In The Experience Economy, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore argued that in an era when consumers were more sophisticated than ever before, it was no longer enough to meet their needs with commodities, goods, or services.  They argued that to compete in the modern era, you had to make their interaction with your business an experience, compelling enough to be memorable such that the memory itself becomes the product.  They relied heavily (and convincingly, in 1999 anyway) on examples from Disney, Starbucks, and Nordstrom to make their case. Read more »

I’ve just finished reading Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media), and wanted to pass it along to my readers as a pretty good starting place for those new to marketing services and products on the web.

Inbound Marketing is a good primer on the basic foundation of an online presence. The phrase “inbound marketing” hits me well because I hate selling, and so do most people. If you’re like me and hardcore sales isn’t your thing, you’ll especially identify with the basic premise here – do what it takes to get found in ways that people are finding goods and services today.

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That’s right – I’ve got a fancy newsletter list and I plan on sending updates weekly – more than just a glorified rss feed but a nice resource for bloggers. You can see the inaugural edition of Blog A Little Better This Week but I’d really recommend you subscribe using one of the THREE forms on every single post page of this site.

For the past few days, I’ve been offering some video posts here about the cloud that surrounds content consumers today…

• Get Your Content Into the Cloud
• Infiltrating the Cloud In Which People Breathe
• Decrease the Distance by Growing Your Network

Today, I want to get a bit more specific about how to understand the cloud and begin to infiltrate it. The secret boils down to shifting your thinking. Your site doesn’t exist to consume users, it exists to feed users where they hang out.

And here’s the Youtube link to Your Site Is Just a Launching Pad Into the Cloud.

I wanted to clarify my thoughts from my previous post about getting your content into the cloud. I mention some technologies here that people “breathe” every day, such as their subscribed feeds, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Our goal is not only to get people to our site, but to get our content to where they are so that it can act as a magnet to draw them to an intended destination.

Here’s a Youtube.com link to the video Infiltrating the Cloud In Which People Breathe.

Thoughts? Would love to hear them. Over the next week or two, I’ll be talking about specific techniques for infiltrating the cloud.

On January 12th, I posted a tweet asking the question, “If a business were going to hire you for a few hours per week to apply your social media savvy, how would you best use that time for them?” I asked it because it was asked of me in just that same way.

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“Social media marketing” is a fad, a trend, and it’s raging with popularity right now. Will it last? Absolutely, but not as we know it today. Some of the buzz words will eventually be dropped and social media marketing will finally be seen for what it is – a very effective single prong of a multi-faceted way of sharing news about a person, product, or organization. But it still won’t reach my grandmother.

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Who likes spam? Personally, I love it, seared in a pan with mayo on fresh bread with a slice of pepper jack! That’s one reason to be careful with the word spam. It’s pretty good stuff, and if everything washes away or burns up in December of 2012, the few who survive could live off of a stockpile of spam for quite some time.

Obviously, in the world of the internet, the word spam has come to refer to unsolicited commercial emails. There are rules about spam, and rightly so. I’m as opposed to spammy practices as anybody, but I also have another pet peeve and that is when people abuse the word spam, applying it to almost anything they don’t particularly like. For example…

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I love books and have a personal library of hundreds of volumes. I’ve also started using the Amazon Wishlist feature to sort of bookmark resources I’d like to have. A few of the following are not on my list because I already have them. Others, I haven’t read but would like to own. The first eight are books on Amazon, the last three are ebooks I’ve read and have appreciated.

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Twitter + Marketing = One Big Controversy. I have all kinds of opinions about “marketing” yourself on Twitter and what that means, but Brian K. McDaniel (aka, bkmacdaddy) seems to sum it up quite right. Though Brian and I probably wouldn’t line up 100% on every issue, I do love his three major points…

• Stop Marketing (you need to hear his explanation)
• Start Engaging
• Keep Giving

Brian is writing about how to find clients on Twitter, but his words really do apply across most fields. You’ve just got to read his entire article.