Emergence Marketing: book pointers Archives

May 14, 2007

Beyond Buzz - the next generation of word-of-mouth marketing

I have been remiss at writing about a few good books I read in the past few months. My reading list is also desperately out of date...

One book which definitely should interest any marketing practitioner is a book by my good friend Lois Kelly, who also blogs on the Foghound blog.

The book - called Beyond Buzz, The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing - is a great "how to" book with a ton of actionable ideas. The author does a great job clarifying the distinction between making meaning and making buzz. She also teaches you how to uncover interesting things about your company or product and turn them into "point of views" that people will want to talk to you about, she tells you how to organize customer listening tours, and much more. The book also provides some great frameworks and questionnaires to help you turn word-of-mouth strategies into actionable plans that will work, and not fizzle out or backfire, as many of them do.

Definitely a great book to have on your office bookshelf.

[Tags: marketing wom word of mouth marketing beyond buzz word of mouth lois kelly]

January 11, 2007

"Thin-slicing" marketing plans

bulbs & gridsm.jpg There is a new 5 "things" meme going around and I have just been tagged for it by Mary Schmidt. This time the idea is "thin-slice" a particular topic - a term coined by Malcolm Gladwell in his latest book Blink, and described as follows:

"Thin-slicing is a neat cognitive trick that involves taking a narrow slice of data, just what you can capture in the blink of an eye, and letting your intuition do the work for you."

My task was to thin-slice a marketing plan - so here we go:

1) Do you really need a marketing "plan"?
Very often people just need to get out and engage with customers, prospects, influencers and connectors. There is no need for a marketing plan to do that. Often times marketing plans are just produced by marketing luddites as a CYA document. Granted, for some very large projects that involve large teams of people a plan can be useful - but more as a check-list than as a marketing roadmap.

2) Does the marketing plan show the addressable market being in the billions of dollars?
Any VC will scoff at these numbers - yet they won't invest if it is not true. Don't talk about the total addressable market, tell me how you will get your next 10 or 100 customers. Who are they, what do they do, where do they live, how will you reach them? Give me real life scenarios of potential customers and how you will help them solve their problem. Don't give aggregate figures that have zero meaning.

3) Are you pretending or intending on being a leader in a category that nobody ever heard of?
Most companies I have worked with consider themselves the category leader in a category with one player - themselves. A category is recognized by others as a category and has other players in it. You can "create" a category, but you need help to create a new one - including help from competitors. Show me how you will create a new category, and who you will enlist to help with the creation? Show me how you will change the rules of the game in that category, how you will change the players or change their respective value as you enter the category - now that's interesting!

4) Does your competitive review result in your company or product being in the upper right hand corner of some diagram?
Do I need to elaborate? You and everybody else lives there...it must be pretty tough to compete there. Show me where you are on the BS curve compared to others - that would be much more interesting...

5) What part of the plan deals with how you will deal with change?
The biggest danger with plans is that they become "bibles" - and once they are approved nobody can deviate from the chosen path. Yet most successful marketing programs are emergent in nature, they are like a jamming sessions...and so back to point 1) do you really need a marketing plan?

And now my turn to tag:

Tara - how about engaging communities as part of your marketing plan?

Pito - what about product plans?

Jackie - how about word of mouth marketing plans?

Chris - what about customer service strategies?

Tom - what about brand strategies?

[updated] I decided to add a 6th one as I care about PR and Europeans :) - Neville, what do you think?

[Tags: thin-slicing thin-slice marketing plan blink]

January 2, 2007

[off topic] Unexpected reading...

Here are two interesting and very unexpected things that I ran across this weekend...

First from the New England Journal of Medicine review of Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Post-World War II America on Amazon:

Alcohol has always had a special role in the United States. From 1620, when the Puritans were forced to land on Plymouth Rock because the Mayflower had almost run out of beer
(via Rageboy email)

Then next from Richard Dawkins' new book - The GOD Delusion:

The Penguin English Dictionary defines a delusion as a 'false belief or impression'. Surprisingly, the illustrative quotation the dictionary gives is from Philip E. Johnson (the leader of the creationist charge against Darwinism in the US): 'Darwinism is the story of humanity's liberation from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself.'
(italic text was added by me)

Hilarious! The puritans running out of beer and the creationists calling a higher power a delusion!!!

December 18, 2006

[off topic] A hypoallergenic cat anyone?

Right on the heels of finishing Michael Crichton's last book, NEXT - which deals with the future of genetic research - I read an article in Utne describing how a California company has developed a Hypoallergenic cat. You got it right - for $3,950 you can buy a genetically modified cat that does not produce the glycoprotein responsible for itchy eyes, sneezing, and hives. Note that for that price they will not guarantee that the cat will lead a healthy life.

Yikes...what's next after that? Genetically engineered sharpshooters, genetically designed actors, genetically enhanced football players? How about genetically designed preachers? No that's not going to work, those guys already think that they are the end of evolution...

Thankfully there are also good applications of genetic research such as this clinic that treats Anhedonia:

Or this one - where a company has preserved the gene for blondes - which are expected to become extinct in the next 200 years.

[Tags: genetic research genetic engineering genetic design genetic]

November 20, 2006

[off topic] God: wrong on defense, wrong for America

new rules.jpg I read Bill Maher's latest book this weekend - New Rules, Polite Musings From a Timid Observer - which was great.

Here is an interesting new rules:

God is a waffler. Pat Robertson said God told him that Iraq would be a bloody disaster. But the same God told Bush it wouldn't, which so surprised Robertson, he almost dropped the pennies he was stealing off a dead's woman's eyes. But why is God talking out of two sides of his mouth? Flip-flop. God told us to beat our swords into plowshares. God: Wrong on defense, wrong for America.

And here is another:

Ass-kissing must be done in person. Yes, I'll "continue to hold" but not because you said, "Your call is important to us." If my call was really important to you, you'd hire a human to pick up the damn phone.

January 4, 2006

Building emergent business models

As I am working through my (huge) pile of books to read I hit another good one last night. It is "The birth of the Chaordic Age" by Dee Hock. Not exactly a new one, but I never claimed this site to be a news site or a recent book review site...

As many of you know, Dee Hock was the founder of VISA - one of the largest companies in the world. The interesting part about VISA is that it is one of the few large-scale commercial entities where the organizational infrastructure is not based on a command and control hierarchy, but rather on a true emergent self-organizing infrastructure. When Hock realized that none of the traditional company models could handle such a massively complex and distributed business model he focused instead on building a DNA for the new company, based on purpose and principles, rather than building a command and control infrastructure with all of its associated rules and regulations. The results - a huge company that emerged from chaos in less than 2 decades to become one of the most successful self-organizing companies in the world.

It is interesting to see what questions drove him throughout his career and ultimately led to the creation of VISA:

Why are institutions everywhere, whether political, commercial, or social, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?
Why are individuals, everywhere, increasingly in conflict with and alienated from the institutions of which they are part?
Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray?

It's also interesting to read him say that: "...the need to harbor the Four Beasts that inevitably devour their keeper, Ego, Envy, Avarice and Ambition, and of a great bargain, trading Ego for humility, Envy for equanimity, Avarice for time, and Ambition for liberty..."

Maybe that is the way to ensure that marketing is not just another department (or worse - a set of departments) in a company - but rather a way of doing business, a way to behave in the marketplace. Instead of creating organizational structures with hierarchies, goals, rules and regulations we could focus instead on developing marketing DNA that can spread throughout the whole organization and become part of the company's fabric. On a certain level, Ritz was able to do that with their "every employee can spend up to $2,000 to fix any customer problem" principle. That's not a rule which gets enforced, and it's not a goal that gets measured (other than maybe to track potential abuse) - it's really a "behavioral" DNA strand that gets injected throughout the company. We could expand on that and come up with "listening" DNA strands, "innovation" DNA strands, or "branding" DNA strands.

Heck - why stop with marketing? Why not "financial" DNA strands, or a "governance" DNA strands?

[Technorati Tags: organizational structure hr marketing employee behavior]

December 10, 2005

A must read...

I have always been a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut, one of the grandmasters of American letters, and I too am glad that he broke his promise and wrote one more book - A Man Without A Country (that's how I feel sometimes - as do many expats).

I know I would not do it justice if I were to try to summarize/review what is in this collection of mini-memoirs - but I wanted to quote a few passages to give you a taste of what to expect:

"But I am now eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."

Or when he writes:

" I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren...They like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government."

...and this:

"Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives...Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people too..."

Not all is dark in this most recent book - every now and again you can still see signs of the all too typical Vonnegut humor.

[Technorati Tags: kurt vonnegut]

December 5, 2005

Firms of edearment returns surpass "good to great" companies

David Wolfe over at Ageless Marketing has started chronicling the stories of firms of endearment - in advance of his upcoming book, which should be published early next year (here and here).

Firms of endearment challenge Milton Friedman's premise that companies only have one social responsibility - maximizing shareholder return. Firms of endearment do not favor any particular stakeholder, but rather treat all 5 stakeholders on the same footing - employees, customers, suppliers, society and shareholders. David believes that firms of endearment are forerunners of a new business model - one that could very well change capitalism at its core.

And how are the firms of endearment doing compared to the S&P 500 or good-to-great companies? Check for yourself...

[Technorati Tags: social responsibility capitalism business model]

November 6, 2005

Ambient Findability?

Somehow I came across a mention about this small book with a provocative title by Peter Morville. Go here to check it out on Amazon. After reading an excerpt on A List Apart I knew I had to buy a copy. Remember that I said that I "somehow" came across a mention of the book. So Mr. Morville immediately calls my bluff in the book's preface. Opening sentences: How did you get here? How did you find this book? What were you looking for? And so on. He asks because the odds of actually finding his book are vanishingly small. Estimates place the worldwide stock of books at between 75- and 150-million titles; plus there are millions of blogs, billions of web pages, countless radio and TV shows, RSS feeds, podcasts, and the beat goes on. As Morville points out, given this vast array of information competing for my attention I would be more likely to win a lottery than find his book. And yet, without actually being able to accurately answer his questions about how I found his book and what I was looking for when I found it (as best as I can remember, I was bored so I started surfing, and somehow found a blog that mentioned the book, which led me to A List Apart, which motivated me to go to Amazon, which prompted a decision to buy).

Now that I have dug more deeply into the book, I realize that the mindless ease with which I moved from becoming aware of an interesting concept, to holding a book in my hands that helps me learn more about it is really a small example of ambient findability.

Now the plot thickens. Today I decide to check out the author's website. Here I browse some of his earlier articles, such as one he wrote on Ambient Findability in 2002. As I skim the article I notice a reference to The Diamond Age. This as it turns out is a sci fi book published in 1989 by Neal Stephenson. But was is really amazing (to me at least) is that literally minutes before seeing it mentioned in Morville's article, I saw the book mentioned in my daily Reuters Technology Report email. This time it was in a story about an enabling technology for Ambient Findability: electronic paper. In Stephenson's book, a young girl carries a book that can speak to her and continually change the contents of its pages. Over a decade after his book was published, Phillips of Holland demonstrated that what was once science fiction is about to become the real deal.

Are you ready for Ambient Findability? Remember, it is a two way deal. You get to find what you want, when you want it, where ever you are. And conversely, you and everything about you are equally easily findable by anyone else.

August 5, 2005

Steven Vincent - a journalist and a hero

I was shocked when I heard the news that Steven Vincent - who wrote a great piece in the Sunday New York Times on how the English soldiers are in effect participants in the creation of a totally corrupt and extremist government in Basra - was murdered by the very people he criticized. It is too bad that not enough people realize how critically important it is for democracies to have people like that - willing to put their lives on the line in the search for truth.

Visit his blog, and buy his last book - that's what I did.

[Technorati Tags: investigative journalism Steven Johnson]

June 3, 2005

All marketers are liars

I started reading Seth Godin's new book, "All Marketers Are Liars" - as usual a good read. A few things in the book caught my attention as worth commenting on.

First is when he says that marketing is not about pitching products but about telling stories. That is so true, my friend Gabe (btw - where the heck are you Gabe? if blocked use autoblogger ;-)) used to say “its not the better product that wins it's the product with the better story”. The story has to be powerful enough so that people want to retell your story but also simple enough so that they can retell it with some degree of consistency. Sadly enough, too many companies do not yet understand that. Nor do they understand the fact that the story about the product travels separately from the product itself and that those channels need to be managed separately.

The other major statement that caught my eye was:

"marketing is about spreading ideas, and spreading ideas is the single most important output of our civilization".

As you know, I believe that marketing it broader than that. Spreading ideas happens after you invented and built the product. And once you have the product and you successfully are able to spread your stories, you have to train the organization as a whole to behave in accordance to the story that you are spreading.

More later...I am enjoying this one.

[Technorati Tags: marketing seth godin]

May 10, 2005

I have been practicing this for years - laughter yoga...

But now I know that I am not alone (laughter yoga). I found this and many other very interesting links in Dan Pink's latest book - A Whole New Mind.

It's a great book about how people will have to be much more "right-brain" in order to get ahead. While I did not intend this post to be a book review - there are much better reviewers than me (as in here, here and here) - I did want to point to it because it is very insightful, and full of interesting facts and links.

Another example from the book that will calm many parents with video game-playing kids is when he says:

"Indeed, a growing stack of research is showing video games can sharpen many of the skills that are vital in the Conceptual Age (that's the right-brain thing). For instance, an important 2003 study in the journal Nature found an array of benefits to playing video games. On tests of visual perception, game players scored 30% higher than non-players."

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