Archive for Good Books

James Carson | March 26, 2012
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Thought Leaders and Failures of Digital Integration: Why I’m Rejecting Inbound Marketing

I had a period of loving Seth Godin, listening to whatever Rand Fishkin said and gulping down The Cluetrain Manifesto. But something wasn’t quite right – if all this Internet was so much more effective as a marketing channel, why did established media remain so big ever since these guys started operating?

Not only has it remained, but established media continues to grow – not diminish! Last year the UK watched a record average of 28 hours a week. It is true that print has been fighting decline since the growth of ‘Web 2.0’ (another buzzword that has been replaced by ‘Social Media’), but broadcast is thriving. How on earth can what funds the majority of TV viewing in Britain – interruptive advertising – be dead as Godin has written on numerous occasions?

Seth Godin is a Very Rich Man

It quickly dawned on me that Seth Godin was made a very rich man via the Internet. Yahoo! Paid $30million for his company YoYodyne and he became VP of Direct Marketing at one of the web’s biggest companies. His form of Permission Marketing made him wealthy, and in marketing circles, famous. He is likely to support an agenda that made him rich, because it worked for him, and now his agenda makes him even wealthier as people continue to buy his books. I’m quite a big fan of Seth’s – without reading four of his books, I don’t think I’d have quite so much belief in trying to change things – but stating ‘old marketing is dead’ is simply flawed. As Steve Harrison notes in his excellent How to do Better Creative Work, Godin mistook a broken discipline for bad execution. ‘Interruptive advertising’, as Godin puts it, relies on good ideas. Godin never makes this point – he just says it’s a wasteful media buy.

HubSpot is Carrying the Inbound Fire

The people carrying Godin’s fire are many, but the people I come across the most are the founders of HubSpot – Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan. This is mostly because their overview of Inbound Marketing is regularly quoted by Rand Fishkin (indeed I first the term first from him), and I’ve followed him since I started in the game.

Note: Inbound Marketing has a quote by Seth Godin on the cover, and he’s second on an acknowledgements list that includes a host of people who have similar mantras.

Fundamentally, Inbound Marketing is a fairly basic book. It touches on a broad subject range and can’t do all the disciplines mentioned that much justice. Most of its concepts (they’re not ideas, although grouping them is) are easily found elsewhere (read The One to One Future or The Cluetrain Manifesto for deeper thoughts into how the web can work). Unlike Godin, they don’t make the point that established media is dead. However, much in the same vein, their entire first chapter is devoted to ‘outbound’ tactics (those paid ones) being expensively wasteful against ‘inbound’ ones. They pretty much say outbound is dead without saying it directly.

Rand Fishkin and SeoMoz Killed it for Me (The Irony)

To be honest, I really enjoyed the overall message of Inbound Marketing and couldn’t recommend it more for small business owners. However, I’ve realised that the ‘outbound’ rejection is flawed, and that ‘inbound’ actually is not the path of integration that I think digital marketing needs to follow. Unfortunately Rand Fishkin nailed this on the head for me on two occasions:

  • 1 Everything’s Easier with Fans

The first was at his ‘Everything’s Easier with Fans’ at last year’s Search Love conference – while typically well delivered, it’s fundamental rejection of ‘outbound’ media, in favour of building communities doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for everyone. For the first time, I really didn’t believe in Rand’s argument. What if you sell toothpaste? Or kitchen supplies? Sure you could build a community around those products, but my guess it would be a pretty small one. Books like Groundswell point out a range of online communities that have worked, but no one pointed out the thousands of attempts that have failed. The web is littered with spam filled graveyards, born out of dreams for communities.

  • 2 SEO Has an Image Problem

The second death knell to my faith in inbound came from Rand two weeks ago in his blog The Brand of SEO and the Trend of Inbound Marketing. The post clearly drummed up a lot of debate – and it became apparent that a lot of people in SEO want to reject the mantra of ‘inbound’ for a number of reasons (read the comments for the onslaught). For instance:

  • Inbound is just ‘digital marketing’ – it’s another buzzword that will confuse people.
  • I’m tired of this holistic view of SEO – my clients pay for rankings.
  • We’ve lost our identity!

I doubt many people who reject the term have read the book, but I have begun to feel the sentiment. Those who define themselves as ‘SEO’ have a right to feel cheesed off by thought leaders redefining their role for them, when it might not be how they want to play the game with clients.

I’ve got to say, I agree with Rand’s sentiment on the post – what he puts forth is difficult to argue with in this context. SEO has an image problem.

If you were an alien visiting from space and read enough blogs, you could make the conclusion that SEO is a spam riddled mess of low quality link farms created by snake oil salesman.

That’s hyperbole from within our own industry talking.

But Rand went on Twitter to defend himself and I had to put it to him that outbound methods can contribute to inbound. While Brian Halligan later contributed that he felt this was possible, Rand remained sceptical.

Inbound is Dead

So I rejected inbound for the summarised reasons below:

Five Reasons Why I’ve Rejected Inbound:

  • It is largely based around the utopian sentiment similar to The Cluetrain Manifesto and Permission Marketing. Both of these make hyperbole filled rejections of so called ‘traditional’ methods to promote a new agenda.
  • Its promoters aim at rejecting paid for ‘interruption marketing’ – indeed Rand bundled interruptive media with spam in this diagram. That just doesn’t ring true.
  • ‘Inbound marketing’ does not do a good job in considering markets. It works in selling software to digital natives for Halligan, Shah and Fishkin –‘it worked for me so it’ll work for you.’ It won’t have quite the same effect on my non digital dad.
  • The term is a marketing vehicle in itself for HubSpot. Its continued adoption leads to greater fame for a commercial company.
  • It does not account for the economies of scale involved in mass media. If there is a good idea executed on multiple sources of paid media, sales often sky rocket.

The Key One: Inbound’s Hyperbole Will Lead to Integration Failure

Most unfortunately, Inbound fails to comprehend the required merging of online and offline into data driven integrated marketing departments, or the integration of media sources. In many companies digital continues to exist as a separate entity to established (outbound, offline, traditional, whatever) marketing and operates in a silo. Inbound does nothing to consolidate the two. I thought it did, and have even created a model that felt could lead to proper integration. However, I think it is a mistake to carry on this mantra since Inbound fundamentally rejects paid media, and thus integration.

Oh Dear… SEO has an Image Problem and Inbound Doesn’t Work

I now leave myself with an identity crisis. I can’t call myself an SEO because that’s not the crux of what I do. I think people who work in SEO can still call themselves SEOs if they wish to – that’s fine – but I don’t think it’ll ever shake the image problem. I can’t call myself an Inbound Marketer because the mantra rejects paid media, which I need to integrate into for my message to be more effective. So what am I?

Well I’m a marketer. I feel pretty integrated already. It’s that simple.

Further Reading

Category: Good Books, Inbound Marketing, Permission Marketing, SEO, Theory |
James Carson | December 6, 2011
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Great Books for Digital Marketers #3: Networking

So it’s been a while since my previous posts on the books I’ve managed to read over the last year (that are actually relevant for this blog), but alas, I thought I’d make it a trilogy, and there’s likely to be more. If you missed the last two posts, then you can check them out below:

Now for the main event – broadly, I’d thought I’d group these books into ‘networking’, largely because they all either talk about the power of networks or how to work inside them. So, here are the four great reads in this category:

 

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell (2001)

This is not a book about the Internet and never was, but it outlines what it takes for an idea to ‘tip’ (basically become viral). Gladwell says it depends on three key factors: The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor & The Power of Context. Read it, and you’ll be a lot closer to having a viral idea.

 

Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferazzi (2005)

This isn’t strictly an Internet book either, but it examines the principles and benefits of human networking (which is one of the key features of getting ideas to tip), and why it’s important to create your own people network. It’s completely relevant for the social media age, not to mention it’s incredibly motivational.

 

Crush It: Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion, by Gary Vaynerchuck (2009)

Gary Vaynerchuck’s impassioned read informs of what’s needed to make it in a world where the technology to build your own personal brand is widely available. You’ve got to know your technology, but most of all, you’ve got to hustle.

 

Get Noticed, by Marcus Taylor and Rob Laurence (2011)

I’ve done a recent review of this book on my blog – I really like it’s practicality and instructive approach, something curiously missing from quite a few business books. It’s a great read if you generally want to become more confident and meet more people.

 

If you’re wondering why it’s been quiet – I’ve had an advertising course over the last ten weeks – that’s finished up now, so should be going back to blogging soon.

Category: Good Books |
James Carson | November 9, 2011
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An Interview with Marcus Taylor – Head of Social at SEOptimise and Co-author of Get Noticed

So yesterday I gave a review on Marcus Taylor and Rob Laurence’s new book Get Noticed. Today I bring you an interview I had with Marcus about the book.

When’s Get Noticed available to buy, and where from?

Get Noticed is available to buy as a hardback book or eBook from www.wegetnoticed.com/about-the-book. It will also be available from Amazon in the next two weeks.

What are the key influencers’ of this book and which other books that shaped your thinking are you most keen to recommend?

I would say that during the course of writing Get Noticed, I was inspired more so by the people I was meeting, rather than the books I was reading. Sure, the classics like Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People‘, Debra Fine’s ‘The Art of Small Talk‘ and Keith Ferrazzi’s ‘Never Eat Alone‘ gave us a foundation to work from, but it was the people listed in the preface of the book who contributed the most inspiration for the concepts and findings in the book. That said, the book was co-written with Rob Lawrence, who contributed invaluable knowledge from his decades worth of experience as a creativity coach and leader in technology.

The book is not primarily about working in digital – how can the skills and tips suggested be applied by digital marketers to further their day to day jobs?

The ideas in the book can be applied to literally any line of work that involves communicating and meeting people. One thing that I think is particularly relevant for digital marketers is the fact that your brand can be no bigger than you are, and by investing in your communication skills you raise the ‘glass ceiling’ that limits your brand’s network. The chapter on ‘How to be in the right place at the right time, all the time’ is also very interesting when applied to digital marketing, as you can use the ‘ACE Process’ and tips on accessibility to improve your outreach campaigns and networking strategy. I wrote a post on the SEOptimise blog last week explaining this in more detail.

32,000 words is quite an achievement – people who are aspiring to write will be wondering how did you find time to write the book?And how long did it take between you?

The book took Rob and I three months to write and one month to go through three edits. As a blogger, I tend to write in blocks of 500-600 words at a time. It usually takes me about 1-2 hours to write a 500 blog post, therefore it would only take 60 days of writing the equivalent of one blog post a day. Visualising large writing projects in this way helps me to realise that writing a book is realistic and manageable. I am also an advocate of collaboration – Get Noticed was co-written with Rob Lawrence, which made me realise the benefit of sharing ideas and including an extra perspective whilst pursuing creative work.

So you’re heading to Down Under and New Zealand for ten months during 2012 – what are your reasons for the trip?

My main reason for travelling next year is to get out of my comfort zone. I’m looking forward to spending ten months travelling around meeting new people, seeing new places, and trying lots of new experiences, whilst applying all of the things I’ve learnt whilst researching and writing Get Noticed.

Do you have any more books planned on the horizon?

I guess it’s too early to say whether there are any new books on the horizon – that said, writing is a major passion of mine, so i’m sure there will be more books in the future!

Category: Authorship, Good Books, Social Media |
James Carson | November 8, 2011
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Review of Marcus Taylor and Rob Lawrence’s Get Noticed

If you haven’t noticed on this blog, I read business books quite a bit. I’ve completely stopped reading novels, which were quite a passion of mine for some time, and turned my thirst for knowledge close to something that can be applied. After getting through quite a few in 2011, I was pretty exhausted of reading so many business books, so when Marcus Taylor (@MarcusATaylor) asked me to do a review of his and Rob Lawrence’s book Get Noticed, I’ve got to admit to having some trepidation. I was work booked out.

However, I sat down to read it just before #searchlove London and sped through it at a fairly rapid pace. It’s 32,000 words long, so not as long as your typical business book. That said, it’s also simple to follow – the authors give a thorough outline of points for each chapter, and then address this with a series of actionable steps.

At first I was getting quite a Keith Ferazzi vibe about Get Noticed. If you haven’t read his Never Eat Alone, then I suggest you do, because it’s probably my favourite book that I’ve read this year. The main crux is really that your success depends on forming your own network which you can rely on, rather than believing in yourself to do everything. However, later on, the only other book I’ve read that could be compared to Get Noticed would be Neill Strauss’ The Game. I realise my knowledge of things like neuro linguistic programming is limited to this book currently, and I’m not altogether convinced of training myself in it.

Chapter One was fairly long considering the length of the book (and there are eight other chapters), but I enjoyed the amount of practical advice given. I particularly liked the example of the young copywriter Alec Brownstein who had a great idea on how to get himself noticed by a potential employer online. Check it out:

7 be noticeable online – great example of Alec Brownstein who put an ad online whenever a CD typed in their name

The book also has some great quotes in it, which certainly can help with your direction. I certainly feel like this sometimes, but it seems to tell me to give up when the going gets tough:

See that any time you feel pained or defeated, it is only because you insist on clinging to what doesn’t work. Dare to let go and you won’t lose a thing except for a punishing idea.

Guy Finley

I’m not going to tell the narrative of the whole book in this review, but I really liked Chapter Two because it offered a wide range of practical tips which were genuinely uplifting. I particularly enjoyed quotes like this:

For optional events, the goal is to push yourself to actually do it, which is a mental process of convincing yourself that you will be fine. This takes time, and for optional events the best thing to do is just prepare and allow yourself time to overcome the nerves by visualising the successful outcome.

Which pushes the nerves of people with single statuses into practice and action. However, I had to take disagreement to the idea that it’s a good idea to take friends with you to networking events. It’s one way to beat nerves, but it’s also a one way ticket to inaction, largely because you’ll stand around chatting to them all night. Instead, I highly recommend going to networking events alone – always. I travelled the world on my own, and now go to networking events solo principally because it forces me to get me away from a table of friends and into the company of strangers.

I’m also a little out with a point about Facebook being a closed network and making it difficult to meet new friends. It is still possible to meet people on Facebook through groups and pages (although the recent removal of the default discussions application has dampened this somewhat), largely through shared discussions and joining groups with causes. It is also a very useful tool for keeping in touch with those you have just met. For instance, I go to a party, meet someone who I’m not likely to see again soon but who I thought I’d get along with, then Facebook is a great tool to continue conversation.

get noticed book cover

These points aside (they are disagreements with somewhat minor points, rather than disagreements with the message of the book), later Chapters urged me to go out alone on a Friday night and attempt to behave in a manner akin to Bradley Cooper’s character in Limitless. I haven’t done it yet, but the message is so regularly uplifting that I feel it at least contributed to some of my networking success at events like #searchlove. Afterwards, I positively felt like I could easily walk into a room with most of the speakers and they’d know my name. I guess it’s taken a little while to break into such a circle, but reading a book like Get Noticed makes you think about networking success far more succinctly.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed it. It presented ideas simply and suggested clear ways to action them, which is something that is often rare in business books these days. However, this is not so much a business book as a book with the goal of changing your entire attitude without putting it into practice; a read and a reread will certainly be worth anyone’s while.

Category: Good Books, Social Media, Theory |
James Carson | November 4, 2011
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Quote Friday #3: The Beginning of the Creative Age

Not long after agriculture first appeared, two separate economic classes were created:those who owned land, and those who worked on land owned by others. To this day, we say that people with old money are part of the landed class. The industrial revolution created an additional type of “landed” class-the capitalist factory owner. Capitalists owned factories, and others worked in them.

Now our basic social structure is about to be changed once again, very dramatically-this time by 1: technologies. As destructive as this change will be to the current social order, it nevertheless will be built on a very basic, and very worthy, premise: the creative liberation of the individual.

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, The One to One Future

Category: Good Books, Quotes |
James Carson | October 31, 2011
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Great Books for Digital Marketers #2: Thinking Digitally

So a couple of weeks back I hightlighted my favourite reads for crowdsourcing. This time around I’ve got several books on overall digital theory – basically how to think about marketing digitally. A couple of books by Seth Godin and the one that clearly influenced him feature in the list:

 

Top Books for Digital Marketing

 

The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time, Don Peppers and Martha Richards (1993)

Written before the strength of the Internet was realised, most of The One to One Future’s practical examples are now dated. It talks about fax, VCR and automated phone messaging a lot, but this book is a complete powerhouse in explaining the new dynamic of customer relationship management before social media. It appears to be the key influence in both Seth Godin’s writings and Inbound Marketing theory.

 

Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers, by Seth Godin (1999)

Seth Godin’s classic develops ideas presented by The One to One Future into more practical usage for today. It’s explains customer funnels and levels of permission you need to get to achieve lifelong loyal customers.

 

The Long Tail: How Unlimited Choice is Creating Endless Demand, by Chris Anderson (2006)

The former editor of Wired explains the new economic system of endless choice creates unlimited demand – ushering in the age of eBay, iTunes, Netflix and Amazon. It pretty much explains why Woolworths was doomed.

 

 

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, by Seth Godin (2008)

Simple in its concept, but brilliantly argued, Seth Godin tells us what’s required to succeed in a world of endless choice. It is no longer enough to have a well marketed but mediocre product, the game has changed so that your product must be remarkable to stand out – a Purple Cow.

 

 

Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs, Brian Halligan and Darmesh Shah (2009)

Most experienced digital marketers will tear through this at a rapid pace, but it gives a well-rounded overview of the new system of marketing that is practically free to use. I liked it so much I bought 20 copies for our office.

Category: Good Books, Inbound Marketing, Permission Marketing, Social Media, Theory | Tags: , ,
James Carson | October 21, 2011
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Quote Friday #1: Getting Stuck on Stupid

My colleague Gil Likes to quote US Army Lieutenant General Russell Honore, pointing out that too many people get “stuck on stupid”.

I’m imagining that your colleagues aren’t stupid. But when the world changes, the rules change. And if you insist on playing today’s games by yesterday’s rules, you’re stuck. Stuck with a stupid strategy. Because the world changes.

Some organisations are stuck. Others move quickly. In a changing world, who’s having more fun?

Seth Godin, Tribes

Category: Good Books, Quotes | Tags:
James Carson | October 16, 2011
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Great Books for Digital Marketers #1: Crowdsourcing

Blogs are great. You’re reading one right now. There’s nothing like them for getting up to date in the world of digital marketing. However, I certainly feel they lack a bit of substance sometime. You might read a wide berth of blogs without really getting to the crux or theory behind what’s being written – often, you’ll be missing that big idea. That’s where I find books to be incredibly useful – they often give more substance, depth and subsequent power to ideas. Certainly, books do go out of date very quickly in the web world, but I never really use them for practicalities. I read them because they help me answer the bigger questions and theory.

I think every digital marketer needs to read both books and blogs voraciously, but it’s not always easy to know where to start. I got an itch after a strategy course last year where the seminar leader kept dropping author names and arguments. I was intrigued. A year later and I’ve read a whole load. It’s not the most fun activity imaginable, but it makes you better at what you do.

In this series, I’ll be noting down the books which have influenced me in a particular area. I’m going to kick off with crowdsourcing.

Top Books for Crowdsourcing

All of the below books were written prior to 2008. That might seem a long time ago in web terms, and you will see barely anything about Facebook or Twitter. However, they are brilliant for explaining the theories and thought processes behind crowd sourcing, and it’s the application of these ideas that has made social networking so succesful.

 

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams (2008)

Originally compiled in 2006, just as Web 2.0 was just taking off, this is a classic on crowdsourcing. Through a wide range of solid examples, from mining to star mapping, the authors demonstrate that the power of networks and mass collaboration. Be warned though, the authors have a penchant for going a little bit overboard!

 

The Cluetrain Manifesto, by various authors, (10th anniversary edition published in 2009)

This is a collection of essays around what the Internet really means and what its uses really are. It details the shift from hierarchical to web based (democatised) communication and provides stark warning to slow moving corporations. Be prepared to read the word ‘conversation’ hundreds of times, but it’s the strongest book for pure internet theory (with little practicality) I’ve read.

 

The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the rest of today’s user-generated media are killing our culture and economy, by Andrew Keen, (2008)

While I don’t agree with Andrew Keen on many of his points (his interpretation of Google, for instance, is misinformed), he writes a counter argument to Cluetrain and Wikinomics by highlighting the dangerous erosion of professional authority during the Web 2.0 era. Some points are hard to disagree with, but crowdsourcing has happened and will go on.

 

Tribes, by Seth Godin, (2008)

Seth Godin explains some of the methods employed by brands and people in creating impassioned audiences and networks. He also defines what it is to be a leader of such a community against what it is to be a typical manager.

 

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, by Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff, (2008)

Groundswell celebrates the role of community in modern marketing through numerous case studies, with particular standouts being LEGO, Best Buy and Proctor & Gamble. It also gives indicative figures on how social media drives down customer management costs.

Let me know if you have anymore good crowdsourcing books below in the comments – next week I’ll do some more!

Category: Good Books, Social Media, Theory |