Connected Marketing is a business book about the state of the art in viral, buzz and word-of-mouth marketing. Written by 17 experts working at the cutting edge of viral, buzz and word-of-mouth marketing, Connected Marketing introduces the range of scalable, predictable and measurable solutions for driving business growth by stimulating positive brand talk between clients, customers and consumers.

Connected Marketing: The Viral, Buzz and Word of Mouth Revolution

You've got your hands on one of the greatest marketing manuals ever written -- the classic that defines the strategies, plans, and campaigns of today's marketing battlefield. Marketing is war. To triumph over the competition, it's not enough to target customers. Marketers must take aim at their competitors -- and be prepared to defend their own turf from would-be attackers at all times. This indispensable guide gives smart fighters the best tactics -- defensive, offensive, flanking, and guerrilla. It's the book that wrote the new rules!

Marketing Warfare

I don't really know if this book is any good, but I found the title strangely magnetic.

Rare is the opportunity to chat with a legendary figure and hear the unvarnished truth about what really goes on behind the scenes. Hedgehogging represents just such an opportunity, allowing you to step inside the world of Wall Street with Barton Biggs as he discusses investing in general, hedge funds in particular, and how he has learned to find and profit from the best moneymaking opportunities in an eat-what-you-kill, cutthroat investment world.

Hedgehogging

The phrase "Fair Trade coffee" has percolated into the vernacular, and the label it represents pervades the business at every level.

If the movement has shed some of its intensity since those heady early days, you can chalk that up to the complacency of success. Fair Trade certification, intended to raise the living standards of coffee farmers in Nicaragua and elsewhere, has grown into a complex bureaucracy and an industry in itself.

In 2003 Dunkin' Donuts agreed to make all of its espresso drinks certified. Nestle, one of the biggest coffee companies on Earth, launched a Fair Trade line in October 2005; the same month, McDonald's agreed to test Fair Trade in 658 outlets. High-end specialty coffees are the fastest growing sector of the industry, and Fair Trade is the fastest growing specialty coffee; demand for it has ballooned by around 70 percent annually for the last five years.

You'd think this confluence of social responsibility and double lattes, good business practices and lefty politics, would make one of its founders a happy man. But he and a growing number of roasters say the Fair Trade movement has lost its way.

The real meaning of Fair Trade coffee

Business schools are like pathologists: we do our best work with dead patients.

The amount of money you spend on research and development has little to no correlation with the quality of any kind of innovation that you do. The idea that more time or more money equals a better result is delusional.

So stop griping about VC funding!

You know, you're in real trouble as an organization when you won't conduct a cheap experiment to learn something important about your business, your profitability, and your customers.

[In order to innovate,] you have to have an internal economy where there are appropriate rewards and incentives for collaborating, and appropriate disincentives for not collaborating.

This is an interesting perspective I haven't seen before:

Google isn't a search company, it's an instant search company. What Google has done is like what McDonald's has done. The speed is built in. It's implicit to the value, and we're kidding ourselves if we try to focus on the search aspects of Google and downplay the immediacy and speed aspects of Google.

This last part is primarily of personal interest:

... The other book I'm interested in doing is about innovation as an act of persuasion: it's not just act of creation, it's an act of persuasion, and I'm very interested in the role of demos as a medium of persuasion in getting individuals and institutions to explore or commit to innovation.

Interview with Michael Schrage

"I suggest that you use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not just reminding yourself that they exist."

A quote from Getting Things Done

Harvard Business Review endorses MemeStreams:

Eliminating cross-functional bottlenecks actually has less to do with shifting decision-making responsibilities between departments and more to do with ensuring that the people with relevant information are allowed to share it. The decision maker is important, of course, but more important is designing a system that aligns decision making and makes it routine.

Who has the D? | HBR, January 2006

According to a co-founder of Verisign, the key to success is a proven ability to finish fast.

The primary goal of an elevator pitch is to intrigue someone to learn more.

Like that novel you buy on impulse at the airport, the first sentence has to grab you.

One way to do that is to highlight the enormity of the problem you are tackling ...

If you get stuck on this step because the problem you’re tackling isn’t impressively large and obvious, you have a more severe issue to worry about than your elevator pitch.

...

To really expose the genius, the pitch includes a good 10-20 minute tutorial. Who Has Time For This? Not VC’s, and certainly not prospective buyers.

Surely the brilliance of the idea must compel them!
Compel? More like confuse, bore and repel.

Practicing the art of subtext. See also:

Are you just another AFC ("average frustrated chump") trying to meet an HB ("hot babe")? How would you like to "full-close" with a Penthouse Pet of the Year? The answers, my friend, are in Neil Strauss's entertaining book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.

But remember:

After a while, he ran out of one-liners and had to have a real conversation.

Practicing the Art of Pitchcraft

Most US workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago, according to newly released research.

Americans work more, seem to accomplish less

Following on the heels of Panexa ...

"Can my ring tones make you sexy?"

Watch the video, then consider the Double Header:

For men who think fun comes better in pairs, this Pherotone is dynamically calibrated to attract two like-minded females simultaneously. We can’t promise your party of three will last forever. But in the morning, they’ll probably at least stay for coffee.

This final statement could as easily be about cartoons as ring tones:

"Even if you offend somebody, it seems to spread the gospel of the campaign."

Ring tones are so stupid! Can I get an amen?

Fakin' It: A Marketer Intends to Tease Consumers