Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Book Report – The Little Red Book of Selling

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

In Jeffrey Gitomer’s The Little Red Book of Selling, there are a few decently helpful themes in the books for web entrepreneurs. For the most part, it’s a motivational self-help book that’s big on obvious answers and an underlying “never say die” approach to selling. At most times of day, this is exactly what most salespeople need to hear.

In the end, it’s a great book for web entrepreneurs for two reasons:

  1. Sales is all about engaging the prospect. Similarly, in most websites, you have to engage the user to immediately engage and use your site. Most sites have some sort of registration or participation process, and you have to be creative in engaging them. There are different styles to doing so, but you have to have a strategy from that start and/or splash page to engage the user as a returning customer of your site. The point is that you cannot hope that some bit of “technological sweetness” will push users towards your site alone.
  2. Learn to be creative. Read about it. There are several lists on Amazon that can point you in the right direction. My first book on creativity and product development was IDEO’s The Art of Innovation. If you can understand how the human creates novel ideas, then you’ll be more prone to create it. In sales, it’s being creative in asking insightful questions to create opportunities.

In any case, the Little Red Book of Selling is a great first book to read to get some exposure on how to sell yourself, your site, and your services.

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Book Report – Buzzmarketing

Monday, October 13, 2008

When Luc was trying his hand at his first startup, an affiliate office of Ready 2 Play., he and his partners read Buzzmarketing by Mark Hughes. They eventually came up with an idea to stack thousands of CD’s on top of each other near the Washington Monument on the National Mall. That never happened, but the book is still worth reading for generating marketing ideas.

The key takeaways are:

Marketing is not buzzmarketing. In a traditional marketing paradigm, marketing is about news releases and getting blogs to write about the latest achievement of your company. That’s bland, and consumers are great at filtering the noise. The goal of buzzmarketing is compelling the consumers and the media to have a conversation about your product. Once they have the conversation, then the product sells itself. But buzzmarketing is more than a means to sell your product. It should be an end in itself.

Know the six buttons of buzz. These pressure points for buzz are: the taboo, the unusual, the outrageous, the hilarious, the remarkable, the secrets. If you take these buttons to heart, you should think in these terms to create buzz for your company.

Create a compelling story. If you leverage the six buttons of buzz and create a story, then you’re more likely to grab the media attention that you so desire. Hughes offers his six templates for stories, that the media gravitates to: the David-and-Goliath story, the unusual or outrageous story, the controversy story, the celebrity story, and the “what’s already hot in the media” story.

Like some have already said, the story about two college kids creating a webs site is kinda done and old. We’ve all heard it, and we need something new. You have to work on the story as much as you have to work on your pitch or on our tagline for your site/service/product.

Advertise in an unflitered media stream. You have to take risks, when you’re a young, hungry enterpreneur. Of course, you can start a Google AdWords campaign to spread the word on your product. You can go through print and television advertising, but these are tried and true methods. And, like Hughes drums into your head throughout the book, consumers are great at filtering commercials through those media. Find other avenues to advertise, like renaming a city. Half.com renamed a city in Oregon to increase the buzz around their product, and you can’t pay for that type of publicity.

Keep swingin’. Inevitably, as we plan to stay creative and market in creative ways, we’re bound to fail repeatedly in attempting to generate buzz. That’s unfortunate, but it’s true. The only way to be successful is to keep trying… at developing the right product and creating the right buzz.

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Book Report: Purple Cow

Thursday, October 2, 2008

This is the third part of our Book Report series.

In Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, he talks about the need to create a Purple Cow – a remarkable product. The product has to be so remarkable that it markets itself. Though you can stop reading there, and know what the complete story behind the book, it’s worth driving the point home for new ideas on the Net.

If you’re not creating something that completely leaves everything behind in the dust, then you’re not doing it right. In the era of mass market advertising, your potential target market is already so good at avoiding the noise. If you create a marginally better product, there’s no chance of being able to create enough momentum to take on the mass-marketed product in your industry. No startup is creating an alternative to Gmail, because they know it can’t compete with the Google brand on an enormously successful product.

That’s only the beginning, because you can’t market to the masses in any case – remarkable product or not. The masses, in the graph below, are the early and late majority.

Consumer Product Adoption Curve

Any new product on the Net should appeal to the early adopters. They’ll naturally cling to a new, remarkable product. If you don’t know who your early adopters are, find them aggressively. Find a group that has a passion around a product that you intend to create. It almost goes without saying that too many products are not being remarkable, they’re just being incrementally better. It’ll be hard for them to survive when competing with the big marketing budgets of their competitors. That’s Seth Godin’s message.

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Now is Gone – Book Report for Web Entrepreneurs

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Now is Gone by Geoff Livingston is a great high-level primer on the social media landscape for budding startup web-based applications. For the entrepreneurs, I came away with the following lessons:

  • You’re in a dialogue with your community. You’re only one stakeholder in a community that involves your customers, investors, and others. That being said, don’t look to manage the message, because you can’t. If you get slammed by a major blog, deal with it graciously. Most don’t, and therefore don’t understand the basic principles of social media. Managing message out. Listening in!
  • If you’re unsure about that, listen first. Before you participate and intend to start blogging about your company, start listening first. If it’s too rough out there, you really don’t have to start participating in the conversation around your product or site. In some cases, no participation is better than really bad participation.
  • Human feedback is important. You have to have human, distinctive, empathetic voice in helping your users tackle problems. All too often, startup websites disappear from their blog, and the replies to support emails are impersonal. Your customer wants to know that you care in a very human way.

In reading this book, the great, simple takeaway message is start listening and talking to your customers, and treat them as a stakeholder in your success. Answer their concerns, as if you were having a face-to-face discussion with them. Be credible. Don’t fall into the old public relations strategy of controlling the message, and trying to keep a hard front in troubled times. Be straightforward and honest always. If you’re interested in reading it, please do. It’s a short, quick read.

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