SEO Werkt!

It’s not quite fair that this commercial featuring Apple greats Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, George Crow, Bill Atkinson, and Mike Murray never aired, but it’s easy to see why. In it you meet some of the creators of the Mac who go on to offer some insight on the design process and end with the tagline “Insanely Great.” Arguably, this sort of self-promotion is a little gauche, but it’s definitely nice to see these boys in their prime, talking about something they loved.

For context, Smith designed the Mac motherboard while Hertzfeld created many of Mac OS’ UI components. In short, these are the Young Turks of the proto-PC/Mac era.

Sadly, the commercial only aired at Apple sales events where this team of Apple Avengers got to tell their tale.

BONUS: Check out Hertzfeld’s design for Frox, a home computer that looks more like a mutated Wii than anything available back in 1990.

via 9to5mac

This is Episode 28 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Katie Richman of espnW. Read on for insights from Jay Baer plus Eric Boggs‘s Social Media Stat of the Week (This week: interesting Facebook contest engagement stats from Wildfire.)

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Please Support Our Sponsors

Huge thanks to data-driven social media management software company Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft, Janrain, and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; Janrain is our crackerjack social integration company, and Jim is our guest host for the podcast (and a smart guy).

Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment, Thanks to Speechpad for the Transcription

Jay: We are back with episode number 27 of Social Pros, the podcast about social media professionals. I am Jay Baer joined as always by my pal, the CEO of social media management software empire Argyle Social, Mr. Eric Boggs. Eric, how are you, sir?

Eric: Doing just fine, Jay. Empire is very generous, thank you.

Jay: Well, everything is an empire in social media.

Eric: There are definitely a number of empire builders in social media. I will give you that.

Jay: Indeed. What have you been doing? Have you been watching the Olympics? What’s going on with you?

Eric: A little bit of the Olympics. My wife, interestingly, did a girls’ weekend at the beach, so it was me and my one-year-old by myself all weekend. It’s pretty cool.

Jay: Is that the first time you’ve flown solo with the baby?

Eric: Well, I had a little bit of help from grandma and grandpa, but I did have a lot of solo time. Not the first time, but this was by far the biggest chunk.

Jay: Nice. You have survived obviously?

Eric: Oh, man, piece of cake, piece of cake.

Jay: Don’t say that too loudly, because grandma and grandpa will be like, “Well, if he doesn’t need us, we’re just going to stay here.”

Eric: I doubt that they’re Social Pros listeners.

Jay: See, you can’t even get your grandparents to listen. I guess it would be your parents, your child’s grandparents.

Eric: Yeah, it would be really embarrassing if they listened.

Jay: Yeah, probably so. Well, you could maybe make them a DVD collection of the show at some point. We have a very good show today, a very good show. Speaking of women and sports and things along those lines, we have the the Director of Social Media Strategy for espnW. Ms. Katie Richman is going to be joining us on the program today.

Eric: Yeah. Jill from Argyle bumped into Katie at an event not too long ago. We made the intro, really happy to bring her in to the conversation in a bit.

Jay: As we are discussing this, the U.S. women are playing the Canadian women in the big soccer semi-final. I don’t know if that game is over yet. It was in overtime last time I checked.

Eric: Yeah, well some of the sales guys at Argyle got really excited a few minutes ago. I was like, “Oh, good.” Turns out the USA women scored a goal.

Jay: You thought it was a giant sale?

Eric: Yeah. I was like, “Oh, we got that one we’ve been waiting on,” but no, it was a goal, whatever. That’s good too.

Jay: End-to-end Olympic streaming coverage is the death of American productivity, even more so than Twitter and Facebook. Let’s take a second before we jump into today’s topics to thank our other sponsors beyond Argyle Social; our good friends at Infusionsoft, email and CRM guys that we use at Convince & Convert and for Social Pros; our friends at Janrain, amazing social sign-in and social appending service out of beautiful Portland, Oregon; and our buddy Jim Kukral from digitalbooklaunch.com, who helps authors launch their books in the digital space and is also our guest host here on the program.

Jay’s Thought of the Week

Jay: So, speaking about productivity and paying attention and all those kind of things, here’s my topic du jour, there was an interesting article in Ad Age a couple of weeks ago. It’s about this prospective new social media firm that’s going to open in Chicago.

It’s going to be run by Brian Mandelbaum, who has been around the block a couple of times in the advertising space, was also on season 4 of the Apprentice, and worked for a bunch of other startups mostly in the video space. His, I think, most recent sort of legitimate agency job was the VP of Digital at Cramer-Krasselt, who actually has a big Phoenix office that I’m real familiar with from my days in Arizona.

The agency is as yet unnamed, but their premise is that they will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They are going to become the 7-Eleven/Taco Bell of social media monitoring and management. Because as we know, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, maybe LinkedIn, Instagram, and Foursquare do not keep nine to five hours.

Many times there are mentions of the brand at nights and weekends, and then people at the brand don’t necessarily work nights and weekends, and “Oh, what do we do?” and etc., etc. We’ve talked about those issues here on Social Pros in the past.

This is, to my knowledge, the first time an agency has come out and said, “Yeah, we’re going to play that game. We will be the 3:00 am guys. We will be the Sunday at 11:00 am guys.” I ask you, Mr. Eric Boggs, being a company that supplies the kind of software that an agency like that would use to enable this type of round the clock service, is this the first shot across the bow of something that will be at some point just a no-brainer for companies, or is this the beginning of the end? Is this the nadir, if you will, of social media monitoring?

Eric: I don’t know. I’m trying to process this. Our software runs 24 hours a day, and we don’t have engineers sitting by the screen watching logs around the clock. It seems a little unnecessary to me actually, the more I think about it because there’s an awful lot you can do with notifications via email, via text.

Being on call is one thing, but humans sitting by a phone in an office with a desk 24/7 – I don’t know. The market will bear that out, right? If they land ten huge accounts in the first 12 months, then awesome. I say go for it. But I don’t know. I don’t know, that it seems necessary.

Jay: I certainly don’t see the upside during regular business hours, because there are many other social media agencies who can perform that service. Of course as we’ve talked about in the past, it’s probably best for the brand itself to be doing their monitoring during the regular day.

I can see a circumstance where brands may have a disproportionate amount of chatter at night or weekends, and therefore you want to staff it. But if you’re a brand that has a disproportionate amount of chatter nights and weekends, let’s say an airline, a movie theater, Taco Bell, then wouldn’t you think to staff that yourselves round the clock, and then put a couple people on that?

Eric: Yeah. You would either have support people, or if it’s kind of moving with time zones you have an office in London and an office in Melbourne that’s kind of addressing the off-hours. I don’t know. We’ll see. What’s their positioning? Is it really just, “We’re the guys that are going to be on the clock nonstop”? Or is there kind of something a little more to it than that?

Jay: All I have to go on is the Ad Age coverage of it. I looked for some other coverage, and I didn’t see anything else really, and that was pretty much it. It was billed as the first 24/7 social media agency, so that seems to be their stock and trade. It certainly worked in terms of getting pretty significant coverage for an agency that doesn’t even have a name yet.

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: Props on the news jacking angle. But yeah, I wonder. Certainly if you’re going to trust your 3:00 a.m. tweets to an agency, the best characteristic of that agency can’t be they’re open.

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: There needs to be some other level of skill and aplomb there that I suspect will be table stakes. But you don’t know.

Eric: Yeah, that’s curious. We should make a note to follow up on this.

Jay: Yeah. Well, I was thinking it’d be a great person to have on the show, once they get a little further along.

Eric: Yeah, bring them on.

Jay: Yeah. That’s what I was thinking

Eric: Yeah, interesting.

Jay: Speaking of things that are interesting, Mr. Boggs, do you have for the Social Pros listeners a social media stat of the week?

Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: For Every 1 Person Who Joins a Campaign on Facebook, 1.3 New People Engage With That Campaign

Eric: I do, indeed. This stat comes from Wildfire, which I guess is now Google Wildfire in some surprising news. A social media marketing software provider analyzed 10,000 campaigns from top 10% performing brands, which probably means the top 10% of their customers, to understand some stuff about social campaigns. There are a couple data points that jumped out that I thought might warrant a brief discussion on Social Pros.

One, for every one brand advocate who joins a social campaign on Facebook via a Wildfire campaign, which is typically sweepstakes and contests and that sort of thing, for every one person who joins a campaign, 1.3 new people engage with that campaign. I don’t know if that means join the campaign or like that someone joined the campaign or what.

Another nugget that warrants discussion is for every share that someone makes advocating one of these contests it generates 14 new media impressions. So, presumably 14 people see it, or it shows up in 14 people’s news feed. These numbers jumped out to me as low. I don’t know what your thoughts are, Jay, but the numbers seemed less earth-shattering than I would have thought for allegedly the top performing brands.

Jay: I would say it depends on the data point. The first one, and if I’m understanding you correctly, if I enter a contest, then because of my entry, or on average because of my entry, 1.3 other people will also enter the contest. I think that’s what they were getting at there. That doesn’t bother me too much, because you essentially have a multiple of two.

You have a viral effect of 1.3 to one, and when you’re talking about actually participating in a contest – therefore you’ve got to authenticate the app, you have to provide data, you might have to upload something – I think that’s an adequate level of participation. That doesn’t surprise me. It doesn’t dishearten me.

Eric: Well, it says “engage with the campaign”. It doesn’t say “join the campaign”.

Jay: Okay, got it. So maybe that is a different data point. We’ll link up the report in the transcript notes. The other one I thought was a little bit interesting, that if you share or advocate on the behalf of a contest. So, I say, “Hey people who are connected to me on Facebook, this contest sure is great. I just entered,” and a lot of times that “I just entered” part is built into the contest itself. Then only 14 people see that. Only 14 people actually consume that content in their news feed.

That seems to me to say one of two things, or parts of two things. One, that on average people have a lot fewer Facebook connections than you and I do, and I know that to be true from other research, but 14 is still pretty low.

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: The last I saw, I thought the average was 120, or 100, or something like that, somewhere in that ballpark. Then the second part is that it feels to me like Facebook is pushing down EdgeRank for contest-shared notifications like that. Because even if your average is 120, if only 14 of your 120 see that, that feels to me like a not a very strong ratio.

Eric: Yep.

Jay: Does that make sense?

Eric: Yep. I think so. We’ve been kind of goofing around with some promoted posts on Facebook, and it’s pretty fascinating how the game is really starting to take shape. That the organic content, it’s becoming tougher and tougher to play that game. Data like this, related to contests, I think kind of bears that out a little bit.

Even six or 12 months ago, when you would log into Facebook it was nothing but FarmVille and Word Smash and whatever else, right? That stuff just doesn’t seem to be there as much anymore and I see a ton more promoted content.

Jay: Yep, and either they’re pushing it out just because of the way they’re handling EdgeRank, or we’re pushing it out ourselves just based on our own customization of the stream, or both.

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: What does work though, I think, is when you get a bunch of people participating all at once. There’s no question that on Facebook, at the individual piece of content level, the rich get richer. Things that are successful become very successful, and things that are unsuccessful are not successful in any way, shape, or form.

I think in that way Facebook is successfully replicating sort of Google results in the news feed. The things that get a lot of links, things that get a lot of shares, things that get a lot of traffic are ranked highly, and therefore it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy, and things that don’t, don’t.

So, I certainly prefer today’s Facebook environment that is somewhat devoid of FarmVille and Mafia Wars updates. But as a consultant to brands it makes it difficult, and you’ve got to really get creative.

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: That’s why I think Katie Richman is a particularly fantastic guest on the show today.

Eric: Nice segue.

Special Guest: Katie Richman, espnW

Jay: Thank you. For espnW, because Katie and her team have done some really interesting programs with Title IX and other viral successes on Facebook and beyond, where they’ve reached that tipping point and have lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of people participating. Katie, thank you for being on Social Pros. Tell us your secret sauce.

Katie: Hey, guys. Spoiler alert, the USA just basically took Canada there in the women’s game, so Alex Morgan is America’s new sweetheart.

Jay: USA number one.

Katie: Yeah. Women’s soccer, honestly, I just saw this tweet, and it’s one of the most interesting things about espnW. A dude just wrote, “Honestly never thought I’d see the day my dad and I were watching women’s soccer together.”

Jay: Very cool.

Katie: That’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen. It’s been really interesting. What you guys are talking about, I love, and it’s totally true. EdgeRank is something that will kill you, I think. I mean, it kills you. Links are great for the one…

Jay: That would be the headline for today’s show, “EdgeRank will kill you” says espnW.

Katie: Absolutely. Well, it’s the double-edged sword, and it’s something that we talk about all the time, where we talk about a lot within the walls of ESPN. It’s do you want the quick hit link, because you can get that once? Or do you want the piece of content that’s the branding piece?

It’s something actually that sort of the images and some of the stuff that we’ve done with images was something that I couched a lot from Disney and working with Disney. Because, looking through the Disney feed, they work a ton with their images and text, and kind of just work with that and getting people to share their images.

Jay: Well, the stuff that Oreo has been doing lately is brilliant.

Eric: Yeah.

Katie: I don’t know what Oreo has been doing. What have they been doing?

Jay: They’ve been taking just little moments in time, like today they had one, and it was just an open-faced Oreo with red cream on it, and it had the little tracks across it, and it was “Congratulations, Mars Rover.”

Katie: Exactly.

Jay: They’re doing it every couple days.

Eric: That’s cool.

Jay: They’re doing something really, really interesting, and it’s just taken off. Just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, share, share, share.

Katie: I’m looking at my feed right now, because it was interesting as you guys talk about that, because as you notice, I notice a ton brands are disappearing from my feed more and more every day. I’m like, “What brands are even in my feed?” For whatever reason, Disney is in my feed, because I actually look at this stuff. I cut some of this from work. But Disney is in my feed, and for whatever reason, don’t judge me, Victoria’s Secret is in my feed, so these things are next to me.

Jay: I’m not judging. I’m actually kind of stoked.

Eric: Exactly, yeah.

Katie: These two things are side by side right now, and one of them is Winnie the Pooh, and it’s Pooh and whatever the kid is looking over the side of…

Jay: One with the Winnie the Pooh bra, which is a really unexpected cross- promotion.

Katie: I don’t even want to know what that is. That’s disgusting.

Eric: Facebook is so creepy. How did they know that I have on my Winnie the Pooh jammies?

Jay: Aren’t you occupationally required to have Disney in your feed though? Isn’t that the mother ship for you?

Katie: Yeah. It may not be exactly in my target demographic, but it’s cool. I would have it in there. I may just not have found it, but it’s this huge image, and it says, “And Pooh, promise you won’t forget me.” Oh my, gosh, they’ve got over 50,000 likes. But more importantly they’ve got 6,000 shares, and that’s just in this one image.

Jay: Wow.

Katie: Then I go down to this Victoria’s Secret thing, and it’s, and this is no knock on Victoria’s Secret, but it’s just a big bottle of perfume. It says, “We hear peeps love the super fresh scent of the new Body. What do you love about it? Shop now,” and a link, and it’s got 120 shares and 4,000 likes.

Eric: I’m looking at the Victoria Secret page purely for science right now.

Katie: Yeah, yeah. Just studying, right? But those two things both have images in them, but they are totally different.

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: It’s certainly the images that can stand alone. That’s what I loved what you were doing with Lexus and U.S. soccer, where you didn’t even need copy around the image. That the image itself…

Katie: Stands alone.

Jay: …is the content. That I think is really interesting, where if you have to say, “Here’s a picture of perfume, and then let me give you a two sentence description…”

Katie: To explain it.

Jay: “…and a link,” then I think you have an image that is not fully optimized for modern virility.

Katie: Totally.

Jay: Pinterest is driving this, right? It’s funny to see how much we don’t talk about this enough. Maybe we should do a show on it. That Pinterest is driving user experience on Facebook, which is the ultimate cart before the horse mathematically. But that’s how people want to consume content now. It’s the visualification of content marketing, and it’s I think a really fascinating trend.

Katie: I agree with what you’re saying, but I think it’s a little different. Sort of like the psychology of women that Pinterest has captured in a bottle. Because it’s really interesting, I actually helped ESPN High School, their high school girl’s side. When we were first talking about how to capture that voice, we were sitting around talking about what we did in high school.

A bunch of us were saying – well, you guys can’t relate to this – remember when we would have sleepovers, we would sit around with magazines and rip pictures out of magazines, and they were words? They were like “hot” or “awesome” and it would be of a sunset, and it was this collagey thing that girls do. They somehow, all the words and pictures together, represent something about you, and there is this sort of just this need to do that all the time.

Jay: It still happens. I have a 14-year-old daughter.

Katie: Absolutely.

Jay: Here’s the exact tipping point in my life. So, she used to have a collage just like the one you describe in her room.

Katie: Yes.

Jay: She got an iPad. The collage came down.

Katie: It’s digital.

Jay: In three weeks she pins everything.

Katie: But it goes further than this I think. That was a locker thing, and this is pre-Pinterest, this is a few years ago, and we said, “Why don’t we start doing this on Facebook with images and words for high schoolers?” So, we started doing phrases, and those were getting shared like crazy. We weren’t even putting branding on them at the time.

But then we learned pretty quickly, “Let’s put some subtle branding on this stuff.” We started putting ESPN Rise on it, and then when we started espnW we said, “Well, secretly guys, we still like this stuff.” So, we classed it up design-wise and made it older. But we kept doing sort of that same thing. It’s saying something about who you are, and you have a need to share it. But because by sharing, it you’re saying something about yourself, if that makes sense?

Jay: Absolutely.

Eric: Oh yeah.

Katie: It’s the same thing as Someecards, but people think it’s a girl thing. I just think nobody’s done it right for guys yet. But I totally think there’s an opportunity for this. The same psychology for men exists. It just hasn’t been done.

Jay: Yeah. I think Gentlemint is the probably the closest in that dynamic. But it’s a little too much of a straight knock-off. But I agree. The desire to express yourself through saying, “This is what I would like to be true,” I think is gender agnostic.

Katie: I think a brand can capture that in a bottle and just kind of ride it out. That’s what we’ve tried to do with espnW, is kind of capture something psychologically and let the brand just ride the coattails of that.

Jay: Let me ask you about that psychology. You’ve had a lot of successes, like your Title IX project, where you had – how many women submitted photos to be a part of that?

Katie: We had between 4,000 and 5,000 at the end of the day.

Jay: Yeah. 4,000 or 5,000 people uploaded photos to become part of this giant integrated mosaic, and we’ll link it up. It’s really amazing. So, do you think the tipping point for those kinds of successes is the power of being asked, or the power of being asked by a brand that you inherently support, like espnW? Or is it the power of other people already participating?

You look at this, you’re like, “Well jeez, 300 or 1,000 or 2,000 or 2,900 people have already done this, so maybe I should do it too. It is worthy in my estimation.” Or do they do it just because it makes them feel good, right?

Katie: Right.

Jay: So, I guess how much do you put social proof into that equation?

Katie: Yes. That’s a really interesting question. When we were first thinking about doing this, it was a little bit… All this stuff is clipped, little pieces from other people’s great work, but we thought a little bit about kind of the mashable wall that they put together, their Facebook wall up in their office, and a little bit about that YouTube project where they took that one day and everybody did a minute.

But I think it was the idea. Our call to action was, “Be a part of history. Be a part of the largest collection of female athlete photos ever assembled.” It’s sort of this call to action that this is a chance to do something right now that’s bigger than yourself.

We purposefully didn’t put a prize attached to it. It was interesting listening to you guys talk about the contest, because we looked at some of the other mosaic type of Facebook tabs and things people have done. I was sort of envious, because other brands have done these projects and had more uploads when you attach a new car to it or something like that.

I had to hold myself back, because I partially wanted the more uploads, but more importantly I wanted this to mean something a little bit more than that. I felt like it would almost cheapen it, if that makes sense? I wanted this to be part of history, so now all of these women are.

Jay: But I think it’s great that espnW in particular and your group specifically, has the ability and has the license within the organization to do something like that. To say, “You know what? We’re not going to track the success of this via some sort of short term ROI or social mentions, ad equivalent value metric. We’re going to take a longer term view of the success of this.”

Do you think that’s because espnW is still somewhat nascent and so you don’t have that sort of day-to-day, week-to-week metrics pressure?

Katie: Yeah. There’s a combination of factors, but it initially goes back to having just, first of all, an extremely supportive… The lead on espnW, Laura Gentile, is pretty visionary with this stuff. She hired me when she started espnW. I was within the first couple hires that she made. If you think about that, what you need when you start up, whether internally or externally, I think that was pretty brave.

But even within the digital media organization at ESPN, it’s been an interesting mix to kind of work in a startup organization, but with the resources of ESPN and some of the navigating the waters working in a larger organization. We have had a lot of support, as long as we kind of prove out the why of what we’re doing.

I think that I have a little social team. I have one woman that works with me, and as long as we stay ahead of that why, and we say, “Here’s why we’re doing it this way, guys,” and “Here’s the value of what this is,” and we did a ton of work on the back end of this and said, “Here’s the value of it.”

At the end of this mosaic, we set out with this and said, “We’re not after the upload,” and, “We’re not after tying this to one specific brand.” What we’re after is A) what we were talking about before. Tying our brand to something a little bit bigger in a very subtle and classy way, so saying, be a part of history around the significance of 40 years of Title IX.

Then everyone was talking about Title IX during that day or that week, and it was a lot of chatter about the same stuff. We wanted something that spoke out a little differently. We ended up putting this on the side of the museum in D.C. and doing an animation that was gorgeous. You get organic press then, because it’s interesting and different. It actually worked out that way.

Jay: It’s an amazing sort of combination of elements. You had a lot of pieces in that program, so that’s probably the most complicated one that you’ve done.

Katie: It was.

Jay: Then we talked about the other ones that are much more simple, where it’s just the individual photo with some branding on it that becomes more of a Facebook-centric program that doesn’t require form fill-out and uploading photos, and all those kind of things. Do you think that it is the best practice then for brands to do some of all of that? That is needs to be a mixture of asks on the part of the audience?

Katie: Yeah, absolutely.

Jay: Because I feel like we beat the dead horse, or we killed the golden goose. It’s like, “Oh, this worked, so let’s do this 1,000 times in a row until it doesn’t work anymore.” I feel like if it works, that’s great, but give it some air. I think we tend to pile on what works today, and ultimately it becomes ineffective.

Katie: It can’t be a conceit. It’s got to be part of, and this sounds over the top, but part of a system, like a beautiful system that works together. So, you’ve got this visual that can be subtly tied to a link on the back end. Maybe it ties to Pinterest, and that leads you subtly to a back end of some site. So, then it can be espnW/whatever, or your site/vanity URL, where in that environment people can get even more.

But when they get to your site, then you need to have your beautiful plugins that take them back out to the social web, so they can share those back out. If then, say your model is ad sales partnerships you’re able to offer to your partners then more than just one silly contest on Facebook. You’re able to offer them a complete system, this really organic system that flows from your site through Facebook and Pinterest. You can link it from Twitter, but it’s none of those things just unto themselves. It’s not a stunt.

Eric: Katie, are you guys mapping your social campaigns outside of these core platforms? Are you guys running banner ads, TV spots, email campaigns to kind of support these ongoing efforts?

Katie: That’s our next phase. Well, that’s my next kind of goal, is to get to that point. So far I just honestly haven’t had the resources to do that, but that’s where I want to get.

Jay: Great. Well, I should mention that Katie is participating in Social Pros live from a yacht or something in Rhode Island on vacation.

Katie: Stop it. No, I’m at a cottage.

Jay: This is her only vacation activity this week, was joining us on Social Pros, which is very nice of her. You are a terrific guest.

Katie: It is. I’m off now.

Jay: She’s got a lobster in one hand and a crab in the other or something like that.

Katie: I’m having lobster tonight.

Jay: See? Do you have a Social Pros shout out for us, Katie?

Social Pros Shoutout

Katie: Yeah. I’m going to switch it up on you guys right now. I’m giving it out to Alex Morgan, because she just won it for the U.S. team, and she’s taking us on to the next level, so for Team USA in the Olympics. On Twitter she’s alexmorgan13. Follow her.

Jay: All right, alexmorgan13. We will link it up on the show. Thanks so much for being here, Katie. You were fantastic. We very much appreciate it.

Katie: Absolutely, guys.

Jay: Next week on the show, more fun from the team here at Social Pros. Who do we have on the show next week, Eric?

Eric: Opening the spreadsheet now.

Jay: You can see the amazing level of pre-planning we have on this show.

Eric: Exactly.

Jay: It’s extraordinary.

Eric: We run a tight ship here, folks.

Jay: We do. We do run a ship.

Eric: Lauren Vargas.

Jay: Oh, of course. I knew that. I should have remembered that. Lauren Vargas, who is the social media strategist for Aetna and a fabulous lady and super smart, is going to join us and talk a little bit about the complexities of healthcare in social media, so that should be really interesting.

Thanks as always to Eric and his company, Argyle Social, who I will be using to acknowledge alexmogan13 forthwith, also our good friends at Janrain, Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at Digital Book Launch. Bye, everybody.

About the Jay Baer:

Jay Baer is a hype-free social media and content strategist & speaker, and co-author of The NOW Revolution. Jay is the founder of http://convinceandconvert.com and host of the Social Pros podcast.

Social Pros 28 – Katie Richman, espnW is a post from: Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting

Posted by Jonathon Colman

Howdy, SEOmoz fans! In today's video, we'll explore the nifty, nefarious world on Agile Marketing, which I talked about at MozCon a few weeks ago. We'll take a look at four key principles of Agile Marketing and talk about how you can use them to hack your organization to deliver more value to your customers more often by breaking down barriers and removing impediments to your progress.

The strengths of Agile are that it focuses on bringing customers into our marketing and development efforts; it focuses on interaction with your colleagues by building cross-functional teams; it pushes us to always stay in motion by prioritizing delivery to our users and customers above all other concerns; and it follows a strong, iterative "Build-Measure-Learn" cycle, just like Eric Ries talks about in The Lean Startup.

You know how fast things change in the world of SEO and inbound marketing – Google published 52 changes to their algorithm last April and another 39 changes in May. Agile methodologies can help you respond and react to those changes so that you can stay on top of new opportunities.

Enjoy, and I'd love to see your comments below! I'll be jumping in to answer your questions as they come up.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. I'm Jonathon Colman from REI, and today we're going to be talking about agile marketing. This is a discipline that we are picking up from software developers, who have been practicing agile for decades, and we're applying it to our discipline of marketing and we're doing that for a couple of really good reasons.

First of all, agile helps us focus on our users and create more value for them more often, in ways that make sense, and it also helps us, as an organization, adapt to change. And you know better than anyone, how much change there is. Google's releasing algorithm updates, 52 of them last May, 29 right after that. There's Panda, there's Penguin, all of the news and tips and tricks we see on Inbound.org.

We are constantly taking in new information to our organizations. But, oftentimes, our organizations aren't able to respond to them. And why is that? Because they're structured like this, because they're structured in a big hierarchy that's not centered around the user. So even when they take in new information, they can't apply it directly to the people who matter most, their customers.

Secondly, we tend to work in models like this, which is a waterfall development model, where we take in requirements at the beginning, and then we do a chunk of work, and we do a chunk of work, and we do a chunk of work, and so on. But if change is coming down the road, if something happens here, like a Penguin, we can't respond to that because that's six months later. And, as you know, SEO, inbound marketing, social media, that's changing hourly, not in six-month or one-year cycles. So we have to become better at changing, and that's what agile helps us do.

So let's talk about four principles of agile and a couple hacks that we can use to change our organizations.

First of all come customers. They're the most important people. They're our reason for existing as a business. So we like to say, "Users are number one." "We're number one!" So what we do is we structure our work and ourselves all around the user. And one great way of doing that, here's a hack you can use, is to develop user stories. So as you're doing research with your users, as you're collaborating with them and sort of bringing them into the business to find out what they need to succeed in their goals, you'll start building these out. And they have a really simple formula.

As a user or buyer or shopper or, in our case, maybe something like backpacker, I want whatever is that they have as a goal. Perhaps I want to be able to find the lightest weight backpacking products so that they can succeed. So this would be so that I can have a great time in an outdoor adventure, hiking the Adirondacks. And what this helps us do, what user stories are so good at is keeping us focused on that increment of work that we need to do so that our customers can succeed. So this is a great way of doing light and quick documentation to help us fulfill user goals.

The next principle we're going to talk about is cross-functional teams, and that's where we really blow away this hierarchy from the old-school business days. What we do is we take all those institutional silos and we just reduce them to rubble, and we form this sort of cross-functional team, where content design, code, inbound marketing, data or analytics, project management, we all sit together, all in the same place, work together on the same thing at the same time. No one is ever gone. You don't have to walk to another building or send a long e-mail to explain something. We cut down on documentation, on all those pesky e-mails and IM's, and we actually have person-to-person interactions. It's a real strength of agile.

So I have a couple tools to help you with that. First is the stand-up meeting. This is one of the few meetings you have in agile marketing, and if it takes longer than 10 minutes, something has gone wrong. Imagine just having one meeting of just 10 minutes, 10 minutes, once a day, and then being able to focus on real work that creates value for users. It's awesome.

So here's how the stand-up meeting works. Everyone gathers around, you stand up, and that helps keep it short, and you talk about first what you did, then what you're doing, and then anything that might be blocking your progress. We'll talk about how to deal with problems like that in just a second. Some tools that can help you out with that, if you visit Trello.com. They're an online collaboration tool. Distilled used them as part of their creation of DistilledU, which is an awesome tool. And then the Meeting Cost Calculator, which you can get at bit.ly/meetcost, and you can also click in these links below us here.

So next, we have the principle of having a bias toward action, and really this is very simple. Doing is always going to be greater than not doing. So when we deal with problems like analysis paralysis, when we have problems like a politician who has the power to say yes or no, and here's my favorite, when someone comes up to you and says, "It sounds like a good idea, but we just don't do it that way," agile helps us break that down, because we always go back to our user story and we say, "Well, this is something the customer needs."

So what we do is we negotiate to "Yes." What we do is, we find that ground that allows us to proceed with our work. There's actually a role in agile that does nothing besides remove impediments to your work. So doing is always greater than not doing. And another hack that you can use is to just say no, because once you have your set of user stories developed, if someone comes around and tries to give you extra work or tries to say, "Well, you need to do this, and this, and this," which happens quite a lot, the old, "Yeah, I'm going to need you to have to come in on Saturday and, yeah, maybe on Sunday too," that doesn't create value for the customer right now. What we have to do is get this prioritize user story out the door as quickly as possible. So we want to maximize the amount of work that we do not do by just saying no.

And our last principle is to "Don't Hate, Iterate." I'm stealing this from a colleague at REI. It's just a great phrase. When we don't release on a six-month or a one-year cycle, when we're releasing every two weeks or every four weeks, we fall into Eric Ries' "Build, Measure, Learn" model here, where we develop our products or we do our marketing campaign, we get it out the door, we launch it, and then we see how it works for customers. We have this measurement phase. We see how it performs, and you know what, if it's not up to snuff, that's okay. It's all right. We learn. And then, two weeks later, we release a fix. When we do an iteration, we do something better that customers are going to respond to. And if that doesn't work either, that's okay. We go through the cycle again until we get closer and closer to what the customer needs to succeed in their goals.

And that leads to our final principle, which is "You're Not Perfect." I'm not perfect. Rand Fishkin is not perfect. He's pretty good, but he's not perfect. And that's okay. We don't want to be perfect, because perfect, chasing perfection holds us up in our work to get something out the door to customers. We don't want that. We want to always be delivering, always be shipping to customers as fast and as quickly as we can. So you shouldn't chasing the A+. You should be chasing what's going to be valuable for your users. Go back to your user story. That's what you need to succeed at. And if you don't get there, it's okay because two weeks later, you'll have another chance.

So, I talked about this at MozCon, and you can download my presentation at bit.ly/agilewins. There's also a link below. Please comment on the story. I'll come in and try to answer your questions and direct you to more resources.

So that's it. Thank you everyone, and see you next Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Well damn. If there wasn’t already enough fuel on the “new iPhone will have a taller screen” fire, 9to5Mac happened to discover something terribly interesting after playing with the iOS 6 simulator.

The full explanation can be found here, but in short they found when setting a simulated device’s screen resolution to 1136 x 640, iOS 6 would neatly arrange apps on the homescreen into five rows — a homescreen layout that the iPhone rumor mill has pointed to for the past few months.

Suffice it to say that wasn’t the case when they did the same thing in iOS 5.1 — all the app icons remained in four rows, though they were set further apart from each other to fill up that additional space. What’s more, changing the resolution in the iOS 6 simulator to anything but 1136 x 640 (and the standard 960 by 640, naturally) yields a sort of “iPad-like” layout with peculiar proportions.

It’s not exactly a smoking gun (finding a prototype unit a la Gizmodo would be ideal) but it’s pretty damning stuff nonetheless. Rumors of an iPhone with a taller screen have been circulating for what seems like ages now, and if that particular screen resolution sounds familiar, that’s because 9to5mac pointed to it as a likely suspect for the new iPhone back in May.

At the time, they (along with quite a few others) reported that a 4-inch screen would be doing all that pixel pushing, yet another bit of iPhone scuttlebutt that seems like a lock as we head into the final stretch. With a grand unveiling reportedly taking place just over a month from now, it’s little wonder that these juicy new tidbits are coming hard and fast — here’s hoping the suspense ends sooner rather than later.

Ekaterinburg, Russia has a serious problem with street fights between the Chavas (sort of like gang members) and (believe it or not) hipsters that have all of a sudden become so popular in the city, the Chavas feel threatened.

It has gotten so bad local city blog, It’s My City, decided it was time to take a stand. To do that, they came up with a super creative idea to capitalize on the exact moment when the Russian Army (tanks and all) parade through the city practicing for the Victory Day Parade.

The concept was simple actually: just hang banners claiming the Hipsters took back the right to hang out in the city over the areas where the tanks would be driving. Take videos and picts and twist it to create an online campaign that looked like a Hipster Revolution.

Apparently it worked too, creating so much buzz the government tightened security and made it safer for hipsters to walk the streets. Check out the video to really see the brilliance.

Have you ever caught yourself saying, “If only we’d had more time/money/resources we could have knocked that project out of the park!”?

Some marketers are great at brainstorming great ideas and have trouble implementing, while others are more task oriented and have a hard time seeing the big picture.  Whether you relate to one of the two types mentioned above or fall somewhere in the middle there is always an opportunity for growth and discovery.

Often we can find ourselves getting caught up in the day-to-day minutiae of completing tasks related to our structured marketing programs. While creating an executable and realistic content plan is an essential part of implementing a successful marketing strategy, I think there is another very important and often overlooked option as well.

A few months ago I started putting together what I call my “Internet Marketing Bucket List”.  This list is constantly growing and is a compilation of marketing tactics and ideas that I want to execute but may not be realistic right now.  I’ve found that this exercise accomplishes a few objectives:

• Central place to store ideas & concepts
• A great creative outlet
• Helps me think outside the box

In this post I have included tips for drafting your own list, as well as some questions to get you started.  Time to begin thinking about what you would include on your very own Marketing Bucket List!

Start Brainstorming & Documenting Your Ideas

One of the toughest parts about creating this list is getting something down.  If you’re like me, sometimes you have to be in the right creative frame of mind to work on this type of project.  Don’t worry about creating the whole list at once.  I continue to add marketing items to my list whenever I think of them.  A few additional tips would include:

• Write everything down, even if you think it might be a bad idea
• Include ideas you think are realistic and those that may seem like a long shot
• “Borrow” ideas from other companies

Don’t Limit Yourself

Depending on your role, you may be responsible for a segment of marketing, or marketing as a whole.  Say you’re responsible for social media but also have some ideas that would lend themselves to a content marketing plan, get it down. What are the benefits of thinking outside your job function?

• You can become a resource for other team members
• A unique or perspective can often solve a difficult problem
• Your value as an employee can dramatically increase if you think outside the box

Collaborate & Share Your Ideas

Some people like to organize all of their thoughts and have a structured plan before sharing ideas with anyone else.  I on the other hand prefer to bounce ideas off of my team as I’m jotting down ideas.  Who knows that small conversation may spark additional ideas.

The Marketing Bucket List is not a project that has to be completed on your own.  Perhaps you have a weekly or monthly team meeting and could use a portion of the time allocated to brainstorm with your fellow employees.

15 Questions to Jumpstart Your Marketing Bucket List

Below I have listed some questions you can ask yourself to jumpstart the creative juices and begin your very own bucket list.

1. How are you going to store the information? (I use Google Docs)
2. What are some small tactics you could implement today but simply don’t have the time?
3. What are some bigger ideas that may not be possible to implement with current budget and resources?
4. If money were no object what sort of campaigns or events would you like to have?
5. Can you find examples of marketing that you appreciate from other companies, even if they are competitors?
6. What tactics have you always wanted to try but have been too timid to move forward with?
7. What sort of marketing inspires you as a consumer or purchaser?
8. Who do you think would be the best target market for your marketing ideas?
9. What is something you’ve implemented before that didn’t work as well as you had anticipated?
10. What would you have done differently?
11. Who would be a good person within your organization to discuss your marketing ideas with?
12. Are there areas within your field that you need additional education on? (social media, email marketing, blog writing, press releases, etc.)
13. Is there a skill or area of marketing that you’ve mastered and want to share with the rest of your team?
14. What is your end goal with implementing these new tactics?
15. Can you estimate what the ROI would be for your company?

The best advice I can give is not to over-think what you’re writing down.  Keep your Marketing Bucket List in a location that is easy to access at your desk or on the go.  You never know when a good idea might pop up.  As you work through your list cross of those you’ve been able to complete, and add additional ideas as needed.

If you’re looking for some input or want to take this conversation further please feel free to comment on this post or connect with our team via Twitter: @TopRank, @AZeckman.

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Seriously, people? Unbaby.me? You hate seeing baby pictures on Facebook so much that you have to use a Chrome extension to block them? Look, I get it. Parents and non-parents sort of can’t stand each other. For god’s sake, we can’t even hang out at the same bar together without it turning into some kind of turf war. (Yeah, that’s right: bar. Apparently, it’s not totally irresponsible parenting to consume alcohol in front the kids. See also: my house, every Friday night).

But even though Unbaby.me is only the latest development in the whole us vs. them saga of breeders vs. non-breeders, it actually speaks to a couple of long-standing issues surrounding social networking services: that A) you’re either doing it wrong, or B) the social network itself has failed you in some way. In this case, I’m voting for A.

YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG, BABY HATERS

No one is twisting your arm to stay connected with us breeders here on Facebook. Too many babies? Feel free to “unfriend” at will. Alternately, if you can’t bring yourself to take that bold of a step for all the social repercussions it involves, there’s also another option: that unsubscribe button in your News Feed. Yep, you can actually tell Facebook that you would like to see no more of Jill-the-baby-picture-posting fiend, thank you very much.

Outside of not having a firm grip on Facebook’s settings, here’s another suggestion to save you from more baby-induced outrage in the future. Don’t friend people you don’t care about. Really. Facebook doesn’t get better the more people you add. It gets worse. And then you have to run off to hidey holes like Path just to avoid the mess you created.

BUT IT’S ALL FACEBOOK’S FAULT!

The other issue with this whole anti-baby backlash is that it implies that Facebook has somehow failed to serve up the right content that interests you. It’s a reflection of Facebook’s inability to properly reflect our real-world relationships. That’s sort of true. This same complaint has led Facebook to experiment with all sorts of filtering mechanisms, including lists, automatic lists, and even one-way subscriptions. None of them really work that well. Lists filter, but too rigidly. If you don’t look at the right ones, you miss things. Subscriptions don’t work because there’s always someone who still friends you because they feel closer to you than you do to them.

So yes, Facebook does have an obligation to stop serving up the endless baby-stream to people who never click on the photos, or engage with the proud parents to be. (I’d actually argue that, over the years, Facebook’s algorithm has gotten quite good at doing just that, but I suppose there are still some inescapable baby photos out there which Facebook insists you must see.)

IN CONCLUSION: WAH, WAH.

Facebook isn’t the only social networking platform where a supposedly infringed upon group wants to complain about one of its use cases. Twitter users have long been chastised for posting what they ate for lunch, tweeting too much from an event, posting their Foursquare check-ins automatically, not being “authentic,” only posting links, and other transgressions. Instagram, meanwhile, seems to encourage a community who post photos of sunsets, landscapes, nature, architecture, foamy lattes or hipsters out on the town (or at least that’s what this Twitter parody account implies.)

If anything, it’s a testament to Facebook that it has managed to expand beyond its own initial culture of students, then early adopters, and later, the rest of the world. It’s a testament that it continued to grow even after mom and dad and grandma and grandpa joined. And it’s a testament that it’s the one platform where even the dueling tribes of parents and non-parents can occasionally connect. Even if that means you have to Unbaby them from time to time.

Now excuse me while I go work on an app that removes those incessant pictures of your pets.

Image via foundshit. 

FCC filings, leaked roadmaps, and comments from RIM’s top brass all pointed to the existence of an LTE-capable BlackBerry PlayBook — the only question left was when the thing would finally launch. The answer, according to a new statement released by RIM, is very soon.

RIM’s LTE PlayBook will launch in Canada on August 9 (with support from a handful of Canadian carriers), where it will remain for the time being. The company hasn’t provided any specifics on when the 4G-capable tab will trickle into other markets, saying only that it will be available in “the coming months from carriers in the US, Europe, South Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Interestingly enough, there’s very little word on what (if any) changes RIM made to the tablet aside from the inclusion of an LTE radio and a microSD card slot. All that RIM has revealed as far as the refreshed tab’s spec sheet is that it sports 32GB of internal storage — not much of a shock considering that RIM killed the 16GB PlayBook line back in June. Also notably absent from today’s announcement are any specifics when it comes to pricing for the tablet, though that’s probably the sort of detail that’s best left for RIM’s carrier partners to disclose.

While the 4G PlayBook’s existence has been an open secret for months now, it’s sort of heartening to see RIM getting ready to push it out the door. If the roadmap I previously alluded to is accurate, then the refreshed tab looks appears to be the last major bit of hardware RIM was planned before the first BlackBerry 10 devices make their debut in early 2013. Considering how much the company has riding on a successful launch, it’s probably good for them to be able to take one more thing off their already-loaded plate. That said, the market for a RIM tablet appears to be slowly drying up — RIM reported that it shipped 260,000 PlayBooks in its most recent earnings statement, down nearly 50% from the previous quarter — and the inclusion of an LTE radio may not be enough to turn that trend around.

What do you do if you’re playing League of Legends, the free real-time strategy game with over a hundred champions that gamers must employ to conquer their opponents, and you can’t keep track of each hero’s detailed strengths and weaknesses?

If you’re twin brothers Keith and Ken Hanson, you build your own app as a sort of iPhone-enabled cheat sheet. Then you jump back into the competition and destroy your opponents.

“At first we sucked horribly,” Keith Hanson told me a month ago when we talked about their League of Legends app, Pentakill. “While we were playing we felt so lost … so we wanted to have a reference guide in our hand.”

Keith — the engineer twin — coded an app in his spare time. Meanwhile Ken, the creative twin, invested some time and energy to design the look and feel of the app. Then they gave it to 3500 beta testers.

The result, released just recently on the iTunes app store, allows League of Legends players to quickly check up on one of those hundred plus champion characters: their strengths and skills in attack and defense.

In addition, the Hansons told me, Pentakill helps League of Legends players keep track of hundreds of spells for teleporting, powering up, healing, and more. Not to mention the many items players encounter in the game, such as Atma’s Impaler, each of which has its own strengths and abilities.

Gamers can also check literally hundreds of skins so they can see what their player will look like before purchasing a particular skin.

But the story behind the twins is almost as interesting as the app they created.

“Because were were identical twins we needed to differentiate ourselves,” Ken told me.

That partly explains why Keith went deep into math and engineering and Ken moves to, some would say, the opposite direction: design and art. And why Ken moved to San Francisco and interviewed for Apple while Keith remained home in Shreveport, freelancing.

Growing up the Hansons did not actually swap girlfriends — or at least are not admitting it — but did pull the old twin switcheroo on a teacher. Unfortunately, that backfired when the teacher ended up crying, and the twins never tried it again.

When the opportunity came to work together to create Twin Engine Labs, Ken, who had sworn he would never move back, moved back. According to Ken, “we finally decided that we weren’t two guys who were so alike that we’d fight like cats and dogs.”

Starting a few years ago with $15,000 of their own money and a couple of desks in a coworking space, the twins now employ a team of seven, plus contractors, working on app development projects for clients such as Cisco Networks and Cabot Cheese.

But Pentakill is the company’s first product launch … and it was a labor of love.

Both Ken and Keith are gamers, and League of Legends is their favorite game. Building an app to give back to the community was a no-brainer for Keith … especially if it help him win.

“We’re building the features because we need them for the game,” Ken said.

And those 3500 beta testers? They must have helped Twin Engine do something right: With 46 ratings already in the iTunes store, early reviews average 4.5 stars.

See more of the app here:

Filed under: Entrepreneur, games, mobile

When the Artspotter app and site first appeared last year we noted it was a more of an art map that lets you discover and publish art around you, whether it be galleries, street art, you name it. It was billed as a sort of art discovery app for the iPhone [iTunes link]. But now it’s evolving in a more social direction and this can only be a good thing. Indeed, we might even go so far as to say that it could be the ‘Foursquare for art lovers’. The problems they hope to solve for users is allowing them to find more art outside of the obvious museums and galleries. The eventual business model? Think Google Analytics for cultural venues. But it’s early days yet – right now they are product-focused on making an app art lovers will, well, love.

Prior to the new iteration Artspotter was about discovery with some social interaction. The new focus is about discovering art through the people and places you follow. That’s the social pivot I was hoping Artspotter would make, and they’ve done it.

It’s now all about what hat’s happening now in realtime, and around you. It’s more social aspect means it’s therefore more personalised. In addition, the new iPhone app is blisteringly fast compared to the old one make ‘art spotting’ much more fun.

There’s a activity feed, nice map integration, but the big deal is the Spot button. This is automatically tags your location when you want to ‘spot’ a gallery, venue or street art. You can also say you are at a venue not just at a specific exhibition. So far they have 10,000 venues in over 40 countries.

In terms of funding, the small team lead by passionate art lover and fonder Raphaelle Heaf has had a convertible note from the Ignite 100 accelerator but is now in the process of raising a Series A funding round.

Heaf tell me she wants to build a “massive platform for a connected art world.”

“It’s not just about what’s going on but how everyone is moving around it, how the dynamics of the art world work and how that data can inform users of even more exciting discoveries.

“The art world is naturally a cool, exciting place to be, we just want to use art to bring “social” back to the real world,” she says.

On this showing, art lovers are likely to warm to the app, and it’s clear that there is real no-one doing what Artspotter does right now.