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27 Dec 09

Email Extractor Lite - Free web and email address extractor - Surf7.net

www.surf7.net/...extractor.php - Preview

tools email marketing

14 Nov 08

Radiohead’s In Rainbows: A Look at Anti-Marketing in the Music Industry

www.doshdosh.com/arketing-in-the-music-industry - Preview

marketing free-economy anti-marketing music-industry Musicians can prosper in the age of free music

The RIAA sees file sharing as mere copyright infringement but pundits fail to understand that file-sharers are music fans, first and foremost. Some of them are far more willing to support independent ventures if you understand or reach out to their community.
Look beyond commercial side of all ventures and embrace your audience before everything else. Especially if you are someone who believes in the value of what you are offering to the entire world.

01 Apr 08

Capulet's Best Online Marketing Articles | Capulet Communications

www.capulet.com/best-online-marketing-articles - Preview

article marketing web-marketing

28 Dec 07

How to Change the World: Word of Mouth Versus Key Influencers

blog.guykawasaki.com/...word-of-mouth-v.html - Preview

marketing word-of-mouth

This summary of an article from the December issue of the Journal of Advertising Research (good luck finding the issue online because I couldn’t) says that common word-of-mouth advertising by regular folks is more powerful than “key influencers.”
Said Coyle:

“We find that trying to track down key influencers, people who have extremely large social networks, is typically unnecessary and, more importantly, can actually limit a campaign or advertisement’s viral potential. Instead, marketers need to realize that the majority of their audience, not just the well-connected few, is eager and willing to pass along well-designed and relevant messages.”
1 more annotations...
- The marketing lesson is this: Create something great, sow fields (not window boxes), “let a hundred flowers blossom,” and pray that “regular folks” will spread the word.

24 Dec 07

Social Media Marketing eBook: Blogger Relations, Facebook Marketing, SMO and Word of Mouth on the Web

www.socialmediaready.com - Preview

blog-marketing blogging darren-barefoot ebook marketing social-media social-web

23 Dec 07

Squidoo: Seth Godin’s Purple Albatross?

www.techcrunch.com/...o-seth-godins-purple-albatross - Preview

knowledge-sharing marketing seth-godin squidoo

Myspace works, however, because it’s a social network, with pages linking to eachother (your friends) in a way that produces massive inter-site traffic and networks-within-the-network.
People are also passionate about Myspace because the central plot of a page is you - and most people are pretty passionate about themselves.

22 Dec 07

The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos

www.techcrunch.com/...egies-behind-many-viral-videos - Preview

advertising marketing media seo viral youtube

Sample Chapters from Our Social Media Marketing eBook

www.socialmediaready.com/sample-chapters - Preview

blogging book-excerpt marketing social-media social-web

28 Nov 07

the cluetrain manifesto

cluetrain.com/ - Preview

book business cluetrain consumerism corporate-culture e-commerce economics internet marketing manifesto marketing

We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But
we are not waiting.
Our allegiance is to ourselves—our friends, our new allies
and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Companies that
have no part in this world, also have no future.
27 more annotations...
- We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the
  light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive,
  more interesting, more fun to play with.
- We have better things to do than worry about whether you'll
  change in time to get our business. Business is only a part of
  our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it:
  who needs whom?
- When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you
  didn't have such a tight rein on "your people" maybe they'd be
  among the people we'd turn to.
- Don't worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it's
  not the only thing on your mind.
  
  Have you noticed that, in itself, money is kind of
  one-dimensional and boring? What else can we talk about?
- You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.
- We've got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some
  better service. Stuff we'd be willing to pay for. Got a minute?
  
  You're too busy "doing business" to answer our email? Oh gosh,
  sorry, gee, we'll come back later. Maybe.
- We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.
  
  If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it
  something interesting for a change.
- We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are
  creating it.
  
  You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at the
  door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!
- We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and
  strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will
  not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block
  with eye candy but lacking any substance.
- However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online
  perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that
  are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.
  
  This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.
- There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One
  with the market.
  
  In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost
  invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete
  notions of command and control.
- Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect
  for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.
- Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about
  human concerns.
  
  The community of discourse is the market.
  
  Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will
  die.
- Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market
  might see what's really going on inside the company.
- Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to
  the people with whom they hope to create relationships.
- Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take
  a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their
  market actually cares about.
- Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At
  them.
- People in networked markets have figured out that they get far
  better information and support from one another than from
  vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to
  commoditized products.
  
  There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than
  companies do about their own products. And whether the news is
  good or bad, they tell everyone.
- In both internetworked markets and among
  intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each
  other in a powerful new way.
  
  These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of
  social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
- Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
- The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that
  were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
- Online Markets...
  
  Networked markets are beginning to
  self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally
  served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better
  informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from
  most business organizations.
  
  ...People of
  Earth
  
  The sky is open to the stars. Clouds roll over us night and day.
  Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may have heard, this is our
  world, our place to be. Whatever you've been told, our flags fly
  free. Our heart goes on forever. People of Earth,
  remember.

14 Aug 07

Amazon.com: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference: Books: Malcolm Gladwell

www.amazon.com/...002-8767936-2898439 - Preview

malcolm-gladwell marketing meme tipping-point

03 Jun 07

The Marketing ICE Blog

marketingice.com/blog - Preview

internet-marketing marketing seo

17 Apr 07

Chris Baggott's Email Marketing Best Practices: The right way to email a blogger

exacttarget.typepad.com/...the_right_way_t.html - Preview

blogging marketing

The one comment that he should have linked first is very valid. If he likes our blogs so much, he should have linked to them and then sent an email later saying... I added you to my blog role a few months ago...

06 Apr 07

StumbleUpon - The Other Monkey in the Jungle | Capulet Communications

www.capulet.com/...the-other-monkey-in-the-jungle - Preview

digg marketing meme online-markeing social-bookmarking stumbleupon trends viral-marketing

The Meme Epidemic - A Case Study - at Viral Marketing

www.onedegree.ca/...the-meme-epidemic-a-case-study - Preview

marketing meme

The Meme Epidemic - A Case Study
A meme is a virally-transmitted unit of cultural information.
1 more annotations...
- The most important thing about a meme, and the only way it can survive, is that it’s compelling enough to pass on.

04 Apr 07

In Praise of the Purple Cow

www.fastcompany.com/...purplecow.html - Preview

marketing seth-godin

In Marketing Outrageously (Bard Press, 2001), author Jon Spoelstra points out the catch-22 logic of the Purple Cow. If times are tough, your peers and your boss may very well point out that you can't afford to be remarkable. There's not enough room to innovate: We have to conserve, to play it safe. We don't have the money to make a mistake. In good times, however, those very same people will tell you to relax, take it easy. There's not enough need to innovate: We can afford to be conservative, to play it safe.
And that means you have to be a leader. You can't be remarkable by following someone else who's remarkable.
14 more annotations...
- This is an essay about what it takes to create and sell something remarkable. It is a manifesto for marketers who want to make a difference at their company by helping create products and services that are worth marketing in the first place. It is a plea for originality, for passion, guts, and daring. Not just because going through life with passion and guts beats the alternative (which it does), but also because it's the only way to be successful. Today, the one sure way to fail is to be boring. Your one chance for success is to be remarkable.
- Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service. Not just slapping on the marketing function as a last-minute add-on, but also understanding from the outset that if your offering itself isn't remarkable, then it's invisible -- no matter how much you spend on well-crafted advertising.
- For years, marketers have talked about the "five Ps" (actually, there are more than five, but everyone picks their favorite handful): product, pricing, promotion, positioning, publicity, packaging, pass along, permission.
- In Praise of the Purple Cow
  
  Remarkably honest ideas (and remarkably useful case studies) about making and marketing remarkable products.
  
  From:
  Issue 67
  |
  January 2003
  | Page 74
  | By: Seth Godin
- Sidebar: 10 ways to raise a purple cow
  
  Making and marketing something remarkable means asking new questions -- and trying new practices. Here are 10 suggestions.
  
  Differentiate your customers. Find the group that's most profitable. Find the group that's most likely to influence other customers. Figure out how to develop for, advertise to, or reward either group. Ignore the rest. Cater to the customers you would choose if you could choose your customers.
  If you could pick one underserved niche to target (and to dominate), what would it be? Why not launch a product to compete with your own that does nothing but appeal to that market?
  Create two teams: the inventors and the milkers. Put them in separate buildings. Hold a formal ceremony when you move a product from one group to the other. Celebrate them both, and rotate people around.
  Do you have the email addresses of the 20% of your customer base that loves what you do? If not, start getting them. If you do, what could you make for them that would be superspecial?
  Remarkable isn't always about changing the biggest machine in your factory. It can be the way you answer the phone, launch a new brand, or price a revision to your software. Getting in the habit of doing the "unsafe" thing every time you have the opportunity is the best way to see what's working and what's not.
  Explore the limits. What if you're the cheapest, the fastest, the slowest, the hottest, the coldest, the easiest, the most efficient, the loudest, the most hated, the copycat, the outsider, the hardest, the oldest, the newest, or just the most! If there's a limit, you should (must) test it.
  Think small. One vestige of the TV-industrial complex is a need to think mass. If it doesn't appeal to everyone, the thinking goes, it's not worth it. No longer. Think of the smallest conceivable market and describe a product that overwhelms it with its remarkability. Go from there.
  Find things that are "just not done" in your industry, and then go ahead and do them. For example, JetBlue Airways almost instituted a dress code -- for its passengers! The company is still playing with the idea of giving a free airline ticket to the best-dressed person on the plane. A plastic surgeon could offer gift certificates. A book publisher could put a book on sale for a certain period of time. Stew Leonard's took the strawberries out of the little green plastic cages and let the customers pick their own. Sales doubled.
  Ask, "Why not?" Almost everything you don't do has no good reason for it. Almost everything you don't do is the result of fear or inertia or a historical lack of someone asking, "Why not?"
  What would happen if you simply told the truth inside your company and to your customers?
- If a company is failing, it's the fault of the most senior management, and the problem is probably this: They are just running a company, not marketing a product. And today, that's a remarkably ineffective way to compete.
- But isn't the same idea true for a local restaurant, a grinding-wheel company, and Citibank? In a world where anything we need is good enough and where just about all of the profit comes from the Purple Cow, we must all be marketers.
- Boring always leads to failure. Boring is always the riskiest strategy. Smart businesspeople realize this and work to minimize (but not eliminate) the risk from the process. They know that sometimes it's not going to work, but they accept the fact that that's okay.
- Playing it safe. Following the rules. They seem like the best ways to avoid failure. Alas, that pattern is awfully dangerous. The current marketing "rules" will ultimately lead to failure. In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.
- If you're remarkable, then it's likely that some people won't like you. That's part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise -- ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out.
- Some people would like you to believe that there are too few great ideas, that their product or their industry or their company simply can't support a great idea. That, of course, is absolute nonsense. Another reason the Purple Cow is so rare is because people are so afraid.
- The more intransigent your market, the more crowded the marketplace, the busier your customers, the more you need a Purple Cow. Half-measures will fail. Overhauling the product with dramatic improvements in things that the right customers care about, on the other hand, can have an enormous payoff.
- The old rule was this: Create safe products and combine them with great marketing. Average products for average people. That's broken. The new rule is: Create remarkable products that the right people seek out.
- the sad truth about marketing just about anything, whether it's a product or a service, whether it's marketed to consumers or corporations: Most people can't buy your product. Either they don't have the money, they don't have the time, or they don't want it.

02 Apr 07

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Customer value and the network effect

www.roughtype.com/...the_value_of_ne.php - Preview

business ebay economics marketing network-economy network-effect social-web

In transportation infrastructure planning it has long been understood that the value of a system as a whole increases exponentially with linear increases in the number of nodes. Reason is that the network becomes more useful--you can go more places. This is known, but very frequently not taken into account,
Gupta says that he's currently

working on understanding and modeling complex network structures such as those of MySpace.
Here the issue that we are grappling with is the tangible and intangible value of customers. In other words, customers provide tangible value to a firm through direct purchases but they also provide intangible value through network effects or word of mouth.
> It is quite possible that some customers have low tangible but high intangible value. Traditional models would label such customers as low value and would miss a huge opportunity for a firm.
5 more annotations...
- While heavy markering spending is required in the early days to attract a critical mass of buyers, the network effect itself becomes a larger attractant than marketing as the business grows, allowing a company to cut back its marketing budget over time.
- (To put it another way, the network effect of a buyer on a seller was far stronger than the network effect of a seller on a buyer.
- But a recent paper by three business-school professors - Sunil Gupta, Carl Mela, and Jose Vidal-Sanz - offers a new approach for estimating the value of nonpaying, or, as the professors term them, "free," customers.
- What's the value of a customer who doesn't pay you anything? If you're running a hot dog stand, the answer is probably "zero." But if you're running a two-sided market - a market, like eBay or Monster.com or AdWords or YouTube or Digg or even Second Life, that needs to attract both buyers and sellers (or content generators and content consumers) - the answer may be "a lot."
- Customer value and the network effect
  
  March 08, 2007

30 Mar 07

seth godin - permission marketing book excerpt

mail.google.com/mail - Preview

advertising book business consumerism excerpt marketing permission-marketing seth-godin

THE MARKETING CRISIS THAT MONEY WON'T SOLVE

YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION. NOBODY IS.

It's not your fault. It's just physically impossible for you
to pay attention to everything that marketers expect you
to-like the 17,000 new grocery store products that were
introduced last year, or the $1,000 worth of advertising
that was directed exclusively at you last year.

Is it any wonder that consumers feel like the fast-moving
world around them is getting blurry? There's TV at the
airport, advertisements in urinals, newsletters on virtually
every topic, and a cellular phone wherever you go.
Wouldn't it be great if we could eliminate this incredibly
wasteful part of the process? Unfortunately, Permission
Marketers cannot ignore the interruption part of the
process. They can't walk away from the cost of getting
strangers to raise their hands. But they CAN leverage the
expense of that interruption across multiple interactions.
63 more annotations...
- Be personal. Be relevant. Be specific. And always be
  anticipated. Anticipation, of course, is even better than
  expectation. Without surprising the consumer, gradually
  raise the level of permission you extract.
- The reward you offer a consumer must be obvious and
  simple. To dramatize the importance of this stage, to
  make it crasser than it needs to be, I call it bait.
- In order to make the marketing messages you send
  relevant and personal you need to get some data.
  Permission marketers are totally obvious about their
  objectives with the consumer. They make it crystal clear
  what they will be doing with the data they collect, and
  exactly why it's beneficial to the consumer to give this
  data.
- An interrupted consumer is in no hurry to send you
  money or promise to invest a lot of time. An interrupted
  consumer won't fill out a long demographic form or get
  in his car to drive down to your automall. The less you
  ask of the consumer and the bigger the 'bribe', the more
  likely the consumer will give you permission. The
  permission won't be broad or deep. But it will guarantee
  that your next interaction will be significantly more
  impactful.
- The response rate to a free
  sample or an affinity program or a birthday club might be
  five or ten times the response rate of an ad asking for a
  sale.
- The only goal of the video is to get permission to have a
  personal meeting. It doesn't sell the camp. It sells the
  meeting.
  
  Now, fully qualified, and having seen the testimonials,
  the photographs, the facilities and the happy campers, the
  family is ready to be sold on the camp. And that's done in
  person.
- The ad
  sells the brochure, not the camp.
- But the first step is still to interrupt the consumer. That's
  one reason there will always be socially acceptable
  interruption marketing media. We need to get that initial
  attention.
- Customer service has always
  mattered. But now that power has shifted to the
  consumer, it matters a great deal more.
- Did he burn a customer? Of course. That was his
  intention. But what he hasn't learned yet (and soon will,
  or he'll be gone) is that the act of dismissing that
  customer didn't cost him just one sale. It cost him the loss
  of permission to sell products to this woman for the rest
  of her life.
- Technology enables marketers to have a perfect memory,
  and provides them with the ability to customize
  correspondence on the fly and deliver it for free via e-
  mail. Combine that with a database of customers who
  expect to receive marketing messages from you because
  they gave you their permission, and most industry book
  chains should begin to see a looming threat.
- Amazon appears to be building a permission asset, not a
  brand asset. Amazon has overt permission to track which
  books you buy and which books you browse. They have
  explicit permission to send you promotional e-mail
  messages. They are building special interest communities
  in which Amazon and its customers will be able to talk
  with each other about specific genres of books. Why?
  Where's the payoff?
  
  The payoff comes the day Amazon decides to publish
  books. This is where the profit lies and where Amazon is
  best able to leverage their permission asset.
- They're building an asset that has
  nothing to do with brand and everything to do with their
  relationship with you.
- As the company gains
  more permission, it's not hard to imagine them branching
  into house cleaning, house painting, gardening and a
  huge range of home care and home delivery services.
- Then, using the Web, you log on each week and tell
  Streamline what you need. You fill out a pre-automated
  shopping list. They pick up dry cleaning and
  prescriptions and photos as well. Then, while you're at
  work, they do all your errands, pick up what you need,
  and drop it off at your house.
- Frank Britt and Tim DeMello run a company called
  Streamline that is at the vanguard of the junction between
  Permission Marketing and one to one marketing.
  Streamline capitalizes on the technologies and social shifts
  that are changing our lives, and they are building a
  fantastic business that serves as a model for the future.
  They offer to save customers hours and hours of time
  each week by doing virtually all of their routine errands.
- sidebar
  The one to one marketer works to change his focus from
  finding as many new customers as he can to extracting the
  maximum value from each customer.
  
  The Permission marketer works to change his focus from
  finding as many prospects as he can to converting the
  largest number of prospects into customers. And then he
  leverages the permission on an ongoing basis.
- THE NATURAL SYNERGY OF PERMISSION AND ONE TO ONE
  MARKETING
  As you've seen, Permission Marketing is the cousin of
  one to one marketing. Where Peppers and Rogers begin
  the process with the first sale, Permission begins the
  process with the very first contact.
  
  Permission Marketing works to turn strangers into friends
  and then friends into customers. One to one marketing
  uses the very same techniques, incorporating knowledge,
  frequency, and relevance, to turn customers into
  supercustomers. One to one doesn't compete with
  Permission Marketing. It's part of the very same
  continuum. The one to one marketer takes the permission
  that's been granted after someone becomes a customer
  and uses that permission to create even better customers.
  The better the permission, the more profit created.
- The process of getting new customers needs to be
  reengineered. Like caterpillars turning into butterflies,
  prospects go through a five step cycle:
  
  Strangers
  Friends
  Customers
  Loyal Customers
  Former Customers
- 2. Increase the durability of customer
  relationships. Invest money in customer retention,
  because it's a small fraction of the cost of customer
  acquisition.
- CHAPTER FOUR
  
  GETTING STARTED-FOCUS ON SHARE OF CUSTOMER, NOT MARKET
  SHARE
  
  FIRE 70% OF YOUR CUSTOMERS AND WATCH YOUR PROFITS GO
  UP!
  
  Five years ago, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote a
  book that changed the marketing landscape forever. Titled
  The One to One Future, they proposed a radical
  rethinking of the way marketers treat their customers.
  Peppers and Rogers presented a manifesto for how
  companies can increase their profits by selling more
  things to fewer customers. In other words, they believe
  it's wiser to focus more on increasing sales to a smaller
  percentage of your existing customers than it is to find
  new ones.
- Mass marketers optimized their organizations for this
  approach. They created brand managers and advertising
  agencies and measurement companies and focus groups
  and a myriad of other techniques to institutionalize their
  attachment to Interruption Marketing.
- Permission Marketing has been around forever (or at least
  as long as dating!), but it takes advantage of new
  technology better than other forms of marketing. The
  internet is the greatest direct mail medium of all time, and
  the low cost of frequent interaction makes it ideal for
  Permission Marketing.
- Worst of all, Permission Marketing requires patience.
  Permission Marketing campaigns grow over time-the
  opposite of what most marketers look for these days. And
  Permission Marketing requires a leap of faith. Even a bad
  Interruption campaign gets some results right away, while
  a permission campaign requires infrastructure, and a
  belief in the durability of the permission concept before it
  blossoms with success..
- [sidebar]
  Five Steps to Dating Your Customer
  1. Offer the prospect an incentive to volunteer
  2. Using the attention offered by the prospect, offer a
  curriculum over time, teaching the consumer about your
  product or service
  3. Reinforce the incentive to guarantee that the prospect
  maintains the permission
  4. Offer additional incentives to get even more permission
  from the consumer
  5. Over time, leverage the permission to change consumer
  behavior towards profits
- Permission to gather more data about the customer's
  >
  
  personal life
  >, or hobbies, or interests. Permission to offer
  a new category of product for the customer's
  consideration. Permission to provide a product sample.
  The range of permission you can obtain from a customer
  is very wide, and limited only by its relevance to the
  customer.
- Along with reinforcing the incentive, the fourth step is to
  increase the level of permission the marketer receives
  from the potential customer.
- The third step involves reinforcing the incentive. Over
  time, any incentive wears out.
- the Permission Marketer is able to
  focus on product benefits -- on specific, focused ways
  this product will help that prospect. Without question,
  this ability to talk freely over time is the most powerful
  element of this marketing approach.
- Second, using the attention offered by the consumer, the
  marketer offers a curriculum over time, teaching the
  consumer about the product or service he has to offer.
- Without a selfish reason to continue dating, your new
  potential customer (and your new potential date) will
  refuse you a second chance. If you don't provide a
  benefit to the consumer for paying attention, your offer
  will suffer the same fate as every other ad campaign that's
  vying for their attention. It will be ignored.
- THE FIVE STEPS TO DATING YOUR CUSTOMER
  Every marketer must offer the prospective customer an
  incentive for volunteering. In the vernacular of dating,
  that means you have to offer something that makes it
  interesting enough to go out on a first date.
- While your competition continues to interrupt strangers
  with mediocre results, your Permission Marketing
  campaign is turning strangers into friends and friends into
  customers.
- Permission marketing is anticipated, personal, relevant.
  Anticipated-people look forward to hearing from you
  Personal-the messages are directly related to the
  individual.
  Relevant-the marketing is about something the prospect
  is interested in.
- Interruption Marketing is the enemy of anyone trying to
  save time. By constantly interrupting what we are doing
  at any given moment, the marketer who interrupts us not
  only tends to fail at selling his product, but wastes our
  most coveted commodity, time. In the long run,
  therefore, Interruption Marketing is doomed as a mass
  marketing tool. The cost to the consumer is just too high.
- There is one critical resource, though, that is in
  chronically short supply. Bill Gates has just as much as
  you do. And even Warren Buffet can't buy more. That
  scarce resource is TIME. And in light of today's
  information glut, that means that there's a vast shortage of
  ATTENTION.
- Software provides another example. The most popular
  web server is not made by Microsoft or Netscape. And it
  doesn't cost $1,000 or $10,000. It's called Apache, and
  it's created by a loosely knit consortium of programmers
  and it's is totally free. Free to download, free to use. As
  resources go, information is not scarce.
- Imagine a tropical island, populated by people with
  simple needs and plenty of resources. You won't find a
  bustling economy there. That's because you need two
  things in order to have an economy: people who want
  things, and a scarcity of things they want. Without
  scarcity, there's no basis for an economy.
- But in today's free market, there are plenty of factories,
  plenty of brands and way too many choices. With just a
  little effort and a little savings, we can get almost anything
  we want. You can find a TV set in every house in this
  country. People throw away their broken microwave
  ovens instead of having them repaired.
- Every marketing campaign gets
  better when an element of permission is added. In some
  cases, a switch to marketing with Permission can
  fundamentally change a company's entire business model
  and profit structure.
- What if you could turn clutter into an asset? What if the
  tremendous barriers faced by Interruption Marketers
  actually became an advantage for you and your company?
  The truth is that even though clutter is bad and getting
  worse, Permission Marketers turn clutter to their
  advantage. In fact, the worse the clutter gets, the more
  profitable your Permission Marketing efforts become.
- CHAPTER TWO
  
  PERMISSION MARKETING-THE WAY TO MAKE ADVERTISING
  WORK AGAIN
  
  POWERFUL ADVERTISING IS ANTICIPATED, PERSONAL AND RELEVANT.
- Is mass marketing due for a cataclysmic shakeout?
  Absolutely. A new form of marketing is changing the
  landscape, and it will affect interruption marketing as
  significantly as the automobile affected the makers of
  buggy whips.
- 6. But, as you've seen, spending more and more money
  in order to get bigger returns leads to ever more clutter.
  
  7. Catch-22: The more they spend, the less it works. The
  less it works, the more they spend.
- 5. But this increase in marketing exposure costs big
  money
- 4. In order to capture more attention and more money,
  Interruption Marketers must increase spending.
- 3. The more products offered, the less money there is to
  go around.
- 2. Human beings have a finite amount of money.
- 1. Human beings have a finite amount of attention.
- INTERRUPTION MARKETERS FACE A CATCH 22
  To summarize the problem that faces the Interruption
  Marketer:
- The last frontier of Interruption Marketing appears to be
  exemplified by the movie Titanic. James Cameron
  showed the world that outspending any rational marketer
  will indeed cut through the clutter.
- Of course, database marketing is a weapon available to
  any marketer, so like all trends in Interruption Marketing,
  this one will soon lose its edge. When others jump in as
  well, the clutter will inevitably catch up.
- Of course, just as suburbanites learned when they fled the
  city to avoid the crowds, if a strategy works, other people
  will be right on your heels. That bucolic countryside
  rapidly fills up with other people looking to get away
  from it all. Correspondingly, as each of these promotional
  media becomes measurably effective, every smart
  marketer rushes to join in. Finding a unique approach that
  cuts through the clutter is usually very short lived.
- Alta Vista, one of the most complete and most visited
  search engines on the internet, claims to have indexed 100
  million pages. That means that their computer has surfed
  and scanned 100 million pages of information, and if you
  do a search, that's the database you're searching through.
- MASS MEDIA IS DEAD. LONG LIVE NICHE MEDIA!
  Technology and the marketplace have also brought the
  consumer a glut of ways to be exposed to advertising.
- It's estimated that the average consumer sees
  about one million marketing messages a year-about
  3,000 a day.
- Except for fast moving industries like
  computers, the brands we have today are good enough to
  last us for years and years. Because our needs as
  consumers are satisfied, we've stopped looking really
  hard for new solutions.
- We've also come a long way as consumers. Ninety years
  ago, it was unusual to find a lot of brand name products
  in a consumer's house. Ninety years ago, we made stuff,
  we didn't buy it. Today, however, we buy almost
  everything. Canned goods. Bread. Perked coffee. Even
  water. As a result, we already have a favorite brand of
  almost everything. If you like your favorite brand, why
  invest time in trying to figure out how to switch?
- You've got
  too much to do and not enough time to get it done. You're
  being accosted by strangers constantly. Every day, you're
  exposed to more than four hours of media. Most of it is
  optimized to interrupt what you're doing. And
  increasingly, it's getting harder and harder to find a little
  peace and quiet.
- You can define advertising as the science of creating and
  placing media that interrupts the consumer and then gets
  him or her to take some action. That's quite a lot to ask of
  thirty seconds of TV time or 25 square inches of the
  newspaper, but without interruption, there's no chance
  for action, and without action, advertising flops.
- For ninety years, marketers have relied on one form of
  advertising almost exclusively. I call it Interruption
  Marketing. Interruption, because the key to each and
  every ad is to interrupt what the viewers are doing in
  order to get them to think about something else.
  
  INTERRUPTION MARKETING-THE TRADITIONAL APPROACH TO
  GETTING CONSUMER ATTENTION
- This is a book about the attention crisis in America and
  how marketers can survive and thrive in this harsh new
  environment. Smart marketers have discovered that the
  old way of advertising and selling products isn't working
  as well as it used to, and they're aggressively searching
  for a new, enterprising way to increase market share and
  profits. Permission Marketing is a fundamentally different
  way of thinking about advertising and customers.
  
  There's no more room for all these advertisements!
- The clutter, as you know, has only gotten worse. Try
  counting how many marketing messages you encounter
  today. Don't forget to include giant brand names on T-
  shirts, the logos on your computer, the Microsoft start-up
  banner on your monitor, radio ads, TV ads, airport ads,
  billboards, bumper stickers and even the ads in your local
  paper.

28 Mar 07

Unleash Your Ideavirus

www.fastcompany.com/...ideavirus.html - Preview

business ideavirus marketing seth-godin

But the moment any of us connects to the Internet, we all connect to each other. And those connections make ideas travel. Fast.
Word of Mouse Beats Word of Mouth
21 more annotations...
- Nathan Mhyrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft, says that a great employee is worth 1,000 times more than an average one. Why? Because of the quality of her ideas.
- To a greater or lesser degree, this effect applies to market share for automobiles, candy bars, soft drinks, software, and to the frequency of hits on Web pages. In other words, in almost every field of endeavor, being number 1 isn't just a little bit better than being number 2 or number 10 -- it's a whole lot better. Rewards are distributed unevenly, especially in our networked world. On the Internet, the magnification gets even greater, the stakes even higher.
- Busy people don't have time to look at every painting. They only have room in their overcrowded brains for a few paintings. And when you come right down to it, most people would like to see only the "celebrity" paintings. Just as there can be only one "My favorite famous actress" (Julia Roberts) and only one "This site equals the Internet" (Yahoo!), there's room for only one "Most famous painting in the world" -- and the safe choice is the Mona Lisa.
- Continue creating noteworthy online experiences to spread new viruses. Always begin by infecting your core audience of sneezers.
- Get permission from users to maintain an ongoing dialogue with them so that you can build a relationship that gives them a beneficial experience and gives you a profit stream.
- Achieve "lock-in" by making it more and more costly to switch from your service to someone else's.
- Have the idea behind your online experience go viral, bringing you a large chunk of the group that you're targeting without your having to spend a fortune advertising your new service.
- Create an online experience that offers your users something completely new, something they can't get offline. Or create an online experience that duplicates an offline experience, but does it so much faster, cheaper, and better that switching is worth the hassle.
- Ideavirus Tip #1: Concentrate!
- Whenever advertisers build their business around the strategy of talking directly to the customer, they become slaves to the math of interruption marketing.
- The goal of the marketer is to spend money buying ads that interrupt people who don't want to be bothered. The goal of the consumer is to avoid hearing from the advertiser whenever possible.
- But many other products, services, hit movies, or catchphrases are the intentional acts of smart entrepreneurs and politicians who know that launching and nurturing an ideavirus can help them accomplish their goals.
- It took about 20 years for radio to have 10 million users. By then, an industry had grown that could profit from the mass audience. It took about 10 years for TV to do the same thing. It took only 28 months for Netscape to get to 10 million users -- and Hotmail did it in 7 months. By aggregating a mass audience and by not having to share it with an entire industry, Internet heavyweights such as Hotmail and Netscape are able to realize huge profits, seemingly overnight. And they do it by spreading ideaviruses.
- Why does it matter that ideas can instantly cross international boundaries and change discussions about crime and justice, economics, education, or politics -- or even get us to buy something? Because the currency of our future is ideas, and the ideavirus is the way that those ideas propagate. And you don't have to wait for it to emerge organically or to hope that it happens accidentally. You can plan for it, optimize it, and make it happen.
- Ideaviruses are more important, easier to launch, and more potent than ever before. Ideaviruses are critical because they start fast and spread fast -- and speed wins: Brands and products don't have the time to develop the old way. Ideaviruses give us increasing returns: Word of mouth dies out, but ideaviruses keep growing and spreading. And finally, ideaviruses are the currency of the future, because we relish the new. An ideavirus is always about the new.
- Sometimes it seems as if everyone you know is watching the same TV show, reading the same book, or talking about the same movie, Web site, or TV commercial. How does this happen? It usually happens because an idea spreads on its own, not because a company behind a product spends a ton of money advertising it. How an idea spreads, and how to make it spread faster -- that's the idea behind an ideavirus.
- So, is an ideavirus a form of marketing? Absolutely! But today, what else is there? You don't win with better shipping, or better manufacturing, or better accounts payable. You win with better marketing, because marketing is about spreading ideas -- and ideas are now the very basis of competition.
  
  The future belongs to the people who unleash ideaviruses.
- In the new economy, consumers have built up antibodies that resist traditional marketing. That's why we need to stop marketing at people, and start creating an environment where consumers can market to one another.
- An idea that just sits there is worthless. But an idea that moves, grows, and infects everyone it touches ... that's an ideavirus.
  
  Exactly how does an ideavirus manifest itself? Where does it live? What does it look like? It starts with an idea manifesto, a powerful, logical "essay" that assembles a bunch of existing ideas and transforms them into a new, larger idea that's unified and compelling. Sometimes a manifesto is a written essay. Just as often it's an image, a song, a cool product, or a slick process. The medium doesn't matter; the message does. As long as you can use your manifesto to change the way that people think, talk, and act, you create value.
- Ideas are driving the economy, ideas are making people rich, and, most importantly, ideas are changing the world. So even though we're clueless about how best to organize the production of ideas, one thing is clear: If you can get people to accept, embrace, adore, and cherish your ideas, you win! You win financially, you gain power, and you change the world.
- Soybeans, Wal-Mart, and Ideaviruses
  
  The first 100 years of our country's history were about who could build the biggest, most efficient farms. The second 100 years were about the race to build efficient factories. Welcome to the third century: This one's about ideas.

Seth's Blog: Purple Cow Redux

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business marketing permission-marketing seth-godin

Purple Cow Redux
because there are some useful lessons for all products.
5 more annotations...
- I self-published the book in paperback. I did this because few publishers were interested in a short book on the topic, and were dubious about the future of the web as a promotional tool.
  
  I printed 10,000 copies of the book. I also contacted International Paper to have them print me 10,000 milk cartons.
- Then, Fast Company was kind enough to run an excerpt from the book in the magazine. This is an important part of the story, because this is where the permission marketing part kicks in. Fast Company's 100,000 loyal readers had already given me permission to talk to them. They were listening. If I were doing this today, I'd use my blog, just like you could use yours...
- So the carton arrived, and already the mailman is talking about it. The folks in the next cube notice it. Many people opened the carton from the bottom and left the carton on their desk. It led to conversations. Which was the point.
- First, build an audience that wants to hear from you. Second, create something they want to talk about and make it easy for them to do so.
  
  
  
  Posted by Seth Godin on March 23, 2007
- if you wanted more, you had to buy a dozen for $60. Why a dozen? So you'd give them away. More conversation.

24 Mar 07

the cluetrain manifesto - chapter seven - Post-Apocalypso

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advertising book business cluetrain consumerism economics internet manifesto marketing social

chapter seven

the following is the complete first chapter of

The Cluetrain Manifesto:

The End of Business as Usual
People by the millions are discovering how to negotiate, cooperate, collaborate -- to create, to explore, to enjoy themselves.
9 more annotations...
- We will strive to listen in new ways -- to the voices of
  
  quiet anguish, to voices that speak without words, the voices
  
  of the heart, to the injured voices, and the anxious voices,
  
  and the voices that have despaired of being heard.
  
  Richard M. Nixon, first inaugural address, 1969
- There never was any grand plan on the Internet, and there isn't one today. The Net is just the Net. But it has provided an extraordinarily efficient means of communication to people so long ignored, so long invisible, that they're only now figuring out what to do with it. Funny thing: lawless, planless, management-free, they're figuring out what to do with the Internet much faster than government agencies, academic institutions, media conglomerates, and Fortune-class corporations.
- So what is the Net really good for? Besides chatting, that is. Well, there's the small matter of coordinating distribution.
- One thing the Net is good for is organizing markets. Especially if you're invisible and powerless, ignorant of how things are supposed to work, ignorant of business-as-usual. Especially if you're intent on end-running the empire.
- The Demonic Paradox
  
  Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or
  
  as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its
  
  philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our
  
  thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The
  
  situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system
  
  but we still carry its genes.
  
  Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish journalist, 1991
- And next time you wonder what you're allowed to say at work, online, downtown at the public library, just say whatever the hell you feel like saying. Anyone asks you, tell 'em it's OK. Tell 'em you read about it in a book.
- How do you speak in a human voice? First, you get a life. And corporations just can't do that. Corporations are like Pinocchio. Or Frankenstein. Their noses grow longer at the oddest moments, or they start breaking things for no good reason. They want to be human, but gosh, they're not. They want the Formula for Life -- but they want it so they can institutionalize it. The problem, of course, is that life is anti-formulaic, anti-institutional. The most fundamental quality of life is something the corporation can never capture, never possess. Life can't be shrink-wrapped, caged, dissected, analyzed, or owned. Life is free.
- But if you think of yourself as a company, you've got much bigger worries. We strongly suggest you repeat the following mantra as often as possible until you feel better: "I am not a company. I am a human being."
- Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing from the earth forever.
  
  Yeah. Imagine that.