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South by Southwest Interactive begins in ernest tomorrow as geeks from everywhere descend upon Austin, Texas. If you’ve heard of “South by,” you’ve probably been told it’s an amazing experience that is largely defined by parties and networking. Conference productivity is often tossed by the wayside at these things, but if you don’t plan for business success while attending them, then why are you going?

Conferences of any kind are only as productive as you make them. You can to to every session and learn a lot. You can go to none and do the same. If you’re goals are more business driven, the hallways and blogger lounges are where the action is, if not the exhibition floor. But you can’t just show up and be productive.

As a veteran, albeit a self-appointed title, of many a conference, summit, seminar and boot camp, here’s how I ensure the trip is worthwhile:

Have A Goal

Do you want to learn? Do you want to get in front of venture capitalists and pitch your start-up idea? Do you want to forge a relationship with an influential blogger that can help spread the word about your business? Do you want to find a new job? Know what you’re trying to accomplish so you have a litmus test for decision making. When you’re faced with the decision of going to lunch with your buddies or attending a sponsored lunch/Tweet-up where you know several willing VCs will be milling about, ask: Which will help accomplish my goal of getting funding?

Have A Plan

Whether it’s mapping out the sessions you want to attend or the parties you want to be seen at, going in blindly means you’re going to wind up following everyone else. If you do that, you get sucked into watching them accomplish their goals, if they have any. While the camaraderie and relationship building with the people you know is a big part of getting something out of a conference, it can also be a diversion from what you want to do. Sure, being flexible and going with the flow is good in some instances, but don’t fall into the, “I’ll just do it tomorrow,” trap.

Have A Pitch

Whether you have a defined business objective for the conference or are just going to soak it all in, put together an elevator speech for who you are and what you do. You’ll meet a ton of people. Don’t leave any of them wondering about you, but make your pitch short and concise. Perhaps even do one in 140 characters to force out the B.S.

“I am a speaker, educator and consultant building an online learning community for those interested in understanding social media and Internet technologies for their business.”

Have A Limit

Time will be of the essence in networking, listening to product pitches, pitching your own to as many people as possible, attending sessions and events. Unless you’re locked in to conversations with the people who are helping you get to your goal for the event, know when to step away nicely. I get pitched a lot at conferences. People want me to blog about their gizmo, tool, platform and program. I listen to each pitch, make a quick determination as to whether or not it’s something I might write about, then ask the person to email me details if it is. Some are more persistent than others, but almost everyone understands at that point, I need to move on and I will take the time to look at your thing. Worst case scenario, look at the time and say, “I’m sorry. Maybe we can catch up later? I’ve got to get to a thing. Hit me on Twitter!” It’s polite and non-committal.

Have Another Limit

Most people know that I enjoy a good party. In fact, my South by Southwest experience this year is largely defined by Firefly Funnel Cake Fandango, which is a social event with yummy spirits and snacks. It would be easy for me to have too much fun this week in Nashville, Little Rock and Dallas en route to Austin, then spend the weekend recovering while SXSW ensues. This is one major reason the spirits companies remind us to drink responsibly. Imagine what you want to feel like tomorrow. Base how much you drink tonight on that.

Have Play Time

The evenings at South by Southwest, and many other conferences for that matter, are filled with fun. Sometimes there are daytime events that fit that bill as well. Factor some fun into your experience, rest up for it and plan on letting loose. But schedule the fun around your business goals, not the other way around. Think about it this way, would you rather walk away from the conference with a killer new client, job opportunity or influential friend, or just a killer hangover and a tattoo you can’t explain?

Whatever your goals for South by Southwest, or other conferences you might attend, I hope you reach them. I’ve got my docket full to hit mine. See you in Austin.

Social media platforms are tools. Social media platforms are software. There are other tools and software out there. There will be better tools around the corner.

Twitter doesn’t matter. Facebook doesn’t matter. LinkedIn doesn’t matter. Blogs don’t matter. They all just help us get a little closer to what we really want.

• What we really want is the truth.
• What we really want is to trust.
• What we really want is to understand.
• What we really want is friendship.
• What we really want is help.

This month is a HUGE month for one of my good friends in technology. He’s moving his social media company from Indiana to California. He’s going to be embedded in the heart of The Valley with some of the other sharp minds that have grown their social media applications explosively. (Yes, I’m a little bit jealous).

The application that his team built is simple (so is Twitter!) but it gets to the heart of what people really want. They make it easier. The platform is simply the means to get to the social part. I’m not underestimating the incredible talent and imagination it took to launch such a cool application, there’s no doubt. But the popularity is because of what the application enables. It enables a social engagement we’ve not seen yet.

I educate clients and customers about the technology so that we can fully leverage it and maximize their social impact. So, when clients ask me, “How do I get more [insert followers, fans, subscribers, buzz, retweets], I’m always a little put off. If your company is not a social company, if you don’t care about your clients, if you don’t write fantastic content, if you don’t have a great product, if you don’t have special people, if you’re not remarkable… then the big numbers won’t do you any good.

I keep saying it…. Social media is an amplifier. If you have nothing to amplify, then the biggest amplifier in the world won’t help! Stop searching for bigger and better social media experts to keep building bigger and better amplifiers for you. It’s what they’re amplifying that makes the difference.

It’s the equivalent of someone who can’t sing asking us to fill a stadium. After we fill the stadium, then what? If you can’t sing, we had no business selling a single ticket! Folks like me can get people to show up to the concert… then it’s your job to put on a heck of a show!

So… quit asking me to get you more if you can’t handle the ones you have now. If your 500 followers aren’t doing business with you, then how is getting you 5,000 more going to improve your results? Here’s a tip… it will result in ten times the impact.

Ten times zero is zero.

Some day Twitter won’t be here, Facebook won’t be here, LinkedIn won’t be here… and we’ll be working with newer channels that may continue to make things just a little bit easier. Those new media platforms still won’t be able to fix the core issues challenging your strategy, though. Let’s fix those first.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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Social media monitoring firm Sysomos is launching a free location-based monitoring service today it’s calling FourWhere. The tool mines publicly available Foursquare data (tips) and mashes them up with a Google map of the location you’ve entered. There’s no sign-up or account required. It’s just clever link-bait and enthusiasm-building from one of the emerging players in the social media monitoring market.

My first reaction to this was, “Can’t you just search for a location in Foursquare and get the same thing?” Apparently not. Foursquare seems to offer only the actual location (e.g. – “Toast, Louisville, Ky.”) not the area. (A search for “Louisville, Ky.” produced next to nothing.) If FourWhere provides that, it will be an improvement over what is available.

I got a sneak peek and logged in. You pick a location on the map, right click and choose to show venues or comments. What you get is an immediate scan of any Foursquare info in the immediate area. This is extremely useful if you’re looking for recommendations and referrals and, if FourWhere catches on, or similar services emerge, it makes a business’s use of location-based services all the more important in their social media marketing activities.

According to Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal, the service will soon add information from Yelp, Gowalla, Twitter and other social sources. Now that would be pretty compelling. Keep an eye on it to see what happens.

To their credit, Sysomos has sold itself as offering geo-targeting for quite a while when other social media monitoring services have shied away from it. Offering geo-location for blogs, Tweets, Facebook posts, etc., is not an exact science. You can’t use IP address information to do it. DirecTV satellite users in, say Iowa, still register as being from Los Angeles, for example. So there has to be some public data mining and matching to know a certain blogger hails from Louisville. If you’re using machines to do it, it’s tough. If you’re using humans, it doesn’t scale.

Now that location-based services are offering more data (until recently it was pretty much Yelp and a couple review sites) the Sysomoses of the world are jumping on offering that information up in useful and compelling ways. We’ll see how well it works. Kudos to them for jumping on the opportunity.

For more on Sysomos, check out my review of their offering from November of 2009 when they added Facebook data mining to their Heartbeat services.

And when you jump into FourWhere, come back and tell us what you think. I’m sure Nilesh and gang will be monitoring what you have to say. It’s kinda what they do.

Good friend, Duncan Alney shared this with me today. Let’s hear it for New Dorks…

Heidi, if you’re still looking for me, you can reach me at 317.456.2564…. if I clear out my voicemail box.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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I’ll always remember my high school economics teacher, Mr. Dilk. Aside from his hilarious self-censorship when it was obvious he wanted to curse (“Well … BUGS!”) his repetitive use of cliches actually managed to drive certain bits of wisdom into my hormone-addled brain. Among his favorites:

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Now, this is before the invention of those awful motivational posters with pictures of whale tails and people climbing mountains you see in every corporate office. The dispensation of sage advice was the territory of your parents, teachers, and PBS. Despite the hackneyed nature of such counsel, this one stuck with me.

Now in my professional life, planning takes up a significant portion of my time, and for good reason. When putting together a content and social media strategy, the single most important task is to establish which platforms and services are most useful for your needs and plan your approach accordingly.

Not only does taking a willy-nilly approach dilute your brand personality, it’s also financially wasteful. Without an accurate accounting of what’s been done where–and the time spent doing it–your online efforts are a complete waste of time and money.

Any digital shop worth their salt will pitch you their planning process. If they don’t, ask them about it. If they hem and haw or outright don’t have one, run away. You will find your online marketing budget shrinking and have nothing much to show for it besides canceled checks.

To that end, if your company is in a position to go it alone in the digital space, I highly recommend you look at CMO’s Guide to the Social Landscape. It’s basically a social media cheat sheet to the benefits and shortcomings of the top platforms and services. The analysis was performed by 97th Floor, and it’s a great one-sheet resource guide.

There are numerous social network services out there; no single one is the right one, just as trying to utilize all of them isn’t effective. There is no one answer, no single social media content approach that works for every client. By engaging in thoughtful, constructive planning, you make the best use of your time and money.

This post was written by Matt Chandler

Matt is the Vice President of Content Strategy for Raidious Digital Content Services. He has over 10 years’ experience managing online content for enterprise organizations including NYU Langone Medical Center, Community Health Network and the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System. He also has a ridiculous vinyl record collection and a pug named George Benson.

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Some of you know my dad, Chillie Falls, owns a funnel cake trailer. He even blogs about his adventures selling cakes all over Virginia and elsewhere. You also probably know that I’ve been known to put on a party or two in my time. And yeah, sometimes they sound like an odd combination of locations and themes, but we always wind up blowing the roof off the joint.

When Dad joined Twitter and started chatting with all the freaks and geeks in Internetland, he said, “I’d love to go to one of these conferences and meet all these folks.” Well, get ready, Dad.

Big Red, Dad and I are road trippin’ it to Austin, Texas, to bring Firefly Funnel Cake Fandango to South by Southwest. But we’re stopping along the way to make sure as many people as possible get some of that Funnel Cake Fandango magic. Make sure to follow the action on Dad’s blog where we’ll be posting video diaries of the fun … which may wind up NSFW, so ease up in the cubicle farms, if you know what I mean.

Each night, Dad will pull Big Red up to an exclusive location and serve funnel cakes to anyone willing to buy. Firefly Vodka thought the trip was a cool idea and is sponsoring our shenanigans, too. Drink specials will be had, my friends. (Not to mention, Dad’s been working on a special Firefly Vodka funnel cake glaze. So much for my diet, right?)

We’re stopping at three exclusive locations en route and we want you to join us for a Firefly Funnel Cake Fandango FEEDUP:

Tuesday, March 9
Nashville, Tennessee – Corner Pub, 2000 Broadway

RSVP FOR NASHVILLE AT TWTVITE.COM

Wednesday, March 10
Little Rock, Arkansas – Big Whiskeys – 225 E. Markham Street

RSVP FOR LITTLE ROCK AT TWTVITE.COM

Thursday, March 11
Dallas, Texas – Black Finn’s – 4440 Beltline Road – Addison

RSVP FOR DALLAS AT TWTVITE.COM

The trip culminates with our opening night in Austin, Friday, March 12, for the official Firefly Funnel Cake Fandango at Molotov on West Sixth. Check out the RSVP page on Eventbrite. Social Media Explorer and Blue Clover Studios join forces with Firefly Vodka to put on a regular hootenanny. Come see some killer augmented reality, taste test (or just taste … or test) Firefly Vodka, get one of Dad’s famous funnel cakes (special ones have the Firefly glaze) and hang with some cool cats.

Austin is nuts and parties abound on Friday night. But it doesn’t take much to swing by for a funnel cake! We’ll be there from 8:30 until 1 … or so.

Nashville … Little Rock … Dallas … Austin … We can’t wait to hang with ya. Come see Dad, me, get a funnel cake and try some Firefly. Oh … and drink responsibly. See you soon.

Last April, I did a post about Google Local business. This weekend, I picked up my daughter from her hair appointment. The salon was beautiful and the folks working there were fantastic. The owner asked me what I did for a living and I told him I helped companies with their online marketing.

We were standing at a computer and he shared with me that his point of sales provider also did his website. I asked him to search on Google for “Hair Stylist, Greenwood, IN“. Up popped up a nice map with all of his competition… but no entry for his salon. I walked him through publishing his business on Google Local business and it took all of 10 minutes.

If you’re in the business of selling websites for regional businesses or doing local search engine optimization, how can you leave this out of your strategy? It’s free, it’s at the top of the search results page, and it’s easy to use! Google has even added local status updates to the page.

Even if you’re not a regional business, I would still advise you to use the service. Businesses like to utilize local resources because they’re easier to communicate with, visit, and get support from. Shop local, buy local, search local… and list your business so that you’re found. Bing also has a Local Listings Center

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This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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Each day, The Marketing Technology Blog sends out an email via MailChimp that automatically converts the blog’s feed to nicely formatted HTML email. There’s only a couple hundred folks that take advantage of it – a fraction of the readership of this blog on a daily basis. That’s okay… it’s a niche and feeds those who want it. I don’t try to artificially grow the list, it’s got great retention and does the trick for those who want my blog in their inbox.

Email is a push marketing channel. I’m a huge advocate of permission-based email marketing but I believe the majority of companies utilize email ineffectively.

• Email marketers don’t measure their email list retention, they only pay attention to how many are on the list at any one time. Your list acquisition may be outpacing your retention. If you’re getting a lot of unsubscribes, you need to fix something sooner rather than later.
• Email marketers believe that incredibly low open and conversion rates are good when they’re above industry averages. Folks, a 4% click-through rate off of an email is a 96% failure rate and not something to celebrate.
• Email marketers often have a calendar that requires them to publish, regardless of whether or not the content is crap or not. I get emails in my inbox every week and I seriously wonder how the company possibly thought there was something intriguing enough to send it.
• Email marketers believe in email math: If 10 people purchased from my list of 1,000 on my weekly email, I can double sales with 2 emails per week. It’s like printing money. No… it’s not. More lackluster emails may initially provide an increase in sales, but ultimately you’re going to lose valuable subscribers.

Although the cost of email marketing is plummeting, it still costs companies a lot of time and some money to send email. I haven’t tried to push my email or dress it up because I’m not sure it will do well with readers. Perhaps if I can have dedicated content in the email down the road – but I’m not going to send out crappy emails for the sake of trying to get a few more eyeballs.

The best thing you can do for a company who sends a crappy email is to unsubscribe. Don’t wait for the email to get better – send them a message today. Clean up your inbox.

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This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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Sunday’s Courier-Journal, Louisville’s daily newspaper, is one of the few tactile media publications I still read. I get the paper every day delivered in my RSS feeds, but Sunday mornings with local newspapers are still useful, if for the experience alone. My wife enjoys perusing the coupons. I like reading feature stories and the agate page of the sports section to see items from out-of-market or small college teams the paper never covers.

Sunday, I ran across an interesting article about Fred Greenhalgh’s podcasts at Finalrune.com. The piece was a nice explanation of how Greenhalgh is sort of bringing back the radio drama through his podcasts. The article was a nice read and of decent length and gave me a few moments to revisit my days in radio, but also appreciate the modern medium of Internet podcasts and what can be done with them.

But then I realized something very, very sad.

Image via Wikipedia

The article, found in the Sunday Forum section of the Courier-Journal, was written by Barry Newman. Of the Wall Street Journal. Fred Greenhalgh lives in Portland, Maine. Not a shred of this article had anything to do with Louisville, Kentucky or the surrounding area. On the surface, that might seem like a nonsense criticism of the Courier-Journal’s lack of local focus and wire copy back-falling. I did enjoy the article, after all. But when you consider the similar story of J.C. Hutchins, you see my point.

J.C. Hutchins couldn’t get 7th Son published. The Louisville native had created a masterful first attempt at a book, but publishers were frigid on it. Not one to give up on a dream, Hutchins turned the unpublished work into a published one using the Internet. The 7th Son podcasts grew virally until legions of Clone Army insiders were downloading, blogging, taking pictures in Clone Army shirts and more. The imagination of Hutchins’s futuristic, sci-fi story captured that of thousands.

So much so that a publisher finally realized the mistake and published 7th Son.

A Louisville native, product of Atherton High School, Western Kentucky University graduate, using podcasting, creating audio experiences that not only capture imaginations like radio dramas, but lead to overcoming publishing world obstacles and turning his book dream into reality … that’s the story the Courier-Journal needs to tell. Sadly, it hasn’t. Searching the C-J finds no mention of J.C. Hutchins anywhere. Other local newspapers don’t fare much better.

While there’s nothing wrong with the Courier-Journal telling both stories, and one example does not an industry fault make, the facts of the matter are this: The Wall Street Journal charges for its online content because it is original and serves its audience supremely. The Courier-Journal and similar local newspapers could never get away with monetizing their content because they’re so busy finding wire copy (ironically from the Wall Street Journal) to fill a spot in their Sunday Forum that they don’t even notice stories that their audiences would really care about.

While local newspapers aren’t exactly facing competition from primary new media sources (yet), they must get rid of the notion that they are to supply the entire world’s news and notes to their readers. Or at least realize that if their content isn’t locally relevant and of service to its geographic footprint, it is less relevant than other mediums that are. We will pay for good content. We won’t pay for our local newspaper’s online version. And yes, those two concepts are very much connected.

This is the second time I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with Steven Woods from Eloqua, author of Digital Body Language. At Webtrends Engage conference, Steven did a fantastic job of describing a typical scenario of a purchase made online… and how our data may be failing us.

I can’t stress how important it is to recognize the changes in marketing and sales that are needed to handle the changes that are happening in the buying process. One of the reasons social media has become so important is that we know that decision-making is now happening within and around our network. It’s a disruptive shift that companies must adapt to.

Social media isn’t always a finite measurement… I believe it’s one that can be measured enough to provide a positive return on investment, though. That’s the responsibility of marketing and social media consultants. That return is becoming much greater than what we can accurately measure!

I recognize, even with my clients, that its far more complex… but we start with the very basics and move forward. I don’t typically finish the social media and integration projects I work on – it’s a moving target and we must continue to refine and enhance as demand requires. Get a solid foundation out that incorporates best practices and that can be accurately measured. Then measure, test, and adjust your execution to maximize results.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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