As I’ve matured in my career, I’ve observed with the right type of people (+office culture) …you will actually play up to the level of who you surround yourself with. Work isn’t necessarily thought of as a competition per se, but when I say “playing up”, I mean producing quality output. And working hard.

“Playing to the level of your competition” is a phrase I first learned because my high school soccer coach used to yell at me about it. And much like my soccer team back in high school, it requires a team effort to step their game up. (And the “coach” still matters in the workplace. It always starts at the top.) That said, in the workplace- I’m seeing how when you surround yourself with others who are smarter than you …how it drives you to play up.

My point is, there is something to be said about the human interaction you have with others- when plugged into the right system + with the right people, it allows you to actualize your potential <– and that’s the best place to be. Right?
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Have you ever streamed Twitter while watching TV? (if you have you’ll be able to relate while watching this video blog) I just wanted to share how cool it was to have Echofon on the iPad while watching live TV (if you can’t see the video, click here).

Here is a screenshot of what it was like following the #oscars hashtag:

KCTV5 had me on their morning show to talk iPads and Xooms!!! I shot this video blog to show you the studio and what the video quality looks like when using the Motorola Xoom tablet (click here if you can’t see the video).

BTW, in the video blog, Matt from KCTV5 jumped out of nowhere, I had no clue he would do that! Overall, the quality of the video from the Xoom isn’t bad. Don’t you think? Especially for YouTube.

…I should share, it does feel weird holding a tablet and filming video. It’s like you’re holding a steering wheel up in the air

If you want to watch the interview, it’s online here:

Digital marketers are salivating at the amount of consumer data that is available to leverage tactics for online and mobile phone experiences. And who wouldn’t be? (gosh that’s a cheesy intro, but stick with me here…). As Jeremiah Owyang points out in his latest report, the “amount of consumer data emerging in social web only continues to hockey stick.” He goes on to illustrate in this graphic below, a construct that is a valuable reference piece for corporate digital and social strategists.

The Altimeter Group believes that there are 7 Elements of Social Data: Demographic data, Product data, Psychographic data, Behavioral data, Referral data, Location data, Intention data.

The blog post Jeremiah wrote, is great. Read it. As an analyst his thoughts are well articulated. Someone like myself, who is a web consultant and technologist, I’m actively putting into action, tactics for brands and companies using this type of data elements. To be helpful, I wanted to provide suggestions under some of these categories to understand how we are either applying these for clients already or the ideas we have around them. Hopefully this sparks thinking, in terms of the efforts you can be doing yourself.

Behavioral data

Abandoned Shopping Cart Emails
One of the best performing tactics we deploy for our clients, is what’s called an abandoned shopping cart program. The idea is simple, if a customer is logged in and browsing your ecommerce website, there is data being collected about what they’re viewing and adding to their cart. The system recognizes if you do not check out (by closing your web browser or leaving to another website) and then automatically creates a dynamic an email that gets sent to the customer, with images and names of the products you viewed or they added to their cart. Often, this email is triggered within 24HRS or sooner, in efforts to nudge the customer to reconsider and purchase their products.

It’s a simple program that helps gain back lost revenue. The majority of clients see significant success with this tactic, and ROI in a short period of time. It’s not uncommon to average over 40% for an open rate on these emails since it’s such a targeted communication to the customer.

Last Login or “Last Time You Used Our Service”
This behavioral data point is a simple way to nudge a customer who has not logged-in to your website in over “x” amount of days, or someone who has stopped using/purchasing the products or services on you offer on your website. Often, you’re able to easily setup an automatic export of the data from your ecommerce system to match users and their email addresses to send them a targeted communication.

Interest-based Google advertising
Google’s AdSense is a smart way to advertise to your audience, based on their previous behavioral browsing history. You might not know that Google tracks online behavior to provide relevant advertising. By placing cookies on web users’ browsers, Google collects information about a specific users interests when they visit websites that have AdSense ads. Then Google then assigns each user to some categories and sub-categories of interest (such as “sports enthusiasts” or “travel enthusiasts”). You can also remarket your advertising to visitors who previously visited your site, based on users’ cookies.

Psychographic data

Monitoring Software
Psychographic data primarily deals with the sentiment that’s shared throughout the web. This can vary from customer’s frustrations to praise about your brand service or product. In order to capture this kind of data, and report it, you’ll need access to monitoring software like Radian6 or Infegy. There is the potential listen to a “real-time focus group” of customers online that can help you take action on many things like extending your customer service support and R&D for your products or services. However, the data research can be more broad based to the market to better understand consumer needs, lifestyles, and pain points.

Referral Data

Facebook Like Button
Customers who willingly flag their preferences by clicking the “Like” button provide brands with the opportunity to gauge things like consumer interest (which could affect sales, marketing efforts of what to feature or push and production levels of the product). Interesting to note, Facebook recently opened up the ability for developers to message users in their Facebook News Feed for any pages they’ve clicked the “Like” button.

Additional Data Elements?
There is perhaps another construct that digital marketers and strategists should also consider leveraging. That is contextual content. For example, things like seasonal events, holidays, time/date, news, and pop culture. You can use this data to provide relevancy through contextual content when marketing to your audience.

Finally, keep in mind that…
These tactics I’ve shared above, are just a few examples of the many tactics you can put in place to leverage your online consumer data. Keep in mind, tactics always should ladder up to desired business outcomes and objectives. Many marketers and executives obsess with collecting data and metrics. The real opportunity that exists with the data (“the gold”), is applying the right tactics, which ultimately effect desired business outcomes and objectives.

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I’ll confess.

I like to glance at Mark Zuckerberg‘s (i like to call him Zucky) own Facebook profile + wall every once and a while, just to see what has his attention (annnnnd it’s not always thrilling, recently he “Liked” miniature pencil art <– but who can blame him, it’s pretty damn cool).

But it got me to thinking, if I sent him a message- what would I say? His platform decisions are affecting the world. Arguably reaching more people on a daily basis than even the President (in a much different way of course).

So.

What would you say?
What would you tell him?

There is an on-going debate, I have about Thank You cards, with one of my friends Jeff.

He thinks that the best way to say “Thank You”, is to send them a hand-written card. 100% of the time.

My take is that the message that someone writes or sends to me is all that matters. It’s all about what they say. Not how they sent it. I could care less if they email it, Tweet it, post it on Facebook, or carve it in stone …it’s the sentiment in the message that they’re writing. I’ll be able to tell if what they’re writing is just fluff or obligatory words vs. sharing true, genuine and thoughts.

So who is right?

I’ll add, that I’m not opposed to sending Thank You cards. I still send them. But again, it’s the message that matters most. I make a conscious choice on how to send it based on the person I’m sending it too.

[Bonus Thoughts] As social media technologies continue to be used more and more for communication and interactions, does the medium or platform matter as much? How much of a role does the way it’s delivered matter anymore? Or has the bar been raised for all of use to be better writers with the words we use, because the proliferation of new channels?

What do you think? Who is right?
The comments are yours…
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Recently, Facebook announced major improvements to Pages. Many of the updates are new management tools and features for Community Managers and Administrators to use. If you want to read, print or download an official .PDF of all the changes, grab it here (right-click and save-as).

One of the features added to pages, that businesses and brands can now utilize, is a way to proactively moderate content posted on the page. Often it is a nightmare for PR and Community Managers to see profanity and bad words written on their Facebook Page. Administrators can now add keywords to the “Moderation Blacklist” in order to prevent them from appearing.

If a user was to write a word you define on the blacklist, they receive this prompt when they try to post their comment:

All that said, I wanted to share a free text file of 458 bad words that you can go to your own Facebook page, copy and paste to block common profanity. The source of these bad words came from Urbano’s Blog and then I had my team (thanks Darren!), reformat the file to be comma separated so it configured with Facebook Pages correctly. Just copy and paste the text from the file, edit as you’d like, and you’re all set. Feel free to share and distribute it as you’d like.

• Download the 458 Bad Word List for Facebook Pages
  (right-click and save-as)

  HOW-TO: You can add keywords to the blacklist from the “Manage Permissions” section, available after selecting “Edit Page”.

Just a heads-up for a live Twitter chat I’ll be participating in this week. Digital Evolution Group, the company I work for does many awesome things when it comes to web development and e-consulting. One thing you might not know is that we have an entire team dedicated to providing professional services and full service support around the email platform Exact Target. In 2010, we sent over 560 million emails. We have developed some really sophisticated email programs that do cool things like trigger emails based on weather patterns, send an email after a shopping cart is abandoned, in addition to just providing day-to-day execution.

That said, this Thursday, from 11am-12pm ET, myself and Cara Olson (@EmailGirl) will be participating in a Twitter chat with @ETNexus (the name of Exact Target’s partner network) to discuss email marketing and social media. To participate, add the #NexusCafe hashtag to your Tweets to participate and watch the conversation in your preferred Twitter application. We will be taking questions and talking about the learning’s we’ve had with our retail clients like Gordmans and Crocs, where we deployed tactics that integrate email and Facebook.

So, if you’re interested, join us this Thursday for #NexusCafe at 11am – 12pm EST. Rumor has it that @ExactTarget will also be giving away a free Starbucks gift card to the person that has the most helpful and insightful Tweet during the chat. So, there’s that. Which is pretty awesome.
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This morning I sent another monthly email out to all my friends and colleagues. It occurred to me, I’ve never posted anything on my blog to let people sign-up for this email. Sooooo what can you expect each month if you sign-up? (i feel like i’m talking like a TV infomercial) Honestly, I just try to share good stuff. It’s not SPAM I promise (BACN maybe…). And not all of the content is just stuff from my blog. I try to also link to other interesting and helpful things that I’ve found from others. So sign-up here for my email newsletter or let’s connect on my Linkedin account.

…can you tell I was excited? Last week an email hit my inbox about a Monster Truck (Monster Jam) show coming into town, which sounded like a fun, random activity for the weekend. And I’ve gotta tell you, the whole experience was a pleasant surprise, as you can see in the video blog I shot. Who says only kids enjoy stuff like this!

Last night, I was asked to speak to genKC on Personal Branding (the young professionals group for the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce). I discussed how the social media tools (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc) are what enable you. These free tools allow anyone to publish. More importantly, because of Google, and it’s frequency of usage, you have the opportunity to stand-out and be found online. You have a digital footprint online, and you can influence your footprint through smart, authentic and consistent use of social media tools.

For this presentation I made some changes and updates to my slides and format. In the spirit of open research and sharing, I embedded it below (click here if you can’t see it). I made a focus to really focus at the end on very tactical, “go do this” tips.

If you’re looking for resources or other opinions on Personal Branding, here’s some great links to check-out:

• WIRED: Self-Service: The Delicate Dance of Online Bragging
• Kathy Hansen: Personal Branding is dead? / Long Live Personal Branding
• Jeremiah Owyang: Personal vs. Career Brands
• Mitch Joel: Personal Branding R.I.P.
• Fortune: Building Your Brand (and keeping your job)
• Chris Brogan: Personal Branding Basics

For all my readers that are in Kansas City, I wanted to share this short-n-sweet iPhone video blog + pictures i took at dinner last night. I had a chance to preview Coal Vines, the new restaurant located at the Country Club Plaza. This place took the spot of ReVerse. It does “seems” smaller inside. And the lighting is very dark inside, really relaxed, with kind of a country-club-dark-wood kind of feel. It would be a great place to take a date. And it’s not too upscale. My meal was good. Not great. Tons of wine.

We are in the process of hiring at Digital Evolution Group, so I’ve been sitting in a lot of job interviews. I’ve been listening to people share their stories about their job history and what they do and don’t like about their current position. Now, I won’t attempt to claim I’ve performed hours of research or have extensive experience in analyzing people and their careers (cause i haven’t) …but through some of my own (late night) self-assessments …i’ve reached my own conclusion about people and their jobs, which can be summed up as the “2-of-3 rule”.

My theory behind the “2-of-3 rule” is simple…

As long as a person is happy with 2 of the 3 criteria (listed below), …they will be comfortable and satisfied with their job. However, if things change, in which only 1 of 3 things are being met from these criteria, then a person will leave their job or have extreme dissatisfaction with their career (and over time, eventually will leave).

Here are the 3 criteria for my “2-of-3 rule”:

#1.) Money you earn.
Are you getting paid enough? Every one has an opinion on this. You might be getting paid well, or you might not. Again, this is only 1 of the factors in the 3 part equation.

#2.) People you work with.
Do you enjoy who you work with? Do you really value the people you have to interact with every day (this includes your clients or customers).

#3.) The work you are doing.
Is the work you do each day something that you truly love? Are you a 5PM clock-watcher because you can’t stand what it is you do for work?

Given those 3 criteria, you can test it with different scenarios. I’m willing to bet that if you are satisfied with 2-of-3 of the criteria, you’ll stick with your job (and if you are happy with all 3, then you’re in a great place). Only when you get knocked down to 1-of-3 will you jump ship.

Some examples with the rule applied:

• You might not be making much money, but if you really love your job and the people you’re working with…
• If you making a ton of money and love the work you’re doing, it can be just enough to avoid and deal with the annoying people you work with…

Try it yourself.

See?

I can’t explain why my “2-of-3 rule” works (i think it applies to everyone). It forces you to break-down the root elements of how satisfied you are with your job.

I could be wrong. Am I? What say you?
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I often get questions and concerns about using tools like foursquare or Facebook places. This blog post is just a simple, quick tip I wanted to share. Many people worry the dangers of sharing your exact location, in real-time. A friend of mine has even blogged about her uncomfortable experience. If you’re worried about using foursquare to broadcast where you are, I often tell friends to…

…check-in when you leave.

This way, you still can use the tools, but just more responsibly.

Often it’s easy to forget that the physical world and the digital world are intrinsically connected. I still believe the biggest value of using location based social networking only comes when you share it with your friends in real-time. I’ve had some great impromptu meetups with clients and friends. But, by waiting to check-in until after you leave, this allows you to use the technology in a responsible way.

My Rule of Thumb To Follow: If you’re posting to Twitter, wait until you are leaving to check-in.

My Other Rule of Thumb: Your friend circle on location based networks should be smaller and more intimate (e.g. foursquare or Gowalla), only accept friend requests for people you know IRL.
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The social media team I lead at Digital Evolution Group is continuing to roll-out some great stuff. I lead the team that launched a Facebook project for Crocs and their Facebook page (you know, the company that makes the really super comfy shoes).

This is the default tab that appears when you go to the Crocs Facebook page (for non-fans). What is really slick is users are never taken away from Facebook to a new window or website. After users click submit, the app we coded transfers the customer information into a list within Exact Target (the email platform Crocs uses for their email marketing). We’ve found that the conversion rates dramatically decrease when you directing users out of Facebook. So this application, keeps users within Facebook, while still passing the data. Furthermore, we are able to present unique confirmation page graphic, encouraging users to click the “Like” button after they submit the form.

The free 20% coupon is what we call at DEG a “give to get” tactic. Users must provide their email address to receive the 20% coupon and agree to receive email updates with other special offers and discounts. Studies have found that customers are most likely to provide their email address in exchange for a discount or promotion.

I’m really proud of the team that put this project together and wanted to share this with you. You grab your own free coupon on the Crocs Facebook page.
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