He Had A Dream

January 17, 2010 by The Team · Comments 

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Image via Wikipedia
Over the weekend I had the honor of participating in a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was lucky enough to see the Harlem Gospel Choir perform for a crowd of a few thousand people in Cambridge. Their performance was so uplifting and inclusive that I felt compelled to comment on it. The Choir had the audience on their feet clapping, singing, and ensuring that everyone left feeling uplifted and hopeful. Their website says that “the theme of every performance is ‘bringing people & nations together & giving something back’” and they delivered on that promise.
The Choir was formed in response to a tribute to King the same year his birthday became a national holiday, and they are great ambassadors of the message he espoused.

As it happens, the world as a whole is coming together right now in much the same way, albeit through social media, to help out those in Haiti. I wonder what Dr. King would have done to motivate the world if he had Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Google. Would he applaud our efforts to help those in despair or think that in an age of such powerful mediums we should be doing that much more. I think and I hope we have come a long way since April 4, 1968, but I know that sharing in the music and the love that the Gospel Choir brought to us on Saturday night was a good reminder of what we must continually do now. People coming together to embrace a spirit of love and acceptance… I think Dr. King would be proud.

Do something today in his honor, however small.

Posted via email from holland-mark posterous

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PostRank: 80% of Audience Engagement Now Offsite

January 14, 2010 by Mike Troiano · Comments 

Came across this eye-opening stat today, in light of yesterday’s Content Hub post.

PostRank says that 80% of audience engagement with online content now happens somewhere other than the site on which that content originates.

The slide deck:

Measuring Engagement of the Social Web: 2007-2009

80-freaking-percent. That’s just incredible to me. And yet somehow obvious.

Don’t put your content on an island and hope for the best, folks. Build a system that fishes where the fish are, what we call a Content Hub.

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Ten Steps To Build A Basic Content Hub

January 13, 2010 by Mike Troiano · Comments 

Using the Web to build your brand is less and less about creating destinations, and more and more about creating content useful to the people you want to reach, then empowering them to access that content wherever and however they like.

The key to this is creating something we call a “content hub.” A content hub is more than just a standalone site or application, it’s both the heart of a distributed network of information, and a destination for those that share the interest it supports.

Rather than explain the theory of a content hub in detail, it’s best to just build a quick-and-dirty one, and use it. Here’s the process I’d recommend to do exactly that:

  1. If you don’t have a GMail account, create one, say acme@gmail.com. You’ll need this e-mail for all the logins, might as well use the same one.
  2. Associate your logo with that e-mail in Gravatar.com; this will also come in handy later.
  3. Create a YouTube account associated with the same Google ID.
  4. Create a Flickr account. You may need a Yahoo e-mail account for this. Just create one.
  5. Create a Twitter account, and customize the profile page to reflect your brand identity. Add an image, and a short bio line, for God’s sake.
  6. Create a Facebook Page. You can do this from your personal Facebook account. If you don’t have one, you’ll need to create one.
  7. Create a Posterous account, and activate the Group Profile feature to make it easier for others to post to the account. Connect your YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook pages to Posterous so that any content you send to Posterous bounces into the other accounts automagically.
  8. Create a simple listening station in Google Reader. You’ll have access to Google Reader automatically having set up the GMail account above. Lots of smart people have described how to do this; just do what they say. Once you get the basics down, you’ll be able to pull any RSS feed into Reader, which I promise will come in handy at some point.
  9. Click the Reader “Settings” at upper right, then the rightmost tab, which is “Send To.” Configure Reader to send content to the destination sites you created above.
  10. Use the damn thing.

The “hub” of the system is your new GMail account. If you log into that each morning, you’ll have access to everything you need.

To distribute original content through the system, just use the Posterous account. This is dirt-simple straightforward… You can post everywhere by sending e-mail to post@posterous.com from your GMail address. Send images and they’ll go to Flickr as well. Send video and they’ll post to YouTube automatically, etc. Links to everything you create will appear on your new Posterous blog, and go out to your Twitter followers and Facebook fans, automatically.

“Curating” content is even easier. Whatever is in Reader can be sent through the system by clicking the “Send To” button. When you do that a drop-down appears with Twitter, Facebook, and Posterous as options (remember, choosing “Posterous” sends it everywhere). Begin to poke around in the local blogs and start raising your visibility. Leave short comments on others’ blogs to draw traffic to your own, and create the personal connection you need to deliver on the brand promise. (Gravatar is already set up if you followed the above, so wherever you log in to comment on someone else’s blog and use your GMail address, your icon will also appear and give you some exposure.)

You can also access your brand “listening station” in Google Reader. Just click “Reader” at the upper left of Gmail, and you’ll pretty much be able monitor any appearance of the brand online. You should add some influential local bloggers to the feeds there as well, and create folders for whatever else you like to read on the web.

So what happens now?

Start posting. Share the content you find interesting in Reader. Build some relationships. Get to know folks. Help people, and watch them help you back.

If you need something more industrial strength, please give us a call. But for 90% of the businesses out there, the truth is this is enough to get started building the relationships that will help build your business.

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The White Lie

January 5, 2010 by Mike Troiano · Comments 

Caught this on NPR today… It turns out ski resorts have been <gulp> overstating snowfall to attract skiers:

Eric Zitzewitz and Jon Zinman are both associate professors of economics and fans of snow sports. In their report, Wintertime for Deceptive Advertising, they found that ski areas report more snowfall on the weekends, and that there is no such “weekend effect” in government weather data.

Zinman says they gathered snowfall totals from ski area Web sites and then compared those numbers with government weather data. According to Zinman, resorts reported 23 percent more snow on weekends. And the resorts that had the most to gain by fluffing up their numbers did more of it.

According to Zinman, resorts with more people living within driving distance inflated their numbers more, as did resorts that don’t offer money-back guarantees.

Shocking, I know.

Perhaps more interesting, it appears social media is providing a new incentive to tell the truth:

But in the age of Facebook and Twitter, he also says these traditional snow reports are becoming less important. Today, many skiers are getting information from their friends who live near resorts. So Berry has advice for his colleagues.

“If you try and create a reality that you perceive to be the truth, it better be consistent with the reality on the ground,” Berry says. “The consumer will remind you of that instantly if that’s not the case.”

Zinman saw evidence of this in his research. During the study period, an iPhone application was released that allows skiers and snowboarders to report conditions themselves.

“Once that came online, exaggeration by resorts fell very sharply,” Zinman says. “And [it] fell all the more sharply at resorts that have good iPhone reception.”

The lesson for marketers? Remember what your Mom told you. Always tell the truth.


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Girl-Power

December 14, 2009 by The Team · Comments 

This past Thursday I attended the Massachusetts Conference for Women with the majority of my female coworkers from Holland-Mark. This was the first women’s conference I have ever been to and wasn’t sure what to expect. I was honestly thinking it would be a great place to network, but was also picturing a bunch of boring seminars that would allow for some serious doodling time. For the most part I was wrong about that last statement although some doodling did occur (I just can’t help it). The crowd was huge and slightly overwhelming, you can get a good idea of the size by the picture below, and there were rows of tables behind us!

The Opening Keynote speakers were really engaging, especially Marcus Buckingham (his accent and good looks helped some) and Tory Johnson. They were so great, in fact, that I went to both of their breakout sessions, taking my coworker Liz’s advice that no matter how interesting the titles of the sessions sound, if the person speaking sucks then the whole thing will undoubtedly put you to sleep (not her words, but that’s the idea). She was right because I really enjoyed the first two sessions with Marcus and Torey, and left the third session early because it wasn’t holding my attention at all.

Marcus’s seminar was called “Finding Your Strongest Life” (also the name of his book he is promoting). It’s sort of funny to me that a man is telling women how to be happy, but he made some really interesting and good points. The idea is simple, find moments in your life that invigorate you and pay attention to them, “cradle” them, and make them into something you can do every day. He made the point that happy women don’t multi-task, juggle, or strive for balance, because those goals are all impossible and only means you aren’t paying attention to your tasks 100%. He presented many statistics and facts that made me really think about my own life.

Tory’s seminar was not unlike Marcus’s although it focused a little more on what to do if you lose your job and how to bounce back. She explained that in order to figure out what you really should be doing for a career you need to write down moments of passion or moments where you feel you are “on fire”. Also, you need to be visible; she told her story about when she was fired from her job she sat around her apartment for eight months eating ice cream until she made herself get out and network. She said she had a hard time at first because she would go to events and only talk to her friends, which wasn’t productive at all. She encouraged all of us to meet at least three new people at the event. Although I find walking up to complete strangers hard to do and it’s something I need to work on, this women’s conference was a great place to start.

One comment I have about the seminars I attended is I feel like they catered to women in their late thirties and over. There was a lot of talk about marriage, kids, career changes after being a stay-at-home mom, etc. I absolutely understand that those topics are common for many women, but what about the twenty-somethings who are just getting their career on track? There was one point when Tory asked the audience “who is on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter?”, and MAYBE seven people (including me) raised their hand.

During lunch Suze Orman lectured/screamed at us about money. I find her to be intelligent and obviously knowledgeable in finance, but I honestly had a headache after she was done. I am not one who knows a whole lot about the finance world (definitely have an artist’s brain), and am constantly trying to figure out what I need to be saving for retirement or what I should be putting towards stocks, so I was excited when I got her free book.

Overall I really enjoyed attending the conference. I felt rejuvenated and inspired, feeling as if I could really do anything my heart desired as long as I am doing something I love to do. I know I wouldn’t have attended this conference if it wasn’t for the support of Holland-Mark. Whenever an opportunity arises where we can learn or experience something new, Holland-Mark encourages us to participate and I am thankful for being able to attend an event like this one.

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Playing Monopoly

November 3, 2009 by Chris Colbert · Comments 

Monopoly
Image by elycefeliz via Flickr
We all aspire to be one. A monopoly. The only game in town. Proprietary this, trademarkable that. Product developers and business people all over the world are working their assets off to come up with the next best thing, the thing that is wholly different, that offers tangible distinction that the competition just can’t replicate.

But the truth is that all monopolies die or slowly fade away. The British Empire. Polaroid. GM. Marshall Field’s. Standard Oil. Facebook. Harvard University. The United States…

So why do monopolies inevitably die and/or lose their dominant position?

Because they end up believing that they are above the realities of the marketplace and the need to evolve, to wholly innovate and constantly reinvent themselves. Their first-to-market position convinces them that their brand position and value proposition are permanently secure. They stop listening to the market, they overextend their offering, they take on initiatives that are motivated more by ego and largess than by practical consideration of what would serve their customers (or citizens) best. They lose focus on what is relevant and what really drives sustainable value. They ignore the competition.

A monopolistic position creates a false sense of competency, alarming forms of “strategic laziness,” and a reluctance to take on what I call “essential risk.”

So is monopolistic aspiration the wrong intention? I think not. The way to avoid the downside of the upside is not to eschew the desire to “own the market” but to eschew ego, to be laser focused about what really matters to the people you serve and to look the truth about it all directly in the eye and act on what you see. Clarity. Humility. Practicality. Candor. Bravery. Ardor.

All key to winning the game again and again.

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