As I write this, I am attending the Social Graph Symposium in Silicon Valley which I am super excited about. The event is centered around “the social graph and the implications of the social graph in business, technology, and the community.” I’ve been looking forward to it because I have been thinking a lot about social data lately, and in particular how marketers can leverage it with their communications.

Earlier this year at the Email Insiders Summit in Park City, UT, I was on a Social CRM panel with some great folks, where we were discussing in free form, the aspects of the effects of social data on customer relationship management (CRM). I wanted to expand on one of the interesting points that we only touched on in the panel, which was defining the types of social data that are available to marketers. As you can imagine, this could easily have been the focus of the entire panel. Since social data has been a focus of mine over the last few months, I wanted to put down some thoughts on how I view it’s relevance to marketers.

Social Data Defined

The idea of social data is relatively simple. With the growth of social mediums (social networks, micro-blogging, location based technologies, etc), individuals are generating out an incredible amount of activity, content and behavior on the web. This data is propagated and distributed through many channels (web, email, mobile, etc), and at the same time, a market has been evolving that aggregates this data, organizes it, and in some cases analyzes it. This type of data, albeit in some cases, data overload, can bring to bear some interesting opportunities for marketers. Lets look at the two types of social data that encompass the root of these opportunities.

Social Data Attributes

The first, is social data attributes. This is the broad aspect of defining the social graph within a given audience. Lets say for example that the audience is your customer base. Clearly, this is one of the most valuable assets to any business.

Social data attributes allow you to add specific data points to your given customer database, in particular the social graph layer. For example, maybe on average a marketer would have some basic data attributes on their customer list:

1. First & Last Name
2. Company
3. Email Address
4. etc… (the more sophisticated the marketer, the more data fields included in a customer database).

Social data attributes come into play when you can also identify where your subscribers are on the social web. What percentage of them are on Twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, etc.. ? Beyond where your customers are on the social web, there are also attributes like “influencer” data – this is where the number of “friends” or “followers” can be aggregated, and you can identify who in your customer base is a potential “influencer.” These data points can also be aggregated and appended to your database. This is the base foundation of adding the social graph layer to your customer file.

Social Data Activity

The next, and perhaps more challenging social data marketers now have at their fingertips is social activity data. What I mean by this is, what kind of conversations, interactions, posts, updates, check-in’s, etc, are your customers generating online?

This type of data, which is almost always in the public domain, truly is the “real time” heart and soul of your customer base. Aggregating, analyzing, and responding to some of this data has the potential to completely transform traditional CRM, and in many cases already has.

Just think of how much more relevant your customer interactions can be when you’ve read their latest blog post, tweet stream, viewed the flickr pix they posted from an industry event they just attended, etc. On the human level, this is social CRM. Deeper, more meaningful interactions.

From the sales & lead generation perspective, acting on social activity also helps fill the top of the sales funnel. Think about it, with the right approach, people are having more meaningful relevant conversations that start online with some kind of social activity, but are quickly brought offline for deeper discussion. I know many companies who are having great success leveraging this, mine is one of them. With these small examples, I am just scratching the surface of what is possible.

Socialize My Database

From my perspective, email and social are a beautiful marriage. When you think about where to start with all of this, your customer email database makes the most sense. Since email offers one of the most targeted, efficient and measurable mediums available to marketers today, it would make sense to build your social graph around the email address, hence why you always hear me and the folks at Blue Sky Factory touting email as “the digital glue.”

Think about it, if all of the other social mediums went away, there would still be the email address. Recent research data from Merkle’s “View from the Social Inbox 2010″ report also suggests that many people use the same email for permission-based emails as they do for social networks. This makes even more of a case to leverage your email database first.

I’ve Got the Data Now What?

Many marketers I speak with are not so much struggling with where to find this type of data, they are struggling with how to use it. This is the beginning of a new era of marketing strategy and tactics. When combined with email, some of the basic social data elements described above, the following are just some of the tactics a marketer can leverage:

1. Identify, and target influencer’s within your customer or subscriber file.
2. Create accelerated loyalty & retention campaigns.
3. Jump start a social media presence (cross pollinate your customers to your social properties).
4. Convert community into new email subscribers – build your list!
5. Build your sales pipeline by active social web participation & engagement.

Again, I am just scratching the surface of whats possible. I would love to spark some additional dialog on this topic. What are your thoughts on social data? What did I miss? Do you agree?

Feel free to comment and continue the conversation below. Thanks for reading.

Being a bit of a road warrior the last many years, I have gone through a LOT of luggage. I’ve written before about some of my experience on best practices for travel, and there has been plenty added to the comments of that post.

I have two modes of travel I operate under, one is the multi-day trip and the other is the day or overnight trip. For each one I now use a particular brand of luggage that suits my needs.

The Day / Overnight Bag:

The first is my day / overnight bag. I have been looking for a road warrior, daily / overnight bag that I could use that ideally was a roller (to save the shoulder). In full disclosure, shortly after I published the 10 Tips to Achieving Travel Zen post mentioned above, the nice folks at Briggs & Riley reached out to me and offered to send me a 15.4 inch Rolling Multicase (KR307) to kick the tires on (see below):

When I first received the Briggs & Riley, I was really worried about the space for an overnight bag. Though the bag also expands, I was still slightly concerned. Needless to say, my first trip tested all of the boundaries of the bag. I brought a change of clothes and a pair of running shoes, shorts and shirt, in addition to my laptop, cords, and notebook. I maxed the bag out and vowed never to put myself through such a frustrating experience again. Since then, I have mastered the art of the day bag, and the Briggs & Riley is what I have been using every day for the past couple of months. The roller aspect alone is worth it It has turned into my office bag, and my travel bag for any trip that requires me to spend the night. I definitely recommend the KR307, and in fact one of the other members of my executive team has already purchased one.

The Multi-day Rig:

For any trip that requires more than a nights stay, I bring my tried, true and tested Tumi Townhouse roller. I usually bring the Tumi Westminster bag that straps onto the top of the roller for my laptop, notebook and accessories, and the rest goes into the roller. Like I said, tried, true and tested. This is very high quality luggage that can take a beating yet always be functional. In addition to being functional, its pretty good looking luggage, I mean check out those chrome rims Tumi certainly brings it and is a major contender in the road warrior space.

In addition, for any travel where I require a suit or multiple dress shirts, I use my Tumi garment bag (below). This great bag also features and external pocket on the front that can store all sorts of  “extra’s” for the intrepid traveler, cords, chargers, etc. I’ve used it for things I need quick access to in the airport or during travel.

The one point I want to mention is that none of my travel gear is designed for checking baggage. I absolutely avoid checking luggage at all costs. The gear mentioned above allows me to always travel with carry on (unless I’m flying a prop or a puddle jumper but thats another situation altogether).

What is your travel rig? Would love to hear your thoughts on the gear you use and how it streamlines or enhances your travel experience. Thanks for reading.

I wanted to put up a quick post to mention a couple of great events I will be participating in this week. I’ll be posting my March schedule shortly as well. In the meantime, hopefully you can join me at one of the below. Looking forward to it!

February 25th – Webinar: “Email & Social Media: Community, Content & Killer Campaigns”
DJ Waldow and I will be presenting this on behalf of Awareness, Inc.

Attendees will learn:
• Why email is the digital glue of social media
• How to integrate email & social (tactical, low-hanging fruit)
• Strategies for using email & social media as complementary channels
• How to optimize content to encourage sharing
• Strategies for effective community building using email + social

You can register here.

February 26th – “Got Effective Email Marketing?” – A Panel Discussion
Hosted by ThinkBusiness Media, join me as I moderate the following panel of marketing rockstars:

Jeanne Jennings, Principal, JeanneJennings.com
Raj Khera, CEO, MailerMailer.
Jeffrey Lupisella, President and CEO, Vizual, Inc.
Bill McKay, Vice President, Direct Media Millard.

The event is in Tysons Corner, VA from 7:30-9:30. You can register here.

As Bob Dylan sang, the times they are a changing. For marketers, now the times are a changing more than ever before. Think about the landscape shift we have seen in marketing communications over the last 24 months alone. There have been incredible amounts of change and evolution in marketing mediums, and most importantly the connections, community, trust and influence that the social web has brought to the forefront.

The future is now:

Today, if you are a marketer, and you are ignoring this fundamental shift in communication, you are doing both yourself and your company a large disservice. You are putting your job on the line, and it will be just a matter of time before your organization “shifts” with or without you. As marketers it is our duty to leverage all of the tools that are available to us today.

Are you on the bus or off the bus? That is the question any savvy marketer must ask themselves these days. Sure, every market and industry is different, but everyone is going to be affected this time (they already have, many just don’t know it yet). This marketing communications landscape shift isn’t just another “tactic” to include in your media plan, this is the new frontier of marketing communications. We are in the future now.

Is your marketing department adaptable?

To me, one of the secrets to success in today’s marketing landscape is having the willingness and ability to adapt. The ability to change, hence the marketers “new normal.” What is the new normal? According to me, the “new normal” for any organization should be the ability to constantly change, with the times, the technologies, and the mediums that are literally evolving the way that we think about communicating and engaging with our customer base.

The “new normal” should always be morphing. They say, the only constant is change, and that is so true when it comes to today’s marketing landscape. As marketers, we can no longer be set in our ways. In today’s world, our ways need to be constantly changing because the optimization of our efforts is never complete. As our VP of Strategy & Innovation Chris Penn says, there is always more juice to squeeze!

Are you taking action?

Now is the time of new thinking, experimenting, evaluating and adapting. This is the time. Your company’s marketing department should be morphing into a publishing organization, and leveraging the power of your customers and subscribers networks. As I have said several times this year in my speaking, 2010 is the year of social acceleration, and TRUST and INFLUENCE in the social web will drive more purchasing decisions than EVER before.

So, as we move forward in 2010 and the landscape continues to change, it is important that we as marketers stay nimble and light. Now is not the time to “over process” your marketing function, but rather to test the waters on new mediums, learn more about your existing subscribers (social graph), build brand ambassadors and evangelists (easier said than done, yes), and most importantly LEVERAGE what is beyond your control…… the thoughts, opinions, recommendations and influence of your existing base.

Think about it.

Am I off? Tell me what you think in the comments.

I recently had the opportunity to speak at this years Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. I was part of the Web2Open sessions that were organized by the Podcamp Foundation (Hats off to Whitney Hoffman), and in traditional “unconference” fashion, those of us who were asked to speak could do so on any topic we wanted.

The theme of this year’s Web 2.0 Expo was “The power of less,” and with that in mind I took this opportunity to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, get back to my roots and start talking about my experiences with entrepreneurship, starting a business, bootstrapping, and all of the lessons I have learned along the way…. so far. The Web 2.0 Expo theme was a perfect fit to “beta” a presentation I dubbed: “Bootstrapping: Building a Business Funded by Revenue.”

The Web 2.0 talk was the first step in developing a series of posts and presentations that I will be focused on throughout 2010. Though my story is still very much “in progress,” I have started several businesses, and have been building my most recent company, Blue Sky Factory, for almost 9 years. I’ve learned a wealth of lessons through my experiences building a business from the ground up with zero funding.

The Framework:

As mentioned earlier, the Web 2.0 talk was in “beta,’ as I am still very much flushing out the various topics and segments I would like to cover. As I have been thinking through things, there have been three main topic areas that seem to encompass the spirit of what I would like to talk about. They include the following:

1. Start-up Lessons

Just as it sounds, and what essentially encompasses most of the presentation below, there are oh so many start-up lessons to discuss, and every entrepreneur has their own. Sometimes, more often than not, they all have their own version of the same lesson. I plan on discussing several of the ones that I have experienced and have processed.

2. Building a team

At the end of the day, any good entrepreneur will tell you their company is only as good as its people. It is so true. Over the last 9 years there have been many different people who have joined my company, and each one of them play a key role in our operation. I plan on talking about building teams who are aligned, motivated and constantly executing.

3. Managing growth

It is often said that managing growth is simply the act of trading one set of problems or challenges for the next. There is a lot to be said for that statement. Growth isn’t easy, but if you find yourself managing it, then you are doing something right! There are a several “stages’ of growth to be discussed in a variety of topics (team, technology, infrastructure, finance, sales, etc).

Below, are the slides from the Web 2.0 talk, which tend to focus mostly on the first topic of “start-up lessons.” I would love to hear your input, or questions in the comments below. I will be continuing on this topic organically, and hope to begin to drill down on the high level topics listed above shortly.

This coming week I will again be heading to one of my favorite places on the planet, NYC. I will be attending Ad Tech on Wed and Thur, and will also be speaking on a panel at Graham Lawlor’s Ultra Light Startup’s on Thursday November 5th at 6:30 at Sun Microsystems. The event is dubbed “Email Marketing for Startups”.

I am looking forward to it and I will be joined by some incredible folks who I can’t wait to meet. The panel looks like:

Moderator:

* Maisha Walker, President of message medium and e-commerce columnist with Inc. magazine

Panelists (alphabetic order):

* Greg Cangialosi, CEO of Blue Sky Factory
* Neil Capel, Founder and CEO of SailThru
* Lisa Klieman, Vice President, Business Development at Innovyx, Inc.
* Adam Rich, Co-founder and Editor-in-chief of Thrillist

If you are coming let me know and lets be sure to link up. If you are going to be at Ad Tech and want to link up as well drop me a line. I will be roaming the exhibition floor most of the time. See you in NYC!

This coming Tuesday at 1pm EST, I will be doing a webinar with Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot. Below is the overview of the session. Hope you can join us!

Get leads to come to you, then turn them into customers.  Sound too good to be true?

It’s not, and it gets even better.  No more cold calling, telemarketing, or spending tons on print and radio ads.

Enter inbound marketing.  This (more recent) style of marketing allows you to get found by potential customers online.  The key is retaining these leads, building a relationship with them, and turning them into clients.  Enter email marketing.

Join us for “Inbound & Email Marketing: So Happy Together” on Tuesday, October 13 at 1 PM ET as Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, and I discuss the inbound marketing landscape and how email marketing complements this method of attracting customers.

Attendees will learn:

• Inbound vs. outbound marketing
• Strategies for using inbound marketing to attract new customers
• How to build a relationship and retain leads through email marketing
• Tips for making the most of inbound and email marketing as complementary channels

There’s only one week left to register, so sign up today!

This morning I was inspired to write about some tips for the business traveler, fittingly enough on my flight out to Dallas, TX. The question I asked myself was how does one stay sane with a business travel schedule that just won’t quit? I’m actually not sure that’s possible, but I can share with you the following 10 tips (In no particular order) that help me stay as close to a state of travel zen as I can. I hope these help you when you get ready to jet set again:

1. Show up ready to board. Always check-in and have your boarding pass in hand before you get to the airport. This allows you to skip the crowded counters, eliminates a potential delay, and allows you to head right for the security line when you get to the airport.

2. Never check luggage. I mean ever. As long as you can avoid it. I realize this can be tough for some people, but I can easily go 5 days on the road with a carry on suitcase and a separate carry on shoulder bag. This is key for travel flow, as it allows you to get right on the plane, and right off the plane then get on your way. More importantly, you never have to worry about losing your luggage, something that happens way too much these days.

3. Choose the right airline. Depending on where you are going you should give serious thought to which airline you choose. For business, Airtran & Southwest go almost everywhere for a decent fare, but if you are going cross country, Virgin America is the only way to go. They’ve got flying down.

4. Buy good luggage. Don’t take this one too lightly either. I have had a ton of luggage over the last few years and its all been beaten & broken. Nothing is worse than when the zipper on your suitcase breaks! If you travel a lot don’t skimp on the luggage. I finally upgraded to a nice set of Tumi luggage, a wheeled carry on and a shoulder bag. I can’t believe the difference its made in my travel experience and its only been a month.

5. Stay hydrated. Drink a LOT of water when you travel. Although you should drink water all of the time, drink it even more of it when you travel. Its easy to get dehydrated when you are at 30,000 ft. Stay hydrated it helps all around.

6. Boost your immune system. I try to stay healthy in general, but prior to flying I always go for that extra immune system boost of vitamins and nutrients with Airborne. Let’s face it, airplanes are pretty much germ central. Giving your body that extra boost can’t do you any harm at all. I try to do it before every flight, it’s easy and it doesn’t taste bad at all.

7. Always sleep in a good bed. This is probably one of the more important ones to me. Anytime business takes me away from home, I make sure I am comfortable. Fortunately, a lot of hotels these days have good beds and plenty of other amenities. I am personally a fan of Kimpton Hotels, they offer a good selection of hotels in almost every major market, and they have a great loyalty program (plus free wi-fi).

8. Make time to exercise. This is sometimes hard to do on the road, but I always bring work out clothes with me when I travel. I try to hit the gym at the hotel or hit a local yoga class if convenient. When you travel, sometimes a good sweat makes you feel great and completely rejuvenates you.

9. Pace yourself. Depending on your travel itinerary, you may, like I do, often find yourself faced with back-to-back activities day and night. Take it easy and find a pace. Watch your alcohol intake, and make sure you get enough sleep every night. You know what your body needs to be on point. Try to keep that balance (easier said than done, I know).

10. Eat well my friends. Yes, we all know it’s VERY easy to go off of your diet when you are constantly traveling. But it is possible to eat healthy and stay on track when on the road. I’m a pescatarian (I’m vegetarian but eat fish as well), so my diet is usually limited. I try to research decent restaurants and food establishments before I head out just to get a sense of what’s out there. This is hard with groups of people, etc, but do your best and try to eat well.

Have a tip you would like to add? Please do so in the comments, I’m always looking for more travel tips to streamline the process! What works for you?

Below, is an excerpt from the Maryland Chamber of Commerce Digital Marketing event that took place on Thursday May 14th. In this video, taken by Will Burns, I talk about how to jump start your social media community with your email database, and how to build email subscribers through social media.

I am really excited about Bootstrap Maryland. When Jared Goralnick first asked me to be a part of it I hadn’t even realized he had been working on such an interesting and important event. I’ve always thought an event that brought together similar entrepreneurs who have experience building businesses outside of the most common routes, (ie. raise friend and family money, raise angel investment, raise VC, etc) would be extremely valuable to the next generation of entrepreneurs. Our region is ripe with talent, ideas, and products that are already in “the lab” and just waiting to officially “launch.”

I look forward to sharing my story and advice around building businesses with little to no funding at all. It certainly isn’t easy, but it can be done with, as Jared states “drive, brains and little creativity.” Details on the event are below, or you can click here. If you are thinking of starting a company, or already are out of the gate and are looking for some additional inspiration. Hope to see you there on May 2nd.

Bootstrap Maryland brings together young entrepreneurs and the necessary tools for running a lean and successful technology business.

At the Bootstrap Maryland Conference on May 2, 2009 you will learn how to turn your web or technology idea into a business. The presentations will cover topics such as:

* What you need (and don’t need) to get your business off the ground.
* Most products fail due to lack of marketing, not failed technology. How to get the word out inexpensively with social media, events, and creative PR
* The most relevant technologies people are using today, and ways to get the technology right the first time
* Stories, lessons learned, and discussions from young people who have built successful businesses