actually in the book or he just read that phrase between the lines).
From that advice, Dunay felt he should start writing a blog for his own professional growth. A good idea, but immediately he though, what am I going to do with this? “What kind of content can I create on an ongoing basis that would be an interesting conversation for most people,” Dunay asked himself as he started his blog. “I didn’t have a voice at that moment. [I] sort of started and hoped [I'd] figure it out down the line,” said Dunay, “For me it was a sandbox for me to play with a little bit before I introduced it internally.”
Following corporate blogging guidelines?
Dunay began his personal/professional blog without alerting anyone at BearingPoint. About a month into writing the blog they got wind of what he was doing and he got “the call” from corporate and they asked him, “‘Are you adhering to any sort of corporate guidelines around [the blog]?’ And of course I typed in ‘corporate blogging guidelines’ at the time to a Google search engine and came up with the IBM corporate blogging guidelines and I said, ‘Oh yes, I’m using the IBM corporate blogging guidelines.’” Not realizing he was winging his answer on the call, BearingPoint’s legal department was so happy that he was following some sort of official type guidelines that they asked him to send him a copy. And so Dunay, after seeing the IBM corporate blogging guidelines for the first time, downloaded them, and sent them off to BearingPoint’s legal department.
After that conversation, Dunay added the following copy on the front page of his blog to indicate the division between Paul Dunay the individual thought leader and Paul Dunay the consultant who works for BearingPoint.
“The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent BearingPoint’s positions, strategies or opinions.”
Developing a blogging strategy, and hooking readers
Dunay wanted to take charge of the social media strategy at BearingPoint and he knew the best way he was going to learn social media is just by doing it (How very “Nike” of him). There were two aspects of social media he needed to learn: the technical (e.g. how to set up a blog, how to configure an RSS feed, how to post a podcast) and the strategy. At the beginning, Dunay’s only “strategy” was to blog. Over time he thought about his audience, the buzz marketer, and how he should target them. Initially, Dunay was just giving advice on what they should specifically do to create “buzz.” But he quickly realized that came off as a “voice of G-d” telling you what you should do and it didn’t encourage conversation.
Dunay began to tweak his writing style to engage readers more in conversation. But to really hook people to read his posts he quickly realized that those first few words of his title were critical as they are the first words a search engine sees. Which is very true, although the way Dunay has his Blogger blog set up, the first words a search engine sees are actually AFTER the title of his blog, “Buzz Marketing for Technology.” Just prior to our interview, I had attended a WordCamp conference (a conference for WordPress users) whre SEO (search engine optimization) expert Stephen Spencer of Netconcepts recommended that bloggers put the title of their blog AFTER the blog post. This is the content that appears inside the <TITLE> tag of a blog post which gets indexed very highly on search engines. Luckily, for WordPress users, Spencer offered us a free plugin called SEO Title Tag that could do just that. Is there an equivalent plugin for Blogger?
Dunay and I then got into a discussion about the value and problems with migrating your blog to another platform. There are two ways to publish a blog. Publish it on the blog company’s servers or publish it on your own server. The advantage of the former is there’s no maintenance and it’s completely free. The disadvantage is you’re connected to their addressing system (e.g. http://davidspark.blogspot.com/interestingpost.html). While there are plenty of tools to migrate a blog from one platform to another (e.g. Blogger to WordPress) Dunay fears he’ll lose all his “Google juice,” because the addressing system will inevitably have to change. While you can bring over readers, it takes time for the search engines to rediscover your content.
“Pick your platform and your URL wisely,” advised Dunay who was having second thoughts about his blog being hosted on Blogger.
Build an audience for your blog by linking to others
Dunay said that developing an audience for his blog required linking to people, commenting on other blogs, and linking back to stuff on your blog that was relative to what they were saying. “The best way to get a blog audience is to follow the people you want following you,” recommended Dunay. It was even easier for Dunay because he would invite bloggers he liked to be interviewed for a podcast.
Dunay was posting two, maybe three times a week. Many of the people he followed were far more prolific than him. He thought of increasing his posting but realized he needed to create a balance with his work and that the schedule he created so far was sufficient.
BearingPoint has a blog as well now called New Thinking. All interactions with that blog – views, downloads, comments – are cross-referenced with other marketing that BearingPoint is doing. They’re tracking the audiences’ interest and interactions and responding. The information, updated weekly, is invaluable to them.
Dunay and I got into talking about link baiting techniques. For example, using lists or specifically going negative with posts that start “The Worst…” or the “The Biggest Mistakes…” BearingPoint does go negative for traffic, but they’re not so crass and have to be more politically judicious, so they’ll substitute the word “pitfalls” instead.
Taking advantage of podcasting’s shortcomings
Dunay admitted one of his greatest “pitfalls” came during his early days of podcasting. His first show, never actually published, was a disaster. He wrote a paper and hired a voice talent for $2,000 to read the paper into a microphone, and that was going to be his “podcast.” It didn’t sound like a show. It sounded more like a book on tape and he and his colleagues were horrified when they actually listened to it. Realizing that hiring talent to read podcasts was not going to be the solution, Dunay looked for another podcast format that was conversational and avoided the stilted premise of having a vendor come in and shill their product.
When I worked as a host of The Sprint podcast, I would often get marketing people as guests on the show. And marketing people can’t shut off that part of their brain that causes them to talk only in sales mode. They know their talking points and they can’t help themselves from repeating them. While hosting the podcast, I kept begging Sprint, please stop sending me marketing people, send me geeks to interview.
Dunay had a somewhat similar situation. While he didn’t get marketing people and got the geeks, the geeks were being trained or questioned with traditional marketing questions like, “What are the six implementation pitfalls?” Dunay shifted focus and started asking more qualitative questions such as “When you delivered this, what did the client say and what was the reaction internally?” It got around to the same point, but he realized that the medium (podcasting) was different than blogs or even video, and depending on which one you choose, “you have to design into each medium,” advised Dunay.
Dunay also confirmed something that I’ve seen time and time again about podcasting. I’m a very strong proponent and consumer of podcasts on my iPod. I subscribe to them, download them, and take them with me to listen to on my commute or when I’m working out, Problem is I’m in a severe minority. I keep seeing statistics that 70% of all podcasts are heard on the computer at the moment and not via a subscription like iTunes or on the iPod.
To facilitate that ‘listening at your computer experience, Dunay implemented Veotag’s technology on his podcasts which allows the publisher to title chapters of his podcast and let listeners skip to portions of the show. “They want the question they want answered, and that’s the end of it,” said Dunay realizing that sometimes listeners don’t want to hear his entire show. Other advantages of Veotag for podcasts is the tags improve SEO and he can run slides or video alongside the audio of the podcast.
Crafting your editorial to coincide with what’s on people’s minds now
The core of BearingPoint’s messaging is through its editorial. Building their editorial requires knowing the top concerns of their audience which revolve around issues of identity theft and personal privacy. To increase interest, BearingPoint carves its editorial to tie in their issues with topical news. For example, and admittedly not a good one but it gets the point across, BearingPoint might write a story, “What should Michael Phelps be concerned about with his presence on Facebook?” Hooking your editorial with top of mind issues increases your chances of being recognized.
A good trick to knowing what are top news stories is to follow social bookmarking sites such as Google Trends, Hitwise, Technorati, Techmeme, Digg, and Tailrank, to name a few.
Be like Dunay
For those of you just starting out, Dunay advises first and foremost that you just start. Like the lottery “You have to be in it to win it,” Dunay said. Once you start, follow what is and isn’t working. “What is getting the reaction compared to what isn’t getting the reaction,” Dunay said. If people are gravitating towards a certain subject, then build it out. Turn it into a multi-part series, invite others to comment and join in the conversation. Like any marketing you might do, success comes with time.
Filed under: Blogging, Editorial, Podcast, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »
How to launch a community from nothing – podcast
August 25th, 2008
Episode five of the “Be the Voice” podcast stars Pete Krainik, who is the CEO and founder of “The CMO Club.”
Summary (Pete Krainik):
- The CMO Club filled a pent up demand for top level marketing executives that were looking for peers to lean on for advice.
- The CMO Club’s brand has risen to be defined as “content for conversation, not content for presentation.”
- Keeping CMOs interested means finding topics of discussion that cross industries.
- Launching a grass roots organization requires touch, meaning face-to-face communications, not mass mailings.
- Creating an organization means you’re going to have to take on the branding role of “the connector.”
- Competition in a very green industry is good because it provides more editorial where there is none and raises the profile for the entire category.
Full article:
Pete Krainik is the CEO, CMO, and founder of “The CMO Club” an organization for only top level marketing professionals to engage in high level discussions and concerns that CMOs are going through (CMO stands for Chief Marketing Officer, not Chief Medical Officer which is what my father, the doctor, thought it stood for.)
Hey, want to join my exclusive club? Please?
Krainik has been very fortunate to have worked in a variety of high-level marketing and executive positions at many organizations including M&M/Mars, Seybold, Avaya, and DoubleClick. The idea for The CMO Club came out of his own frustration not being able to meet any of his peers. He’d go out to dinners at events and he’d be the only CMO. There was never an opportunity for a peer discussion. Conversations would either be very basic marketing 101 or they’d be sponsored-driven pitches.
Two years ago Krainik gathered six CMO friends for a dinner just to have that high-level discussion he was so eagerly seeking. It turns out his frustration is shared by others. Over the past two years The CMO Club dinners have spread to twelve cities with dinners every other month. Krainik had his first conference in NYC with 60 CMOs (Krainik hired me to produced editorial content at the event), and this February he launched The CMO Club exclusive site that already has 735 registered and approved CMOs.
Krainik attests the early success to just good ‘ole fashioned hard work which requires meeting and calling CMOs, personal conversations, and word of mouth recommendations. Plus, his dinners are not pay-to-play sponsored dinners. People are invited because he thinks they would provide valuable content and conversation.
Oh yes, you paid for dinner, so I guess I have to listen to your company pitch
The benefit of his events is that they cut through traditional hidden agendas, said Krainik, and CMOs can address issues that affect them like rebranding, going public, and dealing with PR issues. “Who better to help me as a CMO understand the issues I have, the challenges, or the strategies I’m about to unfold, than someone who is a peer of mine and been there,” said Krainik. Everyone comes looking for those few nuggets of advice from someone who has gone through these issues and let’s them know “don’t do this, do this” or “here are some people I recommend.”
And it’s these conversations that have become the most powerful for the attendees. Krainik’s “voice” is that of the facilitator allowing those conversations to happen. In fact, the feedback he got from his first event in May was “Great event, but we want even less speakers,” said Krainik, “They wanted more discussion.”
In fact, one of the CMOs coined a phrase that’s become the moniker for The CMO Club: “It’s content for conversation, not content for presentation.”
Krainik’s success proves there’s pent up demand for a CMO support group. The role of a CMO is tenuous they cycle through companies quickly. Eighteen months at one organization for a CMO is considered a lifetime. The high turnover is not because they’re getting fired, but rather because they’re fed up and want to move on.
Benefits of The CMO Club from Jen Sanning, CMO Rainbow Rewards
CMOs can get bored quickly, so keep them interested
At this point in the conversation, Krainik and I shifted roles and I began to question him more about the issues he’s having growing The CMO Club and the brand. His number one challenge is to come up with topics and vehicles to get CMOs to want to participate and share their insight beyond the dinners. He truly wants to differentiate his organization from similar high-level executive organizations.
Topics that cross multiple industries do very well, said Krainik. For example, How do I keep great marketing stars? How do I influence change at the C-level? How do I approach social media and how do I think of it as being connected to all my other components? How do I manage globally?
At the end of each dinner Krainik sends a recap out to all the attendees. It’s an excellent way to build relations and provide extended value from an event. But he has to keep this recording of information to a minimum because one of the values of his dinners is the privacy of information.
One way he’s maintaining balance is by conducting short video interviews with a Flip camera asking CMOs at the dinner what was their number one takeaway. It has two-fold value: it respects the CMO’s time (it only takes a minute) and other CMOs love to hear what’s on other CMO’s minds. The response to these videos has been very positive.
All projects must be measured from Phil Clement, CMO, AON
Everyone loves the life of the party
This type of connecting that Pete Krainik is doing reminds me of what Ken Rutkowski and Jeff Pulver who have become known connectors in the tech industry, hosting dinners and introducing people. Both are very creative with intriguing ice breaker conversation starters at their events. Rutkowski requires attendees to bring a piece of juicy gossip nobody knows to share with others, or at the last event you had to mention someone else you just met and plug their company. Jeff Pulver turns people into human tagging and taggable objects. You write tags on stickers to describe what you think a person is like and you stick it on them.
You’ve established a brand and editorial, how do you monetize it?
Krainik is constantly thinking of ways to monetize and also bring interest, traffic, and community to his site. One way he would like to do that is through a recommendations section where CMOs can recommend talented vendors, people, products, and services. Based on some advice I received from a former colleague, I suggested Krainik put recommendations in his regular mass emails to attendees. Let them see that a specific CMO recommends this vendor, and put in the quote as to why he/she thinks that vendor is so great. That way, over time, CMOs will start to associate The CMO Club with this recommendation service.
Where is your audience?
Krainik has a very unusual issue in that there really isn’t a single area online or in the offline world that all CMOs go to. That makes it very difficult to message or reach them all. He’s trying to build a community where a community hasn’t existed before. In such situations, competition is actually very helpful because conversation and communication on the topic raises the profile of the entire industry and everyone benefits. One such competitor to The CMO Club is the CMO Summit from the CMO Council and I suggested Krainik open a dialogue with him.
When I used to work as a stand up comic, we would see this happen in the comedy industry. A new comedy club would open in town and do a lot of marketing or would get a huge headliner. The initial reaction was to think, “Oh no, this is going to destroy the smaller club.” But quite the opposite would actually happen. Smaller clubs in town would see a jump in attendance at their clubs as well because the public’s interest in the category of comedy had been piqued.
The reason people come back, said Krainik is that people are looking for those one or two valuable nuggets of information. If they get just a couple of those great nuggets or connections, then it’s all worth it.
Starting a community from scratch
For other organizations looking to create a community, Krainik said you have to start with the touch. Face to face in the beginning is critical, said Krainik. Start from that rather than thinking, ‘How can I create the site to get millions of eyeballs?’ Instead said Krainik, “Start with the touch, and then move back.”
“Marketing Health vs. Healthcare” from Leo Tokar, CMO Kaiser Permanente
Filed under: Editorial, Podcast, Video | 1 Comment »
Feed the market what it wants and you don’t need to do marketing – podcast
August 23rd, 2008
Episode five of the “Be the Voice” podcast stars Dana Gardner who is the founder and principal of the analyst firm Interarbor Solutions.
Summary (Dana Gardner):
- Deliver high quality content and the social media tools and search engines will do their work to make your material discoverable.
- Answer your audience’s questions.
- It is possible to produce editorial content that satisfies the desires of your audience and your sponsors.
- BriefingsDirect aims to expose in full the analyst briefing experience. A valuable conversation that traditionally has been hidden from the public.
- Social media allows for interaction and feedback from your audience which is far cheaper and faster than conducting traditional research.
- Flame wars can result in great traffic, but they don’t solicit the audience you really want.
- Don’t rely on a single individual to be the voice of your company. Create a network of voices.
Full article:
Dana Gardner is the founder and principal of the analyst firm Interarbor Solutions, he blogs for ZDNet, and he’s also the host of BriefingsDirect, a podcast that lets sit in and listen to the in depth conversation during an analyst briefing. Gardner has been a journalist and industry analyst for years, covering IT in the enterprise and currently focuses on hot issues for enterprise organizations such as service-oriented architecture or SOA. The combination of being an analyst, producing freely available content, and distributing it to the people who need it make up the three pillars of his business.
Gardner began producing all this content when he saw a need in the market for someone to be an advocate at the enterprise level for IT decisions and spending. The enterprise has traditionally been the space for innovation, said Gardner. Discoveries happen at the highest levels and then they work their way down to the masses thanks to economies of scale. Gardner though readily realizes that the complete reverse happens all the time. It’s what’s getting all the press these days. Technologies start at the bottom, at a pedestrian or grass roots level, and then they bubble up to the enterprise. Think Web 2.0 and it’s enterprise moniker, Enterprise 2.0.
Steve Gillmor, Dana Gardner, and Dan Farber (photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)
Detailed answers to audience questions
Gardner is always looking to answer questions people have in his area of expertise. He recognizes that he’s riding the hype curve, but that’s what people are interested in that given time. And if Gardner wants to stay relevant he has to provide answers to what concerns his audience at the time they need the information.
Given the complexity of IT development in the enterprise, any discussion on the topic has to be thorough in order to be credible to the audience. In Gardner’s own work, what he discovered was the more detailed, deep, and rich his content was, the more the search engines paid attention, driving traffic to his Web site. Pointing to one example, he wrote a post on “application modernization.” It only got a couple of comments, yet today a search on “application modernization” into Google, brings that post up as the second post.
Feed the market what it wants and you don’t need to do marketing
“When you become associated as a content producer with essential keywords in IT you don’t have to go out and do advertising or marketing. The fact that you’re defining some of the top organic content around very important up and coming and global IT subject matter makes people recognize it,” Gardner said, “I don’t know enough about the algorithms of the search engines to feed them what they want, but I try to feed the market what it wants in terms of education, evangelism, and understanding, and hope that the algorithms recognize that and then that becomes a self fulfilling or virtual adoption pattern.”
Gardner has found that by finding his niche of delivering high quality B2B content, the social media tools and search engines will do their work to make his material discoverable.
Producing editorial that satisfies your audience and sponsors
Companies will sponsor Gardner’s content, but as Gardner explained, “I take into full account what they’re (the sponsor) trying to accomplish, but my number one role is to be an advocate for the listener and to be important and valuable and productive for the people that find the content. And my secondary role is trying to be productive and an advocate for the sponsor. The nice thing is that you can do both. It is not an either or or zero sum equation. However, you don’t want to err too far in one way or the other. If you’re just out there for just a consumer level discussion then somebody wouldn’t be interested in sponsoring it. It has to be deep it has to be specific. It has to be about a technology that’s emerging. On the other hand if you’re too far in the advocacy side of the sponsor well then you become of diminishing value to the end listener. And so striking that balance is what becomes essential and that’s why the analyst briefing model works so well is because organizations that come in to brief an analyst know they’re not going to BS them. They’re not going to pull a snow job over on these people. These people are too well versed and well educated in the subject matter to do that. At the same time the analyst does legitimately want to learn a lot more about this organization because they need to present this back to the market.”
Take cutting room floor content and produce it as social media
Gardner said he got the idea for his podcast BriefingsDirect from his work at a previous analyst firm. “We’d have hour long discussions with people – fabulous discussions – deep penetration into the markets, the trends, the competitive analysis, the implications, the ongoing business outcomes, but 5% of what took place in these discussions would end up in an analyst report. I figure I’d take the 95% left on the cutting room floor and present it out as social media,” said Gardner.
Allowing for conversation across social media has proven to be a fabulous research tool. “The feedback you take back from that (allowing comments on your blog) is very valuable. I highly encourage anybody to blog for no other reason than to enjoy a rich market research capability,” said Gardner, “You can learn so much from a few quick comments that might take you months and then some significant investment to uncover otherwise.”
Social media is alluring, but don’t fall into its traps
Gardner has seen other companies fall into the trap of not committing to social media even though they “say” they want to do it. “Unfortunately, many times, like with blogging, companies will do this (social media) three or four times and then suddenly it falls to the back burner. Other people are very busy. They don’t have the time. They see it as an imposition. Publishing and/or presenting in a media format is not their core competency. They feel a little unsure of themselves. And because they don’t do it frequently, it becomes stale,” Gardner said.
In his past, Gardner admits he would get into online arguments that would get him excited to keep doing it because the traffic on his site would shoot up as a result of all the arguing. But over time Gardner realized that flaming and reflaming and getting into these arguments don’t amount to much and it ultimately doesn’t attract the right kind of audience. “Going to the lowest emotional common denominator to me is an ineffective way of reaching that audience. I’d rather come up with valuable insightful fresh innovative content then appeal to angry white men sitting around computers that don’t have anything else to do,” Gardner said.
Your company’s voice should be a network of voices, not just an individual voice
You have to make a decision if this is worthwhile for you as an organization to do. Is there a lot of information your company possesses that your audience wants to know? If so, then you need to be out there communicating. But remember not every business is capable of producing content on an ongoing basis without it becoming arduous and consuming. That’s when you have to decide is it better to do it yourself, partner, or buy.
Once you go into production, be wary of giving one individual too much public authority. “If you’re a company and you’ve got an individual who becomes the voice of your company, they might leave in two months and you have to start from scratch,” warned Gardner. “If you’re a company though, be careful that you don’t place this visibility and brand in the hands of someone who is only a resume away from moving on to some other place,” said Gardner. If someone leaves, you will lose the audience you had two days earlier.
Gardner advises to create a network, not an individual. Have a stable of people, third parties, and outside influencers. You want to create a community and conversation, but don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Filed under: Blogging, Editorial, Podcast, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »
Any problems you’re hiding will eventually blow up in your face – podcast
August 18th, 2008
Episode four of the “Be the Voice” podcast stars Charlene Li, independent (formerly with Forrester) thought leader covering emerging technology.
Summary (Charlene Li):
- Charlene Li leaves Forrester to break out an independent though leader and consultant in the area of emerging technologies.
- Business communications have changed. Even if you try to hide problems, they will eventually be discovered and blow up in your face.
- Social media should not be treated like an advertising campaign. It’s a conversation. And conversations are open ended.
- If you don’t give your audience what they need and want, it doesn’t matter how great a voice you have, they won’t come and listen to you.
Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes
Subscribe to the Be the Voice blog
Full article:
I’ve run into Charlene Li many times at related tech industry events in the San Francisco Bay Area. Last time I saw her was at the Blogher conference in San Francisco which also happened to be her last day at Forrester where she worked for 9 1/2 years as an emerging technology analyst. I asked Charlene what she was going to do now and she said she was going to break out on her own as an independent thought leader.
The decision said Li was due to a collection of different events converging. While she was very happy with her time at Forrester, she wanted more balance between her work and home life (she has two children). And the success of her new book Groundswell has proven to her that she’s developed a strong enough industry voice for herself that she has the capability to be successful on her own.
As an independent, Li wants to broaden her reach to cover and track more emerging technologies, such as mobile, and not be pigeon-holed into just social media because she’s interested in all technologies and how they relate to social media.
Her audiences include other thought leaders she wants to influence, practitioners that want advice on what’s good and what’s bad, and then there’s the press for which she advises as well. At Forrester, she developed a very strong relationship with the press who are constantly looking for tips on breaking news and feedback on phenomenons. In fact, I think she’s NPR’s go to person for anything and everything that’s social media.
Charlene Li wants her independent consulting and online voice to be more conversational and not so institutionalized as when she worked at Forrester, which offers a far more considered “from the company” opinion. Her own personality and personal experiences are injected in her analysis of emerging technologies. But being an independent will not be the first time she will have done that. She developed her own voice at Forrester, where the company allowed her to do just that even though they knew that she could leave at any time. She did eventually leave, but only after working there for more than nine years to which Li said speaks volumes of how much she enjoyed working at Forrester.
I was surprised to hear that Charlene Li spends only two to three hours a week at most on blogging activities. It’s an area she doesn’t rely on for her industry voice. What she does rely on are her public appearances and her strong relationship with press for which she spends at least an hour every day talking with journalists.
What she likes so much about public speaking is NOT delivering typical “voice of G-d” speeches which come off as “you’re stupid if you don’t get this.” Rather she prefers more conversational presentations that try to make technology less scary and show how others can use it in your every day life. She tries to avoid a lot of the hype. She just wants to boil it down to what’s going to work and what’s not going to work.
Any problems you’re hiding will eventually blow up in your face
Typical client engagements for Charlene Li involve companies about to launch a product and maybe they don’t know how open they should or should not be about it. I asked in what situations does she advise one way or the other and Li said it all depends on the client’s audience. Does the audience want openness?
Many companies are very fearful of that openness because they think something’s going to blow up in their face. Business communications have changed, said Li, and any problems you may be hiding now will blow up eventually. The question is do you want it to blow up two days from now or two months from now? A core part of Li’s job is advising clients on the relationship they need to build with their customers.
Advertising agencies are misguiding their clients developing social media campaigns
“I think advertising agencies are doing a great disservice to the industry because they’re creating what I call ’social media campaigns,’ rather than a strategy that says, ‘This is what the relationship is going to look like.’ [Social media] is not a one off. It’s a long term conversation you want to have with these people. It sounds kind of trite, but conversations are open ended and marketing and advertising by definition are not open ended. They want you to go buy a product. That’s not what people want these days,” Li said.
For those companies fearful of this kind of openness, Li advises them to start something small off in the corner of the organization and see how it works and what it needs to survive. For example, the corporate blogging mark of success is Bob Lutz’s Fastlane blog. It appears it was the first blog for GM because that’s the one that got all the press. But it was not GM’s first blog, said Li, GM’s first blog was actually a small block engine blog celebrating the 25th anniversary of the block engine. The success of that small blog gave GM and Bob Lutz the confidence to launch his more high profile blog publicly at the auto show.
You must listen to your audience in order to build your business
Now that Charlene Li is going independent and is no longer a Forrester salaried employee, I asked her how she’s going to manage and rationalize all her non-revenue generating work like blogging and research. “My posts are based on revenue generating. Because these are the questions that people will be dying to ask me about. They want to dig deeper into it. They want to have discussions with me about it,” said Li, “These are topics that are very much driven by what my clients and my prospects are thinking about. So that’s always at the front of what I’m doing. Frankly, if you don’t give your audience what they need and want, it doesn’t matter how great a voice you have, they won’t come and listen to you.”
“The core content has to address the core problems that other people are willing to pay money to get more information about,” Li advised. As a result, Li goes out of her way at events or with clients and vendors to talk to users and ask them what are the problems they’re facing to better understand the issues of her audience.
Unlike Alec Saunders who committed himself to posting three blogs a day, Charlene Li only publishes when she has something to say and something that her audience wants to hear. She doesn’t want to waste her audience’s time with frivolous content. For others, she recommends they have a clear strategy in mind. What is it you want to say and not want to say over what platforms, e.g. blogs, Twitter, social networks, etc. And what is it your audience wants to hear? That will be your content strategy.
For more on Charlene Li, visit her blog.
Filed under: Blogging, Editorial, Podcast, Web 2.0 | 4 Comments »
Build your audience by sharing their ideals and beliefs – podcast
August 17th, 2008
Episode three of the “Be the Voice” podcast stars two of the founders of The Conversation Group, Chris Heuer (Social Media Club) and Peter Hirshberg (Technorati).
Summary (Chris Heuer and Peter Hirshberg):
- A company with all its employees blogging and talking with customers is more powerful than its sales force.
- It’s important to give employees great work experiences, because they live in social networks and they will communicate that to others.
- “Tofu” are PR-crafted messages to bloggers that are targeted correctly, but have no basis for a relationship.
- Blogger relations is like a cocktail party: listen first and find a commonality to begin a relationship.
- You have to share the ideals and beliefs and what your audience cares about.
Full article:
Driving up from a dinner and panel at the Building Blocks conference in San Jose, Chris Heuer of Social Media Club and The Conversation Group and Peter Hirshberg also of The Conversation Group and chairman of Technorati talked with me about engaging with your community. Both offer some amazing insight with regard to developing your voice, caring about what your audience cares about, and NOT just being an agent to deliver a message for a brand or company.
Traditionally, clients are major brands and through traditional advertising, marketing, and PR, they would create one-way positioning. The problem is brands in of themselves don’t create a voice. Rather individuals within an organization become the voice associated with the brand. Examples are Robert Scoble and Microsoft or Bob Lutz and GM. It puts a face on what is often a faceless or unapproachable organization. “Customers love to hear from the experts within brands,” said Hirshberg.
“The reason Sun loves it when all of its employees are bloggers is their view is ‘well if we have all of these touch points between our employees and our customers that is a hell of a lot more than our sales force or what we can do in broadcasting,’” said Hirshberg. Heuer admits that when The Conversation Group deals with clients that aren’t as advanced as Sun, they are hesitant. They’re concerned to support an environment where they have 50,000 employees speaking to their customers and they aren’t speaking on message.
Watch what you say around the office. Your coworkers are talking about your when they leave the office
But the environment has become Enterprise 2.0: social media tools being used for communications inside and outside of the enterprise to improve communications and relations. As Hirshberg explained, employees can no longer be viewed as cogs in a machine. Your staffers live and breathe in social networks. And even though people talk about wanting to keep their work life and personal life separate, they really don’t and as a result it’s hard to keep those two worlds apart.
“One of the big things companies are beginning to understand is since your employees are always talking, you need to do great things to keep your employees excited and thrilled, so that’s what they project to the world,” Hirshberg advised, “Because if your employees turn on you, you can’t shut it up, the word will get out.”
It’s not new explained Heuer, “Individuals have always represented their companies. With social media it just becomes more visible.”
Your PR team has no relationship with bloggers, so why are they talking to them?
“If you want people to contribute and get involved, you need to ask them things,” said Hirshberg.
One thing that The Conversation Group does is blogger outreach, communicating with people who are creating content online that would have interest in the conversation or content The Conversation Group is producing on behalf of its clients. Heuer reasserts that the most important part of blogger outreach is the relationship, not just the relaying of information.
Heuer brings up two concepts, “tofu” and “bacon,” that have been bandied about in the blogger outreach community. “Tofu” is the process of studying the person’s blog and crafting a tailored message so that the communications is sound. It’s a common practice among PR agencies who send emails on behalf of their clients. The problem with “tofu”-style communications is there isn’t a basis for a relationship. “[Tofu] is crafted, it’s personalized, it’s made nutritious, but people don’t like the taste of it anyways,” Heuer explained. Conversely, “bacon” are the messages commonly seen on social networks that are a little big fatty and a little bit tasty. You’re drawn to them because they’re attractive to you personally, but only initially. So messages like “somebody just added you as a friend” or “somebody just posted a picture of you” are considered “bacon.”
“The first thing is the person who is doing the outreach better have his own reputation as someone who cares about the community and is an individual. Because if you’re just reaching out as an agent on behalf of an agency on behalf of another corporation and you don’t have a presence for people to turn to and say, ‘Oh, wow I really like this person,’ you’re really not going to be as effective,” advised Heuer, “Blogger outreach in general doesn’t work as effectively as people think it does. You really have to have those relationships within that community and an understanding of what those people care about.” Bloggers hate press releases and they hate being talked at.
Politics, the latest with Paris and Britney, and more conversation starters with bloggers
Hirshberg explains blogger relations is like going to a cocktail party. You don’t just barge in and announce who you are and what you’re doing. Rather you listen, and find a point of commonality and a reason to relate.
Bloggers write about what they care about, and they often do it for free. They’re not beholden to some other editorial mandate that dictates what they can and can’t write about. That’s why they respond positively to people who show interest in their work and develop a relationship with them.
“As soon as it’s me talking to you, trying to get you to do something as opposed to me just talking to you, it changes the dynamics of the relationship,” warned Heuer of the traditional PR process of “flacking” bloggers and press. You need to extend invitations to participate, and return the favor by letting bloggers know what you’re going to do for them and their readers in return.
“The question is how do you build something that folks care about and will naturally spread as opposed to something that people feel like they need to be badgered into doing,” asked Hirshberg, “At the end of the day, all this outreach stuff is like kindling. You work very few people and you hope it will multiply.”
Chris Heuer brought up the issue of the “end of messaging” which is an issue that Chris Peterson of Chautauqua Communications (now part of the R2C group) agrees with. But Peterson believes it’s all about story. Heuer says it’s all about how do we get the “gist” across. It’s beyond the message, and it’s the goal of the story. That’s because depending on who you speak to, the message needs to be tailored differently because each person or category of people have different needs.
What’s “The Big Ideal?”
Hirshberg brought up Ogilvy’s theory of marketing that we’re trending away from “The Big Idea” to “The Big Ideal.” “‘The Big Ideal’ has to do with the fact that to break through clutter today you actually have to share the ideals and beliefs and what your audience cares about, because people really pay attention to what they care about,” said Hirshberg, “If your communications is based on siding with, amplifying, supporting, throwing attention on the ideals of what your audience cares about, they’re more likely to pay attention to you and spread the message.” Most common in this space today are companies that rally around “green” issues.
It’s beneficial to your bottom line and it can reduce costs. “The more excited they are the less your advertising budget needs to be because they’re going to do the advertising via word of mouth for you,” explained Heuer. This is what happened when Nike+ created an environment for others to communicate. It was so successful reaching their audience that they were able to cut their TV ad budget by tens of millions in one year.
Filed under: Collaboration, Editorial, Podcast | 2 Comments »
Is enterprise collaboration an oxymoron? – podcast
August 4th, 2008
Episode two of the “Be the Voice” podcast stars enterprise collaboration consultant, Oliver Marks.
Summary (Oliver Marks):
- Competitive enterprises fight collaboration. People don’t like each other and they’re competing for funding for their divisions.
- An open internal and exteneral editorial environment is necessary.
- C-level people aren’t reading blogs, but the people they trust are.
- Collaboration projects die because they don’t get the funding or credibility of the organization.
The full article:
I sat down with blogger and enterprise collaboration consultant Oliver Marks at Cafe Flore in San Francisco. Marks is omnipresent in the enterprise collaboration space with his high profile blogs at Collaboration 2.0 for ZDNet and Inc. magazine.
Working as an independent consultant today, Marks recently left Sony Playstation where he was developing their collaboration environment. The plan was to create an engineering portal allowing offices in Japan, Europe, and USA to collaborate. Marks admits it’s sometimes an oxymoron to have collaboration in a large organization because they often set up competition among groups in an effort to drive innovation. And this is especially true, said Marks, in the game industry.
Sony had bigger plans, explained Marks, “The president of world wide studios demanded a collaboration environment be set up. There was an expectation that the synergies of having people work more closely together would both save money and be more efficient.” Marks admits that’s the politically correct answer. “Being very blunt,” the reality said Marks, “In large companies a lot of people basically don’t like each other and they’re competing. You have to overcome all of that.”
A lot of information was top secret, and there was plenty of information you couldn’t talk about. The use of permissions (your role within the company) defined what people saw. Sony had no open editorial environment beyond just news being gathered from all around the world.
What’s an enterprise collaboration consultant to do?
Once Marks left he could actually start practicing what he was preaching-collaboration.
The power of many people collaborating has a greater impact than just an individual telling his or her experiences. “It’s a much more powerful experience for people if they’re aware you’re constantly interacting with others and gathering more and more information,” said Marks
Marks is trying to liken his consulting style to that of Stowe Boyd. Boyd tells clients that he’s only available 10 days out of the month and the other 20 days he’s doing research which involves talking to vendors and subject matter experts. “That is the value that is essential. Otherwise you’re selling canned information which is basically a year past its ’sell by’ date,” explained Marks.
What do you expose and what do you protect is the main question Marks is asking himself. “There is an interesting division between what you’re sharing for free to your audience and what is actually something you’re selling – in my case is a fairly substantial amount of money – which are the last few pieces of the jigsaw in a way that make the business model work,” said Marks.
With his blogging and consulting, Marks is aiming towards C-level people. It’s a tough hill to climb as I’ve had clients say to me, “But C-level people aren’t reading blogs.” To which I argue back, “But the people they trust are.” Marks’ blogging is around strategy and tactics which are elements that will be carried out by the trusted employee network of C-level people.
“So many collaboration projects die because they grow out of mid-level or even grass roots people. And they don’t get the funding, they don’t get the credibility in the organization, and there’s no coherent strategy or organization around them,” Marks explained. For example, an enterprise may try a pilot collaboration project among 300 people. That does well and so the enterprise immediately scales it up to 3000 and it fails. When it grows to that size, it becomes a different animal and you need to look and plan for it differently. You can save a lot of costs by planning things out well and thinking them through, which as Marks explained, “Is what I do.”
People not talking to each other or collaborating with each other are not new problems. Web 2.0 technologies are not a magic wand that will force people to collaborate. Tools can make it easier and make people want to collaborate, but often people are fearful of how long it will take and will it change their work/home life.
Everyone in large companies wants to be told what to do and told that what they’re doing is right. Yet Web 2.0 technologies like Twitter and instant messaging are often being initiated and used with no top-down approval. Marks is aiming at C-level employees because he knows convincing them has the best chance for enterprise-wide success. He’s trying to get top-down understanding and deployment from top execs.
What Oliver Marks has personally learned using Web 2.0 tools
Marks started using Twitter and Facebook to meet people. And he’s admitted that networking in the Bay Area is truly unparalleled.
Whether in person (ideal) or online, you’re building a rapport. A common multi-Web 2.0 technology scenario for Marks begins with a public conversation in Twitter, it then goes private, then there’s an invitation to talk by voice over Skype.
“It’s amazing how much you can respect somebody’s opinion through hearing what they’ve been saying, even micro blogging like Twitter,” said Marks. Twitter is great to know what people are thinking in the moment.
Mistakes: Marks admits as he’s learning and exploring he can get heavily distracted and take on too much. It’s good ‘ole fashioned curiosity that sends him in multiple directions.
Advice: A little new agey, but Marks said to speak from the heart and be genuine. You can’t fake sincerity. It always comes through. If you put out canned press releases and sales patter, people simply won’t respond. People feel when you’re being yourself. Getting that level of sincerity is such a critical component.
Filed under: Collaboration, Podcast | 3 Comments »
Even the best description of your product can’t beat a demonstration of your product – podcast
August 4th, 2008
Episode one of the “Be the Voice” podcast stars VoIP industry thought leader and founder of iotum, Alec Saunders.
Summary (Alec Saunders):
- The “Holy Grail” of “Be the Voice” communications is to build thought leadership using your own product.
- Give people the opportunity to see in action an applicable and fun use of your product.
- The best description of a product can’t beat a demonstration of your product.
- On developing his thought leadership in Voice 2.0, Saunders said, “I’m pushing others in the industry to adopt these technologies because when they do, it becomes easier for our company to do business.”
- The alternative to spending money on marketing is developing your industry voice. It’s cheaper and long lasting.
- Saunders’ blog traffic jumps correlates with jumps in his business site’s traffic (iotum).
- Frequency of content wins. Saunders went from 300 visitors a day to 200,000 a month in just one year solely by writing three posts a day, NOT engaging in social media.
The full article:
Alec Saunders is the author of the VoIP-centric blog, SaundersLog, and also the roundtable tech podcast, The SquawkBox. These are the avenues that he uses to expose his wisdom and engage others in conversation about VoIP and also technology in general. For the past year I’ve admired the dedication he’s put into developing his industry voice through his blog and podcast. It’s why I asked Alec to join me in a conversation about how he’s used blogging and podcasting to become a leading voice in telephony and VoIP.
In addition to blogging and podcasting, Saunders is the CEO of Iotum, a voice call management technology that operates on BlackBerry devices and on the Web. Out of Iotum, he also launched a free conference call tool, Calliflower, which he uses to record his SquawkBox podcast.
Building thought leadership using your own product
What really drew me to interview Alec is he’s accomplished what I think is the Holy Grail of “Be the Voice” communications. He is building thought leadership using his own product. People who are interested in being a participant in Saunders’ daily SquawkBox recording simply join the Calliflower conference call which is recorded and then posted on his blog. The daily podcast varies between a roundtable discussion of the tech news of the day, or Saunders invites a guest to talk about their new product offering. Personally, I’m so impressed with the process that I’ve volunteered to be a substitute host.
It’s not always possible for someone to use their own product to build their own public voice. But when you can, you’re giving people the opportunity to see your product in action. And when people see it, can participate in it, they see the value of it, and then there’s no need to actually invest in marketing or have a formal sales pitch. As much as you describe a product, no description can even come close to seeing a product in action. The value Alec Saunders brings to his company Iotum and its product Calliflower is by recording a five-days-a-week podcast.
Calliflower’s first iteration was a Facebook application simply called, “Free Conference Calls.” Iotum took advantage of Facebook’s pre-built listings because as Saunders said, “The emergence of social networks is going to drive all kinds of changes in directories.” Saunders still believes that’s going to happen, but it’s not happening at the pace he thought it would happen. That’s why when Iotum rereleased the product as Calliflower, he kept the Facebook application in tact, but he also took the product outside of the closed social network and allowed anyone to join.
Becoming the voice of “Voice 2.0″
Three years ago Saunders wrote the “Voice 2.0 Manifesto” arguing that there’s going to be an intersection between the openness of the Internet and the closed limited functionality of the telco industry. It’s a world that communications providers have been forced to participate in for years, but given the Internet’s ability to build lightweight communications applications on top of Internet protocols, like HTTP, Voice 2.0 communications removes the traditional constraints of business.
Within twelve months of writing his manifesto, “Voice 2.0″ became a meme that spread throughout the world and there was a conference launched by the same name. Saunders didn’t try to own the name as he knew its value had greater value to the community. “I’m pushing others in the industry to adopt these technologies because when they do, it becomes easier for our company to do business,” realized Saunders. As of writing this post, if you do a search for “Voice 2.0″ on Google, Alec Saunders’ blog appears in the top two results.
Saunders explains his rationale for building so much online voice. As a start up, Iotum simply doesn’t have the marketing budget of his competitors. The most effective promotion they do is the blog and podcast, Saunders said.
Why blogging critical to your business
It’s difficult to show a one-to-one correlation between blogging and sales, but Saunders can still demonstrate the value of blogging using a tool called Alexaholic (now called Statsaholic as required by Amazon). The tool allows you to compare the Alexa traffic for various Web sites. Saunders showed one friend the traffic of Saunderslog vs Iotum demonstrating that when his blog traffic spiked, so did his company site.
Saunders repeated the process using his friend’s business site. He could see a handful of tiny bumps where the company issued press releases. But that was it. There was no continuing interest in the company like what Saunders had developed over the long term with his blog. The difference between Saunders and his friend, is his friend was spending all kinds of money on promotional marketing and nothing was happening. Saunders didn’t spend any money on marketing. He just blogged. Said Saunders, “I’m just out there talking to people. The difference is [with blogging it's] palpable and apparent.”
Saunders gets calls from people who have heard or participated in the SquawkBox podcast and they want to become users of Calliflower for free conference calls. Saunders provides the answers they’re looking for and they return as users.
The biggest tip Saunders offers to anyone else wanting to jump into blogging or podcasting is frequency. Lack of it during his early days of blogging was his biggest mistake. Saunders began blogging only when he felt he had something to say, which could be weeks. “There was a period of time several months went by and my traffic went down, and down, and down, and down, and people weren’t coming by. And they never had a reason to return because I wasn’t publishing anything new,” said Saunders.
A mutual friend of ours, Andy Abramson, also a VoIP blogger and owner of the public relations and marketing firm Comunicano, advised Saunders to blog three times every day. Saunders was shocked at the advice, but he did it, even on weekends, for an entire year. The result is his traffic went from 300 people a day, to 1000 pretty quickly. By the time the year was over he had 200,000 visitors a month. Blogging was all he did. He didn’t take advantage of any of the social media tools. “A lot of people invest in everything in social media. I decided to focus on one thing really really closely, and that was content,” said Saunders, “You don’t get the comments traffic until you get the content for people to comment on. You don’t get people returning over and over again or commenting on what you wrote on other blogs until you’ve got the content.”
Saunders’ blog created enormous interest from carriers who were very interested in what we were trying to do. It was that interest that led Iotum to building its BlackBerry call management product and Saunders writing the “Voice 2.0 Manifesto.”
“Blogs are great marketing tools,” said Saunders. Blogs create lots of content and lots of links and that’s exactly what Google look for. Static Web sites won’t ever be able to do that.
“If you’ve got the ability and the desire to write you can create a very valuable promotional tool for your company,” advised Saunders.
Blog.
Filed under: Blogging, Collaboration, Editorial, Podcast | 9 Comments »