XBlog

Entrance: Stage Right

You walk into a bar after a long day and see someone across the room sitting there, head down, eyes focused on their drink. What’s your first reaction?

You’re unlikely to strike up a conversation with an uninviting stranger. More likely you head over to the rail and order a drink. The two guys next to you are chatting it up, the topic sounds interesting, one of them notices your interest and brings you into the conversation.

You end up closing the bar with the guys, exchanging contact information and setting up plans to pursue some business initiatives in the future. All the while old sulky is sitting staring into his cups wishing his luck would change.

Old Routines

Bring this scenario into the world of digital marketing and you start getting an idea of what social media is all about.  What are you doing to promote this kind of connective conversation in your social media efforts? Are you a one person show? A big mouth self promoter? A sulking lurker?

Or have you embraced a bit of Vaudeville in your campaign and started playing the old good cop/bad cop routine with some trusted business associates across the web, or the old straight man/funny man. In other words are you using your conversations to promote your goals?

A Quick Question and Answer Session

How do you do what you love to do successfully?  Through conversations.

How do people hear about and share what you love to do?  Through conversations.

How do you meet the people who can help you do what you love to do?  Yeah,  you get the idea.

Worry Less, Do More

The old Vaudeville masters were great at conversation on and off the stage, more so they were great at turning a conversation into an opportunity. Whether it was to amuse or to milk the crowd, the old stars of the stage could converse their way to greatness.

With a bit of practice you can start using your conversations to do the same thing. If you’re chatting on Twitter it’s a public forum for your ideas. Why not stop wasting time worrying about what to say, and start saying something that will get people interested in what you’re doing!

Innovation in the Personal Enterprise

Chicago’s Western Suburbs have long been a hub of technological innovation, after all we have two of the largest national laboratories right here in our backyard! So when XNet Information Systems saw the opportunity to host a TEDx event that would showcase some of the incredible minds at work in the area we leapt at the chance.

Organizing this even has been a great opportunity, not only to rediscover places like Argonne and FermiLab, but also to meet with some new faces and develop deeper relationships with some acquaintances who, it turns out, are stellar innovators in their own right!

Cross Fertilization & Joint Partnerships

Entrepreneurship & innovation go hand in hand. Silicon Valley was founded through joint
partnerships between government agencies and Stanford University to push innovation in
the electronic communications field during World War II and very little has changed since
Stanford set up their entrepreneurship model. New companies spring up daily from the
fertile field of graduate students coming out of institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and
Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Business.

Robert Wolcott and Michael J. Lippitz’ studies of corporate entrepreneurship provide an
interesting look at the classic structure developed by Stanford for large organizations
to promote innovation through entrepreneurial divisions and subsidiaries. Their updated
review provides a clear picture of how large, centralized organizations can still utilize
the maneuverability of entrepreneurship to spur innovation despite the tendency towards
stagnation frequently encountered in the hierarchical management models and cut/paste
best practices common to most large companies.

Back to Their Roots

Even government organizations like NASA are returning to their entrepreneurial roots and
discussing how to use the private sector to create more efficient innovation in the realm
of space exploration. We often forget that stalwarts like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
at CalTech were originally organized using as many ‘hobbyists’ as certified academic
scientists. Since advanced communications allow for greater leverage of entrepreneurial
growth in innovation, and allow organizations and individuals to collaborate in ways that
were impossible before, there is much to be said for this shift in focus back to the
private sector.

Models such as those described by Wolcott, Mohanbir Sawhney, and Inigo Arroniz’ in their
‘12 Different Ways for Companies to Innovate‘ in the MIT Sloan Management Review are
helpful tools for aging organizations looking to capitalize on these trends. It’s
interesting to observe the struggle these organizations are having as communication
technology supports more decentralized models and make it difficult for the often
unwieldy corporate behemoths to move forward in this environment.

The Discussion Continues

We’re very excited to have Robert join us as a speaker at TEDxNaperville.  He has found that the techniques for innovation at the enterprise level can be applied to personal goals as well. It’s a perfect circle that mirrors the return of larger organizations to their entrepreneurial roots and we’re looking forward to discussing the future of entrepreneurship & innovation with him.

As a co-founder of the Kellogg Innovation Network in 2003 with colleague Mohan Sawheny, and with his work at the Pentagon’s Institute for Defense Analysis, he represents a long tradition of collaboration between academia, government and corporations. These collaborative efforts form the basis for the advancements that mark the 21st century and will surely continue to lead us into the future.

Happy Birthday Edgar, Thanks for the Advice!

Edgar Allan Poe may seem an unlikely advisor in the burgeoning carnival of social media, but his visually oriented writing style is the perfect accomplice to a devilishly effective digital marketing campaign. “Visual” language is the ideal technique for a medium that doesn’t provide proper context for the non-verbal cues making up more than 70% of our communication.

Visual Language

As the French critical theorist Jacques Ellul pointed out in his book The Humiliation of the Word:

“We are dazed by sight — by an image or a vision. The word takes us to the edge…only when descriptive and painting extremely precise images.”

He quickly goes on to discuss Poe’s narrative style as an early example of the visual language that would come to define Western fiction. This visual language is a necessary component to any digital conversation since it recreates the emotional expression left off by text based communication.

Examining the Elements

Examining the elements of Poe’s prose we can find some very helpful clues for writing in an effective and actionable voice perfectly suited to the digital domain:

1. Who am “I”: Poe is famous for his use of first person narrative. In fact this is a common trope in ghost stories or as they get called in the American idiom “Weird Tales”. This technique is a simple psychological trick that forces the reader to constantly repeat “I” as they read. After the first paragraph the reader begins to visualize the story as if it were literally happening to them.
2. Where are we?: From the dim ossuaries of the Cask of Amontillado to the multi-colored pageantry that portends a decadent end in The Masque of the Red Death, Poe is a master at providing small visual clues that help the reader picture the setting. The key here is that he only focuses on a few important items, allowing the mind of the reader to create the rest of the picture. When the reader is engaged in actively participating in the “creation” of the scene it’s more easily integrated into their conscious understanding.
3. The high and low: Poe spices his stories with arcane references to Leibnitz, Persian folk tales, and Greek philosophy which give them an air of sophistication and high culture. However, his time at West Point didn’t leave him a stranger to the bowery and burned out fringes of society. Writing is about communication, and full communication is a vertical process, sticking to one end of the tax bracket or the other will leave your writing pale and empty. This goes for diction, syntax, grammar, etc. Loosen up; digital media is about conversations not the Chicago Manual of Style.
4. More with less: As one of the first practitioners of the contemporary short-story Poe was an early adopter of the ‘micro’ format that has progressed down it’s diminutive path to now include messages with no more than 140 characters of type. Living in an urban center like Boston during the industrial revolution, Poe’s style was affected by the speed of “modern” life. Writing for money meant that he had to pay attention to what his audience wanted and with the world moving faster, longer books didn’t look to be best sellers.
5. Who done it?: Another first that Poe brought to the fictional forefront was the detective genre. Readers become more engaged when their enwrapped in a mystery and if the story is published in a serial format they’re more likely to buy the next installment when they’re left on edge. Engaging clients in your company’s digital media efforts requires a similar approach. Whether they are solving a mystery or following a story, the development of your brand’s media outreach should reflect a progression that leads them deeper into the conversation.

Are You a Conversationalist or a Conman?

Cultivating genuine value from business relationships requires more than well branded sales slicks, promotional emails, press releases and the occasional “reconnect” call. At the highest point of the Ars Venditiones (Art of Sales) the client seeks to connect without prompting and urges others to do the same for a very simple reason:

To continue a good conversation…

Marketing is the term used to describe the craft of creating this conversation. The most skilled practitioners carry on disembodied conversations with captivated audiences that can include millions of participants. The marketer effortlessly encapsulates and heightens a few key commonalities and sculpts a conversation that can reach across the most stalwart cultural and synaptic barriers.

Why then has the image of the marketer become so tainted? After all wasn’t Shakespeare in some sense merely hocking valuable cultural capital when he wrote Julius Caesar? Et tu Guy Kawasaki?

Molecule and Model

The difference is one of art and technique, of a molecule and a molecular model. The best contemporary sales and marketing professionals are technicians and cultural fashion designers of the highest order. They are not artists. Efficient technique and the living embodiment of an art form are two different playgrounds.

Shakespeare was a successful Elizabethan propagandist whose PR work became a center point of English literature. Even as a solid politico for Queen ‘Liza and her ladies, he was still a highly evocative, illuminated and urbane Enlightenment playwright. Shakespeare knew the art of conversations well and was a master at selling his audience.

Performance Art

Contemporary marketing professionals can’t boast this kind of reputation. No one is, nor will they be, performing Guy’s blog posts in public parks and it’s highly doubtful that anyone getting info off Alltop is experiencing the heights of existential expression. (Actually this might be a good idea for avant-pop college thespians to get some viral traction on YouTube…but is it worth it?)

The majority of marketing leaders are simply technicians and creators of fast fashion. In the same way that a good mechanic can fix your engine, they are adept at fixing your messaging. He can tighten the bolts, diagnose problems and will give you the proper oil, but he isn’t going to break into universal sublimity. Marketing has fallen into the hands of fashionistas bent on prettying the outside at the expense of a deeper meaning.  Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?

Wise Words from the Departed

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) remarked that “fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.” When food looks good people eat it, and you can make your brand look as tasty as you want, but when the people you feed start getting dysentery they’re unlikely to come back for more. Foster a conversation that lasts and encourages your client to bring others to the table. Don’t force feed them cardboard until they wise up and leave.

Take some time going into the new year and ask yourself…

Are you a conversationalist? Or are you just running a con?

Come to XNet’s “Annual” Open House!

It’s that time again! XNet Information Systems will be hosting our “annual” Christmas open house on December 22nd, from 4:00 pm until 8:00 pm.

We assure you there’ll be a wide variety of food, microbrew beer and fine wine to enjoy! We even have some surprises in store and cupcake creations that will leave the epicureans drooling.

This year we’ll be premiering:

• TEDx - Naperville: The first TEDx event in the Chicagoland suburbs!
• XNet’s Digital Engagement Audit and Digital Media Services: In depth intelligence on where you’re at on the Social Media scene!
• Our soon to be released remote storage solution.

3 years have passed since the founding of our Critical Computing Facility and we’ll be offering tours during the open house.  As always founders Arthur Zards (@zards on Twitter) and Brian Clark will be on hand to talk shop, catch up on your business, and discuss what’s coming down the line.

We’ll be running our “annual” raffle again this year so remember to RSVP via email and attend the open house to be eligible to win.

Mark your calendars for December 22nd, 4:00-8:00pm at our offices; 3080 Ogden Ave, Suite 303, Lisle, IL.

Looking forward to seeing you here!

Lewis University Radio (WLRA) & United Way of Will County Team Up With XNet to Bring You the Spirit & Sounds of the Season

The holiday season has arrived with its usual dance of dry leaves and dropping mercury. To spark the spirit of giving Lewis University Radio (WLRA) has partnered with United Way of Will County to put a spotlight on United Way and their 46 Partner Agencies whose year round mission is to help alleviate the struggle of those less fortunate in the community.

WLRA will be playing Christmas music from Thanksgiving until New Years and instead of commercials, every 15 minutes they’ll air brief messages about United Way Agencies and what they’re doing to make things a little bit better for a whole lot of people who need it. The real gift is that WLRA is doing this free of charge so United Way can focus on what it does best, helping people.

So what does this have to do with XNet?

Well, first of all we host WLRA’s website and streaming internet radio, and we’re proud to see one of our clients doing something this generous. With the economy the way it is every little bit counts, and over a month of free advertising for United Way accounts for more than a little.

On top of that we wouldn’t feel right if we just sat around talking about what others are doing. Whether it’s the Silicon Prairie Social or the upcoming TEDx Naperville we’ve always got our hands in something that we hope will give back to the community.  So in support of WLRA, United Way and their 46 Partner Agencies, XNet will be donating, completely free of cost, the bandwidth for streaming WLRA on the internet.

If you have an iPhone you can download Lewis University’s new streaming radio app for free and enjoy WLRA’s seasonal offerings wherever you go:

“Christmas Memories For You and Your Family”  (Lewis University’s iPhone app requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later)

Even if you don’t have an iPhone, check out WLRA online and hear what it sounds like to really care about community:

www.wlraradio.com

And while you’re at it don’t forget to stop by United Way of Will County’s website and maybe do a little giving of your own:

www.uwwill.org

9 Axioms of an Enlightened Marketer

With all the talk in the media and trade mags of a new Renaissance, we’ve been taking some time to evaluate what exactly that might mean. Since the staff at XNet have never looked good in plunging necklines or crushed velvet we’ve decided to move the clock forward past the average futurist’s line of sight, buckle on our shoes, and start settling in for the Post-Neo-Renaissance Enlightenment.

We hope that things may have rounded out by then so that Marketing is no longer the handmaid of Deceit. To spur this desperately needed transition along here are 9 marketing axioms that eschew baroque emotional appeal and embrace the cold elegance of reason:

~ : 9 Axioms of an Enlightened Marketer : ~

1. We are conversationalists, not carny barkers. Conversing leads to engagement, barking just moves the shills along.
2. Engagement requires active participation. Remote islands with hostile inhabitants are rarely visited by the vacationing set.
3. To participate you must be present at the party, to be present you must be an agreeable guest.
4. A good message is mutually reciprocated like a brotherly handshake, not endured like blunt force trauma.
5. Uniqueness and quality are not easily copied, be wary of best practices that have gone stale.
6. Even with the philosopher’s stone of marketing in hand, conjuring in front of the wrong audience will get you burned at the proverbial stake.
7. No matter how artful, aesthetically pleasing, coercive or perfect, a product or service’s marketing message is only worth as much as the product or service being marketed.
8. However, a well crafted message that spends more time on universal concepts than on product placement can transcend its use-value to become valuable in itself.
9. When you realize that Shakespeare, Milton & Goethe were marketing their ideals you realize the bar for professionalism is set much higher than they told you in business school.

Aberrant Advice

It’s easy to get sucked into “best practice” blogs and tip lists hoping to find that little gem to really revolutionize your business. With busy schedules, active personal lives and an urge to participate in our communities the temptation to take short cuts is an ever present thorn.

Unfortunately our very cognitive structure means we lack objectivity when approaching this kind of information on the web. Savvy website designers have a bag of neuroactive grifter’s tricks that would make Felix the Cat blush. While looking for “best practices” we often end up filling our head with the run off content from someone’s marketing campaign. Content created to lure web-crawlers usually has little to do with providing real value and all too often in our search we’re subjected to a mélange of unexpected psychological cons.

Smiling Faces Tell Lies

One of the most prevalent tricks is as simple as a smile. Images of smiling faces tap into “mirror neurons” tricking our brains into an immediate sense of camaraderie and emotional well being. This mirror effect works best in face to face meetings, but remains successful even when still images or representational forms are used.

Easy Curves

Another trick relies on easy curves. Our ability to recognize a pleasing image is related to how that image is processed in our brain. Crisp, professionally finished websites provide the round curves and image abstraction that neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran and cognitive philosopher William Hirstein posited are necessary for our brains to quickly process visual information. ( See their article: The Artful Brain )

By using this fact in strategic design, websites can lead the viewer to another automatic neurologically based form of engagement. These processes are keyed to such clearly identified brain traits that they don’t need to be artful in their execution to be effective.

The Dreaded Wheel

The most subtle is something we all learned in grade school art class. That long forgotten friend the Color Wheel is a psychological tool kit often overlooked due to its inconspicuous nature. Within this humble wheel lies the key to evoking everything from a sense of nausea to salivating desire depending on the conditioning of the subject. Seems silly but research suggests more than gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s our psyches that are tied to the board by those 24 chromatic con-men.

The Mark Inside

You may think yourself a well tenured professional immune to such paltry parlor fair, but as W.S. Burroughs, American Academy of Arts and Letters, pointed out: “Hustlers of the world, there is one mark that you cannot beat: the mark inside.”

We’re betrayed by our own brain’s functionality into concessions we might not otherwise actively decide to make. Even when designers aren’t fiddling with Photoshop color enhancement to stimulate your occipital lobe, low tech bait and switch still works the crowd like magic. For a few cobbled tidbits strung together to bait web crawlers we often sacrifice our innate ability to develop viable strategies.

If you’re truly searching for “best practices” Burroughs has some additional insight that might help:  “Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”

Good business doesn’t come from cookie cutter solutions.  You’re the only one who knows what your business does best and it’s going to be you who develops the solutions that bring it to the next level.

Resources:

Wikipedia: Neuromarketing

Neuroscience Marketing Blog - Where Brain Science and Marketing Meet

Neuromarketing: The New Science of Marketing Without Marketing (YouTube)

Andre Marquis - Google Tech Talks - Links Between Biometric Measures and Consumer Response to Media

Rules of Engagement

An important lesson gained from Ad:Tech is the necessity of engagement in all marketing efforts. Engagement is the quality that allows a person to interact, interpret and implement some aspect of your marketing message in their daily experience. It’s the quality that helps a piece of marketing go “viral”.

The major rule of engagement in business is the same as it is in war: never underestimate the other person and never overestimate yourself. Keeping your message focused on yourself leads to a very boring message and as the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard put it, “the only thing worse than being bored is being boring.”

An engaging message is about the other person, but it is about the other person recognizing themselves in the reality that your messaging provides. When you underestimate the other person you can end up offending them, putting yourself in a position where future messages will require their active permission to be heard.

A good message, an engaging message, doesn’t require permission, it’s immediately accepted with active participation.

Exposure

We open up to participating in personal engagement when someone opens up to us. The same is true in marketing; the more open (perhaps even vulnerable) a message seems the more likely it is to engage another person. Again this is not about focusing on you or your company, it’s about relating to the other person through commonalities.

Think about the media messaging you’ve seen become prolific in the past, what is one of the most common themes that comes up?

Vulnerability.

Images of children, families, people in situations that expose their human frailty or the overcoming of that frailty; images that focus on commonalities amongst a larger group. These are themes that catch the attention and cause a message to be repeated, to become engaging. People repeat the message because they recognize themselves, their own victories, overcomings and failures in the message.

I’ll Be Your Mirror

As mentioned in a prior post, the movie American Beauty provides a great example of how carefully crafted (it might even be said - scientifically crafted)  imagery can invoke a sympathetic response and engage an audience.

This kind of messaging focuses on the following:

• It engages the audience in relating themselves, via pre-existent cultural cues, to the characters and setting the message presents. American Beauty presents the stereotypes of husband, office worker, house wife, disturbed army vet, insular teenage girl, etc. How can your marketing utilize character types/common settings to capture the viewer?
• It  takes the viewer’s previously held believes, values, and cultural position and realigns them to bring them into the reality presented by the messaging. In a car commercial it is assumed that the viewer drives a car and understands/relates to the driving experience. What is unique is that the commercial represents a specific company’s attempt to place their brand of car into the viewer’s assumed common experience.
• It becomes a mirror for the viewer to recognize themselves and to potentiate an ideal existence in the future. This means that the message  becomes a reflection of not only how the viewer currently sees themselves, but also provides suggestions for how the viewer should expect to see themselves in the future, ie. a customer seeing an ad might think “I recognize that person is similar to me, but with X product they look like a better version of what I am/want to be.”
• Finally, it assumes a reality to the message beyond the message itself. Good messaging doesn’t sneak around pretending no one sees it, it walks down the street like it owns the city and assumes people will follow. A successful message with a baseball player in it will assume to be, and achieve the illusion of being, the definitive message with a baseball player in it.

Are your messages asking for permission or are they engaging the audience in participation?

A Friendly Mistake

Recently an offhand joke on a UK message board provided a vibrant example on how social media can boost your marketing efforts.

A play on the name XNet lead to a message board user posting a link to XNet’s website. The link was posted as a joke, a sarcastic answer to a question, but it lead to the XNet website getting 200+ hits a day from curious readers.

Imagine the potential if you could intentionally harness that level of response for your business.