Community Blogs

Gary Vaynerchuk's Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion is a short book at 142 pages, but a book I think you’ll enjoy. I read it over the course of three 60 minute Nordic Track Ski sessions. I would best categorize this book as infectious. Vaynerchuk uses his own experience with Wine Library TV and other ventures to inspire you to keep doing what you love and believe in, while using Social Media to eventually prove that you were right all along. 4 out of 5 Nordic Track Ski Stars. ____________________ p.5 Live your passion. What does that mean, anyway? It means that when you get up for work every morning, every single morning, you’re pumped because you get to talk about or work with or do the thing that interests you the...

We’ve reviewed several books on Social Media Marketing and Paul Gillin’s Secrets of Social Media Marketing: How to Use Online Conversations and Customer Communities to Turbo-Charge Your Business! may be the best of them to date. Comprehensive, an easy read, well laid out, and true to its title, you felt like you were getting the inside scoop on how to use get the most out of social media to effectively market your business. 5-out-of-5 Nordic Track Ski Stars. __________________ p.7 Be willing to admit fallibility and promise to improve. Nothing will stop a negative discussion more quickly. p.9 When customers believe that companies actually care about their concerns they are more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt before taking to the...

The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary from Eric Raymond is the Bible on Open Source development. I read two other books on Open Source over the last few months and can’t believe I let this book sit on my shelf while I read the others.  I gained a lot from this book. Eric Raymond has been writing open source software since the 70’s and is a principle figure in shaping and chronicling the Open Source Movement. You can see him in Revolution OS (on Netflix Instant View), a well-produced and interesting documentary on the history of open source. 4 out of 5 Nordic Track Ski Stars (not the highest rating only because he bashed Microsoft so much. :-) _________________ p.16 The most important...

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity from Hugh MacLeod was a big surprise for me. I didn’t think I’d get much out of it, but I enjoyed it a lot. MacLeod is the man behind GapingVoid and creator of those business card-size sketched toons so pervasive on the web. He shares a personal perspective on “success,” which I put in quotes because by the end of the book you may define real success differently than you did before reading the book. 5-out-of-5 Nordic Track Ski Stars. _______________ p.1 The more original your idea the less good advice other people will be able to give you. p.5 The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours. p.7 The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content...

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...