David Meerman Scott (photo courtesy of the author)
It’s nice to be able to exhale, and to share information that had to be held back.
(It’s also nice to be able to use the word “Free” in a headline — and mean it.)
David Meerman Scott's "World Wide Rave"
We had a brief chat in our offices Tuesday with author David Meerman Scott, whose latest release, World Wide Rave(which sports one of the longer subtitles in recent memory: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories) has just hit the bookstores. David’s brilliant, of course — you may have seen, read, or heard about his previous book (The New Rules of Marketing and PR, which also had a lengthy subtitle: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly) — but unlike many thought leaders, he actually puts his theories into practice.
Turns out David’s not satisfied with the notion of selling his book the old-fashioned way — or any of the old-fashioned ways, in fact. One of the new-fashioned ways he plans on distributing it is through Amazon.com’s Kindle format.
And now he’s decided to make it free. Completely free. For five days.
Click through to read what he told us about why he decided to go this route — the very counterintuitive model of an author opting to not sell his own book.
Here are some edited highlights from her tweetstream are below. (Timestamps are GMT, alas.) If you were there, feel free to share your take in the comments.
We’ll have her two dispatches up shortly over in the news section. I’ll add the links here when they’re live. Here’s the first story, on “The 6 Principles of User-Generated Content.” And here’s the second, entitled “No Money in UGC Video…Yet.”
In a fast-paced presentation here at the Gartner Web Innovation Summit in LA, marketing analyst Andrew Frank lead a fast-paced session about Brands in Social Media.
“I think you need to think of social media as a truly global phenomenon that’s applicable against different groups,” Frank says. He affirms that companies need to participate in social media — whether they want to or not.
As Phillip Britt reported for destinationCRM.com last week, new research shows that the majority of a company’s marketing budget is now spent towards online efforts. Frank echoes the research, sharing the fact that GM now spends 50 percent of its marketing budget on the Web. He says that businesses market in three areas on the Web:
Search and performance [i.e: Google]
Media brands [ex: Fox or Espn.com]
Virally [Facebook or YouTube]
Frank shares five goals of branded viral content:
1. Get awareness: Frank uses Burger King’s Subservient Chicken to demonstrate. (If you haven’t seen this already, please visit and request “The Worm.”) 2. Engage people with the brand: A perfect example is creating your own M&M representation. 3. Collect data: Sephora.com often does instant polling of its site visitors, gaining both market research and customer data. 4. Extend a service: Providing value through widgets is a great way to do so. (“Widgets are the glue or the content that pulsates through social networks and creates these experiences,” Frank says.) Betty Crocker, for instance, provides a daily recipe gadget for iGoogle.
And the ultimate goal remains to….
5. Foster community loyalty: Nike+ not only allows you to monitor your training, but also lets you connect to a community of users who might be participating in the same events as you or are engaging in the same type of training.
“These devices will represent 70 percent of all phones sold in the us by 2012. That is a huge change in thinking.”
Bajarin goes on, saying that generation Y will not even consider using a regular cell phone anymore. A phone without a text keyboard? Forget about it.
Mobile CRM makes sense. CRM is not an industry that ties its employees to desks. Sales and marketing people are often traveling and doing business whenever and wherever. Recently, I had the privilege to have dinner with a several CRM vendors, one of whom sells mobile CRM solutions for BlackBerry. At one point during the evening, the man next to him turned and said, “I need you.” He shared that all through the day at the destinationCRM exhibit hall, he was meeting people, making contacts, and taking business cards. He was frantically writing down information on the back of the business cards so that when he goes back and enters the contacts into his CRM system, he will hopefully be able to put a face to the name. However, as he told the mobile CRM guy, if he would have been able to pull up the CRM database on his BlackBerry, it could have been done in seconds.
I recently purchased a smartphone, mostly because I wanted to be able to check email on the road. I won’t share which kind of phone it is, but I will tell you that it’s not an iPhone or a BlackBerry. I have found myself, even after having the phone for about six months now, discovering new features and using it in new ways. Perhaps my favorite application is the quick access to Google Maps. [It means I don't have to bring my old fold-out map with me when trekking through new areas of the city. Basically, it allows me to still look "cool" in New York, even when I am incredibly lost and confused.]
Talks of mobile CRM has seemed to have taken conferences — and headlines — by storm. In the words of my dear colleague, Jessica Tsai, “Dude, I’m so relevant.”
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