http://www.changethis.com/44.04.TrustEconomy
This is an ebook from ChangeThis.com. (If you haven’t heard of ChangeThis.com, you should probably change that. Its a great site where the most relevant ebooks come to the top as voted on by the community. Some big name authors and marketers such as these post their books here for free)
Key Ideas:
Trust is what matters now, more than anything else in regards to marketing
- You wont get sales until you build trust with your consumers
Social Networking makes it easy to identify the influencers
- Try to target these influencers to spread the word about your brand (the new PR)
When you enter a new market, be a real person, act like one & feel like one
- This is an idea that gets repeated over and over in the marketing 2.0 world. I watched a great video about it by Gary Vaynerchuk (an online marketing guru) about how Brittany Spears needs to change her twitter tweets to encompass this idea. http://garyvaynerchuk.com/2008/10/17/brittany-spears-is-on-twitterkinda/
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http://www.deanhunt.com/Buzz%20Content%20Hustlers%20eBook.pdf
What can I say, this e-book is really good! It is short and sweet with many case studies, exactly what I like. These guys combine humor with amazing viral marketing ideas. I think that anyone could read this and right away start a successful blog.
This e-book is really about how to get the most people to your website. It provides ideas called “hustles” that will get your website off the ground and have thousands of people tune in quickly. The ideas here can be applied to pretty much any product in any industry. For big companies it is especially useful for their blogs or micro-sites and smaller companies can use the ideas for any product.
Some “hustles” are:
The Ego-Stroking Hustle – launch a blog praising everyone in your industry. People’s ego’s are a great thing to play off. They will be so happy with this they will sing your praises off of rooftops in the form of links. One of the biggest money making blogs on the internet accomplished its success doing just this. Ex. alltop.com
The Challenge (with forfeit) Hustle – ex. “One man’s challenge to see how much weight he can lose using Nintendo Wii Fit” People love to see challenges, especially ridicolous ones like this. And the beauty is that even if you don’t succeed the forfeit can get as much attention as the attempts.
This will only take you ten minutes to read and its worth it.
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http://www.webtrafficorgasm.com/thankyou.html
This article is about how to get a blog post to be seen by tons of people. Dean does a case study of how he made a bet with his friend that he could take a a boring blog post, spice it up a bit and within a week have it show up on the Digg main page. He accomplishes this within 36 hours. Here’s how:
Note: Some of this wording is taken directly from this e-book
(A summary of his 9 steps)
1. Global Appeal – Blogs unlike more traditional advertising can be seen by everyone, globally. If you use easy to understand language that non-native speakers can understand, you are more likely to get tons of viewers. Ex. Original blog article was called “procrastinator’s creed”. He changed it to “10 step guide to thinking like a loser”
2. Use a negativity slant – Content with a negative slant always gets more buzz then positive content. Think local daily news.
3. The killer headline
4. Internet readers LOVE lists – Apparently “Top 7″ is the magic number. The most number of stories on the Digg main page have this as compared to any other headline.
5. Stand out from the crowd – be creative, controversial, edgy, weird, unique. Try them all.
6. Curiosity killed the cat – create a headline that raises people’s interest. This is achievable by using a teaser in the headline.
7. Image is everything – Add an article to your article.
8. Perfect Packaging – Have a professional looking site, otherwise no one will link to you.
9. Write in second person – This shifts the focus from you to them. Think about how boring it is when someone is constantly talking about themselves all day. Which is more powerful? “Do you want to know how I made $10,000 in a day?” OR “How you can make $10,000 in a day?”
These summaries are good if you are short on time, however this e-book is a quick read and if you have a spare 15 minutes you should really give it a read.
Thanks for the lead to ChangeThis and your comments on Trust Economy. The idea is an important one. But as you say, it’s also one that’s getting a lot of play. So it’s nice to see how you connect this idea to the video about Brittany Spears. Have you ever considered doing a spider where you show the most important connections/authors/books to an idea like trust. Or is that just doing something that search engines do better?
Interesting to see your comments on Buzz Content Hustlers. The references to “hustlers” and “hustles” while provocative were a turn-off to me and seemed to fly in the face of the whole idea of trust. So interesting that you found them useful and “honest.” Got to say lines like praise everybody and stroke egos seem to be more self-serving than honest and are still a bit of a turn-off. I would have liked to have been given an overview of the broad topics their various hustles address. And since you say that the book has a lot of case studies, I would have liked to have heard about some of the companies profiled and maybe a few profiles or ideas from the profiles that you found helpful. Maybe when you give a book such a high rating, you might want to provide more details.
Interesting that we had different feelings about this one. It is fair to ask me to give more details when I do praise something so highly and I will try to do that more. I guess “honest” to me was that the authors were giving away some of the things they do that make their viral campaigns successful. It is a very interesting point you give though about how many of the online marketers talk about building community and trust and this article is more about how to manipulate that for self serving reasons.
Appreciate the review of the e book from Change This. I like how you break out the key ideas. And they do seem to be key. But as you point out, they also seem to be fairly widespread. Is that why you gave the book a 7? Were there any ideas in the book that you found absolutely fresh? And were there other reasons why the book received a 7? I’d like to know.