The notion of a platform is one that receives a fair amount of play in various contexts.

An author is said to possess a platform when they have built a following. Consultants might work with a business owner to build a platform through speaking, writing, blogging and connecting in social media. And finally, many tech firms have built platforms by creating open source software, such as WordPress, that allows other 3rd party providers to build commerce and community on top of their framework.

Amazon sells lots of books, but in order to do that they needed to develop lots of file serving and storage capacity and get very, very good at delivering lightning quick web results in one of the highest traffic demand environments online.

Amazon took something that had little to do with their existing business, but which they had become incredibly proficient at, and created Amazon Web Services that allows thousands of business to build on the Amazon framework. I host and stream all of my product videos using Amazon S3 servers.

Airbnb is a community marketplace that allows property owners and travelers to connect with each other for the purpose of renting unique vacation spaces around the world. I use it frequently and love how simple the service is to use. Airbnb is built on Amazon Web Services and uses their database tools to build their community.

I would like to suggest that the notion of a platform is one that we can apply to almost any business.

What is a platform in this context?

A platform is a system that helps people create products, services, profits, businesses, communities, and networks of their own. The dynamics that must be present to create a platform environment are openness and collaboration.

So, the questions you need to ponder are:

• How could you or your business act as a platform?
• What could others build on top of your business or products?
• How could you add more value through your platform approach?
• How could you grow a network on your platform?
• Are there other businesses that your platform could launch?
• How could your community generate value for each other?
• How could your platform learn from community members?
• How could you create something open enough to attract your competitors?
• What platforms already exist that you could build on?
• Could you use your existing purpose, culture or community as a platform?
• What could you acquire as a way to build a platform?
• What could you extend as a way to build a platform?

When you start to think about your business in this manner you can move beyond the traditional applications of the term platform and blend platform type thinking into your business model, your culture and ultimately how you engage and communicate with your community.

Find your unique framework for openness

The key is to locate your unique framework as the foundation for the platform. Often times this requires thinking far outside of what your core business was designed to do and looking purely at things you can do, things you’ve gotten good at doing, even if they are simply things you do to support your core business.

AppleTree Answers is a call center business headquartered in Wilmington Delaware. The company has built a platform of sorts by figuring out how to change the paradigm of the call center culture. The company has received numerous awards for workplace excellence and is a frequent member of the Inc 500 and 5000.

AppleTree’s rapid growth then has come about by acquiring other small call centers and installing Appletree’s unique framework of openness. Appletree’s strong culture is the platform they’ve built all of their expansion on.

It’s all about building more value

A major dynamic of the platform component is value creation. No matter what your business does it will sink or swim based on the value (perceived or otherwise) it creates in someone’s life. This is extremely so when we talk about the community aspect of a platform.

Further, if you want to differentiate your business from others that are already providing value to a market, you’ve got to find a way to create more value as a competitive edge.

Many people default to adding features to products and services as a way to address value, but I think the real impact in value creation comes from strategically finding ways to add value in the way your business delivers a unique experience to its customer rather than through some sort of product enhancement.

The beauty of understanding value creation at the strategic level and then forcing that thinking into every tactical decision is that this is some of the most profitable work you can do. When a market comes to value what you have to offer as the “go to” choice you’re on your way to a premium pricing opportunity. People will pay dearly for an experience that helps them get more of what they want out of life.

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It’s simple… You pick up the phone and call your past clients, customers or patients just to check in and see how things are going. Are they happy with the product? Did they benefit from the service? Are they feeling well?

Now, keep in mind I’m not saying you want to be a pushy salesperson.  Nor do I expect you to call during the dinner hour. But realistically you should WANT to know how they’re doing and how happy they are with your products or services. And as a business owner, you NEED to know this information if you want to grow.

So grab that customer or client list and set aside 30 minutes to an hour a day to make follow up calls. Chances are you’ll leave quite a few voice mails, but be sure to move those folks to the end of your list and call them again later.

When you do get someone on the phone, while you shouldn’t sell, be prepared for them to want to buy. Because many people, if they were happy with what they bought from you before, will happily buy again – particularly when provided with a convenient opportunity to do so. Heck, they might even have been thinking about doing so for weeks but just hadn’t gotten around to it.

On top of all that, even those that don’t buy are going to be reminded of you. And they’re going to experience, right then, how much you truly care about the quality of your products and services, as well as their experience and results. Meaning the chance of getting a referral from them goes way up!

What if you’ve just opened your doors and don’t have past clients, customers or patients to call?

If that’s the case, then you need to get in front of a lot of well-targeted prospects as quickly as possible. So do a bit of research and identify other people or organizations offering complementary products or services to the same target market. Then call to introduce yourself and get to know them better.

If they seem like someone you might want to support or work with, look for ways to partner up or help each other. Think: shared marketing, cross marketing, referrals, joint ventures, offering teleseminars to each other’s lists, trading blog posts, creating and delivering a program or product together, etc.

The bottom line is, when you’re a small business owner you need to hustle. The Internet, email and social media are great, but sometimes a more personal connection does the job better.

That’s why you need to pick up the phone, reach out and make contact. And do it regularly. When you do this, you’re going to grow your business; and you’re going to learn a ton about your business, your customers and yourself along the way.

Do you regularly call your clients, customers or patients just to check in? If so, what are your results? If not, why not? What other thoughts do you have about this? Please do leave a comment…

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Time is Required.  Relationships must be built, nurtured and maintained and this takes time.  Just like any relationship, you have to put the work in for it to be successful.  You can however preschedule some of your posts, set up monitoring and alerts for customer service issues, etc. but you will still need time for live posting and interaction.  Showing the human side of your business is very important.   This will be a great commitment so structure how and when to dedicate time so you won’t feel lost in a time warp.

Never Rely Solely on Automation.  It’s pretty hard to show the human side of your business if you have everything prescheduled and automated and never answer when asked a question, never say anything spontaneous, never comment on a customer’s post at all, never share a picture or video, etc.  Social media marketing is not mean to be a new feed only, information dumping ground or anything of the like.  While you can set your blog to feed into your Facebook or Twitter business pages, for example, you never want that to be your only source of content.  Real interaction from real people is what this is all about.

Customer Service Issues are Your Friend.  Another reason to not solely automate is not only because your community will pick up on it quickly, be turned off and leave but that is just not what they are there for.  If they want to see your blog or news feed, they’ll sign up for it.  Plus if you have a customer service issue addressed on your Facebook page, for example, you want to respond immediately and professionally.  It’s a great opportunity to show how dedicated you are to your customers.  The entire community will be watching how you respond and how you handle it.  When they see you take care of it and turn that customer’s negativity into a positive experience they’ll be more apt to recommend your services or products and help bring in other community members, thus more customers for you.  No one expects perfection.  But everyone expects responsibility and a solution when something goes wrong.  Take advantage of these opportunities when they arise to retain a customer and gain more.

Be Consistent.  Creating and sticking to a reasonable editorial calendar and having consistency in your post content is important.  It’s part of your branding and the personality of the human side of your business.  It gains trust from your community as they start to know what to expect from you and what they can rely on you for.  This is part of what gets them to start sharing information about your community and getting others to join.

Promotions Should be Kept to a Minimum While Leveraging Expertise.  Social media marketing is not a sales stomping ground.  Again, it is about relationships.  While it is very much acceptable, and even expected, to share a sale, product launch, coupon, freebie, etc. it is important for that to not be your only content.  You should share industry and related tips and tricks with your community, share related personal pictures and videos, have related discussions and much more.

For example, if your business is a recipe and cooking magazine or online site, then why not also tell your community when certain stores (that have nothing to do with your business in any way) have sales on cooking appliances, cutlery, serving dishes, etc.  Give party tips and advice.  Group recipes for certain holidays and suggest cocktails that would go good with them.  Give tips on how to clean the oven if a certain sauce gets spilled, how to get red wine out of the carpet, etc.  Anything that is relevant to your business and strengthens and positions you as an expert but keeps your voice consistent and makes you more valuable to your community as a well-rounded, trusted source is what you need to offer.

These tips should give you a solid starting point in creating and managing your social media marketing campaign for 2012.

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Don’t Worry About Google

Almost every growing startup comes to a point where they have to worry about “what if Google does it.” If it is a market worth getting into, then Google or someone else as large as them will almost certainly get into the market. What you aren’t remembering is the fact that it is probably going to be a smaller effort with little or no budget inside of the larger company. The main focus of any large company is their main profit driver, which is almost certainly not your startup’s experimental business model. Microsoft, Google, and every other large company lacks the main asset of a startup: speed. By the time that a larger company really puts momentum and force behind competing against you, then the game is most likely over for them. Google took over seven years to truly compete against Facebook, which had 800 million users at that point. Everyone heralded Facebook Places as the end of Foursquare forever and that they should pack up shop. A year later, Facebook Places has faded into obscurity while Foursquare’s traffic has soared. When a large incumbent comes into your space, largely ignore them and use the press for validation.

Find A Giant As An Ally

The enemy of my enemy is thy friend. If a giant such as Google comes into your market to compete against you, odds are one of the other giants are taking notice as well such as Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. . They might be planning to come into the market as well or already exist in the market with a flawed product. You should see this as the opportunity to partner with one of the other larger companies out there. You get massive distribution and they get the benefits of being in the space without a loss of speed or manpower. This route can also be one that leads to an acquisition at the end of the road.

Copycats don’t have the roadmap

Before someone like Google comes along to compete with you, a slew of copycats will spring up. We recently had this happen with Onswipe as an unoriginal 100% ripoff popped up using our name to gain press with a shoddy product. Along the way, a copycat will constantly try to play fast follower by copying your latest and greatest feature. The problem is the fact that, copycats are always one step behind and often stay that way. They never started out creating the company as a problem they wanted to solve, but as a way to capitalize on the great opportunity that you shed light upon. The copycats will create confusion in the marketplace, which should be your greatest worry. Potential customers may ask how you are different than them. The way to combat this is to sell more than just the current snapshot in time, but the longer term vision. Since the copycat does not have your startup’s longer term vision, you can out sell them.

Mis-education creates false competitors

If you are similar on the surface to another company, the press and potential partners may be fast to label you competitors. Many people think of Flipboard as a direct competitor to Onswipe. This happens because we both provide beautiful interface on the iPad, but our businesses are entirely different. The same false competition between Facebook and Twitter happened many years ago as both were thought of as Social Networks. Over time it has become very clear that Facebook and Twitter are two very different companies. To combat mis-education in the market, you should have a simple and clear 2-3 sentence reasoning of why you are different. Over time as both companies in a space mature towards their individual visions, it will become apparent to anyone the difference between the two companies. Up until that point, it will likely take a mix of explaining the difference to the market while having many one on one conversations.

Don’t try to win on features

Competitors will try to constantly battle you by adding an incremental amount of features. It’s tempting to want to constantly play a game of one-upping a competitor with features, but that usually results in a product that no one wants. It’s the path that many tablet makers have taken when competing against the iPad. There is a constant game of one-upping on features like processor speed or 3D screens, yet nobody has even come close to overtaking the iPad in the tablet market. Why is this? Everyone is trying to BE Apple, not BEAT Apple. When it comes to features, march to the drum of your own roadmap and vision.

Price wars are a race to the bottom

Many entrepreneurs think that a competitor will come in and beat them on price. You may lose some customers, but in the long haul, a competitor can’t be you by just being cheaper. If a competitor does come into your market and competes solely on price, do not be tempted to constantly lower your price to beat them. Instead you should fight on product quality and the true return on investment for the user. When it comes to a competitor that comes into your market and offers a product for free that you have charged for, then you may have a problem depending on what type of business you are building. If you are building a company built upon fast growth, then your business model may be flawed in the first place. If it’s not, then you should dig in deeper as to why the competitor is offering the product for free. They will eventually have to turn a profit, whether it is by charging YOU or someone ELSE.

Speed wins

Larger companies are often slow, though large in size. They may ENTER your market, but they will often not have the speed to STAY in the market. Speed comes in a few different varieties when competing against a large company like Google or Microsoft. The first variety of speed is iteration. How fast can you iterate on a product after market feedback? A large company is going to have to stick to a much larger roadmap and won’t be able to turn a ship on a dime. The second variety of speed is feature addition. Large competitors won’t be able to add features as fast as you and will most likely be trying to play catch up to what you already have.

Focus on the normals

Pinterest has become a huge success and has < a href=”http://allthingsd.com/20111222/pinterests-growth-hockey-stick-would-make-a-great-craft-project/”>grown tremendously over the past year. The largest part of Pinterest’s success story has not been its adoption by the inner circle of Silicon Valley or sex crazed college students, but those of women from Middle America. Most competitors will come into the market and try to create buzz amongst the early adopters of the tech community. Instead of falling into this trap, try to attract the normal users of the world ie- women in the midwest or a teenager that wants to find new music. It’s hard to reach this audience and once you have a grasp on it, it will be hard for a competitor to come in and compete against you.

Cash matters when scaling

If you have started to grow and a new competitor comes into the market, it’s wise to have enough cash on hand to really ignite your growth. Everyone thinks that products take off and that it’s all taken care of. There are always financial barriers in place when rocket fueled growth kicks in. If you are lucky enough to hit that point, you want to make sure that you have the cash to leave your competitors in the dust.

You are your biggest competitor

You are often your biggest competitor. You should not completely ignore your competition, but the biggest battle happens inside of the four walls of your startup’s office. Startups come down to pure execution of a strategy on a daily basis and maintaining the faith for the long haul. Most startups don’t lose to competition, but because they lose the will to fight.

Avoiding the build versus buy problem

Many startups will not be competing with other startups, but with the internal development teams of their larger customers. Moveable Type lost the blogging wars to WordPress by not moving themselves towards being a fully flexible platform. Instead of having conversations that are a build versus buy scenario where it’s either your startup or your customer’s internal development team, you should be positioning yourself into a build OR buy scenario. In order to do this, your product needs to become a platform that others can build upon to meet their needs. This will let you grow overtime to meet the needs of any customer without sacrificing your own roadmap. This will often require you to sacrifice some short term gains for long term sustainability. Any and all changes you make to your software have to be applicable to the greater good of the platform. That means no custom development and no bending to the wills of customers crazy demands.

Bring traffic to the table

The largest successes of the past few years have been audience driver. Twitter and Facebook have been killing search as a referral source, while YouTube has opened brought forth a new audience for professional and amateur creators alike. Tumblr has seen widespread adoption by major publishers due to the viral nature of the platform. Pinterest is getting adoption by mainstream fashion brands due to its ability to drive more traffic than Facebook. If you can bring traffic to your users, then they are going to be addicted to your service like crack cocaine. Once network effects kick in, a publisher is very unlikely to leave your service.

Bring money to the table

Most partners want two things. The first thing I touched on before, which is traffic. The second and most important is M O N E Y. If you can make partners money, then they are likely to side with you and stay when a competitor comes along. Cash is a powerful force and if your company can be a direct or indirect way for people to make money, then you are going to be hard to unseat. Everyone thinks that Google won the search wars by having JUST the world’s best algorithm. They had a great product, but they gained distribution by powering search for publishers. With this, they were smart enough to make money for publishers and win the search wars. How have you dealt with competition in your space? Another interesting angle that I wish I could analyze is, what it is like to enter the market as a competitor to an existing incumbent. Whatever the scenario may be, the most important of the 13 lessons above is to remember that you are your own competitor. Keep fighting the fight and be prepared for the war, not just the battle.

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• Which employees will have access to social media sites during business hours, which sites will they be provided access to, during what hours, and for what purposes (business and/or non-business)
• How will you handle mis-use of social networks and what will constitute misuse?
• What kind of action would you take in the event of a problem?
• Do you have a policy in place and who does it apply to?
• IS social media employee use to be monitored?
• Will policies cover use at work and outside of work?

What potential issues could result?

• A number of potential issues have come up to date. Some of the things you should prepare yourself for include:
• threats against your company, your brand, or your workers
• Slanderous statements
• Incidents of racism
• Vulgar language
• Release of trade secrets and confidential information
• An exit strategy for employees. Who owns social media accounts and what happens when key users leave. Keep this in mind because people will leave!

Training your workers in social media use is an important consideration. Some items to consider include:

• Definition of social media as it applies to your business
• Explanation of your company’s social media philosophy
• Who will be charged with discipline, how to train people regarding it, and how it will be delivered
• Considerations of the impact on productivity
• Discussion of clients and information regarding clients
• How employees will be identified online
• Strategy for following and re-tweeting with company accounts
• Strategy for employee discussion, replies and re-tweets amongst each other
• How to integrate and mention other social accounts on twitter
• Schedules for tweeting, assignment of duties

For more on this topic I suggest you look at the following article from SocialTimes - What Are Companies Saying About Social Media In The Workplace? [Infographic] – thanks to Tina Cary @tinacary for sharing a pointer to this resource on Twitter.

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Brett Tabke and his team did a really good job putting on another great show that covered many disciplines and subject areas. If it’s still not on your road-map as a must-attend event, then it should be.

This year I discussed how large brands with noisy subject matters manage and maintain discipline while monitoring reputation. Below I’ve outlined the basics of what I went over, since in large part my PowerPoint was devoid of any of the important details I presented.

Obtain the most important information

Oftentimes large brands don’t have the time nor the capabilities, depending on the vertical, to ‘listen’ to every single piece of content that is created on the web about them. From what I have found from working at Ignite over the years and dealing with many major brands on the monitoring front is that there is an epic cartload of spam created on the web on a daily basis.

It’s enough at times to make your monitoring initiatives feel futile.

So it is absolutely critical to obtain the information you really care about. You need to monitor certain things and ignore others. If you’re monitoring the online reputation for Wal-Mart, listening to just the term ‘walmart’ for example doesn’t really do you a lot of good. Identifying specific targets or buckets of important information and honing in on those important conversations is paramount.

Now you need to understand your important keywords and who/what you should be monitoring. I recommend at a basic level to monitor the following:

Identify your important keywords

1. Brand name
2. Key executives
3. Important employees
4. Products
5. Your competitors

Eliminate Noise

Now that you have identified the content that is important, you need to segment out the data into digestible buckets of information. Most tools I have used over the years have a way to do this through advanced Boolean queries. Below is an example of what one of those might look like.

Utilize tools that allow advanced Boolean queries

NEAR7((Walmart OR Wal Mart) AND (tv OR tvs OR televisions)) AND NOT (amazon OR buy)

The query above is something that might help the electronics team at Wal-Mart keep an eye on conversations that are relevant to them. It looks for mentions of walmart or wal mart then tv or tvs or televisions, all common variations. Then perhaps they want to make sure to weed out a bit of the spam which is typically attributed to folks linking to their Amazon affiliate sites so they remove any mentions that say amazon.

Finally, the near 7 field makes sure that the words are in close proximity to each other because typically off-topic mentions and irrelevant content comes in when folks utilize widgets or other mechanisms of getting content onto a site that isn’t necessarily related to the actual post. This helps alleviate that problem, thus increasing the chance of someone actually talking about TVs from Wal-Mart.

Whitelist the important sites, Blacklist the bad ones

Most marketers who work with large sites see conversations coming from a short list of forums and websites that commonly discuss the brand. Typically we recommend creating different boolean variables to pull in those conversations because they are identified as a much cleaner source. Essentially you are whitelisting the sites because you know they are not sources ripe with spam and noise.

You want to make sure you find their conversations as they are of higher quality.

Just like you want to whitelist important sites you also need to blacklist sites, as you will certainly find sites that continue to frustrate and complicate your monitoring efforts. Keep those sites from ever having a chance to show up in your stream by blacklisting them. Any tool worth its salt has a way to do this quickly and easily.

Automate Blacklisting with Rules

A more advanced method for handling this is to setup automated rules that block sites that are potentially spam. We have found that sites exhibiting traits similar to a spam site should automatically be blocked using the following sort of logic. Keep in mind this depends greatly on your brand’s situation.

Amazon affiliate code + Adsense + 3 keywords in domain  + keyword “buy”

Clean stream of mentions. Ahhh…much better, right?

Now that you have a handle on how to develop a clean stream of mentions you should work on identifying the key people of interest and what departments need to see mentions as seen below.

Direct Conversations to important people

• CEO
• Product team
• Customer service

Each individual team has mentions it needs to see. Make sure you direct the most beneficial conversation to the people that matter. More often than not when you have to manage a large amount of mentions on a daily basis, no one person or entity inside of the company should wade through it all. Break up the data and get it to the people that matter.

Automated alerts in the form of E-mail or SMS

Most advanced tools and systems for monitoring your reputation have an option for E-mail alerts or SMS notifications when certain pieces of content are starting to gain traction. This is where having an inclusion list (whitelisted websites) helps because you can have the system monitor those domains for trending conversations that mention your company.

If you know specific pieces of content have the potential to cause damage, having an automated alert sent to you calling that specific piece of content out can be very helpful.

Understand your brand’s overall health

Many top level executives want to know their overall brand health. After all, you are spending all this time monitoring and the managers who see the day to day conversations have a really good grasp of what is going on. But how do you relate that to top level executives?

Pro Tip: Automated sentiment analysis is unreliable and often very inaccurate

Many of the monitoring tools offer automated sentiment analysis, however, I tend to stand by the fact they don’t serve much purpose other than looking pretty in charts.

We usually recommend sentiment reports through more sophisticated tools packages that tend to not be classified as ‘reputation monitoring tools.’

Pro Tip: If you automate, make sure you analyze enough data to meet statistical relevance

Look for tools that do feature level sentiment scoring

If you do choose to automate however, look for a tool that does feature level scoring. Simply put: feature level scoring is when a tool compares posts based on similar topics. Natural language processing can be much more accurate when doing so.

The alternative you see to this with most automated sentiment tools is that they try to compare all variety of posts vs. comparing them as similar posts then cross checking for sentiment. Below is an example of feature level sentiment scoring:

Feature Level Examples

• Entities (persons, companies)
• Topics (“hotel room,” “room service,” “location”)
• Concepts (“cleanliness,” “value”)

Pro Tip: Crimson Hexagon is a tool that does a good job scoring sentiment based on feature level analysis.

Reputation Monitoring Tools For Big Brands

I have talked quite a bit about tools so far. At this point you are probably wanting to know what are the best large scale reputation monitoring tools. I have compiled a short list below of tools to check out:

• Sysomos
• Radian6
• Buzzmetrics
• Alterian SM2
• Converseon
• Cymfony
• Visible Technologies

The pricing for many of these tools ranges from $500/month all the way up to $10,000+/month. $2,000/month seems to be a pretty average price tag for many top tier monitoring tools. You can check out a previous blog post of mine on the problems with many social monitoring tools to give you further insight into the fallacies of most monitoring tools.

Hire a Social API Engineer and build an internal tool

If those services noted above seem like too much to pay for just a tool, then I encourage companies to look into hiring an in-house engineer to build out a custom setup catered to the business. There is much more one can do with a custom solution in terms of automating rules, creating clean sources of data and funneling the data to the right people.

I have personally used over 5 different monitoring tools and I can say from experience that none of them do exactly what you need when you need it.

Engineers can still leverage reliable back-end support through a social discovery service called gnip and just worry about building the infrastructure to deliver clean results, when it matters, to the right people.

For some businesses it can make a lot of sense to go this route.

It’s not all about the tools

Tools shmools. At this point of the game whats failing you from monitoring your reputation effectively is not a lack of a dashboard or user interface. Its probably the fact you have hired 3 interns to read your posts and leverage some 10k/month tool.

Avinash puts it well with the following quote found here:

“Through my humble experience in this field I have developed a rule to fix this problem and achieve Magnificent Success. I call it the 10 / 90 rule. Here it what it says……..

• Our Goal: Highest value from Web Analytics implementation.
• Cost of analytics tool & vendor professional services: $ 10.
• Required investment in “intelligent resources/analysts”: $ 90.
• Bottom-line for Magnificent Success: Its the people.”

Granted this isn’t a complete overlap as he is talking about web analytics tools but I think it overlaps well with the monitoring space. You can’t expect to throw 50k a year at a tool and expect to get all the viable information necessary out of it by popping off a chart or report. You need to invest much more in the actual people who use the reports and manage the tools. A good general rule to follow: spend 90% on people, 10% on the tools.

Pro Tip: Take actionable steps based off of daily monitoring and make iterative improvements

Takeaways

Tools and people are important, but at the end of the day it’s even more important to have actionable takeaways on a consistent basis. Big brands do not suffer the same problem as smaller businesses. People are in fact out there talking about you, it’s just a matter of putting together the processes to digest it all.

At the end of the day you should be doing the following on a consistent basis based off of what people are saying about you:

• Improve your products
• Optimize the customer service pipeline
• Establish a unique selling point
• Mitigate brand damage

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What did I take away? A few key themes emerged for me throughout the week.

Ask better questions

Tom Webster presented at BlogWorld NY in the spring and I missed it–I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. And, I’m sure glad I didn’t. Tom’s entire presentation could be boiled down to three simple world: Ask better questions. As a professional market researcher, Tom talked at length about how we need to ask these better questions to get better data. To get better insights. To get better answers.

Know your readers

Another speakers I hadn’t seen present before that I really wanted to see first-hand was Darren Rowse. I’ve followed Darren’s ProBlogger  blog for years, and his personal stories and accounts have really resonated with me. And while I had a list of takeaways from this session, the most impactful was the mantra: Know your readers. Darren encouraged folks to develop audience profiles for their blog (great idea)–just like a marketer would do when thinking about their key targets. Give these readers a name. Describe them in detail. Demographics. Psychographics. The works. With those audience profiles in hand, you’ll be able to better target your content and make it more relevant for your readers.

Do your own work

Another key takeaway from Mr. Webster early on Thursday, but one I heard other speakers espouse throughout the week afterward (including Jason Falls on Saturday). Tom and Jason were talking about doing your own work with respect to research, but it’s really a good lesson for digital work across the board. Don’t try to mimic what other companies are doing–your brand is unique. You have different customers. Different circumstances. Different employees. Don’t take research you find online as gospel. Do your own first-hand research and see what makes sense for YOUR organization. Do your own work.

Have a back-up plan for success

I first heard Peter Shankman speak a few years ago when he came to a Minnesota PRSA event I helped organize. Nowadays, he’s “internet famous.” But, he’s still the same guy. He takes some heat for his approach and strong opinions from time to time, but I’ve always loved his presentations. He brings huge energy to the stage. And, more importantly, the guy knows how to tell a story. He had me, and a whole slew of people in that audience Thursday, hooked from the get go. One of the key lessons he shared: Have a back-up plan for success. If and when your video, blog post or project blows up online, make sure you have a plan in place to capitalize on that success. Sure, we all fail more than we succeed, but you want to be ready for success. Love Peter’s optimism.

And, I’ll leave you with one last note. It’s a video Shankman featured in his presentation, and it was the single most hilarious thing I read or watched all week. Enjoy.