Secret Investment Opportunities...

...I have an old free junk email account I use for my personal messages, like sending pictures of my cat, rather than pictures of my monetized cat, which are reserved for this blog:

It always has these ads at the top, right? They crack me up. 25% back accounts, the lost investment opportunities of Alaska's unknown wilderness, the royal Saudi mythic money machine, blah blah blah. Today's was a corker. My interpretation:

Now, this could be real. I doubt it, but it could be. I haven't clicked on it to find out because I don't want cookies and spyware infesting my machine. Certainly, the outlandish claim and the graphic design (faux-sophisticated) lead me to think otherwise. Yes, Virginia, sometimes slick marketing can make you seem like a con artist.

But most of all, it promises a secret no one's talking about. Except in BANNER ADS ON THE TOP OF FREE EMAIL ACCOUNTS EVERYONE USES!!! For pity's sake!

The only secrets I want to know are:

1. Whether or not this girl is telling the truth when she says she's into me
2. Whether or not the butler did it
3. What my boss thinks of Maury
   

And usually, the best way to find out is just to ask.

REVIEW: Meatball Sundae

Seth Godin has made a name for himself in marketing circles because he writes short books. He admits it in the intro-- those sell better, so breezy reads like The Dip have made the rounds. It helps that he's long on ideas and short on bloated, crummy prose. Would that his peers could all write as well as him, instead of cranking out filler just to make the spine more visible on the rack.

Anyway, his new book made the librarian raise her not inconsiderable eyebrow. "Meatball Sundae? What's THAT?" I immediately knew not to try the Singles Bar Test on this one.

And what is it? Well, a meatball sundae is flat-out disgusting, the kind of thing you make your beloved when the expiration date's long gone, if they can't take a hint. Not because of the meatballs-- meatballs are great! So's whipped cream & the cherry on top. Together, though...

In the business world, it's when all the newfangled Web 2.0 viral XML marketbot stuff gets applied to, oh, toothpaste. Or buckets. Inverted, it's like a Happy Meal tie-in for Cloverfield. Oops! Horrified screaming kids, smashed Mickey D's.

So Godin puts forth the novel idea: all this Inter-Web gobbedlygook works, but only when the user adapts to it. Huh? In other words, if the Web demands you communicate with your customers fast & honestly, it's a hard fit for a huge Megacorp. Unless the Megacorp changes how it does business!

Godin shows this through his well-integrated case studies. Constantly dipping into real-world stories with Kiva & Recording the Beatles, as well as Amazon & Wal-Mart, he outlines fourteen trends he sees as central to the huge shift underway. The shift, of course, is the change from a huge monomedia model (TV, radio) to a diversity of outlets thanks to the Internet.

The trends, many will have already heard of, like outsourcing (#6), direct consumer-to-consumer communication and commerce (#9), and the Long Tail (#5). It does, however, have as much food for an entrepreneur's thought as for the executive. I have certainly rethought many of my approaches to CATpitalism reading it.

Best things I can say about this book: he can write! And he has things to say.

Also, as another bald guy, I appreciate that Godin has branded himself using his own bald head. It's shapely, and full of Godin goodness.

REVIEW: The Marketing Gurus

Since 1978, Soundview Executive Book Summaries has offered its subscribers condensed versions of the best business books published each year.

My first question: Is this legal?

It would appear so, as each summary says the authors gave permission. I guess they got some scratch back, too. I also guess high-powered CATpitalist executives don't mind the details when they need to fit a book into 20 minutes. And when they have someone they pay to take care of the details, like actually reading the things.

Now I too can pretend I've read a book. Thanks, Executive Summaries! Some of the books I've mastered:

• Networking with the Affluent by Thomas Stanley. Give them things and they'll pay you back later with business contacts. Don't ask for anything, though.
  
• Relentless by Johny K. Johansson and Ikujiro Nonaka. The Japanese market differently than we do. They follow the leader and differentiate their products with incremental improvements, while treating the customer like a king.
  
• How to Drive Your Competition Crazy by Guy Kawasaki. Coopetition!
  
• Lateral Marketing by Philip Kotler. This one's more about product development, but taking product development from a marketing perspective. In other words, don't rely on your scientologists to make up new products, let the market & the product appear at the same time.
• The Purple Cow by Seth Godin. The beast of the title looks weird, but people remember it. And TALK about it-- viral marketing!
  

There are more-- not all fit a small entrepreneur like me, but I will return to their ideas of corporate-marketing dominance once CATpitalism has swept the world's porch.

Now that I think of it, Zooey is kind of a high-powered executive. I run errands for her, get her lunch & dinner, clean up after her, and generally make sure she looks good. That's a pretty good gig. Maybe I should dress up in a cat suit and start hanging out down in the Subdivision of Mansions behind the gates. I will sit in my owner's lap, sipping champagne, purring out Executive Book Summaries in front of the fire.

REVIEW: Studying Marketing

Another cold, snowy day... Zooey's huddled up in her house, and so am I.

So book reviews!

Actually, the book's called A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Marketing. The cover design's quite nice, all handwritten as though on graph paper. It's clearly aimed at college students-- which I am not-- but as Jim Blythe writes in the Introduction:

my two marketing lecturers ensured that I had no formal knowledge of marketing, so like a road sweeper I have picked it up as I went along, and consequently I learned it for fun. I recommend you to do the same.

I'm trying!

Now, understand what I didn't. This is not a how-to book, but a book talking about the roots of marketing and how it's studied (oh no!) in school. On that note, you may wish to skip to "How This Book Realigned my Chakras" below. It fits well in the first weeks of an Intro to Marketing course, or for someone studying political & economic history.

But it is interesting, if you have a head for names and ideas. It opens with Adam Smith and Malthus and takes us through psychology & sociology to end up with this weird mongrel subject, marketing. Personally, I always wondered at people who studied marketing in school. It's not terribly interesting as a book subject and I have since watched a couple of friends without the degree achieve success in the field. It is not, after all, mechanical engineering or Russian. You can fake it. Or just learn by doing.

Blythe's version of events puts marketing's birth with the idea that "the route to success is to consider the customer's needs." Then he traces the discipline, as it borrowed ideas from other more stable subjects, on its shambling march to respectability. Now that it has its own journals & theorists, he claims, marketers don't need to know much of anything. Ouch.

Then he gives a whirlwind tour of everything you need to know in marketing. He summarizes the gurus-- Levitt, Drucker, Brown, D'Aveni, Kotler. He gives some hints to the jargon and even a nice little primer on postmodernism (Hyperreality! Fragmentation! Acceptance of Disorder and C H A O S!). Finally, he covers why marketing is-- and isn't-- a real subject to study. Mainly that it's young. And that people hate marketers.

Now, I kind of feel a day behind in my efforts to Brand, Monetize, Capitalize, and Value-Add my cat. But I'm not so sure time was wasted. This is, after all, an agreeable book, with tons of places to look for more info. Most marketing texts don't even touch on Andy Warhol and peanuts, and I am now in much better shape when it comes to reading marketing books. They rely so heavily on jargon-- in books that are supposed to be pragmatic!-- that I'm thankful to have had a pleasant guide to the ideas behind them.

How This Book Realigned My Chakras for Better and Worse

• I learned something while being entertained
  
• I stopped feeling inadequate next to not only Madison Avenue, but Madison, Dane's little girl next door, who always sits out on her porch and puffs up obnoxious Mr. MacMuffin's fluffy, noxious coat
• I did no actual marketing
• (it's actually cheap only only for a textbook)
  
• I'm still not entirely sure how to do it
• Hmmm.
• Oh, we're out of milk, too.

REVIEW: eMarketing eXcellence

I picked up eMarketing eXcellence, an "e-marketing essentials" book, at the library when all the For Dummies books had been checked out. It's thick and dense and seems a lot more impressive to carry around than a For Dummies book. Do the Singles Bar test: read a For Dummies book at the bar with a Bud Lite and see how much "play" you get. Then go to a different bar and whip out eMarketing eXcellence while drinking a cola. Not a Cuervo Black and cola, just a cola. You may find its sleek, impressive, six-figure-looking cover makes your "pLay" go up "eXponentially."

Just don't actually read it. It is written, not for human beings, but middle managers, who speak in the arcane language of Six Sigma and Dilbertese. A sample from the section on web site design:

Web site design presents a challenge few have mastered. We all have used web sites that provide us with what we are looking for, and many more that don't, but what makes some sites more appealing than others? This section looks at the purpose or objectives of web sites and then the key variables required to achieve web objectives. Clarifying the key objectives and purpose of the site helps to determine the functions and content of the site. [emphasis mine]

Satan writes like this in the Netherworld. Aren't "objectives" and "purpose" the same thing? Why write it twice? To bludgeon? Does word design too present a challenge few have mastered? Seriously, you could cut this paragraph down to about five words and still get the job done.

The authors try to jazz it up with lots of section headers and graphs and charts, but this cements its fall into the land of sad textbooks who spend Prom on the shelf, neither bought nor even checked out.

Who writes books like this? Who reads them? Actually, the question is, who buys them. The book's primary audience is not human beings who read something to learn. It's managers and workshop leaders who put the thing on a syllabus and force large groups of people to buy it, or even whole company departments. It's one of those awful college-level textbooks that not only feels like nobody's ever read it, but nobody actually wrote it either.

So if you are a middle manager or have to teach a workshop, I recommend it highly. You can skim the bullet lists and section headers and pretty quickly get the lingo down. Think of it as a phrasebook for marketing-speak.

IN SUM:

What did I learn from this book? How not to write a book. To learn about e-marketing ideas I can use, I guess I'll have to wait for those For Dummies books. Sorry, ladies.

MARKETING: Craigslist SEO

SEO is "Search Engine Optimization," and Craigslist is the quirky, uniquely Netty classifieds service. It reaches gazillions of people every 0.5 seconds and has a Google PageRank of like 1 or 2 so all the marketing gurus are freaking out about how to use it all the time. I've run across a number of blog posts claiming sneaky ways to get on it so your PageRank will explode and you'll become rich and sexy. Some guys even sell eBooks about how to do it.

But it doesn't want to be used for marketing. It's a free-for-all, but the people there have an idea of what it should be. They hate spammers, hate it when people try to screw with the system, and like it when it's just real people connecting with other real people to give away a musty couch or a lava lamp. It's not like getting 20 seconds free on ESPN.

Don't believe me? Browse the Best of Craigslist for ads selected by the users. My favorite? The one that summed it all up.

So, even though the SEO gurus say Craigslist is where it's at, think twice before diving in there. It's too much like showing up at a circus in admiralwear.

As a bonus, check this out, from the New York Times:

Craigslist Meets the Capitalists

If Craig has a cat, I bet it's not monetized at all!