David Meerman Scott's Blog, page 66

Google glass for real time public speaking

In late 2013 I signed up for the Google Glass Explorer Program and last week I received my Google Glass Explorer Edition 2.0. The Explorer Program is designed for people who want to get involved early and help shape the future of Glass.

I wanted a beta version of Glass because I see some great uses in public speaking and wanted to test drive as quickly as possible. I’ve now had two experiences to use it live: at an event I spoke at for the National Association of Elementary School Principals on Sunday and today at KC IABC Business Communicators Summit.

Here are my thoughts after a week of playing and two live gigs.

Set up and getting started

The process of getting going takes some time. Don’t expect it to work right out the box – it takes some work to set up. I created a mobile hotspot on my iPhone, which I then tethered to run Glass. This was a bit of a hassle, as I had to contact my wireless provider to upgrade my plan to include a personal hotspot. Glass also works when connected to a WiFi network and there is an iPhone app that you use to connect and then use glass to scan a QR code.

It took me a while to figure out how to set up Twitter for Glass. The issue for me is that I didn’t want to use the defaults because I would get way too many updates, so I had to figure out how to get all the Twitter mobile settings right to only get mentions of my @dmscott Twitter ID.

Fortunately, the Explorer Program includes exclusive forums where lots of helpful people (some from Google but most other Explorers) jump in to offer advice and answer questions. I quickly found a thread started by Randall Wong that walked me through setting up Twitter on Glass. We then connected on Twitter and @randallw provided more helpful advice.

Although it took several hours of mucking about, for a product in beta I found it fairly easy to set up and learn how to use Glass. Here’s a very good review of Glass on gizmag if you’re looking for much more on set up and use.

Sharing a photo of the audience

It took just four seconds to use Glass to take a photo of the audience and share that photo via Twitter. This was awesome! I like to do something real-time while on the stage. Previously, it would take a minute or more to use my iPhone to get a photo out.

While my photo Tweet did not have custom text, nor did I add the hashtag for the events, I found “Just shared a photo #throughglass pic.twitter.com/aJSoHwzkPp” to be just fine as audience members quickly found the tweet and RT’d it with the hashtag.

For me, that one feature alone had a nice real-time wow factor with my audience.

Seeing the live Twitter feed during Q&A

While doing some Q&A today, I was watching the Twitter feed to see if any questions came in. Indeed Paul Arnhold tweeted a question and I was able to see it and answer.

Glass has tremendous promise as a way to monitor the twitter feed from the stage (better than using a screen because I can be heads up). But I haven’t yet figured out how real-time it is. I'm not sure if it is up to the second or only up to the minute. In real-time Q&A this is a huge difference. I’m going to keep experimenting with this aspect.

Use as a confidence monitor

What I really want to do, which I don’t think is yet possible, is have an image of the slide that I am currently showing on the screen to the audience pop into Glass in real-time.

I’d like to use Glass as my “confidence monitor” (hate that term). My style is lots of image slides with almost no words. I’ll show 150 slides in an hour sometimes. So having the image of the current slide in Glass means I can walk the room and always have the current slide in view.

I spoke with Google about this and they suggested a hack involving pointing my iPhone at the screen and broadcasting that in a Google Hangout that I could connect to on Glass. But that idea sounded dreadful. I can’t imagine it would be real-time enough. I hope an app developer creates something to solve this problem.

For more ideas on using Glass for public speaking check out Nick Morgan’s post I Have Seen the Future of Public Speaking and It Is...

The Glasshole factor

As I was wearing Glass, I wondered how much wearing this futuristic device detracts from the talk? Are people paying attention to my information? Or are they wondering about that damn thing on my face?

There is certainly a Glasshole factor at play, but how much? At the NAESP gig I had Glass on for just a moment and at KC IABC I wore Glass only for the 20 minute Q&A session and not during the 75 minute keynote.

I’m sure that over time as wearable technology like Glass becomes more mainstream, there won’t be as much of a weirdness factor. I was listening to a BBC radio interview this week (I don’t recall who talking) about the parallel between the development of timepieces and computing devices. I like this as a way to look at what’s happening:

At first clocks were really big things in public places. Then a smaller home version was developed that the average family could afford to put on their mantle. Soon after affordable clocks got smaller and then people carried pocket watches around. Soon watches got even smaller and started appearing on people’s wrists. And now timekeeping is embedding in lots of other places like your phone and your car and so on.

Same with computers—they went from room-sized contraptions to big clunky home units to smaller notebooks to a computer that doubles as your phone. And now computers are appearing that can be worn on the head and on the wrist.

So over time, just like a wristwatch and a smart phone, people will become used to wearables and there won’t be as much of the weirdness factor. But for now they are still uncommon.

Problems with Google Glass

Google Glass is clearly early days. Think back to the first iPhone 1.0 release and imagine what that offering was like in beta and you’ll get a sense where Glass is. In particular, there are only a handful of apps, a problem I’m sure that will be solved going forward.

A huge issue is that Glass battery life stinks. I’ve found it to drain after just an hour of use. So that needs to be fixed.

When getting used to the interfaces—the trackpad on the side and the voice commands, it’s easy to make mistakes. I accidently sent a photo to someone I hadn’t communicated with in years and I accidently replied to a tweet without knowing it. I wonder what we’ll call a buttdial with Glass? ButtGlass?

However, the biggest problem I see so far is that Glass is tied to all your Google accounts—Gmail, G+, Google Search, and so on. It works great if you live in Googleland. But there is an islands mentality at play here because the product doesn’t work as well with other email accounts and other social networks.

I see big promise for Glass (or a similar product from another company) helping me to present better and for my audience to have a better experience as a result. I look forward to continue to test and experiment and see what happens.

Digital photo stickers as content marketing

Last month I was in Bangkok delivering a talk at the Spark Conference.

During the startup panel discussion at the end of the day, there was a short discussion of “stickers.” Panelists were enthusiastic about the potential for early stage sticker companies to do well. This was a completely new category of technology so I wanted to learn more.

A digital photo “sticker” is sort of like a watermark that goes onto a photo. I’ve seen these on photos many times. For example HubSpot put a “HubSpotting Around the World” sticker in the corner of my Antarctica polar plunge photo (see the end of the post for the photo - that’s a HubSpot logo hat in my hand) and then shared it along with other photos that people had shot around the world. The HubSpotting Around the World sticker brands the photos in the series.

My favorite of the apps discussed in Bangkok is Sticgo, a location-based, real time photo sticker app. It is currently only available in Thailand but I expect it will catch on globally.

Sticgo is sort of like Instagram (because you share photos) but also like Foursquare (because you collect a sticker for your photo when you check-in at a location that has stickers).

The two app images here illustrates how Sticgo works. The Sticgo Facebook page has a bunch of examples of how the app is used.

Other companies in the space include PicoCandy, a company licensing well-known characters for stickers (I’m imaging putting Bart Simpson on a pic). And Quan that is doing a sort of emoticon approach to adding stickers to photos.

I tried to find other examples of sticker companies located in North America and Europe, but there were too many false hits in the Google results. The app store in iTunes has some apps so maybe there’s more going on. Does anyone know other examples?

Digital photo stickers as content marketing

I see big potential here for content marketers. Here are a few ideas. Maybe you have some too.

Conferences and events could have a custom sticker so when people snap a pic at the conference, they can add the sticker and brand the image as being from that event.

Weddings, graduations, birthday parties and the like can sticker up the resulting photos.

At rock concerts, most of the audience is snapping pics anyway, so why not get rid of the “no photography” signs and allow photos. Bands could encourage people to add a custom sticker with the artist, date, and venue: “David Byrne & St. Vincent, Orpheum Theater, September 24, 2013” (great show BTW).

Any other ideas?

We can put men on the moon but can’t get books off a dock

Several weeks ago I announced my newest book Marketing the Moon which I wrote with Rich Jurek. The book tells the story of the most successful marketing and public relations campaign in history, featuring heroic astronauts, press-savvy rocket scientists, enthusiastic reporters, deep-pocketed defense contractors, and Tang.

If you pre-ordered a copy, thank you! Short story = the books are still on the dock waiting to be unloaded.

The long story includes snowstorms, busted cranes, and a severe shortage of salt.

Yeah, I know I told many of you that your books would have arrived by now. Whoops. I sort of forgot that printed books need to be, well, moved!

In today’s always on, real-time world it is easy to forget that physical stuff still has to be physically delivered.

1) The books were printed in Asia and are absolutely beautiful. Scott-Martin Kosofsky, who worked on every aspect of the design and production, chose high quality paper, process, and materials throughout.

2) Then the books needed to be put into a container and loaded onto a ship.

3) The ship needed to travel halfway around the world. I was fascinated to watch in real-time via its GPS coordinates as the MSC Rania, a Panamanian flagged 94,000 Gross tonnage container ship made its way to New York with our books. I’d tell Rich something like: “Hey the books are now in the Mediterranean Sea between Sicily and Tunisia!”

4) Since we knew the destination was the Port of New York we could accurately predict when the ship would arrive, figure when they’d be offloaded, and when they would arrive at the MIT Press warehouse. That allows us to predict when books will ship from retailers like Amazon.

Or not. Because we didn’t figure on:

5) Snow! The several large snowstorms disrupted traffic at the Port of New York, backing up trucks and slowing down shipments. Me: “Snow happens. It’s the US Northeast. Why don’t they deal with it?”

6) The terminal’s crane experienced some mechanical problem due to temperature. Me: “Really? The crane busted?!”

7) A shortage of rock salt used to melt snow. Me: “Now this is getting ridiculous!”

Turns out the books are still at the port waiting to be delivered. I hope that books will reach you in early March. But at this stage, who the heck knows?

I write a lot about real-time content. This book shipment is the opposite of real-time. If its not one thing its another.

I know “We can put a man on the moon but we can’t...” is an enormous cliché. But considering the subject of our book, it’s an apt title for this post, don’t you think?

Who wrote that awesome white paper?

A reader asks: “Should white papers have a named author? Or can it simply state a company name or department as author?”

This seemingly small issue has big ramifications so I’m sharing here.

My strong preference is that white papers, ebooks, and other such content should have an author rather than be published without an author's name. It humanizes your company. It serves as a way for interested people to connect, and it facilitates extending the expertise to other venues like speaking gigs.

It may be obvious, but the author of the white paper should be, well, its author! I’d rather see a real author of the white paper listed than to randomly put a senior executive’s name on it which is what some organizations do.

But what if there are several people collaborating on the paper? Yes, it can have multiple authors.

Or, you might choose one lead author. This should be the person who will interact with those who are interested in the topic, who is good at doing media interviews, and who speaks at conferences and events on the topic. When these things align, the author’s personal brand and the company’s brand align and both benefit.

Showcasing expertise

A person’s bio is a better way of showcasing expertise than a bland company or department description (no author) or some random big shot’s name and bio slapped on like the CEO (unless, of course, the CEO actually wrote it).

The author’s biography, typically at the end of the white paper or ebook, should have links to social like a Twitter and LinkedIn so people can follow and connect.

And, importantly, an email address for the author in the bio means interested people will contact her and that can turn into a discussion that can lead to a sale.

How have you handled this challenge?

Terrible healthcare customer service

In my experience as a patient and as a family member of patients, I’d have to say that the healthcare industry has the absolute worst customer service there is. It’s crazy! If I need to make an appointment with my primary care physician, I can’t do it online. I MUST call them “during normal business hours” which is a three hour window in the morning and a three hour window in the afternoon weekdays only. No, you cannot call them before 9:00 am. No, you can’t call them when they are on a lunch break.

And when you do call, there’s no way you can actually speak with the doctor. All they will do is grant an appointment.

And don’t even get me started about after appointment service. Typically, they give you a prescription and send you on your way with no information at all. Sure, you can read the ten page legalese that comes with the pills, but that’s not helpful. My questions like “Can I exercise when I take this medication” isn’t included because there are so many warnings that the various government agencies require.

And the language they use! Yikes! Check out this world class, cutting-edge hospital gobbledygook.

Do this and don't call me

I recall a few years ago when I injured my leg and needed to go to physical therapy. The therapist wanted me to do exercises at home between sessions. So how did he “help” me to learn the exercises? Well, he demonstrated once, had me do them once and then gave me a one-page handout that was a series of stick figure drawings of a person doing the exercises. The copy itself was terrible quality, probably a hundredth generation reproduction. Got a question about the exercise? Tough! You have to wait till the next appointment to ask.

Don't get me wrong. I like my primary care physician and I like the nurse practitioner I see. They care about patients and do the bast they can within the system they work in.

I’m not sure why healthcare is so awful at how they treat customers. Is it because doctors, with their fancy degrees, are so revered that we can’t insist on better service? Is it something related to the American healthcare system that means doctors have no incentive to take care of people properly? I’m not sure of the underlying reasons, but there is no doubt that in my case, the experience has been horrible.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. It is certainly possible for doctors to pioneer great customer service in healthcare.

Why not share content with patients in secure HIPPA compliant web sites? Why not point patients to videos and blog posts and articles on the web that will help them?

The good news is I've found some examples of this and will share in future blog posts.

Marketing the Moon - announcing my new book!

Geek alert(!!)

My newest book, Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program, will release from MIT Press this month. I am mega excited.

Here is the Amazon USA listing for the book and here is the Marketing the Moon book companion site.

This project is a total departure from my social media and online content books, bringing me back in some ways to my years in corporate marketing and PR.

Marketing the Moon is a full-color, 11" x 9 1/2", lavishly illustrated book telling the story of the most successful marketing and public relations campaign in history.

It features heroic astronauts, press-savvy rocket scientists, enthusiastic reporters, deep-pocketed defense contractors, and Tang.



With all the recent hoopla, few people realize that content marketing has been around for more than fifty years. In fact, the greatest story never told (until now) about content as a marketing tool is that it helped to deliver humans to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This fascinating story is the subject of Marketing the Moon.

I wrote Marketing the Moon with Richard Jurek, president of Inland Marketing & Communications, Inc. Like me, Rich is a lifelong space enthusiast and a collector of historic space artifacts from the Apollo program. We met several times a year at various Apollo astronaut gatherings and talked about the intersection of our interests in space and marketing – often belaboring the fact that no book had been written to date covering the subject in a way that we would want it covered as practitioners. When we shared the idea with astronauts and those responsible for the marketing of the program, they were very enthusiastic.

I collect hardware used in the Apollo missions which I display on my Apollo Artifacts site, have a large collection of marketing and PR materials from the Apollo program, and am likely the only person in the world with a lunar module descent engine thrust chamber in his living room. Rich has the world’s most extensive collection of two dollar bills flown into space, which are showcased in his Jefferson in Space Museum.

Moonwalkers, Movies, and Mad Men

Captain Eugene A. Cernan wrote the forward to Marketing the Moon. Flying to the Moon not once, but twice, Captain Cernan also holds the distinction of being the second American to walk in space and the last man to have left his footprints on the lunar surface.

Documentary film rights to Marketing the Moon are being optioned by Robert Stone Productions. Robert has had four films premiered at Sundance and an Academy Award nomination for Radio Bikini as best documentary film. Robert is now raising funds to produce the film version of the book.

Marketing the Moon was produced and designed by the multi-talented Scott-Martin Kosofsky. We've worked with Scott since the beginning on this project because we wanted to make sure the visual elements were showcased in the book. It contains key documents and images that have never before been published or even seen since their creation. "Marketing the Moon a treasure-trove of period design and advertising," Scott says. "From the typically tawdry to the very cool. It includes Real Mad Men graphics and the typefaces of the era."

Learning from history

It’s been a blast to dig into marketing history by speaking with people who worked on the Apollo lunar program. Rich and I spoke with more than half of the men who walked on the moon, NASA public affairs staffers, PR people from contractors like Boeing and Raytheon, and journalists who worked at publications like The New York Post and Reuters.

“Because without public relations . . . we would have been unable to do it.”

—Dr. Wernher von Braun, director of NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center and chief architect of the Apollo Saturn V launch rocket, July 22, 1969

In a world where we think everything is “new” it is fun (and instructive) to look back!

We can all learn from the marketing, sales, and public relations fundamentals that were as important a part of the Apollo lunar missions as the rockets and the astronauts.

Let there be no doubt: Without great marketing, mankind would never had landed on the moon. And it may well be the case that, for lack of good marketing, humans have not yet been to Mars.

The default position

Most people choose the easy way.

Go to a four-year college, get a job in a company, move up the ladder, retire.

Send an invite with the text: “I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”

Book a room in the city at that big, famous chain hotel. Buy a vacation package at that well-known beach resort.

Watch the popular Oscar winning film. Buy the Grammy winning album. See the classic rock act that was popular when you were a kid.

The 3-course set menu with beef and a glass of the house red.

The software package including standard service.

What do you choose?

It is much easier to choose the default. But bigger things can come from doing the unusual and unexpected.

Start a business, find a boutique hotel in the arty part of town, see an indie band in a 250 person club, invite people to connect with you on LinkedIn by sending them a personal message recalling when you last saw them in person.

Do you choose things to enrich your life? Of course you do!

What do you deliver?

Building products around the default, the safe choice, the offering for the masses is terribly risky. It means someone else can make a similar commodity that costs just a little less or is a tiny bit faster.

But there is a sustainable business in a niche market, for the people Seth Godin calls weird, for individuals who think for themselves. A true leadership position comes from serving those who avoid the default position.

Tranquilseas, an eco-resort hotel in an out of the way place with just seven rooms can be number one selling to a niche.

GoPro, a camera for extreme action sports, can become a billion dollar company in ten years selling to a niche.

Do something that enriches other peoples’ lives and you’ll always have rewarding work.

How to hack Instagram to share your favorite older photos

I love sharing on Instagram! It is so easy and fun to snap an iPhone pic, edit, apply filters, tag with my location, and share.

Because I travel a lot, Instagram is a really cool way for me to remember places I’ve been by looking through my dmscott Instagram photostream. This week I am in Honduras, last week was Bangkok, Thailand and Vientiane, Laos and in December I was in Antarctica and Istanbul, Turkey and all are showcased on my feed.

As I sing Instagram’s praises, some people have asked me about sending older photos via Instagram. While the service is set up to be instant, real-time sharing, I’ve found a bit of a hack making it possible to send any photo you like through the service.

The photo I am using as an example is one that @YukariWatanabe shot while we were in Roatan, Honduras this week. she emailed it to me and I followed the steps below.

Notes: I’m an amateur geek. Professional geeks may have a better way to do this, but my way works great for me. I use a MacBook pro and iPhone 5 and I’m not sure if this works on other platforms.

Six steps to hack Instagram to share your favorite older photos

1) The first step is to get the photo you want to send via Instagram into iPhoto on your Mac. If the photo is already in iPhoto (like that great rock concert pic you shot a year ago) you’re all set and you can skip step 3.

2) If the photo you want to send isn’t in iPhoto yet (your wedding portrait from a decade ago perhaps), you’ll need to make a digital image and get it onto your Mac. Then, in iPhoto, go to File > Import to Library. Once the photo is in iPhoto, you’ll need to synch your iPhone to get the newly uploaded photo onto your iPhone.

3) Next comes the hack. SEE THE TOP IMAGE BELOW. You need to bring the photo you want into your iPhone camera roll. To do this, go to the Photo app on your iPhone, find “albums” and choose “last import”. In there you will find the photo you just uploaded.

4) Click the photo and then edit it slightly. SEE THE SECOND IMAGE I usually just use the crop tool (bottom right) and crop the photo a tiny bit. Then touch “save” and in the next screen “save to camera roll”. Now your photo is saved to your camera roll so you can easily find it on Instagram.

5) Go to the Instagram app on your iPhone and click the button to send an Instagram photo. THIRD IMAGE. Your camera will be ready to shoot a photo but you will bypass that. Instead find the camera roll, which includes the photo you want to send, at the bottom left of the screen. Click that square, find the photo in the roll, and click it.

6) Now you’re all set to edit and send your classic photo via Instagram in the normal way. Apply your filters, add a caption, tag the location, and share with your followers.

The bottom image is what the final Instagram screen shot looks like.

Bonus for reading this far: To capture a screen shot in an iPhone like I did below, hold the middle button down and at the same time hold down the power button. The screen capture will be in your camera roll.

Hillary Clinton wins Super Bowl Newsjacking derby with Oreo runner up

While everyone was looking for a consumer brand to be the best example of newsjacking NFL Super Bowl XLVIII, the winner by far was none other than Hillary Clinton who brilliantly tweeted from @HillaryClinton It’s so much more fun to watch FOX when it’s someone else being blitzed & sacked! #SuperBowl

Gotta love the humor and subtle ribbing of going after FOX News, known for its conservative political positions. As of this writing, the tweet generated more than 50,000 retweets and 36,000 favorites.

Newsjacking the 2014 Super Bowl

Newsjacking is the art and science of how to inject your ideas into a breaking news story and generate tons of media coverage.

Many of the more than 100 news stories talking about newsjacking in the lead up to last nights game offered predictions and advice about newsjacking the 2014 Super Bowl.

Most referenced the 2013 Super Bowl and the @Oreo tweet Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark.

Therefore, many people were looking to @Oreo to see what they would do this year.

In what I think is an absolutely brilliant move, @Oreo just didn't show up with: Hey guys…enjoy the game tonight. We’re going dark. #OreoOut

@Oreo manages to generate attention by doing... nothing!

A final thought...

As I write this it's a little after 2:00 am on the USA East Coast, about five hours after the game concluded.

I'm quite amazed that my little idea of newsjacking has become "a thing". (I wrote the book on newsjacking which released in late 2011.) While I didn't coin the term, before my book the technique was unknown by that name with only a handful of references to it on Google.

I'm stunned with the fact that there were more than 100 news stories referencing newsjacking in the past few weeks.

I am convinced that anybody can identify a trend in their industry, define it, write about it, and then get recognized for it. You can do it too.

That being said, I have a question: Is me talking about newsjacking the Super Bowl an example of newsjacking my own idea? Hmmm... I'm not sure. A strange 2:00 am thought indeed!

Super Bowl Newsjacking Advice

My Newsjacking advice for game day and the day after?

Forget the damned Super Bowl and focus on unexpected breaking news instead.

Everyone is trying to repeat the newsjacking success of Oreo in the 2013 Super Bowl.

You can't. So don't try.

When everyone is focused on a fixed event to newsjack like the Super Bowl, that's a perfect opportunity for you to look elsewhere.

I'll be watching. If you have a success please let me know!