Riding LimoLiner from Boston to New York

I’m on my way from Boston to New York City right now to attend ad:tech. As I hurtle towards Gotham, I’m also writing a blog post, reviewing electronic resumes for a Marketing Communications/Social Media Specialist position, coordinating a PR effort, mocking up some web designs on Photoshop, charging my iPhone, and tweeting – all while minimizing the dent my travel is making to the marketing budget I hold so dear.

How in the hell?? I took the bus. LimoLiner, to be exact. High-speed internet, a desk, power outlets, and lunch. All for significantly less than a flight. And, if you take into account traveling to and from the airport, making it through security, sitting at the terminal and waiting on the tarmac after landing, about the same amount of time, except none of  it is wasted.

So what’s my point?

Only that sometimes productivity is unexpected. Sometimes it’s downright counterintuitive. Executing on a social media strategy can take a lot of work – not just blogging and tweeting and syndicating content to all of your social profiles, but joining the conversation: commenting on thought-provoking blog posts, replying to DMs, answering LinkedIn questions. Add to the mix that most of you, like me, probably run a marketing department or wear a lot of hats, and the result can be pure madness. That makes anything that boosts productivity or cuts down on wasted time is a very welcome thing indeed.

Uncovering efficiency can be just like discovering that the bus will actually save you time. Here are two examples from my world:

Sometimes tools don’t save time: I don’t use an RSS reader. I know, insane. I keep all the blogs I follow in a bookmark folder, and click “Open All As New Tabs” every morning. It makes it easy to cycle through everything, closing the tabs rapidly on anything that doesn’t look relevant or  interesting. What’s left I’ll read or comment on. It takes less than five minutes to glance at a hundred articles and figure out the few I want to spend time on.

Cutting out tasks that don’t deliver value: In the world of Web 2.0, there are a lot of shiny toys to keep us occupied. It often makes equating efficiency to acquiring or adopting new tools or channels. But the opposite can be just as effective. Is Facebook not driving any kind of meaningful results? Are you finding that your constituency isn’t really interested in Squidoo lenses? There’s no reason you have to be on any channel for the sake of presence – everything should drive an outcome. If it isn’t driving results, cut it out.

Where have you taken the bus? What ghetto hacks, unexpected processes, or unconventional solutions are making you more efficient? I’d love to hear them.

(The book on the desk, by the way, is Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah’s Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs. It’s tactical and excellent – check it out.)

When I started writing this, Motorola’s viral ad “Droid Does” (or is it iDon’t?) video had amassed over 209,048 views and 808 comments on YouTube in less than one day. Now, a day later, it’s up to 870k views and almost 1500 comments. See the video here:

It’s an advertisement. The same format we flip channels (and buy devices) to avoid. And yet it’s generated a massive amount of buzz, user-generated content, and traffic in support of the soon-to-be released Motorola Droid.

What makes the Droid ad so successful? (Besides the fact that it’s really, really good?) At Inbound Marketing Summit Boston last week, Tim Street identified three attributes that often contribute to making a video viral: spectacle, story, and emotion. “iDon’t” has all three. And I don’t know into which of these elements Tim would classify “contrast,” but it certainly makes this ad compelling.

In the first half of the video the sunny, almost frolicsome soundtrack provided by MoZella’s song “Magic” and the Apple-esque aesthetic contrast with the negative statements presented in Apple’s own “voice.” When the transition hits, and the electric, digital bath takes us into almost “Haunting in Connecticut” territory, we’re seeing contrast again – this time at it’s most impactful. The message? Droid is a wall of storm clouds amassing on the horizon, and Apple – skipping along on a flowery hill – never sees it coming.

The result is a viral video that does what it’s supposed to: ignite a firestorm of conversation. 1500 Youtube comments in 24 hours. Reaction videos. Blog posts, and threads of comments all over the web. Although there’s a good deal of Motorola and Verizon-slamming, there’s also a lot of interest and hype being generated. And tons of user-generated content:

My love for motorola went up from -2 to +200 (10minutehobo on Engadget)

Think I have found my new phone… Morotola Droid! (rottenspice on Twitter)

Having ditched an Iphone 3GS due to slow coverage and poor connection. Tried a GSM Hero… and yes… ALL TRUE. Once you try it.. you see why its best to DROID, cause it DOES (IDroid on PopWatch)

and, maybe my favorite (although this one is in support of the victim):

iThink I’m going to be OK due to superior brand perception. (oOo on Buzzfeed)

I’m sure the results are turning a lot of marketers (and ad agencies) green with envy. Do you harness contrast in your messaging?

Awareness Tweetup at Inbound Marketing Summit Boston

If the promise of Inbound Marketing Summit was to provide actionable, tactical information to attendees on how to market their businesses online, the second day definitely delivered. Highlights:

Jason Falls: Rabid Kentuckyite Jason Falls began his talk by asking us: “How many of you put your website on your traditional ads? How many of you have ensured that your website doesn’t suck?” Very nice – and a perfect lead into the his message of making your website content-centric as opposed to product-centric, and left us with some immediate action items to start the wheels turning. His slides on Slideshare.

Brian Solis: If you don’t know Brian, check him out. He created the excellent Conversation Prism and freshly unveiled Social Compass. I’ll say the same thing about Brian that I did about Valeria Maltoni yesterday – this cat know his stuff. Brian riffed tactical on social media optimization and public relations, with gold like “Social Objects [the cool stuff you make available online] are the catalysts for conversations and occurrences,” and “the more you engage the bigger your digital footprint.” Check out Brian’s blog, PR 2.0

Dharmesh Shah: Probably one of my favorite sessions from the entire event. The author of On Startups and another member of the Hubspot team, Dharmesh gave a killer talk on getting found online, smacking us in the face with a goal for everyone to take back to the office – raise your traffic 6x in the next 12 months.

Dharmesh crammed an impossible amount of information into his half-hour marketing tornado, ranging from the very tactical to the very strategic. Some examples:

• Google Ranking = Context + Authority (with context being the low-hanging fruit)
• Make a list of all the possible keywords you could rank #1 for and describe your business – these will inform your SEO strategy
• Page title is undisputably the #1 on-page search factor for SEO, with earlier words send a stronger signal to Google.
• Free is powerful. “We strongly advocate coming up with something that’s free,” giving HubSpot’s website grader as an example.
• Don’t pick a fight with a Ninja.

In the process of telling us not to forget humans, to write for people, and to polarize an audience, he also gave us one of IMS’s most-tweeted memes: Outbound Marketing Harms Kittens. (To which I clearly must add – open-source content management systems eat babies.)

The Bigger Picture

In the midst of such an avalanche of tactical takeaways and action items, it’s easy to lose sight of the central point of IMS. Two presenters, Dharmesh (see above) and Shiv Sing of Razorfish, framed the same central theme elegantly.

Marketing = convincing people to buy your product.
Great Marketing = convincing people to sell your product [for you].

and

Old Thinking: The purpose of a business is to create customers.
New Thinking: The purpose of a business is to create customers who create customers.

It’s a powerful train of thought. And one that reflected upon begins fleshing out the important of a killer content strategy and using social media to activate and amplify it. Above all, it confirms what we all still know is true: Content is King.

See you next time.

Free is powerful. “We strongly advocate coming up with something that’s free,” giving HubSpot’s website grader as an example.

If you read my blog post yesterday and inferred that I was at a marketing event, you were right. Day 1 of the Inbound Marketing Summit Boston (#ims09, if you’re following on Twitter) was packed full of sessions, with titles like “7 Steps to Social Media Measurement,” “Getting the Word Out: PR 2.0,” and “Ingredients of a Viral Video.”

From our perch overlooking the Patriots’ field in Foxboro, MA, fellow Percussionites Vern Imrich, Peter Webster, and I took in the knowledge tsunami and met marketers in nearly every vertical.

Here are some highlights and key takeaways from the day:

Great insights from the Innovative Marketing Programs Using New Media panel:

AJ Gerritson from 451 Marketing suggested that killer content is the crucial element in a marketing campaign, but search is the go-to platform. If you can get killer organic search results and complement them with social inbounds, you’ll be knee deep in quality leads.

He also observed that a lot of blocking and tackling needs to get done for quality search results (like a solid landing page strategy, relevancy, and meta information), but the result is always great ROI.

HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan’s presentation on closing the loop between sales and marketing.

Brian outlined the changing landscape of “interruptive marketing avoidance” with a salient metaphor. In the 1950’s, TV viewers were a captive audience. With the advent of remote control, viewers could for the first time avoid interruptive marketing by changing the channel. Then came pay-per-view. Brian narrated us into the digital age, where search engines are the new remote control, and interruptive marketing as a standalone tactic is all but dead.

Valeria Maltoni’s presentation on writing content for the web.

Valeria Maltoni is the real deal. Read her blog, Conversation Agent, follow her on Twitter. She know’s what she’s talking about, and you’ll learn a ton about marketing and communications. When asked about concerns that embracing social media means giving consumers the ability to criticize your brand: “I prefer for people to say ‘You suck’ because then I can go in and say ‘Hey, let’s have a conversation about that.’” Right on.

Tim Street’s talk “Ingredients of a Viral Video: How To Make Your Video Online Wildly Popular”

I have always believed that there’s no such thing as a “viral button,” to steal a phrase from one of my colleagues, but Tim gets us pretty close. He identifies spectacle, story, and emotion as elements of a surefire viral video. I would add humor – check out one of my favorites from Ikea:

Tim also introduced me to a tool which makes it easy to syndicate web content online: Tubemogul. Check it out – looks like a great way to streamline your video marketing execution and leverage great analytics while you’re at it.

Day 2 has just started. It seems like it’s on it’s way to be just as good. See you there. And, if you’re around and read this in time, shoot me a message on Twitter – @percussion and let’s see if we can connect.

It’s 5:01pm under a golden New England sky, and I’ve been sitting in Gillette Stadium for the past nine hours, sharing a conference space with hundreds of other marketers assembled to listen and talk about how best to reach their constituencies, engage communities, and drive perception of their brand online.

Throughout the day, the insights and ideas shared have taken digital form in real-time as videos are recorded by attendees and posted immediately to YouTube, reactions are blogged, LinkedIn connections are made, and countless tweets sparkle and fade in view of millions. It’s a pretty incredible dynamic.

Just five years ago, when I was beginning to help the legendary pop culture chain Newbury Comics build their e-commerce empire, the tendrils of the social web had already taken hold and begun to shape the current online landscape. Last year, when I came on board at Percussion Software, we were already well beyond the point at which any of this could be considered new.

The social internet and mainstream web have converged. The barriers to entry for content creation have been shattered – it’s becoming easier than ever to publish content. It’s more difficult to get people to find it. And waves of important developments have affected the way people communicate online. That’s what this blog is about.

In the coming days, weeks, and months, as Radiating Influence takes form, I’ll be giving you my thoughts on how you can identify and participate in the conversations taking place around your brand through a purpose-driven content strategy, social media, and driving value to those around you. And I’ll be asking for your thoughts in return.

Onward and upward, everyone.