Cameron McGrane» Marketing

Lessons from Porn Stars on Personal Branding

Cama — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 02:20:18 +0000

Disclaimer: Links could lead to x rated content.

I believe the porn industry was the first to really understand and implement the ideas of the 1997 Fast Company article by Tom Peters on personal branding.

Below are porn industry contributions to the evolution of BRAND YOU

1. Identify what you are great at and stick to it!

Do a couple of things great than many things mediocre. e.g. Porn stars who love certain acts, stick with these acts because otherwise they risk losing their core audience loyalty.
Where are your strengths? What is your favorite position?

2. Build a small team, learn, do, learn some more
Porn stars are cutting out the middle men and doing there own thang with their boyfriend as the agent\director and the nerd down the street as the web master.
What can you learn today then do yourself? What does your partner bring to the table?

3. Produce content that sucks.
Sucks them in off course and has them coming back for more with new “variety” on point No 1..

4. Treat your audience as if they are the only person in the room.
Branding was a corporate creation to mass communicate differing value. Some where along the line it stopped being personable. As a personal brand you have a competitive advantage over any corporation. To be personable. How do porn stars scale up to the corporate level while maintaining personal-ability?

Do the camera not the person you are actually doing.

4. If it feels uncomfortable do it.
Every porn star had to overcome inhibitions to perform, social taboos and in-denial parents. If it is a bit riske, out there, or damn right impossible (See DVDA) and you love it. Then maybe it is worth doing?

And most importantly…..

1. THE NAME.

All successful porn stars have memorable, easy to spell, low syllable, short, first and last name.
No one wants to twitter a @difficultname to spell and using nick names is a faux par.
Some people are lucky others not.

If you are one of the lata?

Do what I am about to do.

Use the “What is your Porn Star Name” facebook app and go straight to your local births and marriages office and change your name to it by de-poll.

We can keep looking to the porn industry for insights but I would prefer for you to learn from rock stars not porn stars so take the next step in personal branding and check out
Chris Brogan’s free personal branding book that even the porn industry can learn a thing or two from.

Be Aware Of The Book

Cama — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:54:47 +0000

Creative Commons – http://www.flickr.com/photos/florian_b/44227093/

Cash going into your business\muse\micro-enterprise and NOT the library? Here are free books to keep you inspired and skilled up.

http://thepiratesdilemma.com/download-the-book/
Here are four books go start your own X, Y and Z
http://free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf
Question your deep seeded beliefs on copyright. Now go innovate.
http://www.storycenter.org/cookbook.pdf
Our society is constructed on stories. Time to tell yours.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/bzzagent/The_Word_of_Mouth_Manual_Volume_II.pdf
It may infuriate but you should be across it.

Free to some degree book resources

http://www.gutenberg.org
Huge resource of expired copyright material

http://openlibrary.org
One web page for every book ever published.

http://freebooksource.com
Chock full of advertising but plenty of material

Thanks to Dan, Fred, Dennis and Chris Brogan for contributing one way or another to these resources.

Reverse Cold Calling – How I get business asking to stock my product

Cama — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:25:06 +0000

Yesterday, I received this message from a retailer asking to stock a product I sell purely online.

Did it make sense? Probably not.

Why? Because the guy had never heard of my business or the products I sell but strangely enough customers kept coming in hassling him for my product.

What did this business owner do on encountering this unusual situation?

Cold called the person who had what the customers were asking for!

Ok. How can you do what I did?

Identify a “Bricks & Mortar” retailer that your online customers would visit
List the retailer (with out telling them) on your website as an exclusive dealer of your product
Sit and wait for the retailer to contact you after customers repeatably come in asking for your product which they don’t stock.

This strategies success is heightened if these three key factors exist to some degree

A great product – I have a niche product, with a robust barrier to entry, that repeatably sells online.
Time sensitive – Many people want my product NOW, not 2-3 days after ordering online. Remember B&M shops still hold it over the online world when it comes to Right Now
Geographic evidence – When customers want it NOW. They ask where I am? I ask them where they are? The more geographic specific requests for pickups the more likely this strategy will work. Alternatively, place a “pickup location” page with analytics to see who and where the people are from who click on it

Happy reverse cold calling. And be super nice to your new retailers because you will have to work harder then usual to build rapport for being a cheeky little bastard.

Help! A social media strategy presentation….

Cama — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:32:47 +0000

A mate from University has the hookup to an interesting mobile phone management platform and wanted to know if I had any ideas to get people on board.

To no surprise I did and created a proposal for his management team.

The presentation includes some details of a non traditional startup yourmobilecompany.com.au applying notions of web democracy, equal ownership and emergence. Which makes me a level 8 or 9 on the purest-corporatist scale

With the model and audience (corporate) in mind, I designed the presentation with the objective of educating my audience, improving awareness and providing a teaser to get me on board to flesh out deeper insights for development and a potential partnership.

There are notes included to help apply to your own circumstances but you will need to download the powerpoint to access.

| View | Upload your own

It is still pretty blue sky at the moment and I would be grateful for feedback on

where it should be bolted down?
what are the risks or potential problems?
where a similar model has been used?

Don’t bother having a resume just be remarkable

Cama — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 08:33:33 +0000

Well that is what Seth Godin says on his recent article.

Even if you are remarkable you may need a place to pull all the neat things you have done into one place and crystallize what you are really about. Enter the “New Media” type resume, the brain child of Chris Penn, extended by Bryan Person and morphed over to Wordpress by me.

Spammers can’t you find another business opportunity?

Cama — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:56:43 +0000

I do not know this person; they are apparently female; play on my ego; have no network and are providing me an unusual link.

Funnily enough, I couldn’t stop myself from clicking on the link because the message was unexpected on facebook and I wanted to work out the spammer’s end game.

The link took me to http://e45r08w9ployz16.two2tango.org/?id=2524&mypics which resulted in a “Server Not Found” error page.

Probably because it has been shut down.

I went to primary domain two2tango.org which ends up being a static redirect to a dodgy dating site called friendorama.com.

Friendorama.com has an affiliate program.

Which poses the question. Was it an affiliate creating accounts and spamming people like me to drive traffic? Or the people behind the site trying to get registrations up.

It is painfully obvious, Friendorama.com’s site will not make any money from the lack of point of difference, cookie cutter look and feel, no content and empty support pages on a mysterious site called onlinepersonalshelp.com.

This rules out affiliates because there is nothing to pay them!

Overall a reasonable amount of sophistication and planning has occurred for no foreseeable return.

Owners of shoddy dating sites, pioneering facebook spamming techniques, please focus your obvious talents on a half decent business model.

And when you find this blog in your link backs. Flick me a message from your REAL facebook account and say “G’day” because I think you are O.K for trying and you are my first time.

What does color mean to your audience?

Cama — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 01:58:40 +0000

Sometime ago, two friends building their internet start-up had to decide on two colour profiles, one themed black the other light green. Flipping back and forth my intuition suggested black represented formal and green flexibility. Recently, I inadvertently came across this slide from Cornell’s consumer behavour course which confirmed my feeling.

Google adsense asp.net code for your application

admin — Thu, 17 May 2007 17:21:39 +0000

My Dotnetnuke social network enabler incorporates google adsense into the profile, summary or search page. The most recent release allows designers and developers who use the customizable modules to set their own Publisher Id to generate revenue for themselves. You can download the webcontrol and example code here

A day helping Chris Brogan and Network2.tv

admin — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 12:23:09 +0000

A day working with Chris Brogan and Network2.tv