Oh sure, you DID stuff, a lot of stuff. But nothing was truly accomplished. Ask yourself how you spent your time throughout the day. Were you going back and forth from task to task, biting of small bits of each task, only to swallow it quickly and move onto something else?

Or did you sit down, shut out everything else and eat up the entire task, while actually taking time to taste?

You will only be successful when you multi-task, not multiple-task.

Unfortunately we often times confuse conventional belief with conventional wisdom, particularly in marketing circles. For example, if you just listen to the masses, social media is still THE top vehicle for marketers. But shift through the noise. Log off Twitter and those annoying #chats and talk to some really smart marketers who are working in the trenches. The conventional wisdom has it that the tried and true practices of marketing are making an enormous swing back into the mainstream. But they have been rejuvenated by the social media assault of 2008-2010.

Direct mail. Email Marketing. Events. And, yes, even advertising, are getting the best results these days.

But today they are done in a smarter and more focused manner. Because of all the social media noise these smart campaigns have become a breathe of fresh air. Certainly creativity and strong content still win the day, but the “old school” delivery mechanisms remain the best way to sell your product.

I’m not trying to write some “social media is dead” post, not in the slightest, but it goes back to something I wrote in January of 2007, when the blog was the highest form of “social”, in the post “Blogs are to hieroglyphics as Scoble is to _______?“:

“Content is still King, the blog is just one form of transportation.”

Don’t be blinded by conventional beliefs that social media is a revolution that you must be a part of or you will never succeed as a marketer. Instead listen to the conventional wisdom and realize that social media is (still) just another fantastic tool for you to use. Use it as a compliment, not in place of fantastic content and creative results-driven marketing campaigns. Always trend towards the wise and away from the believers.

Privacy is important, or at least it should be, but unfortunately most people ignore their role in this tale. On the other end of the spectrum we have an organization like Facebook that has decided that privacy is the least of their problems and they are going to exploit an inherent weakness in people: Online Privacy Ignorance. This blog is not the place to resurrect what is currently going on in the world of privacy and Facebook, you can get that from better sources. But this latest privacy run around and “fix” has woken me up to the fact that I had created a very large group of FBFs (1,400+), many of which might or might not fall into the Online Privacy Ignorance category. Most, however, did fall into the “why do I feel it is OK to share with them what I am sharing” category. Listen up now, what I need to tell you IS very important: It’s not you, it’s me.

That’s right, we are no longer friends on Facebook. Please. Stop. Crying will not help us get through what are sure to be trying days. Instead I want you to think back on all the good times (cue cheesy flashback music and start montage):

• Hiding your Farmville updates as quickly as humanely possible.
• Removing that disgusting comment you made about me when I posted a family photo.
• The hours I spent building lists thinking that it would create different pockets of privacy.
• Hiding your MafiaWar updates as quickly as humanely possible.
• Disabling my wall to protect me, and you if I can be so frank, from malware and Phishing expeditions.
• Hiding your updates altogether during the last Presidential election cycle.
• Laughing out loud at the fact that you are still the only person that uses the “Poke” function.
• Wondering why you post drunken updates every Saturday night…with accompanying pictures of you in the restroom of local bars.

It is always hard to remember all those good times. Speaking of remembering, can you remember when we became FBFs? Or why? Strangely enough, I can’t even remember ever having met you in real life. When you have those types of challenges in front of you it is a wonder that our relationship, even this digital one, lasted for so many years.

The time has come for us to no longer be friends on Facebook. You may not even notice the change, since there is no way for me to contact you once we are no longer FBFs and we don’t even live in the same state and in some cases the same country. But thank you for being my FBF during a time when we all felt comfortable sharing intimate details about our lives with complete strangers. Today the world is simply a different place, and FBF, I’ve grown.

Perhaps one day I’ll regret this, but with my cursor poised over the “Remove Connection” button I bid you and 1,200 of my closest FBFers, adieu.

Warm and deep regards,

Kyle

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.

• 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.

• 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?

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.

Communication is defined, in many dictionaries, as the “imparting or exchanging of information or news”.

Let’s agree that the definition of Conversation should change a bit, to at least include “written words” along side those that are spoken.

Now, a question for you.

On Twitter, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?

On Facebook, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?

On eMail, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?

On the phone, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?

Yesterday during Jason Stoddard’s Ubiquity Marketing unSummit I got a fantastic reminder of how important this notion was from the always poignant Michelle Greer. During one of the panels Michelle quite adamantly reminded all of the attendees that they have to learn how to use these tools, and she wasn’t talking about Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Michelle was talking drupal, APIs and at the very least HTML.

No longer can you be a marketer that simply comes up with big ideas (see my post about marketing people that are all talk and no action). Instead we must come up with smart ideas and be able to implement them at some level. If you want to build a blog for your company don’t read a book about effective blogging techniques, buy some books on WordPress, HTML and CSS. Have a great idea on how to filter Tweets to more easily respond to customer inquiries? Don’t worry about how to engage people on Twitter, worry about how to work with the Twitter API in order to get it done. The best way for you to insure your role in the future of marketing is to not only coming up with the great ideas, but also helping to implement the ideas and watch them pay off for your business or organization.

Learning these skills can often seem like learning a foreign language. Wait, scratch that, it IS like learning a new language. Did I ever think that I would write this way as a marketer?

span tal:repeat="subject python:here.Subject()"
                a tal:attributes="href python:here.blog.tags.absolute_url()
                                                                    + '/' + subject"
                                                   span tal:replace="subject"

No, of course not, but in order to manager our website and implement some functionality we wanted it was important for me to purchase “Learning Python“. Have I read the whole book? No. I read what I needed to read to do what I needed to do and when I reached my very low brick wall of learning I asked people for help. The point is that working in marketing means working with technology as much as anything else.

Today, rather than just Tweeting, learn what makes Twitter work.

Thanks Michelle for moving me again on this topic, I’ve been meaning to dive a bit more into CSS and just put “CSS: The Definitive Guide” into my back back for the long weekend.