Nathan Snell :: The Technopian

Holy Crap Pants

I’m alive. It’s true. In fact, I was just up at BlogCarolinas in Research Triangle Park a few days ago, so I even have evidence of my livelihood and that this isn’t in fact a ghost writer trying to cover up my assassination (because, you know, I’m important enough to be assassinated).

So what’s been my deal? Well, I graduated from UNCW this past weekend, which is pretty much awesome, but took quite a bit of my time over the past month or two, as you can imagine. Now I am working on finalizing where I will be working this week. With that, my advice would be to not lowball yourself. I generally don’t, but Rolf from Shoeboxed gave me a kickass-challenge of an interview. Seriously, he fired questions faster than I type words (122 words per minute) or faster than immigrants hop across the border. Good questions, too! It was a blast. But I cracked slightly under the pressure (hence forth came my lowball). Damn.

On the same college note, I will have to say, I hate academics. I love education. I read business books all day, but the standard scenario in college (from what i’ve seen) involves a teacher who sucks at teaching, or has had the passion, curiosity, and worthwhile sucked from their eyeballs (shooooooooock!). That said, while not all the teachers in the business school at UNCW were good, Tracy Meyer and Steve Harper were two individuals that made coming to college entirely worth it. That still doesn’t mean I like academics anymore than before.

In addition, and I am sure this is of no surprise, I’ve also been slightly preoccupied as I’ve been playing around with a side project. It’s a website I suspect to get to usable measures come the end of this week (or slightly into next). I look forward to the challenge of marketing it as I am planning on using entirely unconventional methods (or near unconventional). More on this later.

I have also been researching/learning/developing an online community development plan for a social networking site. While it doesn’t pertain specifically to marketing (or social media in the normal sense) if you all would like, I can post my findings, methods, and so forth here (I almost said “y’all”. That would have been dreadful).

There are a few posts in the rafters here that I am working on unborifying (oh, that’s a word). They should have some relative intrigue to them. If nothing else, it’ll be a little something-something for your brain to nibble on before shoving into the recess of your mind until you’re in a meeting later, recall it, and then sing my praises (insert evil cackle).

In the mean time, thanks for sticking with me. As my life shifts from balancing college to working full-time doing awesome stuff for a company, I look forward to shifting my posts in a similar fashion of awesomeness (that actually is a word) for you all :)

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Balance

A phrase you often hear in regards to life, especially when you’re in college. The importance of “having a balanced life” is emphasized time and again by adults, mentors, and most of all parents.

All through my academic career I was working toward “balance.” The balance between teaching myself everything I wanted to know, learning about businesses, helping small businesses, and doing well in school, receiving the education others deemed entirely necessary. I aimed for a balanced life where I juggled school, life, relationships, hobbies, friends, outside projects and more.

As I look toward graduation in one week, I get to ask myself a new question. A question I probably should have asked myself long ago. What kind of balance do I want? Then I would have realized my answer is “I don’t.”

I don’t want balance, not right now. I want to be engrossed with making a change. I want to be an integral part of a company’s fruition. I want to work side by side with people who despise balance, love knowledge, and want to make dreams happen. A lot of people may not get this. But one type will. Entrepreneurs.

Where does your balance lie?

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Where Has All The Writing Gone?

For the small number of souls that were curious as to just where I went, or if I ever did come back from BS08, rest assured, I have been back. Since I’ve been back, there have been a number of events that have kept me at bay. Two in particular, actually.

The first is half sparked from a fantastic Q&A session put on by Ryan Paugh and Penelope Trunk for the Brazen Careerist. During this session Penelope made one comment in particular that I find especially interesting. It was in part a response to a question I had asked on inserting more of my personality into posts. Penelope had said posts that have strong opinions can’t help but have a lot of personality.

Of course, the other side of having a strong opinion is having an opinion that people actually care about. “Care about” is the wrong way to state that. What I mean to say is, it’s not just having a strong opinion, but having a different opinion as well. A significant enough personal twist or thought that makes people interested.

“That’ easy!” I thought at first. The number of posts that have occurred since that session, a week or so back now, is partial evidence to both the lack of ease and the results of trying too hard. Part of the issue, as I see it, is I agree with a lot of the people whose blogs I read (which are marketing and tech bloggers). At first I thought this made sense. It doesn’t.

Marketing, at least the kind I talk about, takes place on the edge. The funny thing about the edge is it’s all about what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, what you think will work, and more or less making it up as you go. Obviously in that sort of environment, it shouldn’t be difficult to find things to disagree with (in some instance it’s not, it’s just not substantial enough to write about). What’s happening, however, is the echo chamber of crap that keeps bouncing off the walls, from one blogger to the next, is growing. In most cases, you see generally the same thoughts being written about over and over again. This isn’t every blogger, but it’s a lot of them (I’ve been victim of this as well).

So here’s the deal from my end. I don’t want to be an echo chamber, and I don’t want to regurgitate the same stuff most everyone else is. That’s what my focus will be on when it comes to providing information that you all care about. This has been my focus over the past month or so (and I can see the results). What I want from you all is patience and input, if you’d be so kind. I may not post every day (especially as the next two weeks marks the close of my college career), but I will post as often as I can with stuff that will hopefully be great. If it’s not great, or if I missed something you wanted to know more about. Tell me and we’ll go from there.

Oh yeah, the other project that’s been taking up my time is that my business plan made it as a finalist in UNCW’s business plan competition. I do the final pitch of it this Friday. I plan to win.

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Gone to BS08

Blogger Social 2008 is finally here! At first it seemed like it was too far out, now it’s hard to believe I fly out to New York tomorrow (ahhh, NY, I am visiting you again so soon!).

It will be an amazing experience to meet so many of the awesome people I’ve interacted with for some time, as well as meeting new people, too!

If you’re curious as to what all is going on, you can check out the BS08 website (linked above) or Ryan Karpeles nifty googly summary (I did in fact manage to end all 3 words with “y”). Never seen that Google Maps feature before (if it is one), but I will definitely be utilizing it in the future.

Anyway, if you’re curious as to how it will all be going. I will be updating my flickr and twitter periodically while I am there. Also be sure to watch the BS08 flickr group.

The downside of heading to BS08 is my blog will be silent (at least on my end) until Monday or Tuesday of next week (I have to sleep at some point, we certainly aren’t doing it at the social!). Rest assured, I will resume to the best of my ability then :)

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Just A Job

If it’s “just” a job, then why are you there? Why aren’t you at a place where it’s the job, or your job? People can tell when it’s just a job. It matters.

Had lunch with Mike Duncan yesterday and he sparked this thought when he spoke of the employees he worked for. If a company highers for people who want their job, makes you think about what the company is like.

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Smaller Content. Bigger Spread.

Break your content into smaller chunks and disperse it on as many websites as you can. The act of chunking your content increases the chance others will take hold of it and pass it on (distribute it).

Today, most marketers work on having some component of their campaign viral. When done right, giving away small chunks of content greatly improves the chance of your campaigns’ viral spread, and spread in general.

Let’s take a look at a few sites/products that naturally provide a way for you to break your content into chunks.

Flickr allows people to upload pictures for the purpose of sharing photos. This fundamentally is the idea of chunking, where each picture is an easy to share chunk. Not everyone will want all of your pictures, but there are certainly some who would like a few. When a user shares a picture, they often build a link into the picture, and this creates the means by which the small chunk of content on flickr begins its viral travels.

Flickr also built a mashup of their chunked content (pictures) into another form - slideshows. The slideshow is an enticement for users to distribute their content more. For example, without a slideshow, I may only share a picture or two from my trip to New York. The slideshow ties all the chunks together in an attractive, but still shareable format. It makes the content seem like something new, something you want to share again. You can see my slideshow from New York, here.

YouTube is another example of chunking content. YouTube allows their content to be chunked and distributed by letting any YouTube user share a video they enjoy on any site. In addition to being able to put a YouTube video on any site, YouTube spurs more exchange and interaction of their chunked content by suggesting other videos the user might like. You can take advantage of these suggestions by creating multiple videos with very similar tags, creating a chunked content stream.

When it comes to chunking content, Facebook did something really neat. They built the Mini-Feed.

Facebook’s Mini-Feed takes actions users already do on the site, like write on their friend’s “Wall”, and wraps those actions into small chunks of content they call updates. Facebook then sends these updates to the mini-feed of all the people who are friends of the user.

For example, if it’s my room mates birthday and I write “Happy Birthday!” on his wall, ~100 of my other friends will receive an update (chunked content) saying I wrote “Happy Birthday” on my friends wall. If they’re friends with him, they will then do the same, which will then send updates to all of their friends, and on it goes.

When you’re creating your next piece of content, think about how to make them smaller and more easy to distribute. Consider the services that they might fit into to help them spread. But make sure not to skimp on the quality of the content itself. It’s easy to figure out a way to break them down into smaller, distributable pieces. It’s much harder to create content worth sharing. Focus on content that people want to share first, then build it into a system that let’s that happen.

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Theme Songs: So Long Status Quo, Danger is Go

You could ask Chad (the guy I am co-founding Profile360 with) and he will tell you I pretty much always listen to music when I work. The right songs simply pump me up. Gets me in the mood.

Lately I’ve heard two songs that pretty well identify my business ideals. The 2nd song is much closer to my preferred style of music (European Melodic Metal, etc).

Brave by Nichole Nordeman with a chorus of “So long status quo…”

Danger is Go by Powerman5000 and, well, the song speaks for itself.

Anyone else have songs to add that identify with their view of business, creativity, or some other passion in their life? Let us know :)

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Why Don’t People Get It?

It’s about people. It’s about sharing. It’s about conversations.

For those that may have missed the first Age of Conversation, it’s a fantastic book co-authored by 102 of the leading creative and marketing thinkers. What was really neat is the book proved exactly what it talked about. It was about all this new “social media”conversation stuff.

Now, after The Age of Conversation’s success last year, Drew and Gavin are at it again, arranging the next installment of The Age of Conversation, “Why don’t people get it?” The topic was voted on by this years new list of authors, which now spans not 102 people, but 275. In this book, an author chooses 1 of 8 sub-topics to write about.

As my excitement is building with Blogger Social 2008 just next week, I look forward to getting to know all our new co-authors of this next book :)

Here’s a list of the talent!

Adam Crowe, Adrian Ho, Aki Spicer, Alex Henault, Amy Jussel, Andrew Odom, Andy Nulman, Andy Sernovitz, Andy Whitlock, Angela Maiers, Ann Handley, Anna Farmery, Armando Alves, Arun Rajagopal, Asi Sharabi, Becky Carroll, Becky McCray, Bernie Scheffler, Bill Gammell, Bob Carlton, Bob LeDrew, Brad Shorr, Bradley Spitzer, Brandon Murphy, Branislav Peric, Brent Dixon, Brett Macfarlane, Brian Reich, C.C. Chapman, Cam Beck, Casper Willer, Cathleen Rittereiser, Cathryn Hrudicka, Cedric Giorgi, Charles Sipe, Chris Kieff, Chris Cree, Chris Wilson, Christina Kerley (CK), C.B. Whittemore, Clay Parker Jones, Chris Brown, Colin McKay, Connie Bensen, Connie Reece, Cord Silverstein, Corentin Monot, Craig Wilson, Daniel Honigman, Dan Goldstein, Dan Schawbel, Dana VanDen Heuvel, Dan Sitter, Daria Radota Rasmussen, Darren Herman, Darryl Patterson, Dave Davison, Dave Origano, David Armano, David Bausola, David Berkowitz, David Brazeal, David Koopmans, David Meerman Scott, David Petherick, David Reich, David Weinfeld, David Zinger, Deanna Gernert, Deborah Brown, Dennis Price, Derrick Kwa, Dino Demopoulos, Doug Haslam, Doug Meacham, Doug Mitchell, Douglas Hanna, Douglas Karr, Drew McLellan, Duane Brown, Dustin Jacobsen, Dylan Viner, Ed Brenegar, Ed Cotton, Efrain Mendicuti, Ellen Weber, Emily Reed, Eric Peterson, Eric Nehrlich, Ernie Mosteller, Faris Yakob, Fernanda Romano, Francis Anderson, G. Kofi Annan, Gareth Kay, Gary Cohen, Gaurav Mishra, Gavin Heaton, Geert Desager, George Jenkins, G.L. Hoffman, Gianandrea Facchini, Gordon Whitehead, Graham Hill, Greg Verdino, Gretel Going & Kathryn Fleming, Hillel Cooperman, Hugh Weber, J. Erik Potter, J.C. Hutchins, James Gordon-Macintosh, Jamey Shiels, Jasmin Tragas, Jason Oke, Jay Ehret, Jeanne Dininni, Jeff De Cagna, Jeff Gwynne, Jeff Noble, Jeff Wallace, Jennifer Warwick, Jenny Meade, Jeremy Fuksa, Jeremy Heilpern, Jeremy Middleton, Jeroen Verkroost, Jessica Hagy, Joanna Young, Joe Pulizzi, Joe Talbott, John Herrington, John Jantsch, John Moore, John Rosen, John Todor, Jon Burg, Jon Swanson, Jonathan Trenn, Jordan Behan, Julie Fleischer, Justin Flowers, Justin Foster, Karl Turley, Kate Trgovac, Katie Chatfield, Katie Konrath, Kenny Lauer, Keri Willenborg, Kevin Jessop, Kris Hoet, Krishna De, Kristin Gorski, Laura Fitton, Laurence Helene Borei, Lewis Green, Lois Kelly, Lori Magno, Louise Barnes-Johnston, Louise Mangan, Louise Manning, Luc Debaisieux, Marcus Brown, Mario Vellandi, Mark Blair, Mark Earls, Mark Goren, Mark Hancock, Mark Lewis, Mark McGuinness, Mark McSpadden, Matt Dickman, Matt J. McDonald, Matt Moore, Michael Hawkins, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Michelle Lamar, Mike Arauz, Mike McAllen, Mike Sansone, Mitch Joel, Monica Wright, Nathan Gilliatt, Nathan Snell, Neil Perkin, Nettie Hartsock, Nick Rice, Oleksandr Skorokhod, Ozgur Alaz, Paul Chaney, Paul Hebert, Paul Isakson, Paul Marobella, Paul McEnany, Paul Tedesco, Paul Williams, Pet Campbell, Pete Deutschman, Peter Corbett, Phil Gerbyshak, Phil Lewis, Phil Soden, Piet Wulleman, Rachel Steiner, Sreeraj Menon, Reginald Adkins, Richard Huntington, Rishi Desai, Beeker Northam, Rob Mortimer, Robert Hruzek, Roberta Rosenberg, Robyn McMaster, Roger von Oech, Rohit Bhargava, Ron Shevlin, Ryan Barrett, Ryan Karpeles, Ryan Rasmussen, Sam Huleatt, Sandy Renshaw, Scott Goodson, Scott Monty, Scott Townsend, Scott White, Sean Howard, Sean Scott, Seni Thomas, Seth Gaffney, Shama Hyder, Sheila Scarborough, Sheryl Steadman, Simon Payn, Sonia Simone, Spike Jones, Stanley Johnson, Stephen Collins, Stephen Cribbett, Stephen Landau, Stephen Smith, Steve Bannister, Steve Hardy, Steve Portigal, Steve Roesler, Steven Verbruggen, Steve Woodruff, Sue Edworthy, Susan Bird, Susan Gunelius, Susan Heywood, Tammy Lenski, Terrell Meek, Thomas Clifford, Thomas Knoll, Tiffany Kenyon, Tim Brunelle, Tim Buesing, Tim Connor, Tim Jackson, Tim Longhurst, Tim Mannveille, Tim Tyler, Timothy Johnson, Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Toby Bloomberg, Todd Andrlik, Troy Rutter, Troy Worman, Uwe Hook, Valeria Maltoni, Vandana Ahuja, Vanessa DiMauro, Veronique Rabuteau, Wayne Buckhanan, William Azaroff, Yves Van Landeghem

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Understand SEO and Your Blog

There’s a great article on MarketingProfs about sculpting your sites page rank to improve your search engine ranking.

The act of optimizing your site for better results and higher ranks in search engines is commonly referred to as Search Engine O optimization. Working some SEO into your blog certainly has its benefits.

Before I go further, let me say I am still in the process of learning all this SEO jazz. Really, it works out well, because it allows me to pass the information on to you all. But I say that to let you know that while what I say may work, I have no reference as to how well, and so forth. So you all get to learn with me ;)

Now, there are 2 things to take away from the Marketing Profs’ link.

• Every site has Google juice

Your site has a certain amount of Google juice, as defined by Google (the juice is raspberry, by the way). This “juice” makes up your Google PageRank. You can direct this juice or disperse this juice all across your site, causing more important pages to have more juice, and thus rank better in Google’s search results. One way to direct the Google juice is by using the “nofollow” indicator when creating a hyperlink.

It looks something like this:
< href="yoururl.com" rel="nofollow" >

Just like it sounds, the rel tag tells Google not to go to that page (follow the link) preventing your Google juice from being distributed to pages that otherwise would not benefit as much from it.

• Google juice allows you to place a higher importance on relevant links

When having multiple links to a single page, you can use Google juice to control which link receives the largest flow, or no flow at all, focusing the flow of the juice.

How do I apply this?

The pages to apply the rel=”nofollow” tag are those pages of lesser importance for showing up in a search result. Here are a few: Copyright, Privacy Policy, and Comment Policy. Depending on whether you want your about page to show up in searches, that could be another. I have also applied them to my links that are outgoing to social networks like del.icio.us.

When applying the notion from takeaway #2 above, you can also focus your Google juice to each blog post by adding the rel=”nofollow” to multiple links that point to the same post that aren’t your permanent link (the link that’s in the title of the post).

For example:
The post you’re reading now has 2 links to the actual single page of this post. Those two links are the posts title (which is the permanent link), and the “Click to Comment” link at the bottom of this post. I can focus Google juice to this post by applying the rel=”nofollow” tag to the “Click to Comment” link, forcing all of the flow to go straight through the permanent link.

Hope this post benefited you all. If you haven’t read the MarketingProfs post above, I would encourage you to do so!

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Starbucks Ventures Into Social Media And I Fall Asleep

For those of you who missed the news, Starbucks launched a social media site called My Starbucks Idea. Those of you savvy readers may find a striking resemblance between My Starbucks Idea and Dell’s IdeaStorm. That’s because they’re the same thing, contrary to what Starbucks says.

I’ve seen a lot of people pretty excited about Starbucks’ launch of a web 2.0 site that harnesses user feedback. I’m pleased to see Starbucks getting into the social media game. On the other hand, I am pretty unimpressed by the lack of innovation and creativity that went into My Starbucks Idea. I realize bringing a company into the online social media game and interacting in a real two way conversation with customers isn’t as simple as the flick of a switch. But Starbucks is a huge, global brand. They’ve got a flurry of vastly intelligent personnel, and the best they could come up with was a customized Digg? What a let down.

Where’s My Starbucks Idea struggling?
Their biggest failing, in my opinion, is how they’ve started it all off. They’ve done nothing to try to build any trust, or show that they’re even actually listening. I mean, really listening.

If we look at their “Ideas In Action” section, the latest post, “Wow!”, talks about how they’re so excited (yay marketing!) and they’ve gotten so much feedback. Guess what? We know. We can read numbers, too. In the post, however, they do nothing to mention any of the ideas that have been brought up thus far.

Oh, and did I mention you can’t link to any of the posts on the “Ideas In Action” page? How great is that? If by some stroke of luck the idea does get implemented, I can’t even reference the post to tell my friends. Way to kill word of mouth distribution.

Let’s move on to the ideas people are submitting. They actually have Starbucks employees responding to comments. That’s a fantastic start! Responding in the comments creates an opportunity for Starbucks to learn, and in the event Starbucks already does something suggested, a chance to educate customers.

The problem is, the Starbucks employees don’t seem to be listening. In fact, I think they sound more like customer service reps than people who give a damn. Take for example the call for free wifi. The request for free wifi is pretty straight forward. We want it free. No extra crap. A Starbucks rep responded to the request in the comments:

“I know that free Wi-Fi is a big request from many customers but we struggle with making sure that our stores are welcoming to all customers. We want to provide a place for both Wi-Fi and non Wi-Fi users - some people want to come in and chat with friends and others want to sit down and read a book. We have found that 2 hours is more than enough time for the average Wi-Fi user. With our change to AT&T we are offering a way to get 2 complimentary hours of Wi-Fi every day by activating and using a Starbucks card. This is a way to reward Starbucks Card holders and to create a balance with the variety of customers who enjoy spending time at Starbucks.”

Doesn’t sound like Starbucks is doing a lot of listening. We say “Give us free wifi.” They say “2 hours is enough.” Is the point of their site to listen to the desires of their customers or to give them more excuses as to why they won’t do what we’re asking them to do? Because I thought they made it for the latter purpose rather than the former purpose.

This all goes back to how social media can’t just be lip service, otherwise it will fall flat on its face. A company really needs to adopt the mindset and framework behind social media.

Besides the other glaring problems I mentioned, Starbucks didn’t start off building trust. They started off with traditional, non-authentic, non-personal marketing. Not the greatest way to enter into a conversation.

How I suggest Starbucks could have started off better.
First, Starbucks could have taken a moment before making an entire website dedicated to “listening” to customers and seen what’s out there. Had they, they would have seen some excellent posts by John Moore suggesting how Starbucks can improve its experience. Then, they could have commented on John’s blog, referring to elements within his posts (showing they read it), and thanking him (and others who contributed) for their time, because it does take time.

But let’s say they really dig this IdeaStorm clone. What then? Well, their first blog post could have been written by a relatively well known blogger who is a Starbucks fan. If that’s a bit too big a step for the initial post, they could have started off with a shout out to all those bloggers (like John Moore) who have spent hours discussing and giving insight into how to improve Starbucks. You know, show some appreciation for your customers?

The other “issue” Starbucks has to tackle is that because they have so many stores, I imagine making even a single change from My Starbucks Idea could take a lot of time. Let’s say Starbucks really wants to make these changes and show us all they’re listening. What to do? Seeing is believing.

The issue is present in showing customers the link between their suggestion and Starbucks’ action. Naturally, Starbucks will start making these changes in a number of their stores across the world. What they do after that is key.

After having made the changes in a few stores, they could send Starbucks personnel to one of the modified Starbucks and make a video of the whole thing. Bring customers into the video, talk with them, explain the changes made, show the changes made, and give thanks to some of the users who were involved in suggesting the change. Then they can put that video onto YouTube and embed it on their Ideas In Action “blog”.

Even given all I said, I commend Starbucks for taking that first step. It will be exciting to see exactly how Starbucks’ efforts evolve in the future. If they can manage to generate some great success with their new found path, then it could mean a lot of companies may be taking the plunge soon.

Note: I realized the irony of my post title this morning, seeing as how I published it at 2AM.

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