How much do you really know about PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Marketing? If you are not sure – or even if you believe you know a lot – I do recommend that you read PPC Marketing: An Hour A Day by David Szetela, the owner and CEO of ClixMarketing and Joseph Kerschbaum who recently joined the company as its Client Services Director. This book is a must read if you want to either enhance or perfect your understanding of an advertising genre that is not even ten years old and is growing faster than other forms of online advertising. It’s very well written and addresses marketers as well as the rest of us – because in the end, we all are both advertising recipients and initiators. The book is designed as a monthly methodology course that takes you through all the key concepts and processes involved in PPC marketing. Yet, the outstanding readability of the text makes it a fantastic book on the commercial depths of the Internet for non-specialists.
Direct Internet advertising, a science, an art… and a sophisticated iterative process. PPC advertising is all about constant attention to your users and customers – it’s a bottom up process, just like in all form social media campaigns. You can’t throw your mesage out there and wish for the best – because more often than not, nothing will happen; but if you work at it properly – you will get phenomenal results. So, first define what your strategic goal is about, and then implement it knowingly. Chapter after chapter, the book takes you from understanding why keyword research is one of the most important tasks in the discipline of PPC marketing, how “squeezing meaning and motivation into a tiny space” when you create an ad is a skill by itself, or how to maximize traffic as well as conversion of visitors to customers. Google is a huge network, but you must develop best practices and techniques to get results – as you also should for the Microsoft or Yahoo! networks. So build up your knowledge, test and optimize everything you do iteratively. As Dave sums it up: “Success in advertising is based on the mechanics of getting the advertising pieces into the hands of the right people, finding the right target audience, creating persuasive language and images and improving efficiency over time.
Even if you do not want to build your PPC campaigns yourself, real familiarity with PPC marketing is a must-have in 2010, even if you hire the right people to do it for you. Of course, one of the best companies you might consider is actually Dave’s company, ClixMarketing. There two main reasons for this:
A field-tested competence: Dave has been involved in direct marketing for twenty years. After nine years at the University to become a scientist just like his father who had worked for United Technologies for thirty-five years, he dropped out six months before finalizing his Ph.D. in Chemistry with a minor in Computer Sciences. He had gotten obsessed with the Apple II and decided that the personal computer industry would be his world. So he joined one of the first magazine publisher on the the Apple II to combine his love of the computer industry with his love of writing … and I found another love: direct (snail)mail advertising. From that day on, even after he joined Apple Computer as Developer Services Manager, he had one goal: Inform and advertise users and customers effectively? When PPC advertising started to really take shape in 2003, Dave started ClixMarketing.
A practitioner engaged in your success: One of the main competitive advantages of ClixMarketing is that they charge their clients based on the performance of the advertising campaigns: “We decided,” Dave says, “that the usual method for charging clients based on how much money is spent on advertising is anachronistic and provides only an incentive to spend more money with no guarantee of wider impact. ClixMarketing takes responsibility for the results and takes a share of it.” Very few agencies (if any) operate this way in the United States. There are reasons to this. While it’s extremely attractive to clients, it’s difficult to manage for traditional ad agencies. Many of the factors that are crucial for profitability have to do with the way visitors behave when they get to the site and traditionally ad agencies do not get involved in page and site design and optimization. The strength of ClixMarketing is its ability to provide a holistic approach and efficiently interact with the design and optimization and processes – that’s the big plus of an agency that was digital native from day one.
Engage is the name of the game. Engaging in a bottom-up strategy is the name of success on the Web. It’s social in nature, whether you befriend people or advertise what you do. PPC Marketing is the art of interacting with people on their own terms. You must find them. You must speak their language, and in the end you must be truthful. That’s the type of advertising people actually like: it’s not blasted into their face, but part of their own discovery process.
Disclosure note: I have known Dave Szetela for twenty years, when he was working at Apple. He was a fabulous resource for Apple developers, always ready to find a solution (and never afraid to hear about an issue). We have remained friends since then, and I must admit that he trained me about PPC. Incidentally, Dave is a fantastic musician too. Some of you may remember the band that was playing at Esther Dyson’s or Stewart Alsop’s Conferences. He was the one who initiated the trend. We talked about it recently. “I had formed an opinion that there was a disproportionately large number of musicians in the personal computer industry,” he recalls. “Clearly there was some correlation between programming and enjoying/practicing music. I was testing this theory when I met Roger McNamee, the founding partner of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners. We created the band “Random Axes” and always had great concerts.” My take is that Dave had a lot to do with Roger McNamee turning into a touring musician (along with his wife, Ann, a music theory Ph.D). Please take a look at Ann Atomic and of course at Moonalice!
As far as I am concerned, I have “formed the opinion” to reuse Dave’s word that musicians have the most essential quality required for social media: they interact with an audience, and when they don’t, they fail!
I recently went to a master class given in the context of the Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute (BASOTI), an intensive summer program for pre-professional singers founded by Sylvia Anderson in 1992 that my daughter Sophie Delphis is currently attending. This master class was given by BASOTI’s Artistic Director, Yefim Maizel, a well-known and remarkable stage director. After graduating with a master’s degree in violin from the Riga Conservatory in 1980, he earned his master’s degree in opera stage direction from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1987 and moved to the United States in 1989.
Yefim Maizel’s master classes are different from the ones generally offered to students pursuing singing and opera — that are provided by famous opera singers or esteemed teachers who concentrate on technique and vocal interpretation. Maizel comes to the master class form from a director’s point of view and focuses exclusively on helping singers make an aria comprehensible and believable to people who, more often than not, do not understand Italian, German, French or Russian. And very quickly, his teaching evolves around a key double-statement: Understand what you say and live it out through meaningful gestures. Yes, it’s that simple, except that it’s awfully hard. For singers – and guess what? — for entrepreneurs, too.
Here is one of the main reasons why people don’t care too much about opera: They don’t understand, and singers rarely help them because many of them do not have a thorough understanding of what they actually sing, of the words – and as a result, they are unable to act out these words accurately. They have an idea of the general meaning of what they sing, but rarely a true comprehension of the words themselves and their connotations: in other terms, of the details that give sentences their structural thrust. As a result, singers often indulge in meaningless, approximate or irrelevant gestures, and even worse, reproduce what other singers or teachers have done before, removing themselves even further from any direct comprehension of the actual pulse of the text they sing. For example, why do so many tenors let their arms dangle along their body or keep them on a table as they invite their beloved Manon to share their vision of future happiness in the country side, when a more natural move would be to extend one arm towards the horizon in order to enable both Manon and the audience to project themselves into the paradise of brooks and foliages they are summoning? Sure, the music is divinely romantic, but as Maizel said for another aria: “Don’t float in the music, actually exist in it, cut through it.” Open up, tap into real emotions and into what the words actually mean, give the whole story, and expose a life to which people can relate through concrete moves, gestures and focus points. All of the six singers I heard improved by an order of magnitude when they started to engage their audience through a deeper awareness of the meaning of what they were saying. They began to turn into real people involving the audience into their thought process – conjuring up the secret magic that drives believability.
Every entrepreneur getting ready to pitch anybody should just watch this type of master class to get a sense of how things either resonate or vanish into thin air. Not only is learning through analogy a powerful way of reflecting on one’s own art and demeanor, but entrepreneurs are actors in many respects. Entrepreneurs do play a role, a role that they have created for themselves (and hopefully is close to them), and they have to connect to stage/company partners and to their audience — customers, partners, VCs, etc. Just as singers, when entrepreneurs give their pitch, it’s very easy for them to basically only go on script rather than remembering that they must actually believe in what they are saying. They have to keep in mind that they are trying to sell what they have in exactly the same way a singer has to sell to an audience on what his or her character is trying to say.
So forget about all the vague industry buzzwords that don’t rhyme with anything in you. Don’t strike unnatural poses, move your hands, your head or your body with a purpose – and sing your story with the right tone and intensity – the right voice pitch — to make it easier for people to relate to you!
If you are interested in Jewish studies and read French, here is yet another great book: Jean-Richard Bloch ou A la découverte du monde connu : Jérusalem et Berlin (1925-1928). The book includes two fascinating essays by Jean-Richard Bloch (1884-1947) Le Robinson Juif, written in 1925 and Mitropa (i.e. Europe of the middle), written in 1928, which had only appeared in magazines. In addition, the book presents the personal letters that Bloch wrote to his wife at the time, and contain fantastic, unfiltered background information to both texts (that Bloch had actually planned to publish in a book, but never did).
Initiated by prominent historian Michel Trebitsch (1948-2004), whose preface to Le Robinson Juif is included, the project was carried out by Wolfgang Asholt, Professor at the Osnabrück University, who prefaced Mitropa, and by my sister, Claudine Delphis-Goettmann, Professor at the University of Paris VII, who put together and annotated the correspondence.
Jerusalem and Berlin: two different worlds of the twenties reunited by a common denominator, a then well-known French author. Like many intellectual Jews of the time, he looked for novel cultures – a world without borders, beyond entrenched ideologies, that would enable both Jews and non-Jews to share a common humanist faith in progress and peace. The creation of the University of Jerusalem, for which inauguration* he was invited, sounded to him like “a natural letter of universal naturalization”: “If so many men came over here from all the corners of the world, with so much trust and hope, it’s because today as we have fallen into allotments, particularisms, nationalisms where the mind, the very free mind, is undergoing a balkanization process, eyes eagerly look towards all the pieces of universalism that remain among the peoples, towards everything, wherever in the world, that tells us about unity and restores the big dream of mutual understanding, something that — madly, maybe — humanity keeps on pursuing.” Kfar Yeladim (the village of the children) was yet another sign of a new future to come. In Tel Aviv and in the “mystic Valley of Galilee,” any Jew from any part of the world, regardless of his/her history, beliefs, or political denomination was like Robinson, finding the island where it’s up to each and every one to create a meaningful future.
The Spielberg Jewish Film Archive – Kfar Yeladim (in 1930) – Silent with Hebrew inter-titles.
As he hung out in the bars, theaters and salons of Berlin, Bloch similarly experienced the German youth’s need for pervasive changes poised to destroy the “old gothic cell,” and relegate to the history books the images of tanks that plowed the villages of Mitropa and killed a whole generation of young men. The “neue Sachlichkeit” (the “new reality”) provided an unconventional perspective on the world, and unprecedented beats, “the tempo of a new Berlin,” fully international, resounded in the ebullient street scenes and avant-garde theater stages. “I live in such a whirlwind,” Bloch wrote to his wife as he worked on his play with Karl Heinz Martin and Piscator. He experienced the same joy as he traveled to Leipzig, where he met with his friend Wilhelm Friedmann, who welcomed all the French authors! Then, absolute bliss in Vienna, too. Berlin had spread its modernity throughout Mitropa.
Jerusalem and Berlin: Two complementary utopias, and dozens of friends or common friends whom Jean-Richard Bloch saw or heard about, whether in Palestine or in Mitropa. As he visited the Jewish Library of Jerusalem, he found that the librarian, Bergmann, was a schoolmate of his friend Paul Amann. As you read Bloch’s letters to his wife (and the three hundred plus footnotes that my sister added to tell you who is who!), you experience two phenomenal cultural melting pots, where you often meet the same people or people who know one another, as well as their amazing constructive optimism.
Yet, here and there in these two very modern essays, you can’t help think that clouds were looming – and that the “old reality” never really disappeared. The League of Nations that was to secure the Jews of Palestine and the peace in Europe was to be unable to fulfill the promises of its idealist mandates – “of preventing war through collective security, disarmament, and settling international disputes through negotiation and arbitration.” Jean-Richard Bloch, as most Jews, had to come to the realization that having been French for generations and fought in the WWI by no means equaled to personal security. Bloch emigrated to Russia, and coming back to Paris early 1945, found out that his second daughter, France, had been arrested as a resistant in 1942 and executed in Hamburg in 1943, and that his 86 year-old mother had died in Auschwitz in June 1944.
Getting to the Top: Strategies for Career Success… It’s most everybody’s dream, and the title of a very useful book by Kathryn Ullrich, a high tech and consulting executive recruiter at Kathryn Ullrich & Associates located in the Silicon Valley. The book is the result of the Getting to the Top career development programs, a series of seminars and workshops that have been held in Stanford and UCLA business schools since 2006. Each of them had a functional focus: VP Marketing, VP Product Management, VP Sales, VP Bus Dev, VP Strategic Alliances, CEO, COO, General Manager, CIO, CFO.
There are numerous books related to improving one’s skills in marketing, sales, product management, and basically any of the typical corporate functional areas, and tons of books focusing on leadership. Yet, there are very few practical guides, if any, that deal with career development itself, and respond to the seemingly simple question: I am a small biz specialist in a mid-sized company today, how will I become one day the CMO of a Fortune 100? This question is at the back of the head of thousands of MBA students, yet, more often than not, they spend exorbitant tuition costs and hardly get any form of response to their simplest existential problem. You are trained. You are happy to find your first job, and after that, you are pretty much in the wild, haphazardly jumping from one position to another across various companies based on a random variety of criteria: better pay, closer to home, nice boss, trendy area, or whatever. Ten years later, a recruiter looks at your resume, and has the feeling that you have zigzaged through your professional life quite a bit. Or have you? Does what you did reflect a career strategy that you knowingly — or unknowingly — followed? It’s up to you to make it come across, though. It’s up to you to convey your own credibility.
Obviously, you can’t know it all and plan it all when you are 25 (that’s often the sign of conventional bores), but as you evolve, you start to have an idea of what you ultimately want to be at down the road. So sit down, and go through the personal assessment that will enable you to identify the guidelines that traverse your career to both leverage your past course and get better control over your future. However, this doesn’t mean that you should remain deaf to unexpected opportunities. While it’s true, as Kathryn acknowledges very early on in her book, that the vast majority of people now get their jobs through their network, and that not all hiring decisions are not based on requisite skills or experiences, it’s also true that zero sales and marketing experience will be a problem if you apply for a position as VP of Channels and Strategic Alliances or that a total of lack engineering skills are likely to make you a mediocre VP of Product Management. You’ll get on the nerves of engineers in no time!
The particular interest of Getting to the Top is that it’s really one of the very first books to lay down typical career paths in a no fancy way, with real examples of real people. Kathryn’s purpose is not to establish normative criteria and tell you Here Is What You Must Do, but to honestly provide you with typical career paths through true-to-life examples to help you plot your own course and assess where you are at any given point. Stop wondering about what it takes to become a VP: be aware of the definition of the role, check if you have the crafts usually expected in that role, if you have the tactical and strategic skills that are expected and the type of experience that will enable you to succeed. This book will save you a lot of time – as well as spare you from disappointing interviews. Yes you can be lucky and land a job above your actual qualifications, but guess what! You may also be miserable (or ridiculously unfit for the task and suffer from it). Frankly, how good of a CEO will you be if you have no strategic perspective, if you don’t give a damn about what customers think, if you hate to communicate or respond to the (sometimes petty) concerns of your direct reports? In other words – if you have no leadership. Nobody is entitled to anything, but success is within your reach if you are realistic. So look at the stars but keep your feet on the ground and read this no BS guide! Your career development is not only your responsibility, and rising to the top means understanding your goals, developing, and sticking to a career strategy, even as it evolves.
I had the pleasure of welcoming one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, now its CTO, Jean-Luc Vaillant, on a panel on social media for business organized by the French-American Chamber of Commerce that I moderated. I had little to do, as I had remarkable panelists: Kelly Graham from Cisco, Ken Kaplan from Intel, William Gaultier from e-Storm and Harry McCraken from Technologizer. Jean-Luc was the tech guru of the group. Vibrant, crisp, and guess what? just as business-savvy as everybody else – for he is one of these die-hard engineers for whom building things that work for people is a must.
Although the phrase “social media” did not exist in 1996 (it was coined in 2004 by Chris Shipley), Jean-Luc’s Vaillant’s life in this country is all about social media and social networking. He came from France to the Silicon Valley thanks to a job posting on a newsgroup (comp.lang.c++.thread) that specialized in parallel programming in C++. Although job postings were unwelcome in this tiny world of hyper-techies, somebody from Fujitsu was desperate enough to find an engineer with a strong experience in Solaris, C++, parallel computing, and highly scalable system to take the risk of upsetting the community. This was Jean-Luc’s good fortune, as he was wondering how to come to the US, where he had only spent six months as an intern at Bell Labs. He was hired over the phone and obtained his visa. On November 1, 1996, a date that he still cherishes, he landed in San Francisco with his kids, his wife, and his luggage to join a fascinating project, WorldsAway, a new species of online service and one of the first virtual worlds, “part chat room, part adventure game, part puppet show, part simulation,” which Robert Rossneydescribed extensively for a Wired June 1996 article called Metaworlds. A fabulous experience. “Who doesn’t dream of creating a whole new world?” he likes to say. This was also the beginning of a long-lasting relationship with Reid Hoffman, who was the general manager and product manager for WorldsAway. who left to start Socialnet.com during the Summer of 1997 – Jean-Luc joined him in May 1998.
“I came for a great project, WorldsAway. But the whole thing fizzled away. There was a big problem with the business model, and ultimately, it wasn’t my thing to work for an established company. As soon as I set foot in the Valley, I felt that I had to be part of what this place was really about, new entrepreneurial endeavors. So I joined Socialnet.com enthusiastically.” The company was eventually acquired by Match.com, but it expanded Jean-Luc’s experience in a big way. The focus wasn’t to be part of a newsgroup as he had been, nor was it about building a virtual community as in WorldsAway, it was about matching people to one another, facilitating their ability to connect. To this day he is still proud of the matching engine (”still the best dating matching system IMHO” he writes on his LinkedIn profile) that he built with his team. Incidentally, he also met three of the additional co-founders of LinkedIn, Allen Blue, Yan Pujante, and Chris Saccheri.
“Once an engineer, always an engineer.” Jean-Luc continued to expand his understanding of the social Web. It was not enough to have people connect optimally, maybe they could also share objects. This took him to join Spotlife, which offered a stored video service within Yahoo Mail to bring personal video broadcasting to the masses, and ultimately Logitech (which acquired Spotlife). He became the technical manager for Quicksend, a photo sharing service and took charge of the IM Companion product, a P2P video application for instant messaging. But as extraordinary as Logitech had become under the guidance of Guerrino de Luca, the call for more entrepreneurship was stronger than job security, even if the family had welcomed a third child in 2000. So in 2002, after working for five companies in seven years at an unabated pace, he joined the gang of buddies that was to start LinkedIn.
As he tells it: “We were brainstorming on what our next startup would be and around the Summer of 2002, Reid pinged me on a new idea. The idea was to create a company around the Internet consumer without having to get a crazy amount of funding to acquire members. At the time there were companies like Hot or Not with a traffic explosion, but they had no way to monetize. Between us all we had an amazing experience on all the aspects of viral marketing on Internet as well as the social networking power of the Web. So we created a prototype. In the beginning it was supposed to be a sort of week-end hobby. But very quickly, Reid felt that there were other companies in our space. We were faced with the risk that somebody would be first on the market. Ryze.com was founded late 2001 by Adrian Scott to help people leverage their business networks. Plaxo launched in November 2002. We had to get serious and we did. We all decided to leave our day job. The company was launched in December 2002 and by March 2003 the core team was in place.” The rest is history. LinkedIn is the most valuable business social network, and potentially, a critical platform for any consistent business-driven social media strategy. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc remains incredibly simple and I am impressed to see how open he was to the questions or suggestions of numerous budding entrepreneurs sitting in the room where I moderated my panel.
Books related to social media marketing keep coming out. The truth is that even if Internet and social media marketing aren’t new, the information needs for marketing managers are huge: the more they read, the faster they will get the immersion feel enabling them to move from a tactical use of social media to a strategic management of social media campaigns.
Not all books are equally valuable, though. Count Facebook Marketing an hour a day by Chris Treadaway (@ctreada) and Mari Smith (@MariSmith) among the great ones. Unpretentious and practical, it takes you by the hand and shows you how Facebook can work for you, as an individual with a personal practice, or as a social “editor-in-chief” for your company. Even if you believe that you already “know” a lot, read this book as it’s quite possible that you might not yet be taking full advantage of what you “know.”
The first chapter is one of the simplest and best written short history of Internet Marketing I have seen in a while; it summarizes how customer targeting is quickly evolving towards building up coherent sets of motivated and intention-driven social commerce addressees, and takes you to the second chapter on what Facebook is: a platform that brings people to real or virtual places or stores based on who they are, what they like, or what they are looking for. In other words, people who have described themselves in their own terms. Based on this understanding of the potential of Facebook as a sales and marketing platform, you are able to define your “social media product,” because “the social media presence is, in effect, an interactive online product.” Promoting or positioning this “product” requires a structured view of your social media project, so start with the beginning: Create a campaign. Facebook Marketing is one of the few books reminding you of this simple, yet critical concept of “campaign”: it’s what kicks off the entire work process and your operational plan.
Chapters 4 to 7 take you through a month-by-month (as well as week-by-week and day-by-day) planning and execution plan. This is yet another real plus of this book: the authors are hands-on practitioners sincerely willing to transfer their own experience and turn you into empowered, rather than dogmatic, professionals. Because measurable success will not come overnight. It’s the result of an iterative process composed of a collection of adjustments, experiments, and reassessments. “Remember,” the authors warn, “these projects involve a lot of trials and errors.” So, generally speaking, no matter how convinced you may be that you are cutting edge, always temper your own expectations, don’t over-promise, and measure impact and results like crazy.
The last three chapters offer a variety of tips and advice – from leveraging Facebook apps to picking up the right people and vendors – and invite you to remain on the look out. Facebook has quickly become a marketing power-kingdom. Continued learning will be part of your continued success. Incidentally, keep abreast with the authors’ sites and wisdom.
Note: The authors mention a few software products at the end of the book, including ObjectiveMarketer, a company for which I am a Board Member. The platform specifically focuses on the end-to-end management of social media campaigns- from the planning stage across a team to the distribution across multiple media channels, all the way to the analytics evaluating the effectiveness of messages.
Diateino, the French publisher of Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start and Reality Check as well as and Seth Godin’s Tribes, will release the French translation of Seth Godin’s Linchpin on May 2o. This time, I was not the translator, but I wrote a preface that is available on the Diateino blog. Here below is the English translation of my text.
Seth Godin has written a dozen books within the last ten years, that read like epistles of sorts – short conversational treatises in which he urges company founders, managers, and marketers in simple terms to create and promote out-of-the-ordinary products, to select their targets insightfully, turn strangers into friends and friends into customers. Book after book, his message has become more personal, more humanist. This has lead to Linchpin, which the author said in an interview in Anvers is his last book. Even more than in Tribes, his tone is that of an exhortation, and in the “last word” conclusion of the book, he sounds like a facilitator for a conversation where the Buddhist prajña meets Kabbalistic balance. “The result of getting back in touch with our pre-commercial selves will actually create a post-commercial world that feeds us, enriches us, and gives us the stability we’ve been seeking for so long.”
“Is it really the ‘last word’ of one of the biggest marketing gurus?” you might ask, “and is it what marketing is about?” Yes it is. For there are two types of marketing:
1) Mass marketing that harps prosaic messages for insignificant products offered to ordinary people, and for which schools train legions of average students whose personal goal is to do what they are told to do and then get back home, put on their slippers and watch TV.
2) Inspired marketing that addresses early adopters, plugged-in folks, geeks, and enthusiasts, and that tells stories about products or people you feel like discovering and events in which you want to participate.
Mass marketing doesn’t inspire. But inspired marketing can generate massive success. That’s the case of Seth Godin himself, actually. His blog is one of the most read marketing blogs in the world. Several million people have bought or downloaded one or more of his books. If you have never heard him in public, just go to YouTube and click on any video. Even a non-English-speaker will immediately get a feel of what an inspired marketer is about: someone who emboldens you to act, whatever you had in mind to do – buy or sell a product, or invite your neighbors to join a fundraising for a sick child. Inspired marketing is transformational; it makes you find out about new things and new people – as well as find about your own self. It urges you to ask yourself the right questions, as unsettling as they may be, such as, for instance: “Am I indispensable?”
This book is for people who want to be more than “faceless cog[s] in the machinery of capitalism” (the “factory”), as well as executives who understand that they need more than “two teams” (”management and labor”) to make an impact on people’s lives, those who intend to create “a third team, composed of “linchpins.” That is, a group of people who, through their leadership and their drive, “can invent, connect, create and make things happen.” “Linchpins are the essential blocks of tomorrow’s high-value organizations. They don’t bring capital or expensive machinery, nor do they blindly follow instructions and merely contribute labor. Linchpins are indispensable, the driving force of our future.” As was the case of Tribes, this book sits in between several genres: it’s a socio-political pamphlet, a manifesto for individual and interpersonal development, and a call for a new workplace.
The book starts with a reference to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations that focuses on the division of labor. Yes, “what factory owners want is an available set of compliant, low-paid, replaceable cogs to run their efficient machines.” But “great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.” So unlock the genius in you. Interact with people, because you can’t be a linchpin alone in your corner. Inspire. Be pragmatic with artistry, and invent new rules that will make you succeed, and with you, the colleagues and the companies that leverage your talent.
Linchpinis for those whose aspirations can be invigorated, who want to rebuild a sort of personal unity and express a positive energy through a job they like or a cause in which they believe. If you want to be a linchpin, if you are a linchpin, if you can firmly say that you are indispensable, if dozens, thousands are like you, people wanting to connect to make things happen, if you are one of the linchpins within a generalized insurrection of talents… what will happen? The end of pointless “factories.”
Seth Godin’s contagious optimism and fervent iconoclasm remind me of one of the most fascinating assailant of the concept of factory, the Russian Prince Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), who similarly invited his contemporaries to read again The Wealth of Nations‘ first chapter, in his Fields, Factories and Workshops. Their ultimate goal is quite similar: revive the artist in you, or something of “the artist who formerly found aesthetic enjoyment in the work of his hands,” but was replaced by a “human slave of an iron slave.” Both advocate novel “integral education” to help reshape a different future. This future varies based on any thinker’s present. In our time, the future will be designed by the change agents that Seth Godin calls the “linchpins,” because they will build a world where “dignity, humanity, and generosity” intersect.
This book is not a theorist’s work. It’s the book of a man who calls for action without cluttering your brain with literary references. Don’t get it wrong, though! This is also the book of an extraordinarily cultivated author, who has obviously read and analyzed with a modern perspective the masterpieces he mentions in his remarkable bibliography.
Less than a year ago, it was all about conversations. Now, the word “conversation” is used with a pinch of salt. People finally admit that Twitter is more of a broadcast channel, as was clear from the extensive analysis (What is Twitter, as Social Networks or a News Media?) provided by Korean researchers, Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moon at the World Wide Web (WWW) in Raleigh NC at the end of April – a study that has been reported by multiple publications since then. At the end of last week, I had an informal meeting with a newly formed social media group in which one man, the skeptic of the gang, had seen the report and asked somewhat provocatively to his colleagues: “What comes next, now that “conversation” is not what we should focus on?”
“You focus on social media itself, and what you want to accomplish,” was my response. “Conversations” may happen, but it’s only one aspect (not the most scalable one) of a broader program, the art of engaging – a much more relevant word that Brian Solis quite conveniently pushed towards the lime-lights with his book Engage! (See my post about it in March).
Engaging encompasses multiple levels and forms of direct or indirect interactions with customers, as well as the ability to facilitate communication of customers among themselves without your direct, heavy-handed participation (more often than not, it’s a better way to really know what’s wrong with your product, what people expect, what they love or hate about you). Twitter is only one of multiple means by which to connect with customers – and it does make sense to take advantage of the fact that it is a broadcast architecture. You can broadcast more often, and, leveraging the talents of a larger number of employees, you can broadcast more human messages. The point is to know what you want to say, whom you empower to tweet and how you train your people to express in their own words what the company’s mission is about, and how well they evangelize customers by expressing something they themselves believe in. So, the more you broadcast, the better! Then, leveraging social media means managing all campaigns end-to-end to know at all times which messages resonate best, and identify your most effective messengers within and without. If what you have to say as a company is interesting, your internal buzz agents will enable their followers to carry out the good word. Why do you think Twitter is doing well on good causes messages? Because good causes create good messages.
In the eighties, IT folks and executives had qualms about providing desktop computers to their employees – the idea of empowering them boiled down to relinquishing command and control. Yet, the world didn’t stop turning. The accelerated rise of social media poses a similar problem, albeit much larger by an order of magnitude, because this time employees and customers didn’t ask anybody for the permission to show their power. So, either you try to fight it (with virtually no chance of winning), or you realize that you too can leverage social media, understand what Open leadership is about, and “how social technology can transform the way you lead,” in just the same way people understood how social media technology would enable them to stand up in your face.
The book “is about how leaders must let go to gain more,” “open leadership” being defined as “having the confidence and the humility to give up the need to be in control while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals.” The task is not easy, and Charlene is well aware that calls from various management experts for leaders to remodel their management styles for the last fifty years “have gone largely unanswered.” Why does she feel she can succeed while so many have been preaching in the desert?
I see two main reasons why this book has a much higher chance of impact.
1) The context: “Giving up control is inevitable.”
While many books on management have characterized the traits and mindset of open leaders along similar lines as Charlene does throughout her book, the reasons for people to change are structurally different. For the last fifty years, these reasons had somewhat of a normative undertone, ranging from becoming a more charismatic person to preparing for an undefined future. Today, the future is here, and command and control executives had better move quickly because the world where sharing, relationships, conversations, and higher levels of transparency are becoming prominent paradigms, is slipping under their feet. In short, addressing self-preservation instincts in people could be more efficient than exhorting them to greatness.
2) A measured and pragmatic approach: Open leadership through “Open-driven objectives”
No matter how convinced one may be that social media technologies will revolutionize the planet, each business is local, with its own spots of both inertia and vitality. One of the best aspects of the book is the clear acknowledgment that there are many degrees between open-door and closed-door leadership policies. This is often a fairly natural stand for a consultant to take, but harder to express positively in a book. Charlene remarkably sidesteps the problem by offering relevant examples, looking at the scope of benefits from the point of view of the various stakeholders, and establishing the checklist of any open strategy. While expounding on a correlation (although not a causality) between deep, broad engagement and financial performance, and presenting a compelling case for “new metrics for new relationships” instead compartmentalized ROI calculations, she is well aware that “each company will have a different sized sandbox, depending on how open it wants to be,” and proposes tailored and incremental approaches accordingly. But listen: “if companies like Johnson & Johnson and Wells Fargo, who are in highly regulated industries, can have an open engagement with their audiences, you can too.”
It is obvious that openness transforms organizations, and multiple success stories attest to that. Yet, “the new rules of relationship created by the advent of social technologies require that you develop new skills and behaviors that accentuate and support your own individual leadership style.” Change can’t happen overnight, so there is nothing wrong with having “start small” as a mantra, and making a few mistakes. But start! Open-mindedness is the first step to open leadership, anyway.
… And read Open Leadership. This will be one of your reference books, for sure. The book will be available on May 24. Incidentally, also read Groundswell published by the same author, published in 2008.
The purpose of Social Media Metrics, subtitled “How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment,” by Jim Sterne is not to convince companies about the importance of social media: “If you’re still not sure whether social media is important or is important to your company, save this book for later.” I’d love every company to read this statement as a litotes of sorts and realize that understanding what social media metrics is about is precisely an excellent pathway to understanding how important social media is. And there is a lot to do there! Jason Falls from Social Media Today reports interesting findings from a survey by City bank asking 550 small business owners across America about Internet and social media use for their companies: 81 percent don’t use social media! It’s hard to believe that these companies exclusively address people that live only offline when 71% of the total population is online (according to a recent eMarketer report). It’s safer to assume that many businesses have been deterred by the noise around social media, preventing them from understanding that the purpose of getting involved in social media is to build up metrics-driven marketing campaigns. To make a long story short: yes, this book addresses any business owner or marketer and gives them reasons to buy into social media.
The book starts with the 100 ways to measure social media in November 2009 by David Berkowitz, and once you know that, you must identify your goals and define the KPIs that indicate how efficiently such goals are met – and get inspired by Katie Delahaye Paine’s measurement standards. When your goals are clear, you want to get attention and know if your message is reaching the right people, and the nature and the scope of their influence (that Jim Sterne designates through a neologism “influencity”. Ultimately you want to identify your actual amplifiers, i.e. the people who expand the impact of your message, making sure they stay engaged – and sit high on the “engagement food chain.” However, winning people’s hearts and minds also requires a real and continuous commitment from marketers to listen methodically, as recommended by Jeremiah Owyang in his Eight Stages of Listening, participating in the conversation and eventually anticipating followers’ expectations, and by doing so, driving and accelerating favorable business outcomes. Now convince your boss or your colleagues, and do so by showing to them that social media is not a touchy-feely story, but an end-to-end metrics-driven process!
What I like about the book:
- It’s an action-oriented framework with minimal blah blah.
- Jim Sterne doesn’t try to reinvent it all, and refers oecumenically (and relevantly) to a variety of authors, consultants, and practitioners.
Although the book offers an appendix of important resources, marketers who are new to social media metrics would benefit from a summary bibliography and linkography.
How much do you really know about PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Marketing? If you are not sure – or even if you believe you know a lot – I do recommend that you read PPC Marketing: An Hour A Day by David Szetela, the owner and CEO of ClixMarketing and Joseph Kerschbaum who recently joined the company as its Client Services Director. This book is a must read if you want to either enhance or perfect your understanding of an advertising genre that is not even ten years old and is growing faster than other forms of online advertising. It’s very well written and addresses marketers as well as the rest of us – because in the end, we all are both advertising recipients and initiators. The book is designed as a monthly methodology course that takes you through all the key concepts and processes involved in PPC marketing. Yet, the outstanding readability of the text makes it a fantastic book on the commercial depths of the Internet for non-specialists.
I recently went to a master class given in the context of the Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute (
If you are interested in Jewish studies and read French, here is yet another great book: 
Getting to the Top: Strategies for Career Success
I had the pleasure of welcoming one of the co-founders of 
Books related to social media marketing keep coming out. The truth is that even if Internet and social media marketing aren’t new, the information needs for marketing managers are huge: the more they read, the faster they will get the immersion feel enabling them to move from a tactical use of social media to a strategic management of social media campaigns.
The purpose of