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.
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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 »
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 »
Welcome to the Be the Voice blog and podcast
July 9th, 2008
Welcome to the “Be the Voice” blog and podcast. This blog is an ongoing project to uncover the stories of how businesses are driving business growth through thought leadership.
In the new economy of ideas and information, your business growth is dependent on your ability to educate your audience at the time they need to make decisions. Creating an industry voice is critical, because every time you provide an answer at a key point, you move potential consumers along the decision making process to purchase. The goal is to turn these seekers into consumers and ultimately evangelists who in turn will help your business continue to provide decision making information.
Are you creating editorial content online that’s driving your business’ growth? If so, I’m interested in talking with you. Please contact me at david AT sparkmediasolutions DOT com.
Please visit Spark Media Solutions if your company is looking for an industry voice producing solution.
And for more on me, David Spark, please read my blog, Spark Minute or my bio.
Filed under: Blogging, Editorial, Podcast | No Comments »