Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Connecting Roots and Branches

Originally published in MediaPostAbove: My grandfather's emigration card from Germany in 1951, found on Ancestry.com. Born in Poland, he escaped the Holocaust with his family through Siberia and Kazakhstan, settling in Germany after the war before coming to the United States.

Connecting Roots and Branches 

Some people compete around badges and mayorships (Foursquare), connections and testimonials (LinkedIn), followers and list appearances (Twitter), and gang members and farm acreage (Zynga). Lately, I've found a new addiction: racking up profiles added and managed (Geni).

Geni, one of the leading genealogy sites, tells me I've added 334 relatives to my family tree. I created the tree on January 17, 2007. Most of the connections happened in the past few weeks, and it's all thanks to social media.

The network effect applies to genealogy. Having more people active in a network increases the value of the offering for everyone taking part. In this case, when more people are part of my family tree, it increases the likelihood that I will connect with others in the tree and thus discover more people in turn. Additionally, as I create more spokes branching out from me, other family members will gravitate toward me as a hub, and all such hubs in turn will strengthen from the increased information flowing among us.

As in any network, you'll find hubs who actively create content, joiners who manage their own profiles and perhaps those of their immediate families, and spectators who passively peruse the content without contributing to it. In this case, hubs are both people and content. I'm a hub because I've connected so many branches of the tree together in one place, just as my David Berkowitz avatar on sites like Geni is a hub that links to branches such as those of the Silversteins, Baraks, Samuels, Freilichs, and too many others to name.

My "come to Jesus moment," if I can borrow the phrase given my lineage of Berkowitzes and Silversteins, came from using genealogy sites as social networks. I maintain a profile on another site, MyHeritage, and my father's third cousin discovered there that our trees overlapped.  He provided information that I then incorporated into my tree, and I built on it, wiki-style. He then introduced me to other relatives. I shared some details he didn't know. I discovered more far-flung family members, including one woman whose tree has about a thousand relatives; she is my first cousin three times removed's husband's third great nephew's wife. (Cue "Spaceballs": Dark Helmet: "I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate." Lone Star: "What's that make us?" Dark Helmet: "Absolutely nothing...")

If you're curious to see how the worlds of social media and genealogy collide firsthand, here are a few tips I've picked up along the way:

1) Use a Web-based program. There's some great software you can download, but even if you go that route, upload the tree periodically online to find other relatives. Thanks to a string of connections, I met a relative in his 80s actively managing a tree who reconstructed family lines I never knew of before, and he's doing it all on his computer. He's extremely generous with his information, but he'd be much easier to find online.

2) Use several sites. I'm partial to Geni, MyHeritage, and Ancestry.com. I find Geni to be the easiest to use. MyHeritage has led to the most discoveries of family members, but those relatives are in Israel and each site will undoubtedly have various geographies and demographics where they are strongest. Hedge bets if you're trying to find new family members rather than simply organizing what you know. If you start filling out one tree, you can export data to other sites using the standard GEDCOM format.

3) Fill out complete profiles. What's true of LinkedIn and dating sites is true of genealogy sites: complete profiles get better results. It's hard enough finding the right matches for names like Berkowitz and Silverstein. If you're Jack Smith, forget it. Yet if you're Jack Smith married to Elaine Harris Smith, you were born in Houston in 1954, and your parents are Roger and Millie, you increase your chances of finding more relevant relatives. Much of this is possible thanks to the matching technology (e.g., Tree Matches on Geni or Smart Matches on MyHeritage) that look for similar family relationships and allow you to reach out to those trees' managers.

4) Consider trial subscriptions. If you're already investing a lot of time in genealogy, investing a little money can help. All of these sites have premium offerings, and the value proposition is somewhat different with each one. At Ancestry, the advanced record search is invaluable; I found my father's family's emigration files when they left Germany for the U.S. in 1951, along with census information on my mother's ancestors in early 20^th century New York. Geni promotes its tree matches, which linked me up with several relatives and greatly contributed to my tree. MyHeritage hooked me when it said I'd need to pay up to manage more than 250 relatives, a number I'll likely double by the year's end.

5) Repeat searches periodically. Ancestry seems to constantly add new databases to its search records. Search functionality across all of the sites keeps getting better. New databases keep migrating online. Every year or so, try some searches that may not have proved fruitful the first time.

6) Pick up the phone, and pack up your suitcase. Some relatives like keeping the past in the past, but there tend to be a few who are willing to recreate the past as best as they can remember it. Software will never replace that truly personal form of social networking.

If you have other tips, share them in the comments. If you've connected with relatives of yours this way, share your story. If you think we're related, share your tree. I have more relatives today than I thought I did a month ago -- and always welcome a few more.

What A Camp Counselor Can Teach You about Social Media

Today's column channels some fun camp memories. I was walking through Madison Square Park on the way to work and saw a woman with two kids in matching blue t-shirts, and suddenly I was back - metaphorically - at Beth El. One personally gratifying experience in writing this was realizing how many of those memories have crystallized and how vivid they still are - even dating back to the initial orientations when I was 13.

Here's the post, originally in MediaPost's Search Insider:

What A Camp Counselor Can Teach You about Social Media

One of the hardest jobs I ever had was working as a day camp counselor, spending eight summers straight at Beth El Summer Session in New Rochelle, NY. While it's been a few years since I wore a T-shirt and swimsuit to work every day, seeing all the kids home from camp swarming around Madison Square Park this week brought back a few memories. It also made me realize how relevant a lot of what I learned in that job is to what I'm doing now.

Here are some of the lessons I still carry with me. They should be especially relevant to social marketing practitioners today.

1)   Don't feed your campers soggy chips. This is more or less a direct quote from Jack Gruenberg, who ran the Counselor in Training program with his wife Sandy when I worked at the camp. The literal meaning was to avoid giving campers anything that you wouldn't want to eat yourself. I'd amend this today to "Don't feed your clients soggy chips." Think of yourself in their situation with their specific goals and needs. You should only present them with ideas and work product that you'd in turn be happy with. And just as kids know when they're getting a raw deal, clients can smell a dud right away. In both circumstances, you risk hurting your credibility.

2)   Plan ahead. Before the summer started, counselors and parents received group schedules that had a plan for every day of the week and an overview of what the entire summer would look like. So much of social media feels reactive to the point where plans get lost too easily, but developing editorial calendars can be so helpful for just about any content-rich program you're running, whether it's a Facebook Page, Twitter, blog, video production or syndication program, or digital word-of-mouth marketing.

3)   Keep a rainy-day schedule handy. Rainy-day schedules and backup indoor activities were always on-hand. Some days schedules shifted indoors due to heat advisories (though those days, as a bonus, they served delicious fruit punch that my five-year-old campers called "blood"). It's hard to tell when New Yorkers should carry umbrellas, and it's hard to tell what brands will come under fire. Really, did you ever think that Whole Foods' CEO, a hippie who started his company in Austin, would irk liberals so much that they'd stage a boycott against his company? And the poor Domino's Pizza CEO had to publicly apologize for a brand hijack by two of his own employees, something that could happen to any business owner. As a counselor, especially when I became group leader, I had to put those rainy-day plans into action FAST -- if you've worked with a group of 20 kindergarteners, mommy bloggers seem tame by comparison. You have to have a plan for those days to make sure you can execute on it if you have to. Know who's in charge, who can respond, and what communication channels you have available.

4)   Run headcounts often. If I had 20 kids in my group, I'd probably count to 20 a hundred times a day (after a few days I got pretty good at it). What marketers need to keep track of is their assets they can use for social marketing, what 360i's Social Marketing Playbook refers to as a brand's arsenal. Know what you have to work with inside and out -- then you'll get a pretty good idea of what you can do with it.

5)   Get down to eye level. During staff orientation, Julie Rockowitz, who ran the program when I was there and still does so today, urged all counselors to get down to eye level with the children. Someone who's five-foot-something looks pretty distant and imposing to someone who's three-foot-something, but crouching down and talking eye to eye eliminates that issue. The same is true when communicating with others through social media, whether it's a customer or an influencer. You can still use your own voice and be yourself, but you need to use them in the way that's appropriate to the platform you're using, eliminating any barriers between you and your audience.

6)   Get wet. Counselors had to wear their swimsuits every day, even days that started out rainy. This rule was made partially for safety reasons, but also to encourage counselors to swim with their campers and share their experiences. Marketers and agencies similarly need to swim where their customers swim. You might not always feel like swimming and sometimes the water will be freezing, but the only way to really develop a meaningful experience is to know what it's like firsthand. Most of the time you'll find it's more fun hanging out in the pool rather than sitting on your towel.

7)   Have fun. There were so many rules and regulations as a counselor that it was easy to complain. But the job meant getting paid to run around outdoors, hang out with a bunch of mostly pretty entertaining kids, and work decent hours. Now the hours are much longer, the pay's a bit better, and some clients are every bit as demanding as the most attention-hogging campers, but it's still a fun way to make a living. Anyone who's in this field has to take a second to remember that every day, no matter how hectic it is.

Thank you Julie, Jack, Sandy, the hundreds of other staff I had the pleasure of working with, and the children in the Barracudas, Whales, Sunfish, Blue Jays, All-Stars, and Batmen. You all taught me far more than I could ever capture here.

Vote

Image by RodBegbie via FlickrThat's it.

Really.

Just reminding you. No endorsements here or anything. Rather, the picture included here serves to let you know that even Storm Troopers are taking part in the political process, and just think how hard it was to get an absentee ballot on the Death Star. You should have no excuse.

If you need your polling place, you can find it on Google Maps.

I'd write more, but I'm voting.

And when I'm not voting, I'm checking election.twitter.com. And stopping by ad:tech. And getting some work done. And spending election night with the New York Times.

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Birthday Greetings by Channel: Facebook Surges Ahead in 2008

Image via Wikipedia

Last year, I took an analytical approach to my birthday - hardly surprising to those who know me. When I learned in first grade how to take surveys and make tally marks, I did a poll around school of preferences for Doritos, Fritos, or Cheetos (Doritos won handily).

This year, two birthday well-wishers mentioned they were eager to see how things would track for 2008 chart. Given the anticipation, and my own curiosity, I kept better track of the metrics. Nothing makes for birthday fun than opening up a spreadsheet whenever someone says happy birthday to you.

Here are a few observations about this year's birthday greetings:

• Facebook well surpassed in-person greetings this year. Even with birthday drinks with friends, celebrating the day in the office, and a family lunch on Sunday. Some other personal greetings came the night before my birthday, which was coincidentally the party for 360i's tenth birthday (see the MediaPost coverage and Kelly Samardak's Flickr photos).
• Facebook does so well feeding on itself. Someone wishes me happy birthday, it appears on my wall. That action may show up in their friends' news feeds. I'll then write on their walls to thank them (or I might do so via Facebook email), and then anyone who visits those walls will see the exchange. Of course, the biggest driver is the prominent space on the homepage Facebook provides to alert people of their friends' birthdays. Then there are apps like Birthday Calendar that provide other notifications.
• Dropping off the list from last year: MySpace and Friendster. My network has fully migrated.  Also, no Skype this time, but I don't keep it open as much.
• New to the list: Twitter, with four mentions (first one, thanks @andrewnevelos, and then a quick burst of a few, @danperry, @worleygirl, and @gregory - thanks all around there too). Also, I received my first note on geneaology service Geni (thanks Aunt Aida).
• Not yet on the list: LinkedIn wasn't used for birthday greetings at all, nor was FriendFeed.
• I kept a few new tallies - including greetings from:
  • People I kind of know: 4
  • People I can't remember how I know: 7
  • People I know but am kind of embarrassed to be friends with or don't like very much: 3
• Time zones also played a fun role:
  • Ryan Govindan in India was the first to wish me happy birthday on my actual birthday; it was only 2:30pm in New York but my birthday was underway then.
  • My brother emailed me happy birthday while on business in China. Yet at the time, it was his birthday (I'm eight years, 364 days his junior). 
• Marketers to send birthday greetings this year included Michael C. Fina (like last year, with a 15% coupon for the month), Borders (with a 15% coupon for the day), Facebook (just on the site), Eons (wow, I must be getting old), and this themed cruise outfit in Atlanta called Sixthman that I hadn't heard of before.

And now, this year's chart. The one channel I included was in-person, which was much harder to track; again, Facebook still would have come out on top.

Vacation Recap: Most Useful Technologies

I took a week off last week, driving with my wife upstate from New York City to the Finger Lakes for some sightseeing and winery touring (with stops along the way in White Plains, Binghamton, and Corning), and then to Hyde Park (via Ithaca and Woodstock) for the FDR Library and Culinary Institute of America, and then on to East Hampton (along with some excursions there to Montauk, Sag Harbor, and Southampton).

I managed to spend the entire week off email - even off Facebook mail - but still made some good use of technology. Here are the most useful sites and tools that helped with my vacation (you can also check photo albums of the upstate and Hamptons legs):

1) Zipcar: We're car-less Manhattanites, and while we were able to borrow a family member's car for the update leg, we used Zipcar, the car-sharing service, for the Hamptons journey. It worked out very well, with only a couple glitches. While the rental costs include free gas and tolls, the gas card didn't work so I have to file for a reimbursement. Also, they have a four-day limit, and since we needed it Tues-Sat, we had to time the pickup and dropoff to get the most out of the 96-hour window. Overall though, it was a good deal and very helpful.

2) Google Maps: This is a 'duh' moment, but the best feature here was being able to drag routes through different roads and cities to automatically reroute it. For instance, after driving up through Binghamton, it's hardly a scenic route and there aren't any fun stops. Going to Hyde Park had us covering largely the same route back. Instead, I dragged the map through Ithaca and Woodstock, which led to some other unexpected stops like Coles Maple and an alpaca farm.

3) VZ Navigator: We don't have a car so we don't have GPS. My smartphone, the Samsung i760, isn't equipped for GPS either, but my wife's Motorola Krazr can run it - does that make any sense at all? Not really, but we were fortunate to have her phone so we could spring for Navigator at only $10 a month. It fared as well as any other GPS device I've used (and when I rent cars I always get GPS now), and it allowed us a ton of flexibility on our trip. Great deal.

4) The mobile web: My phone did come in handy for getting Mets scores and letting my wife read NY Post's Page 6 at the beach.

5) Television: Anachronistic? Sure. But once the Olympics started, we actually switched where we were staying in the Finger Lakes since the first B&B didn't have a TV. Getting to watch Michael Phelps win that final gold medal live, and then getting to marvel at Usain Bolt and the US women's Olympic team, made me so thankful for television. While I tested out a couple versions of online video around the Olympics, I didn't need the web for anything beyond medal counts and reading some athlete bios in Wikipedia. TV delivered 99% of the experience.

My 20 Most Important Media Moments

I've been working on this post for awhile now, having been inspired by something at a keynote at an iMedia Summit in March, and I can't remember the connection. What follows is a biography as told through the most important moments and times where media shaped my life. In the comments or on your own blog, share yours and let me know when you do.

1) Early 80s: While I don't remember starting to read, I do remember writing early, around kindergarten. I generally focus on rhyming poetry, channeling inspiration from Shel Silverstein, and then Ogden Nash and Jack Prelutsky. Later, in sleepaway camp, I write poems for the newsletter and am dubbed the "poet laureate of Camp Scatico." My other writing at Scatico: frequent letters home and to aunts and uncles with specific lists of the junk food I want in my care packages.

2) Early 80s: My brother gets an Apple IIe - green and black monochrome. I don't know what he used it for, but there were three games on it. One was Fat City, the only game I was allowed to play, where you had a wrecking ball and you had to destroy a city in search of oil and other treasures. There were two other games I couldn't play. One was strip poker. The other was a hacked spoof of the adventure game Jungle Hunt, with the second word renamed to rhyme with anatomical slang.

3) Early-mid 80s: I write my first book report on Stuart Little using Wordperfect, and learn about the thesaurus in the process. In my report not long after on Sir Francis Drake, I call the explorer "daring and mature, my kind of type." Years later, my mom explained how valuable the computer was for my education as I'd think too fast to capture thoughts in writing. The computer let me capture it all.

4) 80s: He-Man airs. I'm transfixed not just by the show, but by the commercials. I SO wanted to be the kids playing with the He-Man action figures in the TV spots. And I had a better haircut.

5) Mid-late 80s: My friend and I realize we can chat online by dialing up each other's modems. I'm on a 1200 baud, he's on a 2400 (remember baud rates?). When we're on half-duplex, we can see what the other's typing as it's written, essentially a collaborative workspace operating in real-time, though for us, it was just the coolest but most inefficient way possible to have a conversation, which most likely had a lot to do with the Thundercats.

6) Late 80s/early 90s: I get a TV on my room, and it has one of the sneakiest features ever added to a media device: sleep timer. That's right, watch as much as you can and keep the TV going for another 30 minutes so that your media consumption can carry on until the exact minute you conk out.

7) Late 80s/early 90s) Early 90s: My family gets cable. And still there's nothing on.

8) Early 90s: I get a CD player and a gift certificate to Tower Records. Six of the first nine albums I get are by Billy Joel.

9) Early 90s: My family signs up for Prodigy, the internet service provider (ISP). We get email. I didn't know much about what this internet thing was all about, but I was transfixed by it. I also learned about finance by dialing into Citibank and playing an educational game there (my parents had a mixed track record with early adoption, but they were among the first people in the world to use online banking). It was also probably one of the first examples of a services company evolving as an online media company.

10) Late 90s: I start writing the Literally Speaking column for my university's twice-weekly campus newspaper. It's a humorous take on personal anecdotes and campus observations, inspired by Dave Barry and, to lesser degrees, Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen.

11) Late 90s: I host a viewing party for the Seinfeld finale, complete with chocolate babka, Tweety Bird Pez dispensers, and other icons from the show. My newspaper column goes on to envision 25 years in the future with people from school reminiscing on where they were when Seinfeld went off the air. It's possibly the last time a TV series finale will inspire anything like that.

12) Late 90s: I leave my post as co-editor-in-chief elect of the college newspaper - hands down the main media engine of my university - to launch an online entertainment magazine. As a campus group, I request and receive a budget of $150 from the Student Association, compared to the tens of thousands of dollars it takes to run the paper. Expenditures from that $150: buying the domain, web hosting, photocopies (including cardstock bookmarks as a reminder to bookmark the site) and a pizza party for the volunteer staff. 

13) 2000: I go on my first job interview for an internet company, via Monster.com. The job's for a technical writer. I'm asked for tech writing samples I've done, and I don't have any, since I don't know what tech writing is. That night, I go home and write an FAQ for the online mag, coding the HTML and uploading it via FTP. I get the job, which indirectly leads to me landing at eMarketer several months later (through a job posting on HotJobs) and the start of my career.

14) I start a long-form interview series at eMarketer, with a Q&A with Ask.com being the first of 175 articles published during my time there; my column-writing later continues with MediaPost's Search Insider in 2004. Between eMarketer, MediaPost, and other bylines (including some that were ghost-written for others), I've written about 400 columns, and then there's the 1,000 or so blog posts on this blog and others. Only occasionally do I use the thesaurus, which was so instrumental for that Stuart Little book report.

15) September 11, 2001: I'm heading to work at eMarketer just south of Union Square in Manhattan when the terrorists attack. I first hear about the attacks via word of mouth; a man collecting money for the homeless saw the planes fly overhead and tries making sense of the news. I stay at work for hours since the IM, email, and landline phone at the office are all working, and I want to stay where I know I can send and receive information. I try to hover around screens to watch online video on MSNBC.com and elsewhere, but no one has the bandwidth to deliver it. Someone has a radio. I have my manual Pentax K1000 35mm camera with me, and I go outside to take pictures of the Towers on fire, covered in smoke, and then ultimately gone. Later, I take pictures of the city on my walk home to East 66th Street.

16) November 2005: This blog launches, giving me an everpresent online voice and an official entryway into the blogging community that I've joined previously through several group blogs and corporate blogs.

17) I get a digital video recorder (DVR) through Time Warner Cable. My TV viewing habits are permanently altered. I start watching far more TV, though it's often best for when there's nothing on so I can watch reruns of The Office.

18) 2007: I use Skype from Mexico to call friends and family to tell them I'm engaged. I even selected the hotel because of its in-room internet access.

19) 2007: I get a Wii, the first game console I bought in 20 years. While I won't forget the first time I played it at my friend Mike's apartment, those moments of amazement happen regularly, even months after first getting it.

20) 2008: I get my first smartphone. While I tried out an early version of the BlackBerry years back, and I would go online with my standard mobile phone, the Samsung i760 gives me access to the mobile web in full (okay, some of it's more accessible than others). The power is tremendous. I try explaining to people how it is to have all of Google, Wikipedia, The New York Times, and so much of the world's digital information with me wherever I go, whenever I want it, through a device I keep in my pocket wherever I go. The more I think about it, the less I can fathom it, just as I can't fathom how media will shape my life in the decades to come.

Wedding Recap (or, Nobody's Business but the Turks & Caicos)

I'm back from my wedding in Turks & Caicos, and thanks to my wife, our parents, and everyone who came, it was a more incredible experience than I could have imagined.

This is a marketing blog, so I have to single out a few brands that also contributed to the wedding week:

• The Somerset, where the wedding took place, is one of the best spots you can stay anywhere, in terms of service (thanks Katrina, Jennifer, Winston, and the whole gang), amenities, grounds, room decor, food, and just about everything else.
• Ileana from Tropical Imaging, who was a true professional and a pleasure to work with; I can't wait to see her photos.
• Correy Forbes and the Lively Rakooneers, one of the best wedding bands I ever heard, and far more talented in person than I realized from his online recordings (they just don't do him justice). For some really fun Caribbean music, I'm partial to "Knock and Jook" and "Dry Conch and Grits" on the Island Boys album.
• The New York Times, for posting our wedding announcement, which is a dream come true for lifelong Sunday Styles readers

Some photos are below courtesy of Picasa, though they don't yet include anything from the wedding itself.

Birthday Greetings by Channel, Updated

Now that the birthday's done, I had to update the pie chart from yesterday on birthday greeting referrals. As if the blog comments here weren't enough, colleague Chris Humber, featured in this week's column on universal search, scrawled out a handwritten note.

Some more notes on this chart:

• Friendster beat MySpace for referrals because Friendster, passe as it is, still sends birthday alerts via email.
• Skype came through at the buzzer, as I found a couple messages there when I left my computer on last night and checked this morning.
• With greeting cards, I'm still optimistic that my grandmothers will come through. Just give them a little leeway, alright? You might remember an introduction to one of them, Grandmom Berkowitz, in the Google vs. Grandmom column from a couple years ago.
• I'm surprised how few marketers take advantage of birthdays since so many have it on file. The best one to reach out to me was Michael C. Fina, which emailed a 15% discount during my birthday month. While we were planning to already, this reaffirmed that Cara and I would buy our wedding bands there. (An aside: their customer service is abysmal, no matter who I've dealt with there at their NYC retail store, but merchandise quality has saved their brand for us.) Other marketers to reach out for my big day: Xing.com, the social network that I never use, and LiftTicketsCheap, a friend's ski lift ticket site that left a birthday card + ad in my MySpace profile comments (Nate, your ad just went viral).
  Update: It turned out Helio and Travelocity's Roaming Gnome also left me birthday greetings with prominent images on my MySpace comments. No need to update the chart for the ads.
  
• Thanks to everyone for their birthday wishes. I'm looking forward to a great year.

Birthday Greetings by Channel, October 2007

This year more than ever, my birthday (today) has emerged as a great networking opportunity, largely thanks to people reaching out via Facebook, email, and to a noticeable degree this year, Plaxo. Here's a rough stab at charting it out:

A few notes here:

• The phone is entirely from family and a couple close friends.
• Other social media properties like MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Upcoming, Flickr, and Delicious haven't registered.
• The blog hasn't contributed yet, but it may well now, not that I'm fishing.

Welcome New Blog Readers: Mom & Dad

Over the weekend I was home with my parents in Westchester County, and I shared an update about a cousin which I found out about from Facebook. Before long, this led to a tour of Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and other sites. There was one, though, I thought they were familiar with: this blog. It turns out it was new to them (even though I'm sure I've sent them a couple of links here). Mom, Dad, welcome - and thanks for bookmarking it.

In November, this blog will turn two years old. It's good to know in that time I still haven't exhausted the target audience. I'll have to make house calls more often.