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Louisville Digital Association’s 6th Annual Digital Media Summit Schedule

I’m very proud to be one of the speakers at the 6th annual Digital Media Summit in Louisville on October 16. it’s a single day event held in Frazier Hall at Bellarmine University, and it’s sponsored by the fine fols at Brown-Forman and Bellarmine University’s School of Communication. You can get tickets here.

With the tagline, Improve your business and marketing through technology, several of us will be talking about how to do social media marketing better, including my two co-authors, Jason Falls and Kyle Lacy.

2014 Louisville Digital Media Summit

Tentative Agenda for Louisville Digital Media Summit

8 – 8:30 a.m. Networking, Breakfast, Setup

8:30 a.m. Introductions Jason Falls

8:40 a.m. Opening Keynote A Decade of Chasing What’s Next
Rick Murray, former president of Edelman Digital

9:30 a.m. 10 Professional Writing Secrets
Erik Deckers, Pro Blog Service

10:10 a.m. Break

10:20 a.m. The Mobile Commerce Revolution
Tim Hayden & Tom Webster, Edison Research

11:10 a.m. Paid Advertising In Facebook, How PPC Ninja’s Really Work Founder
Jason Brown, SERPWoo

12:00 p.m. Lunch

1:00 p.m. Bellarmine School of Communication
Dr. Lara Needham, Bellarmine University

1:20 p.m. 5 Technology Trends Disrupting Behavior
Kyle Lacy, Exact Target Marketing Cloud

2:10 p.m. Communicating at the right time, right channel and right situation in a crisis
Dr. Karen Freberg, University of Louisville

3:00 p.m. Break

3:10 p.m. Your Brand, Your Brain
Julia Roy, CoFounder, Workhacks

4:00 p.m. What Didn’t We Learn? Speaker Panel
Jason Falls, Moderator

4:30 p.m. Closing

You can register for the event here. By the way, if you’re interested in going, I’ve got a special discount code you can use. Just email me — erik at problogservice dot com — and I’ll give it to you.

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Ain’t No Party Like a PERQ Launch Party

If you’re involved in the Indianapolis tech startup scene, you already know about Verge, the startup community made up of entrepreneurs, programmers, and investors. We come together once a month, hear a few pitches from some exciting new startups, drink beer, eat pizza, and network with new people (and old friends).

Tonight was an especially huge night for Verge, because we were being hosted by PERQ, the new company formerly known as CIK Enterprises. They were hosting us because they were launching their new corporate identity and look. This was a mega launch party, the size of which I have not seen in Indianapolis in my nearly six years of doing social media and tech stuff.

PERQ was created when CIK consolidated several different companies they owned, and created this new enterprise. The previous three companies served clients in the newspaper, automotive, and retail industries. Because of this consolidation, they’re combining all forces to create a new marketing technology solution — FATWIN — to offer “business-branded games, contests, and sweepstakes with direct mail, email and advertising campaigns to attract in-store and online traffic.”

I first became acquainted with CIK and one of their companies, Tri-Auto Enterprises, when I worked at a local direct mail company years ago. In fact, I bumped into my old boss on the shuttle ride over from the parking lot, who was there for the PERQ launch. He hadn’t heard of Verge, so I was able to fill him in on what it was all about.

Employee in PERQ collaboration space
See? At first glance, you probably thought it was a real bookshelf too.
Not only were they launching a new company with new branding, they had a new look to their office. Everyone who attended got the grand tour of the office, including the conference rooms (complete with Legos for brainstorming, or at least looking creative), the open concept desks, the giant warehouse space turned meeting and collaboration space, the gym and weight room, and even the video broadcast booth. The whole building is so big, they even have Razor scooters for people to ride, like some sort of inter-office scooter share program. TKO Graphics created several of the wall decorations, including a gigantic bookshelf wall that I kept mistaking for a real bookshelf when I saw it from the corner of my eye.

All in all, it’s a gorgeous new space, and I kept wishing I worked there just because it looked so awesome. I might even be able to, because according to their press release, the company plans on hiring 30 new employees to deal with all their new growth and to help promote their new FATWIN technology.

FATWIN is an interesting new product that lets people enter promotional contests held by different companies using the service. From what I can tell, I can either join a company’s FATWIN promotion, or I can join FATWIN and join different companies’ promotions from there. My data is used only by the companies whose promotions I join, and they don’t sell it to third parties. From a data privacy standpoint, I appreciate this approach, because I can give my data only to the companies of my choosing, and not have to worry that some fly-by-night company is going to start spamming me two weeks later.

According to the FATWIN website:

FATWIN is a resource for people who love to win. It’s for people who love to play games, love to enter promotions, and hate to sign up for free stuff over and over again. Our goal is to be as transparent as possible — and for you to have a great experience while winning great prizes and discounts from your favorite brands.

For more information on PERQ, you can visit the website at . You can also follow them on Twitter at @perqmarketing.

Photo credit: PERQ

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Is the Forbes Top 50 Social Media List Flawed?

If you made the Forbes Top 50 Social Media Influencers list, you’re generally regarded as being pretty hot stuff. The Top 50 have a lot of influence, are extremely knowledgeable, and are connected to tens of thousands of people in their various networks.

If you didn’t make the list, you can tell yourself you were #51, or just try harder next year.

This year’s list was compiled by Haydn Shaughnessy using a “Pull Report” from PeekAnalytics.com.

There are also some basic criteria for involvement – experts must be creating their own content, and it has to be about social media. See more on the criteria here.

On the scoring, Peek Analytics gives people a score called Pull. If an individual has a Pull of 10x, that means that the audience the individual can reach is at least ten times greater than what the average social media user can reach.

Sounds pretty straightforward: if you’re a rockstar, you’ll be on the list.

Except it’s missing several notable names.

Jason Falls, Jay Baer, Chris Baggott
Seriously, these guys didn’t make the list? Jason Falls (l), Jay Baer, Chris Baggott (standing)
According to Judith Gotwald on Social Media Today (25 Social Media Influencers Forbes Ignored (And Why)), the Forbes list has snubbed a lot of pretty influential people, including several who were on last year’s list: Jay Baer, Jason Falls, Gini Dietrich, Charlene Li, Brian Solis, C.C. Chapman (Forbes did include his Content Rules co-author, Ann Handley), and even Mitch Joel.

Of course, Forbes does include some of the names you would expect: Mari Smith, Chris Brogan (but not his Trust Agents co-author Julien Smith), Liz Strauss, Jeff Bullas, Scott Stratten, and Dan Schawbel (disclosure: I write for Dan’s Personal Branding blog).

So what’s up? What happened to the names you would normally expect to see? Did Shaughnessy forget them? Did the non-Forbes people drop off on their Pull? Was PeekAnalytics having a bad day?

Admittedly, many names on both lists are names you expect to see year after year on a Top 50 or Top 100 list, but many of these missing names are glaring in their omission.

I’d like to see some better explanations for the list, and who did and didn’t make it, and why/how. I’d love to hear some of that “inside baseball” talk to explain how he went about determining who to measure, and who not to. How did he come up with the names to check? Is Pull based entirely on followers and reach, or is more like Klout, which could give a person with a very small following a high score because they the followers interact frequently? Or did Shaughnessy want to give some new people a shot at being on the Forbes Top 50? That’s admirable if it’s true, but then the list isn’t accurate or reflective.

It’s not that I’m suspicious of Forbes’ list, or will reject it out of hand, like it’s some partisan wing-nut website. It’s just that the exclusion of several noted social media experts is, well, eyebrow-raising, to say the least.

At the very least, Forbes’ list will be seen as problematic, which can be fixed with some basic explanations. At the worst, it’s a flawed list that is seriously lacking in its execution. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

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Mobile Phones Are Dying!

Yesterday’s blog post on LinkedIn by Martin Varsavsky, CEO of Fon, says that mobile phones are killing the laptop, and people will eventually quit using them simply because of the rise of mobile-only apps like Foursquare and Instagram. Also, laptops are $1,000 – $2,000, and smartphones are nearly free, and therefore people would rather buy phones than laptops.

Muh-huh.

Varsavsky’s reasoning reminds me of the old philosophy joke, “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, all men are Socrates.”

So people will no longer buy laptops to write blog posts, create spreadsheets, create websites, design magazine ads and logos? They’ll just whip out their handy-dandy iPhone and everything will be just as powerful and fast as a laptop?

Technology Adoption Lifecycle bell curve
The Technology Adoption Lifecycle shows the number of people who will adopt new technology, like smartphones and tablets
I don’t know what kinds of phones Varsavsky is using, but until I can use mine to tell my transporter chief to beam me aboard, there is absolutely no way a mobile phone is going to replace the laptop.

Besides, haven’t you heard, mobile phones are dying. At least, the technology experts are predicting that tablets like the iPad will outsell mobile phones in 2013.

Clearly — clearly! — this spells the mobile phone’s demise, right? Because with a tablet, I have a bigger screen than a phone. I can play games, watch Netflix without straining my eyes, and they’re faster and more robust, which means they’re better, right?

At least that’s what Varsavsky’s logic means, right? That our ringtones are slowly changing to death rattles?

If we follow his reasoning, the only reason tablets are outselling mobile phones is because the phone eco-system is dying.

And it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that everyone already owns a mobile phone and that sales plateaued, but tablets are still new enough that people are constantly buying them. Also, Varsavsky is hoping you won’t realize that many people already own laptops, which is why their sales have plateaued, while smartphones are just reaching the Late Majority adoption phase of technology, and people are still buying them.

While the sky may be falling in Varsavsky’s world, the millions of us who use laptops and desktop computers to actually produce the things the mobile phone users consume will continue on our way, doing the actual work on computers big enough and powerful enough to create it.

To say one technology is dying just because another starts to outsell it does not mean the death of that first technology. That’s like saying the 2nd place Indy 500 finisher is a failure. Specious arguments like that — as well as the one about mobile phones replacing laptops — deserve to be laughed at.

Photo credit: Wikipedia, Creative Commons

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Erik Deckers to Speak at Revenue North Indy on March 21st, Free Passes Available

I’ll be speaking at the Revenue North Indianapolis conference on March 21, 2013 at the Wyndham Indianapolis West Hotel. It starts at 8:00 am and runs until 5:00 pm, and they’re expecting close to 1000 people.

Erik Deckers speaking in public
I might even wear this shirt when I speak.

Passes are normally $99 for individuals and $299 for companies sending up to 5 people. But if you use my special promo code, A28LG7, you can get the individual pass for FREE.

You can see the full conference schedule here. Some of the speakers will include Doug Karr speaking about the Dangers of SEO; Kyle Lacy’s dad Dan speaking on Transforming Your Business; networking specialist Jamar Cobb-Denard will tell you to Stop Wasting Time Networking; my mentor Lorraine Ball of Roundpeg will tell you Why People Hate Your Website; and, I’m speaking about your 10 Professional Branding Secrets.

There are nearly 100 breakout sessions throughout the day, so you’re going to get your head crammed with a lot of great information.

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CelebBoutique Shredded by a Lack of Curiosity and General Awareness

CelebBoutique, the British clothing website, may have committed the foul-up of all foul-ups:

CelebBoutique tweet says #Aurora is trending, clearly about our Kim K inspired #Aurora dress.

After being hammered for just a few minutes on social media, their social media people turned on the TV, and saw the terrible news from Aurora, Colorado. Then they sent this:

We apologise for our misunderstanding about Aurora. – CB

We didn’t check what the trend was about hence the confusion, again we do apologise.

Followed by this:

We are incredibly sorry for our tweet about Aurora – Our PR is NOT US based and had not checked the reason for the trend, at that time our
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social media was totally UNAWARE of the situation and simply thought it was another trending topic – we have removed the very insensitive
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tweet and will of course take more care in future to look into what we say in our tweets. Again we do apologise for any offense caused
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this was not intentional & will not occur again. Our most sincere apologies for both the tweet and situation. – CB

Meanwhile, most Americans are livid at the insensitivity of what is now being perceived as a vacuous and clueless fashion brand spouting off about clothes, shoes, and celebrities. As a result, CelebBoutique has just taken a major hit to its brand, with several thousand people pounding them like the fist of an angry god.

And it’s not going to go away anytime soon.

I’ll cut them a little slack. Yes, I’m angry, but I also recognize that mistakes do happen. Someone made a terrible mistake, and it’s not worth storming the castle with pitchforks and torches. No one should lose their job for this.

But this was a mistake that could have easily — EASILY! — been prevented.

All you have to do is be curious, and be willing to educate yourself.

Lack of Curiosity Killed CelebBoutique

Erik Deckers' Twitter response to CelebBoutiqueTheir first follow-up tweets are the first indication that curiosity is not something CelebBoutique’s social media staff holds in great quantities.

“We didn’t check what the trend was about.”

How do you not check this? How can you not be the least bit curious that some word is trending? Why was the first thing that popped into your head about you and your dress, and not “gee, I wonder why that word is trending?”

There are tools to tell you what is trending. There are tools to tell you why something is trending. Google, Twitter Search, even hashtags.org are all places to start.

This is where people need to think like journalists. A journalist never reports on a story that he hears from one person. A newspaper reporter doesn’t write a single sentence until she has confirmed everything her sources tell her. And they never, ever fire off a comment without knowing a single thing about what they’re talking about.

I don’t know if CelebBoutique uses an outside PR firm to do their social media, or if they have an internal staff. I don’t know if they have one person in charge of the Twitter account, or if there are several people.

But regardless of who is doing what, you need to act like a journalist. Even for just a minute. Act like a journalist.

Be curious.

Ask questions.

Wonder why something is happening, and don’t just fire off the first thing that comes into your head, like an 8-year-old.

Otherwise, you pull a boneheaded move like this, and all the goodwill you and your company have worked for will be shredded and ground into the dirt.

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Update: It looks like the National Rifle Association made a similar gaffe. They actually deleted their entire Twitter account.