Branding, creativity and the importance of a good story. The Servant of Chaos blog covers social media marketing, digital and brand strategy and the art of storytelling for brand engagement.
It has taken some time to come together, but the new book, Age of Conversation 3: It's time to get busy!, is in its final stages. Very soon you will be able to purchase it directly from Amazon or a number of other online book stores. The new cover, as you can see on the left, was designed by Chris Wilson. And our new site, was designed and built by Craig Wilson and the hard working team at Sticky Advertising.
We’re excited to be at this stage of the process. The quality of thinking throughout the book is of the highest calibre - as would be expected from such an illustrious group. The authors who have contributed to this year's edition are:
Self publishing is one of the amazing developments of the “social web”. Not only can we simply and easily share insights, analysis, stories, poems, movies, music or any other types of creative work – thanks to applications like Blurb.com, we can also turn these into publications – books, calendars and so on.
The Perfect Gift for a Man was a book that Mark Pollard and I edited and published through Blurb. But when it came to promoting the book, there was nothing that made it easy for us to share the book across the web (we ended up creating our own image based widget). Now, Blurb is trialling a new widget that allows you to embed, share, preview and buy books directly from your blog. I think it’s a huge and much needed improvement. Here it is below:
For those of you lucky enough to have seen David Meerman Scott in action during his recent Australian visit, you will know he is a force to be reckoned with. His sharp thinking and experience comes through in everything he says, his charm disarms the most strident critic and his enthusiasm sweeps you along. It also helps that he is armed with story after story of how marketers big and small have used social media to transform their businesses.
But no matter what level of experience you have with marketing, PR or social media, you will take away plenty of useful information, case studies and approaches from David’s book. It is, dare I say it, required reading.
There is always a long list of things that I want to read. Sometimes they are new, sometimes they are old friends that I need to reacquaint myself with – and sometimes they are unknown frontiers – random arrivals that I hope will tempt me into their brave new worlds.
While I constantly read, I am frightfully bad at actually writing proper reviews. Not that I am not interested – it’s just that reviews often get pushed down my list of publishing priorities, and by the time I get around to reviewing a book, it’s past its launch period. This year I am going to try to be a little more consistent with book reviews – sharing what I am reading AS I am reading it, as well as later reviews and impressions.
Over the last month or so – with the benefit of a little time off – I have indulged in some great reading. I have revisited:
Herd by the fabulous Mark Earls – a must for any serious marketer seeking to understand the patterns in consumer behaviour
The Brand Innovation Manifesto – John Grant’s excellent, practical guide to out-thinking yourself and your competitors in the world of marketing
The Rocks – Grace Karskens’ detailed analysis of Sydney’s earliest white settlement
Open Wallets – Stephen Saunders’ great unveiling of the secrets to retail sales success
New arrivals on the bedside table include:
Death of a River Guide – Richard Flanagan always reminds me that we do have great Australian writers
Stillwater Creek by Alison Booth – new book, new author and plenty to chew on
Wanting – Another great Richard Flanagan novel set in colonial Tasmania – documenting our simultaneous capacity for love and inhumanity
Celebrity Leverage – Jordan McAuley’s insider’s view on celebrity endorsement
Around this time of year we often see the announcement of new books being published, new music being released and new films arriving in the cinemas – all in time for the holiday season. It’s the marketer’s year end rush – our attempt to stake our claim for your attention and your wallet. But this year, there are some differences – with a number of free alternatives bypassing their claim over our hard-earned income, hoping instead to capture our imagination.
Valeria Maltoni is also pulling together a year-end, crowdsourced collection just in time for the holidays. Keep your eyes out for this – it’s due any day now!
With publishing tools now readily available, I am surprised that more brands don’t pull together some sort of publication for their customers at year end. Agencies too. It is a GREAT alternative to the staid Christmas card. And while I know that the last weeks of December are fraught with activity, going that extra step to provide your business stakeholders with an unexpected, branded gift such as an eBook shows that you understand that the new currency is not FREE but all about VALUE.
When Andy Sernovitz initiated me into the Secret and Mysterious Order of Word of Mouth, I was surprised by the bacon bits that came along with the book. Far from leaving a bad taste in my mouth, the revised version of Word of Mouth Marketing, with its updated case studies, worksheets and frank, business focused style was more than a meal.
Andy kicks off the book explaining the four rules of word of mouth marketing:
Be interesting
Make it easy
Make people happy
Earn trust and respect
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Sure, there is a lot here that most marketers will know and understand. But word of mouth is not a campaign. It’s a transformation in the way that brands go about their business. It means, for me at least, placing storytelling and experience at the heart of your interactions with your business stakeholders (from customers to employees and partners to suppliers).
For marketers, the hard work of systematising and operationalising your word of mouth efforts is the challenge. What are the tasks (and resources) required to turn the idea of a “story” into something tangible for your agency or your team? What are the additional line items required to support and amplify word of mouth across your business? For at least some of these questions, Andy provides a range of templates and thought-starter charts. You will love, for example, the Creating Your Action Plan checklist.
Check also Drew McLellan’s review of the book – and take advantage of the discount code for Andy’s upcoming Word of Mouth Supergenius workshops being held in Chicago next week.
When I started reading Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s book, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust , I planned to jot notes, tweet summaries and scribble in the margins. But I must admit that I did none of these things. You see, these two write so engagingly that once you are IN the book, you forget about everything else. Normally this only happens to me with novels, but there are some great storytelling elements in Trust Agents – and with every chapter my mind was whirring – in agreement or thinking through how an idea could be put into action.
What I liked about this book is that it focuses on YOU – the person who participates in the world of social networks. It shows you how to begin to build profitable relationships with these “trust agents” – “digitally savvy people who use the Web to humanize businesses using transparency, honesty and genuine relationships”. It also shows you how you too, can become a trust agent.
One of the suggestions in the last chapter was to give your book away. Now, I love collecting books, but I like this idea. There is a great deal of value in this book for anyone interested in the online space. So, while I would encourage you to BUY a copy of the book – you have a small chance to get a copy FREE. It’s in excellent condition – no margin notes, no marks – and it smells like new. If you want it, leave me a comment telling me why YOU should be trusted with this book. You only have until the end of the week.
Oh, and I will mail it to you anywhere in the world.
I am often asked whether the strategies, ideas and approaches discussed here on my blog can be applied to small business. The answer, in the best marketing speak, is “yes” and “no”.
For while it is easy to get caught in the endless repetition of strategic planning, creating a continuous digital strategy can be quite fast. If you know what you are doing, you can knock it over in a lazy afternoon. Unfortunately, you can also easily fall into the state of “analysis paralysis” – where you are unable to shift beyond one part of a process due to the volume of information you are trying to assimilate. My advice is to start as SMALL as you possibly can.
However, if you really are a small business and you want to get started with blogging – AND you want to do it in a way that is SCALABLE, can help you GROW your business and delivers RESULTS, then my advice would be to check out The Dialup Guide to Blogging.
I wrote this short (43pp), easy-to-read guide to blogging with the individual in mind – but the lessons and approaches apply equally to the small business. No matter whether your brand is personal or business, there is plenty to learn, and the book covers all the bases of digital strategy as well as the all important DOING IT part:
The book takes you through the practical steps of establishing your blogging objectives, creating domain names, signing up for a blog, creating your online "footprint" and writing your first posts. It is a must for anyone wondering HOW to get started.
And the best part – you can get it as a soft cover for those who are interested in “digital” but prefer non-digital books. Oh, and there is a downloadable eBook version too – for those too impatient to wait for delivery.
I remember reading John Naisbitt’s Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives years ago and being struck by the concept of high tech/high touch. That is, the more high tech our lives became, the greater our demand for high touch elements. This could account for everything from office design through to the interest in gadgets, and surprisingly, books. And everywhere I looked I could see evidence.
Then, as eBooks began their steady march forward, there were many who suggested that the book publishing industry was on the brink of collapse. We now know this is not true – and that book publishing may well be in the healthiest shape that it has been in for decades. BookExpo America indicates that there were over 130,000 active publishers in 2008 – an increase of 27%. And virtually all this growth occurs in the small publisher category. Clearly it would take something seismic to destroy a $40.3 billion industry.
But despite the growth of blogs and other forms of social communication, books continue to hold a prominent position in our culture. Think about the recent conferences you have attended – how many of the keynote speakers are authors? Think about the way we still continue to revere books. Perhaps it is the lure of storytelling or something more primal. Bruce Temkin suggests that part of our biological makeup, fundamental to evolutionary success, is the way that stories transform our brain’s responses:
People relate to stories because it is part of their evolutionary makeup. Stories cause our mirror neurons to fire at similar experiences, helping us remember and relate.
In my own experience, as the author of The Dialup Guide to Blogging, and more notably, publisher and contributor to The Age of Conversation, extreme care is taken whenever a word is laid out in print. We take more care with words when they are perceived as more PERMANENT than the digital variety, and we pay more attention to their context when they are given physical presence. Yes, a potential employer may Google your name before an interview, but they may throw a quote back in your face. Words really can eat you.
But on the consumption side – as a reader – books are also becoming status symbols. Up until recently, our book collections or libraries signalled our own tastes, follies and predilections to a private audience – those who are invited into the inner sanctums of our homes. (I don’t know about you, but when I visit a friend’s house, I scour their bookshelves for insight and maybe even scandal.) These days, however, we wear our libraries as badges of social honour – with sites such as BookTagger.com, Amazon and Shelfari bringing our reading list into the social networking space.
Nowadays, books are indicators of our conscious attention decisions - when we choose to read a book, we choose to immerse ourselves in its world and the imaginings of the author. Kyle Mitchell, agrees:
But books go beyond this too. When we read a book, we are making a statement to others as well as to ourselves. We invest in an unwritten contract where the rewards on offer can only be reached via our own commitment. As readers, we delay our gratification until the very last page. It’s like a slow dance with an uncertain ending. It’s like sex – or more precisely – like seduction.
There is much that marketers can learn from publishing in this regard. How do we capture the inbuilt Auchterlonie Effect provided by books (allowing others to tell their story about OUR story)? How do we mimetically reproduce that high tech/high touch aspect that is bound up in hundreds of years of publishing history? I think Jeremy Lebard, creator of BookTagger.com points us in the right direction:
Reading provides a quiet solitude seldom found in our busy world. It invokes in me a quiet chamber of the mind that shuts out external distractions and focuses on the story at hand. From that quiet room I get the best view of the world no matter where I am. The view is like no other; I watch a story unfold through the eyes of the author. The author's words become the script and I the producer and out springs a living breathing story within the walls of my imagination. I am forced to interpret that with which I am unfamiliar. Every story I read takes my imagination for a workout. Reading forces you to become a producer that even with the merest budget it takes to buy a book you can compete with the latest commercially produced multi-million dollar production. Don't believe me? Just listen next time a book is turned into a movie. More often than not you'll hear "It's not as good as the book".
For many marketers, the holy grail of digital advertising is the YouTube video that “goes viral” – generating thousands, if not millions, of views for little, if any, cost. The challenge, of course, is that finding just the right piece, or having your “community” build something on your behalf is never easy. Nor does it guarantee success.
But David Meerman Scott’s recent book World Wide Rave, actually covers some of the things that you need to consider. It’s full of practical examples and ideas for you to riff off – all with the aim that you create your own “world wide rave”.
There are some great examples of how some daring folks have put their reputation on the line to test the social media waters. From Disney through to a local dentist, David shows that you don’t need to be big to have an impact – or to generate serious sales/business outcomes using social media. He reinforces that while influence can be useful, world wide raves are about trust – about igniting the potential of your story in the words of someone else (or what I call the Auchterlonie Effect).
But you know what? Don’t take my word for it! David is running a Social Media Master Class in Melbourne. Go along and hear him speak for yourself. It could be the best investment you ever make in your business.
. It builds on the first edition (which has been translated into 24 languages) – with new stories, additional anecdotes and interviews. Personally, I am keen to see whether 
, with its updated case studies, worksheets and frank, business focused style was more than a meal.
, I planned to jot notes, tweet summaries and scribble in the margins. But I must admit that I did none of these things. You see, these two write so engagingly that once you are IN the book, you forget about everything else. Normally this only happens to me with novels, but there are some great storytelling elements in 
years ago and being struck by the concept of high tech/high touch. That is, the more high tech our lives became, the greater our demand for high touch elements. This could account for everything from office design through to the interest in gadgets, and surprisingly, books. And everywhere I looked I could see evidence. 
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