Hi there. First of all, I want to say thank you for stopping by.
Unfortunately, you’ve found the older version. I have moved everything over to www.thegeekgiant.com.
Again, I appreciate you stopping by, so come on over to the new site and see what’s happening 🙂
~ Eric
Yeah, I said it. Marketing is a bunch of CRAP! But not the kind of crap you may be thinking I mean. I am talking about C.R.A.P.: Communicate, relate, anticipate and participate.
These are the foundations of an effective marketing campaign and will help any brand, any PR pro or any marketer work better with their clients and potential customers. So, spread the CRAP and let me know what you think.
Photo from Flickr user kool_skatkat under Creative Commons.
This is a pretty obvious practice and should be standard operating procedure. Communicating means not just broadcasting, but responding and conversing with your audience as well. Most organizations fall short in a couple of key areas.
Openness is essential. The Beta’s delayed? Say so. There’s a bug? Fix it, apologize and move on to new features. There is a limit to how open you want to be, but I feel that in order for a company to succeed, it needs to be as open as responsibly possible.
Brevity is a key. I have invented a word: conciseification (ironic, no?), which means “take what you said in 500 words and say it in 200. Take your four sentences and make them two. By tightening your message, it becomes more memorable. The recipient can take the message away much easier.
Listening makes you a good spouse. By actively listening and conversing with your audience, they feel respected, empowered and happy. A happy audience is one of the most effective marketing tools possible.
Relating to your potential market is absolutely essential. Don’t just go to the trade show, take it over. Be a presence anywhere your potential customer base is at. This does not need to be huge parties, expensive sponsorships or even in-depth webinars.
A simple hello or a simple appearance at a meetup is enough. People will remember the brand or the business that goes the extra step to go to a Barcamp or to go to a PHP Meetup. Your competition isn’t doing it, so you should be.
This is probably the hardest premise to follow. In the tech business, people the customers generally get what they want. How can you as a marketer anticipate what the customer wants? Easy: Follow the other three elements of this post.
By communicating, relating and participating, you become an expert. You can identify trends and you can jump ahead of the mob to deliver the solution it is running toward.
I thought about just retyping the word “participate.” But I realized there’s a lot more to participation than being present. You’re participating because you have a goal: to succeed. But if you are genuinely passionate about the product or brand you are representing, then it will show.
Photo from Flickr user matiasjajaja under Creative Commons.
These concepts make for an effective cornerstone for a product launch, a new campaign or simply reconnecting with your audience. Step in this CRAP and the only thing you’ll smell is success. What do you think?
Technology is a wonderful tool for tackling fears. You can register for any anonymous email address you want and post anything you want, anywhere you want it.
But what does it take to really tackle a fear or move past an initial hesitation? In our highly-social, highly connected world, it’s difficult to imagine that we have real emotions that cause us to pause, and have to stare something in the face.
But in reality, a lot of our daily decisions are, at a minimim, affected by fear. The fear of failure, the fear of not being acceped. Even the fear of success.So, let’s look at fear from a sociological perspective and determine how to fix fear.
According to a paper in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, fear can be divided into two primary types: fear as an emotion and fear as a consequence of or motivation for social relations.
Fear as an emotion is often times based upon learned or natural behaviors that external forces have no bearing on. But what about the fear we can control? The social and business interactions.
In my opinion, situational and social fear is normal. Being hesitant to enter a situation, sign a term sheet or hit submit means that your brain is firing as it should. But the challenge is what methods can you use to conquer the fear?
I’ve found that being knowledgeable helps to alleviate any fear or intimidation I may have been feeling. Make sure you are factually accurate and can defend your points and perspective. Then you have nothing to worry about.
Making any decision is difficult. If you’re educated on the circumstances, then trust your instincts. Usually the first reaction is proper and won’t lead you too far astray.
Find somebody you trust. Having one person that can serve as a confident but is honest enough to provide a reality check is an essential business tool.
These are just three tips that I use and help me make decisions and proceed in the face of fear.
So, what do you do to confront fear? Let me know.
Micro-sharing within a large enterprise. The concept mystifies me. If I were in charge of running a large corporation, or even a division within one, I would be so adamantly against the use of company funds, time and resources to develop something like was talked about recently on ReadWriteWeb.
The author (Laura Fitton, who is AWESOME), has an interview with the two guys that developed a service for Best Buy called Mix. Mix is an initiative to get Best Buy’s employees micro-sharing and micro-blogging. This is absurd.
We’re all a bunch of geeks. Those of us on Twitter have adopted this way of communicating as a means to fool ourselves into thinking we’re interacting with people. For “micro-sharing” to be thrust onto an army of retail workers seems like an inherently bad idea. Now, I’ll be even more self conscious when I check out, wondering what they’re going to post about the 6’8″ guy that just bought a Wii.
But I’ll Twitter that, so you’ll find out I guess.
The other issue I have with this is the productivity suck these services are. Think about this. I work in a small office. But in a given day, I will email, call, Skype, IM and maybe have a Twitter conversation with people in my company. Now, compound this by expecting me to participate in a micro-sharing thing makes me wonder when any actual “work” will get done.
Am I completely wrong?
GigaOm recently announced a $4.5 million round of funding and the rest of the blogoshpere went HOORAY!
This is GigaOm’s second round and boosted its war chest to a reported $5.3 million. They join Silicon Alley Insider, b5Media, VentureBeat and a couple of smaller networks as having raised institutional money. I have mixed emotions about this.
On one hand, all businesses require an up-front capital injection in order to get started. Often times, however, this is a small, upfront loan that is repayed when the business succeeds. In the case of venture capital, the cash injection is doled out at some point well within a company’s life cycle.
For a blog network that relies upon posting news stories of companies, which generally are backed by venture capital firms, to take venture capital money seems like an inherent conflict of interest.
SAI’s disclaimer page does not allude to its funding sources. It’s disclosure statement does not say what VC it has raised. And I couldn’t track down any information about its funding on its site or its parent company’s site, AlleyCorp. But this summer, it announced a round of funding.
Does this affect its coverage? I would hope not. But bloggers, reporters, journalists or anybody that purports to report “news” should be attempting to maintain a level of objectiveness. And when you’re fueled by a VC firm’s funds, that can be kind of difficult.
I’m just sayin’.
I mean it, I’m back into blogging. I’m going to be moving this to a hosted install and actually writing here. Just a warning 🙂
Yes, you read that right. Monetization does NOT equal revenue. I’m tired of hearing about Web “applications” that are promising venture capitalists that their ad-supported business model is going to be successful and yield that 15x return their looking for.
Monetization, as I define it, is using advertising to make some money off of your Web site. It is not recurring revenue that results from users willingly paying for the service.
This is a dangerous model to put much faith in for a number of reasons. The first is the visceral reaction the general public has to advertising. When was the last time you thought to yourself, “Man, I really liked the annoying Flash ad. I must go see ‘Legally Blonde 7: Divorce Rules.’ ”
Advertising is effective as a brand awareness driver. If you’re letting advertising dictate your purchasing decisions, then that’s a separate issue. What advertising is not, however, is a model on which to build a business. Because the only one getting rich off of ads is Google.
When a Web application is so valuable that people willingly pay a monthly or annual fee for the pleasure of its use, that is revenue. Revenue is profit. Revenue is a viable, sustainable model for growth and success.
When a Web application offers functionality that either increases my productivity or adds value to my life, I’ll gladly pay for it.
So, when I saw that LinkedIn recently completed a founding round of $53 million, I nearly choked. Not only does this value the company at $1 BILLION, but it also gives them plenty of ammo to fire across the bows of upstart SocNets. According to the LA Times, LinkedIn has been profitable for a couple of years. So, where does this revenue come from? I don’t pay for it. Nor will I.
So, in the chart I’ve embedded from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the growth rate of online advertising revenues has been astonishing. In Q1 of 2008, online advertising revenues were approximately $5.8 billion. So, why do these companies need so much venture capital? I think it’s because that “revenue” is only being realized by the ad networks and not the apps them selves.
It kind of pains me to link to Valleywag, but they did the dirty work for me on this. Time recently announced its 50 top Web sites and Valleywag made some quick and dirty analysis (really, is there any other kind?). Of the 50:
So, of “Web sites,” advertising is obviously a good way to make some revenue. But for businesses, it’s all about subscription models and real users paying real money.
How will you make your profit?
Back into the flow of things. Here’s what I’ve noticed lately.
Not a whole lot. Innovation appears to be on a temporary hiatus. Yahoo is trying its best to be the belle of the ball, but is ending up only as the last-call cougar. I don’t care if it’s Googlehoo, Microhoo, Yahoogle or whatever mashup you want to call it, it’s still going to be “contextual” ads in the way of my Internet search.
I like Google not for its results, but for the fact that to search for something, I type it into my Firefox space and it gives me what I want. So, whatever happens, keep making Mozilla rich so I can keep using the quick search.
I’m not fatigued of the act of social networking, I’m fatigued of the myriad Web sites I feel it necessary to register as /geekgiant or what have you. Here’s my proposal.
We all love Twitter (when it works). We’ve all settled on FriendFeed as a way to abandon RSS sharing. And we all seem to have a LinkedIn profile. Let’s call it a day. It’s time for the Web to be used for something useful. How about a network for managing emergency responses. Or how about a CMS that has a reality check built in for poor writers. Another idea I have is for a Customer Relationship Management that is usable by, well, everybody.
Just an idea.
I think that what the IPO bubble was to Web 1.0, consolidation will be to Web 2.0. We’re going to see makers of widgets get absorbed into the social networks they serve. I think we’ll see some of the proprietary Web app creation tools such as Coghead or Bungee Labs dissolve and I think that some of the blogs will consolidate as well.
We’re in the birth of a new economy. The Web is the platform for innovation and I’m excited to see where we go.
I spent last week offline in Puerto Vallarta Mexico and realized that my world is very small.
Nobody was Twittering about the sun or the timeshare presentations. I had no IM, no email and no iPhone.
And I loved it.
Our world is expanding thanks to these tools, but there is so much of it we miss by chasing each other from social networking tool to social networking tool. The Web is going to change the world. But I think it’s going to change it in a way we don’t expect.
The world is actually going to get bigger because of our self-created isolation that these “social” networks strive for. Instead of going to see my good friend who is about to have a new baby, I sent him a message on MySpace. Instead of getting some friends together to watch the recent NFL draft, I went into a chat room.
We’re slowly eliminating human and social interaction from our lives by adding what we’re being told is being social. As our online presence continues to evolve and our Pownce/FriendFeed/SocialThing/Facebook/LinkedIn selves continue to spiral around the concentric circles, we are actually going to create a smaller world around us.
I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen in the next 10 years. There’s a lot of room for new technologies to bring us together. There’s a lot of room for technologies that bring niche communities together around a common theme. Unfortunately, that’s going to create a social world that is heavily divided within numerous microcultures.
I think that the social networking sites are innovative. I love Twitter and reading about the dynamic experiences of others. But I think that the future of these applications are in the enterprise. If somebody can figure out how to put Twitter to work or figure out how to increase productivity with these tools, a lot of people will make a lot of money.
I could be totally wrong, too. Or you can prove me wrong. Go introduce yourself to the person next to you and show me that our society isn’t going backward.
the geek GIANT 
Participate in your marketing
November 14, 2008One of the things I quickly realized when I wrote my last post is that it is much more difficult to participate in a marketing or public relations campaign than one would imagine. So, I wanted to expand a bit more on the Participate element of CRAP.
Most large companies simply aren’t agile enough to actively be involved and followup on a campaign. And a lot of smaller companies simply don’t have the time to be actively participating in conversations.
Participating in a marketing campaign is about connecting with the audience. Let them into your world. Show them how things work and show them why your product is the best.
One of the best examples of participation is Wine Library TV. The point of WLTV is not to get video views or Twitter comments, it is to sell wine. The videos that are produced, the events Gary speaks at and the messages he sends on Twitter are a means to an end.
But other examples exist as well. Every party thrown is an act of participation. When Scott Beale at Laughing Squid has a drink up, the goal is to meet new people, interact with his audience and hopefully score some new business.
More traditional methods exist as well. Take the Webinar as an example. A project manager or product architect giving a personal, non-marketing tour of a product or technology goes a lot further with an engaged audience than a banner ad on Digg.
So, participate with your audience. It’s not about being seen, it’s about seeing and connecting with the audience.
Posted in General business concepts, Industry commentary | Tagged conversation, marketing, Participate, PR | Leave a Comment »