Month: October 2007

Categories
Daily Life

Podcamp is not Barcamp is not Band Camp

So this is my last time rambling about Podcamp. C.C. Chapman has had about 1,000,000 comments on his post talking about podcamp not being free. I’m a bit of a heretic, I remember talking with Bryper about the first podcamp and saying that they should charge for that one to weed out the trick-or-treaters that show up for free stuff and nothing else. There’s a lot of discussion about what makes a conference and what makes a camp. These are all academic arguments that the average person probably isn’t even aware of, never mind give a whizz in the River Kwai about.

Some of my favorite highlights – Eric Rice calling it Podshow 2.0, and Tim Bourquin welcoming everyone to the world of paid conferences. I think that aside from the names, Barcamp and Podcamp are two very different things. From what I’ve seen, Barcamps involve a lot of collaboration, where podcamps are all about education. I can easily see why someone who’s been to Barcamps or Brainjams would not be as excited about Podcamp, it’s not the same experience.

Ok, even I’m getting tired of the “Inside Baseball”. In closing, maybe I don’t get to sleep on the floor for podcamp, but there are still human connections made. There are a lot of people who go to podcamp who know nothing, or next to nothing about new media and they would like the guided tour, not pandemonium.

Me and NicoHere’s a picture of me and Nico, my graphic designer / wordpress genius. I’ve worked with many designers for professional projects, but Nico works on my personal projects. I put the rough graphics of Ronin Marketeer together and then he got it all to work correctly (I hate dealing with tables and I’m pretty lame with stylesheets). I knew there is a point where I’d lose interest in tweaking the code and it would be faster and less headache for a pro to take care of it.

The cool part is that we did this site almost a year ago, and from across the planet – he’s in Argentina. He surprised everyone by flying 30 hours to show up at Podcamp Boston. That alone makes podcamp cool enough for me, and yes I’d be willing to $20 to register for it to show I’m serious about attending…

I also a chance to catch up with all my Canadian friends (why the hell is Canada so much more hip than the US?), and was fortunate enough to meet Anna Farmery from the engaging brand. Next time I’m breaking out the recorder.

For more audio discussion on Podcamp, Technorati, and fighting Sploggers, check out the latest Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

Categories
Daily Life

Goulet

Robert Goulet has passed from this world, read more about Goulet here. I didn’t know he was local, but always appreciated his big band, partying sound.

Just prepping for Marketing Over Coffee tomorrow, if Mr. Penn is not wiped out from the VON festivities that everyone is twittering about. Talk to you then…

Categories
The Marketeer

In Defense of the Thought Leader

Christopher Penn proposes deep sixing the term “Thought Leader”

I agree that the term is lame (it really doesn’t involve leadership – much like podcasting not requiring an iPod), but I think it does define a very specific role: a person in a company who is an expert in the field who blogs, speaks, and presents about the industry and future trends in general rather than just pimping their product. These actions give their company credibility and increase the perception that they are truly experts at what they do now, and will continue to be experts into the future.

These types of people generate a competitive advantage over companies that don’t have any thought leaders.

With this definition there are no thought quarterbacks or generals leading on the field, but there are experts on football who have their own shows that give out in-depth analysis about the sport and get paid for it. There are retired generals who speak on news shows and write about what war really means, and they usually get paid to consult.

I think the bottom line is that the terms consultant and analyst are overused, tired and worn out. Thought Leaders are New and Improved!

Categories
Great Marketing Lead Generation

What’s Your Cost Per Lead?

Over the past 20 years ROI has been a measure of successful marketing. Many management teams want to see the ROI of each sucessful campaign. Seth Godin (sweet Red Saber post BTW) has argued for a long time that this is the “safe” path, and will ultimately lead to your destruction. If you only make the safe choices, somebody that you compete with is going to take a chance, and will eventually send you back to asking customers if they “want fries with that?”

So how do you get around this? It may be impossible if your management team is already expecting ROI on everything you propose, but you need to change the ground rules. View all of your marketing efforts as a whole – given your entire budget, how many leads do you pull in? How good are they? How many close, and for how much?

With metrics like this you can determine a cost per lead, and determine how much revenue each lead generates. Now you know the overall ROI of your marketing programs. You can see how every program performs in both terms of cost and quality. You’ll be able to make some informed decisions such as – perhaps Google clicks are not worth the huge dollars and you don’t need to be spending so much there. Are yahoo clicks worth the same amount as those from google? Which trade shows are worth going to?

The end result is that if your overall activites are generating a positive ROI you now have an excuse to to some R&D, and you should refer to it as such. Now you don’t have to try and make up numbers about what a YouTube video might do for you, or some other program that you’ve never tried before. You just say that this is an experiment and it may fail, but we will learn if it’s possible for it to generate enough return to add to our marketing mix. The great part is that as soon as you get the data you’ll be able to compare it to the rest of your programs.

The Evolution of Marketing
I’m thinking about the evolution in Marketing as an organization grows. As an enterprise is born marketing exists to serve as lead generator. As the enterprise expands, the earlier sections of the sales cycle can be outsourced to Marketing Automation. Ultimately Marketing moves into branding if it becomes necessary to influence the public, shareholders, or other groups that are not directly purchasing the product. Different skills and toolsets are used during the evolution. I’m too tired to ponder upon this more. Good night…

Categories
Daily Life

Podcamp Boston 2

Clarence and JuliaThis is my fave from the show, Clarence and the blur draw you in, but you eventually can’t avoid Julia.

Lots of great discussions yesterday at Podcamp and I’m getting ready to head back into town. Unfortunately we were not able to find anywhere quiet enough to record Marketing Over Coffee, but that ended up being a blessing. On the ride home I realized that without picking up a bizarre specialized cable, I’m not going to be able to record anyway.

I’ll be doing a session at 2pm covering any basic questions anyone still may have. For more photos, check out the set.

Categories
Great Marketing

Mitch Joel and C.C. Chapman Hacked!

This dynamic duo is presenting now at Podcamp Boston! If google is running hard this will show up on the Main Screen where they are showing off Google Reader!

Marketing Over Coffee #1

Your pal,

J

Categories
Productivity Booster The Marketeer

The biggest mistake made at trade shows

is not to have a plan. I could write some pointers, and I’d just be covering some ground that Jeff Pulver has already laid out in a straightforward fashion.

And this is not to say that your plan has to be all business. I only had 3 goals at Podcamp Pittsburgh and one of them was to get this picture:

photo by Kimberly Reed
If you are at Podcamp Boston and you need a picture with somebody, just ask, I’m sure we can find them in the crowd.

Categories
Swipe File

Goldmine

I was passed a copy of an old Malcolm Gladwell article and that made me wonder if any of his stuff was online. On The M Show I’ve talked about his books The Tipping Point and Blink, which are both very interesting, but I’ve found his New Yorker articles the most fascinating.

Lo and behold, his has all of them (or at least a bunch of them) posted on his website!

He also has a blog up there that hasn’t been updated in a while, including this very interesting post on Freakonomics.

It’s interesting to note that all of the posts have tons of comments – it makes me wonder – once you are being paid professionally to write is there any reason to blog other than to promote your current book, or test ideas for the next one?

Categories
Podcasting

Marketing Over Cocktails!

Marketing Over Coffee has gone out a day ahead of time because of the impending podcamp crush. I have some stuff to cover from the WebInno dinner yesterday, lots of interesting discussion about virtual worlds. In other interesting news, the drinking post has been running wild, digg it if you get a chance!

You can attend a live recording of Marketing Over Coffee! Marketing Over Cocktails will be (around) 9pm, this Saturday at the Westin at the Boston Convention Center, please stop by!

Categories
The Marketeer

Celebrity Teachers and Lawyers

This is an oxymoron – there are none. I challenge anyone to come up with one. I define celebrity in the U.S. US magazine style – someone who gets press for nothing more than being part of the entertainment/media machine, not for having accomplished anything that would make them respected or even famous.

Once you reach celebrity status you can no longer be an effective Teacher or Lawyer. These positions rely upon the image of the professional. If the school committee or the jury can find the normal celebrity crap about you on the web, your career is over and you better hope you can score on the celebrity front because your professional days are finished.

You’re probably asking “What the hell is this rambling about?” and the answer is that before the explosion in social media this would only apply to fringe cases – the teacher that sleeps with a student, the attorney that kills his wife, stories you may recall from past years. These were literally less than 1 in a million chances – the problem is that the odds now are dead even.

Any professional can be strung up if the wrong information hits the web. I’ve consulted a number of friends and family about how to defend your reputation, and I was reminded of the topic when Lisa Kate was writing about reconciling her personal writing against her professional.

If you are an attorney you’d better have Google Alerts set up for both your name and your firm and you need to investigate every occurrence of your brand. The good news is that it’s fairly simple of you to strike fear into those who are abusing your name and most things should be very simple to clean up if you strike early.

Here’s the sad truth – you cannot blog about your personal life without doing it anonymously. Blogging about your professional life is a great idea. I have no doubt that there will be many teachers that will become leaders in their field because of their blogs, and there will be many law firms that will squash the competition because they have simple blogs that describe legal concepts in simple terms and use their city name in the post (if you Google CLP“Dallas Real Estate Attorney” guess who just beat the crap out of the firm that has a full page ad in the paper or the yellow pages? Oh yeah, and they did that for no cash down.)

Even with an anonymous blog it’s kind of a bummer because you are denied photos. You could try to use pictures that don’t identify you (like my relative that I’m reminding about CLP – career limiting photographs), but the problem is that if your blog starts to gain any steam, you’re going to have the whole world trying to solve the mystery of who you are.

So, the conclusion? If you are in Law and Education and you want to blog about your personal life you only have 2 options. You can go with password protected posts and only let your circle of approved friends have access. Or, if, deep down inside, you are itching to create a blog that’s widely read, maybe you want to consider a different line of work.