SFIMA Keynote Speech by Peter Shankman

I was at the SFIMA.com conference yesterday who had Peter Shankman as the keynote speaker. Here were some of the key points of his speech:

Be transparent
Peter told the story of an idea he came up with regarding creating a list of PR professionals. He was constantly receiving queries for comments on articles as an "expert", but some of the answers to questions or comments journalists were seeking didn't match up with his skillset. He created a list that he could then send these queries out to other "experts" like himself who could then speak with the journalist so they could make their deadline. The mailing list built up to a nice size when he was contacted by an apparel company who was interested in sending an advertisement to the list. He wrote an email to the list talking about the products with a tracking code + url pointing to the advertiser. The return was 17% when the apparel company was used to normally receiving less than a 1% conversion rate. When they asked him what he did differently, all he said was he just wrote honestly about it and people on his mailing list trust his opinion so they purchased.

Privacy settings cannot be protected by stupid
If you don't want your information to fall into the wrong hands online, then don't put it online. A story he told was that he asked an audience member what kind of personal details she posted online and she replied "All of it but I only have it online for my friends". He then asked her friend if they were connected on Facebook, to which he said "yes". He gave him $100 and logged in with his ID and went directly to her Wall and saw all her info. In summary, don't post information online that you don't want everyone to know about.

Relevance - Find out how audience prefers to have their media delivered
He used an example of a non profit Animal Rescue group that was sending out coffee table books to anyone who made a donation. When he made his donation he called up the Rescue group and asked them about it. They told him their average donator tended to be older and didn't use the Internet. Well after getting added to the Advisory Board he conducted a survey and found out 2 things, 1) The average age of a donator was between 10 and 15 years younger than what they had thought and 2) they preferred to get their information online. He was able to save the Rescue group, $500,000 in the first year on postage and production costs while increasing their donations 30%.

Revenue. Always work on or create projects that will make money.
The days of the Pets.com sock puppet which went through $300 million in venture capital with very little revenue are over.

Attention Spans are very short.
The average amount of a person's attention span was 2.4 or about 142 characters. Normally you would think this was a Tweet but it's actually the length of a text message. As fast as cell phone growth is exploding, the text message is exploding along with it. Good writing is clarity and brevity and clarity and brevity is marketing.

Top of mind will win.
The big differentiator amongst all of the brands out there competing for your attention is customer service. For example, Delta had to make an emergency landing in South Carolina on a flight to NY and everything at the airport was closed while the pilots had vanished. He started tweeting to @Delta telling them they were stranded and then they needed help. Guess who responded to him? Southwest Airlines who told him if he could get them to an airport 30 miles north they would fly him to NY. Another time he was landing in Europe and was dead tires. He tweeted to his hotel that he wanted some coffee. When he checked into his room he had a knock on the door and it was room service with his coffee. These types of experiences are the reason why he stays exclusive to these brands.

What is your "KLOUT" score?
Influence is always important and just moving online. People with Klout Scores about particular subjects will have more influence in a decision making process.

LinkedIn Plans to Go Public May 19th

Tomorrow will be another big day for LinkedIn – it goes public. LinkedIn currently has over 100 million members and is used in over 200 countries and territories worldwide. It continues to grow at a healthy pace and now will be backed with additional working capital to further its products. LinkedIn reports it will use the funds from the offering for general corporate use such as working capital, sales and marketing, capital expenditures, acquisitions investments in complimentary technologies and general/administrative matters.

Additional details include:

• Anticipates raising near $274 million this week
• LinkedIn will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LNKD
• Shares are expected to trade in the $32 to $35 range
• 7.84 million shares will be available

I do think LinkedIn will continue to grow and establish itself as the social media site for business executives. One aspect of the site that I do hope to see further improvements on is the advertising platform. It still feels like it’s in its infancy but could be a big win for LinkedIn, if they get it right. LinkedIn ads can be laser targeted by job title, job function, industry, geography, age, gender, company name, company size or LinkedIn Group – but I’m still looking for success cases with the ad platform. Hopefully this IPO and the influx of funding, will aid in the development of the ad platform for the future.

Image credit: mariosundar

People often ask me 'What is a Blog'?

What are blogs? The term is short for web-log, and the original blogs were online journals and web reports such as live updates from journalists embedded with the military.

A blog is just a really simple website. The charm of a blog is that if you can send email you can blog. All you do is log-in, type a title and a short article (called a blog post) and push ‘Publish’ and your blog automatically adds the new blog post at the top of the page and pushes the older blog posts lower down the page.

Blogs have 3 main business benefits.
1. The search engines love blogs. Lots of words, frequently updates and bloggers often link to each other. Words+Links=Search Engine Success.

2. People subscribe to blogs to get an electronic notification every time you update the blog. The updates come to a cell phone or your computer through RSS feeds (a technical sounding term, but this is just a tool to facilitate blog subscriptions called Really Simple Syndication).
3. Blogs are more conversational than websites, you can allow a bit of personality to shine through a company blog or a CEO blog.

To see a few of my favorite marketing blogs, please have a look at our list of the Top 10 Internet Marketing Blogs on the TenGoldenRules.com website.


Flickr Photo Credit francescopozzi

TrafficWave - OceanSwell TEAM Update (#71)

I just want everyone to know that I have updated the rotating URL's again for both TrafficWave and Global NPN.  To be perfectly honest with you, we've had a lot of drops.  Yes, you wish that people wouldn't join affiliate programs and then drop like flies within 90 days (or less).  But that's just reality.  They do, and they will.  That's because everyone's chasing that feather in the wind, and serious players are few and far between.  For those of you who are in this for the long-term (as in forever), it just means that your affiliate link is more likely to come up in the rotating system that we use with Team OceanSwell.

With any kind of MLM-style affiliate program, it's really pretty simple - if everybody does it, everybody gets rich.  But everybody won't do it.  Most simply can't.  That is why it is my belief that the best chance you will ever have for building an affiliate downline is by having a plan and a system that others can duplicate without much 'thinking'.  If there's a better system out there than what our team is using, I haven't seen it.  Believe me, I've seen it all... and I've joined many of them.  But one thing people tell me a lot is that 'I don't have time to promote'.  Well, don't tell it to me.  In my job, I work seven (yes, 7) days a week.  So I don't want to hear it.  We ALL work hard and nobody has enough time.

Anyway, we still have many active team members who are working their butts off every month.  This month's $40.00 team member, promotion bonus goes out to Leo Watson (hardjudge).  Leo is a long-time team member who actually uses TrafficWave in his online business activities.  Leo, just send me your AlertPay or PayPal address and I'll get that $40.00 bonus to you pronto!

InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Lessons from Thomas Edison: 5 Ways to Think Like an Innovator

Join Sarah Miller Caldicott, a great grandniece of Thomas Edison and co-author of Innovate like Edison (Dutton, Penguin), as she presents “Lessons from Thomas Edison: 5 Ways to Think Like an Innovator.”

After spending the first 15 years of her career in consumer packaged goods at Quaker Oats and Helene Curtis, she began researching the timeless innovation methods of Thomas Edison at Rutgers University. Sarah’s book reveals the success factors that led to Edison’s development of 6 industries in less than 40 years, all of which remain today.

This webinar will introduce a carefully researched, easy-to-apply system of the five success secrets inspired by the creative methods of Thomas Alva Edison. The greatest innovator in American history, Edison set the stage for America’s global leadership in innovation by his focus on practical accomplishment. Now you can apply the best practices of this American genius to contemporary business situations to help today’s leaders harness their own innovative potential. Learn the blueprint for success that will enable executives and entrepreneurs to revitalize their own ingenuity and thrive in today’s culture of innovation.

Sarah is an innovation consultant, speaker, and trainer offering insights on Edison’s world-changing methods to Global 50 companies as well as small, entrepreneurial firms.

This free webinar will take place Wednesday, May 18, 2011 12:30pmEDT – 1:30pmEDT. To register and for more information please visit: Lessons from Thomas Edison: 5 Ways to Think Like an Innovator

Gold In The Phones

Do you have a smart phone? Even if you don’t, I’m willing to bet many of your friends and family do. The number of people using smart phones continues to grow exponentially. Over the past year, the amount of users has gone up 187% to just over 18 million. As this number increases, so do the opportunities for marketing. There are countless online articles relating to the potential smart phones have for marketing to individuals using their mobile devices for shopping, directions, and focused social media.

Mobile-only social media sites are becoming popular with those who do not want to carry a laptop but will instead use their smart phone. This is producing more marketing opportunities within new mediums. Studies have shown that the number of consumers using their mobile phones for shopping increases daily by the thousands. Retailers can use this information to target more focused marketing. Revenue from social related networks is said to be around $60 billion by 2012. These are numbers that companies cannot afford to ignore.

With search becoming so individually targeted by Google and others, mobile shows nothing but incredible numbers from a marketing stand-point. Smart phones become more and more like PCs with every new release. These increasing technological advances continue to open new doors to innovative marketing strategies. No matter how you look at it, mobile marketing is a future with great possibilities.

Facebook Update: Encourage Fans to Tag Your Business Page in Photos Now

Mashable has announced, starting today (although it hasn’t been completely rolled out yet with all of the details), Facebook users will now be able to tag Pages (products/brands) and People (i.e. celebrities) in their Facebook photos.

What does this mean for your Business Page?

Free advertising! Anyone can tag a Page in a photo, regardless if they Like the page or not. These tagged photos will appear in a Page’s photos page. As you would expect, privacy settings will still apply to whom a user’s photos are exposed to.

How do you take advantage of this feature?

Encourage your fans to tag your Page within their photos. Interact with your fans so that their desire to tag your Page within their photos just happens naturally. For example, if I purchase fitness attire from your Company and I attend a sporting event with a group of friends, take some photos, and tag your Business Page in my photos – your Page has now been exposed with free advertising from me, your customer.

How will you engage your fans to tag your Page in photos?

Image credit: jadendave