Magic MarketBuying and selling in the marketplace of ideas

A few months back, I was going to attend a seminar called “Building Brands on Social Networks” … but I got a cold and couldn’t make it. Sad trombone.

Fortunately, a lot of the conference is up on SlideShare, and I’ve been working my way through the various presentations, chomping on the useful bits. For example! The presentation that Roland Smart at Sprout, which helps big brands like Disney to approach consumers on social media networks.

I’ve embedded the presentation at the end of the post, but here’s all of what I thought were the Interesting Bits in case you don’t want to watch the whole thing:

3:30 – We’re seeing a shift from growth to engagement: user growth is slowing down; twitter users now spending more time developing their profiles. “Early adopters are maturing … they have greater expectations. … It is now possible to meet those expectations” due to data portability with APIs.

5:00 – Marketers are prioritizing Facebook applications

5:15 – FB apps are most effective tool for driving engagement, but underutilized. “This is a big opportunity.”

6:50 – Integrated approach is crucial: Fan pages to engagement apps to display ads.

6:15 – The Integrated Engagement Machine ™ is as follows: Brands + Sprout = Strategy & Creative. The Strategy & Creative is turned into display ads that attract users (hopefully virally, which extends the ad buy), then funnel them to fan pages to identify product, then to apps that engage people with little value-ads, which then generates more attraction through peoples’ networks. Meanwhile it’s all measured and analyzed.

8:05 – Fan pages are “relationship management hubs.” “It’s where you deliver value.” Examples of value: coupons/deals, twitter feeds, contests, video feeds.

8:50 – Fan page best-practices: always make the fan page the default tab, rather than the wall. Incorporate social hooks like twitter & video. Make it consistent with larger strategy. Deliver on clear value proposition.

9:45 – Greater interaction leads to greater in-stream presence. Facebook rewards brands that engage well: you’ll be prioritized in feeds.

10:40 – Best practices: Always include links to your apps. Highlight user-generated content. Have a regular schedule. Don’t oversaturate the stream.

15:10 – Intel gave users a reason to get their friends to join — lower prices as more members join.

16:10 – Dos: start with value, “why are your fans going to be interested?” … include content strategy and user experience up front … make your app viral-ready with social hooks like sharing … aim for the activity stream, since it offers a rate of interaction which exceeds any other opportunity.

17:50 – Don’ts: Contests with network actions, since FB will shut it down … too much moderation … too much complexity (short experiences are OK) … avoid arduous pre-roll and barriers to entry

20:20 – Use metrics!

20:40 – Things to track: unique visitors, visits, page views; time in campaign; actions; posts to wall; shares from stream; total # of referrals to external pages

21:40 – Create engagement funnels

22:00 – Predictions for 2010: Branded content will be more integrated with user-gen content in activity stream. Social networks will create new rules to reward value. There will be innovation with social targeting integrated with social graph data. Increased connectivity with social graph data — porting social data to other apps and sites.

Do I really need a new blog?

Apparently yes! I’ve just started Writers Getting Paid, a blog about, well, Writers Who Get Paid.

Since quitting my day job to focus fulltime on blogging, I’ve been learning a lot from my friends and colleagues who make a living out of making sentences. We’ve been having so many informative, insightful, intelligent (and gossipy!) conversations that I’ve decided to start documenting all of the neat stuff that I’m learning.

Head on over and check it out — I’ll be posting lots more interviews as time goes on, and the plan is to eventually release an e-book with even more content. And you can even sign up for the email newsletter to get news and interviews delivered right to your inbox. Handy!

Up-and-comer Fabulis did some research into what gays do and want on the web, and the results are a little surprising! Also, some of them are not so surprising.

Not surprising: nobody likes MySpace.

The big shock to me was that there seems to be a lot of demand for friendship sites, rather than new hookup sites! Not what I would have expected, given how much word-of-mouth Grinder’s been getting. But maybe that word-of-mouth hasn’t translated into actual conversions — it’s just chatter, rather than satisfied customers.

I wonder how accurate this really is. Do gays just say they want a friendship site because we don’t want to admit that we’re looking for dating?

Have you seen those ads on Facebook about “weird trick to losing weight” and “weird tricks to whitening teeth” and so on? Usually discovered by a mom who JUST SO HAPPENS to live in either the same town as you, or the same town as your proxy server?

Yeah they’re pretty dumb. But they do activate some primitive part of the human brain that’s hard to resist. “WHAT IS THE WEIRD TRICK! I MUST KNOW!”

There’s something about the unexpected that piques our interest, and once it’s piqued, something irresistible about having the unexpected explained to us.

Which is why I love this fake ad so much.

Spotted at the utterly NSFW webcomic Oglaf.

I’m going to try using the “What Would Seth Godin Do” Wordpess plugin: it greets brand-new users with a special message. In this case, it’ll be an introduction and a reminder to subscribe. Currently, readership of the site is pretty low, including RSS, so I’ll be interested to see if this has an impact. Couldn’t hurt, right?

Right?

A recent acquaintance asked me this morning how I manage to eke out a living on the nets. Here’s my response. Note the links scattered throughout! Providing links is something that’s become second-nature to me, which is interesting because it relates to my advice in the email: share, share, share.

Hi Michael,

I’m lucky enough that I work full-time (and am paid! so rare in the blogosphere) to generate content, so I’m spared the usual freelancer chore of chasing gigs. (But I still do little side jobs from time to time: http://mattbaume.com/)

I agree that online audiences are browsers, not buyers! Getting people to open their wallets is a trick that many greater minds than mine are still trying to figure out. I’m more of a journalist than marketer, but there are handy tips to be found here: http://www.problogger.net/

A lot of those “Problogger” techniques seem a bit snake-oil to me; to really be a successful salesman online, it seems like you need to have a bit of the old-fashioned pitchman’s instinct. The tactics that have worked best for me (and that I am also the most comfortable with) involve building community around high-quality content: commenting on other people’s work so they comment on mine, nurturing relationships, making content as “sharable” as possible.

There are two books that I’ve found to be the most helpful for this sort of thing: one is “Made to Stick,” which is all about being memorable & viral. The other, as crazy as this sounds, is “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Despite the super-corny title and old-timey writing, the advice in there really gets to the heart of how humans always have and always will work.

Recently I’ve found myself having to do more and more marketing for myself, and I just stared a blog to document what I’m learning. That’s here: http://magicmarket.mattbaume.com/ (See? Networking!)

Fundamentally, a lot of what I’ve learned comes down to a simple formula: “Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy = $$$$” … That is, the “secret” to success is building a community and offering something amazing. Both of which, obviously, require a lot of hard work. But if you’re doing what you love, it hardly feels like work at all.

Hope that helps! And please do keep in touch.

Matt

Here is a fabulous suggestion! Before sending out a press release, look it over and make sure it doesn’t say anything dumb.

As a sometimes-journalist, I get sent some dreadful press releases, but this may be the funniest one. The subject: “Was Emily Dickinson Gay? Interviews Available.” Oh, are they really? Because I thought she was dead.

Anyway, the text of the press release is about a guy named Jerome Charyn who wrote a novel in the voice of Emily Dickinson. (I think that we can assume that it is comprised primarily of hyphens. But can it be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”?)

There are a few inexplicable forays into first-person: “it’s easy to see how Emily’s poetic instincts are born from the shifting sensations of comfort and resentment brought by a childhood spent serenading Father with my tiny Tambourine.”

But the best part comes at the end. After describing how fabulous this novel is, the release closes with this: “while this vivid impersonation is a stylistic achievement, it’s also confining and limits higher revelations. ”

Oh. Well, okay, thanks for the info. Did you just copypaste someone else’s review of the book and then spam-blast a bunch of freelancers without checking to make sure that the review was favorable? BRAVO.

And the second best part: the entire press release was formatted in Comic Sans. I don’t normally call out people for making careless mistakes, but that font is beyond the pale. The parties responsible: Mark Goldman (516)639-0988 & markgoldman73@gmail.com and Ryan McCormick at (516)901-1103 & Ryan@risingsunpr.com.

Well isn’t that helpful!Just the other day I was wondering about how bloggers make money on the strength on personality, and then conveniently enough Darren Rowse wrote a post with a few hints in that direction.

While his post “How to be a More Relational Blogger” doesn’t spell out exactly how I can make cash off of my blog-punditry, it does address the importance of having a personality when you write.

The highlights:

• Build a core group of loyal readers
• Respond on your blog and participate on other blogs
• Creating great content is your primary concern. (It is a relief to read this! Because it is my favorite part.)

I like what he has to say because it calls to mind a helpful formula: Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy = $$$$.” Okay obvs it’s a little more complicated than that to make $$$$ but the point is well-taken. So much of the markety-businessy advice that I read can be distilled down to that formula.

Here’s Mike Masnick from Techdirt, helpfully expanding on the concept:

I really want to believe that this works, because it sounds both ethical and accurate. But I worry that CwF+RtB might just be a really nice dream that works now and then in anecdotes but not on a large scale.

Richard Wong asks, “Is Social Media a Waste of Time for Photographers?”

Kind of a leading question, obviously it can be a waste of time, just as easily as it can be absolutely vital. It all depends on your strategy and execution.

A commenter on the article makes a good point: the best way to use social networks is the same as the best way to network in person. Build relationships, gain trust, get referrals. Karma, basically.

The point in Richard’s article that most caught my eye was a criticism of social networks: it’s hard to be heard over all that noise. Oh goodness YES. All this connection is great, but it’s a bit of an overload sometimes, isn’t it? And by sometimes I mean always.

Richard’s response to this criticism is basically, “don’t worry, the good stuff will get eyeballs and the bad stuff will disappear.” And boy oh boy I really want to believe that, but I don’t know if I do.

There’s lots of fabulous photographers (and fabulous bakers, actors, tennis players, osteopaths, etc) toiling in undeserved obscurity. Some cream rises to the top; some cream settles to the bottom. Why? What’s the difference? Is it purely a matter of “right place right time?”

There’s a nice post on Problogger (bluh, how I cringe at that name — it sounds so snake-oil to me, plus it has that “probe” sound to it) about getting rich.

Most of it is common sense stuff: seek a market that’s willing to buy, generate trust and goodwill, and so on. For most of the article, I was like, “yes, yes, obviously.”

Then it gets to the end and the author mentioned that he can make hundreds of dollars a day on the strength of his personality. Wait, what? What does that mean? That’s where I’m most aware of the gap in my marketing-knowledge.

I mean, I know people do that, but I’m still pretty vague on what exactly it is that they do. He says in his article, “Personality marketing means using your own voice and own self and own talents to generate value rather than embarking on an anonymous system like niche websites or AdSense.”

Hm. Yes. That does sound like a good idea. But still … I’d like to see what exactly “generating value” looks like. I have a feeling that it’s something I do it already — but I’m still fuzzy on how to define it, and even fuzzier on how to turn it into money.

For example, I appeared on a news show the other day, talking about transit. That’s something that I’m uniquely positioned to do, and I know I get a lot of attention for doing it. So it startles me to see that I could actually turn it into income, rather than giving it away for free.