Dance With Strangers

Last year at SXSW a few of us had a little fun with a game we call B.S. Bingo. You take a bingo card and you add the most popular “lingo” that you might hear during an event like SXSW, specifically the Interactive portion. Below is the 2010 version, enjoy and remember it is all in fun. Big thanks to so many of you on Twitter/Buzz who helped populate this year’s SXSWi bingo card:

Download the SXSWi Bingo Card.

My favorite time to work out is at lunch time. It energizes me for the rest of the day.

My favorite time to check email is early morning. It helps me prioritize the rest of the day.

My favorite time to socialize is happy hour. It is lighter than dinner, but more fun than lunch.

My favorite time to blog is late at night when I can’t sleep. It is my way of expelling the ills that leave me awake.

My favorite time to eat is breakfast. There is nothing better than breakfast.

My favorite time to sleep is in between 3-5pm. It is the ideal time for a nap.

My favorite time to talk is right before lunch. I’m full of ideas, yet determined to get to the gym.

My favorite time to listen to music is anytime. Music pushes me further.

What is your favorite time to ______________?

Next week many folks will be descending upon Austin for South by Southwest Interactive, or “SXSWi” for those cool enough to use acronyms. This will only be my second SXSWi, but since I live here in Austin is easy for me to attend. I’m also extraordinarily lucky that my friend Tim Walker asked me to be on a panel which was subsequently selected for the show. But I’ve had several people in the B2B marketing community ask me whether they should come to the event this year; if it was worth their time and investment (it is not cheap). Instead of going on some diatribe like I did last year I’m going to simply list the reasons I’m excited to go to SXSWi 2010. You have to make your own decision whether it is worth it to attend:

1. HTML5 and CSS3:On my schedule right now are four sessions that deal with HTML5, CSS3 or web typography. As a B2B marketer it is critical that we are up to date on the latest on our web languages and standards. It is never enough to pawn this stuff off on someone else and I’ve declared here how B2B marketers need to roll up their sleeves and get dirty with technology. Here is your shot during SXSWi. My recommendations:
• CSS3 Design with HTML5
• CSS and Fonts: Fluid Web Typography
• Fun with HTML5 Video
2. Science, Globalization and Marketing: One aspect of marketing that I don’t dive into quite enough is how our brain works and how to use that to your advantage as a marketer. There are some amazing blogs out there on neuroscience and marketing and during SXSWi I’m really excited to dive into the topic a bit deeper during “Big Brother in Your Business: Neuroscience & Marketing“. And since the way we present our marketing is so important to the brain and to our global community I’ll be attending “Design, Collaboration, Pokemon: How Not to Offend People Globally“.
3. Catching Up: Undoubtedly someone has already said something to you along the lines of, “SXSWi is one awesome party” or “The best conversations happen in the hallway”. Let us address these two parts of SXSWi. Yes, there are some amazing parties scheduled and Austin is simply one of the best cities in the country to enjoy great food, music and entertainment. But for me the parties are really not that fun, primarily because I’m not a fan of networking, crowds or heavy house music. That is why I’m more prone to head out for long lunchs and early dinners with some of the folks I’m most excited to see again and skip the parties all together. The same goes for the hallway chatter. If you leave SXSWi and say that the best conversations you had were in the hallway you did a poor job planning your schedule and you never left your hotel room at night.
4. Doing It All In Two Days:If you look at my schedule for SXSWi you will notice that I’m only attending sessions on Saturday and Sunday. The reason is simple, I’m not going to take time off of work to attend sessions on Friday, Monday or Tuesday (besides my own panel, of course). I thought long and hard about this, viewed the calendar of sessions and it was a no brainer for me.

Now, are you coming to SXSWi? Would you encourage other B2B marketers to pony up the investment?

Sure, we’ve talked about some of the things you can do to succeed at a trade show like integrating social media, placing news, coordinating email, and more. But one aspect of trade show preparation must be taking very seriously and this time it has nothing to do with your marketing strategy. What type of workout are you doing to be physically prepared for that long trade show week.

This week I’m on the show floor at RSA Conference in San Francisco. Each day I’m walking around the show floors for hours, dashing to the press room for a briefing and talking with folks in our booth. We all know what a long day it can be and when you have 3-4 in a row (plus going out to the parties at night) it can take a toll. Many people start getting a sore back and feet right away, while others struggle to avoid a nasty cold or even bad allergies from the recirculating air. All in all it can seem like an infirmary on the show floor.

Now, how can you prevent these ailments? Here are a few tips I have, but share your secrets to staying healthy at a trade show:

1. Your Core is Core: Make sure that you start doing a good regimen of core exercises leading up to trade show season. This will be critical in supporting your trunk to handle the beating it will take on that hard show floor. Some of my favorite core exercises I found in Runner’s World.
2. S T R E T C H: Stretching is really important before and during the trade show, particularly your hamstrings. The tighter your hammies the more difficult it is to move around and you over compensate with your lower back. Now you shouldn’t stretch cold muscles so when you get to the show floor walk the perimeter at a nice pace, then find a quick place to stretch out those hamstrings, quads and calfs. Keep that lower body as flexible as possible.
3. Don’t Lose Your Routine: The best thing you can do is hit the gym every day during your trip and fortunately most hotels have decent gyms these days or use MapMyRun to find local places to get in a run or ride. I know it is much easier said then done, particularly with long nights and time zone changes, but even if you get on a treadmill or elliptical for twenty minutes it will keep you fresh during the show.
4. H20: Keep hydrated on the floor. Did you know that a healthy male should have 13 cups of water a day and a healthy woman should have 9 cups? Make sure you get in your water throughout the day because you are losing a ton of it just talking to people, not to mention walking around the whole day.

Keeping healthy on the show floor is not only important for your physical fitness, but it corresponds directly into your mental fitness and consequently your production during the show. It is great to get your team prepared with all the marketing and sales enablement tools, but make sure you get them physically ready for that next show.

Talking about measurement of your marketing programs is something we have taken very seriously here on the blog, whether it was B2B social media ROI or using LinkedIn for B2B sales enablement. The key in most of these posts has been that ROI is not difficult to measure, as long as you put the work into making it happen. Well it is not always simply about the hard work, it can also be about being smart about the tools you choose to use. Fortunately those tools are something that my colleague John Repa is looking at nearly every day. A few months ago John brought in Act-On Software and we deployed it within our marketing team. Let me let Act-On tell you what they provide:

The Act-On Marketing Service gives you all the tools you need for your online marketing programs. Whether you are just getting started with e-mail marketing, forms and landing pages, or you are looking to upgrade your lead generation programs with advanced techniques like lead nurturing and lead scoring, the Act-On Marketing Service offers a straightforward way to get it done.

Act-On automates many of our marketing programs, but the one I want to focus on today is how Act-On helps us manage our webcasts and the measurement data they provide. One of the main reasons we chose Act-On was the fact that it sits perfectly in between SalesForce.com, WebEx and our own website:

Starting in Act-On we set up our webcasts, which are immediately implemented into our WebEx instance and allows us to quickly develop registration forms that we use in all of our promotions for the event. There is nothing really special about the forms themselves, but after you create the form the magic begins. Lets use our webcast held last week on IPv6 to tell the story.

After creating a form I have a basic URL that I can drive folks to use, but I can also generate additional URLs to the same form my hitting “More” and “Get Public URLs”:

I want to create a URL for use on Twitter:

I want to make a URL for organic LinkedIn (we use LinkedIn PPC as well, so good to differentiate):

And, because it is always good to test the next-gen networks impact on your marketing, make one for Google Buzz:

Ultimately, for this webcast, we created eight different URLs for different places we were going to promote the webcast and for the social networks URLs I converted to shortened versions. Why go to all the trouble? Take a look at the real-time report I pulled twenty-four hours after starting to promote the webcast:

Do you see what I see? Immediately I can see what is working in terms of promoting our webcast. This information allows me to make important decisions and devote resources to what will work best. In this case I can see quickly that email is going to be a critical component in this webcast, Twitter is making s strong push and the links in the sidebar of our website are decent. This is valuable information and particularly so after promoting the webcast for weeks and as we have data from more and more webcasts to create comparative analysis.

Amazing what a strong tool and a little extra work will do for you and your marketing measurement.

Next time we’ll look at how Act-On integrates into SalesForce.com so I can perfectly measure the impact our webcast had on sales.

Ever notice that a warm sunny day gets your brain working much faster?

Today it was in the mid-70s and sunny in Austin and I spent most of it in front of my MacBook…outside on my deck. I got more done in two hours outside in the warm fresh air than I sometimes get done in an entire day.

What circumstances, weather or otherwise, set you up for work success?

Linkedin in is a powerful tool for B2B sales enablement, engagement and prospecting. This is a presentation given to our global sales force at BreakingPoint on how to use the capabilities of LinkedIn to move from being an online resume to online resource.

It seems the Twitterati are up in arms because Google went out and created something that didn’t follow their “rules”. Buzz was introduced this week with little fanfare and clearly in Beta mode, but that did not stop many folks on Twitter (several who I respect dearly) from dismissing it out of hand after one quick look.

Funny. I remember signing up for Twitter in December of 2007 and many people laughing at me for the following 24 months because Twitter was:

1. Noisy
2. Difficult to follow
3. Intrusive
4. Pointless
5. Had an ugly UI

Perhaps it is because I’m in technology, but I feel that innovation does not simply happen in a vacuum. Great products grow when they are used and improved throughout their life. In fact many products completely shift in their original mission and find a new home doing something completely different.

Did it ever occur to the Twits out there that perhaps Buzz wasn’t meant for them. Perhaps Buzz is an extension of Gmail for people who don’t want to be on Twitter? That when combined with improvements to Wave, Buzz will provide a more complete way of communicating with the people you actually want to talk with on a daily basis? Are people just afraid because they don’t want to try something else after finally succumbing to Twitter? Or are we just in a time when it is easier to rip something down than help build it up?

The point is, take a breath before you start hating on Buzz and rather than typing #epicfail in your 140 characters, try and produce some feedback that might help a company develop a product you will want to use. That is what being a part of a community is all about.

From time to time I’m asked about social media guidelines for a company. Typically the person is putting something together and an executive has quite smartly stated that the employees need some guidelines. Now the original statement they made may have even said the dreaded “r” word, but either way the goal here is pretty straight forward. Or at least it should be. Your ultimate goal in creating social media guidelines is:

To produce a thorough but easily readable document that provides all employees a practical guide on how to interact within the context of social networks realizing that they are employed by said company.

Let’s break those down a bit further.

Thorough

• The social media guidelines should include as much of what people SHOULD be talking about as what they SHOULD NOT be talking about.
• The guidelines should take into account all facets of social media ranging from blogging and Twitter to posting online photos, audio clips and geo-location services.
• The guidelines should have some language approved by your legal department, but it should also be vetted through HR, sales, marketing, PR, exec leadership and others. This is a document for the entire company.

Easily Readable

• This may read as “short” to you, but that is not necessarily the case. It could also mean it is designed well or broken into well thought out chunks.
• Social media guidelines should be easily accessible to all employees.
• You do not have to publish your social media guidelines for the whole world to see. It is not frowned upon, but don’t think you have to reveal everything to everyone.
• Think about providing your guidelines in other formats such as video, audio or cheat-sheets to tack to cubicle walls.

Practical Guide

How to Interact

• Be respectful
• Be honest
• Be helpful

Social media guidelines are not rocket science, but they should provide people with a clear guide on how to participate in social media.

Thanks to Jim Storer for the inspiration needed for this post.

How do you finish the sentence above? A few of mine are below, but tell me your answer in the comments.

The end of a hard week brings…

…a cold beer.
…a warm hug from my sons.
…the satisfaction of a hard week of challenging work.
…the NFL Pro Bowl.