Spending the past week at MarketingProfs B2B Forum it was evident that the transformation is already happening, albeit slowly. This show focused on marketing best practices with a sprinkling of social media and left behind the short-lived legacy of social media focused shows. The latter had promoted personality and ego, which is not sustainable. The former is all about substance and education, which brings people back for more. During MarketingProfs I sat in six sessions and in all but one of them social media was an after thought or simply a part of a larger process. Even during the Boston Social Media Breakfast there was much more focus on practical communication and marketing methods than talk of “using Twitter for lead generation”.

This shift makes obvious sense and it will take a few more years for social media to exit the hype cycle, but doesn’t is seem like we’ve been here before? Remember eMarketing? Email marketing? Direct marketing? Eventually they move from being a short-lived yet enthusiastic fad and into a function of a greater practice. In this instance, marketing.  Social media, although extraordinarily useful outside of marketing, has now rightfully started to move from fad into fade.

Thou Protest Too Much

Now don’t fret, this is a really great sign for those of us who believe that social media is a good marketing technique (hand raised emphatically). During the MarketingProfs conference I listened to people give me terrific pointers on better trade show marketing, building communities online and offline, creating brand advocacy and building better content. Not once did I have to suffer through another “social media case study” or a set of slides pontificating the “confusion prism“. We have begun the move towards making social media a more respected function of business, rather than a set of caricatures trying a little too hard to defend the practice.

Te people I talked with during the panels, in the hallway and at the functions had also been making the shift — or perhaps they had never bought into the fad. They provided me with amazing ideas and refreshed my thinking, but also surprised me with their titles. Hardly anyone introduced themselves as a social media consultant, expert, guru or some other nonsense. Instead I was talking with directors and vice presidents of marketing, heads of agencies and business development, small companies and large. Twice I even spoke with people who had removed social media from their titles during the past three months. They were searching for answers, not rhetoric. They were teaching, not preaching.

It’s about time.

Peer motivation, on the other hand, provides the necessary inspiration from those surrounding you, but in a positive environment. This happens all the time in business, often through the creation of challenges amongst teammates to hit goals of self-inflicted peer motivation for folks driven to out perform others. Overall, peer motivation is something that we can harness in appropriate dosages to push ourselves and our teams to achieve great things, oh and it really works for parenting, but that is for another blog.

Peer Motivation and Athletics

When it comes to sports and athletics peer motivation is a critical part of the success recipe. Players often find themselves in situations where their peers raise their game to another level, not simply through the play of the game, but the influence of their workouts, diet or studying game tape. In fact, peers within sports are not necessarily on your own team, it could be your greatest opponent. Last night I was reminded of how powerful peer motivation can be watching “Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals“. Growing up in the 80s, in Boston, it was a great honor to watch Larry Bird and Magic Johnson take each other to new levels, and along with it an entire professional sports league. This peer motivation happens all the time in sports, although not always to the level of a Bird & Magic, and it also happens for individuals who are…well…um…not professional athletes.

During the last part of 2009 I was training to run a half-marathon in Austin and for this ex-offensive lineman running isn’t exactly a natural physical state.

But throughout the training process peer motivation kept me going, and the “peers” didn’t even realize the effect they were having on getting me through my goal. One of those people, Tim Walker, has been chronicling much of his work out regimen and discipline on his blog and on Twitter. Seemingly, each time I thought about skipping or skimping on a run Tim would Tweet or post about a workout technique. Undeniably this would make me run longer and faster, helping push me to finish that half-marathon in February. Peer motivation.

Peer Motivation and Social Media

Social media is full of peer pressure, that has been well documented, but peer motivation is also a fantastic side benefit of social media. One great example is ChallengeApp, a new social network that allows you to challenge your friends or network to any type of challenge. Not surprisingly, Tim pointed out ChallengeApp to me and immediately we were in a challenge for the month of April. Our challenge is to get through 20 substantial workouts in April (join us?). We are only a few days into the month, but already I can tell this is going to drive me since we remind each other over Twitter and ChallengeApp about our workouts and don’t think it isn’t killing me that Tim has one more workout than I do already!

Peer motivation using social media or any other means is not just for athletics, in fact ChallengeApp (or really any collaborative platform) is a great tool for a team of bloggers looking for more production, fundraisers looking for more donations, company departments looking to out produce another department, the options are endless. Understanding how much power your words have on others may inspire you to be more proactive about peer motivation, and on the flip side you should search for people who will motivate you.

How are you going to motivate your peers today? Who motivates you each and every day and might not know it?

Plancast is getting a ton of attention lately and being talked about very highly by folks I know and trust. At first glance I too thought it was a fantastic platform for interacting and making plans, but I quickly changed my mind. But rather than turn away immediately I gave it another chance after Aaron Strout told me to give it another try and he recommended:

1. I follow the right people, i.e. be people that I actually know
2. Subscribe to the digest which is essentially an itinerary of cool things to do

This post is my response to Aaron’s challenge:

Firstly I find it interesting that most comments I’ve seen about your podcast center around iPadio, including my own. That tool is efficient, easy to use, helpful and brings something new to the table.

Alas, Plancast is only one of those things (yet). The current incarnation of Plancast is a glorified version of Upcoming and the other scheduling tools available. But lets start with the positive and what I like about Plancast:

• Easy to Use: Plancast is super easy to use and has a nice clean interface (unlike Upcoming). You can integrate it with your other social networks or choose to remain agnostic. This is nice since you can have a Facebook Event also show up in Plancast. Also they make it super easy to add events to your actual calendar and you can already “@” folks in the title of plans.
• Privacy: Plancast is doing a terrific job with privacy concerns, particularly when compared to other social networks. You can easily cancel your account under settings. You have to opt-in to allow others to automatically include you in their plans (hello Facebook photo tagging, are you listening?). You can easily block other users. Even the terms of service are tolerable.
• Responsive: The entire Plancast team are highly responsive, in fact I’ll bet they will respond to this blog post. Check out their community where they tackle user questions, needs, critiques and more. Very impressive. But better yet look at the privacy thread and you can see they are already implementing suggestions from people. Certainly a great example of community best practices.

But now it gets into where I think Plancast is missing the boat and let me first just say what I always do about new tools. These are NEW tools and typically in beta. As someone in the technology industry I understand how this works and empathize. Therefore most of the things I say are probably already being addressed or just as likely Plancast may not be the right tool for me, which is cool too.

• Too Much Noise: Just like Aaron I subscribed to the “right” people; my friends. And not “friends” like Facebook’s definition, but people I had actually met and value their opinion on events and plans. The homepage’s “upcoming” stream is not helpful because it is being pushed down the page by the “What are you planning to do?” box and then the listing of events are very noisy, particularly by the few friends who like to post every single thing that they do to Plancast. There is too much emphasis on the pictures of people attending the event so that I can’t easily scroll through the page, find an event I like and then expand to find additional people. The same thing can be done for the planning box at the top, or better yet put a “Make A Plan” button on the left-hand nav and save me some space.
• Filters: This is a corollary of the above since it is very difficult to actually find plans that would be useful to me. I’ve tried the search functionality to no avail. But I’d also like to see the ability to create filters by geography and even user list. For example, most of the people I’m subscribed to are in Austin. I’d love to make a list of just these folks and get a quick glimpse at what is going on in my town with my friends. Taking that another step, I travel a lot and am subscribed to people in San Francisco, Chicago, London, Boston and other locales. Can I have a filter or list for those geographies so I can check out what is happening the week of May 5th when I’m in Boston? Currently I go to the site, I scroll down my list of subscribers and I leave. I’m not getting anything out of the experience because it is not useful as currently created.
• Count Me In: With a click of a button I can put my name down on the list for a plan. One issue though is if the plan was created in Facebook…it won’t pull my RSVP through to Facebook. I’m guessing that this is something that could be addressed when the API is available, and it should be. But I’d also like to see it extend beyond Facebook to any network you have linked in including, well LinkedIn.
• Speaking of LinkedIn: As I’ve said on this blog before, I’m much more partial to LinkedIn than Twitter or Facebook, mainly because it brings me more value for my day job. Plancast seems like it was made for social media people and marketing consultants, not for people doing actual business. Perhaps this issue gets answered in my call for filters because it would be really nice to easily find plans that have something to do with my work.

And here is what it really comes down to, Plancast is for two main people:

1. People who want to plan social events with their friends that might run the gamut across multiple networks.
2. People who want to make sure everyone knows that they have social plans and hope that others will join them in those plans.

I need a planning site that is going to help me find events that are important for my job and my life, I’m not interested in using it to meet up with people at the Apple store. Ultimately the way I make social plans is on my actual calender, not on Facebook, Twitter or Plancast. Social networks are just ways for me to find out about events, not to RSVP or mange a plan. If I want to open up my socialization I use Gowalla; if I’m out and open to meeting up with folks in my extended network, presto I can make that happen. Obviously it is more in real-time, but that is the way I socialize.

Ultimately I think that Plancast has a significant opportunity to address the needs of people like me who are looking for great events that help them with their job and their lives, not just when the next tweetup is happening. From what I’ve seen on their forums and Twitter they are receptive to making changes, so my promise to them and to Aaron is that I’m going to stay on the network through the year and keep checking back to see if it has become a tool that I’ll put in my belt.

Later that night, however, the reality sunk in that I hadn’t gotten to any of the big writing projects I wanted to get to while I was in the air. Typically I use my 3-4 hours in the air to get away from email and the churn of work and write web content, news releases, blog posts and more. The time away from an Internet connection refreshes me and gets my brain moving into big picture thinking and out of the tactical thinking we so often need to get our jobs done. After the initial positive feelings on inflight WiFi I was suddenly disappointed.

But here is the solution, and it is what I’m going to do during my next trip with WiFi. Use the first few hours on your trip to do that big picture thinking and writing. Or hell, sit back and read a book in order to refresh those neurons. With about an hour left in the flight login to catch up on email and get information that might help shape the rest of your business day.

Like all things, inflight WiFi is great as long as you use it to your advantage and not lose the benefits that inherently come when you are disconnected.

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.

• 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.

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.

1. Good Friends
2. Marketers I Trust
3. Colleagues
4. Boston Sports
5. Foodies
6. Austin Peeps

Building these lists allows me to follow more people and focus on certain topics, but it has also expelled any thought of visiting the main Twitter site. Nor will I check my full list of people that I follow since I don’t like to give up that real estate in TweetDeck. And herein lies one of the pitfalls of lists (whether within Twitter or in an app), because once I build those lists I rarely add new people, since I’m only looking, well, at those lists. I love my lists, they are full of great information and great people. But with your lists you don’t know what you don’t know.  My lists were missing people. People that I knew.

It finally hit me during a run. Yesterday as I was hitting my stride on a long distance jaunt I actually started thinking about Dave Fleet. Now, I’ve never met Dave personally, but we have had several conversations on Twitter and our respective blogs over the years. I’ve always liked the way Dave thinks and how he challenges people consistently, but in a productive method. Dave is a self-described “running nut”, hence why the run jogged my memory (sorry, had to), and I realized at that moment that I had forgotten to add Dave onto any of my lists in TweetDeck! As soon as I was back at the house I remedied this egregious error and realized I needed to go through my lists closely to make sure I’m not missing other folks like Dave. People who I have enjoyed talking with over the years and who teach me a great deal.

Here is how I’m going to do it:

1. Batch review my mentions (people who used @kyleflaherty) from 2007 and 2008.
2. Analyze trends to determine frequency of communications in order to find those I talked to the most.
3. Cross-reference this with my lists in Tweetdeck (now that they are interlinked with lists in the API).
4. Find the other Dave Fleet’s I’ve been missing.

Is this problem simply an element of my own lack of vision or something inherent in list building? Oh, and hey Dave, I have a few questions about stretching after a long run for you

It struck me this morning however that shiny object syndrome is talked about because it is so easy to fall into…and to be honest, I love being in this phase. I do love new tools, gadgets, websites, social networks and more. There is something about unwrapping a new toy that harkens us back to that birthday so many years ago. I love discovering people on a new social network, particularly seeing folks I already recognize from other networks; reminds me of running into an old friend on the street purely on accident.

This week I have been hit by the syndrome twice! First was starting to use Gowalla, a geo-location social network similar to FourSquare. It is a fun network that allows me to find different “hot spots” near me such as a restaurant, movie, etc. The long term usage of this type of network may be minimal, but right now I’m having a blast collecting tacos (you have to play to understand that one).

But this morning my shiny object syndrome hit a fever pitch when I started to unwrap my new Kodak Zi8. I’ll be back with a longer review of how I use it from a B2B prespective…but today I’m just going to enjoy the side effects of the syndrome!