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.

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?

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?

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.

If you didn’t know English would this picture help you? Make your graphics work for your message.

It’s event season for most B2B companies, particularly in the technology world. In the next six weeks I’ll be going to a bunch of shows for BreakingPoint, mainly to demo our cyber simulation capabilities to folks. As you prep for your upcoming schedule of events how are you telling your community that you will be out and about? Couple of suggestions:

• Blog about the events you are attending, why and what you will be doing at the event.
• Set up Twitter searches for the show names or hashtags, connect with people talking about the event.
• Post events to LinkedIn (groups and their actual event feature).
• Send out an email to segments who may be attending certain shows with an offer (we have a super cool t-shirt).

If you don’t tell people you are going to be someplace, don’t be surprised if they fail to show up.

Last night it finally happened, the Dell Inspirion that I had been using for the past six years (not to mention three house moves) gave up the fight. First off, this was a solid computer. Used for nearly every facet of my life during the past six years including:

• Partitioned web server when I started my own consulting business in 2004.
• File server for 100+ GB of pictures, music and video, including a huge growth in files with the births of two sons (‘06 and ‘08).
• Accounting system for the entire family.
• Gaming system before I bought a Wii. My wife and I spent many an hour playing Civilization I, II and III on this piece of hardware.
• Home office computer part deux when my wife started to work from home after our move to Austin.
• Learning platform as I played around with education myself on the innards of computers, programming, HTML/CSS and networking.

Alas, all good things come to an end. The research towards a new computer begins today, but I’m looking for suggestions from all of you, who know me fairly well at this point. Tell me what computer would work best for my family, here are some critical points:

1. I use a MacBook Pro for work and love it.
2. My wife has a separate Dell for work now and she loves it.
3. We need a central computer in the house to serve as a primary system to hold all of pictures, videos and music for networking throughout the house.
4. The computer does not necessarily need any “Office” applications.
5. I need the computer to be partially partitioned as a web server to host my blogs, including this one and several family blogs.
6. I would like to start doing the family video editing on the home computer, whereas today I use FinalCut on my 15″ MacBook Pro.

What say you loyal reader?

What is the one habit you can’t kick? You have one; at LEAST one. Want to know one of mine? I have to drink two cups of coffee in the morning and then one diet Coke with lunch and then one more coffee at 4pm. There you go, I’ve included a habit with my obsessive compulsive disorder. Habits come in a variety of flavors, ranging from innocent to life-threatening.

Habits are often placed in a negative light, and in most cases rightfully so. Yet as a B2B marketer one of your goals is to create habit-forming campaigns in order to lead generation and cultivation. Why do you use drip email? Why do you execute webcasts on a monthly basis? Why are advertising buys predicated on daily, weekly or monthly runs? The list goes on and on, but ultimately you should be planning out your activities so that you can take advantage of the natural habit behaviors of humans, which I assume your customers are ultimately, until the robots take over.

The first time I came across this concept was after reading Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore, a terrific look at how marketers ignore this natural human instinct. Using habit-based marketing techniques is more than simply throwing out materials on a regular basis. Let’s look at five keys to creating habits through your marketing in order to generate more and more qualified leads.

1. Be Regular–put out content on a regular basis.
2. Be Different–use different platforms to put out the content, not everyone likes eMail and not everyone knows what RSS can do.
3. Be Consistent–your company voice should have a consistency throughout the different content and throughout the year.
4. Be Creative–encourage resourceful design to make emails easier to read, use audio/video to make more personable, etc.
5. Be Useful–don’t put our content for the sake of the first four points above. Before you send anything out ask, “Will this help my customers?”.

It’s time to introduce habitually good marketing to your audience.

One thing will make you a better writer, besides actually writing, and that is reading. I’ve been trying to read a new book each week, which certainly has been difficult given the recent work schedule, speaking schedule and holiday schedule. Although I may be falling behind my goal of four books in December I have finished three and each really made me thing more intensely about my own writing.

The books were vastly different reads. I started with Barbra Kingsolver’s The Lacuna: A Novel, where the first person memoir aspect, mixed with third person recapturing can often challenge the reader. As with some challenging writing, if you stick with the author the payoff can be hugely entertaining and in this case moving. After finishing, as I do with every book finished, I reread the first fifty pages. In this case, I found myself learning more about the lead character, specifically about their relationships with people of prominence and how that altered his own life’s success. After digesting the novel and looking back at my 2009 writings it was obvious that I had started to get lazy in my layering approach for writing. This isn’t simply a call to have longer posts, but to write more stories that take the reader into the mindset of what I’m trying to convey.

After Kingslover I moved to one of my favorite authors, Chuck Klosterman and Eating the Dinosaur. Klosterman is a critic at heart, and all great critics, no matter their genre, can ask questions. Throughout each of his book, but I think most notably this latest collection, Klosterman comes at the reader with questions they probably thought of in some form or another, or at least it feels that way when you read it on the page for the first time. The whole book is a critical examination of various topics ranging from Kurt Cobain, ABBA, “the wildcat” and how Barack Obama is responsible for a thirst for Pepsi. The opinions can at one time be hilarious (Pepsi and Mad Men) and in the next moment infuriating (Kurt Cobain and Branch Davidians). But no matter what is written, it is done with zero hint of remorse nor apology. Too often in 2009 I didn’t write many of the posts that perhaps I wanted to write because it might have offended some folks, but when I did they were my most read and most commented posts. No more apologies.

Finally, I just finished Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Everyone should read this book and I’m glad that I read it now this “late” in my own life. Reading it forces you to think about the world, and your existence within its confines, differently. Hawking is a certifiable genius and examines aspects of the world that should not be visited casually. Throughout he not only introduces serious theories around quantum physics, but does it in a way that allows anyone to understand. That, in itself, is an accomplishment, but what I find the most compelling and helpful for my own writing, is that he does it without demeaning the reader. All too often, when I re-read my work from 2009, I over explain simple concepts, which I think can frustrate the reader.

Reading makes me a better writer. What makes you a better writer?