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!

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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

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.

Way back in the day (2007!) I found a service called TextMarks that let you roll your own text-messaging service, and used the readership of SFist (which I co-edited at the time) to crowdsource Muni predictions. The way it worked was pretty neat: you set up a code for a stop (like “24DIVISHAYESIN” for the 24 inbound at Divisadero and Hayes) and when you sent that code to 41411 it would reply with a prediction for the next bus. It worked great.

Delightfully, TextMarks is still around, but these days they’re focussing more on marketing applications (which makes sense, since there probably wasn’t much money to be made in bus predictions). I don’t have a use for SMS-based marketing at the moment, but I kind of wish I did because TextMarks is easy to use and pretty cool.

You just set up a keyword, and when people text it to 41411 they’ll get your pre-configured response. (In our case, with SFist, we configured it to reply with the content of a specific NextBus page). And you can also set it up so that you can broadcast a message to all of your subscribers at once. Handy!

There is, obviously, a bit of an overlap with Twitter here. You could just as easily tell people, “check Twitter for my current status” or whatever. But there’s just so much noise on Twitter that it can be difficult to stand out. It may be harder to get buy-in on a SMS service, since everyone’s on Twitter already. But the people who do sign up are probably a more engaged, and therefore more likely to convert on whatever campaign you’re sending out.

Lindsay Patterson has a marvelous post about how to do PR in a way that bloggers will respond to.

As a blogger, I can easily agree with everything she says. But there’s an interesting insight from a successful PR person in there: cultivate relationships with a smallish (like, 8) number of bloggers and target releases for them. They don’t have to be big names; let the interesting stuff trickle up.

I’ve seen this at work many times: the small guys get something good, and after a day or two the bigger sites pick it up. (This is extremely irritating for the small blogs when they don’t get credit.)

But the idea of PR people cultivating a small number of relationships is not something that had occurred to me, and it sounds very smart. To really be close to a blog, to know what it likes to write about and to keep current with its coverage, you’d would have to limit your focus to only a couple of sites.

So, how do you pick the sites to focus on? I don’t know! It probably takes a while to develop a sense of which sites should get the most attention. But here’s what I would guess are signs to look for:

• Coverage often gets picked up by other sites — in other words, people link to them a lot
• Prompt and personal response
• Selective — they don’t publish just anything that comes along

As a blogger, I’ve been approached by a lot of PR people. The approaches that work best are the ones that offer me something that I need, rather than that ask me the favor of publishing their content.

Oh, what a coincidence: I just got a press release about some guy who has something to do with American Idol and released a song or something and who calls himself Mars Music. What? I have no idea who this is or what this story is about — mostly because this is a subject I don’t ever touch. Why did they write to me? I’ve certainly learned to ignore this person now.

Online marketing! It is so dumb.

Boring, I mean. There are so many interesting things one can do with an Internet; why would you try to ruin everyone’s fun by manipulating users and content with tricks and spin and insincere sales pitches? It all feels like a bunch of nasty snake oil.

Is there any way that marketing can be a good thing? Yes! At least, I hope so. Marketing — or more fundamentally, markets and how humans use them — can be fascinating. Like a farmer’s market — those are interesting! Or a weird old bazaar in a remote country — interesting! Thrift stores, rare flower markets, hardware stores with shelves two feet apart and twelve feet high, used book shops with only a skylight for illumination, art stores where you can buy a million different shades of red. And how about that Portobello Road scene in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, before it gets bogged down in a culturally insensitive dance montage?

Yes, very fancy, well done everyone.

These places are interesting because they are wild, lawless, extravagant, unpredictable — oh hey, like the Internet. Some of what’s being sold is bad; but there’s also magic hidden everywhere, and the hunt for the magic is what makes it fun.

One of my favorite markets is The Floating Market from Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. I can’t find a video clip of it but the cover of the DVD does give you a sense of the atmosphere. The book is even richer: a literally magical place where anything can happen, inhabited by all manner of strange creatures and objects, some of which are vendors and some of which are merchandise. The trading of goods is only half (or less) of what goes on: you go to The Floating Market more for the people you’ll encounter than to pick of a trinket. It’s the hive of scum and villainy from Star Wars; the threshold that Joseph Campbell would always bring up.

Neverwhere is made up, but there’s a bookstore here in San Francisco where a hairless cat climbs on your lap if you sit down to read; down the street is a store that sells pirate supplies. Between them is a store that sells carnivorous plants and tea leaves picked by monkeys. For my birthday, we went to a zine festival, with tables after table of inscrutable Xeroxed books. The next day, the very same room was transformed into a rare orchid sale. All of this is kind of magical, isn’t it?

And then there’s this delightful bazaar in Nigeria where you can obtain a pangolin, which is my second-favorite animal EVER:

So! Markets: sometimes pretty neat. And the Internet is the most powerful Marketplace of Ideas ever invented: every website a crazy Portobelloesque vendor’s stall, every user Angela Lansbury picking through in a bemused bafflement. But somehow online marketing is often A Thing That Is Dreadful: not fun, not meaningful, something you suffer through. Maybe it’s because marketing in general is often a bit dreadful — for example, just look at at this variation on the cover art for the DVD of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Ack. This state of affairs won’t do.

I got the idea for this blog because, as a young and vivacious journalism-type person, I’ve found that there’s simply no way to do my job without participating in a marketplace of ideas; and more importantly, the more I participate, the better my stories are and the more other people participate in their creation and consumption. So I want to get really good at it, and I want to remember the stuff that works well, so I’m writing it all down here.

The “Magic Market” is the place where everyone’s simultaneously buying and selling and the product is the same as the currency: content and relationships.