Category: Marketing

Free Book Downloads and Vicarious Curiosity


Chris Anderson is writing a new book called FREE (you can click the link to learn more and vote on the subtitles; my favorite is “How $0.00 changed the world.”) In a subsequent post he includes a link to the site where large excerpts of his best-seller, The Long Tail, are available for free. His publisher will be offering his new book as a free downloadable audiobook, and is exploring some ad-supported free book options for people who prefer print.

Here are some other examples of the free phenomenon, and one in particular that is an interesting analysis of how word-of-mouth works.

I stumbled upon Greg Stielstra’s Pyromarketing blog the other day, and signed up for the RSS feed because it Greg’s content seemed interesting and fresh. Check out this take on Vicarious Curiosity as the key to word-of-mouth:

Last Friday night my fifteen-year-old son went to see Pirates of the Caribbean III . The next morning he teased his younger sister Shelby. “You won’t believe what happens to Will,” he said. Upon hearing those words Shelby absolutely had to know what happened to Will and pestered Dominic until he divulged his secret.

Moments later Shelby came into the living room where Amy and I were enjoying our morning coffee. “Can I tell you what happened to Will in Pirates of the Caribbean,” she asked? She squirmed back and forth on the couch awaiting our answer. “Please, please, please,” she said.

What curious behavior. Why would Shelby care about the fate of a character in a movie she hadn’t yet seen. Stranger still, why would Shelby be so eager to tell me and Amy? We hadn’t even expressed any interest in knowing, yet she was desperate to tell. The answer, I think, sheds some light on the forces that power word-of-mouth.

Hopefully I’ve created the curiosity that makes you want to read the rest of his analysis here. And, of course, it made me curious to read some of his other posts.

Like this one about Scott Ginsberg, and his book “Make a Name for Yourself,” which he is giving away for free as a PDF download from blog. Scott’s story: one day after leaving a meeting, he left his “Hello, My Name Is…” nametag on, and it changed his life. You can subscribe to Scott’s RSS feed here. Or download the book for free here. I did. I hope to read it in the next few days and post a review.


Meanwhile, back at Greg’s blog, I clicked around some more and found that his book, Pyromarketing, was available as a free download audio book. I’m looking forward to listening to it as I do some yardwork.


Oh, and here’s another value…not quite free…but a great deal. Audible.com has a special right now, that gives you the first three months of its Gold level (1 credit/book per month) for half price: $7.49. I used it last night to get Wikinomics for about $10 less than I can get the hardcover version on Amazon.

But let’s get back to FREE. Here’s a site that’s a directory of the web’s best free stuff.


So, I guess Greg was right about Vicarious Curiosity. It worked to get me to write this post. I just had to tell you!

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Avoiding Irrelevance

Jeremiah’s Web Strategy blog has a great post about evolving your irrelevant corporate website.

Here’s a taste of his view of the future:

Websites are created with customers
This is disruptive, but I predict that the most relevant future websites will have customers building websites alongside employees. The most effective websites will contain a balanced point of view of both the product team and customers –even if they have qualms with the product.

Unfiltered customer testimonials will appear
You’ll no longer only be the only one publishing to your website, customers, prospects, and other members of the community will have direct access to publish on your website. Sure, there will be controls to make sure the content is somewhat factual or reviewed, but it will be obvious to many that the only voice won’t be the marketing one.

Content will have both negative and positive views about your products
This one is hard to swallow, but how do you build the most trust? By being open, authentic, and transparent to the marketplace. We know from research that the highest degree of trust comes from those ‘like me’, a savvy marketer will allow content to appear from peers, customers, and the market. These will not always be a product rave, in fact it may be downright criticism, the goal? To take that feedback, and demonstrate in public how you will improve your offerings in plain view. Case study: Dell has done this with IdeaStorm.

Check out the rest here. It’s certainly thought-provoking. Some organizations have high levels of trust. I think what Jeremiah is advocating will be keys to building and maintaining that good will with the public in the long term.

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These columns must be mixed up

That’s what I thought at first when I logged on to my Wells Fargo on-line brokerage account today and saw $27.39 as the increase for the day for my aQuantive (AQNT) stock.

“That must be the stock price, not the increase,” I said to myself. “It’s been trading in the 30s. A $27 increase can’t be right.”

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Then I read the daily news and found out Microsoft had agreed to purchase aQuantive for $66.50 a share, an 85 percent premium over the previous day’s close. It’s all over the blogs, too: here, and here, and here, and here.
Good for my IRA.

It just goes to show what a BIG deal on-line advertising will be. With Google having announced a deal for DoubleClick, Microsoft needed to buy a seat at the advertising table.

I first bought AQNT stock (but unfortunately only 100 shares) because of trends I had been following in media and advertising. Spending on TV ads is huge, but audiences are getting smaller and people are skipping the commercials. But so far there hasn’t been anywhere near enough on-line ad inventory for current TV advertisers to buy. So I figured companies like aQuantive would have a great long-term opportunity for growth as they figured out how to create advertising opportunities.
In this investment, I was partially taking advice from two money people I respect, and partially going against both. Phil Town in his Rule #1 Investing suggests purchasing single stocks in industries you follow and understand. That I did. This is an area I work in and blog about.
Town says, however, you should look for companies with long track records of earnings, but which are currently trading at a significant discount to projected future earnings. That wasn’t true for AQNT, but the long-term market upside looked too good to wait until this stock got cheap by his standards.
My real financial hero, Dave Ramsey, the get-out-of-debt guru, says you shouldn’t buy single stocks, but instead should invest in mutual funds with a long track record. He rightly points out the examples of Enron and others, in which employees who had all their retirement eggs in the company stock found themselves financially ruined.

So because I like the Town tactic and the Ramsey rule, I just try to, in essence, create my own mutual fund by limiting each individual stock to no more than 10 percent of my IRA. That meant I had to sell Apple because it had gone up enough that it was too big of a part of my portfolio.

Yes, I’ve had my share of losers, too. Nortel hasn’t been great (and that was one that did have accounting problems that whacked the stock.) And then there was the STUPID Tax I paid by falling for a “hot tip” on Pangea Petroleum (PAPO). But because they were small percentages of my account, they were just aggravating, not devastating.

aQuantive isn’t a Peter Lynch 10-bagger for me (although if you had bought it five years ago, it would have been), but having it go up 130 percent in six months, and 78 percent in a day, makes up for some mistakes.

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Blogs DO Get Higher Search Rankings

One reason people give for companies starting a blog is SEO (search engine optimization). They say BLOG stands for Better Listings On Google. I have a personal example that leads me to see that’s right.

Last November I did a post on John Kotter’s 8 Steps to Successful Change, reviewing his book, “Our Iceberg is Melting.” As I occasionally review my blog stats at wordpress.com, I’ve seen that consistently show up among my higher-ranking posts. As I looked further, I saw that “John Kotter 8 steps” and variants appear as search terms used to reach my blog.

I thought maybe it was through Technorati, so I tried a Google search with the term John Kotter 8 steps, and was surpised to find:
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My surpise was that my post showed up on the first page of search results, and that it was above the Wikipedia entry on John Kotter.

I previously did a post about how for almost any proper noun you enter in Google, Wikipedia will be among the first 10 results. The traffic on my blog isn’t huge, and I don’t have tons of incoming links. So that’s why it seemed odd that my little ol’ blog post would rank higher than Wikipedia, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.

Blogs really do get Google juice.

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Building a Strong Services Brand

Disclosure: This presentation is by Kent Seltman from Mayo Clinic’s Division of Marketing. I’m also from Mayo Clinic, where I work with National Media Relations, Research Communications and New Media. We’re both probably biased. But here’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Kent’s three lessons (which are in the book he is writing with Len Berry) include:

  1. Attend to the Values
  2. Play Defense, not just Offense
  3. Turn Customers Into Marketers

A related article appears in the current issue of the journal, Business Horizons.

The Presented Brand is what the organization controls, and directly affects brand awareness. Examples are advertising, brand name, logo, web sites, employee uniforms and facilities design.

External Brand Communication includes Organization-influenced communication. Examples are media relations and word-of-mouth, which we can somewhat influence but cannot control. Presented Brand and External Communication influence brand meaning, but indirectly.

Customer Experience is the cumulative experience with a company, and is directly and disproportionately influential in creating brand meaning. Nothing trumps the customer’s actual experience in creating brand meaning. Customers’ actual experiences have large influence on word-of-mouth communications.
“Mayo Clinic” is created every day on the fly by every employee in every interaction with every patient. (I also would add that this applies to interaction with other clients such as, in my team’s case, news media. And news media give word-of-mouth with a megaphone.)Over 37 percent of Americans know someone who has been a patient at Mayo Clinic.

Brand History: In the 1890s Dr. Will and Dr. Charlie Mayo gained notoriety for good surgical outcomes because they were early adopters of aseptic surgical techniques, and in 1905 Dr. Will became president of the American Medical Association.

Journalists at the turn of the 20th century wrote several articles that made the Mayo brothers extremely uncomfortable, making outlandish claims about how wonderful they were, like “not a single patient died under their knife” and that they were “the court of last appeal for the sick of all the world.”

Kent observes that “The Mayo Clinic brand became the leading healthcare provider brand in the United States WITHOUT a marketing department or brand manager, just a combination of outstanding healthcare and vigilance to preserve a great REPUTATION.” I agree with him to a point, except when he says “just” outstanding healthcare. Those early newspaper articles played an important role in building the reputation, even though there was no media relations team. The Mayo brothers didn’t like the articles because they created animosity among other physicians. But there’s no denying they played a role, because Mayo Clinic is still seen as that “last hope” for many patients.

Lesson I: Attend to Values First. Key values are “The needs of the patients come first” and “Teamwork.” Here’s a case in which both of those values are exemplified, and infrastructure such as the integrated medical record (since 1905) which is now electronic, vertical buildings, wide halls and priority paging infrastructure helps teams collaborate.
Lesson II: Play offense (extend the brand appropriately) and defend it against well-meaning internal people who might dilute it and against external groups that want to trade on Mayo Clinic’s name.

Lesson III: Turn Customers into Marketers. In our studies, 95 percent of our patients said “good things” about Mayo Clinic after visits to an average of 46 people, and 90 percent advised people to come to Mayo and claimed an average of 7 actually came.

Capitalizing on Word-of-Mouth (WOM) requires providing a service that exceeds customers’ expectations. “The real brand heroes are those industrial engineers and other leaders who design the service processes and the line employees who perform – often on the fly – their individualized service for patients.” Efficiency of care correlates most highly with patient satisfaction at Mayo Clinic.

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