The Word of Mouth Marketing Association defines an influencer as:

A person who has a greater than average reach or impact through word of mouth in a relevant marketplace.

Your job as a company, brand or marketer is to indentify, seek out, and engage with these influencers to gain the support of the influencer for your business, product or service.

Read more on the Influencer Marketing Strategy.

Why it’s effective:

• People trust friends
• People trust known authority
• People Trust social proof (independent sources and many of them)

Some of the best influencer strategy overviews come from Michael Wu, Lithium’s Principal Scientist of Analytics. Check out these posts:

• The 6 Factors of Social Media Influence (introducing the model)
• Finding the Influencers (covers credibility and bandwidth)
• The Right Content at the Right Time (covers relevance and timing)
• Hitting Your Targets (covers alignment and confidence. There are several excellent and in-depth dialogs in the comment section)

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Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects. It is an amazing opportunity to connect with other passionate and skilled individuals, and perhaps even find a co-founder or two to transform your idea into reality. StartUp Weekend.

To find about the Twin Cities Start Up Weekend visit here. The team I was on Polywiks, helping you discover how your values match up with how your politicians actually vote. I give a little minor case study on how we were able to create an email list, facebook and twitter followers.

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This show as inspired by a marketing great Eugene M. Shwartz author of the book Breakthrough Advertising. Here we go, strap in. (Also I have to apologize, my P’s in this audio popped a little, will fix that going forward).

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Have you thought about the unique aspects of what makes your business different? Are those business ideas valuable to others? Not valuable in the way that you have where you have are present to give value but the ideas, the concepts, and the business practices. Today we talk about why it’s time to think about building your own intellectual property.

A few things I’ve seen lately have pushed me to focus on why it’s important to have your own IP. I recently read the book The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin. This book is basically about how technology is killing the human labor force. I like reading books that are a few years old to see if they were accurate in their predictions. This one seems spot on.

For instance the news from the World’s Largest Electronics Manufacturer Foxconn Wants 1 Million More Robots In 3 Years. Bye-bye Human Labor. Then we have Japanese Scientists Invent Robot That Learns, Thinks, and Acts.

I also give my experience of a new software program that takes graphic designed PSD files and turns them into WordPress themes. Then we have the Y Combinator concept. From Wikipedia:

Compared to other startup funds, Y Combinator provides very little money ($14,000 for startups with 1 founder, $17,000 for startups with 2 founders, and $20,000 for those with 3 or more[2]). This reflects co-founder Paul Graham’s theory that between free software, dynamic languages, the web, and Moore’s Law, the cost of founding an information technology startup has greatly decreased.[3] Wired has called Y Combinator a “boot camp for startups”.[4]

14K – 20K is not a lot of money for a startup but with Moore’s law and the cost of development tools and languages it makes sense. I’ve seen it first hand when I attended a start up weekend here in St Paul, MN.

Technology Is Changing All Levels of Labor

All of these lead me to think that technology will drastically change the labor force within 10-12 years. It’s not just manual labor but sales, management, and a host of other traditional white-collar jobs. Just look at what has happened to Wall Street. Trades can now be executed within 150 micro seconds or 1/2000th the time it takes the human eye to blink. Welcome to the age of algorithmic trading —- the new order. Another term that’s used is HFT or High Frequency Trading. In studies I’ve seen algorithmic trading accounts for nearly 60% of the volumes.

So no longer do we need the men and women who decided what to trade, did the research, or even provided the human touch. Now a machine decides in an amazing slice of time what to trade, when, and how. Could something similar happen in your industry? If so who are the ones that are continuing to get paid? In the HFT and Wall Street world it’s the programmers (the ones with IP).

Outside of this conversation is the moral stand and what this means for our society. Given this drive for technology to replace human labor what is one answer? I believe it’s to develop your own form of intellectual property. So let’s jump in…

What is Intellectual Property?

There are 4 main types of IP.

• Copyrights (think stuff like books and music)
• Trademarks (stuff like business logo, name, slogan)
• Patents (most valuable a “business method” or new technology)
• Trade Secrets (think the Coca Cola Recipe)

It’s that last one that is most relevant to our discussion today.

Trade Secrets as Intellectual Property

Trade secrets are secrets of your business trade. A few good examples of intellectual property trade secrets:

• Recipes
• Business Methods
• Marketing Strategies
• Anything else that gives the business a competitive advantage

A trade secret is not a patent or a trademark. Both patents and trademarks are matters of public record, while a trade secret is confidential and proprietary. Trade secrets cover information that includes formulas, patterns, compilations, programs, devices, methods, techniques or processes.

Questions for Your Own Trade Secrets

Developing assets from your own unique business experience and processes has the potential to open other revenues sources. We’ve recently gone through this exercise at You Brand, Inc. We found we have a few things that are unique and are opportunities for trade secrets.

So what can you do about developing your own IP? Here are some questions I’d start with:

• What aspects of my business model makes me different from my competitors?
• What aspects of business is valuable to others?
• What aspects of what I do or my business would someone pay for without me being present?

I believe as technology innovation accelerates human logic and unique practices developed by a thinking person will become more important. Even if that doesn’t happen I still think developing your own unique IP will give you a possible extra revenue source.

I’ve also found a good overview of protecting your trade secrets. Check that out right here.

What do you think? Is IP important for everybody to consider or will machines and tech never be able to replace your role or your value you provide?

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I watched a fascinating presentation the other day from Joshua Foer on The99Percent.com. It was all about experts and the things that they have in common that keep them at the top of their game.

That’s what we talk about today. What are those 4 disciplines and how can you put them into practice in your business?

1. Experts tend to operate outside of their comfort zone and study themselves failing. For instance, the best figure skaters are the ones that practice the jumps they don’t land instead of the ones they do.
2. They will try to walk in the shoes of someone who is more competent than them. For instance, studies of the great chess players reveals that the indicator of how good and fast they grow as chess players has more to do with how much time they spend studying grandmaster chess players–not how much they play themselves.
3. Experts crave and thrive on immediate and constant feedback.
4. Experts treat what they do like a science. They collect data, they analyze data, they create theories about what works and doesn’t work, then test them.

Here’s What to Do Next

Take all four of those key ideas and figure out how you can put them into practice in your business or what you do. Get specific and create a strategy to put these into action.

• Why Creating content means more than SEO
• Why the adult learning theory is important in the content you create
• Thinking about the inverted pyramid is important when creating content
• Some quick tips on using the big four (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube)
• When to worry about Search engine optimization
• Why commenting on other blogs builds authority

Remember authority is build over time and with trust.

What about your about page? Have you dialed it in to speak directly to your target audience? Below I’ve included some of the best posts and tips I’ve found on creating a great about us page:

• The Top 10 Ways to Create a Perfect ‘About Us’ or ‘About Me’ Page
• Best Practices For Effective Design Of “About me”-Pages
• What Does Your “About Us” Page Say About Your Startup?
• 15 Awesome About Page Designs
• Awesome About Us Page Examples

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We talk a little about that and how to put it in practice. I also mention a few stories to support this. First is:

A lingering recession, coupled with consumers’ rapid adoption of digital tools, has inexorably altered shopping behavior in categories like groceries, home electronics, apparel and quick-service restaurants. Consumers engage with a variety of digital platforms as they research small and large purchases, when they’re in physical stores and during post-shop activities such as product reviews and referrals. More here >>

And Welcome e-mails with offers equal more transactions: Experian.

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Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs says you can predict how people will behave by looking at their underlying needs. Maslow believed, for example, a starving person would find food first, putting aside every other consideration including social niceties.

What are these core needs?

• Physiological needs are the requirements for human survival. They include breathing, food, water, shelter, sex, clothing, sleep and comfort.
• Safety needs can be seen as a way to meet tomorrow’s physiological needs. They include personal and financial security, health, order, law and protection from elements.
• Love and belonging needs are about social interactions. We don’t want to go through life alone. Social needs include friendship, love, intimacy, family, community, belonging and relationships.
• Esteem needs include self-esteem as well as recognition from others. Esteem can come in the form of achievement, status, prestige, recognition, mastery, independence and responsibility.
• Self-actualization needs relate to becoming more than what we are, and they can come from peace, knowledge, self-fulfillment, realization of personal potential, personal growth and peak experiences.

We talk about these needs. Can you get to a further understanding of these needs to connect with people in the social space. I go in different directions here in the hope that I spur some thoughts for you. Can we use these needs to understand why people engage social media. How you can keep these needs in mind when you engage in earned media.

I would love feedback on this show or should I stick to a roundup of news and thoughts?

** this show is one of the top 10 listened to and shared shows from 2010.

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Cloud computing, mobile technology, RFID, NFC, and facial recognition are some of the things that are just waiting to steam roll to the average person. The key is this technology isn’t a dream… all of it could be implemented today. I’m not arguing for that–in fact I think we need to be very careful about our privacy and what technologies we embrace. I still find it hard to see how we are going to stop it.

You might have seen this story on Google Facial recognition:

This morning I read the CNN story that said Google was finally going to incorporate facial recognition technology into its Goggles app or another mobile application. I then wrote an opinion piece that argued Google was courting a major privacy backlash, despite seeming to have privacy controls worked out in the article. More on Search Engine Land

We talk about that but also dive in with Near field communication, RFID devices, and how Facebook changes the experience of your after high school years. One place I do suggest that you follow is the NFC association. I see this technology in most mobile devices in the next 3 years and will be the defacto purchasing platform.

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