Community Blogs

Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust is deceivingly simplistic. You read, “be helpful, connect people, be transparent, blah, blah.” Social Marketing concepts you already know and may perhaps practice, yet they are presented here in such a way that you realize you can do it better, much better. Chris Brogan has proven the effectiveness of his claims after all. The book was a solidly constructed hardback, a much nicer experience than many of the paperback-only recently published social marketing books in my collection (which I’m not all-too happy about.) Trust Agents was a quick read with a ton of good excerpts as you’ll see below. Recommended. 4-out-of-5 Nordic Track Ski Stars. _________________...

I’ve been working out of my home office doing mostly freelance work for nearly 10 years, so I read books like Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love on occasion to help keep me on the path. The book is authored by Jonathan Fields who has some good things to say as you’ll see in the excerpts. The physical book has a cheap mass-market feel to it that took away from the experience, but still a book worth spending quality Nordic Track Ski Machine time with. 3-out-of-5 stars. __________________ p.23 What activity would you do for free purely out of a sense of passion? You just won the lottery. One condition: You have to work the rest of your life. You can use the lottery winnings to live on, but not to fund any professional...

Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs. The title pretty much does my job of describing the book to you. A light-weight Nordic Track read with good marketing advice. 2.5-out-of-5 Nordic Track Ski Stars. _______________ p.9 An idea that people immediately understand has value to them even if they have never heard of your company or its products and services. The tuned in company constantly listens to, observes and understands the problems that buyers are willing to pay money to solve. p.12 What business are we in? What businesses are we not in? Who are our buyers? What’s unique about our offering? How can we compete? What’s our positioning strategy? How can we turn a profit? p.25 Because the customer...

Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing by Lois Kelly picks up where the Cluetrain Manifesto left off. Beyond Buzz provides clear guidance on how to transform conversational marketing into buzz in a way that is both interesting and thought provoking. 5-out-of-5 Nordic Track Stars. ________________ p.1 New marketing is about conversations. It’s about helping people get to know us in ways that build understanding, trust and feelings, that make them want to do business with our companies. p.3 Moving into the talk world, have a point of view. Talk like you talk. Listen more. Give more advice. Invite more people in. Tap into what’s bubbling. Make people feel heard. Ask more questions. Be brave. p.14 It’s a struggle for consumers...

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google was written by Nicholas Carr, the author of Does IT Matter? Switch is much like a “Does IT Matter” Part II, where Carr proposes that computing is becoming a utility much like electricity, something all around us we no longer have to think about. But unlike electricity, the computer grid may have ominous side affects. This book is like Ray Kurzweil on depressants. Not pretty. Yet Carr makes a lot of observations about a dark side of ubiquitous computing that are hard to argue against. 4-out-of-5 Nordic Track Stars. _____________________ p.11 Around a century ago, manufacturers no longer had to be in the power generation business. What happened to the generation of power at that time is...

From the title you’d think this book is some sort of existential read on the meaning of life. In actuality it’s all about great design, brand, and the customer experience. Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company was published in 2008. Personally I think they should have dropped the “Do you Matter” from the title, but hey, if it sells books. 3-out-of-5 Nordic Track Ski Stars. ________________ p.6 The Razr did not transform Motorola’s culture. The company had only a single product, and now Motorola is back in trouble because it tried to repeatedly milk this one product. To be blunt, Motorola doesn’t matter in the mobile market anymore. p.7 The difference between a great product and a merely good product is that a great...

I’m giving Jeff Howe’s 2008 work Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business 3-out-of-5 Nordic Track Stars. This doesn’t mean it’s not a valuable read, but that perhaps other books on the subject, like Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody or Seth Godin’s Tribes provided—for me, anyway—more useful information about crowdsourcing than Crowdsourcing. Or it simply could have been because I read them first, otherwise this would have gotten 5-out-of-5 stars, too. ___________________ p.6 Threadless isn’t really in the T-shirt business. It sells community. Threadless is a business only by accident. They just wanted to make a cool site where people who liked the stuff they liked would feel at home. p.8 Labor can often be...

To say that Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price is generating a lot of discussion would be an understatement. I linked to three posts on Free in the most recent Everyman. Another post worth reading is Cory Doctorow’s review in Guardian News. I felt Free was a somewhat tedious read on the Nordic Track , a lot less engrossing than I anticipated. Perhaps that’s because my expectations were pretty high. Also, having read so many posts on the economics of Free, reading about it in a longer form factor wasn’t as action-packed. I didn’t think there was much new here or many takeaways, but after packaging up the excerpts for this review (with additional excerpts not displayed) ,I realized there was a lot in this book that I...

The Unfinished Revolution: How to Make Technology Work for Us--Instead of the Other Way Around is the second Michael Dertouzos book I read, the first being What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives. Michael Dertouzos was the Director of the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science from 1974 until his death in 2001. Unfinished Revolution was published in 2001. As you'll read in the excerpts, Dertouzos is trying to guide us into thinking about computers as serving human endeavor instead of us serving them. Many of us developer and IT support types benefit financially by the current relationship of man vs. machine, but that’s another topic. 3-out-of-5 Nordic Track Stars. ____________________ p.xi The Unfinished Revolution...

The Social Network Business Plan: 18 Strategies That Will Create Great Wealth is a 2009 work by David Silver. It's very current with a few really good takeaways. Silver builds on the concept of a “Recommender Community,” which is both obvious and novel at the same time. Enjoyable read. 4-out-of-5 Nordic Track Stars. _________________ p.xv The purpose of marketing is to make selling easy. A social network that encourages reviewing, ranking and recommending is the new marketing tool. p.xix You will need to learn the singular importance of the words “trust and verify.” MySpace and Facebook do not build trust among their members, and the statements of their members are not verified. Perfect business models are always built on truthfulness. The...