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.

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

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.