Participate in your marketing

One 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.

Conquering fear

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.

Social fear

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?

Information is power

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.

Trust your gut

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.

Talk about it

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.

Back from Mexico

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.

What’s happening

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.

What it means

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.