Mike Maney

Category: Uncategorized

  • Friends and influencers

    What does it take to be a friend? At a minimum, you need the following qualities:

    • A general common interest
    • Mutual respect
    • Comfort to be one’s self
    • Honesty
    • Fairness
    • Open communication

    I have no illusions that I’m probably missing more than a few qualities that should be on this list. But a tweet from LittleBird founder (and friend) Marshall Kirkpatrick caused me to think about what it means to truly develop relationships with the influencers that matter most to your organization, as well as those who may matter in the future.

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    Building friendships with influencers is something that doesn’t come naturally to most organizations or the marketers telling their stories. Part of the reason is that the ratio of marketers to influencers is skewed kind of heavily in the marketers favor. It’s like putting lead on one side of a scale and helium on the other. No influencer is going to have that many friends, nor should they.

    Another reason, and I think this is the one where a lot of people start to find out how difficult influencer relations is, is that being a friend means stepping out of your marketing skin and, well, being a friend. There aren’t a lot of people who can do that. There are fewer who do it well. The ones who rock obliterate any wall between being a friend and engaging an influencer. It’s a thing of beauty to see in action (one of the humans who does this the best is IBM’s Amy Hermes).

    Building influencer relationships is not easy. It takes time. It means coloring outside the lines and on the fly of what might be on the existing marketing plan. It means less reliance on hard metrics and more acceptance of knowing you are doing what’s right for both the influencer and your organization (do you keep an ROI spreadsheet for your other friends?). It means being an actual friend to a small group of people you deem worthy of being part of your organization’s circle of trust.

    If you need help identifying who your influencers are or need guidance on how to start developing relationships with them, give me a shout.

     

  • How a Hit Broadway Show Became a Branding Case Study

    Hamilton is a popular play on Broadway. It will have a long run and make a lot of money for its investors. If that was all it did, Hamilton would leave a lasting memory as a certified hit and leave a lasting impact on theater and entertainment.

    But someone in the Hamilton machine is thinking beyond the musical’s core product. Someone sees opportunity to use the show’s influence to play a larger role in improving other human’s lives. And they found a way to do it while staying true to the production’s brand.

     

    “The Eliza Project” has been in the works for months. Curious about the lasting impact of the strong, progressive woman she portrayed on stage, Ms. Soo visited the Graham School and spent hours talking with its students. She wanted to offer them the kind of ‘‘teaching artist” program she saw when she studied at the Juilliard School.

    “‘Hamilton’ Cast Helps Children in Need,” by Leslie Brody, Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2015

     

    In a world increasingly enamored with profit, it is heartening to see some companies think beyond the products they sell.

  • An Experiment: Instagram for Pitching

    This was actually a good thing. Martin wanted to test Instagram as a pitch tool and I happened to be online. Haven’t used it since, but it was fun to experiment.

  • On “getting press” and metrics

    Getting “press,” as this job ad I saw on HackerNews claims to want, is more than measurement. It’s about relationships, news, an eye for tying a company’s story into wider trends, and having an experienced gut feel for when a story is worthy of press and when it’s better suited for some other type of marketing channel. It’s a long game made up of moves that often go unseen because they aren’t on a plan or directly and tactically measurable.

    So, please startups, if you are hiring for PR or searching for an agency to help with your marketing efforts, dig deep to understand what exactly you want them to do..and why. Not doing so wastes your time, wastes theirs and, worse, wastes the media’s.

    By all means, measure what you can. But recognize the value of the unseen that makes the measurable possible.

  • On “getting press” and metrics

    Getting “press,” as this job ad I saw on HackerNews claims to want, is more than measurement. It’s about relationships, news, an eye for tying a company’s story into wider trends, and having an experienced gut feel for when a story is worthy of press and when it’s better suited for some other type of marketing channel. It’s a long game made up of moves that often go unseen because they aren’t on a plan or directly and tactically measurable.

    So, please startups, if you are hiring for PR or searching for an agency to help with your marketing efforts, dig deep to understand what exactly you want them to do..and why. Not doing so wastes your time, wastes theirs and, worse, wastes the media’s.

    By all means, measure what you can. But recognize the value of the unseen that makes the measurable possible.

  • Running Scared: Bud, Craft and The Bowl

    When you’re the biggest dog in an industry being eaten away by a band of small rebels, do you:

    (a) Listen to the market and adapt your product?

    (b) Rally your vast resources to build a better product?

    (c) Publicly acknowledge that you are worried while simultaneously offending any potential new customer?

    If you’re Anhauser-Busch, your answer is (c). Last night, the brewing behemoth used the nation’s biggest advertising platform — the Super Bowl — to run an ad not extolling the virtues of its product, but, rather, slamming the buyers of its top competition. No statistic could reinforce more clearly how the craft beer movement has hurt the commodity beer business.

    When you’re the category leader, you don’t acknowledge your competitor. Ever. Unless they are really threatening your business. That’s something Budweiser tacitly admitted to the world last night.

  • Twitter Video: The real current TV

    Combing through my news feed this morning, I stumbled across this short video by NPH:

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    No big deal, right? Just Barney with a cameraphone giving everyone a quick scoop of his upcoming Academy Award hosting gig. Except it is a big deal. Because it’s the first official video shared on Twitter.

    Let that sink in for a moment.

    Instead of 140 tight characters, you can now squeeze more words and images into 30 second video clips. The normal soundbite is a measly 7 seconds max. Ever talk out your 140 character tweets? Less than 7 seconds even in if you talk at the speed of Stephen Wright. 30 seconds is an eternity in today’s media culture.

    This is big.

    Sure, we’re going to be inundated with feeds full of half-minute cat videos. Yes, the spammers are going to abuse it. And the porn. Don’t forget the porn.

    But this will also give citizen journalists — people like you and me — the ability to share eyewitness accounts of global news events faster than ever. This is something Twitter has already proven itself indispensable, even in 140 character word form. What was once a river of words becomes a current of moving images. With apologies to Al Gore, Twitter has just become the real current TV.

    It’s a sign that Generation YouTube has won. A generation that doesn’t tune into the morning, 5 o’clock or 10 o’clock news (11 o’clock news has long since hit the graveyard thanks to The Daily Show). It’s a generation that wants news when it happens, unfiltered by advertisers and editors.

    If you’re in the news business, your world just went from soundbites to video clips. If you’re in the business of making news, it just got a lot more interesting.

  • Talking tech with Tom

    Redmonk analyst and Monktoberfest partner in crime Tom Raftery recently invited me to be a guest on his weekly “Technology for Good” show. You can catch us talking about wide range of tech issues in the video below.

  • The Other Bird Twitter Needs

    I still owe Marshall a post on how I use LittleBird, but an article popped in my newsfeed this morning that seems a bit more urgent.

    Twitter was all over the tech news yesterday with people reporting and analyzing yet another management shakeup. I’ve been in big companies. News? Eh, not so much. Yet, under the cover of the coverage (see what I did there?) was legitimate conjecture on why the company’s leadership has not been able to hit the user growth targets it has set. One of the reasons, as Owen Williams points out is that the onboarding process for new users is, well, not so good a lot.

    It feels like a missed opportunity to showcase other users that are active and having conversations with their followers, rather than famous people. The value in Twitter is not observing and it’s clear that this feature misses the point.

    Bingo. While I follow a few celebrities, the real value of Twitter is engaging with people who know more than me on topics I care about. Which is something Twitter can’t recommend in its current onboarding process. It just doesn’t have that data or ability to know its new users beyond their address books. It’s a missed opportunity because there is a way to make the onboarding process better and much more relevant.

    Imagine if, upon signing up for Twitter, you were asked “What are some topics you’re interested in?” And then, rather than spit back a suggested list of popular people to follow, it instead pre-populated a topical list of the most influential people on that topic? Helpful and relevant, no? That’s what LittleBird does. As Marshall says, it “focuses on relevant connections inside a community, not just the content people post and popularity they can fake.” I use it frequently (maybe too frequently) to discover who I should be listening to.

    If I were running the onboarding process for Twitter (or whoever is running it after this last shakeup), I’d look at finding a way to integrate LittleBird. While it wouldn’t fix all the onboarding problems (number of steps, etc.), it would make Twitter instantly more relevant to every new user.

  • The Billion Dollar Barometer

    How much IT spending is happening in the cloud? A lot. And a big slice of it is being managed by Cloudability (client). How big of a slice? $1 billion (cue Dr. Evil laugh). ReadWrite’s Matt Asay breaks the story and finds parallels between the cloud and how open source software exploded across the enterprise.