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Read MoreDo You Poken?
Poken seems to have taken over the techie space as the next big thing in conferences and networking. Don’t know what a Poken is? Well, it’s basically a USB drive with a cartoon character for a cover. The drive has software installed on it that automatically connects to the Poken website when you plug it in. It also has a sensor on the hand that flashes when you “high 4” with another poken, effectively exchanging virtual contact information.
I first learned of this product at Affiliate Summit East 2009, thanks to Peter Shankman mentioning them in his keynote. It seemed like everyone wanted a Poken after that – and many people bought some from Peter before the conference was over. Peter has obviously identified these cute little virtual business cards as a significant advance in sharing contact information, a “game-changer”, even.
But are Poken really the wave of the future?
It depends who you are. If you travel and network a lot, they could be incredibly useful as they pick up popularity and more people are available for you to “high 4” with. Shelly Good-Cook says of the device, “I bought one a couple months and other than my twin sister, for whom I also bought one, I haven’t found anyone to “high five” mine with. I took it to a networking event I attended in Arlington, VA recently where most of the attendees were young, hip and computer savvy, but none of them had heard of it yet. I even met a reporter who covered that beat and it was new to her, so I gave her the scoop on it, hoping she covers it. They may have won a Tech Crunch Award in Europe, but they still have work to do in the U.S. before they get wide spread adoption. For me, this is like the early days of the fax machine. I have one but there isn’t much value in it until a lot more people get one. Most of the people I talked to about it at the networking event thought it was a great idea, although some of the men were less than thrilled with the limited design options. Most thought $20 was reasonable for the functionality although a few balked at the price point, stating it was much too high.”
Poken has responded to the cartoon complaints and come out with a more professional looking Poken, the Poken Pulse, that looks much closer to a traditional USB drive and boasts 2GB of space and traditional USB drive functionality in addition to the Poken networking features. At a higher price point, I actually expect more professionals will go with it over the cartoonish regular Poken as it does have that added functionality. Most of the feedback I get about Poken are from my contacts in the affiliate marketing community, and I wonder now that there have been a couple more conferences if they’ve gotten more use. Elizabeth Hannan said of her Poken, “I have had a experience with Poken at SXSW 09 where I was first introduced to Poken. It was incredibly helpful and made awkward introductions into easy conversations.”. I can definitely see how that is beneficial for those of us that are friendly but not incredibly extroverted.
Whether or not these are the wave of the future, time will tell. The buzz has seemed to died down in the last few months, but they’re not being tossed aside with that m100 Palm Pilot just yet. Do you Poken? Share your story!
Read MoreQuick Update on Web 2.0 Expo
Yes, that’s where I’ve been Wednesday and Thursday, and will return to on Friday. It’s been a different experience for me; this is my first time attending Web 2.0 Expo and I don’t have a full conference pass, so I’m limited to what’s open for all attendees, namely the expo hall and the sponsored sessions.
My original intention was the live blog the sessions, but with no tables in the session rooms at Moscone and a spotty wifi connection, that’s obviously not been happening. But as always I have my notes and will share them with you next week!
In the meantime I guess, look for my Twitter posts with the hashtag #w2e for my tweets from the conference.
Read MoreAffiliate Summit Mentor Program – Deadline is CLOSE!
For those of you who don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, at the last Affiliate Summit in Boston a great new tradition was started. The Affiliate Summit Mentor Program. This program, headed by the gracious Teresa Caldwell for Affiliate Summit East and now headed by awesome Jen Goode for Affiliate Summit West, is a way for first time conference attendees to learn the ropes.
I remember my first summit, not that long ago, in Miami in July 07. SO overwhelmed with information, especially considering that was my first trade show at ALL and I was relatively new to affiliate marketing and hadn’t been exposed to the industry at large. I’m not the only first time attendee to feel consumed by it all, hence why the mentor program was created. The program matches up volunteer mentors who have experience attending the shows and know generally what to expect and how to get the most out of your attendance, with newbie first timers who’ve asked for a bit of guidance.
At the last summit I agreed to be a mentor, having that be my 3rd show attending, and I felt the experience didn’t go all that well. I exchanged a few emails with my assigned newbie/”mentee” and after they didn’t respond to the last email, that was it – unfortunately I didn’t know if they even ended up attending the show or not.
Hence my reluctance to sign up this time around. I didn’t feel like I was that helpful, and I guess the person was less-than-impressed with who I was the first time, which made me think that perhaps I’m not the best person to be a mentor. But the ever wise Jen Goode convinced me to give it another shot, so I’m happy to say that once again I’m participating in the mentor program for Affiliate Summit West 09 in Las Vegas next month.
I just received the email with my newbie’s information, and I’m off to shot them a welcome – if you’re a veteran attendee of the Affiliate Summit, and haven’t signed up yet, DO IT! Go to http://blog.affiliatesummit.com/affiliate-summit-mentor-program and sign up today – the deadline is December 28th!
Also, watch this video that former mentee turned mentor Michael Buechele of 11|15 Media did if you need more convincing!
Social Media Marketing Summit: Karl Long
As an excellent last minute addition, Karl Long wasn’t in the schedule for the summit and delayed the release of attendees to the reception cocktail party, but it was well worth it! I thoroughly enjoyed his presentation, titled “Employing Your Customers for Fun and Profit”, and had the pleasure of having an interesting conversation with him and some other attendees during the reception party. So, without further ado, the presenter was:
- Karl Long, Product Manager OVI/Games, Nokia
This session was basically about utilizing social media to get your customers involved to the point where they’re even working for you!
Bullet Point Review!
- Social media is an engine in which to create value.
- Modern marketing theory comes from the last 50 years.
- Companies tend to focus on one motivation – to purchase.
- Tool: trendwatching.com
- Telling people to “pass it on” is a bit insulting to your customer’s intelligence.
- Employ your customers – have them help you create value in a very web 2.0 way.
- Make it easy to join and easy to get better.
- Reward the right behaviors.
- Recognize top performers.
- Allow exchanges.
- Provide rich feedback.
- Experiment. Fail. Learn.
- Now’s the time to fail – fail fast so you can succeed sooner.
Points brought up during the Q&A
If a company can’t survive, do they warrant survival? Some people see this as a threat – people woill eventually accept it and adopt it, like the internet in general.- Are there companies that shouldn’t participate in social media? If you can’t handle transparency, don’t do it.
- How do you convince your company to spend money to fail? You have to foster the culture to experiment, it’s cheap to try anything with social media.
- Any strategy that relies on containment will fail.
- No walled garden will succeed (Blue Shirt Nation-type internal networks aside)
All in all it was a relevant and humorous presentation by Karl that really deserved better billing! Check out his blogs at ExperienceCurve.com and Tcritic.com.
Read MoreSocial Media Marketing Summit: Segmentation/Diversity
This session took place October 1st and promised to teach those in attendance how marketers can reach very specific groups of users via behavioral targeting, niche social sites, campaigns at specific demographics, hyper targeting and more. The panel consisted of:
- Chris Saad, Founder and CEO, DataPortability.org
- Will Moss, CEO, ConnectPlatform.com
- Ian Swanson, Founder and CEO, Sometrics
To be honest I didn’t like the unorganized nature the panelists took, but there were some decent take-home notes to be had from the session.
Bullet Point Review!
- Methods to find a niche are Google Search and Twitter Search.
- Don’t just observe, participate.
- Lots of people started with apps and then moved to a main web property.
- Find your audience – use demographics, psychographics, behavioral marketing – find them and partner up.
- Partner with fast growing niche networks or create one if it doesn’t exist yet in the niche you’re interested in.
- Experiment with creative ads with the owners of these networks.
- Advertising is yelling, marketing is having a conversation.
- Learn the social contract and participate accordingly.
- Have a process in place on how to respond and join the conversation.
- Put your money where your mouth is and allocate resources to monitor and respond in social media settings.
- There is a need for a new metric. Keywords used to tell people, not so much anymore.
- Need for interests to be measured (APML).
- How do you target? Try – do sample buys, experiment, do lots of little buys.
- Social networks are still cheap to advertise on because they don’t yet perform like traditional ad buys in terms of CPM.
- See what keywords people associate with your brand (quality, sucks, etc).
- Use social networking for lead generation.
- No one’s talking about your product, they’re talking about your brand – so collaborate and build a product that they’ll want to talk about.
- Use social media to saturate a niche market; brainstorm about communities of interest and participate and show your subject matter expertise.
- Use search engines to find individuals and follow them back to their communities.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- You might want to go local before going national – not all products and services scale effectively to a national audience.
- Widgets are the bumper sticker of the web.
- Develop content and specific tags (zip codes, city names, etc.) in targeting.
- Get analytics to see where your traffic is coming from.
- Keyword ads like AdWords, Facebook, MySpace are great for segmentation.
- Hyper targeting is growing in adoption.
- Open Social – create widgets that will work across multiple social networks.
- If you’re going to buy advertising on a social network, you should also participate in that network.
- Be part of that eco system in as many ways as possible.
- Using engagement to see how well ads work can also be used to see what a particular segment is interested in (e.g. how many people mouse over, click, etc.)
- Data portability will break down barriers to entry.
- Using a 3rd party metric contrasts vs. internal and lends credibility and gives you a comparison of you vs. your competitors.
Even the Q&A portion was just an extension of the session, so it was hard to really distinguish what people were asking. It was a decent session but could have been perked up with a bit more empirical data and maybe some real-world experiences.
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