Books

http://swaybook.com

If this were not a marketing blog and just a book review blog, this book would have scored a 7 or an 8. It is a really interesting book and how the authors/brothers describe the decision making process that we make everyday is definitely a shock. I had thought that I would be able to pull a lot of the psychology out of this book and transfer it towards marketing, but that wasn’t exactly the case. However there were some very interesting marketing cases in this book. One such case was when Nathan’s hot dogs was not selling as well as their competitors and so they hired doctors dressed up in their doctor garb to stand outside Nathan’s eating dogs and saw their sales skyrocket. They go into depth about why we are swayed to make the decisions we are and use convincing evidence.

This was a fun, quick read over the holidays and made me think, but probably not the best marketing book on the shelf.

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The New Influencers – A marketer’s guide to social media by Paul Gillin

If you are new to social media then this is a good place to start. Gillin starts with the basics of web2.0 and does a really good job explaining some of the more basic concepts. This includes how it can be used for marketing by both large and small companies, key insights into blogging and the leading bloggers, “tools of the trade” (podcasts, vodcasts, rss, tagging, etc), and how to “go viral”.

One the downside, Gillin doesn’t arrive at too many major insights in this book. He profiles some key players in the marketing 2.0 world and you can pull some insights out of their stories, but Gillin doesn’t really take this initiative himself.

Some of the best stuff taken from this book:

Transparency might be the biggest shift companies face as they engage with social media.

Customer relationships are changing. HackingNetFlix.com is a great example of this. A NetFlix fan started this blog about the company and it shortly had a huge following. Gillin explains how NetFlix was at first weary of this, but soon embraced the fact that they had such a fan who was sharing his passion with tens of thousands. This kind of a relationship with customers is getting to be increasingly important. It again has to do with the idea of transparency and how a company’s product must stand up to consumer tests. If they do they will be praised in this new medium. If they don’t they will get slammed. Ex. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmpDSBAh6RY (Vincent Ferrari – AOL debacle)

Links are the most important metrics of influence in social media

• Good Blog Stat site: Nielsen BuzzMetrics’: BlogPulse

Marketer’s new job is linking perspective customers with happy current customers

Companies/Marketing will be about being content providers

• Why can’t a company give consumers as good info as newspapers?

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This is not a marketing book. However, Timothy Ferris has some golden nuggets of marketing insight in here, and he definitely makes use of new media.

Tim uses Google Adwords to advertise his product. He explains the logistics of Adwords in an easy to understand process that a novice can follow. Ferris also hammers the point of testing. He does tests to come up with his advertising and then once he implements it, he continually tests in order to optimize.

In chapter 5 Tim extensively looks at Pareto’s Law or the 80/20 Principle. He applies it to both business and advertising. This idea is extremely valuable to advertisers and this chapter does a great job describing it.

In his online supplement he writes, “How to get $700,000 of Advertising for $10,000″, an insightful short read into bargaining with publishers.

If you are a small business owner looking for marketing advice, I would consider this a must read.

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This book was an utter disappointment. When I ordered the book from Amazon I was greatly awaiting its arrival. I thought great, a book dedicated to case studies of the best internet marketers, this is right up my alley. WRONG. I have heard of no one in this book and I am impressed by none of their methods. These “internet marketing entrepreneurs” are merely spam junkies. This whole book is about creating email lists and sending out spam. On the bright side this book was extremely effective at putting me to sleep each night. Ten pages with Mr. Comm and it was lights out. I would recommend this book only for those with insomnia.

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Groundswell – Winning in a world transformed by social technologies – is written by two senior analysts at Forrester Research. The goal of this book is to make new media less intimidating to businessmen. The businesses they are targeting in this book are large businesses. And while small businesses can take some of the information in this book and apply it, it really isn’t who the book is aimed at. The book is written with a very corporate feel, think lots of charts and numbers and while they do supplement this with stories, it’s still a fairly boring read.

The title Groundswell is defined as: A serial trend in which people use technologies to get what they need from each other, as opposed to traditional methods of going through corporations.

The first part of the book examines the different people using new social media. It gives a breakdown of who is creating the content, who is commenting and who is listening.

The second part of the book goes into how to use different social media to connect with your customers. Again, really aimed at large companies and they some nice examples. For instance, how TiVo uses a social networking forum to:

Support – by answering questions that their customer’s have and letting customer’s help each other.

Listen – by monitoring what their customers are saying about their company

Talk – by asking questions and engaging their customer’s.

p. 183 “by listening to your customers you can make better products faster. You will have ideas that no one at your company has ever thought of. Your most loyal consumers will help act as a think tank for ideas and improvements. This is a powerful thing to tap into.”

Another nice thing they describe in this chapter is how companies are sorting through all of this data to find the most pertinent responses. By using technology similar to what DIGG uses, consumers can vote up or down different ideas that their fellow consumers wrote. This way the topics that most consumers agree with or feel passionately about will surface to the top.

The third part of the book is about how connecting with the “groundswell” will change your company. And also their prediction as to how the groundswell is going to change into the future. The last part of the book was really boring to read and didn’t do much for me. How connecting to the groundswell would change your company was very obvious. Also their predictions for the future showed their lack of imagination.

Interesting Points

Tags – By looking at how people tagged your company on Delicious, you can see how people perceive your company. These are also a good place to start when looking for keywords for AdWords. Also, while only a small amount of people are tagging, 7% in the US, these people are defining how everyone else sees you.

This book as well as many others talk about how the source of information used to make purchasing decisions is changing. In the past people looked to institutions and advertising to make purchasing decisions. Now, more and more of these decisions are coming from recommendations, from friends and family, and more importantly from online peers that they most likely have never met. According to Forrester:

83% of people trust recommendations from friends

50% of people trust online reviews

And trust in traditional advertising is plummeting.

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PR 2.0 by Deirdre Breakenridge

This is an average book covering different aspects of new media and how it can be used for basic PR purposes. The book covers such things as RSS feeds, podcasts, blogs and how press releases are changing. These topics are covered, however not too many useful things will be learned.

Breakenridge does have one interesting part in this book and that is about interactive newsrooms. This is a topic that isn’t given that much coverage, so if you are in the PR world and want to know about how it is changing than this section might be useful. The gist of this section is that many editors no longer just want pitches, press releases and written information. They are now searching for online pictures, sound and movie clips and links to websites. Breakenridge describes how to set up an online newsroom, basicly a micro site that will have everything that an editor would want. I think this is an interesting idea and I commend Breakenridge on sharing it.

About half of the book is written with interviews of Breakenridge and “experts” in the social networking world. However, I have never heard of ANY of these experts. They are CEO and marketing directions at companies that seem to be pretty obscure. It makes me wonder why Breakenridge was not able to get more notable people for interviews?

Overall, this book is an ok start if you are in PR and don’t know anything about new media. However, instead you should probably pick up The New Rules of Marketing & PR by David Meerman Scott which is supposed to be very good.

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What’s a more powerful offer, “50% off” or “Buy One Get One Free”. Drew Whitman will tell you. No, this is not a book about social media, but about the psychology behind advertising. Whitman then takes that information and shows you you can apply it to direct mail, internet ads, magazine ads and more.

Many people will pick up this book, especially those not in the industry and it will reconfirm everything they hate about advertising. The reason being that Whitman has analyzed study upon study to find out just how the human mind works and how to manipulate it to increase sales. While this doesn’t seem like the most heroic feat, that is what advertising strives to accomplish. For instance Whitman has compiled a list of the seven types of photographs that get the best response rate. In order these are: children & babies, mothers & babies, groups of adults, animals, sports scenes, celebrities and food. Whitman then goes on to describe why this is the case, relating each back to a list similar to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Whitman does this over and over with font type, short vs. long copy, unique selling proposition, selling to emotion and the best ways to start a headline as examples. He also breaks up the book with quotes by some of the greats such as Claude Hopkins, Rosser Reeves and David Ogilvy.

While you will learn nothing about social networking, tagging or blogging in this book, you may take away invaluable insights into the minds of your consumers.

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http://sarahlacy.typepad.com/sarahlacy/

If you want to sound like your in the know, the cool kids call it web twenty, web 2.0 is for posers according to Sarah. In fact if you want to sound like your in the know about the inner workings of facebook, digg, slide, blogger, six apart and any of the other great new silicon valley startups, read this book. And unlike many of the other books I review, this one is far from technical. Its really a fun read, something to keep next to your bed at night or to read on the beach.

Sarah Lacy shares with us the lives of the great internet entrepreneurs. She explores what happened during the dot-com bust and how there is a new round of growth coming out of those ashes. She definitely has an in in the valley and was able to score interviews with the biggest names. People such as Max Levchin who founded billion dollar company PayPal and soon to be Slide. Marc Andreessen who started Netscape and is now working on Ning, while investing in twitter, delicous, digg and others. Sarah makes it known that there is a small group of people in the Valley who are responsible for the bulk of all the new innovation. These people all work together, fund each others projects, mentor each other and compete, further pushing the boundaries of the web. And she makes it clear that the king of this group is Mark Zuckerberg, the face behind facebook.

I highly recommend this read if you want to learn more about the lives of the people who made online social networking possible, or more simply put, the people who have made the internet the amazing tool we use on a daily basis. This is their story and is well worth the read.

p. 167 “It may be hard to understand why Facebook could be worth billions unless you’re in high school or college. Facebook started as an online directory of pictures and contact information for a school’s student body, but as it has grown, it has become much more. People have uploaded so many photos to their profile pages that Facebook is now the largest photo-sharing site on the Web, far out pacing Slide or FlickR. People upload video too. It’s no stretch to imagine a day when Facebook displays more daily videos than YouTube. People blog on the site. They message one another through the site. They even plan events on the site, rather than using another Web site such as Evite. Need to buy a new TV? Facebook has classifieds too. For people in college and to a lesser extent in high school, Facebook is like an Internet within the Internet. They log on in the morning, check their email, and open Facebook. A full two thirds of users come to the site every single day.”

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I knew I had to read this book due to the number of references to The Long Tail all over the internet. Bloggers refer to this principle as if it’s common knowledge, well it should be for all marketers.

The yellow is The Long Tail, which continues on far beyond the confines of this page.

The idea of The Long Tail came from Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired Magazine article. Anderson is the editor in chief at Wired and former business editor at The Economist. The idea of The Long Tail is that because of the internet there is a huge business of selling niche products that traditionally were ignored because of shelf space costs. Anderson argues that products with only a handful of buyers when all pooled together can rival the biggest sellers if there is a channel of distribution large enough. Companies such as Amazon and Itunes have made a large amount of money on this principle. Because these companies have virtually no shelf space costs they can afford to carry books or cds that only sell a few copies a year, whereas Barnes and Nobles or Sam Goody simply can’t afford to carry them.

This may seem like it does not have a ton to do with advertising and marketing, but it does. It gives great incite into the minds of consumer’s and how we are changing our buying behavior because virtually anything we can think of, we can now easily purchase.

In the newest version of this book, Anderson added on a chapter: The Long Tail of Marketing. This is a really insightful chapter less on The Long Tail, but more about how companies need to change their advertising model from the mass media TV/Newspaper stance to a new model that revolves around customer interaction and content creation.

Given the popularity of Anderson’s concept of The Long Tail, he started a blog with the same name.

The Long Tail Blog

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Punk Marketing by Richard Laermer & Mark Simmons

http://punkmarketing.com

Probably the most “unboring” marketing book ever written. Laermer and Simmons know what they are talking about, and know how to convey it to the reader in a really intelligent, interesting and usually funny manner. This book is not about one aspect of marketing, but about how traditional marketing is changing, or at least needs to change to capture the audience’s attention. The authors persuade their readers to be creative, challenging and differ from the norm in an attempt to break through the noise of all of todays marketing efforts. Through the course of the book Laermer and Simmons go through advertising online, on cell phones, on TV, untraditional (sidewalks, merchandise, billboards), video games amongst other things.

Reading this book really got my creative juices flowing. These guys detest that too many advertisers still think inside the box and provide ample stories of alternatives to the norm. This is a great read for anyone in the advertising or marketing business that will definitely get you thinking about creative new ways to reach your audience. Bravo!