Photo by fmgbain A few weeks ago Aleksey Kernes tweeted me to ask about what new marketing books I recommend as good reading. A good question deserves a good answer. Here’s a list of some new marketing book titles that I believe have the potential to keep your nose pointed down towards the table for long periods of time. Fair warning. New Marketing Books I’ve Read and Recommend Please note that while this is a numbered list for order’s sake, in no way is this a ranked order. The list reflects the order of how the titles randomly popped in my head. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and Dick Summer Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation by Sally Hogshead Return On Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing by Mark W. Schaefer Killer Facebook Ads: Master Cutting-Edge Facebook Advertising Techniques by Marty Weintraub Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us by Guy Kawasaki Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin Managing Content Marketing: The Real-World Guide for Creating Passionate Subscribers to Your Brand by Robert Rose & Joe Pullizzi Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History by David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing by Erik Deckers and Jason Falls The Carrot Principle by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton Why We Buy – Paco Underhill Influence by Robert B. Cialdini Putting the Public Back in Public Relations by Brian Solis and Deirdre K. Breakenridge Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive [...]
Read This Post
Business. Business. BUSINESS! For some reason, we humans tend to get stuck in this mindset of only thinking only about how we can use social media to make money for our business. These days, we’re all but infatuated with figuring out how our business can be social. In all honestly, I feel like that paradigm is causing us to skip a mission-critical step in making all of this work. Can Businesses Really ‘Be Social’? Actually, I think not. Your business is still just an idea. It’s an idea that makes you (or who you work for) a bucket of dollars that helps keep people fed and the lights on. Your business may be housed in a building where people come to work each day or like some of the newer models, maybe it’s housed on the web. Your business is nothing more than a vehicle to deliver the product or service that your customers buy. Your business will probably never ‘be social’. Sorry to disappoint you. Nope. In the end, it will be the humans inside your business who will be social. Behind the Curtain Unless your product or service magically becomes self-aware and takes on a mind of it’s own, it will always be the man (or women) behind the curtain who drives the conversation with your customers. That conversion will happen with the help of many modes of human-to-human communication — high speed internet connections, Facebook, Google Hangouts, telephones, on hand-written post cards, and perhaps using the old tested method of facing chairs towards each other while placing cups of coffee between the humans who sit at the table. All of those modes indeed help us humans to be ‘social’ … but they will never, ever be social on our behalf. Your Customers Are Calling — Can You Talk? I one time sat in a client meeting with a big company [...]
Read This Post
While checking LinkedIn this morning, I got sucked in … again Adding new followers has always been a part of my day to day routine, but since the release of the new connections interface on LinkedIn, I’ve realized that I naturally want to spend more time scrolling down. You find this same thing happening on Pinterest. Scrolling down those images can be a deep and entrancing rabbit hole. Our Unbelievable Propensity to Keep Scrolling Down What causes it? Why do you think new popular design layouts on social networks, websites and blogs have shifted away from finite page footers to endless rows of images and other content? Let me know what YOU think in the comments, okay? nateriggsLike what you just read and want to get my posts delivered to your inbox? SUBSCRIBE HEREMore Posts Follow Me:
Read This Post
A few times each year, I take a long and hard look at the tools I use to manage my presence and do some Spring cleaning. Part of my role at The Karcher Group is presence building online and brand evangelism, and that means dedicating a decent amount of time each day to both creating my own content as well as curating your awesome posts and tweets. For the last few weeks, I’ve been sucked into one of my personal reviews, and I want to share with you one of the tools I’ve opted to add to my personal social business tool kit, in part because it’s particularly helpful in using Twitter for business marketing. Why I Use Twitter for Business Marketing Perhaps I’m biased here, but keep in mind that I asked you to mark my words when I made the claim that eventually … Twitter will win. I’m looking forward to seeing Tom Webster present the findings of the Edison Research study at BlogWorld this June, as it seems to point to findings that suggest the same. I’ve always been able to derive a solid base of results from using Twitter for business marketing. It takes a significant investment of time and effort, but in the last few years sharing content and engaging with you nearly everyday has helped me to increase top-of-the-funnel opportunities such as: Discovering new tools, research resources and savvy peers that have helped forward my own business goals. Finding speaking opportunities at conferences like Content Marketing World, BlogWorld, Foodservice Social Media Universe and literally dozens of other national events. Building an audience and subscriber-base for my blog by distributing my posts on Twitter. I still remember how tough it was to build subscribers before Twitter so trust me when I say that all of your gracious mentions, Re-Tweets and [...]
Read This Post
One of the things that drives me a bit nutty is reading tweets that end in “…” I’m betting you’ve seen this too — the dreaded elipse that occurs by default when a user has completely blown past the constraint of the 140 character limit that has made Twitter is so famous. To me, seeing the elipse represents a very basic, yet fumbled opportunity in knowing the features and functions of a powerful tool for building your own online presence, or the presence of a business your work for. For those of use who love to use Twitter regularly, the 140 character limit forces our hand to adopt habitual brevity in a world where long-winded articles and data overload constantly bounce off our Interwebz-conditioned attention deficit. To some extent, we are all a tad bit ADD nowadays. Take that for what it’s worth. With Twitter now being recognized by about 89% of the US population 12+ (Edison Research Study), you can expect that eventually, more and more people will be using the system to communicate, share and become ever more distractible. Eventually, communication brevity will be a key component to being heard at all. Twitter Tips – 17 Ways to Shorten Your Tweets As Twitter users, we’re called to embrace brevity and the “less is more” mindset as the norm. Keeping your tweets shorter brings the benefits of higher amounts of click throughs on links, increased amounts of re-tweets from your followers and savings of time in creating the updates. While these tips are extremely basic, I feel like the stat from Edison Research above seems to speak to a need for going back and reviewing some of the basics on how to use Twitter from the individual user perspective. Here are 17 Twitter tips I think you will find helpful in learning to keep your tweets short and effective: Eliminate the word “and” in [...]
Read This Post
It’s debatable as to whether or not the Peter Drucker actually originated the statement: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” But, no matter who’s responsible for the famous quote, one fact remains — it’s a true statement. If you read yesterday’s post on putting the cart before the horse in generating ROI from social media, you already are thinking about how your going to build more presence and gain the right audience across your social media networks to make them more effecting marketing channels for your business. That’s good too. I promise you that in time, making the effort will lead to better business results that actually make an impact on your business KPI’s. 5 Social Media Measurement Tools for Building More Effective Marketing Channels When talking about content marketing and social media, there are three different genres of metrics that apply to nearly all of your efforts. Publishing Metrics — how much content are you publishing and how frequently. Are you meeting or exceeding your own goals? Presence Metrics — how is your fan or follower base expanding? Is it growing at an effective pace and among the right audience? Business KPI’s — are your social media channels and activities producing results that will make your CEO give nice warm hugs? In order for social media networks to actually do something for your business and get those warm and fuzzy CEO hugs, you first have to build your social media outposts to be effective marketing channels. Trust me when say that doing that will take a concerted investment of time and effort from you and your team. You will need consistently create to tons of good quality content, and even task and train people in your business to be responsible for monitoring social media channels to respond to your brand’s fans and followers. Bu back to measurement — how [...]
Read This Post
Join The Discussion!